You Are Not Fixed

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. Welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about you and what you are and what you are not, and even more importantly, how you see yourself. Because the way you see yourself determines your experience of life. It determines your level of confidence. It determines your reality. And there are a thousand different things we could look at about how you see yourself, because that's what makes up your identity, your sense of who you are. But there's one thing that I want to focus in on today's episode and bring it to front and center awareness for you, because this is the one thing that when you change this will produce the biggest shift, and that's my goal here for you, is to leave this episode and every episode of the show feeling more confident, having more tools, strategies, and skills to become the most free, bold, confident version of you. And this one particular pattern, habit perception that you're doing is going to be limiting you the most. And when you shift it, it's going to free you up the most. So I'm very excited to share this with you. Let's dive in right now. Now, the name of the episode is called you are not Fixed. And when you read that, maybe I don't know if you have a pet, maybe you thought fixed, as in neutered or, you know, maybe you thought fixed. Oh, broken. Is he saying, I'm not broken? Well, I don't need to say that. That just is a simple fact that you are not broken, and you don't need to be fixed in that way either. But that's not what I'm talking about with the name of this episode. What I'm talking about and how I'm using the word fixed is actually in the sense of set or unchanging or unmalleable or frozen. Right? You know, someone might say, hey, can I get a discount? And the vendor or whatever says, oh, I'm sorry, the price is fixed right? Or someone wants to change the way they do something in a company, and maybe their manager says, actually the protocol or the process is fixed, we don't change it. That's what I mean. With fixed means frozen, set, stuck, not gonna change. You are not frozen, set, stuck, not gonna change. You are the opposite of that, which would be fluid, malleable, changeable, transformation, transforming, able. And as you're listening to me, you might be nodding your head and saying, yes, of course. Of course. This is. I know that. Right? Listen, that's why I'm listening to this show. Maybe you read some of my books or watching my YouTube channel. If you're not, by the way, you should definitely check that out. If you're a fan of this show, you will love the YouTube channel. It's called Get More Confidence. Please head on over to YouTube. Subscribe to that if you haven't already, and share with your friends and family. And that's gonna be a great resource for you as well. So, you know, whatever growth you're engaged in right now, you might say it's pretty obvious that I know I'm not fixed. I know I can change. And that's what most people say intellectually in theory, but. And I've seen this again and again and again with clients and in my own self, when we start to bump up against the edges, and it's no longer theoretically, can people change? It's, can I change in this one particular area to go from here to where I want to be? All of a sudden, there's a bit more doubt about whether you are fixed or not. In fact, people start to think, act, talk as if they are fixed. Now, when I work with people, and I've seen this again and again, like hundreds of times with different people, they don't come to me and say, you know, actually, I can't change. It's not possible for me. I mean, they might say that that's part of the story, but then it gets a little more subtle and sophisticated. And that's why I want to highlight this for you, because you might be doing the same thing in your own head. And it goes something like this. We're talking about a specific change that someone wants to make in a specific area of their life. And, you know, some of the big ones that you might relate to that. I work with clients on speaking up more in a work setting, being more assertive, being more of a leader, being more direct, maybe being able to have difficult conversations or confrontations or direct contact, and that could be in your personal life. As well, being more real, being more vulnerable, being more authentic, being more open, putting yourself out there more, taking risks, asking someone out dating, creating a relationship, being more you socially creating friendships. These are all the different areas that the confidence might manifest, the social confidence that someone's building. And as we start to drill down on one of those areas, the person will start to tell me, let's say we're talking about being more assertive with colleagues at work or just speaking up and connecting more in a workplace environment. And then they'll start to tell me about when they were young and how maybe one of their parents had a lot of social anxiety or one of their parents was abusive, or one of their parents had a personality disorder or something. And I'm not saying that that didn't have effect on them. Sure it did. And it might very well have created the stories they're telling themselves or the patterns they've been playing out for 10, 20, 30, 50 years. And you might have past experiences that are doing that too. And the way they're talking about it though, if I could read between the lines, they're telling me, because this happened in my past, I am this way. And no challenge there on my part. I don't deny that. I don't say, no, that's not true. You did have experiences in the past. They did teach you things you did learn. Hey, if I speak up to dad, he yells at me, or if I challenge or I don't do what my mom says, or my mom thinks I'm not nice, then she basically sends messages of shame and I'm terrible self hatred towards myself. So I don't do that. I learned not to do that. That totally makes sense to me. And that's very reasonable story as to try to make sense of why you might feel the way you do now. However, when the person tells me that story, it kind of is like there's a period at the end, right? It's like, well, this is what happened, so this is the way I am, period. And it's like, okay, sure, sure. What now? What about today? What about tomorrow? Oh, well, I can't be different tomorrow because did you just hear my story about why I am the way that I am? That's what's being communicated underneath. I'm not saying that you say that or the clients say that. It is the subtle message. They're not even aware of it. I mean, they're working with me because they want to make the change, right? And they do, consciously, subconsciously. There's a part of My clients. There's a part of me, there's a part of you that does not want to change, wants to keep everything the same, static, frozen. And what a convenient way to keep things the same. If I am fixed, I am frozen. Well, then I guess I can't make these changes. Sometimes I'll have clients ponder, you know, how much change is really possible. Because you know me, I'm like, hey, let's radical and rapid transformation. That's the game that I'm playing. That's what I believe is possible. So someone's like, ah, I had social anxiety. For years I've worked with therapists, you know, I made a little bit of progress, but honestly, not that much. And heck, this is kind of the way it is for me. I'm gonna have this for the rest of my life. It's just my personality. I don't perceive that in the same way as most people might. And that's why I had that break from clinical psychology. And I got trained as a clinical psychologist, which is pretty diagnosis heavy. Was doing traditional therapeutic approaches with people. And I was like, this is extremely limited. I think human potential is so much more than this. And I know from my own personal experience that it's possible to no longer feel like you have social anx. I no longer think I have social anxiety. Now do I feel social anxiety? Sure, sometimes. What human doesn't? But is that my dominant experience of being around people? Is that what comes up first? Is that what comes up most often? Is that a frequent occurrence? No, no, no and no. And it's not because I am superior or better or just born that way and fixed in some other way. It was a change. It was a fluid state of growth that occurred over time. And that is 100% possible for you? For every client that I work with, for every human who is willing, who is willing to engage in that process. Because it isn't as simple as taking a pill. It isn't as simple as labeling it with a diagnosis and then settling. I suppose that's a common, I want to say, approach that people take or path that people take. And that's really unfortunate because there's a lot of professionals in the mental health world that in a sense, kind of reinforce the fixed mindset. You know, they'll give you a diagnosis and the implication is the diagnosis is permanent. Why do we think diagnoses are permanent, by the way? That's such a weird trick of the human mind. Perhaps because they have Latin names or fancy sounding names or someone in a lab coat Told you it or it's in a book written down with, you know. Do you understand how most psychiatric diagnoses are created? It's like a bunch of. I don't know if it's changed, but, you know, throughout history it's been mostly a bunch of men, white men who are like, making checklists. Well, what have you seen? Is it this? Oh, yeah, it's more like that. Okay, write it like that. Okay, put these nine. How many. Here's these nine symptoms of this disorder. Well, how many do they need to have for them to have the disorder? I don't know, six. And I'm being a little flippant about it. Like, there's a lot more research that goes into it, and it's not like a completely useless construct. However, it is extremely limiting to identify with any sort of diagnosis and believe any diagnosis permanent and also believe the prognosis of any particular diagnosis. The prognosis is just what's supposed to happen. Something that I've been obsessed with for, geez, going on 10 years now, give or take, is mind body medicine. And if you know anything about my experience with chronic pain, which you can listen to previous episodes of the show about, that's why I became so obsessed with it, because I had pain since I was age 15. I've just turned 39 now, and I was in ongoing pain for many years of my life. And taking different medications and things didn't really work. And my story of my body became more and more limited, more and more fixed. This is who I am. I have this. I have this autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis. This is how it is. And ankylosing spondylitis has a prognosis, which means a future prediction. And that is one of the most devastating, dangerous side effects of buying in fully to a diagnosis. And you might say, well, there's a benefit, right? Because let's say something has a prognosis where it's fatal, and so then it's going to cause the person to address it or do necessary treatment. Sure, sure. Like you ingested arsenic, there's a certain prognosis you might want to get that go to a poison control center immediately. But there's so many things that are not so black and white like an autoimmune condition. But what we do in our minds is we hear you have, you have it. It's a part of your biology. We think it's a part of our DNA, and we have this antiquated, outdated perception of DNA as if it is the blueprint that's going to determine your destiny. Your genes determine your destiny. This genetic determinism, which is also not true. There is a ton of evidence that's come out in the last 15 to 20 years or maybe even more in the field of epigenetics pioneered by Bruce Lipton. Should check out his stuff or check out his YouTube videos. And I had an opportunity to talk to him. It was fascinating. I wanted to interview him. I tried to pursue him, and he said yes. When I talked to him, we chatted for like 30 minutes in some hallway at an event. But then I never followed up. In that moment, I learned I should just whip out my cell phone and just start recording and be like, let's do an impromptu interview. Dr. Bruce Lipton. But anyway, what he told me, which sticks with me to this day, is how he was a molecular cell biologist, and he worked in a lot of labs throughout the country, and his research was pointing more and more that the genes, like the brain of the cell. Stick with me here. I know it feels like we're digressing, but this is extremely liberating information. It's going to show you that you truly are not fixed. The brains of the cell. What do we learn in school and biology? Well, the brains of the cell is the nucleus, right? And the inside of the nucleus is. There's the DNA, there's. The DNA determines what the cell does and how it replicates. And it's kind of got the blueprint laid out for the house, as it were, which is your body, it turns out. And he did some interesting research where he removed the nucleus from a cell. And then what did the cell do? The cell continued to function as normal. If we removed your brain, do you think you'd function as normal? No. Maybe some sort of zombie shuffle, I don't know. But no, you're done, Right? So the cell was not the brain. And anyway, he went on to study this a lot more, ended up interviewing to work in a lab at Stanford was heavily challenged. Whenever he would talk about this, people would, like, literally walk out of the room because he was challenging the paradigm, the belief that this genetic determinism, the cell, the nucleus is the brain of the cell, and the genes determine this. That's what people thought. And he started to challenge this and showed evidence, and people didn't know what to do with that information, so they just walk out. Eventually, he interviewed at Stanford, and it was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn't like him, but they hired him because they knew that this would create a lot of. Basically they couldn't deny what he was studying. And so they knew that there was something here that could be of value and it would create a lot of. It would further everyone in the department because he's bringing this kind of counter or controversial research. In any case, he's gone on to show a variety of results of what they call epigenetics, which means above or beyond genetics, which means what genes are expressed, how your cells replicate, what you become is not predetermined by your starting genes. It is actually a combination of your starting genes and your environment. And your environment, because you're not a single cell organism, doesn't mean what's in the petri dish. It means how you interface with the world or the petri dish. Right. Because you are taking in the world through your senses. You are a human, which means you're an advanced, a hyper advanced meaning making machine. So in other words, how you perceive yourself, how you perceive the world on a cellular level determines how your cells express. And this isn't just about sickness and health. This is about expansion and contraction. Because that's another thing that Bruce Lipton and his cell research determined was that on a cellular level, your body, your cells will respond to the environment around them in one of two ways. If they drop something noxious or dangerous or threatening or poisonous it into the solution, the cells would move away to whatever degree that they could. They would contract away. They would do this without a nucleus, by the way, without their quote, brain. If they put something desirable towards the cells, some sort of food source, then the cells would move towards it. You are doing the same thing. You can be in either an expansive state or a contracted state. And we all know what that feels like. Expanded state is when you're feeling confident, you're feeling relaxed. Share. Have you ever seen a little kid who's excited and they just want to share? I'm fortunate to be able to see this often because I have two little boys. And just the other morning my younger son woke up at like 4 in the morning, which is unusual for him. And so he's sitting there in the dark and he's whispering like, I want to get up, you know. And Candace is like, well, it's a couple hours till wake up time. He's like, I want to get up. So she starts to sing him back to sleep. He doesn't fall back asleep. She brings him an apple because sometimes he likes to eat an apple. And then he falls back asleep, doesn't fall, fall back Asleep. So now it's like 5am he's been in bed for an hour, which is a shocking amount of time for him to actually lay there semi quietly. And then at some point he's just like wide awake. He just keeps sighing and sitting up and laying down. So I'm about to get up and I say, hey, I'm gonna go take our dog, Shadow. I'm gonna take Shadow for a walk. Do you want to come with me? And he goes, what? Why would you even ask? Of course I want to come with you. So, you know, because he loves, as he calls it, solo time with me where it's just me and him, he gets all my attention. And so we get, we get dressed and we go outside and we go on this walk and it's dark out. And you know, normal for me, I walk the dog almost every morning. But he never gets to be out in the dark. He never gets to be out at this time. He's doing it and his brother's still asleep. It's a very exciting thing. And he's just talking. It was about a 45 minute to an hour walk. And he's like talks the whole time. The only pause is for like breaths. And he's telling me all kinds of stories and like 75% of them are questionable if they happened in this reality or not. But it is, it is adorable. And he's in an expanded state. He just wants to share, he wants to be seen. He's not thinking about, is this story interesting? Does my dad like it? Am I good enough? None of that. And that's what you are when you're in an expanded state. You want to be seen, you want to share, you're open, you're asking questions. And then we all know what it feels like to be in a contracted state and you are playing one of those two things out, you might flip between the two right throughout the day. And when you tell yourself, I am this way, all of a sudden you've now caused your body to start to express itself more in the contracted way. You start to approach situations expecting how you're going to be. And then because of there's the confirmation bias, the consistency bias. These are heuristics in our mind where the confirmation bias is. If you believe something is going to be there, you're going to look for it, you're going to find it. If you believe you're going to be a certain way, you're going to look for that and find evidence of that. If you believe people aren't Going to like you, you're going to look for that and you're going to find that. And then the consistency bias is you want to remain consistent with your identity. This is who I am. Because on some level it feels true, feels right. It feels good to be the same as I thought I was going to be. Right again. That's about stability. That's about addiction to certainty and a comfort of the familiar. And really, that's the root of all this stuff. Underneath the am I, this is how I was and this is how in the past, and this is why I'm this way, and this is why I can't change. All of that is false stories, false ideas. And the only reason you're believing them is why? Why would you believe that you're fixed? I mean, if you really examine it right now with me, can you see how absurd that is? What in reality around you is fixed and unchanging? You might look around and say, look at my desk. My desk is the same as the day I bought it. All right? Is your desk gonna be the same a hundred years from now, 200 years from now, 500 years from now, 1,000 years from now? Do you see any desks from a thousand years ago? Right now that form takes longer to break down. Look at something like your tech, your laptop, your phone, Is that gonna be the same five years from now, ten years from now? Or is it not gonna work anymore? Especially if it needs to interface with whatever the newest stuff is. What about something organic? You look at a carrot or an apple that you got from the store yesterday, it's fresh, it's crispy. What about a week from now maybe? Still good. Carrots and apples got some good longitivity in them. What about left outside of the fridge three months from now, six months from now? You probably don't want to eat that anymore, right? What about organisms? Alive things like you? Oh my. Holy cow. How complex are you compared to a desk compared to an apple? You can move, you can think, and you can therefore move. How do you move your hand? I don't know. I just do. You are this intricate, complex, ever changing system that has multiple layers. A physical body layer, a mental layer of thought, an emotional layer, an energetic layer, a way that you interface with your environment. You are in constant motion, constant change, constant regeneration, constant creation of new cells in your body. The blueprint is constantly being updated. So are you fixed? It's really absurd to think that you are if you look at just the basics that we've been talking about today. So Then the question is, well, why would we cling to that absurd belief? Because if you were not fixed, if you could change radical and rapid transformation, how would you show up tomorrow? What kind of conversations would you have? What would you say? Just talking about this with a client the other day, he works in an office setting and is uncomfortable. Uncomfortable being assertive, but also kind of socially around people and break and lunchtimes and other things. Kind of like, I don't want to interact with people. This is just how I am. I've always been this way. Story, story, story. Fixed, fixed, fixed identities. And I said, okay, if you were a social, confident, outgoing person, what would you do during the lunch break? He's like, well, I'd walk over there. I just joined in this conversation. I'd do that. I would do that. I'd say, okay, great. Let's talk about how you can practice doing that. And if that feels like too much of a stretch, let's look at the lesser version of the same thing, though. And all of a sudden, guess what comes up. A ton of fear. Oh, my God. What if the people aren't gonna like me? Oh, my God, what are we coming? We're bump up against his fears of rejection. We're gonna bump up against his fear of connection, of opening himself. Because that's what I found is often underneath a lot of social anxiety is a fear of being hurt through connection. And that's a whole longer story there. Maybe that resonates as true for you, though, right now, being hurt through connection. So if I let people in, I'm gonna get hurt. And that doesn't necessarily mean romantically. That could be in any way. I get close to people, I'm gonna get hurt. And so we keep everyone at arm's distance. And you can do that in a couple of ways. You can do that by being kind of avoidant and anxious. I want to talk to people. Or very aloof or very quiet, not sharing very much, kind of shut down. Or you can do it by being very nice and just saying what other people want to hear and not rocking the boat and only putting forward, like, a shadow of a shadow version of you. That's very pleasing. And in both cases, you're afraid to really connect. That's what was coming up for him, too. So the reason we cling to that old belief is because we don't want to face those fears. And when you face those fears, when you're willing to face those fears, not just once, but consistently making a practice out of it, then liberation is Possible. And you see the truth, which is I am fluid. I am ever changing. I am dynamic. I am unlimited. Which brings us to our action step. Time for action. Action. Action. If you were not fixed and you were fluid, dynamic, changing, and unlimited, if you were fully confident tonight, today, right now, snap of the finger, what would you go do tomorrow at work in your relationships, romantic life, social life, what would you do? The answer will come to you. You might already know. And there could be a thousand and one stories about why you can't or why it won't work out or blah, blah, blah. And underneath, it's probably just raw fear. This is what I help people. I run a mastermind program. It's been an amazing program. It's been going for six years now. And, you know, this is what we do all day long. All day long. Not literally all day long. That would be pretty intense. But this is what we're doing week in and week out is like looking at. And we're just. We're not letting people go back to this BS Settling story that's gonna ultimately destroy their lives. You can tell I'm passionate about it. I got some heat about this because I'm like, look, if you just live in that, it's gonna destroy your life. No, it's not gonna kill you tomorrow, but it's gonna destroy the quality of your life, and it's gonna destroy your potential and who you are and what you're here to do. So let's keep bringing it back to if you were unlimited, if you did have the capacity to radically shift your confidence, what would you do tomorrow? Now let's face that fear. And then I teach them tools to be with that fear, and we practice it together, and then it's one step at a time. So thanks for being with me today. I hope this serves you. And if you want to learn more about the mastermind program, go to drazziz.com under the coaching tab on the right there. We have more information about that. You can also just enter your name and email there and learn more about coaching and how it works and even apply for a confidence breakthrough session with one of my coaches. And complimentary as a listener of this show and you can see what's possible for you and how coaching might serve you. 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. 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 confidencecenter.com it.