Coming to you from the Center for Social Confidence in Portland, Oregon, welcome to shrink for the shy guy, helping men everywhere go from social anxiety to social domination.

With your host, Dr. Aziz.

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy.

I'm your host, Dr. Aziz, coming to you from the Center for Social Confidence in Portland, Oregon.

This is our second show.

We made it through the first one and everything went according to plan without explosions.

And today is a particularly exciting show because today we're going to get into what is the cause of shyness and social anxiety? You know, when you strip away all of

the ideas that we tell ourselves, all the reasons why things are going to go wrong, all of the

self-criticism, all that stuff that makes up social anxiety, what's underneath that? What is

the cause of this challenge? Because if you understand the cause,

then you can start to work towards the solution. So I'm going to get into that in this episode.

And this material is incredibly valuable to the people that I share it with and when we explore it

in sessions and people start to see what the cause is. There's this light bulb that starts to go off. And you realize that,

hey, wait a minute. You mean the cause is just this one thing that I'm doing repeatedly in my own mind

and there's something that I can do about it? So I'm going to get into that in this episode and I hope

it has as big of an effect that it has that it had on me when I first learned this and then on each person

that I've shared it with over the years.

But I want to start with, though, is just a brief review of what is shyness.

You know, as we talked about in the last podcast, shyness consists of two things.

That is the prediction of a negative response.

There's someone you want to talk to and you don't because you predict something negative

what happened.

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