Start Having Preferences

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence, first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Welcome to today's episode of Shrink for the Shy Guy. I'm your host, Dr. Aziz, and today I'm going to suggest that you start doing something. And as you do this, you will become more clear, more confident. People around you will appreciate you more. You'll have better relationships, better opportunities in your relationships, and you'll start getting more and more of what you actually want in life. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? What is this magical thing? Is it to get a nose job? Is it to get, you know, some sort of implants in the body? No. What's actually going to make you more desirable, more effective in your communication, and get more of what you want in life has nothing to do with how you look. It's about how you show up. And specifically, it's about letting yourself have more preferences. That's what this episode is all about. How to have more preferences, how to give yourself that permission, and of course, how to communicate and express those preferences. This might sound kind of mundane or silly or trivial or maybe even selfish, and maybe that's part of the problem. So let's dive into it. Before we do, if you're benefiting from this show, please take just several minutes and go over to wherever you're listening to it on Apple Podcasts. You can look it up on there Spotify. If you happen to be listening to it directly from my website or the podcast page@shrinkforthshyguy.com, then take just a moment to click over to Apple Podcasts and leave it a review, because that's going to help me reach more people. And there are millions of us out there right now who need this truth that you can shift this, that you're not stuck, that you're not desperate and hopeless and helpless. Barf. Let's change that for as many people as we can. Right? Okay. So thank you so much for doing that. That's one of my preferences would be that you would leave A review and spread this show. What are some of your preferences? Do you even know what your preferences are? Let's start there. Because for many years I did not know what my preferences were. Or I was somewhat aware, but not entirely aware, or some of my preferences were okay and some weren't. And then I couldn't be aware if I. If they were the bad preferences. Or I could have preferences if no one else was around, right? If it's just me. And, you know, when I was younger, me and my two cats, it's a Saturday afternoon, I got the apartment to myself. You know, sure, I have preferences of what I want to eat and what I might want to do with my free time, which was a lot of video games or any other minor thing like that, or even, you know, bigger choices in your life. You might know that stuff when you're alone, but as soon as it involves other people, it might be very hard for you to become aware of what your preferences actually are. Can you relate to that? I see this all the time with clients. A friend, a sibling, a partner, a colleague, a boss, anyone in their life. There's a relationship there. And the person's like, well, what do you think? Or what do you want? And my client's like, I don't know, whatever you want. And in that moment, they might actually think they don't know. Or you might be doing this. You might be saying, you know what? I'm a flexible, relaxed, cool kind of guy or girl. I'm not all high needs like that. I don't have any preferences. Whatevs, whatevs. I'm down. And that's the act that you play. That's the front that you put up. And I'm not saying that you're not a cool as a cucumber, flexible person who can just go with the flow. But you also might be very scared of having a preference. And sometimes you can go with the flow, and sometimes you're faking it, or you're just assuming that that's what you do. And you tell yourself that's what you do, even though deep down it doesn't work for you. Because the downside of saying I'm down for whatever go with the flow is you might end up in negative situations. You might end up spending time in places you don't want to be with people you don't want to be with, doing things that you don't want to do. I mean, you take this far enough, you might get into a relationship with somebody or stay in a relationship with somebody. Or give money to somebody or stay in a job or accept a change or interview. You know, you go to the interview, you actually don't think it's a great fit for you. They offer the job, you're like, well, okay, right? You start to just go through life where if it's not your preferences guiding you, then whose preferences are guiding you? Because someone's agenda is guiding you. Is it, Is it those people around you in your life? And I'm not saying they're all malicious and manipulative and they're taking advantage of you, although people might. But you know, most people are going to be most focused on what serves them right. And I don't know if there's anything totally wrong with that. I think we all have an altruistic part of us that we can feed and become more service oriented. And that's probably part of our development as evolution, as individuals, as a species, as a, you know, spiritual progress, all that stuff. It's great. But you also want to know what, what do I need right now? What do I want right now? I mean, we can't just try to transcend all that stuff and be super spiritual. Which is another thing. I've, I did this one too, especially as I got into Eastern meditation and the Power of Now. Eckhart Tolle right. It's like, oh, all my preferences are just my ego. And I'm above all that now. I don't have an ego. I am so superior. Cause I don't have an ego anymore. It's just another story we tell ourselves and you just disconnect from yourself, disconnect from your preferences. I can't tell how many people I've seen who are, oh, I just don't have those preferences. And they actually have dysfunctional relationships. They're getting walked over. They don't have a sense of power and agency in their lives because they're at the whim of everyone else's agenda. So where do you fall in all this? Is any of this ringing a bell for you? Relating? I lived all this stuff. It's not just about what I saw in clients. I did. Every single one of these things had preferences I could only be aware of by myself. Preferences I felt were bad, so I didn't even let myself know them. Certainly not. Expressing preferences around other people said, whatever, I don't care, I'm down. Then having a situation where if I did want to speak up, if I did want to share, I would do so very tentatively and it would be, well, maybe we could do this Or I want to do that. And then as soon as the other person or people had any questions, hesitations, objections, pushback, I'd say, that's fine, that's fine, that's fine. Have you ever seen an easygoing person just lose it and go crazy? Have you been that person? Right. The easy going person is like, it's fine, whatever, it's fine, I don't care, whatever, it's fine, whatever. And then all of a sudden they said they wanted to go to the theme park or whatever. They said they didn't care what they ate, they said they didn't care, whatever. And then all of a sudden you're sitting there, you're trying to eat one of those pretzels, and they're $9 for a pretzel. What do you think I'm made of money? This is crazy. You spend way too much on this stuff. I don't even want to be here. And then the partner's like, whoa, whoa, what's gotten into you? Jim thought you were easygoing. Jim isn't easy going. Jim is pretending. Why? Because he's terrified of having preferences. And maybe you are as well. Maybe not terrified, maybe just uncomfortable with. Now why would someone be uncomfortable having preferences? I mean, we've all seen little kids. Or you at one point in your life were a little kid. Maybe you spend time around little kids, maybe you don't. I happen to have two little kids. They're 6 and 8. They know their preferences. Little toddlers know that babies and toddlers know their preferences. And they will tell you. And if they don't get them, they'll freak out. Now My kids are 6 and 8. They, you know, they have more emotional tools. They're not going to freak out like a three year old. Sometimes they will, but you know, adults sometimes do, right? But for the most part, they're developing their emotional skills, right? But little kids at 6 and 8 still know what they want, you know, so you tell them, we're gonna do this thing, and they're like, oh, I don't want to do this thing. Or you tell them something exciting. They're like, yeah, they know what they want. So what happens there? The conditioning is what happens. You learn somewhere along the way that having preferences is dangerous. What you want is somehow potentially hurtful, wrong, wrong, upsetting to others. And so you learn from your family, from your peers, from parents, from wherever you start to pick it up. And it could be real intense and you get a really negative response for voicing a preference. How could you want that? How selfish of you. You have to think of other people, what's wrong with you? And that's going to learn you as a little kid, like, oh, okay, all right, won't make that mistake again. Or it could be more subtle. You shape your preference and your parent goes, it's a little look of disgust. And it's not even about you. Your preference wasn't even that big or bad. It was just they're irritated, they're frustrated. Trust me, I'm a parent. I know sometimes my kids ask for something or they do it in a way that's kind of annoying. And I'm like, bleh. You know, as much as I want to be patient and loving and sometimes just annoyed. And so you have a sensitive kid or parents just, you know, that kind of over time you can have that experience and the kid just starts to pick up, you know. You know what, I should just avoid that. I should just downplay my preferences. Like I should see what they want first before I share. You start to make all these calculations and it doesn't just stop with your family, by the way. You know, you get around your teenage friends or even your middle school friends, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, and you're like, well, I don't want to be a bother. And those cool kids want me to do that, so I'm just going to do that. It's about conformity, it's about fitting in, it's about being light. And you learn, hey, the person has low needs, low profile, easy going. Maybe they're more liked, maybe, maybe not. I mean, they might just be more invisible and fly under the radar and be able to tag along. But basically the reason you don't say, you know what, some people might not like me my premiere, but I'm going to share my preferences. That's a high self esteem statement by the way, is because you learn somewhere along the way I might not be enough as me for who I am, might not be totally desirable. And so I need to do what I can to try to maximize my desirability. And one of those things you have probably a lot of things you do, but one of them is to try to minimize a sense of you being demanding or burdensome. And so you say, you know my preferences. If I put them out there in the most casual, non demanding, easily give up, able kind of way, then no one's gonna feel pressured by me, burdened by me, and then therefore they'll want to be with me and sustain relationships with me and that sort of thing. And so here you are running that strategy for five, 10, 15, 50 years and it leads to a life that is not satisfying because no one knows what you want. You're not good at getting what you want because you're not good at advocating for it. Because advocating getting what you. Being good at getting what you want, it means you have to know what you want and you have to advocate for it. And you might not have developed either of those skills very much if you're living in this I shouldn't have preferences strategy. So then you don't know that much what you want. So you say what are my preferences? And you're like, I don't even know, I don't even know what I want. And then if you did know what you wanted to be able to advocate for it, that means you say, hey, you know what I would like to do? Can you join me for this thing? Can you help me with that? I'd like to have this. And what if the person's like maybe or I don't know. And you don't say, you know, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said anything, don't hurt me, right? Instead you say, okay, what might be getting in the way? Or I would really love to have you there. I'm just curious, is it just a logistical thing or is there maybe something about it that doesn't appeal to you? Yeah, that's advocating for. Right. You're leaning in a little bit more. And at first, when you first hear this, if you've been living in the no preferences strategy, this stuff sounds. Not only. It just sounds like too much and impossible and scary. I know because if someone had said that kind of stuff to me many years ago, I would have been like, well, you can't say that stuff that makes you sound pushy and desperate and bad. You just gotta be casual and not care. But that's not even real. That's just a frickin front of I don't care of coolness, of disengaged, of dis. Unattached. You're not that. You're just disconnected from yourself. So what preferences do you really have? What do you want? Start asking yourself that question day to day. What do I want? What do I want for this afternoon? What do I want at work today? What do I want with my partner this weekend? You know, my wife has been. She generally. She also has a strong conditioning and niceness as I did. And it's something that we both have grown a lot in and she's always learning new things just Like I am discovering. Oh, I used to say that. Or used to not do that. And so one thing that she realizes, you know, we have this awesome house out in the country now. We moved out here in about first quarter of 2022. And there's a lot, you know, we have two kids, we have two dogs. We have this property that's always needing something. It's a big forest out here. So you go, okay, I got to go fix the pump house pipe. And then I got to winterize this thing and I got to do this and I got that. And it's a lot of fun stuff that I'm actually really engaged in. And she's, you know, I got to clean up this, and I'm going to cook this meal for us tonight. And so we're just kind of all over the place, especially on the weekends. And it's really fun, it's really engaging, we love it. But a whole weekend can go by and unless you asserted what you wanted, not going to happen. And there's a couple things that she's wanted to do, especially related to photography, which is an art that she's getting more into. And she wants my help with some things because I'm good with tech, kind of a tech whiz, if you will. And so she wants to be able to get it, you know, which kind of camera to hook up to her computer and how to do it and other things. And she's like, hey, I'd love some of your time and attention to go into hooking this stuff up and doing some research about cameras. But she realized that weekends would go by and she wouldn't say that. She would just hope there'd be an opportunity for that and then there wouldn't, and then she'd be disappointed. And so she audio messaged me earlier this week or last week and said, you know what, I would love some time this weekend to, you know, look at that camera stuff with you. Let's, let's talk about it and figure that out. And it was her birthday coming up, and so she said, you know, maybe for my birthday weekend we could do that. And I teased her, I said, we could totally do that on your birthday weekend. And you know what, baby, you can ask me. You can advocate for what you want on the weekends. You won't get it until your birthday. We'll save up all your requests until your birthday weekend. And other than that, the answer is no. I was just teasing her. I was playing with her to highlight. This is so important and it's such A small example, but I can't tell you how many relationships I kind of degrade over time from something simple like this. I wanted a time to focus on, in this case, the photography stuff, but it could be a thousand one things. I wanted you to spend time with me, going to the park, I wanted to go on a hike with you. I want to have this deep conversation. I wanted to make love with you. I want to have whatever it is. People have these desires to share something with their partner, but they don't advocate, they don't clearly ask for it, they hope, they imply, they infer, they wait and see. Maybe the partner will suggest it or maybe they'll float it out there. And the partner's like, oh, I'm real busy that weekend. They're like, okay, that's fine, that's fine, that's cool. And they try to be real casual, real non burdensome about it. I don't want any needs, I don't want to put any pressure on you. And then they start to get more irritated and they start to develop stories about the other partner. Oh, he doesn't care about me. Oh, she's so self absorbed. All she cares about is her friends. She says, what about me? And they start to build this righteousness victim story. And all the while they don't see I didn't just say what I freaking wanted directly and vulnerably and clearly because I'm scared, because of my own conditioning. It has nothing to do with my partner, it's my own fears. And I've worked with a lot of clients who say Noah's these, you don't know it's my partner is these ways. And I say, okay, prove it. Let's do a 30 day test, a boldness test where you actually start to advocate for what you want. Not tiptoe around, not hint, not wish, but to say, hey, this is what I really would love. And not to do it demandingly either. Like, you owe me this. It's been five years now. It's my time. Shut up. Right, not gonna work. Approach them with sincerity and assuming that they want the best in that relationships and they care about your needs, you'll find out soon enough if they don't. But most time those stories of my partner, such a selfish a hole is actually you have been carrying out a pattern in which you suppress your own needs and your own preferences and you pretend like you don't have them and then you blame it on the other person. And this isn't just in romantic relationships. This could be with family, with colleagues, with friends, with anyone. So this is a good time to talk about how to put this into action. Isn't it time for action, action, action. What are you gonna do when it comes to your preferences? Are you gonna share them? If you'd like to start sharing them, you could. That's a choice. I mean, it might seem like it's a rhetorical question because that's what this whole episode's been about, but life is a choose your own adventure, my friend. You can hear these ideas and agree with them or disagree with them. You could also agree with them and then do nothing different, which is. I don't know what that is. It's not really agreeing though, is it? I guess it's like, in theory, I think this is great, but I'm not going to do it. So then are you really agreeing? Do you really believe in it? So if you're willing to really grow and experience the extraordinary in your life, it's going to start becoming aware of your preferences. So couple steps. One is, what do I want The MVP question on my book Not Nice, which you've not listened to yet. Definitely check that out. Go to notnicebook.com you can get on Amazon or Audible. So what do I want? Start asking yourself that question. What do I want for this weekend? What do I want for this evening? What do I want for this day? And don't just be like, well, I'm spending the afternoon with my kids, so whatever they want to do. Well, what do you want to do too? It's this dance. It's this discovery. Can you meet both needs at the same time? Can you get creative? There's so much opportunity to really advocate for yourself. And that doesn't mean you just punch your ideas down everyone else's throats and only get your way. But it's your part of the equation. So what do I want? The next step is going to be to advocate for it, to share it. Not just apologetically and timidly. You float it once and you retract it forever and apologize. No, this is what I want to do, or I don't want to do that. How about this instead? And you explore. You find the middle path. You get your thing now, they get their thing later. You get to find a way to really put it out on the table and create new actions, new arrangements that really factor you in. So that's the invitation for today, and let's see how it goes. Worst case scenario is you become a high needs, terrible bad person that everyone flees from. So that just keep that in mind. You know, tread lightly. If you have any needs or desires or preferences, remember that's only going to end badly. So maybe you should just stuff them all down into your lower intestine and wait. Wait until later when it's safe. No. Okay, I'm playing. It's uncomfortable. It's not deadly. It's just uncomfortable. And you're going to discover that people do care about you. People do want to help you meet your needs. People love you. You have so much at more depth in all your relationships when you start doing this and you get more of what you want and you get bolder and you get better at it and you realize it's not a big deal. So there's a huge upside potential. I invite you to just take that leap. So thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again may have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you are awesome. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to social confidencecenter.com.