Dr. Aziz teaches a confidence practice: ask yourself "What do I want?" before saying yes to your boss, friends, or kids. People who tune into their own preferences set better boundaries and find solutions that work for everyone, not just the person asking.
Your boss wants you to stay later and work longer, maybe even over a weekend. You get an email and says, hey, we need you to come in and work more. Your friend says, hey, I need your help with this thing. Can you help bring, you know, go here on a weekend and help me with this. One of your kids says, hey, get me this thing or I want that, or drive me here, do this. What do you do? Your answer in all those situations should be yes, right? You know, yes to your kids because you're a loving parent. You should do what they want. Yes to your friend because you got to be a good friend. Besides, if you don't help them out, then they're not going to help you out, right? That's what friendship is like. And you got to say, what are you going to say no to your boss? Come on, you got to say yes. You got to be a good team member, you got to be a good employee. You got to stay in good standing. You got to make sure no one gets upset with you. You got to say yes. There's only one thing missing here though, which is what do you want? What do you want? In fact, that is the question of the day. That is the confidence boosting question that I want to share with you in this video. What do I want? This question is so important that in my book, not nice, which if you haven't read, you should pick up asap. Not nice. I call it the MVP question, as in the most valuable player. This question will transform your life. And here's the thing though, you don't need to just ask it once. What do I want? Oh, now I've figured it out forever. It's a moment to moment thing. And for most nice people, we're disconnected from that. We don't even know what we want. I don't know, what do you want? We, well, whatever they want, I'll just do it. And so our reference point to decide how to what we should do in our lives and ultimately who we should be is not even internal. It's external. It's what do you say? What do you think? What do you want? Whatever you want, I'll just do it. And I was working with a woman at an event about this and she had the exact question about work, about her kids. And I asked her, what do you want? And it took a little while because she didn't even know. So do you know in different situations in your life, are you operating externally on what they want or versus what you want? Now here's a lot of what A lot of nice people do in response to that is say, well, I have to pay attention to what other people want. I have to do it this way. Am I just going to ignore other people and become this selfish, self absorbed bad person? And you notice how we go from one extreme to the other. I'm not talking about going totally extreme and like saying, forget my kids, I do whatever I want. You know, there's a great movie about that. Was it called Bad Moms? I think it was called where these parents just go the other extreme. It's like, no, but you gotta at least start with what do I want? Even if you don't end up doing it, it's valuable to ask that question. So when the boss says, hey, I need you to work longer, tune in, what do I want? When your kids say, take me here, do this. Hold on a second, what do I want? Because then you have something valuable. Now what you're gonna do is you can decide how to navigate life from within. And you can say, well, hold on a second. They want me to go here, here and here. What do I want? Man, I would love an hour to relax and take care of myself because I had a pretty intense day myself. Okay, well now I can start to work with, especially if it's a family or a business relationship or a boss. You might need to discuss what's going to work for everybody. But then you can come up with a compromise. You can come up with a solution. So you can say, listen, I can take you to there. And then would you be able to get a friend to take you from there to there? Because I need some time to do this. Now all of a sudden you're problem solving? I do this all the time with my little kids. I got a three and a half and a five and a half year old. And you know, me being the recovering nice guy, especially with his dad, I just want to say yes to everything. And it took me a while to be able to start to say, well, I don't want to do that. How about we do this instead? Or I need to do this, let's do that. And like simple, basic stuff can be so uncomfortable if you've lived in that cage of nice. And same thing with work, you can say no. And here's one other thing I'm going to share about this. We've seen this again and again in my mastermind program where we watch people change over a year or and there's so many things that they say, oh my gosh, there's no way I could say that at work. There's no way I could have that boundary at work. And then with the support of the group and me, they do. And they're utterly blown away by the fact that not only do they not get fired, but all of a sudden their boss and other people are treating them with more respect. People are asking them instead of commanding them. All because they started saying no and being problem solving oriented like well, I can't do that or I don't want to do that, but how about this? Or let's come up with a certain solution because that is powerful, that is leadership. Even if you're not in a leadership role, people see that and respond to that as someone who's a leader, someone who's looking within to guide themselves as opposed to looking without. So be a leader. I encourage you to take this further and if you want to go even further with this if you have not heard of my program, Confidence University, it is the culmination of over 15 years of studying this and helping thousands of people all over the world distill it down to the most step by step confidence transformation experience. It's the most confidence remote building platform that's out there. So I would love for you to explore that. Go to confidenceuniversity.com to find out more about the program and to dive right in today and I would love to see you inside there. Regardless, the question that I want you to ask yourself many, many times today is what is it? That's right. What do I want? Awesome. So share down below what you're learning. Let's all grow together and until we speak again, may have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.
