Dr. Aziz explains how needing to be liked can shift from preference into a nervous system activation that triggers performance anxiety. When the pressure peaks in high-stakes moments like executive meetings, you start hyper-monitoring yourself, which undermines your performance even when you know your material.
Everyone wants to be liked more than they want to be disliked. That's just natural and human. But the level of pressure that we can feel about that and the intensity of that inside is not just ordinary preference. It becomes a necessity. And that's what it feels like, maybe not to your conscious mind, but to your nervous system, which is why I have so many clients that I talk to who are like, I know I can give a good presentation. I know what I'm doing in this work situation. They know their stuff. But then when they're in that meeting, when they're in that professional setting, when there's executives in the room, when there's the potential client in the room, the pressure ratchets up to the nth degree. And then they start to run this hyper self-observation pattern, which is very counter to their best performance, right? You might even call that performance anxiety. Oh, but I better not mess this up.
