What If They're "Out Of My League"?

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 dating, relationships and. And particularly dating people that are too good for you. Oh, yes, that's what we're dive into. And I'm being a little playful here right now. That's a story you probably tell yourself. And as you're going to discover through the course of this episode, it's probably not true. And there's actually way more hope for you, my friend, to date, connect, experience, love and connection with not just anybody that'll choose you, but who you really want to be with, who excites you and lights you up. And that that story of that they're too good for you is actually just. That is a story. So thanks for being with me today. I do want to let you know that this is getting close to the end of our series on dating and relationships leading up to our online virtual event, Unlimited Dating and Relationship Confidence. You're not going to miss that one. We're just about to end the early bird sale for the tickets. So if you want to get those tickets, go to shrinkforthshyguy.com shrinkforthshyguy.com and and underneath this episode, there'll be a link directly to get your tickets as well as sent out via email if you're on my email list. If you're not, you can go to drazeez.com and get the ebook there, the Five Steps to Unleash youh Inner Confidence. It also comes with a free mini course about those five steps, absolutely free, teaching you the exact five steps you could use to boost your confidence. So if you haven't got that already, that in itself is worth it. Plus, then you get on my email list so you get access to the early bird tickets and other specials that we run throughout the year. So that would be the place to go if you've been enjoying this focus for the last month. In the podcast. Yes. There's so much more that we can do together if you invest that time and that focus. Say, hey, this is important enough for me to spend three days really increasing and improving that. And we have had people come to that event that are able to radically shift their experience. And the next time I talk to them or see them or see them at an event or something, they're, yeah, oh, I'm in a relationship, or I'm dating now, or that part of life really opens up. So I invite you to join me for that. And one of the things that we're gonna be focusing on in the first day at that event, which is so important, is how you see yourself, because the way you see yourself determines your dating life. And that's really related to what this episode's about, which is, what if someone's out of my league? And that's a really interesting phrasing that is extremely common, at least in the United States. I'm not sure if it is in other countries or is it because it's kind of a turn of phrase. What do we call that? It's a common saying that we use here in the United States for when you're interested in somebody and basically, she's out of my league or he's out of my league is a way of saying, that person's too good for you. There is no way they would want to date you. So you might need to translate that into. If there's a phrase that. That means. That means that in your culture, if you don't have that person's out of my league. But that's what that means here. So, you know, for me, I would see a woman that. And you know, what makes someone out of your league? Well, you know, sometimes it's a perception of beauty, right? If you see yourself as ugly and them as beautiful, then you're gonna say, oh, she's out of my league. That's what I did. I thought women that were beautiful to me were out of my league because I perceive myself as unattractive, ugly. So therefore, I cannot be with a woman who is beautiful to me because, well, she's out of my league. You know, it's like they don't listen. Women don't go down. Down the ladder that far, my friend. Oh, no. You know, this is so good luck. So there could be other reasons why you imagine someone's out of your league. In fact, that would be a great place to start here for you to reflect on. Are there people that you perceive out of your League. And you know, if you're in a relationship right now, you might like, no, my partner's not out of my league, I'm out of there. I'm better than them, right? I don't know what's going on in your relationship, but you know, do you perceive other people non romantically as out of your league? Maybe someone in business or someone, maybe even someone that's attractive. Even if you're not going to go pursue that as a romantic relationship, you still act as if you're not good enough for them. And if you're dating, single relationship, whatever, and you have people in your mind that you think are out of your league, who comes to mind. And then the great follow up question here is why? Why are they out of your league? As I mentioned before, one common story is appearance. And there could be other things, personality qualities like I'm awkward or shy or not confident and you know, the kind of man or woman who's really attractive to me was only going to want to be someone who's someone who's confident and expressive and, and not awkward and very fluid and charming. And I'm not those things. So they're out of my league. Could be money, I don't have enough money. I need to have more money or stature or status or career success or accomplishments or whatever under my belt. Then I'd be in their league. But until then I'm not in their league. And again, this doesn't just have to be romantically. I was talking to someone in the Mastermind program recently who is an author and doesn't perceive herself as the same league as some of the other authors that she wants to connect with and learn from and share her work with and just network with. Basically it's like, oh, but they're better or more established or more something or other. So it doesn't always just apply to romantic relationships. That's what we're focusing on more so in this episode. Other attributes or qualities around family history or anything that you might link to your self worth really. So that's really what you're highlighting by exploring this is what is your self worth linked to and then what do you do with that information? Because that is your story and it might seem so true. And here's the thing about these stories is we accumulate evidence to support them and sustain them and make them true. So there was a man I was working with who said, look at me, I'm awkward, I'm not confident, I'm overweight. Well, his words, I'm fat. And why would a woman choose me? Why would anyone want to date me? And he's got evidence. He's like, look at me. I look around, you don't see women with guys like me. He has this whole list of reasons that he'd found and established and solidified his perspective with. I said, okay, well, sounds like you're shit out of luck, buddy. And then he laughed. I wanted to break that certainty a little bit. And I said, hmm, you know, are you open to the possibility that things might be different slightly than the way you're perceiving them? Oh, yeah, I'm totally open. Okay. All right. But as we started to talk about it, I noticed he kept on wanting to defend his worldview. This is how I am. I'm a piece of shit. It's not going to work. It's like, okay. I noticed that you are strongly arguing for your limitations, and I wonder what the payoff is for that. He said, well, I don't have to get rejected. I said, aha. Well, there you go. He's been in my group program for a little while. So I was like, the training is paying off. You're seeing that much. That's good. And, hmm, what do we do here? How do you start to shift that then? Because you, too, might be attached to your stories, but what you want to see is that underneath that is you're protected from something, generally rejection or maybe failure. And so if I think that person's out of my league, I don't have to get rejected because I don't go talk to that person. I don't have to feel the pain or the embarrassment or the humiliation or all this stuff that comes up when I get rejected. Not because it has to, by the way. Rejection doesn't have to be the worst thing in the world that destroys you, but because of your default rejection pattern, it's what you load into the rejection. It's what you add on top of it. It's your default conditioned pattern in response to rejection. That's what makes rejection so terrible, which is typically turning on yourself, berating yourself, imagining a terrible future, telling yourself, you can't have what you want, you never will. But none of that has to be so none of that has to be the case, because who is in your league is determined by one thing. How you show up, who you are, how you carry yourself. Your reality determines who is in your league. So, for example, if you approach someone that you're attracted to and you were congruently believing this person would benefit from having me in their Life, you know, I'm funny or I'm interesting or I'm kind. They'd be lucky to be in a relationship with me. If you believed that, all of a sudden they would no longer be out of your league. And the way you'd approach them, the way you treat them, the way you'd interact with them, the way you'd flirt with them would completely change. And a lot of those people might date you. Now, I'm not saying every single one of them would. That doesn't work for anybody anywhere. So you're still gonna get rejected. But some of them are gonna say yes to a date. Some of them are gonna say yes to a second date. Some of them are gonna say yes to more dates. And the only thing that stops you is you are unwilling to experience rejection. You say, no, it's not gonna work out. I know for 100% I'm gonna defend my limitations. Get off my back. Why? Because you're terrified of the rejection. You're addicted to the comfort that comes from avoiding the things that are hard and unpleasant. And you know that there's ease right now in your life. It's painful, might be limiting, it might be frustrating, it might be lonely. But it's easier than learning how to upgrade your capacities emotionally to deal with the rejection. Until you're ready to change that, things won't shift. And I spent many years there, unable, unwilling. And then at one point, I had enough pain and enough frustration, enough suffering, like, eff it, let's go. And I started to go on this journey and I invested in training materials and started learning about how to go approach women. Because that was a start for me to building confidence. And I remember one of the initial programs I went through, they said, write out the 10 things that you believe about yourself when it comes to relationships. And they were terrible. I'm ugly, I'm boring, I'm unattractive. No one would want to date me. Here's all the reasons why. Basically there's a list of why everyone that I would be interested is out of my league. And then I challenged those one by one. And that's a good start. It's not going to be the end all be all, but that's a good start. And then the next step was, that's right, to go talk to women. Go actually see what is out there. What is this life actually like, who am I really in the world? How do people see me? And look at first, it might just be a lot of reinforcing your old stories, you know, like you approach with an energy of like, I suck. You probably don't want to talk to me. Hi, how's it going? Oh, they don't want to talk to me. God, I knew I sucked. Like, okay, maybe you have a few reps like that, a few crappy reps. That's okay. You're just getting warmed up. You're getting. You're just shaking the dust off and you go, try again, experiment again, try again, experiment again, try again, experiment again. And then try again. Spirit again. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep exploring, keep learning. And then you will start to discover that your stories are just protection strategies to try to get you to not do it. And I experienced that these things that I thought made someone out of my league were non issues. I was so obsessed about my appearance for so long. Oh, my gosh. I got dark circles around my eyes. They're so ugly. I have to think about it and ruminate about it and worry about it. I didn't get enough sleep. It's going to look even worse. Oh, my God. And then when I started interacting with women consistently and having the courage to ask them out and the courage to be more bold and the courage to be more expressive and all that stuff, it didn't even come up. It was a non issue. Now, some women might have said no to me because they're like, I don't like him. I think he's ugly. Okay, maybe no one ever told me that could be many other reasons why someone wouldn't want to date me. And then there were women that said yes. And you only discover that through the act, through the courage, the courageous act of testing reality, testing your stories, testing what is. So now you might say, hold on a second, Aziz. But what if. Come on. I mean this. Yes. And there are limits to what you're saying, right? Let's say some guy is 300 pounds and unhealthy and he wants to date a supermodel. I mean, come on, you're telling me that he could just approach her with enough congruence and then she'd say yes and date him? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. How many did he ask? 50 of them out. Maybe one of them would say yes. I don't know. Maybe more would say yes. What's his personality like? How does he make him feel? Right? Because at the end of the day, that's what the most important thing is. How does someone feel in relation to you? So, absolutely, I would say yes. I don't know. Test it out. But another thing that's important to note is, what's he doing at £300? What's going on with his psychology there? What's happening? Is he taking care of himself? Is there an issue? Does he. What is the pattern there? So if there's something in someone's life that is not where they want it to be or is a reflection perhaps of something, you know, whether it's, oh, but my finances are a mess, or, oh, my gosh, I have all this chaos in my life, or I have terrible relationship friendships or, you know, whatever's going on, or I hate my job. Okay, yeah. That doesn't mean you can't date somebody, but it also is a sign of, like, what. What's going on there? Let's clean that up. Because you don't need to be perfect going into dating and relationships. That's a trap in itself, too, right? Like, I'm gonna perfect myself and my life and everything's gonna be great, and then I'll go into a relationship. Well, good luck. I'm gonna perfect loving myself first. Okay. Yeah, but what if you love yourself more through dating and relationships, right? What if you improve your career as you're also connecting? Maybe the person you date inspires you and lights you up and new things are unlocked in you that get better in your career as a result. So you don't perfect everything before dating someone. However, I do think it is essential to take ownership for all the areas of your life before you can successfully date. What does taking ownership mean? It doesn't mean you solved everything. Besides, what does solved everything even mean? Because you're going to get to the next level and achieve certain goals, and then there's more to do after that in every area of life, right? You're always growing. But taking ownership is like, hey, I want to be taking care of my body. I want to be eating well. I want to be exercising. I want to be sleeping well. Hey, I want to work on my career. Like, if I hate my job, I got to have a plan or a vision or a dream or a goal or something that I'm moving towards. I don't feel so stagnant. Hey, my relationships are chaotic. I want to figure that out. I want to learn more about emotional intelligence and how to meditate and regulate myself and have better conversations or be more direct or be less nice or be more assertive. I'm going to be working on that and I'm going to go date, right? And then something shifts. And so to go back to that example of the 300 pound guy wants to be a supermodel again. I don't know what's his level of courage and how does he connect and help create intimacy and have a woman feel seen and known and safe and loved and excited and maybe he could do all that already. And I know if you take that same guy and he's still £300, but something has shifted in him and he's taken ownership of his health and his life and he's like, yeah, I'm gonna do this not because I need to look a certain way and need washboard abs to get a girlfriend or something, but because I want to take care of myself. It's an expression of self love, of being on my own side, of that I matter. I want to feel better in my energy system, I want to feel more alive, I want to feel more vital. And then even before anything has changed in his external world in terms of his appearance or his weight, boom. He's going to become significantly more attractive to any woman he approaches or any man or whatever you're drawn to, and then starts to take even more charge of his health and vitality. And that's going to of course, make someone more attractive. And again, that's not about weight, that's about what are you ingesting, what are you putting in your body, Are you putting in alive foods? Are you putting in a lot of fruits and vegetables, are you drinking water, are you moving your body and getting lymph flowing and getting blood circulating through your whole nervous system? And if so, you are going to be more attractive both physically, literally and, you know, from appearance standpoint, but also energetically, your energy system is brighter and emanating more. And so when that person takes total ownership, then they're going to become significantly more attractive. And so if there's anything that you think like, oh, but they're out of my league because they're like this and I'm not like that. You're probably operating with a fixed mindset. And so that's one of the areas that I work on with people is they think, oh, I'm not confident enough, I'm not expressive enough, I'm too shy, I'm too awkward. And there's some truth to that. Like if you want to date someone who's social and has high self esteem and is confident and you show up and you can't make eye contact with them and you're like, how's it going? And you don't, you're totally shut down in your voice and your expressiveness is turned way down and you're kind of emotionally reserved and guarded around them and you're self deprecating or self critical. Yeah, you're probably not going to drain in a whole lot of chemistry as long as they're out of your league. It's because you're, you're like playing in the minors because you're not training. And if you were to commit to say, hey, I'm going to grow in this area, I'm going to become stronger, I'm going to become more expressive, I'm going to become more myself, I'm going to become more alive, I'm going to turn down the filters. I'm going to face that discomfort. We just had a challenge that I had a seven day challenge in the Mastermind program that I run, the expressiveness challenge, where twice a day you just stretch your limits of expressiveness. You make a funny sound, you communicate in a more animated way. The game came out of one member in the group who felt like he was really restricted and all these filters up and I was like, all right. We looked at the origins and the history and all that stuff, which was illuminating and very helpful. But then I'm a man of action and so I'm like, all right, let's do this. For the next 30 seconds, I want you to tell me about something in your life. Anything doesn't have to matter. It doesn't matter if it's about your breakfast or about something you're interested in, your career or whatever. And as we start to tell this story, and I said, wait, wait, here's what I want you to do though. I want you to tell the story with double the volume you normally would and as fast as you can without stopping talking. And this is a guy whose filters are so high he's almost halting all the time as he's talking. And he's pausing and looking down and his voice is pretty quiet like this, and he talks about this pace and there's these big pauses, right? So I'm like, let's experiment, let's be more expressive. So he does it and he starts to talk faster and a little bit louder. And I said, that was great. He did 30 seconds. And I was like, great job. Let's do another 30 seconds. And I want you to double the volume and the speed again. And his eyes get wide because he's like, what? I don't even know how to do that. And then he's like talking even louder and he's waving his arms around. I was like, that that's what you need to practice twice a day for the next seven days to stretch out your expressiveness. And this is just one little example of one little exercise in a much bigger context of his growth over a year. Actually, he's in his second year of my group program, so there's a lot here that you can expand and grow when you take total ownership for it. So a lot of the time that, like, oh, they're out of my league. What is that? That is an excuse. That is settling. That is avoidance. That is a life not lived that you will regret, probably because that's the number one regret of the dead people that are dying of the dead. I don't know what the regrets of the dead are. Maybe someone does, a medium does, who talks to them, I don't know. But there was a woman who interviewed the dying, and the number one regret in her research was, I did not live a life that was my own. I wasn't me fully. Whew, that's heavy. Right? But it doesn't have to be. You can shift it. You can shift it faster than you think by taking ownership for that and saying, look, if there's a way that I want to become more confident, more expressive, more me, then I can do that. And that's what opens up all the leagues to you again. You don't have to become this person instantly, but if you're moving towards it and you are embodying an energy and a mindset, an attitude of, I can. I can create anything, and I can be who I want to be. If I'm called to that, I'm going to do it. That's very attractive because it's possibility, it's open, it's alive. And, you know, hopefully your partner, those you date are growing, too, and you guys can grow together. So let's talk about how to put this in action. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step today is going to be to find one area of your life where, if you're honest with yourself, you're not taking total ownership for it. You know, what is that? Is it your health? Is it your work, your schedule, your finances, your productivity, your romantic relationship, a relationship with a family member, your relationships in general. Just one area where you're kind of like, no, but that's just how it is. And it's a bonus point if it's an area that you also think, then therefore makes you less attractive or something, right? Makes people out of your league. And then what you want to do is you want to find that place inside of you that says, hey, I'm going to take ownership for this. I'm going to steer this. I'm the captain of my ship and look, this can dominate me for the rest of my life. And I can have all kinds of stories and excuses and reasons that I could tell other people and maybe they would agree with me or maybe they would pity me, but at the end of the day, I've just gotten people to kind of buy into my stories and agree with me. But then my life is not what I want it to be. And there's one thing that's for sure, which is your life, my friend, is finite. And then it ends. And I don't know what happens after it ends and if those dead have any regrets. But I do know that you got one chance here. Anything else after that is conjecture as far as I'm concerned. So what do you want to do with it and where do you want to step up? Fantastic. Thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again, may have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Talk to you soon.

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