Dr. Aziz explains why telling yourself you're boring actually makes you boring. When you worry about what others think, you filter yourself, say less, and seem unengaged. The fix: lower your internal filter, share what genuinely interests you, and ask about what you're curious about.
There is one major lie that you're telling yourself on a regular basis that is killing your self confidence and making it way harder to connect with others. Worse still, this kind of becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where you start to believe it's true over time. What's the lie? It's telling yourself I'm boring or I'm not interesting. And as a result, you get into conversations, you don't say much, you kind of smile and nod and keep it focused on them. And as a result, people don't really connect with you, they're not that interested in you and you start to believe, well, look, I guess I really am not that interesting. The problem is that you're not boring. The problem is that your filters are way too high and the biggest filter is are they going to like this? And you don't know if they're going to like it or not, so you end up deferring and saying nothing, which ends up making you more boring after all. So here's what to do instead. Turn that filter way down. And if it's interesting to you, it's interesting. Share it. If you're curious about it, it's worth asking. So ask about it. And don't think about it more than that. Just get into the conversation and start sharing more and you're going to find that it's way easier to connect.
