The Only Obstacle To Building Confidence

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. Hey, welcome to today's episode of Shrink for the Shy Guy. Today I'm excited to share with you the only obstacle that gets in the way of you building an extraordinary level of confidence. That's right. There's only one. I know it might seem like there's a lot, but there really is only one. I'm going to distill it down in today's episode and I think you're going to leave with a sense of feeling energized and empowered to realize that you can create the confidence that you want and also be mentioning more in the episode a bit later. But if you're not aware of it, we're getting very close to the end of the super early bird for my virtual event called End Social Anxiety now, which is going to be, I mean, talk about accelerating your path to a more confident version of you, more free version of you. If you've never been to one of my virtual events, or if you have, then you know that immersing in that environment for three days is extraordinary. And it's amazing how much connection and feeling of together you can have virtually. Back in the day when Covid first happened and we had to switch a lot of things to virtual, I thought, oh man, this is gonna be. We'll see how this goes. Especially for helping people with social confidence and connecting. I've been amazed, which is why we, we do in person events too. But I've done a lot of virtual ones over the years and they've just been seen them be so effective. So if you've been listening to my show for a little while or reading my books and you wanna really just accelerate things, this is gonna be the way to do it. So you can look down in the description below or go to my website, drzez.com and there'll be a link right there to register for the event. But you might not because this leads to the biggest obstacle. There's Something getting in the way, not just of you coming to this virtual event or not, but something getting in the way of you having the confidence that you want. Building the confidence that you want. What might that be? What might be getting in the way of you having the confidence that you want? In fact, if I were just to say, do you feel fully, freely confident, exactly how you want to be in all kinds of different environments, confident at work, confident relationships, confidence socially and dating and relate, you know, anything. And if the answer is anything less than hell yes, maybe a depends sometimes or no, then why not? Let's actually see what emerges when you ask that question. Why not? And it's really interesting because often the answer is more of a feeling than any information. I guess a feeling might be information, but I mean, any story, mental, verbal, thought, it's just a feeling, right? Maybe the feeling is. It's. It's so far away, it's so heavy, it's hard, hopeless, discouraged. I've talked about a lot on this podcast, but there's a term in clinical psychology they call learned helplessness, which even without knowing a whole lot about that, you can just get from the name of it. Learned helplessness. You've learned that it's. It's hopeless, it's helpless, nothing you can do about it. And it might not be that extreme, like, there's nothing and I'm hopeless. Although it might. But it. It might just have, you know, 50% of that. But it doesn't take much hopeless to take the wins out of your sails. I mean, you know, if it's 100% hopeless, then you're probably depressed and suicidal. If it's 50% hopeless, you might not be, you know, not doing anything, but there's just not a whole lot of pep in your step. The actions you're taking might not be with that much gusto. You might avoid a lot of things. Still, you might have to really work yourself up to try to do something. But then, right. Cause we got that heavy weight of discouraged or hopeless. Maybe you fixate or focus on something that's wrong with you. My appearance, my. My skills, my background, my education, my level of. If I've done enough or if I've been to enough places or I've dated enough people. I mean, depending on the arena, right? So that could fall into the category of experience, life experience. Maybe there's something you believe is wrong with your character or your personality or your psychology, like, oh, I'm an anxious person, or I'm too messed up for my upbringing to have relationships. I got, you know, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, insecure attachment. My attachment mechanisms are broken. I'm not good at connecting with people. I'm, you know, I don't get social cues. I'm on the spectrum. I have too much anxiety. I have social anxiety. And sometimes we just say like, well, I got social anxiety as if it's a thing like you, you caught it and you got it for life. And look, I'm not saying that you don't experience anxiety or maybe you do have, you do experience. Maybe you are on the spectrum and it's a little harder to observe or pick up on certain cues. I'm not saying that none of those things is real and that none of those things is a challenge. I don't know what the challenges are for you. Maybe you do feel like, oh, I'm, I'm uglier than other people or I'm, you know, I know, I get it. Someone so and so is more attractive and always has been and always gets more attention from others. So I'm not here to deny that there's any challenges or that people might have certain things easier than you. Maybe someone does get more dates or more interest or they're taller or whatever and there's nothing you can do about that in terms of your height, let's say so maybe that's so. And having said all that, that's not the main or the only obstacle that stops you because there is someone who is your same height who is getting the results that you want in any arena of life, whatever the reason that you think your height is not the reason why you can't date somebody or whatever, right? There's someone who has your exact upbringing or similar enough upbringing, who is successful in relationships. There's someone with your experience level who is doing well in their career. So what's really the obstacle if it's not those things that we point to? The obstacle is your perception of what's possible for you, your belief about what is possible, which, which leads to predictions of what you is going to happen if you take action. And if you believe that it's, it's not possible for you, or it's very unlikely, or it's going to take forever, then that's going to just completely undercut all the action you could take and it's going to completely distort or influence all the feedback you get along the way. So if you think it's impossible and then someone says no to you once instead of how you interpret that no is very different than someone who Has a completely different perspective. And so you interpret the. No, it's like, yeah, see, told you. I told you. And with that perspective comes a lot of pain, right? Because to think you can't have something, you can't do something, you can't get something that's really meaningful or important to you, especially something as basic as feeling good about yourself and be able to connect with people, which is what confidence really is. I mean, that's discouraging, that feels bad. It's like, yeah, you can't have that. You're gonna be limited from that for the rest of your life. Like, look, so then you're gonna feel bad, you're gonna feel low, your energy is gonna drain out of you. And then when you get into that lower energy state, well, action just feels really hard or overwhelming or confusing. Like, you don't have enough energy going through your system to organize and know how to do things or take actions or what to say. You space out, you're overwhelmed, your anxiety increases. Because now I gotta manage all these things. Oh, my God. And so do you see how, though it's all stemming from that underlying perception. Now, you might not be aware of that perception. That's what the point of this episode is. You might just be aware of the feeling. I just feel bad, feel anxious, I feel overwhelmed, or I feel so drained when I think about taking action, put myself out there, doing things. Right. That's what you're aware of. But underneath that is the perception. So let's go straight to that perception. Let me ask you some questions about that. So do you believe that it's possible for you to create an extraordinary level of confidence? Not theoretically. Not for someone else? Not. Yeah, that's possible. That's. You know, is it possible for someone to get healthy and in shape? Sure, sure. That's within the human band of experience, I guess. Is it possible for you? Me? No, no, no, no, no, no. I got a bad knee, you see, so I'm toasted for life, right? In this case, it's, I got a bad upbringing, so I'm broken. Do you have a perception of yourself as it's not possible. And again, this might not be totally verbalized where you're walking around saying it to yourself in your own head all the time, but as soon as you start to tune into it, you can feel it. And you know, where we add in, learn helplessness, you might have experiences that you've drawn conclusions from that have taught you that. Sure it is. Because maybe you've tried something, maybe you tried to Put yourself out there more and take action and go. Just be social. Fake it till you make it go. Go. Get out there. Be confident. And you tried that for a little while and maybe it sort of worked and then it all fell apart. Or maybe you did get some dates and then someone broke up with you and you're like, blah. And then it all came down and crashing around you. Maybe you had seasons where you've put some effort in and it worked, but it was two steps forward, two steps back. Or maybe you've tried something and it just never really worked. You tried to connect or create friendships and just the fire never took. Right. It's like you trying. You're trying to start a fire with a fire starter and these little sparks are going and you're working really hard. And then it's just, man, people don't seem to really want to hang out with me. I'm trying to connect with people and they don't seem as interested. Or I reach out to other people, but then if I stop putting all that effort in, no one seems to reach back to me. And maybe you've tried that several times in your life. You tried it in college, you tried it in some new city, and now, duh, now, whatever, man, this is just how it is. And so we settle into some new normal, just kind of like a suboptimal, limited way of being, but that's just how it is. So this is the perspective you have about yourself and what's possible for you. And these things can get really sticky. Like, we don't. We don't want to try again. We don't want someone to tell us that it's possible. We get angry when someone says, you don't understand what it was like for me. We get depressed and discouraged about it. But then we're also kind of pissed off and resentful, too. Got a little chip on our shoulder about it. So then we see someone else doing it and we feel envy or we feel inferior or we feel angry. And if someone tries to ask us about it or mention something, then we might get defensive or we might say, I don't even care about that. I don't even want that anyway. It's stupid. It's not for me. And it's all coming from this place of pain. And so when someone comes across my material, this podcast, my books, if you go to my website, drazeez.com, there's a free mini course there called Five Steps to Unleash youh Inner Confidence. And one of the Steps in there is do what scares you. Right? I'm talking about how confidence is a byproduct of action, which if you listen to this show at all, you know, it's not new material, not. Not new ideas, and yet someone hears that and then they're like, ugh, stop taking all that action. It's so hard. I'll sometimes get emails where people are like, angry or upset at me. How dare you say you just do the things. You obviously never experience social anxiety, you don't know what it's like, or people take action and it doesn't quite work. It's half hearted. They don't do that much of it. And you might, aw, you lack willpower, you lack discipline. You're weak. What's wrong with you? Maybe you tell yourself those things, but it's none of those. It's because if you believe it's not really gonna work, then how motivated can you be? How much discipline can you muster? And so that is the root of it. That's what we must target. That's what we must address. You might be thinking, well, like, how. How do I change it? How do I change it? Do you. Do you really want to change it? I guess that's the first question I have for you because we can ask how in two different ways. One is like, how? Well, how. How would I possibly do that? Hmm? It's like, I don't know, man. I don't know. I'm here to try to push down that wall and convince you it's your life. Choose your own adventure. And then there's another way to ask how, which is with true curiosity. Huh? How do I do that? And I think it starts with saying, I want that. Before we get to the how do you want that? Do you want to perceive yourself differently? And that might seem like a rhetorical question. Like, the answer is obviously yes, but is it? Is it really? Do. Do you want to have a different perception of yourself because there are payoffs, hidden payoffs, secondary gain, little benefits, little bennies from perceiving your. It is impossible. You're not able to do that thing. It gets. There's so many benefits to that. It puts it in the realm of out of my control, it's not my fault. It relieves a sense of blame or inadequacy. I'm not saying you have to feel inadequate and blame yourself, but those feelings are there. And then we just get to kind of depressurize that a little bit, not feel that as much. We get to avoid the inherent discomfort in the actions. That's really one of the biggest ones I've seen. I get to avoid the rejection, the uncertainty, the putting effort into something without guarantee of result. It's all very, can be very uncomfortable. Get to avoid all that. I get to preserve a sense of connection with myself. It's almost like self pity maybe, but there's a form of. That can be such a. People can have such a negative connotation towards that. Like, no, I'm not self pitying, I'm not. Or they feel shame, it's so bad at you to self pity. So that's why I'm a little reluctant to use that term. But there is a sympathy, self sympathy. I'm sympathizing, like, oh, that's so hard. I know. And it's a form of connection. And look, acknowledging something is hard and empathizing with yourself is part of self compassion. It's not bad. But if that's all that we got, it's like, oh, I know it's so hard. It's so bad and wrong that those things happen to you. Yeah, yeah. Like where do we go from there? Are we more free or are we more stuck now, even though we feel a little more connection, these are just some of the potential benefits. I'd be curious what you see for yourself. What do I get out of that? Because if we're not willing to find new ways to meet those needs of connection, of feeling, of significance, then we'll go back. We'll go back to what we know and there can be something really exciting and exhilarating and empowering about reclaiming. Wait a minute, wait, wait a minute. I can, I can, I can do this. Like I have periods of my life in different areas, whether it's physical health or business or relationships or other things where I, without knowing it, have settled into a bit of a discouraged like, oh, you know, this is my ceiling, I can't do any more than that. Or I can't create this other thing. That's what I really want. But I'm not gonna tell myself I really want that because then I'll feel disappointed. But I really do want it. So it's affecting me emotionally, but I won't acknowledge it to myself. You ever done that one? And. But then I've tried several times in the past and it was so hard. And now I have some stories about why it's not what I want or why it's not possible for me. And there's a little bit of a reduction of my energy because I'm running to like 20% hopeless vibes. And then something will happen, right? I really want something. Or I have a conversation with someone, or maybe you come to my virtual event coming up in a month and you're like, whoa, breath of fresh air. All this possibility, hearing from other people who are making changes, doing activities, taking action in my life, getting powerful in my body, seeing new things. And then bamboo. Something shifts. Sometimes for me it's just a conversation with somebody, or I receive a coaching session or something happens and I'm like, wow, yeah, no, okay, wait, I do want that. And it's like this amnesia clears. This mist clears. I'm like, wait a minute, of course I've done so many things in my life. And then all this huge track record of capacity and strength and determination, all these things that you already have, you've just forgotten about in this low energy state. This mist, this cloud of amnesia, it starts to fade and this fire kicks in. You're like, wait a minute. No, I. Wait, hold on a second. I can do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to challenge this, I'm going to change that. And you start taking action and everything changes. And it doesn't mean that you don't have particular challenges with your social confidence or, you know, your appearance or there's some disadvantage that you have to overcome because you didn't get something in life. Those are all still there, but maybe they're irrelevant. Or maybe it's like, yeah, okay, I gotta work a little harder on this than others. Okay, I'm willing to do that. That doesn't mean I can't have it. It just means I have to put a little more time in. Let's go. Do you feel? Can you feel it's not just the words I'm using. Can you feel a total different energy? This is what changes everything. Cause then you'll go take actions. Then you'll be able to apply what I'm teaching in my books and other things. Which is why in my mini course, I share and guide people through to help activate that part of you. I call it a threshold moment where you reach this moment of enough of this. And we'll be doing a powerful version of the event too. Because I can't just share information and activities with you. Even if we make an event or an experience or a course or something action oriented, if people are taking action from the wrong place, it's destined to fail. So we got to take it from this place. And I hope you're not just hearing and you know the words I'm saying, but getting a feeling and a sense of the energy of it as well. So let's talk about how you can turn this into action for you. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step is going to be to look at an area in your life where you feel a little bit of that hopeless, discouraged vibe, learned helplessness might not be, you know, 100%, maybe it's only 10%, 20%, 30%, but it's enough to create a drag and just bring your focus to that and ask yourself some of the questions I've asked you in this episode. Just finding out, just even naming that, like, wow, I perceive myself as incapable, or it feels like it's, you know, what I try is not going to work in this area. Wow. Just be with that. Observe that for a little bit. That's a powerful new honest revelation. And then you might say, well, you know, do I want something different here? And what are the benefits of keeping it this way, seeing it this way, holding this belief or perspective? And then maybe, just maybe, you start to challenge that. You question that, you defy that and, well, magic happens then. All right, 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're awesome. I'll talk to you soon. 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, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to over 20 coming shyness and increasing confidence, go to SocialConfidenceCenter.com.