Overcoming social anxiety and shyness is a mean feat. It’s something to be incredibly proud of if you manage it. It varies person to person as to how much work is required. For some people it means nothing more than going out and practicing talking to people to get past bad feelings that aren’t very strong. For others on the other end of the scale it requires years of research, trying and failing with probably multiple different techniques until they find something that works for them. The majority of people are somewhere in the middle, and for the unlucky few social anxiety is something they will never overcome.
I’ve been thinking recently about regardless of how stuck someone may be, just what does it take to be that kind of person who can overcome it. I thought back through my own past from my days over 6 years ago now when I set out on a huge journey to change my life.
Image: Arvind Balaraman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I like the picture above, to me it shows 2 things:
1. That life can be very beautiful
2. That at the same time life can also be devoid of the things you want, for example friends or even just someone to talk to!
So what kind of person does someone need to be in order to be successful in overcoming social anxiety and shyness?
Your first responsibility is to yourself.
Regardless of the technique they end up choosing a person needs to be able to take responsibility for themselves. If you are the kind of person who wont stop whining about being where you are because of other people then you will never be able to succeed. Your whole basis is that because someone else “broke” you either they or someone else needs to “fix” you. Only problem is no one ever will. Even when you seek out techniques to help you it is ultimately you that has to do the work.
You must commit to change.
You also need to be the kind of person who can commit to something. Many people start out trying to change their anxieties and become happy with life, of those that set out probably 90% or more fail. From the research I’ve done most of that 90% is because people fall in with an unsupportive crowd. When I say unsupportive I don’t mean those who don’t help out. Quite the opposite. I see so many people fail because they fall into a group (usually an online social anxiety forum) where people are more than willing to “help” you by justifying where you are and not giving you the kick up the backside to carry on). People who wind up on these forums lose the commitment they started out with, this new group makes them feel safe and supported, but in truth they are just stuck in a slightly different place.
Appreciate the smaller changes.
Being able to see the small changes in life is invaluable. I include myself in this one. When I first started out all I knew was that the person I was was not the person I wanted to be. My life SUCKED. What I aimed for were massive changes that were in line with exactly the change that I was looking for. I found out however that this is a really problematic viewpoint. You see when you look at life through a problem what you see at the destination of where you want to go is totally warped. By being able to see and appreciate small changes I was able to keep reaffirming to myself that life was indeed getting much better, sometimes this meant I went off on a tangent and improved some other area of my life which had a knock on effect to how I dealt with people.
There are a great many other personality traits that will help you along the way. I’d like to open up the comments to allow anyone who has succesfully overcome their social anxiety and shyness to post about the traits they needed. I may also cover some in a future post.
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