- How To Overcome Shyness

How To Overcome Shyness

Almost everyone has struggled with shyness at one time or another. ‘Shyness’ can strike both the introverted and extroverted alike. What matters is not so much why you are feeling shy, but rather what you do about it.

Shyness is made up of three basic components:

1. Overly self-conscious feelings. Shy people are almost exclusively focused on themselves and their own performance in social situations.
2. Overly negative self-evaluation. Shy people tend to judge themselves very harshly, assuming everyone else will share their negative feelings about themselves and see only their faults.
3. Overly negative self-preoccupation. Shy people tend to view everything they do or say in a social situation as a terrible error or an embarrassing misstep, even though others may not even notice anything wrong.

Shy people are very self-absorbed people. Usually this is due to a combination of factors: poor self-image, lack of confidence, an inability to focus outward (instead of inward), and sometimes a lack of basic social skills.

Anyone can overcome the tendency toward shyness however. All it really takes is a commitment to change and a willingness to practice the following basic tips:

• Understand your shyness. Make yourself aware of your tendency to be self-focused and then focus on that instead of obsessing about your imagined deficiencies. Recognize your shyness is a distortion of the truth, acknowledge feeling shyness, and then let it go.

• Understand other people. Other people are much too worried about themselves to have any opinion about you at all. Once you understand that your shyness is more about what you think of you than what others think of you, you can learn to pay less attention to your fears.

• Acknowledge your strengths. Shy people focus exclusively on what they perceive to be their faults. Pick out one of two things you are good at, or that you like about yourself, and bring your attention back to those things over and over again until it becomes a habit.

• Focus on other people. It’s hard to hold onto shy feelings when you are focused on putting another person at ease. Come prepared with some questions for casual conversation and focus on people around you. Try to put them at ease and you will likely feel more at ease yourself.

• Give up on ‘fitting in.’ Not everyone can be the life of the party. Don’t even try if that isn’t who you are. Decide to like what you have, and don’t try to impress others. Realize that it doesn’t matter if you don’t impress every new person you meet. Nobody likes everybody.

• Breath slowly and deeply. Deep slow breathing is physiologically incompatible with anxiety. Practice shifting into this kind of breathing whenever you feel nervous or awkward and it shy feelings will evaporate more quickly.

• Learn to like yourself. Lots of people can’t be alone and even balk at listing their own positive qualities. Learn to appreciate your own company. Go to a matinee movie alone and buy popcorn. Go to a coffee shop alone. Take yourself on an outing that only you would really enjoy then really enjoy it. The more you learn to like your own company, the more you’ll start to enjoy the company of others.

Shyness is not the end of the world, and it is possible to conquer it.

Overcoming shyness is essentially a process of learning to like and live with who you really are. Once you learn to like yourself, getting other people to like you is a piece of cake. It just happens naturally.

Before you know it, you might actually find yourself looking forward to social events!