The 5 Words That Kill Your Confidence

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. The show to help you break free from social anxiety, people pleasing and self doubt so you can speak up, connect and be 100% you. I'm Dr. Aziz, sharing tools that have transformed my life and thousands of others. Let's all liberate ourselves together. Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about you and what you want and what you need in your life and in your relationships. And this could be a romantic relationship, but also any relationship, friendship, social life with family, at work, you know, we're in relation with all kinds of people and in every relation there's things that you want and things that you need. And in this episode we're going to talk about, well, how do you know the difference and more importantly, how do you get more of what you want in your relationships? And just as important, how do you skillfully ask for, advocate for and negotiate for what you want in relationships? Because sometimes, even if you don't get everything you want, even just being able to be more clear, direct, assertive and explicit about what you want helps you feel better. And this is extremely important. So if you have a history of being a nice person, maybe you read my book not nice, maybe you have struggled at times with boundaries, with assertiveness, with relationships, maybe you even struggle with relationships and don't know why. This episode's gonna be profoundly valuable for you. And that was my experience with this, is I had a very hard time, especially with romantic relationships throughout all my 20s. And I had no idea why, because so earlier in my teenage years, in my early 20s, I had a lot of social anxiety in that very. There's a massive obstacle to dating and getting a girlfriend. But then eventually I started to practice. I learned that you could learn confidence and started to apply a lot of what I talk about in this show and in my books and programs and started to get the confidence to approach women and get dates and even have women who'd want to date me or be my girlfriend, you know, so far, so good success, right? Well, kinda. Except for that when I went from the initial meeting, first couple of dates to more serious or seeing someone regularly or even in a relationship with them, it all kind of fell off the rails and I had no idea why. It went from like, I'm really into this person and I can't wait to see her and this is gonna be so great to I kind of, I don't want to spend time together, I kind of want to get away, but that's weird. Why do I want to get away? I thought I was really into this person. I communicated, I was really into her, and now I'm wanting to get away. I'm crazy. Something wrong with me. And that's just what I concluded. I thought, oh, maybe my capacity for intimacy is broken. This is a real solid conclusion. So that wasn't it at all. And the issue was that I had a really hard time navigating boundaries, expressing what I wanted, being able to say what I wanted and what I didn't want, especially when I became in the role of boyfriend or partner or we're hanging out now regularly, so maybe I could get a little more expressive early on. But as soon as we got into that dynamic, then it was all over. And so I'm wondering in your case, where you notice this coming up. Do you have a hard time asking for what you want with a romantic partner like I was describing? Or maybe it's a workplace situation. Maybe it's with employees or an employer, Maybe it's with a friend. And there is no relationship that is untouched by this. And it's so important. And so I'm going to guide you through this in this episode. It's going to be extremely liberating for you, especially if you really take what I'm saying here and apply it in your life. First and foremost, though, is before you basically can't say anything about your needs or advocate or ask for them in any sort of skillful way. If you are already running a campaign against yourself that's taking away your right to have a need or a desire or a want. And that might sound kind of crazy, like, why would I do that? Who would do that to themselves? Well, millions of people. Every nice person you ever met does that. And they have an identity that's, I'm a nice person, I'm flexible, I'm accommodating, I'm easygoing, whatever you want, no problem, no big. Don't worry about me. Oh, don't worry about me. I don't have any needs. There's no pressure from me because in the nice person's psychology, I. Well, just to zoom out a little bit, the seed, the source of all social anxiety and niceness, which are cousins, by the way. They're branches from the same tree. But the seed of that tree is I'm not okay as I am. I'm not lovable, desirable and worthy of attention, relationship, success, happiness as I am. Now, the good news is that's not true. Don't lose heart, my friend. It's not true. It's just a story. It's a usually non verbalized, subconscious story, but nevertheless it affects us. Right? That's why I don't want to go talk to that person, because they're not gonna like me. Why are they not gonna like me? I don't know, dude. Something. Something wrong with me, I guess, right? And maybe we point to specific things, but usually it's just a core feeling. Now, out of that come different strategies. The social anxiety strategy is, well, I'm keep everyone at arm's distance so that I don't get hurt, because deep down I'm not that lovable. Maybe I'll avoid a lot. That's the social anxiety strategy. The niceness strategy is I'll be whoever you want me to be, man. I'll be the most flexible, accommodating person. And for me and you to hang out and for you to want some things and need some things, and I accommodate that. Or they line up and I want some things and need some things, and you accommodate that, and then boom, we're collaborating, we're hanging out together, we're having a great relationship. Well, that doesn't work in the nice person's world, because how dare I? I'm already. It's already a gift that they're giving me to spend time with me, and I can't burden them now with more demands of needing to accommodate me in any way. And so if I do put any demand on them by saying what I want, they're gonna feel pressured, they're gonna feel resentful, they're gonna feel angry, they're gonna be like, what do you high needs person? Oh, you're so this or that. I don't. You're. You're too high needs or you're too demanding or you're too bother. I want someone who just is easygoing. Basically, you imagine through this distorted lens of niceness that everyone is like a super narcissist who can only handle their own needs and only cares about their own needs. And not to make the matter more complex, but oftentimes nice people draw those kinds of people into their world. But regardless, the solution is the same, which is for you to give yourself more permission and to start to claim that you do have desires and, and wants and needs. And that is normal, predictable, typical, and healthy. And that being overly accommodating, overly flexible, always prioritizing others doesn't make you saintly, selfless, virtuous. It's actually unhealthy or dysfunctional. Right? Anything taken too Far can be dysfunctional. Eating healthy food, making healthy food choices. That's great, right? Pick the salad over the pizza at dinner, and you'll probably be better off for it. But if you can only eat salad and you freak out if there's some cheese on your plate, oh, my God, there's too many calories right now. You're going into weird eating disorder territory. So anything taken too far is problematic. And that's exactly true for being overly accommodating, overly flexible. Now, this flexibleness and this accommodating, it happens so fast. It's just part of your identity. And you don't even. You don't think about it and say, hmm, should I be flexible here or not? It's just like, okay, whatever you want. Whatever you want. That's cool. That's cool. And then what you notice and how you know something wasn't right is during the experience that you were being flexible around, you're not enjoying yourself, you're irritable, you're trying to have a good time, but you don't really want to be there. You don't want to be doing the thing for the person, whatever it is. Or afterwards, you have like a tantrum inside, you feel upset. You're like, I don't want to do that kind of stuff anymore. I don't like that person. And depending upon how much permission you have to actually feel, you might be very aware of it and you might not. If you're super nice, you just push it all down and have stomach problems. You don't even know. I just feel anxious. I just feel depressed. I don't even know why. Well, is there something bothering you about hanging out with that person when you didn't want to? No, no, no. I'm too nice to acknowledge that. Right. That's where I lived for many years. Tons of body pain. I talk about this in. I think it's chapter five in Not Nice, the High Cost of Nice. So it's a matter of health and of sanity and of mental health, and it's extremely important. So that's why I'm dedicating so much of this episode to that. Because this is the biggest step. There's no hack of what to say if underneath, you are already undercutting and dismissing and denying that. So we have to claim that, say, no, of course I have things that I want to eat. Of course that's healthy. And if it's a bit of a hard pill to swallow, you're like, nah, I don't know. This doesn't Feel right. Or what if it's too needy? Or what if it's this? Well, get outside of yourself and just imagine you're watching a friend. You're watching a TV show or something, and you're seeing characters interacting, and you see the person who's always, okay, I'll work late. Okay, honey, I'll do what you want, okay? I'll go do all the work. Okay, okay. Okay. And there's this imbalance, you know, greater and greater imbalance. And you, oh, they want to ask for something, but then they don't. And then they're missing out on the thing they really wanted to go to just to, you know, martyr themselves for other people. I mean, if you're watching that from the outside in a TV show, you'd be, like, shouting at the screen, come on, Come on. What are you doing? Right? And that moment in the show or the movie where the character actually starts to do something different, you feel, like, excited. You're like, yes. Finally you tell him no, right? You get some vicarious victory out of it. And if it's one of those shows where the character never does it, you just get kind of irritated and disappointed with them. You're like, come on, dude. Right? So we gotta look at it from the outside and realize, okay, this is healthy, right? So I'm gonna assume you're with me so far. Then what do we do about it? Well, you ask yourself what I call the MVP question from the book, not nice, which is, what do I want? What do I want? What do I want? What do I want? Why am I repeating this so many times? So you start repeating it to yourself in your own head. This shows up everywhere. Here's a really small example. Just the other day, my wife met up with a friend, and they were gonna go for a hike. And, you know, my wife does a lot. Just she's driving around, picking kids up, doing this and that, all kinds of her own responsibilities or life. And so to carve out a chunk of time with a friend and go for a hike, you know, it takes some saying no to other things and prioritizing that. Then right before the moment, the friend lets her know, like, literally right before they're about to meet up, says, okay, I'll see you in, like, 15 minutes or whatever. By the way, my knee hurts, and I can't really do much of a hike. And my wife's like, oh, okay, all right. Yeah, we'll see you in 15 minutes. Right? The person shows up and they're like, oh, yeah, let's Just do a. You know, kind of just hang out. And my wife's like, okay. And then they hung out. And afterwards she noticed, like, I feel like something. I could have done something different there. And we talked about it some, and I was like, well, what do you. What did you really want? It's like, well, I did want to hang out with her, but I also. I really wanted to hike together. That's what I wanted to do. It wasn't just, well, it doesn't matter. We'll just hang out and not move our bodies at all. My wife's very active, and she has some time to herself. She wants to. It's the summertime, so it sounds like such a small thing, right? But the permission, what we explored is what would it have been like to say? The friend says, hey, I can't go for a big hike. Okay. It's like, oh, wait, tell me more. Can you hike at all or just a few miles or what's up? Okay. Okay. I can't hike at all. Really? Oh. Oh, dang. That's a bummer, right? So in order for me to be able to even have this conversation, I have to check inside of myself and say, wait a minute. What do I want? I want to get active today. I was excited about being. Going to this hike to this river. I think I'd rather do that. And then we'll hang out another time when I'm planning on being more sedentary. We can just go watch a movie or just talk or whatever. So you'd be able to say in that moment if you knew, wait a minute. What do I want? Oh, I want to go still for a hike. Okay. Then you'd say, hey, I'm sorry to hear about your knee. That sucks. Listen, I know we had time to plan together today. I am really excited about using my body. You know, I've got a little time away from my kids right now, and I really want to go do this hike. And I would love to do it with you, but it sounds like that's not an option. How about this? How about we reschedule for when I get back in two weeks from my road trip, and we'll. We'll find a time where we can, you know, get some coffee or hang out. You want to find a time now, what is your reaction when you hear this? You selfish son of a. Right. How you're gonna break your friend's heart, you monster, you. Right now, enter the inner campaign to override your own wants and needs. And if you really want to have Healthy relationships. You want to stop being nice. You want to have more health in your body, mind, spirit, enjoy yourself more. It requires this of you. This is something that not everyone will develop. You don't have to develop this. You could just go along with it again and again and again and again. And you'll have a certain quality of life and there's nothing wrong with you. And that's not bad. I'm not here to tell you what's right and wrong. I'm just saying in my own experience, my quality of life is radically better when I. When I can operate in a higher level of healthy self awareness, self interest, being able to advocate for myself. And my relationships are healthy too. It's not like you could hear the example there. It's very skillful and loving and you can have both. Another example, more like higher stakes, or I guess you might call it a more in depth thing. This might seem like such a minor incident, but you add up a dozen of those in a week, whether between your work and your family and your friends, and of a sudden it's not so minor. But I was having an experience where I had a longer conversation with my wife just earlier today where we have a younger son, he's nine. His older brother, they used to sleep in the same room. And now his older brother is 11 and a half. Puberty's kicking in and he wants his independence. He's in his own room now, and so the younger one. And if you were a younger sibling, maybe you relate to this. I certainly. I was exactly the same way. My brother was older, moved to a different bedroom, and I had a real hard time sleeping a lot. And so he's waking up a lot in the night and getting his mom and okay, can you come lie in bed with me until I fall back asleep? And then she will, and then she'll come back into the bed with me and then he'll come get her again later in the night. And this has been happening for quite some time. And so we've kind of been flexible and okay, let's try this or that strategy and something sort of works. Then it doesn't. And it reached a point in me where I was like, okay, what do I want? It's like, I want to be in bed with my wife. Like, what's going on? This is a long stretch here. We've been flexible for too long. I don't want to just indefinitely do this. That's what it seems like we're doing. We fall into a pattern here. So we need to Address this. And so what is addressing it look like? Well, it involves me having a more in depth conversation with my wife and being able to express what is it that I want, what is it that I need? And I'm a huge fan of Dan Weil and his book called after the Honeymoon, where he enters a couples therapist. Weil is spelled W, I L, E in case you want to check it out. But he talks about being skillfully dependent, right? Because there's this myth of independence. I don't need anything from her. She's in bed with me or not. Who cares? Whatever. I'm an independent guy. I'll deal with it. Like, that's a great story, but what if there's a part of me that's like, hey, I need you. It's okay if it's here and there, but if it becomes a regular nightly thing, I don't want to do that for months on end with no end in sight. That sucks. I miss you. I need you close to me at night. Right. There's a sweetness in honoring that interdependence. And so we could pretend to be independent, not need anybody, or we could become skillfully dependent is what he calls it. Because if I'm not skillfully dependent, I can just be like, you know, little barbs out there. Well, fine, I'll see you tomorrow. You know, as if, you know, roommate or whatever. Like, you don't want to sleep in bed with me, huh? Or whatever little barbs I might throw out there in some unproductive way that's just going to create more distance instead of being skillfully dependent and moving towards the person and saying, hey. And this is how I approached her. I was like, hey. So first I know what I want, right? And then I give myself permission. There's nothing wrong with that. It's like, oh, be more flexible. Be more giving. It's like, wait a minute. We've been very giving, and we can support him, but also we can clarify boundaries and help him learn to navigate this transition as opposed to just accommodating the fear and the discomfort. So I approached her and I actually sent her an audio. We do a lot of exchange on audio messages. If we're not, you know, if it's a work day or whatever, I don't see her as much. And I noticed I sent an audio and she didn't reply to that part. I'm like, okay, interesting. So then I pursued it. Later that day, I said, hey, I want to talk to you about this. So I followed up, and there is there's some mixed feelings and I said I have some mixed feelings about it and here's what I'm wanting and here's some of the challenge. And then she shared some of her challenges with it and it opened up this conversation and I persist into it. This is what I see might be a solution. Here's how I think we might could approach it. What do you think? And there's a way that when you are willing to put your needs on the table, everything can become a lot more collaborative. And when you stuff them down and try to live in this accommodating, nice person way, they end up erupting out of you in unskillful ways. Pouting, tantrums, withdrawal, cold anger, stonewalling, getting into spiraling into stories about they don't love you or you don't love them or whatever. Depressed, anxious, overwhelmed, like all these things can spiral out if we don't just move towards the situation. And so let's turn this actually into your action step. Time for action. Action, action. Now you might think your action step is going to be to go to have this kind of conversation, right? No, no. Haha. Keep you on your toes. Your action step is actually more of the foundational part of it which is to regularly ask yourself throughout the day. I'm talking five, seven times per day in this situation. Okay, now I'm in a new situation. Now I'm driving home from work, now I'm at with family, now I'm whatever. You live alone in your apartment, maybe you go to spend time with friends, you're going to go to this thing on the weekend, whatever, every domain of life with your health, with your anything in that situation, what do I want here? What do I want here? And this might sound, if you've been really nice for really long, this might sound really self absorbed. But you know what? It's getting you up on the spectrum of healthy selfishness from over accommodating, self denying to a healthy level of awareness and connection and care for yourself. Just think about if you're with a partner or dating somebody and you know it's a Saturday and you spend the day together and they're like let's talk about I want to share what I want to do. And you're like I don't care, I don't care what you want to do. Shut up. Right? That's a great date right there, right? Stick with that one, right? No, no, you'd be like yeah, what do you want? And doesn't mean you do everything the Other person wants like, oh, that sounds fun. I don't really want to see that movie though. You want to do this instead, right? So you want to listen to yourself, like you're on a date with yourself, like you're a partner, like you love and care about yourself. What do you want? What do I want? What do I want? What do I what? What matters to you here. That doesn't mean you get everything what you want instantly. Maybe sometimes you say, what do I want? There's a part of you is like, I want to just have people take care of me and I don't have to want to work ever again. It's like, okay, I hear that. You know, you can still be loving with that part, but doesn't mean you get that. But you still are asking the question and you're going to get a lot of really good answers in there. What do I want? I want to go to this thing on Saturday. Well, I don't want to do this other thing. Well, I want to spend time with this person. And again, this isn't to become so particular that we can't be flexible at all, but it's to get into this healthy range of you can choose. Because it's not true flexibility if you have to accommodate. Right. That's not real. That's actually extreme rigidity. Just never in towards the direction you want. Always what other people want. So start asking yourself that question, honoring it, listening to yourself and then seeing what might come from that. What you might ask for, what you might say yes and no to in your life. And again, if you want to take it further, if you haven't checked out my book not nice, highly recommend that you can find it on Amazon, on Audible, and that one's got just a wealth of information about how to do this. And if you want a shorter punchier, just lightning bolt to the to transformation around this, check out my other book, Less Nice, more your. Both are powerful resources. You can find them both on my website. Just go to books under draziz.com,/a z I z.com or. Or go to Amazon directly and look it up there. Or audible if you like to listen to books. I read those myself as well. So if you want to spend many hours hanging out with me in your ears, check those out. All right. Thanks for being with me today. Hope this serves you and until we speak again, may have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Thanks for listening to shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Azeez. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkfortheshyguy. Com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter. Com.