The Moment You Start Managing Yourself

Have you ever been in a conversation where you're halfway through it and then you stop being yourself? Right, there's like this drift that starts to occur, and maybe you've been drifting for a little while and then you notice it. And you might not notice it as a mental thought, like, oh, I'm not being myself right now. It might just be a feeling. And that feeling might be one of tension inside or a pressure or an anxiety or something is off. Or another way that I hear many clients put it is they feel like they stop just being their natural selves and then they're in some sort of performance. And I like to think of this as managing yourself. And you're gonna discover exactly why and what's happening when you're doing that in this episode that's gonna really create some powerful insight for you. Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. I'm your host, Dr. Aziz, and I have been helping people overcome social anxiety, people pleasing, the fear of what other people think of them for two decades now. And I've seen that there's some core patterns that we can run when we're feeling unsure about how someone's gonna respond to us. When there's uncertainty around approval is present, right? Like, maybe this person's going to like me, maybe they're going to judge me. And there's a handful of ways that we respond to that. And one of them involves this self-managing that we're doing. And essentially, it goes like this, like, I'm not sure about just walking into this thing. It could be a social thing, a dating thing, a work thing. I don't know about just walking in there and being myself, I guess. Just here I am. And that could be here I am socially and here's my thoughts and interests and ideas. And then at work too, like, here's my professional opinion and my experience and my perspectives. We kind of don't trust that. We're like, yeah, that's probably not going to go well. That's our default assumption, isn't it? Isn't that true? That's what mine was for many years. I just walk over and talk to those people and I'd be all concerned or anxious or want to avoid it or make an excuse. But why? Well, underneath that was, this can't go well. Me as me, that's not going to cut it. Right? And we probably have some idea of a version of you who would cut it, who would be so amazing and maybe not even you. Maybe you look at someone else and you're like, oh, him over there or her over there. She'd be able to, you know, work the room. Everyone would love her, but not me. And either it's just all doomed, right? Like, I'll never be like him or her, so I guess I'll go home and eat worms. Or we have this idea of like some version of myself who's going to be so awesome. And if we do end up speaking up or sharing an idea, work or personal, environment, it's often with this pressured, almost like a performance to be that version of you. Do you know what I'm talking about? Can you relate to this? In fact, I had a client recently just say this. He described it as performance mode. I was going into performance mode again. And that's actually a great sign that he had the language to name it, to describe it, because Without that, it just feels like the only thing to do. But what we don't realize is that it's not the only thing to do, and it's not even you. It's not even your personality. It's actually a fear response, an anxiety response. There's a sense of threat inside of your nervous system. And again, this might not be happening consciously in your thinking mind, but in your limbic system, lower core centers of your brain, right? Your emotional centers, your limbic system, the part of you that's tracking. It's like the mammal part of you. It's like, do I belong? Do I fit in? Am I okay? Am I safe? Right? And you feel that. That's why people feel tense in their bodies and they don't know why. Like, why do I care so much about what this person thinks of me? Why? This meeting at work's not even that big of a deal. And yet their body is telling them this is a really fricking big deal, right? And it's doing that because to your body, to the emotional part of your brain, there is a potential threat here. And that threat is not that I'm not going to get approval. That's not great either. But the real threat is I'm going to get disapproval. I'm going to get judgment. I'm going to get dislike. I'm going to get a dirty look. I'm going to get someone thinking I don't know what I'm talking about or I'm not worth their time. And part of your brain tags that as a significant threat, right? It's like clicks it with a little red flag icon. It's like, look out for that. And so then we have different approaches. And I've found over time that there's only a handful of ways that people respond to this. There could be 1,000 different people and 10,000 different little nuances about what they say in their voice tone, their body language, but it really actually comes down to just a handful, right around 4 patterns is what I've discovered. And one of those big ones involves this pressure to perform, and then it becomes this managing of yourself. And what that looks like is it's almost like here you are in the conversation and, you know, I'm going to say something, I'm going to listen to them, I'm going to ask a question, whatever, normal conversation kind of things. But then it's like there's like a sort of separate into another entity who is on the outside observing me and commenting. And maybe— and this is really going to get weird, you know, sci-fi— it's almost like that entity is either to the side of me or through the eyes of the other person. You know what I'm talking about? And then it just starts commenting real time in your head. Well, that was awkward. I don't know why you did that. You shouldn't be doing this. You need to stand up taller. Oh my God, that sounded really weak. What are you doing right now? Right? And it's, I guess, coaching you kind of on how to be better. It reminds me of like a movie scene or something where I don't know if this is actually probably, it's probably in a movie somewhere, but there's a guy who's maybe not good on a date or something. And he's got a friend who's the suave one. And he's like, all right, man, you know, put an earpiece in my ear. And you just coach me on what to say. And then you're sitting at the dinner table and you got your date across the way from you and you're trying to navigate it and be suave and be cool and maybe see if you can take things places. And then your friend's whispering things in your ear, but instead of whispering good things like suave lines, like Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano, is that the? My brother is shaking his head at me right now 'cause he's the classy one of us two. I think it's, Cyrano de Bergerac. But if you're classy and you're shaking your head at me, well, so be it. But it's some old-timey play. Oh God, I'm really revealing my ignorance here. Some fancy-pants thing that they made me read in school. But a guy, a poet who's, I think, very ugly. He has like a giant nose. Is that what it is? Anyway, he falls in love with this woman, but he feels like he can't let himself be seen, so he finds some other guy and then whispers all the poetry for that guy to tell the woman. I don't know what his plan is because the woman falls in love with the guy who's whispering the poems up at her, not Cyrano. But even though Cyrano is— maybe he's eventually going to think he's going to do some great reveal and be like, it was me sharing the poems. Hahaha. Anyway, these aren't Cyrano de Bergerac poems. Right? These are just awful criticisms and negative self-comments. And that's what your buddy is doing in your earpiece when you're trying to have the date.

"You're making a mistake. That was a dumb thing to say. Why would you say that?

Oh my gosh, sit up straight." And all of a sudden now you are ripped out of the moment. Just, it's virtually impossible to be present when this pattern is running. And that just makes everything worse, doesn't it? Because then we're not present. And everyone can feel that. You can feel it. The person you're talking to can feel it. People in the room can feel it. They might not even know what's going on. But they're just like, why is it a little intense right now? Why am I uncomfortable? Why am I awkward? Or this is where people get in that moment where like, I don't know what to say next. And they kind of freeze in a conversation or freeze when they're speaking in front of a group. It's Because they're— if you were in your own body, in your own experience, present in the moment, and your focus wasn't getting ripped into this observer mode, you would have plenty of things to say. Now, before you resist me on that, I have proof. Even if you and I haven't met personally, I have evidence right now. Do some mind reading, and I bet you I'll blow your mind. You ready? Okay. I'm going to guess that you've had a conversation in your life, maybe a month ago, maybe 5 years ago, I don't know, when you were hanging out with a friend, someone you're close with, a family member where you just didn't have a care in the world. You know they like you, you know they love you. You're just hanging out in a relaxed environment and you're talking and you're just saying stuff. You know what I'm talking about? You just— things just come out of your mouth and then they say some things and you say some things and everyone's saying some things and it's fine. Well, that is you in a natural state, not in performance mode. That's you when your body's not at threat. That's you when you have a baseline assumption of acceptance and approval from that person that you're with. And so you do know what to say. So that story of, oh, I don't know what to say next. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say. That's a very problematic story. It's like, it's the cousin of I'm not interesting. I'm not interesting. Both of those stories really shoot you in the foot. Because they steer you away from the real challenge that you can actually solve, which is performance mode. And then they send you down this wormhole side quest of become more interesting. And that sounds kind of absurd, but maybe you've done it. I certainly have done it. I've talked to clients who, before they met me, or have been on that quest for literally years, actually accumulating a variety of experiences they may or may not want to try to become more interesting, to try to have more things to talk about. And they'll say, oh God, I should really, you know, read more news and stuff so I have things to talk about. And I'm like grimacing as they say that. I'm like, read more news? You definitely don't need to read more news. I don't know if that's going to give you things to talk about or conversations that you actually want to have. You know, are you alive? Have you left your house in the last month? Do you have— do you focus on things? Do you create things? Do you work? Do you Do you have exercise? Do you have a hobby? Do you go outside? Or is there anything that you're interested in your own life? Usually someone will say yes to one of those questions. I'll say, great, you have plenty to talk about. You're already an interesting human. So that's not the issue. The issue is that when we go into performance mode, we're in a threat anxious state. We're hyper-observing ourselves. We no longer become present. And then it's very hard to think of things to say because your filters get super high. You're in performance mode. Everything is, is this person gonna like it? Is this gonna land well? Is this gonna make me look impressive? Is this gonna make me look immature or foolish or bad or weak or less than? And so we're heavily running anything that could come out of our mouths through those filters. And those take time. There's a lot of RAM processing going on, especially if you don't know the person that well. 'Cause then you're like, well, I don't know. Then you're just going on these vague assumptions like, well, men kind of like this and women like a guy who's like that. And you know, it was my parent, mother-in-law, my parents, my wife's parents, old people like this. And then you have some of these general global beliefs and you insert what you're supposed to say and how you're supposed to say it, plus the critique of you falling short. Dude, I am just exhausting describing this. Do you feel that same way? Is this just draining? And here's the problem is, of course, you hear that, you might say, yeah, this is terrible, man. I do this and I did this for so many years. And it seems like, oh yeah, don't do it, right? This is a terrible thing. Stop it. Just stop it. And you might agree. Yeah, I should. Stop it. But then we don't. And the pattern repeats. And maybe what happens sometimes, we listen to a podcast, we're like, yeah, yeah, definitely, that's a stupid thing to do. Let's change it. All right. But the difference is you are in a moment right now when you're listening to this, where you're not being exposed to uncertainty around approval, uncertainty of how people are going to respond to you. That's when these patterns get triggered. And so we have to really start to discover what pattern we're running and, and get why. That's what this is about. I like to think of it as lines of code that are in, say, an operating system. And if we don't even know what system we're running and we have no idea what the code is, Despite our best intentions, we're going to repeat it, right? It's kind of like if your computer is running whatever, Windows or macOS or something, and you boot it up, it's going to just do the macOS boot up thing, right? And same thing with Windows, it's just going to do that. And you'd have to like really fundamentally change some of the code for it to boot up something different. And that's how this works in people, is this is a pattern that we usually learned decades ago, and then we've run the pattern again and again and again and again, and we keep it going for one primary reason, because it's the, it's the only way we feel safe. Like, man, if I did anything else, you're wondering like, yeah, this is silly. Why don't I just do something else? Even though you intellectually might think that when you get in the moment, there is a visceral body-level reaction inside. It would be like saying, okay, just run across the 5 lanes of the freeway. You'll make it. It's okay. And no matter what you'd convince yourself of mentally and why you'd want to do something like that, emotionally, viscerally, your body is going to recoil. And that's what's happening with us. And that's an extreme example. Running across 5 lanes of freeway, we all know, is pretty extremely dangerous. But did you know that people judging you in a meeting feels the same to your nervous system? It's like a hyper-threat. And fascinatingly, there's research that shows, I think it's the structure in the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, which is the part of the brain that responds when you get hit physically. It lights up in the same way when you are excluded or experience social rejection. So there is a very real pattern happening in your body that's going to hard steer to the left to keep you safe and put you into performance mode. And the biggest impact that I see from this is not only is it obviously very unpleasant and distracting and limiting of enjoyment and connection in the moment, it actually erodes the possibility of being deeply seen and known. Because even if you do performance mode okay and you get through it and you perform well, there's not this relief because, do people really know me? Am I really accepted for who I am? And then we got to keep it going. And I've seen this, I've experienced this in my own life, and I've seen people who've been in long-standing friendships, relationships, or on some significant level, people don't really know them or they don't feel really known. And that's where this pattern can really have an impact and why it becomes essential for us to see through it and to choose something different. So when you really see this pattern clearly, that's when everything starts to change. And that's what I want you to do for your action step this week is to just observe this. Where do you see performance mode clicking on for you? It might not be everywhere. It might be only in certain high-stakes situations at work or in a social situation that you don't know that many people. You also might find it kind of kicks on surprisingly in a lot of places. That's what I've seen clients will report to me. They're expecting it to be at this intense meeting at work, but they're not expecting it to happen. With a couple of friends when they're out getting a drink. And it's maybe not the whole night, but man, it kicks on for when they first get there, or okay, someone else new joins the group and then boom, they're in performance mode. Wow. And that, that's the beginning of a profound shift. So bring your focus to that, study that this week. I look forward to speaking with you in the future. 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.