Dr. Aziz explains how to ease social anxiety by shifting focus from yourself to the other person and your surroundings. Three tools: ground yourself in your body, observe the other person closely, and listen deeply to what they say instead of worrying about how you're coming across.
If you experience social anxiety in conversations, perhaps you struggle to know what to say next or you feel self conscious during the conversation. There is one thing that you're doing that you can shift today that will greatly improve your confidence and actually your conversation ability. And let me demonstrate what it is. So when you're feeling nervous in a conversation, socially anxious, what are you doing? What are you focusing on in that situation? Well, when I ask clients this, they'll tell me, well, I'm worrying about what I'm going to say. Am I saying the right thing? What should I say? I don't know what to say. I panic. I got to come up with something to say. Do they like that? Am I, am I coming across well, is that pretty similar for you? And let's contrast that with a conversation where you're feeling totally relaxed, you're comfortable, you're with a good friend, a family member. What are you focused on then? We might be focused on the content of the conversation, what you're talking about, what you enjoy, what you want to share. So what's the difference? You probably see it already, it's in the title of the video. But when we're nervous, when we're anxious, we hyper focus on me. And not in some positive way, right? Like I'm great. What I'm saying is awesome. No, we hyper vigilant focus with this evaluative am I performance, Am I doing it right? And it's like there's a part that's observing you with a clipboard and it's like, nope. Oof, that is bad. Oof. Right? You're getting a D minus. And of course that's going to make you stressed out and anxious. And it also makes it way harder to connect with you because the other person is like, hey, you want to interact, you want to connect, right? Because that's what a conversation is. It might be about a topic or something, but it's humans connecting with each other and they're trying to connect with you. And you're like, I can't look at you, I can't interact with you, I can't focus on you. I got to focus on me. So you might be engaging with them. Your eye contact might be as if you're looking at them, you might be nodding as if you're listening them. But all your energy is going, you know, it's like enveloping inwards like a sea anemone and you're all closed off and people feel that and then there starts to be less engagement on their part, which then Increases our anxiety. Right. So we have to shift this need to change where you focus in that conversation to have a radically different result. What do you focus on instead? Well, you do what you do. When you're comfortable in a conversation, you intentionally bring your focus out. One of the people I've learned a lot from in my life is, as Tony Robbins would say, if you get in your head, you're dead. Right? So if you start to fixate on you, it's going to be way harder. So grasping for what do I say next? Is not the best way to come up with what to say next. It's actually to get out of your own mind and get into your life, into the moment, into the conversation. Well, how do we do this? I want to give you some very practical tools so it's not just some theoretical idea that doesn't work in the moment. So let me give you several really key things you can use right now. The first, basic mindfulness is bring your awareness. If you're all in your head, bring your awareness to your full body, all the way down to your feet. So as you're listening to them, you can practice this. Right now, as you're listening to me, take a full breath and imagine that breath, following it all the way as if it goes beyond your lungs and goes all the way down to your feet. And just for a moment, bring a lot of your attention to your feet, just for a second. Don't worry, you won't get super out of the conversation. Sometimes we think I got to really focus on what I'm going to say next. And if I focus on my feet for a second, I'll lose it. No, actually, you focus on your feet, your mind's going to go from this hyper fixated mode to more expansive mode where creativity naturally flows. So breathe in, focus on the bottoms of your feet for a moment, looking at the person. The second thing is going to be to really look at the other person. Can you notice some quality about them? The skin tone, their eyelashes, their eyebrows, the way their hair falls. Just like really take in the other person, Bring your focus out of you into the person. And also you can actually see in your peripheral vision the scene around the person. Right? Because every person you're acting with has a background. So there's a building behind them or trees behind them, or the sky, whatever it is. You observe the person in the background and really tune in. And the third thing to do is actually really focus in on what they're saying without wondering what you're going to say. Next, really tune into it. What are they talking about? Are they talking about their kids? They're talking about their work. Are they frustrated? Are they happy? Are they sad? The more you tune into that and the surrounding area and them and your feet and your breath and don't go into your mind when it's time to speak, it'll come to you. You'll know exactly what to say next. Because you get out of your head and all of a sudden you're in your life and in the moment. And if you want to go further with this and learn tons of conversation strategies and tools, you're going to love a program I have called Confidence University that has a course inside of it. It's got multiple courses and one of them is called Social Mastery. And inside of Social Mastery, I teach all of this in depth as well as very specific tools on knowing how to pull things from the conversation, how to be more present, how to be more connected, how to really enjoy yourself, how to how to be more engaging and interesting. So if you're finding this fascinating and you want to take things way further, I highly recommend checking out Confidence University. You can just click down in the description below or go to theconfidenceuniversity.com thanks for being with me today. I hope this supports you in breaking free from social anxiety and becoming the most bold, confident version of you.
