The Risk Of Life

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, second, 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 the show. Thanks for being with me today. How are you? You feeling bold? Feel, feeling ready to take some action, take some risks? Maybe you're nodding your head. Maybe you're gripping the steering wheel like, yeah. Or maybe you're subtly shaking your head like, no, no, I'm not. Do I have to? Not today. Well, I want to share some things about risk today that just came to my mind. I just finished a one on one session and it really illuminated how we can hold risk in our awareness and amplify it or lessen it, make it seem really scary or not that big of a deal. And how we hold it really makes a difference between whether we take the risk or not. Because if you use something that is extremely dangerous, man, you're probably not going to take the risk unless the potential reward is so great and your risk tolerance is so high that you'll go for it. But most of us, the reward has to be great and the risk has to be lower because if the risk is too great, it's just not worth it, no matter what the potential reward is. And the problem is many of us unconsciously stack the risk as more and more and more dangerous, even though it's not. And so I was talking with this potential, this client has a potential opportunity in his career to get a promotion. Nothing settled yet. It's just kind of there's some opportunities in the air. He can get a promotion, but it involves moving to a different city, in a different country and leaving his life where he's lived in one city for more than 10 years, leaving it behind to go to this new city. So there's all these potential benefits in his career, not just the promotion, but the kind of work is more engaging for him and more potential for growth. He feels like he's plateaued for a long time. But the risk is, you know, it's going to be hard to leave people and relationships and man have to rebuild new relationships. And so we're exploring it, right? It's a very. Of course someone's going to have a big dilemma even before the opportunity is crystallized, even before the offer is on the table. Just even exploring it can stir up a lot of questioning. Very natural. But what was really interesting is as we explored the risk and the fear and the downside, I started to see a pattern. And maybe you recognize this in yourself. The dangers were not really dangerous. Like, for example, one was, I'm going to go to the new city, so I'm going to leave people behind. That's going to be hard. And I told them, like, yeah, yeah. I mean, leaving friends and leaving your comfort and familiarity of your routines and where you live and where you eat and where you go, you're going to feel loss. There's no way around that. Even if there's a great, bright future there, you're gonna feel some of that loss. So the future has to be bright enough and compelling enough that you're going for it, even though you're gonna feel pain. And though there is this fear of, like, well, what if I go there and I can't make any new friends? And of course, what I know about him and the growth he's made over the last year, it's just ridiculous that I was like, no, it's not gonna happen. You're going to. That's like the fear that I work with someone who is, you know, charming, smart, intelligent, and they're ending a relationship that's not good for them, and they're like, what if I never can date again? I'm never gonna find anyone else. And I'm just like, that's ridiculous. I'll just tell them, like, straight up, like, that's absurd. One guy who told me that he was, you know, getting a very much needed, overdue, but painful divorce, and he just held off for years for the kids, quote unquote. But he realized eventually, like, this wasn't the life he was ready to live. And so he made the decisions and took action and got the divorce. And. And it turned out being actually much better for his kids and the whole family. But before the process, he was like, but, you know, I haven't dated in 15 years. I don't know what I'm doing. What if I never find anybody? And I forgot this exact moment. But, you know, maybe a year after the divorce, he was sharing with some people and he said, I remember that conversation when I told Aziz, maybe I'll never find Anyone to date. He. He laughed at me. He laughed and said it was absurd. So that's what I like to do, laugh at people. That's how I give them confidence. But I laugh at the stories, these fabricated stories. So, okay, you're never going to make friends. You're never going to meet anyone. You're never going to be able to do that. Well, that's not true. That's false. So what are the real fears? And then the next one was, well, if I tell people I'm excited about this promotion and then it doesn't happen, you know, or something follows through, I'll feel embarrassed. I'll feel I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. I'll be foolish. So then there's two things going on there, right? There's like this relationship to life of, like, I shouldn't get my hopes up. Because if I get my hopes up and then it doesn't work out, I'll feel disappointed, and I don't want to feel disappointed. And the other risk, the other danger is, well, I'm gonna, you know, people are gonna judge me. There's like a social aspect of feeling embarrassed. And all of these things are. They're not real dangers. I mean, sure, we can feel anxious about them, but it's not like we're facing real calamity in these decisions. Those are all things that we can work through. Those are all things that we can handle. And not only that, but we don't want those to be deterrence from pursuing what we really want in life. Oh, well, someone might judge me for doing that. Someone might laugh at me for doing that. Not just any risk, just doing anything. If that is stopping us, if that's blocking us, we're ultimately going to suffer more. And so in our attempt to suffer less by saying, well, I'll avoid the risks, so then I won't get judged and then I'll suffer less. Like, no, you'll actually end up suffering more because you limit yourself and you don't engage in life. So let's make this real practical and grounded. Like, is there a current opportunity or a current choice that you're facing or a current anything in your life right now that could be considered a risk. And just pull it to mind right now. Maybe it's ending a relationship or starting a relationship or changing a relationship or having a certain conversation with a boss or a colleague, or changing something in your job or career, or expressing your interest or love for someone, or revealing yourself more fully or openly in relationship, friendships, whatever it is, what Is the risk that's kind of in your world right now and take a moment to really think about like what are the actual dangers and really imagine them. And then ask yourself like, okay, what is that? Why is that? Why would that be so scary or intolerable? What about that is bad? And the more you sit with those, the more you might see a lot of those dissolve. They're just fabrications. And this whole thing about not wanting to be disappointed. There is a way that we can go through life where, I mean, we really just have one fundamental choice. Do you want to live open heartedly or do you want to live a guarded, defended life? And I'm framing it as either or, but really it's a spectrum because it's not a light switch, it's more of a knob. And all the way up is fully open hearted. And then all the way down is totally guarded. We end up kind of being somewhere along that spectrum. But do you want to be turning that up in your life or do you want to be turning it down now? Turning it down is where we try to guard and defend ourselves so that we don't hurt. So I'm not going to get my hopes up because I don't want to feel the hurt of disappointment. I'm not going to fall in love with somebody because I don't want to feel the hurt of rejection or loss. Or if I do love someone and I am in a partnership with them, I'm not going to let myself fully go here and really deeply fall in love with them and really rely on them and merge my heart and soul with them. Because then if something were to happen or they were to cheat on me or they were to die or anything, I just couldn't handle that. So I'm going to hover at about. If the 10 is fully open hearted and 0 is totally guarded, I'll hover around 5 or 6. We'll hang out, we'll talk, we'll share some. But I'm not going to share everything with this person. I'm not going to fully love and give myself over to them because I don't want to get hurt. You ever done that? No, I have. Not only have I, I noticed there's always the next level of subtlety in which I'm still doing that. So I think I'm like fully at 10 and totally open hearted. And then I'll see ways that I'll subtly contract or subtly try to guard me. It happens quickly and unconsciously or even especially after really beautiful sweet moments of Connection with one of my boys or Candace, my wife. Before I know it, maybe even later that day, I might be irritable and not have put together until the next day or something. Like, oh, I was feeling so open and so connected. It was like, too good. Let me get a little distance here from you, because this feels too vulnerable. So are you armoring yourself? Are you guarding yourself to not feel disappointed? And it made me think. And I shared this with a client, and I talked about this. I believe in a couple episodes back, a movie, Free Solo, about a character named Alex Honnold who free climbed El Capitan. Free climbing is when you climb with no ropes. And El Capitan is like this 3000 vertical granite face. I mean, the guy's climbing, like, holding on to things that I didn't even know you could hold on to, like little nubs and cracks and putting his toe on things that look like just smooth mountain face to me. But apparently there's a toehold there. And, you know, not only doing that, but doing that hundreds of times in preparation and then ultimately doing it with no ropes whatsoever. So if he slipped, he dies. And he's done a lot of free climbs before in different mountains and places all over the world and has struggled to have romantic relationships. And part of that is his lifestyle and how he chooses to live. And anyway, in this documentary, the free solo documentary that they're interviewing at the time, he does have an ongoing relationship with a woman. And one of his closest friends is a mountain climber. Climbs with him, trains with him. And they're interviewing them and asking him, like, how do you handle it when he goes and does these free climbs with no ropes? And his climber friend had a really beautiful, fascinating metaphor that really stuck with me. And he said, well, before Alex goes and does one of these free climbs, he armors himself. There's like this armoring around him. And he even references it. Like in the movie, they're interviewing Alex the climber, and they say something and he's like, well, you know, people say they couldn't survive if I died and they couldn't get over. He's like, that's not true. I would die and they would get over and they would move on and they would find someone else and they'd be okay. And then he paused, kind of reflecting on what he just said. He's like, maybe that sounds too harsh. I don't know, you know, but it's like you can kind of hear the mentality. You could hear some of the armoring. And his friend who climbs with him, who loves him, who never. He said, I would never free climb. It freaks me out. This is so dangerous. And he's like a professional world renowned climber himself. But he says so Alex has got this armor around his heart. And I realize that to be close to him would, while he does these free climbs requires that I armor myself too. I just thought, wow, what an interesting metaphor. So you get close to somebody and to be fully open to that person as a friend or a partner or a lover or a parent, whatever, and to be fully open and to know that they could go die is like it's almost impossible to remain open in those contexts. And that makes sense because it's so vulnerable and yet these people in his life love him. So they do. They try to remain as open as possible. And I thought, but isn't that interesting? Because that's just remaining open in the face of potential pain, Great pain. But we're doing that all the time in life on subtle ways, right? Like, do I get myself bright and open and excited about this potential future, this potential job, this potential relationship, or do I armor up a little bit? Because man falling off that cliff would really hurt. Now of course, our cliffs, unless you happen to also be a free climber like Alex, but for most of us, our cliffs are not plummeting to our death. Our cliffs are our heart getting ripped open or our hopes being dashed and feeling disappointed and then we lose perspective and we think, no, we literally are falling off a cliff and we're going to die. But it's not, it's just disappointment. It's just emotional hurt. It's just pain. And so when I think of it that way, I think, wow, that is all that's going to hold me back from really fully being alive and embracing right now. And the love that I can have and the connections that I can have and the magnificence of this life is being unwilling to feel some emotional pain. No, like bring it on, bring it all on. And this is an element that my wife Candice, so she was teaching some of at the unlimited dating and relationship confidence event last year and we were doing this segment on what it takes to create an extraordinary relationship. And she had this beautiful thing that she was sharing of like two to create something really amazing, like really life affirming lifelong that just keeps getting better and better. That's what I would define as an extraordinary relationship where you have this love and this connection and this passion and this desire to be together. One thing that she was highlighting, you must do is you must be willing to be ripped apart. You must be willing to be devastated. Because if you're kind of holding back and like, well, I don't want to get hurt that bad. So I'm going to armor up a little bit here. Then what's going to happen is you are going to lose a lot. You're going to, you know, you'll have a relationship and you might have a lifelong relationship and it might be good, but there'll be some depth that's missing. There'll be something aching inside of you. There'll be some emptiness, some longing, some something. And that's to fully give yourself over is to climb, is to like free climb in a way. And this is like the emotional version of free climbing a mountain face where, yeah, if I fall, I could get dashed and have to pick up the pieces and find my way in life again without this person. But that's the ticket, that's the price, the cost to have something amazing. And many people won't have something amazing, not because they're not capable of it, not because they don't deserve it, because they're not willing to pay the cost, the price. And it's just a risk. It's just a level of risk, a willingness to take these risks. So what kind of life do you want to live? Are you guarding and defending yourself right now, trying to defend against emotional pain? I don't want to feel disappointed. I don't want to feel judged. I don't want to feel rejected. I don't want to feel hurt. I don't want to feel bored. I don't want to feel anything uncomfortable at all. And if so, how many times per day are you armoring up and guarding yourself? Well, I don't want to. And some of it is so habitual, you don't even know you're doing it. It's just part of how you operate. So you just might not share that much about yourself. You just might not share what you're interested in. You might just mute your voice tone and your energy and your facial expressions and everything is kind of muted and deadened and guarded in the armor there. Because I don't want to feel the pain of someone judging me or the pain of rejection or the pain of someone not being interested in me, or the pain of whatever. And so the essential risk is, do you want to open more to life knowing that you will feel more? And yes, you will feel more pain. But here's the thing, you'll feel more acute pain but less drawn out Perma suffering. That's the trade off. That's the promise. I can tell you. So if you are willing to leap more fully into life and open your heart more and take that risk and maybe share your desire or passion or hunger or love for someone in your life, and then they say, no. Or maybe they say, yeah, okay, I'm into it. And then you go out on a few dates or even two months, and then they're like, no, even worse, right? Like Smash fell off the cliffside. And if you're. That's pain, right? That's going to be acute pain. It's going to be heartbreak. And so you'll feel some measure of pain after that. And you say, wow, how much is that? I don't know. It's 100 units of pain. That's a lot. I don't know what the scale is, but that's a lot. Okay, well, let's say you didn't do that and you said, you know what, I want to guard myself. I'm not going to protect myself. I'm not going to reveal that. I'm going to wait until, see if they say something first, then I'll know it's a sure thing and then I'll go into it. And of course they don't say anything first. But you still really like this person. You have all these feelings inside you're not sharing. So you wake up in the morning, you're like, I want to share something with this person. No, not today. It's not safe. And how much is that? Well, that's suffering. That's anxiety, that's fear. That's a lack of trust in yourself and your ability to handle feelings. A lack of trust in life, all that. And how much suffering is that? How much pain is that? I don't know, maybe only five or six units. It's kind of low. But what about that? Day after day after day after day compounds pretty quickly, doesn't it? And so you avoid the acute pain, but man, you are getting the shit kicked out of you in the long term with that long drawn out pain. And you see this, right? That's where that cynicism and that guarding and that skepticism and that hardening turns into depression. And then it's not less acute. Then it takes on this beast feeling of its own where you can feel extreme suffering from that disconnection of yourself and of the life that you really want and we want to pursue. So the question is, how much are you going to turn up that dial? How much are you going to open your heart and take the risks that you want to take to create the life that you most want. In fact, let's turn that into an action step. Time for action. Action, action. So you might think that your action step today is going to be to go out there and take a risk. No, it's not. Because this goes way beyond any individual risk. This is a fundamental orientation of you and your life towards risk. So my action step for you today is to examine how guarded am I living and how open do I really want to be to create the life that I want? And maybe the numbers on the dial might give you some reference point. I mean, this is kind of. This is more of a gut feel than a super sciencey exercise. But so you know, how guarded am I in love and relationships? What have I been playing at? And maybe 0 is totally guarded and 10 is totally open. You go for what you want, you express what you want, you share, you go fully. And maybe you get hurt. Same thing. You could have career, whatever other areas of your life too. So 0 to 10 and just look at a few of the big ones and give a number, whatever your gut sense is. And then what would it be like to turn it up one or two? What would a 10 look like? And what could that bring to my life? Beautiful. 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 vlogs, ebooks, and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to social confidencecenter.com.