This Will Totally Change How You See 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, 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. Today's episode of the show. Today I'm excited to share something with you that's going to be very powerful for increasing your confidence and reducing social anxiety. And when I first say it, it might not sound that exciting. That's why I'm prefacing with this is extremely valuable to you. So if you're listening to this show because you want more confidence, you want to reduce social anxiety, people pleasing fear of what other people think, this is going to be your golden ticket to victory and confidence. But it's going to sound kind of boring or like, oh man, what's the, what's the better magical juice? Well, this, my friend, is the magical juice. Are you ready for the confidence magical juice? We're still working on the branding of that. In any case, I'm going to share with you in this episode real quick. First, if you're benefiting from this, my request would be to spread the message, share this episode with others, this podcast with others. This is completely free in the world and my mission is to help as many people break out of the cage of social anxiety that I was in. Perhaps you are breaking out of that cage now. So let's pay it forward and if you can give a review to this episode on wherever you're listening it to, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever else, then that would be very helpful in spreading the word as well. Because the more reviews it gets, the more someone who's checking out the show saying, is this worth my time? Well, they see your words and that inspires them. So hey, we're all on the same team here, team human. And let's, let's all support each other in growing. So thank you in advance for doing that. Now let's get to the magic juice. Here's what it is. You ready? Expanding your capacity now. I knew, I knew I told you, told you wouldn't sound that exciting. But stick with me because it's extremely empowering and liberating. What do I mean by expanding your capacity? Well, basically, we all have a certain amount of something that we feel like we can handle, right? And that could be literally physically. Just take that simple example to wrap your mind around it. There's a certain amount you can lift and that's beyond that is physically beyond your capacity. There's a certain amount that you can do with a machine or a skill or an instrument. That's your capacity with that machine or instrument or knowledge set. Well, we also have a capacity of what we can handle in terms of experiences and emotions in life. And so a big part of the struggle with social anxiety and niceness and people pleasing is actually a very limited capacity in a couple of key areas. Now, you might have a huge capacity talking huge, dude. I bet your capacity is huge in other arenas, but not in the ones related to confidence. Because what are those? Well, your ability to tolerate someone disagreeing or disliking you or something you said. Your ability to tolerate a. No, a rejection. Someone not getting back to you. Your ability to tolerate failure or something not going the way that you wanted. Maybe someone actually not just, you know, having some issue with something you said, but maybe full on disliking you, being critical of you and kind of seeming to single you out, whether it's at work or somewhere else in the world. These are the kinds of things that I find when I'm working with clients. Their capacity to deal with it is very low. And that's from a couple of different reasons. And we can shift this, we can change this. It's not set in stone. It's not determined by your DNA. It's actually a cycle or a pattern that's begun. And maybe it's been going for a while, but the cycle goes like this. Generally, people that I work with tend to be slightly more sensitive. Humans or they feel more. I'm certainly in that category. What does that mean? You're more empathic. You might feel or pick up on other people's emotions, emotions or energy more. You're in a room, you can kind of tell who's upset or if there's tension in the room, whether you can verbalize what's going on or not. You just feel it more. And same thing if someone doesn't like you or if there's some upset or some conflict. And usually we've gotten. Maybe there's some hard wiring there. There's natural sensitivity that every human comes out of the factory with different profiles. And some of those are more Sensitive. But then also there may be an environmental attuning that happens, right? You grow up with a lot of conflict in the home and you start to really pick up, oh, okay, Dad's coming home mad. I know it's going to be this, okay, let me protect myself, let me how to take care of mom or whatever you're doing as the peacemaker of the family, which is a very common pattern for people with social anxiety. And then you become the peacemaker in the world as an adult. Yay. But not really yay. Boo boo. Anyway, now I am overly responsible for everybody and I feel things way more. And so, oh my God, this leads to part two. Let me avoid that. No, thank you. And so we have a pattern of avoiding those uncomfortable situations. Avoiding the conflict, avoiding the disagreement, avoiding the dislike, avoiding the upset, avoiding the rejection, avoiding the failure. Problem solved, right? Not quite. Because all of those things are actually part of a healthy existence. Failure, disagreement, dislike, conflict, rejection. In fact, you might go so far as to say that not only are they part of it, a high amount of those things is part of a healthy existence. Now, we're not talking about, you know, just chaotic conflict every day of your life for its own sake. I'm talking about assertiveness, which might feel like conflict at first. Having different opinions, being able to say something that someone may or may not like, giving feedback to somebody. These become a part of a regular occurrence. Just think of someone who is taking on a lot at work or managing a lot of people. They might have to give a lot of feedback to a lot of different people on a given day. If you've ever wanted to grow in your dating life, you know that rejection, getting no's is a part of the process and a necessary part of the process. And the more rejections or no's you can get, probably the more you're taking action and the more success you're going to have. And that's absolutely true in business, sales, entrepreneurship, even putting yourself out there to work for different companies. So we want to increase our capacity to handle all these things. And because we might have a natural sensitivity to it, and because we may have avoided it, we might be starting a little behind on that skill or muscle capacity. And that's okay. That's just where you're at. But we want to want to see that, we want to name that, we want to own that, and then we want to take control and shift that. And as you hear all this laid out, you might say, well, yeah, duh, that sounds great. Obviously you just do that. Well, no, no, we don't just do that because it's uncomfortable, it disturbs us, it's overwhelming. We have two minds in there. Probably have actually 50 different parts inside of you. But we got definitely two main parts, right? The part that wants to go out there and explore and grow and experience love and freedom and connection and purpose and all your values. And then you have another part they call your safety police. Like, no way, no, thank you. I'm going to pass on all that. Forget all that. I'm just going to stay safe, avoid everything. So what we want to do is we want to increase our capacity and framing it that way will really serve you. So how do we do that? Well, you go and experience something in life, you take a risk and you are going to get outcomes and some of those outcomes you're not going to like and you're going to start to have feelings about them. Oh, this person said no to me. Oh, there's some conflict. Oh, now the default pattern or response inside is a lot of self judgment and reprimand. And I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have said that. Oh, no, that was a mistake. It was so wrong. The takeaway here is to never do that again. Never put myself out there again. Never speak up. I'm sure I've shared this story at some point on this podcast, but it, to this day still amuses me. This is back in the day when I was doing therapy and had a therapy client and we were working on social anxiety though, and he was working on his dating and he, he'd gone from not literally not being able to talk to a woman to being able to start conversations with women. He was just brilliant hospitalist who worked somewhere locally in Portland at the time. So, you know, capable, intelligent guy, but just absolutely terrified and anxious when it came to women. And so through our work together, he was able to start approaching women, develop the confidence to start conversations, even connect and get phone numbers. And so, you know, making great progress. And then he gets to the next stage where he's got the phone number. Now he's got to call the woman, right? Be like, what's up? You want to hang out? Which is exactly what I told him to say in that exact voice. It works every time. And so he's, you know, calls a woman, he comes to the next session and he's like, oh, that was terrible. That went awful. I was like, well, what happened? And you know, it sounded like they got on the phone and there was a little bit of an initial Connection. And then it kind of. There wasn't. It didn't. The fire didn't take, let's say. And so the conversation kind of petered out and she seemed disinterested and like she kind of wanted to get off the phone and didn't want to see him. And he thought their first conversation was great, though he was kind of disoriented and feeling rejected and kind of clung on to the conversation longer than he wanted to. And then they concluded it and he just felt awful afterwards, embarrassed or self critical. And so we were exploring that and in my mind I'm like, this is great, dude. You went from not talking to any women to now you're approaching and now you're having conversations and now you're building this skill set, the next step. So I said, what, what did you, what did you learn? What did you take away from the conversation? He's like, I'll tell you what I learned. I'm telling you, this is truly what he said. He said, I learned to never talk to a woman on the phone. And he said it with a total straight face. It wasn't a joke or being ironic, but I thought he was having a dry sense of humor. And so I laughed. And he just stared at me like, that wasn't a joke. I was like, oh, shit, you weren't joking. Well, okay, that is one conclusion you might draw. What else could we conclude? Right? And so that is, I mean, he just totally exemplified what we do and why the process stalls out when it comes to building confidence. Because we bump into that edge of your capacity and conclude, well, I should never go there again, as opposed to, oh, I'm at the edge of my capacity. I actually need to hang out here longer. Right? It's. Imagine you are out of shape cardiovascular wise. You don't do any cardio and then you go up some stairs and you're out of breath. What's the conclusion? Well, hopefully the conclusion is, dang, I should start walking and hiking again. Maybe get some jogs or bike rides or something in there. I'm out of breath going up the stairs. That ain't good. Or, and this is. People do this, by the way, they conclude, man, there's too many stairs in this house. Where's the elevator? Okay, well, now we go down a different path. And just to take that physical example further, let's say you avoided all stairs because they made you out of breath. Then what does your capacity to, you know, traverse distances and hike and exercise, go up, stay the same, or go down that's right. It goes down. The capacity shrinks. Use it or lose it. Sure, you've heard that when it came to physical health. Well, it's the same with this. So then you're. If you. If he avoided all phone calls, his capacity to navigate being on the phone would go down. His capacity to tolerate an awkward silence or a conversation that didn't take or whatever was happening would go down. I don't just mean verbally what to say. I mean emotionally. His capacity to tolerate that ambiguity, uncertainty, mixed feelings, trying to feel the other person out. It's vulnerable, but it's part of dating, part of life. So is rejection. So is failure. So is not having an awkward moment. So is not knowing what to say. So is someone saying, I don't really want to be your friend, but guess what? So is someone saying, you're awesome and I want to be your best friend, or, you're awesome and I want to date you, I want to sleep with you, I want to marry you, I want to hire you, Right? So these are all coming out of you having a greater capacity to stay in that zone. So what we want to do is you notice you experience something that's painful or challenging, and instead of retreating and just collapsing or contracting in response to that, it's, oh, this is where I need to hang out. Now, the story in your safety police mind goes, well, don't hang out here. I mean, you're just gonna have a suffer fest and it's gonna be awful. But actually, what happens if you hike a lot of stairs? What happens if you go for a walk once a day? Happens if you go up some hills around your house? Well, within days, I mean, it's gonna be within, you know, literally a day or two, your body's gonna start to adapt. You might not feel it right away, you just feel sore or tired, but after a couple of weeks, you'll notice it. You'll be walking up a hill that before got you winded and you're like, oh, I feel pretty good doing that. That's awesome. It's adaptation. And you will adapt emotionally as well and socially to these new capacities. You just gotta hang out in that zone. Does that make sense? Are you, Are you seeing the pathway here? Because then it gets really exciting. Then all of a sudden when there's this challenge, and this doesn't just apply to your social life, this is kind of life overall. We have a zone. You know, we all heard about our comfort zone, but we also have a capacity zone. And when something feels like it's beyond our capacity. We tend to lament and say, oh, no, this is too much. It's too hard. It's awful. It's wrong. Why is life doing this to me? Why is God doing this to me? It's too much. It's not fair. I don't like it. And we resist and we maybe pity ourselves or fight or lament or complain. And I'm not saying you can't have feelings like, ugh, there's a part of me that says, this is too much. I don't want to do this. Okay, and then. And then what? Do you live in that part? Does that part drive the bus? Drive your life? Because if so, I'm not here to tell you what's right or wrong or morally superior. It's just what's functional, what works. And if you want confidence, that doesn't work. What works is noticing that part says, it's too much. Say, okay, I hear you. Finding a way to maybe increase your self care, nurture yourself, get support, and then hang out in that zone. What can I do to help myself navigate this? What can I do to be on my own side, to give myself the resources and resourcefulness that I need to stay in this zone? Because if I do, I'll adapt, probably within days, but I might not feel it for a couple of weeks, but I'm gonna keep doing this. So, speaking of doing, let's talk about you doing things. Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step for today is to do things. Yes. Right. Things. Well, specifically things that are at the edge of your capacity. Where are you at the edge of your capacity right now? Where could you be if you weren't avoiding something? Pick one thing that feels like and maybe life is giving it to you right now anyway, and you just get to show up for it. But if not, maybe pick something that's a little outside of that capacity or a stretch for your capacity and intentionally go there this week, hang out there and see if you could have this mindset that we're talking about in this episode where you're expanding your capacity rather than something terrible is happening. And then once you see the truth of that, oof, look out. There's no stopping you. All right, thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are, to know on a deep level that you're awesome.

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