You Are Going To Fail

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 second, 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. Yo. Welcome. Today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite topics. Failure. Oh, yes. And it's something that might seem a little uncomfortable, cringy, undesirable, like something's going wrong when we fail. But actually, you'll discover through the course of this episode that it is a good sign when you're failing. And our biggest problem is not that we do, it's that we think that we shouldn't. And all the stories we have are about it and about ourselves and about our worth around failure and all the consequences that we experience from avoiding it. So really, the issue is just our whole psychology around failure rather than failure itself. So we're gonna get into it deep and it's really gonna help you approach life with more confidence, more boldness, more lightness, and more freedom to just be you. Because sometimes we hear the word failure and we think of something really big like, oh, the business failed or something major failed. And actually, failures are small. They could be daily. They could be little things, little mistakes, little awkward moments, little missteps that we actually want to be experiencing a lot of in the service of our growth. So we're gonna get into all of that today. If you're enjoying this podcast and listening to it for quite some time and benefiting from it, and you have not heard about my program, Confidence University, I highly recommend that you check that out. You can go to theconfidenceuniversity.com theconfidenceuniversity.com and learn all about it. It is my most comprehensive, in depth program that I think virtually everyone in the world should go through because it gives you core life skills to build confidence first, self confidence in a course called the Ultimate Confidence Foundation. It's like, required. Everyone has to go through that. And then you get to pick these different specialty tracks inside of Confidence University. So whether you want to master your social life, your Dating, life, your career. You can do all, actually, because why wouldn't you want to excel in all those areas and feel great, but you can pick which one you wanna start with first and they go in depth, step by step action. And that's where it differs. I mean, gotta be honest with yourself. Do you do all the action steps from this podcast? Honestly, most people I talk to, most feedback I get from fans and listeners is no. There's like, oh, yeah, totally, I should probably do that sometime. And it's like, your fault. Or you should. It's just the way we are. If we're not invested in something and we're not targeted about something, and we're not like, I'm doing this, we haven't committed, then usually we don't. But the cool thing about Confidence University is you have to report your action after each lesson. You check boxes and say what you did or didn't do, and it actually makes you take the actions and they're systematic. This podcast can be a bit hodgepodge depending upon what episode you listen to, whereas Confidence University is systematically designed to guide you step by step. So I'm putting it out there because I think it will really serve you if you're listening to this podcast to join. And best of all, we made it very accessible in terms of pricing, wanting to make it affordable for virtually anyone. And I think that if you're very serious about your confidence, you absolutely can afford the monthly membership. Awesome. Let's talk about failing. So when's the last time you failed at something? Dun, dun, dun, dun. Get you a little time to think about that. And again, expanding your definition of failure, as I was talking about earlier, when's the last time? So let's use different words, because sometimes we think, well, I don't know. I don't know if I failed, because we have such a big idea of failure. When's the last time you made a mistake? When's the last time you tried to, you know, you said something you thought was funny and the person didn't laugh? When's the last time you tried to have a connecting conversation and ended up in a fight? When's the last time you were working on something and then it just. All the work you were doing that day turned out it was the wrong thing or it didn't produce the result you wanted? When's the last time you asked for something and someone said no? These are all failures. Maybe small, maybe big, depending on how much work you put into something before realizing you were going down the wrong branch. But whatever it is, these are failures. So when is the last time you experienced one of these? And guess what? Hopefully your answer is quite recently. Because what we deem as a failure, in fact, let's take a step back and think about that. What is a failure? You say you failed at something. How would you define that real quick? Generally, a failure is when something, the result that we're trying to get out of some engagement or interaction or endeavor is not what we want. That's a failure. I want X and reality gave me yes. Jesus, what the fuck? Reality? Come on, man, work with me. Give me more of X. I'm sick of Y. Right, so that whatever happened was a failure, right? You go approach the person because you want to ask a man or woman out, and then they say, no. You wanted a yes, you got a no. You failed. And you tried to. Whatever your idea around a particular work project was, I need to get X done. I mean, it doesn't have to be like you made a bad mistake or lost work. It could just be, I want to get all these things done today. And then come the end of the day, you only got half of that done. You can feel like you failed not because you didn't do anything, but because perhaps your standards were too high, your expectations were too great, you were unrealistic about what you could do. I know people that live in that state where they're just, it's never enough. Yeah, Well, I completed eight things, but I should have gotten 10. So every day they get to be a failure. What a delightful way to live. So when you think about it, failure is anytime reality does not go the way that we want. So why is that a good thing? Why is that beneficial, and why do we want more of that? Because failure is just a term that we put on the outcomes that we don't like. So that means in order to fail, you're getting an outcome, you're getting a result. And in order to get an outcome or a result, you have to do something. You have to take action. So failure is the result of action, not the results that you want, but it's a result. And that's why that is better than no result. Because if you get no result, you're taking no action. So if you know, I lived in this space for many years in my dating life, there's a woman over there that I want to go talk to, and I don't because I'm terrified of it. I've got nothing in my life. I certainly don't have a date. Don't have a girlfriend. But I've also built no courage. I got nothing. And so months or years go by without me changing or growing or getting what I want in life. And I'm also not failing though. Like the amount of rejections I got in a 10 year period. Income restricted down to dating. Although I don't I was so risk averse, I don't think I got much rejection anywhere else. But dating was is an obvious example. In a 10 year period, the amount of rejection that I got, I mean you could probably count it on one hand the amount of times that a woman that I was pursuing rejected me. And probably most of that was skewed towards the end of those 10 years when I got to college and realized like, wow, I have to try this. But I didn't. I kind of vaguely dabbled. And you know what's crazy also, we'll share something on just a second about that, but let's have you reflect on you. Is it very low, your failure amount? And maybe you think that's a good thing, but that's actually a problem because what's happening is you might be moving through life like molasses. That's how I was in those years. Nothing was changing. It was slow. It was geological time. When am I going to get a girlfriend? 70,000 years, 2.1 million years geological time, planetary time, space time. It was slow. Slow for a short human life, not desirable. So what you're going to see, there's a relationship between the amount of failure that you experience and your pace of life. That's the thing that I see a lot of people that I that are coming to my world is their life is slow. Their life is. I liken it to being. If you want your life to be flowing like a river, their life's like the muddy side bank of the river, like thick, slow, sluggish, moving, dredgy mud. And that's usually a lack of action, lack of risk and then a lack of failure. So what was crazy though is when I decided I'm going to focus on this and I reached my breaking point and decided I was going to do whatever it took and started. Study dating advice online and apply it. I got more rejections from Women in a one month period than I had in my entire 21 years of life leading up to that moment, probably even within two to three weeks. Now I wasn't getting rejected thousands of times, I was just taking action at a higher rate than I'd ever taken before. As in multiple times a week. I was attempting to Talk to women. Whereas before, it would be once a blue moon, once every four or five months, six months. So what would happen if your action rate, your failure rate radically increased? And here's the thing. You can't separate those two. I know, I know. I wish I could. I had a powerful moment in growth for me when it came to facing failure in my career. So I really learned this stuff in dating and applied it like crazy and had great results. And then when it came to building my own coaching, teaching, writing, whatever business I do now, helping people in a variety of ways, I needed to put myself out there in a bigger way. I needed to offer services. I needed to offer programs and products and trainings and tell people about what I was doing. Because I believed in the work. I knew it could help. I could watch the results. But then there was the aspect of marketing it, telling people about it. And I was always like, seems uncomfortable. I'm gonna get rejected. Which is another form of failure. And there was one major block that I just hadn't approached. Other things I was doing, albeit uncomfortably, but one thing I was not doing was offering any live workshop or live event with me. Even though people were curious about it and sometimes would ask about it, I didn't do it. I joined a business growth mastermind, which was an awesome experience. I was in it for two years. In one of the earlier meetings, we had some mastermind time. And the facilitator, the leader of the mastermind, is a guy named Christian Michaelson, who is a friend of mine and just an awesome human in a lot of ways. Great teacher, but taught me a lot. I mean, way beyond business, just a lot of, like, spiritual growth in my time with him. So I'm such a. So grateful for what he provided in my life and how much he helped me grow my business and myself as a human, as a father, as a husband, that I actually, out of the blue, just messaged him. I was like, dude, what do you need? Do you need me to help you in some way in your business? And he had an idea, and so I'm helping him out. I just wanted to give back. So I'm at this one of the first events with him. It's a small Mastermind group, maybe 20, 30 people there. And we're looking at my business and the next edge for me, which is these live events, and we're looking at, like, what? Okay, so you take action. All these other areas in your business. Why are you not taking action here? And we're talking about it. And sure enough, the Fear is I'm gonna put this offering out there and no one's gonna take it. Or worse, you know, just a handful, like two or three people are gonna come. And now I'm gonna have this big event space and no one's gonna be there. Which actually happened many years ago. Before that, when I offered something for free when I was working as a counselor at the Portland State Counseling center and I offered a free workshop. And no one came. Well, no, not. No one handful of people came. You know my worst fear? Oh, my ego, my self worth. And so I was afraid of that happening again, and I've been avoiding it. So I'm going on about this, and then Krishna just looks at me for a while and he says. He looks me right in the eye and he says, aziz, you're gonna fail. And he turned to someone else in the room and he pointed at them and he's like, you know, Bob, you're gonna fail. Linda, you're gonna fail. You're gonna. You need to point out like five or six people. And he went on to explain, yeah, if you're taking action, you're going to fail. Not every product that you think up is gonna be great. Not every event that you offer is going to be a hit. Not everything you do is going to be the best and be desired and loved by everyone. It's just things. It's just you putting things out there and seeing what works and then tweaking it and building on it. And you're going to fail. You're going to fail many times. And it's such a simple concept, right? It doesn't take a lot of complex philosophy to understand. It's just a clear fact of life. And I got it, though. I said, oh, my God, I'm just afraid of this one experience. And so it's holding me back from all these areas of my life. So I need to do it, but I'm scared. I know, but I need to, because what's my other option? The only way to avoid failure, as in to avoid the outcomes that you don't want, is to get no outcomes. That one's so important. I'm going to say it again right now. The only way to avoid failure, mistakes, awkward conversations, rejections, things that you do that don't work out the way that you want. The only way to avoid all those things is to not do anything. And maybe you're in that place where you've done that, like I did for months or years or a decade, and maybe you're tired of doing that maybe you don't do that in all areas of your life, but maybe it's just your dating life or just in your career. Because I know plenty of people that have their relationship in a good way. They have a good marriage or a good relationship, but at work, they don't take risks, they don't want to fail. So they're stagnant, they're bored. Because here's the thing, and here's the greater outcome that you don't want in your life. The greater failure is those years of not taking risk, of not being willing to fail, lead to stagnation, lead to lack of challenge, lack of growth, lack of potential, safety, boredom, depression, anxiety, life not fully lived that you regret. And that. That sucks. That sucks way more than having a live event where there's only three people there. Because here's the crazy thing. When I really started to unpack it and look back, I realized that one thing that I offer just that one time. So how many attempts did I make at that? That's right. One. That one little workshop that I put on. And, you know, between a friend of mine came and a woman I was dating at the time came, and my friend brought a few people. So there's probably like nine people, you know, in the room. I had 50 chairs. I was ready, and I had nine people. And so I brought them all up to the front, and we did this workshop for about two hours, and it was freaking awesome. When I look back at it, like, me really in my zone of genius teaching and really helping them. So I'm like, what is that even a failure? Or is that just my ego saying, oh, well, if the room had 50 people, then I'd be the man, Then I'd be worthwhile. And so it's crazy. All these things that we're so afraid of experiencing are just bruises to our ego. Oh, my God. What if that person said no to me? Oh, it'd be tragic. It burns inside. But what is it really? It's just. It bothers the part of me that thinks everyone should want to go out with me. It enrages the part of me that thinks that I'm the best. So no one should ever say no to me. It's just these silly ego things that we get wrapped up in. And look, you don't have to become enlightened and eliminate all that. You just need to not buy into it to the point where you're paralyzed and just get out there and start mucking around. Just get out there, start taking actions, and start failing. In fact, that brings us to your action step for today. Time for action, action, action. Your action step for today, or however long it takes you to get it, is to fail. Oh, yes. That means I want you to start taking actions, because remember, the faster you take action, the faster you're going to fail, the faster you're going to get different results and different outcomes, and then you're going to be able to work on those. So in order to fail, you got to. Maybe you'll fail the first try at something. That means maybe you're going to try something or do something that you're not that great at, or maybe it will not go the way that you were anticipating and then you have to do it multiple times. We do this at some of my live events. We have people go out and play the no game or try to get rejected game. They go out into the world and do things that they think are going to get them rejected, get a no. And many people come back. Well, first of all, people come back. And if they're nervous, oh, yes. The room is, like, tense before people go out for this. About 40, 45 minutes out into downtown Portland, Oregon. And people are just like. Because I introduce the activity, they kind of know something's coming that afternoon because I build it up a little bit and then I introduce it. And then when I start talking about it, the room goes tense. I can feel it. It's just like everyone's guts are clenched. And then they go out and then people come back and it's just on fire. They're chatting, they're talking about. So break them up with a stick to start the workshop again because they just want to keep talking to each other. They're all excited, and we start to figure out what happened. What happened. And one of the most. Besides people feeling liberated and doing things they've never done before, one of the most surprising things is how shocked people are at what they got yeses to. Can I have that free soda? Sure. Can I go for a ride on your bike around the block and bring it back? Sure. Can I have a bite of your burrito? Yes. I'm not talking like a chip where you just pick it up and put it in your mouth. I'm talking a burrito. You're getting your mouth on that thing. I mean, on and on these stories, just absurd stuff because we just have so many stories about how it's gonna go now. Does it radically benefit your life to get a bite of someone's burrito? Probably not. Does it radically benefit your life to approach someone that makes your heart go boom and ask them out, and then you are certain they're gonna say no, and then they say yes. Because your predictions are shit, just like mine are. Because most of our predictions are not based upon our clear sight and analytical mind, the tool that we've been given. No, they're based upon our fears and the past being projected forward and our safety police trying to prevent us from taking any of these actions and getting any of these results. But when we take those actions, holy cow, you just might find that you have no idea what's going to happen next, no idea what the result is going to be. And in a way, the more exposure you get to failure, the more it doesn't matter. Okay, that one didn't work out. Because what's next? Because think about this. I'll give you one more metaphor and then we're going to wrap for today. Imagine you are learning golf and you're taking cracks at a. With an, I don't know, a nine iron at the driving range. And you are going to go out, drive to the driving range, get at your club, get to the place where you can tee off. But instead of getting a bucket of balls, you know, with 100 balls or whatever, you get one ball and you do set up, you do your little shimmy, you check your posture and form and you wind back and then you swing and then you're done. I mean, are you going to get any better at golf? And what if that shot doesn't go well? Well, I guess you're a loser. I guess you're a failure for life. Sorry. No one never going to be able to play golf. Right. It's absurd. And we know it's absurd when we see that, but how many times have you tried something? Like once or twice? Like asking someone out is a great example. I was talking about. Or me leaving those live events, that workshop, offering a workshop. Maybe you trying some skill or something inside your work, some job, some particular task, anything in your life, you just do it once. And that was like five years ago. And you're like, yeah, that's not my thing. Yeah, no, golf's not my thing. I'm not good at it. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I tried it. Oh, yeah? What did you do? I went to the driving range and everything. I even got a ball and took a swing at one. At one. At one. Yeah, yeah, I did. I did a whole. I took a whole swing at a whole one ball, man. Just. Golf's not my thing. So get out there, because what if you had a bucket of 100 balls, and then you flub one and you hit it on the top, and it rolls like, three feet. Who cares? You just pull out another one with your club and then whack that one or not. And then another one, and then another one, and then another one and another one. So failure stops to mean so much when you know you're just gonna take another crack again and again and again and again. And it's not about getting 100%, because you'll never get 100%. It's about being fucking unstoppable. So you just keep going. And that's one thing I always fall back on. No matter how bad something goes or how overwhelming something is or how much I fail at something, it's like, well, I know I'm not gonna stop. At least I got that. I might change my approach. I might scale back. I might take it easy for a little while. But I'm not stopping. When you got that, you got the certainty and the power that you need to keep facing something again and again until you get what you want and create the life that you want. Beautiful. So what are you gonna do today? This week? That's right. Fail. Oh, yes. Thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. 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 blogs, ebooks, and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to Social Confidence center dot com.