There's an invisible pressure that you might not see, but you certainly feel that's pushing you towards not being yourself. And it doesn't show up as some dramatic conversation or conflict where someone's yelling at you and telling you, you can't be yourself. It's so much more subtle than that, invisible, insidious. It's actually a pattern that we buy into without even knowing it. And instead of being that dramatic moment, it's more like death by a thousand paper cuts where you're in that meeting and you have something to say and you tell yourself, ah, now's not the time. I don't think it's going to go well. Or maybe you do speak up, but then instead of being focused on the other person, the content you want to share, your ideas, you're hyper-focused on yourself. and how you're coming across. Did that sound right? Did I look okay? Am I impressive? Am I polished? Am I smart enough? And often behind those questions is the answer, which is no. And we feel that doubt or that discomfort, that unease. And this shows up in our social lives as well, in our relationships, and it can start to be with us everywhere we go. And we don't realize that this is actually a pattern that's happening inside of me. And there is a method to that madness. I'm Dr. Aziz. And this is the first episode of authentic confidence, which to put it as succinctly as possible is the solution to that madness. It's the sanity. Authentic confidence is you allowing yourself, you finding that core permission, that inner authority to determine who you are, who you're allowed to be, how you want to share on the most subtle levels, like what I want to say in this conversation, what kind of joke do I want to make, what kind of facial expressions, and how do I want to sound when I laugh, like all the subtle moment to moment expressions of you, all the way up to bigger life choices, who do I want to be in a relationship with, what do I want to say yes to, what do I want to say no to, where am I going to steer my career. All of that, having your life be an authentic expression of who you are rather than the persona, the mask, the image, who you're supposed to be to get approval, to get love, to fit in, to be allowed to exist. And authentic confidence is you reclaiming that. And that's what this show is going to be all about, is highlighting the ways that we give away or abdicate or defer to others. And essentially say, you know, you determine who I'm allowed to be. And you're going to discover the underlying mechanisms of that and why that pattern persists. Because when you hear it out loud right now, you might say, well, yeah, that sounds pretty terrible. I don't want to do that. I want to be myself. In fact, that's the subject of a billion posts on social media, right? Be yourself with some sort of inspiring image. Yeah, we all know that's the right answer. If you're taking a multiple choice test, you know, option A, be yourself. Option B, suppress who you really are and suffer, right? No one chooses B consciously, but we are choosing B. I personally chose suppress who I am, hide who I am, pressure myself to be someone other than or quote better than who I am so that I'm impressive enough or lovable enough that people want to be with me. I chose that option for many, many years in my life. And maybe you've been choosing that option for many, many years in your life. And that's what's brought you here to discover what is authentic confidence. Not as some interesting intellectual concept. Like, wow, neat. Now I can answer better questions on the next test. No, I want you to have a felt experience, a different way of relating to yourself, to other people, to life that is more authentically confident. And ultimately as a result of that is more fully alive because when we separate from who we really are and try to be what we think other people want us to be, to avoid something very specific, which I'll be covering in much more depth in this show. It's the boogeyman in the closet that we're terrified of. It's what has us continue to run this pattern for years or decades, that when we do that, we become more defended, more separate from ourselves, and ultimately, in many ways, more deadened. And it's painful. And it also can feel like there's no way out because we've set up the game. We've learned the rules and we're living within that construct, that cage. And it basically says you got two options. You can do it the way you're supposed to, which is how you need to be for other people. So you can't be awkward. You can't make any mistakes. You don't, don't speak up there because you could be awkward or make a mistake and don't reveal yourself to others. Don't share yourself with others. It's too vulnerable or they're not going to like you anyway. Oh, you don't really belong here. Uh, put that away. Don't be you here, right? All that nitpicking that we do inside that we're constantly remember death by a thousand paper cuts, sculpting, molding, hiding, chopping off parts of ourselves to present this image of who I'm supposed to be. Or if you run the social anxiety pattern, which I did for many years, you just hide who you are. You just hide in plain sight. Maybe smile and nod occasionally here. So people realize that you're a human, but they don't know anything about you. And there's a million different ways that we hide, many of which we'll cover in this show, all the ways we move away from our authentic self. And the false choice that we face is, well, you either do that, and we're all familiar with and the results of that, which might be feeling less alive, like I was just talking about, or having worse relationships because we're not authentic. People don't know us. And having worse emotional, mental health and well-being because we're not deeply connected because we can't let ourselves be fully real. We're also dealing with a chronic sense of fear in the background of what do people find out. And so we have a lot of pressure to perform, to please, to be nice. And that's a whole nother can of worms we could look at at some point, which is the health effects of excessive niceness and people pleasing, essentially of inauthenticity of a certain type. So that's option A. Or option B is, and I'm not saying this is true, but this is the false choice we've set up. Go be yourself. Do it, man. Just, yeah, be full of yourself. And then enjoy your lonely, lonely, awful life of non-success connection You're not going to have any of those. And that's an awful dilemma. We don't want either option. And most people, when they're faced with that choice, will say, hey, geez, I might as well just keep playing the role and being who I'm supposed to be so that I can get some connection, love, and success. I don't want to give all that up and just go die in the wilderness. And that's a terrible set of options. And it's not our only set of options. But that's how many people live. That's what I thought were my options at the time. And it's based upon some very fundamental errors in our thinking, perceptions of yourself, of life, of how it works, of your own identity. And we have to uncover and shift those if you really want to be able to set yourself free. And in case you don't know much about me, my name is Dr. Aziz and I lived this stuff. That's why I teach it now. My background is in clinical psychology and I got my doctorate from Stanford and Palo Alto of universities back in the day, back in the, in the early two thousands. But that's not why I'm recording this and not why I think I have a vast expertise on this subject. It's because of my obsessive study of it that stems from my own being trapped in these cages, my own living of inauthenticity, of fear to be who I am, of certainty that if I go approach you, you're not going to like it. You're not going to like me, whether this is a dating context or socially and, and my expressions of interest, desire, Hey, do you want to connect with me in some way? If I were to even give you a compliment, all of that is going to be met with aversion, dislike. It's unappreciated, maybe even worse, maybe almost disgust, especially romantically, right? Like, ugh, you creep, get away from me. And I lived in that day in, day out for over a decade. And then as I started to realize that, wait a minute, this is not reality. This is not permanent. And I began to challenge that old false choice, that story. I did break free, but I broke out of one cage and into another, right? Out of the frying pan into the fire. And I realized, I didn't know this at the time, that yeah, I can be more myself, but I'm still playing a role. And the role, the next cage I got into after the social anxiety cage of hiding in plain sight was the nice cage. Ooh, and this cage is stickier. This cage is invisible. This cage has upsides to it. Like, oh, but I'm being really accommodating and giving a ton to people. So they seem to like that. Besides, isn't that being altruistic? Isn't that good for social relationships? There's a term for this in social psychology. They call it reciprocity. Isn't this all good? And it's like, yeah, no, not really. Because where it's coming from, because it's coming from fear still. It's coming from the same misperception, which is that if I'm fully myself, in this case, if I'm less nice and I say no to you, if I have a boundary, if I disagree with you, it's all over. You're not going to like me. You're going to reject me. And it's the same thing. And so my expertise comes from my passionate obsession with my own liberation, which is a journey that still continues to this day. And good news from the frontier, it gets better and better and better the freer you get. You know, you don't go from not being full you and repressed and hiding things and feeling uncomfortable in your own skin, a lot of settings to completely authentically confident in six, five, four, three, two, one now, right? It doesn't work like that. It is a process. It is a journey. It is growth over time, but man, is it worth it? And even though it doesn't all happen in a moment, it doesn't take you some massive amount of time, like five years from now, you'll be quote free. No, it's like, You do something today, you practice something different today, and you will become more free. And then the next week, the next month, more free, the next year, more free. And so if I look back at myself now, you know, version of me 10, 15 years ago, I'm like, whoa, whoa, that dude was afraid in so many ways that I'm not now. And I'm sure if I look back 10 years from now, I'll say, wow, wow, right? So this growth is absolutely possible when you really learn what's happening underneath. And that's what I'm excited to do in this show with you is to reveal one layer deeper from having worked with thousands of people and led workshops and run a mastermind program for over 10 years, entirely focused on this and one-on-one clients and writing, geez, I'm about to have my eighth book come out now soon. I mean, just writing so much about this topic and studying it and seeing, wait a minute, wait a minute, there are certain things that we're doing. There are certain patterns that you're running that make this so. And if we change those underlying patterns, all of the freedom that we want starts to open up. And one of the first patterns I'm going to be diving into in the next week are what I call the approval patterns or the approval types. And these are the four primary ways that we override ourselves. You override your authentic self. And if you don't see these patterns, that it's going to be very hard to access and sustainably live with authentic confidence because these patterns will kick in. They're like a reflex. It just happens. And so when you identify what the pattern is, especially the primary one that you run and how to shift it, then you can catch it and do something else in real time. And there's a beautiful quote by Viktor Frankl, and this is a paraphrase here, but he said, you know, in between the event and our response, there is a pause. And it is in that pause, then we can choose our response. And it's in that choice that our growth and our glory resides. And that is so true. We have to be able to choose something different or else we are just running a program that was installed. I call this nice programming. I can also sometimes call it approval OS, whatever you want to name it. There is an old operating system that we got growing up typically. And many people discover that they go do seven years of therapy where they can tell you every single part of that program and where it came from and they're still running it. And I say, no, thank you to that. The purpose is not some personal archeological excavation, or we could say the people of this tribe used to make pottery from like, okay, cool. You can describe all that about your past, but are you doing something different now? Do you feel free when you walk into the room with your boss? Can you speak up in front of a group of people and know that you're going to deliver because you know your stuff and you're awesome. And this doesn't mean you don't have any insecurity or any doubt. It means that even though there is doubt, there's another part of me that's louder and more clear and is more connected to truth, which is that I'm a complete whole human who brings a lot of value in this world. And the temporary responses of others does not determine who I am. And that's a big clue for what we're going to cover in this show about what authentic confidence is really and how you access it really and how you live it really. And a big part of that is seeing that what prevents us from being our full authentic selves is fear. And there's a specific thing that we're afraid of. And that's what leads to these default patterns. By the way, if you want to find out your, I'm going to cover them more next week, but if you're eager and want to find out your approval type now, I have a quiz that I recently put up on my website. It's awesome. Go to www.draziz.com. You can click it takes like 90 seconds and you'll find out your dominant approval type. This is the primary way that you've been overriding yourself at work, socially relationships, most likely for decades. And when people see this, they're like, oh my God, this is like a mirror of my whole life. And once you find out your type, I have a rundown of what that is. There's a longer PDF if you want to look at also a training free about how to change that with the three steps you can do to shift it. So a ton of resources there. If you want to get started with that, that's at www.doctorazise.com. And the reason we run that approval type and why it's called an approval type in the first place is because one thing that's occurring that causes us to be afraid is we want people to approve of us and not disapprove of us. And that's a pretty basic human hardwired thing. Approval always feels better than disapproval. because of the era that we live in, and I'll be explaining this much more in this show called the approval economy or the age of approval. We have had a misunderstanding, let's say that's gone haywire and, and we've bought into it more and more and more. It's kind of, it's like grown out of proportion inside of us. And the misunderstanding, this, this kind of false conclusion is approval. Whether you approve of me or disapprove of me, it's not just a preference that I have, like all humans I like to be approved of, sure. But if you disapprove of me, that's actually really dangerous. It's a really big deal. It's a threat that I have to track, monitor, and protect myself from. Because if you disapprove of me, that's not just a temporary passing upset, it means something really critical about me. And you're going to find out more in upcoming episodes of this show, what exactly that equation is, where it comes from, because every little piece you see, if you stick with me here and really listen, apply it to your life, sincerely go on this quest of liberation with me, you will start to have these aha moments. It's like, wait a minute. Oh my, I've been doing this. Wait. Oh, that is true. And every single one of those aha moments is opening a doorway that you can step through to a whole new experience, like a whole new life, a whole new version of you. And that's available. And that, that, That version of you is not operating in the same old patterns and the same old program. And that version of you is the most authentic version of you and is naturally confident. And I cannot wait to share more, to give you everything that I got, everything I've been learning over the last 20 years of this obsessive journey that can support you in liberating yourself from the fear of what other people think into becoming your most bold, free, authentic self. So if you're excited to be on this journey with me, I love it. You can subscribe wherever you're listening to this by hitting that subscribe button. And that way you'll catch every episode as it comes out. They'll be coming out on Wednesdays and we'll also be doing some Q and A episodes as time goes along. So we'll figure out how you can ask questions and I'll be sharing more about that in upcoming episodes. And if this is resonating for you, I have a request, which is, Can you share this with one person in your life? Just one, maybe someone in your family or a friend or a coworker. Some of you think, wow, this person could really benefit from the same journey that I'm on. I know that sometimes feels like a risk, right? Like authentic confidence. Oh, we're talking about something real. Ah, hide it, hide it. But man, that's part of liberation. And man, I've been doing this for decades and sharing and practicing what I'm going to preach here, right? Which is taking the risk to be more real. And you would be amazed at how many people when I go there first and say, Hey, check this out, or I'm experiencing this, or I used to struggle with this or whatever. They just pour out, you know, and these are people that from the outside, no concept that they might struggle with anything around confidence or self doubt or anything. You know, they're professional or they're high functioning or their parents, like all this stuff going on. They look put together from the outside and you just open up the door a little bit and it gushes out. They're like, Oh my God, I struggle with this. And this is what I want. This is what I'm afraid of. And, and it's human. So there's someone else that you want to be a human with and, and share this with them. I think it'll support us reaching more people and helping everyone out there who's struggling with that pressure to essentially not be themselves and that disconnection from who they really are so that all of us, not just me on my own or you on our own, all of us together, we can liberate ourselves. I'm excited to be with you. I'll see you next week.
