Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K)

But no one ever tells us how to put yourself out there.

What is the purpose of putting yourself out there?

It'll just get better if you put yourself out there.

Here is literally what you want to do if you have trouble putting yourself out there.

When you expose yourself to a particular situation, there is an environment that will evoke feelings within you.

Those feelings will feel uncomfortable,

You'll have comparisons in your mind.

You'll have self-judgment in your mind.

So this is where we need to learn a skill called distress tolerance.

If you improve your distress tolerance, you will be able to put yourself out there.

People who can put themselves out there, there's a big difference, right?

Their capacity for distress tolerance is way higher.

So here's the key thing.

Putting yourself out there is not about putting yourself out there.

It is about staying out there.

So once I expose myself to this environment, which evokes these negative emotions in me, if I'm not careful, what I will then do, what I will then do is retreat, right?

So if I feel anxious, my brain is sending me signals and says, run away, like Monty Python, run away.

And if we retreat, then we're doing something incredibly dangerous.

We are training our brain that when I feel anxious, the right response is running away.

Now, that may be the correct response when we're living in the jungle and we're being hunted by a tiger.