 Hey guys, David here. I have a question and it is about self-confidence. I made this a little bit shorter than the original question, but we'll get into it here and hopefully this might give you some insights into an approach to self-confidence that I hope also is a little bit different from the typical advice that's out there on this issue. This could be to do with social anxiety or any type of lack of confidence. The advice out there is typically behavioural change is forced through it, trying to become more and more confident, right? Now of course that's the end goal we all want, but there's this thing called emotional bulldozing that I see going on and I don't think it's helpful to say the least. So I'm going to read this question and this person's name is not here, but they've asked me to talk about this so I'll give a few thoughts on it and let me know what you think, maybe what you'd advise this person to do as well. But it says, I wish I had more self-confidence. I would like to be more talkative and outgoing, but there's something that's holding me back. I never know what to say in social situations. In fact, I really dislike going out at all. It's at the stage where it's becoming a massive problem in my life. I'm single but would love to meet someone to share my life. Nothing wrong with that. But the lack of confidence makes this impossible. I feel intense anxiety even when I think of meeting or talking to someone new. I don't see any hope in this improving. I've tried forcing myself to go out more in the past and for a while it sort of worked. But it was so hard for me and it didn't really work. I didn't enjoy myself. I don't want to give up but I don't know what to do. And I don't expect that you can really help me but thanks anyway in advance. So there's a little bit of learned helplessness there at the end and that's just because we've tried other approaches in the past that we begin to learn that trying is equal to failure. So eventually we just give up and we just think, well, this is hopeless. So I'm not saying my advice will be great advice because I'm not really going to give you advice. But what I'm going to say is there is always a solution to every issue. It's just a matter of finding the right one. So what I would say on this is the lack of confidence, the lack of self confidence is down to an image. It's a self image that we have. Now what we have are we're split in two really. We have one side is the persona and the other side of us is our shadow. What we're all looking for is a persona. How would we would like the world or other people to see us? We want to be seen as self confident, outgoing, smart, attractive, friendly, fun, talented, all these things. So that's the good room. That's the persona we're all striving for because it's attractive. And this person mentioned about wanting to be in a relationship. So it is kind of a lot about what we want other people to see. The problem is if there's a good room, there's also a bad room and that's their shadow self. That's the part of itself that says I have no self confidence. I'm weak. I'm lazy. I'm not attractive. I'm worthless. I'm no good. I'm not talented. I'm not clever. So what do we do with this information? And we might go back and forth between shadow and persona. We all want the persona though don't we? Now the point to this is the shadow, which is what you're talking about here. The lack of confidence, lack of self confidence. The shadow cannot exist without the persona. It's wanting the persona so badly that creates the shadow side. Wanting desperately to be more confident automatically sets up a dichotomy of no confidence is unacceptable. So I put it in the dark room, the bad room. Now you're not really going to fix this. You will have feelings around this lack of self confidence. What we want to do is we want to try gimmicks. We want to try behavioral changes. Try anything to get rid of that self confidence. So we go out. We talked about going out more and I think probably maybe forcing yourself to do things that you didn't want to do. Hoping that that feeling would go away. We're also a hopper. We become hoppers that someday, eventually, magically maybe feel more self confident. But what about how you actually feel and being honest about that with yourself to begin with? By the way, it sounds like I'm talking to you. I'm talking to myself. I'm talking to anybody. All of us have this. All of us certainly have, even if it's not a self confidence issue, we hold certain aspects of ourselves. We put in the good room and certain aspects of ourselves we put in the bad room. This is about self confidence but it could be about anything. It's the same thing. You're not going to fix this. You're not going to distract yourself away from this. And hoping isn't really going to do it either. Or forcing yourself into behavioral changes like going out more even though you really don't want to. So what I would say is work on accepting the fact that right now I seem to have no confidence. And to feel that feeling. Okay. Not trying to change it. Not trying to fix it. Just to be totally okay and accept that and feel that lack of confidence. Start to get in touch and feel the anxiety that you have when you mentioned about the thoughts of talking to people. Make me feel anxiety. Bring in that anxiety. Start to feel it. A problem here is that there is a layer of judgment around all these feelings that there's something wrong with them. All they are are feelings that simply need to be felt. You're bringing them, it's called kind of an inner reconciliation with yourself. Learning to accept any of these feelings that come up. Now on a practical level you can think of it as like okay but I should be going out more. Well if you don't want to go out why would you do that? Okay. What about you just accept the fact that look I've got no confidence. It feels like I have no confidence. I have no self esteem. I don't want to go out. Accept that. And in that decision maybe you just stay home. But you make the best of that situation. Okay. Whatever you do at home rather than feeling bad because you've got no self confidence. Proactively embrace the fact that yeah I've got no self confidence. Stay in and I'm going to do something really nice for myself. Really enjoy the fact that I have no self confidence. Embrace it because you can do that. Now I'm not saying there's something wrong with having self confidence. But it's by ignoring the fact or shunning the fact or despising the fact or judging the fact that you're currently in a state of low self confidence. That is what's creating that distance from actually experiencing something real and it will move you towards actual self confidence. Genuine not a fake persona type self confidence either. That's behavioral and external and flashy. So you can try to work on accepting the fact that okay right now I have no self confidence. I'm very anxious around other people. And you know what you're absolutely allowed to feel like that. You're absolutely allowed to feel like that. Now it won't stay like that as long as you can totally accept that fact and work on just being with it. Now what you're going to do is I would say again just try meditation that I talk about in some of my videos. What you're doing is you're getting in touch not just with the feeling but with the inputs to change it to get rid of it to hide it to change it to something else. And just to say okay there's a part of me that really wants to change this desperately really badly and that's okay too to notice that. But then you start to become less reactive to changing it and not changing it means you start to feel it genuinely feel it not distract ourselves. Okay with other things so that we don't have to feel this lack of self confidence. As soon as we begin to feel it almost instantaneously it starts to shift change into something else. So it's a bit of deep work involved with it right. So I sound very against the behavioral approach and I kind of am there's nothing wrong with trying to move outside your comfort zone you know but do the inner work as well on this and notice what happens. Okay so I hope that video helped. If you have a question or you'd like to talk to me you can go to my website drdavimanori.com where I do one-to-one sessions and I post regular videos here as well. So thanks for watching guys and I'll see you again soon. Take care.