Your Social Anxiety Identity

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 social anxiety as we often talk about in this show, but specifically we're going to be looking at your identity of social anxiety. Do you have a social anxiety identity? And as you listen, that's going to become totally clear what that means with some very specific examples for you to check for yourself. It's not really a binary thing like a light switch where you either do or don't have an identity of social anxiety, but you can have more of your identity wrapped up in social anxiety or less, or maybe even none of your identity wrapped in social anxiety. So that's what you're going to discover and it's extremely relevant because the more your identity is one of social anxiety, the more social anxiety you're going to experience, the more it's going to affect you and limit you in your social life, in your dating life and every aspect of your life. And I am excited to reveal this, have you reflect on yourself and ultimately become more free of this. So social anxiety doesn't have to define you, limit you and stop you from having the life that you really want. Speaking of ending your social anxiety, that's the name of my brand new virtual event that's coming up in about a month and a half, beginning of November, November 1st through 3rd. We're doing the Super Early Bird ticket sales right now. So assuming you're listening to this episode right around when it comes out, if it's a little later, you can still check it out. We'll be having other specials going. Just go to draziz.com D R A Z I Z and click on events and you should see it right there and you'll be able to get your ticket. And at the Super early bird, you save 80% and it's, it's virtual so you can attend anywhere. But really investing those three days to discover all this stuff that I'M going to be talking about in today's episode about your identity and shifting. That will just set you up for a very different 2025. Now, I know you might not even be thinking about next year. You're like, that's forever away. But it's coming quick. And we're gonna have the event in November. That's almost December, which is almost New Year's resolution time. And if you really want 2025 to be significantly different, radically better, that is possible. That absolutely is now. So go get those tickets and I would love to see you there. If your identity, however, is really fused with social anxiety, then you might not attend, you might not change much, even if you're listening to this show. I mean, I guess if you were totally fused with social anxiety, you might not listen to this, but you can still listen to this show. But it's kind of like an intellectual curiosity, like, oh, neat. No, that's interesting. Cool. Cool. And it's like a smart person's entertainment because on some level, if it's part of your identity, you probably have it perceived as fixed. So let me take a step back and describe a few terms here. What is your identity? Your identity is simply how you perceive yourself. That means what you believe about yourself, what you believe is possible for you, what you believe. You're like, you know, am I smart or dumb? And I talked about identity not too long ago in an episode you might have heard called earn your new identity. So I cover it there some. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time and what your identity is, but that's basically, it's how do you see yourself? And we all have an identity. It's not a question of if you have one. It's. It's what's in it. And that identity can be more or less beneficial. You can believe things about yourself that are very positive, such as, you know, I can figure anything out, or I'm smart or I'm people like me, people generally want to be my friend. Now, if you imagine that was part of your identity, you probably behave pretty differently. So what is the identity of social anxiety? Well, let's start with a couple of the key key things. The first, like the, the most surface level thing you're probably aware of with social anxiety is fear or anxiousness. About what? About social. About connecting with others. Right. And so first things first in the identity is others don't want to connect with me, or connections aren't going to go well. Right. And. And there's a perception of yourself as more likely to be rejected, more rejectable than others. And it may, you may view people in general as kind of hostile, but often when you talk to someone with social anxiety and you say, well, what about that person over there? Look, he's walking over there and talking to those people or she's just joining into that group. And if you were to ask them and say, yeah, but he's different, you know, he's really confident or oh, she's really charming or she's beautiful and so it's easy for her, right? So there's some way that you can see, okay, it's not the world, it's me. And there's something about me that makes me more rejectable. Which leads to another key aspect of the identity, Rich. This is a whole really underpinning of social anxiety in general, which is why are you more rejectable? Then take a moment to actually think about that. How come? And if I ask people, they'll say a couple, well, I'm awkward, I'm not very good at small talk. I just, I feel anxious and maybe that makes people anxious around me. Okay, all right. And if you probe a little further on those things, why are you awkward? Why do you make people anxious around you? It comes down to some. Either it's those specific things or it's some vague thing of because there's something wrong with me, there's something just not quite as good as others. And so as you can see, the root of social anxiety is a self esteem problem at its root. And that's why that's a big part of breaking free and such a theme of this show, because that's an essential component. But if you perceive yourself, are we speaking to something that's relevant here too? Do you see this as part of your identity? Do you believe or feel or sense on some level that there's something not quite likable, not quite right, not quite the way it should be? And if it was that way, maybe people would like you more, be more open to you, because that's what's underneath. Now, of course, there's also the perception that people are going to reject me more, but usually why it's coming from this underlying thing. In addition, another idea or belief that's in the identity for social anxiety is this is not only something wrong about me, but this is kind of a fixed thing. It's permanent, it's not going to go anywhere. Even if I try to change it, I can't. And that's usually on two levels. One, if it's that Core unworthiness or not likable, I can't change that. That's just. That's like some specter, some curse, some curse I was born with, right? Someone did some voodoo upon me before I was born. That's it. But the other thing that you can point to and say, wait a minute, can't you learn to be more social? Can't you learn how to talk to people? Better social skills, conversation skills, maybe even how to approach or flirt or date? I mean, can't. Can't you learn those things? What do you think? What is your. What is your honest answer? Not what you. What's not the. The right answer on the test or. You're like this. Aziz, you can I. That's. Do I get an A? It's like, dude, no one's grading you. This is for you to look at your own. And look. Your identity is not a rational, chosen, conscious thing. And it can be. You can consciously upgrade it. And as I talked about in a previous episode, you then have to earn it. You have to follow that up with action. You can't just claim a new identity and do nothing because then it doesn't stick. But a lot of the stuff that we're. That we're touching on here, it's not consciously chosen. And you might not even walk around saying this stuff to yourself. When I had a lot of social anxiety, I wasn't walking around thinking to myself, I have a over prediction of the likelihood of rejection and the severity of rejection. And on top of that, that's coming from a feeling of underlying, underlying unworthiness. I also believe that my social skills and abilities are fixed and cannot be changed. Right. That's all true, by the way, which is what perpetuated my social anxiety and kept it going. But I didn't know any of that. Your identity is somewhat invisible to you. It's the lens through which you view yourself and ultimately how you see the world. Right? Because you're relating to the world as you. And so it's how you look out in the world. And it's so you know, if you have perhaps some sort of colorblindness and you never. No one ever told you that. You never knew anything about that. You wouldn't know perhaps the color red from green. It would not even be. You wouldn't even know that you're missing it until someone said, hey, what color is that? And you had this conversation and it's a big reveal. Oh, my God, I've been colorblind. Usually people discover that pretty young. It's diagnosed and they know that it's part of their identity. But this is just how you see it. This is just how it is. And so if you make from this place of the social anxiety identity, if someone makes an attempt to become more social, be more outgoing, interact with people more, well, first of all, you have to push through a lot of fear because you imagine everyone's going to reject you. But even let's say you did that, there often is a, a low frustration tolerance for learning. Like if you wanted to learn an instrument, you kind of know you got to practice, it's going to take some time, eventually you'll get it. You're not going to be great at first. Depending upon the learning curve of the instruments, some are easier to pick up than others. But you know that you put the time in, you're going to learn this thing. And if you don't put the time in, you're not going to learn it. However, when it comes to building social abilities, if you have the social anxiety identity, which is saying, you can't change this anyway, we get frustrated pretty quickly. We either might not really even try, might even just say, ah, that's not gonna work for me. And again, it's not a rational thing. It's an emotional visceral aversion. Like it's not gonna. Maybe you're irritated or upset or discouraged or frustrated. And then if you were to persist and go take some action. I see this happens often with people, usually before they worked with me. If I start working with someone, we can prepare them for this and have them be able to stay, stay in the process. But I talk to people. What have they tried? What have they done in the past? And usually, of course, you've tried stuff. I tried stuff. But it's got a very short half life, right? You do it and then you fizzle out. Because after a few attempts, and I've seen it go both ways, you have a few attempts and it doesn't go well. And you're like, well, this. I knew this was fixed. Forget this. That's like trying to pick up a violin. And then you, you know, that's what my, my son is in third grade. They get to, they're going to be part of the strings ensemble. They don't have any other choice. My older son gets to pick his instrument and band. He chose trumpet. Good choice. But my younger one is like, which stringed instrument do you want to play? The violin, the viola, the cello. And so he chose violin. And that's not going to sound Like Vivaldi, when he picks that thing up, right, it's going to sound like a screeching sort of dismal sound. And it takes a while just to get it, just to get a clean note on a violin. And so that would be like someone, him picking up the violin and you know, running the string across or the bow across the string the first time. And it goes. And he's like, ah, forget this. And he throws it on the ground, right? Like that's, we know that that's, that doesn't work. He has to go again and again and again and learn technique and refine and go again and again and again and again. And then eventually you can get a pure sound out of it. And it's the same thing with building social confidence. And especially because if you've had social anxiety, we've avoided social interactions and so we might have a little bit of catch up to do. And it's absolutely learnable. In fact, I run an event I've done it to most years. I think I'll be doing it in 2025. It's called supremely confident conversation master. And it's, it's three days. I've done it in person and I've done it virtually. And what's amazing is how much in just three days of immersion, people really live into the title of that event, which is Conversation Master. And these people are coming in not in any way. I mean, they're thinking like they're deficient, they're awkward, maybe they've avoided conversations for a long time. And there's two things we do during that event. One is a lot of practice teaching very specific, useful tools and practicing them. But I don't know what percent, at least 50% of what I'm doing there at the event repeatedly throughout the three days is transforming, overriding, changing, challenging, upgrading that perspective that it's fixed. And I keep reinforcing like, no, this isn't something that you just were born without. This is actually an inborn capacity that you have as a human and you can learn it extremely quickly. And it's true, that's not just some sort of positive hype. That's absolutely true. You can learn it much quicker than it's way easier, way easier than a violin, which is the good news. But if you have a fixed identity in social anxiety, then I can't learn this anyway. And then your tolerance to go through some of those training, growing pains is very low. And then we live into that identity, which is the other key, key point around the Social anxiety, identity. And any identity actually, is that we live into it. You live into your identity. You construct your world around you. You step into the next day, the next interaction, this next moment in accordance with your identity. You follow it as if it's a structure in which you operate. And so, based on your identity, there's things you're going to try or not try. If you think, I'm a musical person, I'm good with instruments, and someone's like, hey, you want to try these, you know, pan flutes? You're like, cool, okay? And then you might not be good. You might pick it up and blow on it, and doesn't make any sound to figure out the angle, but you'll give it a shot. Whereas if you're like, oh, I'm no good at music, and I just don't. I'm not talented in that way, then you don't. You don't even pick it up, right? Similarly, when it comes to social anxiety, if you have that identity, again, unconsciously, you're not walking around saying, I have a social anxiety identity, but it's in there. You walk into a room. Do you walk over and talk to that person or those two people talking to each other or not? You know, just yesterday, I was going for a run around Mount Hood, actually. Big, big, long trek. And I came across this group. There's these two women that were running the other way. And then we met up again, like, somewhere else around the mountain. I was like, hey, I recognize you. You guys were running. I saw you earlier in the morning. And she's like, oh, yeah. And we chatted. We just had for, like, two, three minutes. She chatted about her friend, and her friend was faster than her, and she was trying to keep up. And she asked me about where I started. And it was a sweet, little fun, energizing interaction. And then we were on our way. And I didn't really think too much of it. It was extremely natural. But it came to me to point out, like, hey, I saw you earlier, which is initiating a conversation. I could read what, you know, she was asking me questions. I could read how that she was engaged. I could tell by her body language that she wanted to stay and talk with me. I wasn't sure because sometimes people going around in the mountain in a day, myself included, are kind of like, go, go, go, go, go. But she was kind of like just planted in her feet and oriented towards me and seemed to want to talk to me. And so I chatted with her, and I enjoyed it. And then we Went on our way. And you get to draw a little bit of energy from these kind of interactions and they're great. And I've done this, you know, thousands of times in my life. Now if I had the identity of social anxiety, I would not have said anything. I might not even made eye contact, I might not even said hi or anything. Just been in my own world, right? And so because I don't have that identity anymore, I can, I'll just say hi to people, I'll interact with people. In fact, there was a gentleman that's been in my group for my mastermind for a number of years now. And he, one of his goals was to travel. And so he did, I think last, it was earlier in the year, earlier this summer actually he traveled to a variety, a number of places in Europe. And you know, he was sharing a bit about his experience within the group when he got back and he said, you know, it was really interesting. I realized when I was there, like social anxiety is just not anything that I have as part of my experience anymore. I'm walking around, I'm talking to new people, I'm sitting at a cafes, I'm just, you know, out in the world. And he said, it took that, that moment of contrast to see, whoa, this is not even part of who I am anymore. And that's absolutely possible for you if you're willing to challenge your identity, because that is required. Otherwise we will perpetuate the identity. And it takes work at first. It's like once you install a new identity then you stay consistent with that. And so my new one, and it's interesting because let me see if I can. There's a time where I was really consciously working on, on that aspect, the social anxiety side of things. And you know, I had all these things I'd remind myself of. Like I have permission to talk to my fellow humans. People enjoy talking with me. I'm an interesting person and I've in fact inside of my social mastery course, Inside of Confidence University, there's a list of I think 12 key things to tell yourself, to remind yourself of that construct a new socially confident identity. So I was doing all that stuff. Now it's pretty unconsc. I don't walk around thinking that stuff, just like you don't think about the other identity. But I live into it. But it took a lot of kind of training both reminding myself of these things and then taking the action. And it's like anything like new habits, right? It takes work at first and then it becomes natural to where I'm running around a trail, and I want to say hi to somebody or I want to chat with somebody. It's no big deal. That's just one small example. And I know you can have hundreds or thousands of those examples in your own life. The question is, are you ready to take action? Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step is going to be to, first of all, see if you relate to this in this episode. And like, okay, I do have this identity of social anxiety. Okay, See if you can uncover what are, like, the three. Let's just stick with three. What are the three key stories of that identity? Because an identity is nothing more than a story about who you are. So what is it Is I'm not attractive. And look at. Make it as specific as possible for you. I'm ugly. People aren't gonna want to talk to me. And I know these things are unconscious, but we're gonna make them conscious. Just see. Just write a few things down. I know. It's a delightful list, isn't it? It's exactly what you'd want to say to your best friend in the morning when you see him, right? Like, look, you're ugly. Nobody's gonna like you. It's terrible stuff. No wonder we feel bad and anxious. But anyway, write some things down. When you write the right word, you know, like, oh, I'm ugly, or I'm. And maybe that word doesn't do anything. You're like, man, I don't know if that's true. But then you say, you know what? You know, you're. I'm boring. Ooh, you'll just feel it. There's, like, this visceral acknowledgement of like, yeah, that's true. Oh, no. Right, Good, good. Get three of those down. These are negative perceptions of yourself that are in your social anxiety identity. All right, all right, great. Now, when you have those three, I want you to on purpose construct three new identity statements that are in direct opposition to that. So for me, I used to believe I was boring, and I created a new one, which is, I'm a fascinating human. Do you see how that challenges directly the old identity? So you want to come up with these three old identity statements. Three new identity statements. Look, the new ones aren't going to feel real at first. You're like, that's a whole lot of garbage. No way. I'm fascinating. I know I'm boring and I suck. Right? Just. That's a longer conversation of like, what are you. What are you doing? Why. Why are you wanting to keep that old one in place. But for now, just challenge that and start to remind yourself of the new ones, ideally daily. Fantastic. And again, if you want to do this real time, live online with me and a group of people so we can just get it done. That and dozens of other action steps and practical exercises and opportunities to ask questions and a community to do this with so you're not alone. And and and I cannot recommend the virtual event highly enough. Now it's time to do it. Great time to make this shift. And that's what we're gonna be doing is ending social anxiety. Now this pattern can change faster than you think and I can't wait to be so check that out. You can also go to shrinkforthshyguy.com and below this episode there should be a link to get your ticket as well. Regardless, I hope this serves you and 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.

Sam.

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.