Dr. Aziz explains why people freeze in conversations: they treat them like performances being judged. The fix is simple. Stop performing. See it as an exchange of energy instead. He ran an event where anxious people became confident conversationalists in days.
Here's the most important thing about having confident conversations. And this is coming from working with thousands of people over the years and leading an event called Supremely Confident Conversation Master, where I took a room full of people with social anxiety and had them confidently talking with each other, with people out in the world in the matter of just a couple of days. So how do we do that? Was it the greatest techniques and strategies for conversation? No, it was actually one shift, because up until that moment, they saw conversations as a performance where they're being evaluated. It's like there's someone with a clipboard next to them, you know, checking off boxes. Oh, didn't do that. Right. Ooh, made a mistake there. It's very stressful and makes us anxious and unable to connect. We're in our heads, we're worried, we're trying to do it right. And when you really get on a deep level that a conversation is actually about one thing, yes, it's about connection, but ultimately, it's an exchange of energy. There's no performance, there's no evaluation. The only evaluator is in your own head. And when you get that, like, it's not coming from out there, it's coming from in here, then you're free.
