You Are Not Your Critical Thoughts

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 the voices in your head, you crazy maniac. No, don't worry, you're not crazy. You're like the rest of us. We all got voices in our head and we got to learn how to deal with them. That's a huge part of confidence, because confidence is an inside job. And its opposite, which might be anxiety, doubt, self judgment, fear, isolation. All these things that you might think of as the opposite of a confident, full, rich life are not necessarily due to external circumstances. They're often due to the voices in our head. And you can have things going well and think you're not enough. You can have people that love you and think you're unlovable. And so we got to learn how to work with the voices in our head, particularly the critical thoughts. And this episode is about how you are not your critical thoughts. And even though we might really identify with them, and I want to share some metaphors with you and some stories with you that will really help you shift that pattern so that you no longer feel like that voice talking to you and telling you why you're not good enough and why you suck and what's wrong with you, you realize it's not you. And when you see that it's not you, you can start to relate to it in a very different way. That's gonna really free you up. So let me start with a quick story. This just came from a session I was working on with a client, and he spent some time off. And he's a very successful guy. He runs a business, but he spent some time with some family members and extended family. And his cousin is like a. Owns multiple business and multimillionaire and this and that and is very into it and talks about it a lot and is, you know, excited about and likes to maybe even show off his knowledge and wealth a little bit. And so my client's spending time with him. After a few days, he's like, wow, my inner critic just started going crazy. And like, yeah, what's wrong with you? What are you doing? And all of his perfectionism and pressure to be somewhere and do something and get these new results in his life, you know, comes out with a vengeance. And you may or may not relate to that pressure, but you got some kind of pressure. Your critic is trying to make you be something else. Like a client of mine I talked to recently, she was, she's in her mid-30s. And her critics like, what's wrong with you? You should have friends by now or you should have a relationship by now. And all you have is these superficial friendships. And you're not married, you don't have a kid. Like you're failing at life, you suck. And it could go on and on. You know, you don't look right, you're too fat, you're too this, you're too that. In terms of your appearance, it could be you're not in the right station in life. Whether it's money or relationships or. I mean, there's a. There's a billion things that you could pick at yourself for. You might say, well, yeah, Z's, because I really do want a family, or I really do want kids, or I do want deeper friendships, or I do want more money, I do want more career success. So, I mean, how are you telling me that that's, Isn't that just the truth? But you gotta start to separate these things because maybe you do want a certain result in your life. Fair enough. And yet the pattern of self criticism that you're running is a separate process. And this is really important to get because you might think that they're the same thing. Well, I'm attacking myself because I'm not there yet. And if I attack myself enough, I'll get there. Okay, this is a terrible plan. We'll come back to that in a minute. But regardless, those are two separate things that are happening. There's the you wanting the thing and then there's you attacking yourself. And I don't care what the critic says, that it's for your own good and it's going to help you get there and blah, blah, blah. But just realize they're separate things. And so tip number one, which I revealed in my story about the first client, the gentleman who spent the weekend with his cousin, there's already a level of freedom he's developing by being able to tell me in our session, my inner critic was very Active. That's a whole nother level, a layer of freedom. Because where I lived for many years and where many people I talked to live is that voice comes a knocking and we're gone. Like, we don't even know what's what. We're just totally under the spell. So it says, you're a loser and you haven't achieved enough in your life. And we're like, oh my God, I'm such a loser and I haven't achieved enough in my life. Right? There's no separation. It's just. That's it. That's fact. It's the word of God coming through my mind to tell me how it is. God's a jerk. I suck, right? So that's how it is until we start to realize like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I am not these different parts of me. I am not the little voices in my head. And that's a really important life changing distinction. There's a visual metaphor I really like from acceptance and commitment therapy, and it's the bus driver. So you can think of it as that you are the driver of the bus of your life. You're going to choose whether you eat the salad or the burger. You're going to choose whether you work today or take the day off. You're going to choose how productive you are at work. You're going to do stuff. Are you going to just kind of dink around on the web? And you're going to choose all kinds of things. Do you approach that person or not? Do you make the joke or not? Do you. Whatever it is you want to do, you're choosing and you're doing. And then though you have all the other characters on the bus, so you're the driver of the bus, but. But it's not a quiet, empty ride. No. There's all these different voices inside. There's a part that's like, I want the burger. And I know because I have that part, not just obviously inside of myself, But I have two young children and they get to personify at age 7 and 9, the part that wants the marshmallow burger milkshake combo, right? Like put it all in a big bucket. I want to eat it. Right? So can we have a marshmallow? No. Can we have a marshmallow? No. Can we have a marshmallow? No. How about now? No. Can we have a marshmallow now? Can I have. This is great. Where I was on a hike with my kids and my wife and our younger one is like, can I have a marshmallow? And it's like, we're in the middle of the woods, dude. Do you think I got them in my pocket? What can I have when I get home? No, because we'll give our kids sweet things, but we try to have the sweet things be the stuff that's not gonna create tons of rampant craving, which sugar seems to do that for them. So we'll give them sodas that are sweetened with stevia, that kind of stuff. So I was like, no, you can have a soda, you know, of the stevia kind when we get home. It's like, no, but I want a marshmallow, Dad. I want the. Hook it to my veins. I want the good stuff. And so this. I love this line. I was like, no. He's like, can I have a marshmallow? No. He's like, can I have half a marshmallow? No. Can I have a quarter of a marshmallow? No. Can I have three marshmallows? And then I just started laughing because I was like, I love this negotiation tactic. You get no to a quarter of one, and your counter is, how about three? And I just thought, wouldn't that be funny if I was like, yeah, okay, fine. Here's five, right? They're in my pocket right now. Blah. Anyway, we all have that little kid inside that wants the sugar, it wants the candy, it wants the instant gratification, wants the quick fix. We have another part inside of us that wants. That hungers to be special. Oh, my gosh. This part. It hungers to be the belle of the ball. Cinderella. Even if you're a man, you want to be Cinderella? Trust me. You know, maybe have your own version where you're. Who. Who's the king in that story? The king. The prince strutting in. We want to be looked at. We want to be admired. We want to be special. And you might say, I don't have that. I'm better than that. I don't need that. I don't know. Do you really not have that, or is it just kind of dormant? You know, maybe you. You watch a band performing, and there's a party who's like, I wish I was in the center of the stadium playing. And we hunger for it. There's nothing wrong with that part. And then we have the part that wants everybody to like us no matter what. They approve of us no matter what. You know, when we want the part, everyone thinks we're beautiful. We want to be that. There's a part that wants to be the most beautiful by societal standards. The richest, all These things, we have all these parts and they're all on the bus. You also have a part that's the self critical part of you, the inner tyrant, the inner critic that is maybe louder than the rest. Maybe he's sitting right up next to the bus driver whispering in your ear, suck. You should drive faster, come on. And so this is where a lot of people have the Critic as riding shotgun with them. All the other parts are in the back of the bus, you know, chanting things out here and there. Think of them like kids, like it's a school bus. I like to imagine that one of those big yellow school buses and you're the adult driver and there's all these kids. What if your critic was another kid? It wasn't this big terrifying ogre, just a little kid. Because here's the thing. The critic is a strategy. It serves several functions, but one is it's trying to have you not get hurt in life. And there's a few ways to not get hurt. One is to avoid risks. So it'll say, don't take a left turn up there. It's not going to go well. No one's going to like you. No, don't, don't put yourself out there. Don't give the talk. Don't write the book. Don't put the art out there. That's terrible. People are going to think it's dumb, right? So it's going to try to discourage you from taking any turns, any change, any unknown in your life. It also serves another function, though, because it's like, hey, if you think about that, it's avoiding pain, right? I don't want to. I want to avoid the pain of rejection. But there's also another pain. There's a part in the back that's like, I want to be special. If I got rich enough, everyone would think I was great. And the critic hears that and it's like, yeah, yeah. And then it turns to you, the driver, and it's like, hey, bud, you got to get us richer now because I'm feeling pain. We got to stop feeling pain. Pain is bad. Pain is awful. Let's fix it. Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it. And then, you know, imagine the bus driver who is just like pulling their hair out with all these kids yelling things at them and they feel like they're true. So there's a kid that's like, you smell. You're a purple people eater. Whatever. Kids are young. I don't know, kids probably don't say that one. But anyway, you know, Saying a bunch of junk. And the bus driver's, like, freaking out, man. Just, like, swerving all over the road. And that's what we do in our lives. And it's really helpful to literally imagine this bus. What does your critic look like right now? Is it a he or a she or a they? Is it intimidating, dominating, big old. Does it look like your mom or your dad, Grandpa, or that bully at school? What? Where is it? Is it right next to you? Is it whispering in your ear? Is it yelling at you? Is it even trying to get in front of you and block your view from driving? It's so loud. And then how are you, as the bus driver dealing with that? Are you just kind of getting kicked around by all the kids or throwing their sandwiches at you and yelling at you and you're just sobbing, trying to hold on to the wheel? I'm just trying to drive you home. I can't drop you off, though, because these parts don't leave. Parts are just on the bus forever. It's terrible. But the good news is, the good news is you don't have to kick these parts off the bus. They all serve a function in some way, and the part wants to be special. They're all just different hungers and needs and desires. The problem is when we take them as the only way to be, we have to have it now. There's an extreme quality to some of their demands or desires. There's nothing wrong with my kid wanting a marshmallow. But there is a problem. If I'm like, he wants a marshmallow. Oh, no. I better get him a marshmallow now, or else. Oh, no. Oh, no. We're never going to be happy unless we have a marshmallow. Because now I fused with that part. That's how he feels in the moment. But as the driver of the bus, I'm like, I hear ya. I know. And I said that to him on the hike. I was like, I get it, man. It's called craving. I have it, too. We crave things. And the funny thing about the craving is if I were to give you five marshmallows right now, you know what you'd want tomorrow? He looked at me. He's like, five marshmallows. I was like, no, 10 marshmallows. And so there's other ways to work with this craving. Let's, like, explore it. And then he's like, whatever, I don't want to do that. I'm like, okay, all right, well, you're still not getting the marshmallows. But hopefully you can work with the parts of you little differently. But they might be resistant, too, and that's okay. But you still don't give whatever they want. You don't do whatever they say. You're not riding around like you're a hostage. The bus driver's being held up. Where do you want me to take you? Okay, no. Hey, listen, I'm driving the bus. Everybody settle down back there. You critic. What are you doing up in shotgun? No one's allowed to ride up here. You see that yellow line? Get behind the yellow line. Right. I know. You think we should get there faster. You think we should be further along and better than we are. I hear you. I hear you. And now here's the thing. And this is an objection that comes up sometimes with clients. They say, well, yeah, but I do want the things that the critic is pressuring me to get. And I say, great. You want to make more money. You do want a relationship. Whatever your life goals are. Maybe you haven't hit certain life goals and you want them. I'm not saying that you have to somehow give up on everything. You're still driving the bus. You get to steer where you're driving. Maybe you do want to steer more towards career success or better relationships. Great, great, great, great. But here's the thing. How often tune into the energy of that. The voices in the bus and that inner critic, and I'll ask clients this. I'll say, what. What does it feel like? And I'll hear words like urgent, desperate, scared, pressure, upset, freaking out. Right. Does that seem true for you? Certainly for me, there's like a, we need it now. We need it now. We're gonna die. There's a fear quality to it. There's a pouty, angry. It's unfair. I should have it now. Let me ask you this. From a purely effectiveness standpoint, what do you think is more effective to approach someone with desperation and pouty entitlement? Does that get you what you want in life? Take it to a dating setting and you can go approach somebody. You have to talk to me because I'm lonely and I need your attention right now, or I'm gonna die or explode. That's gonna go well, right? And even if you try to hide it, if that's what's coming out of you, you're gonna repel what you want. Same thing with the person who wants more success, more money, more accolades, more accomplishments. You're gonna drive away the accomplishments. You might take more action from a frantic, desperate place. But you're gonna get way less fruit from that action, maybe even none, because you're all desperate out. And so sometimes I'll guide this conversation with clients. I'll say, okay, let's talk to your critic right here. Imagine on the bus, you're saying to them, hey, I also want blank. We're driving towards that right now. But you freaking out there is not going to get us in there any faster. In fact, it's distracting me. It's stressing me out. We're not going to make it. We gotta. We gotta soften, we gotta change. And as the bus driver, you can choose to upgrade your perspective because that frantic freaked out. I gotta make it happen right now. Part. I was sharing this with a client just earlier today. It was pretty funny. Right in the middle. I had this image come to me and I was like, I don't know, this is gonna land for him. I was like, how old are you? He's like, I'm 36. I was like, okay, I'm 40. We're in the same range. Did you ever play Mortal Kombat? And he laughed and he's like, yeah. I was like, oh, great. So I don't know if you played that game or not. I might be just talking nonsense to you, but this was a game. It was big when I was a kid. I think the franchise is still going, but it was like a big deal when I was a kid because there was Street Fighter. Probably played that Street Fighter 2 was huge in arcades and then eventually for consoles. But then there was Mortal Kombat. And Mortal Kombat was kind of like Street Fighter. The mechanics, I think, were a little worse in terms of the gameplay, but its claim to fame was. Do you remember? Maybe you remember they're called fatalities. So at the end of the second round of the match, or the third round, if it was one to one, you play best of three, you know, if you took down all their life total, instead of just falling over dead like they did in Street Fighter, you win, you know, new game. They stand there kind of swaggering, and if you frantically press in the right combo for your particular character, and they all had different combos, you know, like left, left up, down A B or whatever, then they would do the fatality movement. And you only had about two or three seconds to, like, input it as fast as you can, maybe even faster, maybe just one or two seconds. And if you did it, if you didn't do it, it just kind of wobbled. Your character kind of moved around as you're tapping all the buttons and nothing happened. And then, and then they fell over. Your opponent fell over. But if you did it right, they did the fatality. And the fatality was gruesome ways of killing somebody. Punching them into spikes, exploding them, breathing fire on them. This is real good. I was probably like 9 years old. This is great input for a 9 year old brain. In any case, there was one character who I hated playing. I didn't like him. His name was Kano. But Kano's fatality, if you remember this, was to punch through the opponent's chest, through their ribs, grab their heart and rip it out. And then he'd be holding their beating heart and their, their body would collapse over again. Phenomenal input for a nine year old to see. And so I was telling my client, you know, when you're operating from this desperate, urgent place, it's a very misguided approach to life. Like you perceive that you have to punch into life and rip out what you want, like the beating heart. I'm gonna fucking take it. And that energy doesn't work. Might seem like it's determined, but it's actually antagonistic. You're viewing it as you versus life. And when you do that, the forces of creation don't align with you. Things are harder. And there's a misguidance in the hierarchy. Like you don't get to take what you want. It doesn't work. It's not, it's really not gonna work. And there's people that try that strategy might say, well, that person's doing that and it's working for them. I don't know, try it out. Maybe first of all, it feels bad, but secondly, maybe it'll work for you. But most people I see are just kind of frustrated and stuck and desperate. And instead we got to realize like, yes, your action matters. Yes, you got to do things. Yes, you got to show up and have an intention and move towards it. But it is received with grace. Right at the end of the day, do you have 100% control? So you can boldly go walk over and talk to that person. But what happens next, that's grace. It's received, not taken. And that's true for business success, career success, money, life, health. And so as the bus driver, you gotta come from this place and then be able to talk to those kids in the back. And this is like a form of you are the center, you are the whole adult self. And then you have these young parts to just tend to and help rather than let Them control you and the bus. So I'm excited to share more about this. I'm actually in the early, early stages writing my next book called how to Believe in Yourself and Trust in Life, which really gets in depth into this. That's way in advance because I'm in the beginning writing stages. But exciting news, my other book that's actually completed now, which is coming out this year, 2023, is called less Nice, More youe, and that's in the final, final stages of getting all this stuff put together. But all the manuscript, everything's written. And that book will be coming out in just a couple of months, depending when you're listening to this in the fall of 2023. So very excited to share that and more ideas from Dallas as they come to me and as I'm working with them. So let's talk about how you can put this into action. Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step is to perform Kano's fatality on life and punch through it and pull out the beating heart of your dreams and goals, thus achieving victory over life. No, the invitation is going to be to imagine the bus and imagine the different parts and imagine the critic, too. But even other parts. Maybe there's a part that's hurting. The part that's like always pining over your last ex. And it's been like three years and you're still like, right. And you don't have to demonize that part. You just kind of see it in the. It's a little kid in the back of the bus. She's just kind of crying, or he's just got his head down and you're like, hey, back there. I see you doing all right. I love you. I know you miss him. I miss him, too. Anyway, let's keep driving, right? So you don't just stop the bus and go hang out in the back with that mopey kid for the next six years of your life. But you acknowledge it and you're with it. So really visualize this bus. I think this visual metaphor will be really helpful for you, as it has been for me and many of my clients, and let me know how it goes until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. 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 socialconfidencecenter.com it.