The Awful Skill of Settling

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. Today's episode of the show. Yes. Good to be with you today. Did you listen to last week's episode about bath? Are you bath? Did you do anything bath? If so, I'd love to hear about it. You can always go to shrinkforthshyguy.com shrinkforthshyguy.com and there's a little thing you can click there. You can send an email. You can also leave a little voice message that we can hear so you have a story you want to share. I love it. The Baff stuff makes me smile. And today we're going to be talking about kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. So baff is one far end of the spectrum where you're doing really bold things. And then maybe the middle would be like you're taking some bold action, some healthy, strong risks, and that's more of a sustainable pace for a lot of us. But then we can go a little further down the spectrum where we stop doing those things and we don't and we start to settle. And we're going to talk about that. In fact, we're going to be talking about the skill of settling. A lot of people don't think of it as a skill, but we're going to unpack that and help you start to not do that and find the ways that you're doing it and be free of it. And I want to let you know that tomorrow, the 11th of April, is the last day to to get the early bird ticket for my upcoming live event. It's in June in Portland, Oregon, June 21st through 23rd. It's called the ultimate confidence breakthrough. And this may be the first time you've heard about it. It may not. You may be on my email list or have checked out the website and dabbled and looked at it. And if so, and you're clicking around, you're curious, take the leap. There's so much good stuff that happens at those events, people get charged and not even, I mean, this is just a sign of how inspiring the work is. Random people who are not even at the event, like the hotel dude who's refilling the water during the breaks and one of the people who runs something in the hotel around events and something like they kind of, what's going on in there? How's it going today? And they just have this like positive, curious attitude and energy towards me and everyone there because it's cool, it's inspiring to have a room full of people working together to grow. And you might think, oh man, no one else has to do this. But actually everyone would benefit from being at this event who would not benefit from having more confidence, more boldness, more courage. And that's what we focus on at this one. I mean, they're all confidence focused. All my events but this one, the ultimate confidence breakthrough is focused on helping you break through to the next level of your confidence in the areas of your life that matter most to you. So, so we're just raw, 100% unstoppable confidence is what we're going to be activating. And then you can use that in your dating life, in your relationships, in your career, in your work, in your communications. And we're going to be shredding all of that nice people pleasing, approval seeking, fear based anxiety, and helping you return to a rock solid core foundation of unstoppable confidence. And then from that place, taking bold action, being who you want to be, standing up tall and living the life that you want, creating the life that you want. And if you get inspired by these podcasts, imagine being in the room with me for three days where we just go nonstop. It's pretty fun, it's very exciting and it's my favorite thing that I do in terms of my mission, my work, in my life. So go to, let's see, if you go to the Events tab of the page, so go to SocialConfidenceCenter.com and we'll have a link below at ShrinkForthShyGuy.com too. But if you go to SocialConfidenceCenter dot com and click the Events tab, then you can get yourself a ticket for the Early Bird, which ends tomorrow, midnight tomorrow. So do it. Make the leap. Now, what about when we don't take action? What about when we hesitate and hold back and wait? And oftentimes when we hesitate and hold back and wait, we have a reason, don't we? We sort of say, well, that's probably the best thing to do. I don't want to make a rash decision. I don't want. I don't know. I mean, sometimes we don't have a reason. We're just like, I'm not sure if I want to do it or not. I'm not sure what to say to this person. So I'll just say nothing. And then we choose by not choosing. Right. But sometimes we intentionally hold back, intentionally stop, intentionally don't do something, don't take an action. And we have a good reason for it. And we tell ourselves its prudence, its reasonableness, and to do the other thing would be unreasonable or unwise or somehow not good. And we have a very rational reason sometimes. But really what it is is fear. And of course, you know, whatever the action is, we're talking. I'm talking the abstract here, so you got to think about the specifics. But let's say you're in a job and you don't like and you know something needs to change and you might not have to quit, but you at least got to start speaking up for yourself and asking for more of what you want and whatever, having some crucial conversations or quit and go somewhere else. Like, you got to do something, and you know that. But then when it comes to needing to have the conversation or it comes to making the decision to leave or it comes to interviewing for somewhere else, there's a reason not to, right? I don't know. Maybe there's nothing out there. Oh, I don't have the time for it. Oh, besides, it's not safe to leave. What if I can't find anything else in this economy? And we have our list of rational reasons that talk us back from the edge. Oh, later, later. And we never say never. Right. We'll be like, later, I'll do it later. Yeah, that's right. When it's safer and we talk ourselves out of it. And I want to highlight this pattern because it's one of the more sneaky ways that our safety police works. You know, when you want to take a risk, a healthy risk in your life, act of confidence. You might be wondering why I talk about risk so much in this show. It's because confidence is a byproduct of risk. If you take a risk, you do something new, you do something edgy, you do something outside your comfort zone. You might feel nervous, you might feel great as you do it. You also might feel nervous and scared and terrified. But your confidence grows as a result. You know, if you're trying to learn how to rock climb or something, and you push beyond what you've done before. And maybe you're nervous or maybe you fall or something, but now after you've done that, your confidence will go up. You will know that you can do more than you thought originally. And you can do more because you pushed your edge. And so when we take those actions, that's how our confidence grows. That's kind of a basic principle of confidence building, but it's good to worth reinforcing again and again. But what often happens is we think about taking a risk and then our safety police will freak out. You're gonna die, they're gonna reject you, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. And then we're like, oh, okay, fine, fine. And we don't. Now, it's very effective for many years for many people, and the safety police has them under its thumb. And then they start to get into my world and listen to this podcast, read books, whatever, and they start to be like, oh, wait a minute. Okay, all right, all right, I'm gonna. I get it. I gotta challenge my safety police. I gotta do what scares me. All right? And then when the safety police comes up, they find a way to work with it and challenge it, use a technique or something or just barrel through or whatever, and they take the risk. And that's all well and good, but our safety police doesn't just retreat and give up. It doesn't just be like, okay, alright, well, that was a worthy battle, but I'm done. I surrender. No. Your safety police will back up just as far as it needs to and then regroup. It is a perpetual, undefeatable, relentless force. Your safety police will never, ever, ever stop trying to exert its influence over you. That's the bad news. The good news is that you don't need to eliminate your safety police to live an extraordinary, bold, confident, filled life. In fact, some level of safety police is always good. You do want to have that questioning voice in your head. You know, I'm thinking of taking this, this unknown white powder from this beautiful woman here. I mean, she seems, she seems pretty reliable. I just met her. She says it's gonna lead to a good time. I don't know what that means. Maybe it's with her though. In any case, let's take the powder. And then you hear that voice in your head. You're like, you know, dude, you don't know what's in that powder. You don't know what might happen to you after you take it. You are in a sketchy place you've never been before. You do have all your valuables on you. Maybe don't take the sketchy white powder. Now, in that case, you can choose to override or not. I've had instances of both. But let's just say in that moment, your safety, please, might be providing something of value to you, and you can choose to listen to it flash forward. When you are in a relationship and you're having some tension with your partner and you're just kind of irritated with them and you're just like, I don't want to touch them. I'm not sexually into them right now and kind of want to get away from me and just let me do my own thing. And they try to talk to you, and in your head you're like, all right, I'm going to listen to you for a while. But all you do is go on and on about yourself. You're kind of fighting with them in your head, and then there's a part of you that's like, hmm, I got some resentment, I got some anger here. Maybe I need to figure out what's going on. And then I need to have a conversation with them about it. And your safety police goes, no, no, no, no, no, don't. This is your own issue. Just deal with it on your own. Don't bring anything up. You're just gonna create a fight. You're gonna create conflict. Besides, when you talk about it in the past, this doesn't work out. That's when your safety police becomes a real threat, a real liability, because then it's blocking you from a healthy, essential risk to create the life that you want, the relationship that you want. So as you've done this work and you've practiced, you challenge that too. And you say, no, safety police. I do not agree with you. I repudiate your claim, good sir, madam, and I shall have that conversation. And then you do. And then you're a badass now. So far, so good, right? Since you've bested your safety police, it retreats into the shadows and is never to be seen from again. Or it does retreat into the shadows and then it regroups, gets together with its little clan of other policemen, says, what do we. What are we gonna do about this? He's speaking up in his relationship. Seems to be doing it all the time. Speaking up at work too. What the hell's going on here? Shh, shh, shh. He's gonna hear you. Don't say any. Just wait. Okay, he's gone. Alright? How are we gonna stop this? Yeah, doesn't he know he's being unsafe. Yeah, he's being really unsafe. We're gonna get hurt. You don't understand what happens to people who speak up in their relationships all the time. He's gonna keep having more conflict. More conflict is terrible. Oh my God, it's intolerable. Besides, you know, if you have, if you have enough conflict, that's the beginning of the end of the relationship. I know, that's what I'm saying. And he's speaking up at work all the time. I'm trying to keep his mouth shut because if he keeps speaking up at work, I mean, people are going to notice that people are going to be talking behind his back. I bet they are. And then it's going to go up to his boss, he's being all demanding and neat and just claiming what he wants and just they're going to, they're going to come to his office, they're going to tell him to stop that or maybe even probably just fire him. I know we gotta do something. Alright, alright. We need a plan here. Well, he seems to be confronting us regularly. So if we just tell him bad stuff's gonna happen. If he does it, he doesn't listen to us anymore. We need a new plan. And that was a little rendition of the voices of your safety police. You know, I'm trained in the high arts of theater. In any case, that's what your safety police does. Confers amongst itself selves and decides to come up with a more subtle plan to influence you. And so instead of directly confronting you and saying, you can't do that, it's not going to go well. He'll say, yeah, you know, your workplace is bad, it's not good for you. And it's a good thing that you're speaking up, buddy. We're just so proud of you. And you know, here's what we're going to do. Let's, let's speak up, try to get more of what we want and have that conversation with your boss and see if you can ask for that promotion. But let's be reasonable here. Instead of asking for a $10,000 raise, maybe that's a lot, that could really upset him. So maybe something like 5k. 5,000, that's a lot. 5,000 is great. Just ask for that. And if they say no, you think about leaving, going to a new place. And we totally could do that. We just need to be smart about it. All right, so maybe we'll take the next 12 months to kind of research other places, find the best fit, secure another job before we do anything and just really stay. If you look around, there's nothing out there. There's other ways to make it work here. We should make it work here. You know, don't go crazy, all right? Sound reasonable. And it'll just chip away at you like that again and again. And sometimes the fear one will pop in and then the reasonable one will come in and be like, no, no, no, no, no, it's not that bad. It's not that bad. They play a little good cop, bad cop on you. It's not that bad. Don't listen to that part. Yeah, I'm on your side. That part's crazy. We know that bad stuff's not gonna happen. But, you know, it is good to be a little more reasonable. And this is the slippery slope of settling. This is how we build the skill of settling. Because here's the thing. A skill is anything that you practice over time and get better at, right? You practice the guitar over time, you get better at it. You practice whatever ballet. You're better at ballet. Like me. Probably know about me, right? Master ballet est. In any case, we get better at the skills that we practice. And many of us practice settling in this really subtle, sneaky, safety police kind of way. And then we get better and better at it. And the more, the better you get at it, the more that habit is formed, the more you just do that without even putting up the whole fight against your safety police. You just become more and more risk averse. And I've seen this again and again in people that are in my world. It's like they're risk averse in one area of their life or more. And so then there's an opportunity and they're like, I don't know about that. Opportunity seems awfully. I don't know if it's reasonable to do that. And sometimes when I look at the opportunity and the level of risk involved and that person's settling past and skill, how much they've done that in their life, I can give you a pretty damn good guess about what they're going to do about that. If they're going to jump at that opportunity or not. I don't know. I should do a little self study when these kind of things come up, make little guesses on the side and then keep track to give you my hit rate. But I bet it would be pretty high because I'll just. Someone's been habitually settling in their career for a decade or something or more. And then there's this opportunity to move or to upgrade or take this risk or financial burden or whatever. And I hear about the details of it and they're like deliberating and am I going to do it or not? And in my head I'm like, nah, nah. It seems very unlikely they're going to do it. And I may or may not say this to them because I don't know that for certain. And I don't want to dismiss that they could take a leap, because sometimes people surprise me. But here's the thing. If you've been practicing a skill for a really long time, it becomes harder to do something different. The example, the skill of boldness, or last week we were talking about bath, right? Maybe the skill of being bath. That's in direct opposition to the skill of settling. And so which one are you practicing more? And what I wanted to highlight in this episode is how subtle settling can be. How we never say to ourselves, I'm settling in my career and it's probably just gonna suck for the rest of my life. Yeah, I'm just gonna settle in this relationship. It's not very good. But this is. I don't know, this is whatever. Like, maybe, maybe people have that level of, like, brutal honesty with themselves and they're okay with it. But most of us, if we were to say, yeah, this isn't really what I want, like, something else would be better for me, we eventually act. I remember at one of the live events, we were doing these small group meetings and there was a man in that event who'd been in a relationship for a while and was considering breaking up. And for one of the activities, we were having him do a sentence completion where they say, if I was fully on my own side, I would. That's the prompt. So we go around a little circle and each person says, if I was fully on my own side, I would. Boom. And the idea is to not pre plan it. It's just to say whatever comes out of you. And so if you're thinking about it a lot, you know, just let that all go. And then when it's your turn in the circle, just say, if I was. If I was fully on my own side, I would. And this man said, if I was fully on my own side, I would break up with my girlfriend. And then he kind of was like. He was sort of surprised by that. Like, oh, shit, did I just say that? Oh, no. Right? And for him, he was done settling in life. That's why he was there at the event. That's why he was taking bold action. And so he ended up. He ended the relationship probably about. It was still a while, maybe two, three months after that, though. But that was a very significant move for him in his life. So most of us, if we acknowledge, like, well, it'd be better for me to change something in my career. It would be better for me to take this risk. It'd be better for me to start putting myself out there more socially. You know, part of us would eventually do it, but we don't acknowledge it to ourselves. We live in our rationalizations and our stories and our reasonableness. And here's why. Maybe this is what he did for years. Maybe this partner can change. Maybe we just need to work on stuff harder. Maybe. Maybe it's all me. Maybe I just need to stop being so picky. I don't know. I'll probably never find anyone like her again. So, you know, and he just lived in this cloud of reasonableness and it all would make sense. And you could come up with a great case for it that your mom would agree with. Like, yeah, it is important to have a secure job that you hate, but at least you get paid every week, right? You could have other people that would just agree with you. But where does that end up? Where does that end up? It ends up in just Shitville. And that's where I lived for many years, like, settled Settledville, which is also known as Shitville. And there's a person on my team who I talk with regularly, who interacts with people who are interested in what I'm up to, what I'm up to. And they may want. They want to come to an event or they want to. Are interested about taking the next level with joining a Mastermind program or working with a coach on my team, or they're like, yeah, I've read your books. I listen to your podcast. Like, I'm ready, I want to do it. And her name is Lori. She's awesome and someone that's really inspired me in my life. And I love having her on my team and regularly interacting with her. And anyway, she's talking to me in one of our team meetings about a conversation she just had, and she's like, I just talked to this person. And like, they love your work. They've benefited so much. They've gone through Confidence University, and it was really impactful and life changing. And they want to do the Mastermind and I think it's such a great fit for them. I love how excited she gets about the people she talks to. She's like, it would be so good for him, I want him to do it. It's going to be great. And then we'll follow up. And, oh, what happened with that person? She's like, ah, he didn't do it. And it was like, what was it? Was it the commitment? Ah, no. Was it the time commitment? No. Is it the money? No, he has the money. Was it? Was it. What was it? And she was just like. He just hadn't reached that threshold moment yet where he was, like, sick and tired and willing to just do the things he needed to, to change his life. And I'm like, yep, I know it. And she's kind of, you know, she's been. I've talked to way more people over the years in that position, so she's sort of surprised by it. But why wouldn't he want to do it? And I'm like, you don't get the psychology of people who've settled for decades. Well, I didn't settle for decades, fortunately. I only settled for about 10 years. And the longer you've done it, the more urgent it becomes to break free. Because if you do it for 50 years, it's harder than if you've done it for 10 years. It doesn't mean it can't change. We have. You know, people that I've worked with are in their 60s and 70s. I worked with one lady who was 78 years old, and she had massive shifts in her life. So it's never too late. But it's harder. It's harder when you're older because you've been doing that for so long. An old dog can learn new tricks. It just takes a bit more training. So she's talking about this person who just balked at last minute. And I was like. And she's like, what? She's kind of frustrated about it. I was like, all right, here's how it is. There's just so many people that are just running straight towards a cliff. And that cliff is not, you know, instant, horrible death. So maybe a cliff isn't the best metaphor, but it's just like they basically are just running towards a life of more and more suffering, a life and more of more desperation, of quiet desperation, of frustration, of pain, of bad relationships, of picking bad partners and staying in the relationship way too long and being in careers they don't like and being underpaid and being frustrated and not liking themselves and not having the friends and never having the deep connections and going in and out of periods of depression and feeling anxiety and hurting inside and not really enjoying their life. That's the cliff. And there are so many people just running straight for that. And the turbo boost of that is just continual settling. And I said, our job is to, like, stand at the edge of that cliff and. And try to grab people as they're about to go over and be like, no, no, come. You can go this way. We can go up to the mountains where there's a beautiful forest and jungle. You can have a mate that you love. I don't know why we talk like that. That's what we do. And maybe we're not very convincing when we talk in our weird Grover voice. We should probably change that, but, like, hey, let's grab whoever we can, whoever's ready and willing. And those people have reached that threshold moment, that level of pain. We're like, fuck this. I'm not gonna live this way anymore. And then we're like, awesome, now you're speaking our language. Now are you ready to take Bo now are you ready to do something different? And there are those people, and those are the people that, you know, you might be one of those people as you listen to this podcast. If you're doing the action steps, if you're at level five commitment, if you're willing to do whatever it takes, then you are experiencing that. You know what I'm talking about. And if you're not, maybe you're practicing the skill of settling, and that's okay. If you are, the tipping point is when you're gonna be decided something different. And so when people make that decision and they decide to stop settling and take life on, that's when everything turns around. So let's turn this into action. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step can be pretty obvious, Is going to be to identify where you're settling and just be honest with yourself about that. In fact, we're not. We're going to scale it back. Because if I say, okay, then go take bold action on that, there's gonna be a party that might want to delude yourself and say, no, no, I'm not settling there. Because you know that if you discover that you are settling there, you got to take bold action. So instead, just be curious. Look at the places where you're being very reasonable. Look at the places where you feel stuck or stagnant or frustrated on a regular basis, and just look, how am I settling there? How am I settling? What do I tell myself? And another way to find out if you're settling is what do I really want in this area? If life and the universe were not some Stingy, withholding son of a bitch. But it was actually a beautiful, loving universe that wants to give me things where I can actually have the life that I want in whatever it is. Your love life, your career, your social life, your being the person you want to be, the level of freedom, you want to experience fitness, you want to experience financial whatever it is. Like, what do you actually want? And notice where you are and where that is. And there's a huge gap there, maybe even settling. So that's your action step for today. And perhaps your bold action that's going to get you to stop settling is going to be to take the leap to come to live event. I would love that. If you're on that fence, I encourage you to do it. Because at the events, you. We just obliterate that. We obliterate that hesitation, doubt, skepticism, settling. Just smash through all that and help you leave there supercharged and ready and willing to do whatever it takes. Because here's the last final tidbit I'm going to share for you, is what's behind that. Settling is usually a lack of confidence, is a belief that we're not going to be able to get it, or it's going to be too hard to get it, or not even that is too hard. Because if we knew that we were going to get the result that we wanted, we would do it. We would endure any hardship. But it's this, like, doubt, this belief that you can't actually have the life that you want that then creates the settling and we just smash that. Because not only at the event do we challenge that directly, but then you also start to see that if you take action, you can create the life that you want. And we don't just talk about it there, we do it there. So if you're tired of just thinking about it and settling and you want to do something, this is one of the most powerful ways to do it. So go to socialconfidencecenter.com if you want to take advantage of that. We have the early bird going for one more day and I would love it. I would love to meet you, I would love to work with you. I would love to watch you just crush it over three days and that would be a really fun experience to share with you. And regardless, you come to an event or not, look at where you're settling and don't run off that cliff. Good God, don't run off that cliff. There's something so much better for you and I want that for you in your life. Awesome. Thanks for being with me today until we speak again. May you 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. 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 socialconfidencecenter.com.