Trust In The Process

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 the show. Today we're going to be talking about you experiencing a higher level of confidence than ever before. Freeing yourself from social anxiety, being more boldly yourself, all the goals that you want and the secret to achieving them, which happens to be captured in the title of this episode, which is trust in the process. You may have heard that before. Maybe you've heard that and didn't like hearing that. I certainly didn't. I'll tell you a story about that in a minute. I did not like hearing that when I first heard it. And especially if you like control like I do, then you especially don't like hearing that. And yet it truly is your secret sauce. It is the secret to success. It is the secret to social confidence. It is the secret to you ultimately being liberated to be your full self in any situation, confident in charge, steering your life as the captain. So trust me, it's worth it and it's important. So what exactly does it mean to trust in the process? How do you trust in the process? How do you know if you're doing it? How do you know it's going to produce the results that you want and how to bring more of that into your life to achieve goals and success. By the way, if you're benefiting from this, I have a request, which is that if you have not already done so, please go to itunes or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this on and take just a moment to give this show a review, preferably five stars. But, you know, you get to decide if it's gonna be a one star review. Don't leave it. But yeah, if you're benefiting, because what happens is then if I have the more reviews I have, the more of a superior human I become. No, the reason behind that is actually when I want to interview people for the show, which helps grow the show, what's one of the things that they look at is, like, how many? Because you can't necessarily see how many viewers a show has, but you can look at the number of reviews, and if it has a large number of reviews, then it indicates that there's a large number of viewers. So this helps me get more cool guests for the show and expand the reach of the show. And that's the goal here as Operation Mass Liberation. Let's find everyone out there who's feeling alone, disconnected, thinking there's something wrong with them, and really believing, like, no one gets me. And we gotta find those people. And then maybe you're one of those people who's listening. And I get you. We get you. You're not alone. There are millions, hundreds of millions of humans that are experiencing this and maybe even up into the B billion billions at this point of that disconnection or that social anxiety. So, yeah, let's find them and let's all grow together. And one way we're gonna grow together is to trust the process. So I first heard that phrase. I think it's kind of a common phrase in, like, the therapy world. I first just heard it, though. It was actually, after all of my therapy training to be trained as a clinical psychologist. But I was in. I joined my men's group for my own therapy and coaching and growth. And very early on, that's what the facilitator, the leader of the group named Elliot, who is awesome. Love you, Elliot. You're great. And he told me to trust in the process, and I didn't. The reason it agitated me at the time of hearing it, because I didn't know what that even meant. Like, what is the process? What does that even mean? So in the spirit of helping you use that teaching and that wisdom, I'll break it down a little bit more. So a process is basically something that is done consistently in a specific way over time. So you, without knowing it, you have a process for making a certain kind of breakfast that you like to make. There's a certain order that you grab things from the fridge or the cupboard, put them in, whatever, the pot, the blender, the frying pan, you add the water, the milk or the smoothie ingredients or whatever, you have a little process and you do that. And you probably do it very similarly each day, and then you get the same result each day. So if you like your oatmeal a certain way, my two favorite breakfasts are either a smoothie or oatmeal, and I know how I like to make them. And you do a similar process each time. And you get a similar result. Super simple example. I wanted to start simple because then we can all relate to it. You also have more complex processes, right? You know, you have, like, certain process of how you prioritize what you do at work and then take care of those tasks at work. If you feel completely disorganized and overwhelmed at work, then you probably are lacking a process there, right? And so you need to create one now when it comes to certain things, like your food. And you probably noticed when you have, there's two things. There's having a process and then there's following the process. And those are two very different things, right? Because you could be like, the optimal process would be to reach into my fridge, pull out the fresh head of kale, strip off the stalks, and then put it into my smoothie, and then I'm drinking the healthiest vegetables known to humankind and wait, we don't have any kale in our fridge. Oh, dang. That's one way the process can break down. You don't have the ingredient, or you do. There's that fresh, lush head of kale, and you're like, mmm, you know, the bacon and eggs, that sounds better. So I'm gonna do that. And you know, this process is breaking down for several reasons. There. One, you have, you know, you choose something else in the moment because maybe it's gonna taste better to you. Two, why do you have the bacon in your fridge? You know, if you're trying to eat healthier? So there's some couple breakdowns in that process. So that's the process for making breakfast. What is the process that we're talking about here? The process we're talking about here is the process of you going from a life of social anxiety and self doubt or self criticism or holding back or being nice or being afraid of being assertive, being afraid of conflict, or all of the perfectionism, sort of all the manifestations of that core perception of social anxiety, which is, I am not enough as I am. And so therefore, that's social anxiety. We're talking about the process of living more or less with that experience a lot of the time to being socially free, confident. I like who I am. I know who I am. Of course people would welcome me into their lives. I'm charming, I'm interesting, I'm beautiful, I'm sexy, I'm intelligent. I go after what I want. I'm a powerful creator. And then all of the things that result from that perspective of yourself, which is sustained action, progress, growth in your career, better relationships, an awesome love life, greater physical health. That's the shift we're talking about. And the process is the thing that you do regularly in a certain way, just like the smoothie making or the oatmeal making or whatever, that if you do that consistently, you will get a result. And there is a process to free yourself from social anxiety. And the first step in that process is to really get, and I talk about it a lot in this show, so hopefully it's kind of starting to percolate. You really get that social anxiety is not who you are. It is a pattern that you're running. And until you are open to that idea, the social anxiety will persist because it's a fixed mindset, and this is who I am. So it's not going to change. So why try? And that means you're deep in the clutches of the safety police that controls you, which tells you nothing's going to change. Because if you really want to heal social anxiety, liberate yourself from social anxiety, it's going to involve taking risks, doing things that are uncomfortable. And your safety police hates that. So it's gonna tell you you can't change. Don't even try. It stops you dead in your tracks before you even leave the train station. That's the first part. You can't even initiate a process when you're in that fixed mindset. But if you say, you know what? Social anxiety is not who I am, it's a pattern. It might feel like who I am because I've run this pattern for, I don't know, 35 years or something like that. Okay, great. Guess what, you can run a new pattern. The process involves a couple of key things. One is to notice how you're treating yourself. I talk about being on your own side. I talk about self being an optimal coach to yourself versus a toxic coach to yourself. Right? So that's one part of the process is to notice how you're treating yourself. I had someone in the Mastermind just the other night. We often start our calls with people sharing wins. And he said his win was all week. He was noticing when he started to criticize himself and his mind. And he'd say like, whoa, whoa. When he kind of do something to interrupt, like, he'd stand up or he'd say it out loud. He'd say, whoa, no, I'm not going to treat myself that way. That. That's the process, right? The process of challenging that toxic inner voice. And there's a lot of different tools you can use, and I teach them on this show, I teach a ton of them in my books. Confidence University lays out a process to follow for you step by step, so you don't have to piecemeal it together from listening all these episodes of these shows. And you can go to TheConfidenceUniversity.com at any time. TheConfidenceUniversity.com, get started on that. We have a full pay, we have a payment plan, and you can just really master these skills. But I teach a lot of tools in those places. But the overall process is to transform your relationship with yourself. If you do not do this, it's going to be very hard to develop confidence, if not impossible. So the process could be interrupting the critic and then challenging, hey, I'm not going to do that anymore. That's one key part of the process. Another key part of the process that's almost right on my own side. Another key part of the process is bold action. In order to liberate yourself, you have to be taking bold action. And that could be broken down into a couple of things. One is immediate action. So if you hear me talk about something in this show and you're like, that sounds like a great idea. I'll do that in three months. It's probably not going to produce much of a result. The other part, besides immediate, is consistent action. So if you take some action once and then say, ah, well, I tried it, didn't work, or I tried it and it did work, but then you don't consistently do it, it's not going to change anything. Right? No pattern changes from one new iteration. You got to do a lot and lot, a lot of repetitions of that pattern for the new one to start to take hold. So we got bold action, which can be broken down into immediate or consistent action. So bold action is a process that you can engage in and you can do that all over the place. You know, what bold actions might you take today socially, in your work life? Like, what would that be? You don't need me to spell it out for you. You'll look around your life and you'll see those things and you might say, well, geez, I don't know how to get myself to do it. Well, that, that's part of what, you know, I teach. I teach it at my live events. I teach it in this show as much as I can. The Confidence University, like, any way that I can to help you take it from intellectual to, like, visceral. And that's really what that is, is building up the muscle of courage. So a great question to ask yourself. If you feel like, well, I just can't get myself through the uncomfortable or bold action, then say, how? What can I do to. To build my courage muscle? What can I do to build my courage muscle? Because when you combine changing the way you treat yourself and taking bold action, those are two key components of the process of liberating yourself, that when you do them, they will change your life. And the reason that we have to trust in the process is because on any given day, you might not see that this is changing my life. Right? And, you know, so you take a bold action, and maybe you feel really nervous. Maybe you have the conversation you've been avoiding, and on one level it feels relieving because you had the conversation. On another level, it stirs up a bunch of uncomfortable feelings, and you're like, oh, my gosh, I feel guilty now, or now I feel angry, and now I feel more hurt. And this is so uncomfortable. This is not working. I don't like this. This has got to stop. When's this gonna be over? This whole thing is bogus. You know, I can't change this stuff. I've always been a conflict avoidant. I've always been shy. I'm just too sensitive. And we start to thrash around and we flop all the way back to that fixed mindset instead of just trusting the process. And I can say this with absolute certainty because I don't just have one data point of myself. I have. I mean, hundreds of people have gone through my Mastermind program at this point, and, you know, through emails and other things we get from my books and other programs, and we're talking thousands of humans that have reported back to me progress and success with this process. So there's a lot of data points here, but the key is, if you're looking for that immediate, this worked, and now I'm done. That's not how any process works. It's the same thing. If you wanted to grow a business, right? What is that? That's. Well, a business is a system of systems that produces a particular result for its clients or customers. And there's no one in the history of business who's like, I had a business idea, I implemented it. It was seamless. There was no problems. We had amazing results, and it's been the best ever since. It's like, okay, maybe that's your plan. And then what happens? Well, the first thing out of the gate, the plan goes sideways. That's what business is constantly learning how to solve new problems. You have a Great year. You have new problems to solve, you have a down year, you got different problems to solve. It's just constantly learning and adapting and growing and adjusting. And even if you think you got it all on lock, you know, the environment changes or an employee leaves or something happens, or you get money embezzled or who knows, you get sued, there's so many things that can happen. And so you gotta stay in that process of whatever your goal and whatever you're moving towards and your goal can inspire you. You have a vision of yourself as this really confident person. Great. Tap into that future vision, get energized by that. And then come back to today though, and say, what action can I take today? How am I treating myself today? Another key component of the system of the process is going to be to are you developing your skills, your social skills, your conversation skills, your flirting skills, your body language skills, your public speaking skills? And these are all little sub things and you could be developing, you don't have to develop them all at once. That sounds overwhelming, but pick an area that's important to you. So you know what, I want to get better at conversations. It's a common one that we hear from people. So, okay, what can you share? What can you experiment with? What can you do? And then you start to test things out. Now you're in action. But how do you learn this skill? Well, repetition is going to help you, but you can get some specific guidance or coaching, right? Maybe you learn inside of Confidence University. We have a course called Social Mastery and we guide you through specific skills to practice there. Maybe you watch YouTube videos, maybe you read a book about it. There's different places you can go, but you're actively learning that. So if you combine changing the way you treat yourself, being on your own side, taking bold action, developing your skills, success is inevitable. And you can trust in that. You can rely on that. So instead of looking at it from moment to moment, day to day, zoom out. When in doubt, zoom out. And you will see that over time, over a long enough time. If you stay in this process, the trend is up. Let's talk about how you can put this in action. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step is going to be for you to reflect on those components that I talked about in today. One is, you know, first to be able to get into the process. Am I, have I been living in a fixed mindset or seeing that it's just a series of patterns that I'm running, really get curious about that one. And then once you're in the process, reflect on how am I treating myself today, this week, right now, how do I upgrade that? How do I change that? How do I get it more on my own side? Because there's no amount of success you can get externally that's gonna make you automatically on your own side. It seems like that if I get richer, if I get buffer, if I get more beautiful partner or whatever, it's not going to change. The pattern of self criticism and perfectionism will just keep running. It'll just change its metrics. You've probably already seen that in your own life. So you got to get control of this process. The second thing is bold action. How much are you taking it? How consistently are you taking it? And the third thing is, are you developing specific skills that are going to support you in your life? You do those things, you can trust in the process. So just do a self audit here, a little reflection. Which one might I lean in? Practice a little bit more. Use that and you will endlessly grow until we speak again. May you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you are awesome.

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 vlogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.

Sam.