 Experience is so similar to a lot of our clients in our boot camps when we film them interacting. They'll come saying they have intense social anxiety and they'll watch the video back and they're surprised at how calm they look externally and how you can't pick up on it. And that anxiety is very silent to everyone else. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. So you would ask me about my journey into psychology is probably a good place to start. I went to graduate school for psychology. I was in a clinical psychology program and I had I just kind of landed in a program that was like an anxiety research program. Like I didn't actually set out to go and do that but just by happenstance I sort of wound up in this CBT for anxiety program where we were studying how to treatments for anxiety really work like if you really drill into what people are doing in like exposure therapy and trying to figure out like what's actually working there you know trying to make basically trying to make cognitive behavioral therapy more powerful and stronger right. And it turned out to be a really good fit for me because like I was an anxious person. I mean I still am you know like I still have that. But I had had enough experience with my own anxiety that like when I came across CBT and then acceptance and commitment therapy I was like whoa I really get this. I had had never like severe panic disorder but I had done some teaching before that for like the Princeton review you would like have people come in you teach them about like the SATs or whatever help them you know improve their scores. And I remember doing one of these classes before I got into grad school I was probably like 21 22 with like a room full of kids you know probably 17 year old high school kids and I was like teaching going through the lesson lesson plan and for whatever reason I just had this surge of anxiety and I just had this like massive like public speaking panic attack in front of these kids it wasn't even like I was in front of like you know this audience like you know Oscar acceptance award just in front of a bunch of kids but I remember I like stepped out to the hall and I was just kind of like oh my god how am I going to go back in there and I like went back into the classroom and I just kind of like white knuckled it through like the final half hour and they may not have even known any of this was happening for me like it's entirely possible that none of them even knew what or like remembered it but for me it was like this searing thing for like the longest time afterwards like what was that experience is that can happen to me again and if I have to get up and teach in front of people if I have to do public speaking so I knew what it was like to experience like a really intensely anxiety provoking event and then I had had the experience of forcing myself to get out and do it again and again because I had the job I was halfway through the course I couldn't just quit right there you know so I got back into it and taught more courses and over the years you know had gotten a lot better around things like that but I think I could really relate to that experience and I think so many people can of just there's the thing in front of you that is anxiety provoking and then there's all this other stuff that your mind puts around it how do we get rid of that anxiety how do we avoid it how do we deal with it this like meta anxiety thing and so I liked training to help people with all of that other stuff because once you can master that other stuff you're just showing up for the anxiety and just improving your skills and you have to do that anything you're going to do you're going to have to like come face to face with your fears and anxieties absolutely and I think you know your experience is so similar to a lot of our clients in our boot camps when we film them interacting they'll come saying they have intense social anxiety and they'll watch the video back and they're surprised at how calm they look externally and how you can't pick up on it and that anxiety is very silent to everyone else you're experiencing it and internally it is a very difficult experience but many outside don't see that don't pick up on that and I think that also leads to a lot of shame and embarrassment around mental health because people don't perceive it like a normal ailment it's happening almost invisible unless it's in a very extreme form so in our video work sessions you know they'll remark wow I can't believe I look that way on camera because inside I did not feel that way at all totally and we're all looking at everyone else and comparing ourselves to them and we're assuming they have it together because we are all most of the time really good at holding things together and in some ways that serves us really well but ultimately it can be really isolating you know and then and then when you see the mask fall on people and when you see people who know how to gracefully show some vulnerability it draws us closer you know paradoxically right like the whole time everyone's trying to keep together but when you let it slip a little bit it actually helps we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends yeah it creates that human connection that vulnerability that we all crave and I'm sure you know many in our audience struggle with this perfectionism as well that is anxiety provoking so there's the comparison to others certainly but then there's the expectation that they get everything right and that they do everything perfect and that just continues to add to that anxious state yeah and it's a shame because that perfectionism piece that's something that I see in the clients I work with we work with so my clinic is in San Francisco base but we do teletherapy and we work with a lot of folks who are really you know high achieving really smart often working in corporate you know tech companies and big like might have big job titles right and so much imposter syndrome you know people feeling like they're not really who they say they are on LinkedIn you know and the perfectionism piece is huge for people too like I just see this all the time where people will get frozen up they're very capable they're very talented and they can get completely frozen up spend way too much effort on things that are pointless operate sometimes really highly and efficiently in jobs where they need to be moving and clicking and making decisions and you know so perfectionism in many ways is a hindrance but then I'll hear people talk about it like it is this kind of a virtue you know like oh well I really pride myself on you know getting the job done and not making no mistakes and of course there are jobs there are settings where that makes a lot of sense you know if you're a surgeon sure like you need to be really perfectionistic most of the time right but I think for a lot of us and what we do if we're knowledge workers if creatives like you guys are creatives you know perfectionism for you must be a huge hindrance right like you just got to get it done and just keep moving ahead and producing and producing right which is funny I'm more on the artistic side than AJ's on the on the science side of things and I can understand that and work through the perfection thing and I'll just throw stuff up just to get a result and AJ's first reaction to what I've thrown up as just get it done is what are you doing and so there we have this this polarity that I also think has benefited the company as well and we know that about each other and an understanding that has allowed us to work together which normally I think would be quite contentious and I think for many in our audience they probably wouldn't believe it but there's still that self-doubt you know we've been doing this podcast for so long and many in our audience think oh they have it together they hit record they publish it's great and there are episodes where I will check in with Johnny after and I'm like man that felt flat I didn't feel like I really brought a great conversation and he's like you were fantastic let us drop this please don't let the perfectionism get in the way of us publishing this great conversation and I'm fortunate that I have Johnny but that can really become a prison if you let that perfectionism keep you from hitting publish keep you from starting that side hustle keep you from going after that job promotion that you deserve another way to think about perfectionism in this context is just ego right and it's really grounded in fear and control it's like if I put something out there then it's out of my control I don't know how it's gonna respond there's this part of us that wants like I want to create something and I want to create it my way and I want people to think what I think is cool is cool about it you know it's like that little internal dictator and then you do stuff like this enough times and you realize that like the things that I said that I thought were profound and really cool like didn't resonate you know and the things that I just threw away then people were like oh that was like so interesting it's like who's gonna be in control here you know for myself I had to learn this through music and if you rehearse until it's perfect you're never getting on stage and at some point you have to tell the guys listen we just gotta go up there and do it and this is going to be painful but right we're gonna get we're gonna be better for it and for myself one of the I think one of the easiest examples of this is the story of the Ramones you have these four guys in Brooklyn they couldn't play but they wanted to be in a band in the 70s New York City that was a lot of that going on and that was a way that down and out kids could make something of themselves at that time so regardless of their musicianship they put this band together and they decided to do something that was completely different that was on the radio while everyone on the radio was putting these epic monumentous seven minute songs together they're like well our songs are gonna be a minute and a half two minutes and that's gonna be it and we're gonna copy basically 60s doo-wop pop but we're gonna blast it through Marshall Amps and we're gonna wreck the room and they had done this and you can see their early shows that are on YouTube at CBGBs where they play half a song and then getting a fight on stage and it's mayhem and at this point they don't have their image yet it's a giant disaster one glorious disaster by the way but their ideas and what they wanted to do came through for certain people and those certain people encouraged them and supported them and celebrated them getting on that stage and now we are seeing the Ramones having to learn by playing on that stage in front of people and we look at them as one of the most influential bands that every kid who picks up a drumstick or guitar has to go through the Ramones voyage at some point to appreciate what they had brought due to getting on stage and making it happen and learning along the way