Walk With Reid Facebook Live: Being Awkward and Insecure
Join Reid Mihalko on his morning walk and enjoy as he give you relationship advice about being awkward and insecure, you can also head to Reid’s website at http://www.ReidAboutSex.com/
Reid: Hello everybody! It is Reid Mihalko from https://reidaboutsex.com/ and we are now this is our second episode or live broadcast from my….my walking treadmill desk. So I don’t know what we’re going to call this, maybe it’s like going on a walk with Reid. Let me know that the microphone is working. So I’m still like geeking out on…on tech stuff. So I’ve got a wireless mic hooked up to from me to my phone and it worked really well yesterday. And now I’m and I’ve got my phone taped to my big screen my laptop’s right over here so I’ve got my big screen in my office and….and I’ve got my big and behind my big screen I’ve got a safari window open so that I can watch the comments as they come in so that off to keep like peering at the phone and trying to figure out what people are writing.
So, this is how I’m putting us all together and trying to make it work. So let me know if you have suggestions or upgrades and things that we learned from yesterday’s cast is that we can’t see, we can’t figure out how to get the camera to flip it so I know that it’s a sex geek backwards. I know that’s happening and I’m still trying to figure that out so I’m also realizing “oh, I should I should ask you all if you have any solutions to this.” I’m using an iPhone so I’m not on the android I found out that…that there’s some … some app you can use to flip the selfie camera on….on an android but I’m on iPhone and I want to use the selfie camera the reverse camera here not the front camera so that I can see and make sure that the live broadcast is working fine. So that’s those are my preferences. It might be that the easy way is to just start the live broadcast and then flip the camera over and then look at the browser and make sure it’s working and I’m sure at some point we’ll figure out this is you know this is the future we’ll figure this out. So leave comments for you nerds you might already have a solution or like playing detective on those things, you have my permission to…to I’m setting you loose you are always loose to do what you wanted but…but go fetch. Fetch us answers to this ‘coz I want to be helping I want to be helping other sex educators and workshop facilitators you know whoever’s trying to reach and get their message out there to the public. I want to I want to figure out the technical glitches here so that I can help role model and recommend this stuff for folks.
We talked about yesterday. I had my green sex geek summer camp T-shirt on which means I’m just giving business advice and today I have just a regular sex geek t-shirt which means this is relationship advice and sex education advice. So, if you have question, you can leave them in the comment section. Again, you are learning this…with me as I figure out a way that…..that is just going to be fun to talk to people. So you can hit those like buttons, you can make smiley faces come up across my screen. This is kind of fun I’m enjoying this and I decided to do this on my treadmill because I’m setting this up in my office in every morning I get up and I make my coffee. It’s afternoon now on West coast time but I make my coffee and ask like you know what? It would be really fun for me on the days that I can to check off a box of feeling like I gave advice and engaged with people. I’ve been travelling so much it’s been difficult getting or it’s like getting my newsletter out or responding to people on posts and things like that. So rather than beat myself up, I figured I would figure out a way that would make it really fun and build the habit of creating some content and answering questions that people email me and stuff like that. So that’s what we’re going today and we’re doing it on my treadmill. So thank you yesterday for everybody who had amazing comments. Thank you Diane for talking about the observation of me talking about or the value of talking about sex and relationships even when somebody’s heavy breathing as I’m walking on my treadmill. Vera’s kids team Cassey were making fun of me for….for breathing heavy, one because I’m nervous and two because I’m now exercising and I haven’t been exercising a lot. So I’m just trying to get more movement in my life. It seems really healthy and exciting now as I I’m in my late 40’s. So yes, so lot of different interesting things but Diane had this really amazing comment about the value of being able to talk about sex and relationships and heavy breathing and not having it have to be like arousal and excitement not having it have…”have to” lead to sex. And just Diane Long is a geek and an expert nerd around trauma and working around like somatic sexuality and somatic healing and I thought it was “oh, that was really good like you got my brain going.” So if you have observations you want to share in the comments or you want to email me privately and Diane I didn’t ask but I…I’ve just added you ‘coz you emailed me privately last night so I apologize for that it could’ve been better about the consent or I could’ve kept the comment anonymous but the so email me if that was a problem.
But the idea of like you know brain sex like give me your thoughts, give me your ideas. A lot you have amazing life experience and….and you’ve come across books and articles and podcasts and things like that that maybe I haven’t come across yet. So I’m inviting you to send me the stuff that’s been really important, the brain sex and knowledge that has been impactful and instrumental for you I want to know. And the more that you’re realizing I’m going to be able to one, answer all the comments and like all the comments I’m learning that. I can’t even figure out how the Facebook has the comments posting. Its just weird ‘coz I’m trying to like read all the comments and then I’m clicking it to view the comments differently and it’s showing me different comments that I didn’t see. So basically this is a preemptive I apologize if I don’t answer every email or answer every comment and I’m super appreciative and thankful that for one, for technology and two that we get to play this way and I hope that this stuff is useful.
That being said, let’s say let’s see who’ve got on the comments when this piece reminds me kind of like if you if you’re old enough to remember or watch reruns of the Rubble room like when they have the….the magnifying glass lollipop situation so now we can come like say hi and there’s Ma…Mark Michael, good morning! Yes, I will penetrate you with my insight in my dorky ways. Jean Marie, good morning or good afternoon. Rene, hi!
So things…things I want to talk about today. I want to talk about being awkward because for those of you who don’t know me personally or have seen me teach like I’m actually quite insecure in life like I grew up with mom and dad. My mother became an alcoholic and was emotionally abusive, I’m verbally abuse when she was drunk. My dad was going through a whole bunch of stuff and lied a lot and so just you know for me growing up being you know the roly-poly kid who’s too heavy to play every year on the….the Pop Warner Football League in my hometown in New Hampshire where the league that my father started. The team that my father started and was the head coach of like I’d just grew up with being a dork and a nerd. I’d just grew up with a lot of insecurities and we didn’t use the word geek in positive ways back when I was growing up. So, I had a lot of insecurities and didn’t know how to navigate that and eventually you know years later as a geek would have to work through figuring out like how can I harness my awkwardness? And one the things that you know as somebody who’s really insecure but who’s very secure with how insecure they are, I want to you know share with you one of the tools I had to create to help get myself out of my insecurity keyholes from time to time and it’s what I call embracing the awkward and it’s like my little embrace the awkward formula. And when I talk about and teach at different workshops, I teach about like when you get comfortable with how awkward you feel, it’s like you have this seventh or eighth grade superpower because if you think about life is being most adults, “most” air quotes aren’t really don’t ever really get beyond like fifth or seventh grade emotionally speaking and social dynamics. Most people are stuck in like the seventh grade school dance or things are just really difficult and really awkward and I’m noticing that my video is on the on my Facebook browser is frozen. So let me refresh just to make sure that we didn’t screw up the podcast somehow. Okay there are comments still coming in so that’s good. Alright, I think it’s all working now. Peru, Pearly! What are you doing in Peru dude? Like hi, what’s up? So, back to the…the piece here, the….the awkwardness when once you start to become comfortable of how awkward we can get and you understand that most adults are still stuck in seventh grade like it’s a seventh grade school dance but now it’s….it’s like on steroids because now it’s like you know it’s not just that fifth grade like, do you like me? It’s like it’s…now it’s adult, do you like me? Do you want to date me? Do you want to get married to have kids, build a family you know true love, soul mates all of the stuff. It gets really deep and heavy and the other thing that I think a lot of people won’t talk about or calibrate for is like you’ve been alive now longer and you know maybe in fifth grade or seventh grade you hadn’t had a lot of relationship you know train wrecks but now some of us had been around for a while and we’ve had a lot of emotional scar tissue happened from life in general and so now let’s it’s seventh grade school dance on steroids and you’ve been beaten up by life and not drowned a little bit and that’s just up the stakes for people.
So if…if and when if you want to check it out, I have a whole video about embracing the awkward but I’ll teach it to you now but just so I don’t forget you can to https://reidaboutsex.com/awkward and that’ll take you to a page with a little video and you’ve got like two choices on how you want to learn more about how to apply the formula. But the embrace the awkward formula is basically one, understanding the context of “wow, most people don’t handle awkward well at all.” We can get kind of caught up when things start to get awkward make it mean that things are going horribly wrong and the context shift is if you’re at it and understand that everyone’s awkward and if you’re a little bit about if you’re a little bit more comfortable with being awkward then, you have the superpower and you can help other people feel less awkward. And that a lot of human beings worked really well when you give them a step by step guide like when this, do that you know when you’re on fire, stop, drop and roll. And then you just kind of get that in grain. When you are awkward, if this works for you….you know try it on. If it doesn’t work for, you’re not broken just go look for another tool but when you are awkward, try the embrace the awkward formula which means stepping into feeling awkward and using it as the as the catalyst or as the trigger for you to get through or kind of put yourself over the awkward piece. So the more comfortably you become of feeling awkward the more over time you’re anchoring that it’s okay to feel awkward. And if you’re a nerd like me, over time what ends of happening is you start to get excited when things get awkward because you realize that you know what to do. So you don’t you don’t go into a panic….panic situation so to speak.
So, the embrace….embrace the awkward formula is that whenever you feel awkward, you take a deep breath and I’m heavy breathing here because I’m walking on my treadmill you take a deep breath and as you exhale and I would say let out a sound if you can if it’s appropriate. So, if you’re wherever you are at home or hopefully you’re not driving watching this. Take a deep breath and then go uhhhh! You let out that sound for my nerds out there my anatomy nerds, you’re activating, you’re manually stimulating with that kind of vibration you’re manually stimulating your vagus nerve which is helping you get out of fight and flight into rest and relaxation mode. So you’re going from your sympathetic nervous system to your parasympathetic nervous system, yes I think that’s right. Sometimes I flip those two. Correct me in the comments if I’m wrong. So, you take a deep breath noticing that you’re awkward you just you know just exhale or let out some sound. And the first step of the embrace the awkward formula is take a deep breath, say to yourself “the awkward is upon us” as you exhale. And then the second step is to…to whoever is around when you’re feeling awkward to announce “I have an idea.” Now what’s really interesting about this is it sounds kind of kokie is a lot of people when they’re feeling awkward, they just freeze up and if you have two people or more people who are all feeling awkward and everybody freezes up it just gets more awkward. So when you take a deep breath, say to yourself “the awkward is upon us.” That will help trigger the rest of the steps which is “I have an idea” and when you’re hanging out with people who are awkward and you say you have an idea, almost a hundred percent of the time everybody looks at you like you are the savior of the situation they are like “what’s your idea?” One, we’re curious; two when we’re feeling awkward, everyone is looking for anything or anyone who can throw them a life line. So when you say, “I have an idea” most people are like what? What is the idea? And then what I would suggest in interpersonal relationships like let’s say it’s dating or you know you’re in a you’re having sex or you’re in a relationship with your loved one either it’s a business version of this that you can use as well but let’s say it’s in a relationship because it’s a relationship advice. Suggest something that you want that will make you feel good. So, here…the crazy kokie example is when I teach my threesome’s workshops there’s that moment where everyone’s like “oh my god, like we’re….we’re here. We’re about to have a threesome and it’s… everyone is waiting for the…. somebody who make the first move.” So, this is where…you know I’d first started teaching this formula and then I realized that I was doing it in a lot of different areas of my life. But let’s say that you’re on a date and it’s time for that first kiss and you don’t know if it’s time or you’re….you’re pretty sure that it’s time for the first kiss but now it’s awkward and maybe the other person is like, is it time? So, it’s getting more and more awkward so you take a deep breath, the awkward is upon us “I have an idea!” And they’re “what?” And it is like “I think we should kiss right now. Would you like to kiss? Yes or no?” And in saying it, you’re asking for something that you would like and as the reason that you ask for something that you would like because a lot of people don’t handle being put on the spot well especially when they’re awkward. So when you say “I have an idea” and they’re like “what?” And you’re like “what would you like to do right now?” Now, all the pressure is on them and they’re already awkward. So, when you ask for something that you would like and then say “yes or no?” They can give you a response and it takes some of the pressure off of them having to come up with the idea immediately.
Next step is if they say yes, then you have to initiate the thing that you ask for because if you don’t, both people will just wait there expectantly and then it gets awkward again. If you forget to initiate like you forget to lean in they say yes to the kiss and you forget to lean in to the kiss and f*ck her up and they’re both like you’re both just staring at each other then you just keep the formula going. Take another deep breathe, “Awkward is really upon us now. I have another idea!” And they’re like “what?” And like “let’s lean in and touch lips, let’s mush faces” and then you do it. If and when people are hesitant like you don’t get a yes or a no then what I would do is you know you go “I have another idea!” You make another suggestion. If people are still hesitant by that second suggestion, you can oops! Somehow opened up my Instagram.
Ahh. Stop. There it’s open, gosh damn it. Okay. Oh. I think we’re back. Are we back now? Alright. Let me know if we’re back. I think it’s the same thing. I hope it’s the same video or I hope I didn’t totally screw this up.
So….so back to where I was, now that now that I’m really awkward “I have an idea!” How about if I just admit to everybody how awkward that was. I think I didn’t ruin the broadcast. Just be careful when you’re touching your screen ‘coz you’ll open up all kinds of apps. When on that second situation where if somebody hesitates and then you get a no, then you say “I have one more idea!” And on the third try you say “how about you make a suggestion?” And the reason, this sounds really clunky but trust me on this I’ve tested this, I’ve used this for years now and I’ve taught it to thousands of people who’ve used it for years, when you keep coming up with the ideas you’re just kind of keeping you’re breaking the ice, you’re keeping the ice open for…for a possibility for a shift in the situation. So if somebody doesn’t say yes immediately, you’re not a fool. You just didn’t come up with something or the two of you haven’t found something yet that it feels like a good fit. If you beat yourself up for not getting it right for the first try and just close down, then ice you know the ice just freezes back over and everything grinds to a halt.
So again like test drive this the embrace the awkward formula you can get it there’s even a download at https://reidaboutsex.com/awkward and…..and there’s a little video to walk you through everything. But like try it out. See how it how it works for you. I’ve taught people how to use this business. Let’s say you’re on a business meeting and it’s just going horribly wrong and then you’re like “oh my god like they were tanking.” And you’re like “I have an idea. Let’s all take a break for five minutes get some coffee and then come back and we’ll kick ass. Everybody, raise your hand if you’re a yes.” And if everybody raises their hand then you walk out the door to the coffee room like if you just stand there, waiting for everybody else to make the first move after everyone says yes it will get awkward again. In which case, the awkward is upon us yet again “I have another idea. How about we actually get up of our seats and walk out of the room. Ready, set, go.”
So, again I hope this was useful for…for all of you. I feel like I taught the piece I wanted to teach and now I’m going to figure out the comments here. If any of you have figured out how the heck Facebook does comments? I would love to know because I’m looking at my computer screen right now and all I see are four comments and I know that there are more than that and I don’t know how to see them. So, let’s see and hi Nancy! Thank you everybody who’s liking the video and stuff like that. We’ve got a bunch of viewers, let’s see here and I see oh I think I can see all the comments now. So let me just answer any questions Mark Michael Louis, I don’t know why you’re going to be hurt in advance. I have to read through all the comments to figure this out. Hi Nancy! Hi Katrina! Jillian! Okay, everything’s working…good. Okay. Okay I didn’t ruin the whole broadcast….that’s good to know. It’s good to know that you can you know if you open up on your phone another app, it will freeze the live it will pause the live broadcast so just close the app hit Facebook again and it should just start up again that’s good to know. We’re all together on this learning curve. Jean! Jean Marie, how did I get into this sex teaching business? Okay. So quick X-men origin story real quick. I….I was a…the ton roly-poly fifth grader super awkward. My mom and dad who loved each other very….very much their marriage started kind of not…not failing but they didn’t have the communication tools to work through their wants, needs and…and desires and to kinspad of heal their upsets. So my mom would start self-medicating with alcohol, my dad was that…that generation where he thought money would make people happy so he became a workaholic and so my mom became alcoholic they didn’t have the tools to be able to communicate through any of that. And my brothers and I have three other brothers watching people who’d….who’d really love each other and you know whom used to like make out, we catch and making out on the kitchen and cuddling on the couch and stuff like that. Two people who were really kind and amazing and got a lot of the basic you know how to be a good human being programming in to us when we were young. We saw two people who loved each other start to tear themselves and each other apart. They would stay together till my mom passed away but everything would start to crumble down around them and they couldn’t talk about it. There’s a lot of anger and rage and you know slumming doors via Morse code was kind of how they would communicate and the… what it did for me was it set me off on this trajectory of I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to go through this and so what I ended up slowly starting to do is like figure out like what were they missing? What could I do that would help me not fall prey to what was happening to them. Eventually, it went so bad for my mom and dad. They would lose everything and live in their van for several years. I just get really kind of fucked up but it was still obvious how much they loved each other so I learned really quickly that love wasn’t going to be enough. And when I went off to college, I was just trying to figure out like what were the tools that my mom and dad were missing. I was also so insecure about certain things, I want to became sexually active in college, I was trying to figure out that so my nerdery which I didn’t know I was a nerd in a sex geek back then what I started doing was just trying to learn as much as I could about relationship and then also about sex and I had the great benefit of dating a few people early on in my first couple of relationships who were very good about asking for what they wanted, who knew their bodies are very sex positive people and so I just got role model that it was okay to ask and it was okay to show and tell and eventually that would lead to me just becoming a geek about this and eventually my friends encouraging me years later when I was living in…in Manhattan and being a Manhattan bartender and an actor them encouraging me to go pro and charge money for my relationship advice because as a bartender, all I was doing every night was talking to people about sex and relationships which was me doing field research because I wanted to understand what was working and what wasn’t working. And so eventually I would start to become more conscious about what was happening and….and eventually in 2004, I created a workshop called cuddle party in New York City which still exist today and is taught in several different countries around the world and in different languages you can go to http://www.cuddleparty.com/ and Marcia Baczynski and Betty Martin and Lynn Dale and a bunch of other people now run cuddle party. I stepped away from it because I wanted to teach more explicit sex education, I wanted to teach blowjob workshops and threesome workshops and you know how to be more romantic and all these other things and so I stepped away from cuddle party so that I wouldn’t tarnish cuddle party’s non-sexual reputation and confused people because the founder was also teaching blowjob workshops. So that’s that was the….the short like maybe not so short but that was the version of how I got into this.
Okay, I’m going to look at here at the questions and then we’ll end today. This will be our little walk that we went on today. Good stuff, thank you everyone. Hi, Jillian! Hi, Lydia! Admitting you’re feeling awkward to your partner can help. That’s a really great thing thank you Lorie for leaving that comment. Yeah, just talking about things, saying what it is that you’re not saying in relationships is the is the biggest bit of advice that I can give anybody. So if you’re looking for that kind of information, you can go to https://reidaboutsex.com/convo C.O.N.V.O and you can get my Difficult Conversation Formula that helped a lot of people you can download that. Erika, thank you so much! I’m dancing while I talk, Tora said. No, it’s I’m….I’m dancing on my walking treadmill because this is our morning walk together everyone. Yeah, we’ll keep if you figure out that how the comments work, anybody who has good advice for that so that I can read them while we’re broadcasting and answer questions, that’s great. And I’ll try to leave links to post some stuff for those of you who like to tune in, if I say a link and you want to leave it in the comments go right ahead. You can beat me to it. Another question, please remind me again when it’s not a good idea to sleep with hooky people asking for a friend. Maybe I’ll save that for tomorrow’s video. But the quick answer is date your species and you know I believe that most people would really benefit from less angst and difficulty in their relationships and that most of us because many of us grow up in households where there was a lot of friction and a lot of difficulty we mistake love for difficulty. We think that we need to be exerting a lot of effort in relationships to be doing a good job and that’s really I…I still I’ll probably talk about this tomorrow. I think extra effort is…is wrong. There’s….there’s times when relationships require more work like a car driving up a hill, the engine works harder that’s normal versus driving around the town until parking brake on. And so in Jillian’s question, she wanted to know it’s not a good idea to sleep with crazy people and that those are Jillian’s words and I’m just going to say when you date people or sleep with people that aren’t a good fit for you what’s happening is you’re creating a lot of extra effort and that could be catastrophic for a lot of folks. And so there’s no….no value judgement around the word crazy here but I’m going to say you know remind us why it’s not a good idea to sleep with people who aren’t a good fit for us. You can have a perfectly good car, perfectly good set of tires, it’s the wrong set of tires for the car it will only end badly. You will spend so much effort trying to get the tires to fit on the car and the car is not safe, it is not good for the car, no fit of tires, no fit of people in the car. So, it’s about really being mindful and intentional about who you pick and why you pick them. So if you’re going to have a casual fling with somebody, they might be a great person to have a casual fling with. But if you want to go long distances, travel across country with this person, get the tires of the right fit for you. Just because you’re attracted to them doesn’t mean they’re a good fit. I’ll leave it at that. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow. I’m going to end this up right now and I say thank you so much. I’ll take a look at the comments and I’m going to try to do this every day. If I’m home, we’ll walk on the treadmill, we’ll go for a walk together and the…when I’m on the road, I don’t know what we’re going to do maybe we’ll do it in the back step or something like that. Who knows? We’ll do…we’ll figure out something crazy and quickie and exciting.
Again, thank you all of you for your support. Check out https://reidaboutsex.com/awkward for The Embrace the Awkward Formula and we also talked about The Difficult Conversation Formula so that’s https://reidaboutsex.com/convo C.O.N.V.O. Alright, leave your comments. Share the video. Have fun today and thanks for going on this walk with me. Bye!