You Don't Need Their Approval

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 why you don't need their approval. Who's the they? Well, I don't know. Maybe specific people in your life, but also maybe the proverbial they. Them. What are they gonna think of me? We're gonna talk about both. Both sides of it. And the goal for today's episode is for you to be a lot more free, to be you, and to not be so hung up on needing people's approval. So thanks for being with me today. I'm Dr. Aziz. Maybe you've listened to a million of these episodes. Maybe this is your first one. And if so, regardless, welcome and I appreciate you. Thank you for spending your time with me. I like to dive straight into stuff in this show and just listen to more. The more you listen to these episodes and apply what you're learning, the more free you can become. So a quick general description of what's possible for you and then the content of the specific show. So, you know, the name of this show is Shrink for the Shy Guy. And the goal of this show is to help you really free yourself from social anxiety, from the cage of social anxiety, from the cage of niceness, from the cage of being who you think you're supposed to be, to get the approval of others, to feel worthy because other people think you're okay, and really ultimately start to live a life that's more your own, that has more of what you value, and being able to live a life of connection, creativity, enjoyment, passion, purpose, success, whatever it is that you want to steer towards. As the captain of your ship, you know, these episodes are designed to help you, one, reclaim being the captain of your ship, and then, two, being able to steer where you want to go. So thanks for spending your time with me. If you're benefiting from this, please make sure you give this show a review on wherever you're listening to it, maybe Apple podcasts or elsewhere. And those reviews help me reach more people, which is the purpose of this whole mission. Right? I call it Operation Mass Liberation. How do we help everyone out there who's struggling with social anxiety, which is millions of hundreds of millions of humans, and let's. Let's do our part to try to make a little dent in that. Because why not, man? Why not just pick something, pick a worthy, noble cause and go for it. And, you know, you might have your own causes, but this one seems to be one that I can do something with. So here we are. All right, approval. What does that mean? They like you. They think you're great. They would. They would praise you, they would think positive things about you, they would feel positive things towards you. Now, given a multiple choice test, what would you prefer? That person that you're into, A, approves of you, or B, disapproves of you? You probably pick A, right? And that's true for your boss or your friend or your friend's parents or your siblings or your kids. I mean, whoever. We like approval. That's like saying humans like comfort. And we don't like pain. It's pretty much hardwired into our systems. And so positive attention, love, admiration, being respected, these are all naturally desirable experiences. So let's just get that out of the way from the beginning. I'm not saying that there's something wrong with liking it or even wanting it. It's the needing it that's the problem. We're gonna get into that more because anything that we need, or else we're setting ourselves up for a lot of suffering. So I just wanna start with the beginning here. Of course you want it. And you gotta have that level of empathy for yourself that's part of being on your own side. And having compassion for yourself is, of course, so. Cause if you listen to this episode and you're like, all right, I shouldn't need approval. And your takeaway is to attack the part of you that's hungering for approval or attention or love from others, then you're missing the whole point here. And you're not gonna. It's not gonna free you. It's gonna further bury you in the. In the depths of that cage. So it's okay. And we wanna start with empathy for that part. Of course, of course, of course. Some part of me is hungering for approval, maybe aching for approval, maybe addicted to approval, or insatiably wanting approval. Insatiable means no matter how much you eat, you're not full right Right. So there's an insatiable hunger for approval perhaps sometimes in this part. And that's okay, that's where we start, is naming it, feeling it, being able to work with it and contain it. The key is not that you have to amputate or somehow extract that part and get rid of it forever. The key is that you need to learn how to work with that part so it's not dominating your mind and running the show and creating all kinds of anxiety and stress and fear and posturing and hiding and whatever else it might be doing. So with that sort of starting baseline of empathy and compassion and connection and care for yourself and the parts of you. What's going on here, it can be helpful to start by seeing how pervasive your hunger for approval is. So do you feel it with certain people? And if so, you can get curious about what kinds of people. So I was talking with a client about this recently, and he realized that he hungers for approval from basically people that he thinks are important, people that are successful in business, from his family members and from women that he finds beautiful or attractive. And so he shared that list with me, and I said, so basically people with status and then also family. Is it just family members with status or any family members? And we started to explore and pinpoint that. Now, you might have it with certain people, specific people, and then you also might just have it kind of with everyone, right? You know, the random person at the grocery store, the stranger, the friend of a friend, whoever it is, whatever they look like, whatever their status, it doesn't matter. I need it. So just get a lay of the land of how prevalent this is. How much do you experience? And look, just be honest with yourself here. You don't need to make it bad or wrong again. This is normal. This is a normal part. All that it is is a part that we need to figure out how to nourish it. Because if it's insatiable, then it's not getting nourished, right? So if you're hungry and then you eat a bag of potato chips, you might temporarily not be hungry, but a little bit later in the day, you might. You're gonna be hungry again. And no matter how many bags of potato chips, you know, by the end of the day, you're still gonna kind of feel maybe a little sick and full, but also hungry, right? So something is happening as you're not getting the nourishment that you need. And you gotta see how kind of underfed am I. And then the next question Would be, why am I not getting the nourishment? And there's a couple reasons for that. One is you don't allow the approval that's coming your way in. So it's this funny thing where we're hungering for it, but then we don't actually let it in. And so maybe you could think of this in your life right now. Are there people that do already approve of you and love you? Can you think of anything right now? And what's interesting with clients is sometimes I'll see some of their blocks. They'll be like, I don't nobody. Like, really? Come on, now, nobody. What about your mom? Oh, my mom's a crazy narcissist. She hates me. Okay, all right, all right, fair enough. What about siblings, friends, students, teachers, mentors, colleagues? And if they're a total block on that, then I'll say, well, does anyone respect you? Is there any that might respect or admire you? And so just, you know, starting to go down the list with them and see if we can find anyone in your life. So I want to ask you that question. Does anyone love you in your life? Anyone approve of you or respect you or admire you or care about you? And if we were to ask that person, hey, what do you like or approve of about so and so that so and so is you? What would they say? Take a moment to really tune into this, because it's amazing. When I do this with clients, they'll get squeamish and uncomfortable and dodgy and I don't know. And then I'll have to ask them a question that bypasses the I don't know. Like, well, if you did know, what do you think it might be? And then we'll start to get to it. And then I just go further with it, and I say, what would you love to hear? What would be like water to, you know, a thirsty ground? What would just. You would soak it up? What would you love for someone to say about you? Oh, so and so. They're. They're what? Let's say someone was gushing praise about you. What would you love to hear? What would you hope someone would be saying about you? Take a moment to really reflect on that. Great. Now here's the question. What's happening for you? Is this. Does it feel good to imagine those things? Does it feel uncomfortable? Get really curious, get into your body, maybe pay attention right around your heart, your chest, your solar plexus, your stomach. Are you tight somewhere? Are you actually blocking this out? Physically, emotionally energetic, mentally, Dismissing it with your mind. There's so many defenses we have against getting the approval and the love and the connection that we actually want that's already available. It's crazy. We're crazy, aren't we? Humans, man. Just like I want it. No. Get it away from me. So the goal here is going to be to soften and to let yourself be loved and approved of already. Why? Because it nourishes you. It's not the bag of potato chips. It's like an actual meal that feeds your heart, it feeds your soul. It energizes you, it inspires you, it fuels you. And most importantly, it helps reduce that hunger, that insatiable addiction to needing approval from everybody. Now, you might say, well, that's all well and good, Aziz. My mom loves me, right? My best friend thinks I'm great. But you know what? That's all right, I guess. But, you know, the beautiful people don't think I'm great. The popular people don't think I'm great. Not enough people on social media think I'm worth their time and attention because I don't get enough views and clicks and likes and thumbs. And besides, the really important people and the successful people, I don't fit in with them. They don't think I'm much of anything. So I don't get the approval from the people where it counts. Okay, maybe. Why not? What's your story about that? What's your story about why the people that you want the approval of wouldn't approve of you? Because there, right there, you're illuminating your own ceiling, your own story about why you're not enough for the approval of who you really want it from. And you probably have a little bit of a laundry list there from your critic of like, well, finally, now you're asking the right part inside. Let me tell you what's wrong with him and what's wrong with her. They're like this and they're like that, and they don't like this, and of course, no one's gonna want you like this. And that list right there is preventing you from. From really going after what you want, attempting to connect with who you want to connect with and just living your life. I was just talking with a client recently about this, and he's wanting to. He's been working on his dating confidence, and he's made a lot of progress. And at the same time, he still has this pretty strong, lingering feeling when he sees a woman that he's attracted to. She's out of my league, right? And that's a phrase that many, many men that I worked with and I certainly experienced in my own life. They're out of my league. And it's an interesting, persistent one, right? Because now all of a sudden, she's out of my league. I'm hungering for her approval. So I am instantly not worthy, less worthy, not enough. And you might think that the problem is that I want her approval. No, no, no, no. The wanting of someone's approval is a symptom. It's not the source of the problem. It's telling you something. It's showing you something, right? Let's say you are having, I don't know, bumps or hives or a rash or something. And, you know, so you go to the doctor and they cream. Put a cream on it, or they burn it, or they scrape it, or they do something and they get rid of it, and then it comes back. And so they burn it and they scrape it and they put a cream on it and it goes away, and then it comes back. You know, what are you doing? You're just removing the symptom and you're not going and saying, what the hell is causing these rashes, these bumps in the first place? And it turns out, I don't know, it's something that you're eating or something that you're doing right, something you're allergic to. And so when you feel that desperate hungering for approval, it's often combined with a sense of unworthiness. And. And so the hunger for approval is not the problem. It's a symptom. And underneath is the problem. And the problem is a conditional sense of worth, a pervasive sense of unworthiness. And for most people that I work with, this is such a familiar feeling. It goes back to, actually when they were very young. It goes back to different stages in their life when either they were a child and they learned that they were not capable, they weren't good enough, they were inferior. Or when they were a teenager and they learned that they were unattractive, undesirable, they weren't one of the cool kids, one of the popular kids, one of the beautiful people. And now 10 years, 20 years, 50 years later, they're carrying that same identity. And perhaps you're doing the same thing. And so the problem here is not to know a trick on how to get someone to approve of you. And if you just got that one next person to approve of you, it would all go away, because it's insatiable. So you get that next person to Approve of you. And then what about the next one? What about the next one? What about the next one? The bumps keep coming back because the underlying problem of you are not right with yourself. You don't love yourself. You don't have a healthy sense of self worth that's stable, that's rooted in anything. And so it's fluctuating. It's going up and down like an insane carnival ride roller coaster. And what's needed. What's needed is to go at that core, that core of your sense of self and self worth and that lovability. And it's related to that first thing that we were looking at. Who loves you, who approves of you. What would you want them to say about you? Because letting those things in from others and then ultimately being able to send that message to yourself. Hey, Aziz, I'm using my own name here. You'd use your own name. Hey, Aziz, you're all right. You're doing okay. I love you. Here's what's amazing about you. Here's what's special about you. Here's what I appreciate about you. Here's what I'm proud of you for. And you hear that, and you might roll your eyes and you say, oh, my God, look in the mirror and tell myself I'm special. What? Are you kidding me? Give me the. Give me the. This is some sort of after school special. And heck, maybe they tried. They tried with kids to try to get them to learn this stuff and after school specials. I don't know. Maybe Barney did that. Barney was a little after my time. Big purple dinosaur. I'm not sure if you know what I'm talking about here, in any case. Yeah, but that cynicism, that harshness, to reject that. What does that do? Like, what I'm offering you, to use the insatiable eating and the hunger and the food metaphor, is I'm offering you a beautiful meal, you know, salad and grains and meat or beans or a fresh, crisp apple. And you're like, man, that stuff's stupid. Give me the chips. Ah. I ate all these chips. I have a stomachache. This sucks. Why isn't it working right? We need to learn how to nourish ourselves. To tend to the part that feels like it's unworthy to find something inside of you that you. That you value, that you appreciate. That's not necessarily conditional upon, well, I earn X amount of money or I achieved. I was productive today, so now I'm worth. I mean, you can give yourself. You can feel proud of that. That's great. But what's that foundation in? And ideally, that foundation is built in something like unconditional self worth, unconditional confidence. It's not because that person gave me their phone number or because I got a sale today. It's because here I am, because I'm a human on this planet, because I'm worthy. And what I find to tap into that worthiness is you can give yourself this praise for things that you've done, but then it turns into a. You're a human doing, and you have to earn your worth every day, even to yourself. And so you can give yourself that sense of proud for accomplishment. But then we got to go deeper and we got to tap into something that goes beyond the cultural defined, what makes you useful to society. And let's say that's just a part of me. Then there's something else. And I don't know if you want to think of it as your soul or your spirit, if that's the direction you want to go. You can also just think of it in terms of a great unknown, a great mystery. Like, look. Look at us all on this planet. Look at what? What are we even doing here? How could we even begin to assess something's value? Is a cactus valuable? Is a. Is a Doug fir tree lovable? Is a cricket or a caterpillar beautiful or ugly? Worthy or unworthy? Right. And sure, you know, someone could have an opinion about every single one of those things. Crickets hate them. Caterpillars, good. Cactuses, the worst. They're pokey. Get rid of them. You know, one of my younger son likes to come to me and ask this question, dad, if you could have one animal go extinct, what would you pick? And his two are mosquitoes and wasps. And I'm like, yeah, sure, why not? Kill them off, whatever. You know, it's a thought experiment. I don't like mosquitoes that much either. Right, but. And it's also, you can see that it's arbitrary. It's made up. It's preferences, it's conditioning. And so hopefully what I'm helping you tap into and what I'm pointing towards is another party that has a perspective that's like, hey, none of this is set. This is all open to interpretation. And I got. How much more time here? It depends on how old you are. I just turned 40 this year. Really, really struck me that, you know, it was like this, really. I mean, intellectually, I could have told you my whole life. Yeah, I'm gonna die. I know that. Right? But something fascinating happened it was like at age from 39 to 40 in one year, some final layer of the illusion of infinite time was shattered. Somehow at 39, I still thought I had infinite time. And at 40, I realized, wait a minute, I don't have infinite time. And who knows, maybe when I'm 50 or when I'm 60 or when I'm 70, if I, you know, make it that far, that there I'll have even more of a sense of like, oh, my God, I thought at 40 it was finite. Now it's, you know, really finite. But with all that in my awareness, you know, someone. Someone has acne, someone's hair falls one way or the other. Someone makes a lot of money or doesn't make a lot of money. Someone struggles to learn a skill. Someone is an awkward in a conversation. Like, this is what determines someone's existence and their worth on this planet. It's absurd, right? And so what I'm describing here is a way of getting your mind to be able to step outside and expand beyond this kind of narrow, constricted, like, I'm not enough. So I need to get the approval. Beautiful. So what are we covering here today? One, you don't need the approval of everyone. You have the approval already of some people. And look, if you're extremely isolated in your life, maybe it's, you know, you gotta start with this base stuff that we've been talking about, this core sense of unconditional self worth. And then you build from there. And you probably need to start building some connections because if you try to go through this life in total isolation, it's probably not going to end well. It's probably not going to give you what you truly want. So you got to get out there and start being able to make connections. Keep listening to this podcast. You can also check out, go to my website, go to drzeez.com and check out Confidence University. I have a course in there about building your self confidence. And there's also one about social mastery, how to connect with others. So that's super important. But I'd say most people I talk to have at least one person in their life. Heck, maybe it's even just your dog. But just one human in your life who approves of you, who loves you. And that doesn't mean it's 24 7, but, you know, they generally are on your side. They generally care about you and see good in you. And you really want to start to be able to let that in. And if you can't let that in, that's Your first thing to go after is to expand your heart, to soften your defenses and your resistance and your armoring against that so you can really let it in. Then it's being able to see the good in yourself, being able to provide the exact phrase you need to hear, maybe even really questioning. What would I love that beautiful person or that successful person to say about me? What would just make me, you know, feel 10ft tall and my top button bursting with pride, right? And then start to say that stuff to yourself, start to give yourself that message, feed yourself, nourish yourself. And again, if you roll your eyes at this and say, this is so stupid, be really curious about that. Don't just take that at face value, that's probably just another defense. And then the third angle we looked at was just getting outside of the box entirely and realizing that good, bad, right, wrong, worthy, unworthy, these are all just distinctions of the mind and that you are so much more than that, you are so much bigger. You exist on a plane below the level of mind, with your body. Your body intelligence is insane, incredible, miraculous. Your emotional intelligence, the man, the chemicals of emotion, the energy of emotion, all the processes that are keeping your body going. The way your body is connected to the environment and the solar system and the circadian rhythms and small minute changes in the air quality, your body is an incredible, connected, brilliant manifestation of life here on this planet. And then you exist above the level of mind too. Intuition, heart, soul, you're connected to something and you can, you can tap into all these different levels just to get outside of the mind a little bit the box to really start to question some of those really, really, really narrow definitions of like, you do this and then you're worthy. And then, I mean, you can play that game if you want. You could play it for 30, 40 years. But most people that do, they play that game really hard. At some point they're like, is this what life's about? You know, getting the most smooches, getting, getting them the biggest pile of gold, getting the most likes? You know, I don't know, I might feel good, might inflate your ego for a little bit. But you know, after a little while, maybe when you hit 40 and you realize time is finite or 50 or 60 or whatever, and you realize you don't take the money with you, all of a sudden some of these thinking outside of the box things become necessary. And that's when it's time to eat a fistful of mushrooms and go, no. Alright, so let's get to your Action step for today. Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step for today is to eat a fistful of mushrooms. No, it's to. I guided you through a number of things here and I'm wondering if you did them with me. And the invitation is going to be to actively practice one of these things that I offered in more depth sometime today or tomorrow or this week. Just one thing. So maybe you sit down and really reflect on someone who loves and appreciates you and what you would they would say about you. Really focus on that. Maybe you you start to listen in on what would I really hope to hear from somebody else that I would love the approval of and let me start to express those things, communicate those things to myself. Right? So I gave you a number of very practical things to do and I want to turn your action step into doing one of them. And if you kind of just passively did it for a minute while you listened, that's a great start. But take carve out five minutes. It doesn't have to be a huge ordeal. You could do it while you're driving, while you're doing something else just in your mind, but really just focus on it and start to bring this into your life because that's how you address the underlying issue. And then the symptom of incessant approval craving just starts to go away on its own. Alright, beautiful. Thanks for being with me today and until we speak again, may have the courage to be who you are 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 who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free vlogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.

Sam.