Last Updated on April 13, 2023 by Mike Robinson
Shyness is a pattern of behavior characterized by communicative difficulties and social inhibition. However, it is not a disease and can be overcome if you develop the right skills. Learning how to overcome shyness is important if it interferes with your quality of life, well-being, personal relationships, or achievement of goals.
In this article, we will explain 10 practical steps to do so.
After overcoming it and leaving it behind, you can have more opportunities, better personal relationships, and even develop professionally. Losing shyness is a matter of perseverance, patience, and hard work.
What is shyness?
Shyness is a trend of stable behavior characterized by not being noticed, passing unnoticed, and not expressing normally, which usually limits social development.
Timid people find it difficult to express their opinions, to establish conversations, to show their way of being in public, and to function in a socially unconcerned manner.
It is very important to mention that shyness is not a disease or a psychological alteration; it is simply a personality trait and a specific behavior pattern that many people have and can learn to overcome .
However, being shy may reduce a person’s ability level, force them to exert more effort to perform simple social activities and in some cases, may cause problems with self-esteem or personal satisfaction.
This is not to say that being shy is a negative and harmful personality trait and being extroverted is a positive and beneficial personality trait. Extroversion can cause certain problems or discomforts in the same way that shyness can.
The “heart” of the issue lies in how we manage shyness, how we adapt it to our ways of being and behaving, and what effects we cause in our day-to-day lives. Poor management of shyness can lead to certain problems and dissatisfactions and can lead to the appearance of a social phobia .
The effects of social phobia
Social phobia is a radical, extreme, and dis adapted fear of social situations, in which high levels of anxiety are experienced when they can not be avoided. In shyness, this does not happen, so the person can function properly despite the anxiety or nervousness that he may have in certain social situations.
However, it is very important that shy people who are not satisfied with their social functioning learn to manage their shyness to lower their levels of anxiety and acquire an optimum relational style. There are quite a few discrepancies when it comes to determining what is usually the source of shyness.
There are authors who argue that they are innate personality traits that are possessed throughout life, and there are authors who defend that they are styles of behaviors acquired during childhood and adolescence.
In my opinion, as in most psychological aspects, when making a pattern of shyness in a person’s personality, genetic, environmental, and learning factors are involved. However, although shyness is an attribute of personality, that is, shyness is part of being shy, this does not mean that it can not be reversed.
And is it true that to overcome your shyness, you do not have to change the way you are? You do not have to start being an extrovert, which is totally opposite of who you are right now.
To overcome your shyness, what you have to do is get to know yourself and your way of acting well, so that you are able to adequately manage your withdrawal and ensure that it does not alter your social functioning.
10 steps to overcome shyness
1. Analyze your shyness.
As we have said, the first step to overcoming shyness is to know yourself well and to know your shyness even better.
Stop thinking and analyze how your shyness works. How and when does shyness appear? What actions do you prevent? Analyze your feelings do you have in those moments? What general idea do you have about your shyness? How do you feel about that?
Grab some paper and a pencil, and make a column with each of these questions. Then try to answer them and write as much information as possible about each one.
This information will serve to face and delimit the problem, to know the operation of your shyness, and to have a greater control over her during the following steps.
2. Accept yourself the way you are.
The second step you must take is to build a positive attitude to overcome your shyness. This attitude should be based on accepting your way of being and, therefore, your shyness. As we have said, being shy is not a negative attribute; it is not a pathology or a dysfunctional aspect of your personality.
It is true that extreme shyness can lead you to suffer from bigger problems like a social phobia. However, having a way of being the opposite—overly extroverted—may also lead to suffering from a histrionic or narcissistic personality.
This shows that the problem is not to be shy or not to be shy, but to perform a bad management of your shyness.
This must be very present, since the attitude that you must follow throughout the process should not be based on the desire to exterminate your shyness completely or to acquire an opposing way of behaving. Shyness should not be a part of your personality that you want to eradicate but rather a trait you want to learn to manage.
3. Describe the situations in which you would like to be less shy.
Woman with hand on face
Subsequently, you must specify the situations in which your shyness manifests and note that, because of it, things do not work as well as you would like.
Make a list of all the activities in which you notice that you are extremely shy, that you can not communicate properly, that it is very difficult for you to express yourself, or that you do not relate as you would.
These situations will be basically social, and if you analyze them well, you can think of many:
When you’re with friends drinking, at work meetings, when you have to expose or explain something in public , when you meet your neighbor in the elevator, when you have to ask for the bill in a restaurant
Try to make a list of all the situations in which you notice that your shyness influences the way you behave excessively. Then order them from greater to lesser relevance according to your criteria.
4. Detect your automatic thoughts.
Once you have defined all the situations, memorize them well and take them into account. And this is the next step: to detect the automatic thoughts that you have in those situations.
Automatic thoughts are those things that come to mind automatically at a certain time and of which we are rarely aware.
We are not aware of them because, when they appear automatically, we do not stop to think about them. Therefore, when they come to our heads, we ignore them and continue with our lives. These thoughts may be such as:
“If I call the waiter, he may not hear me, but the people at the table next to him will and will think I’m ridiculous.” This thought that appears in your mind makes it very difficult to ask for an account in a restaurant.
“If I say something to my neighbor in the elevator, she’ll think the issue I’ve got is absurd.” This thought may make you choose to remain silent.
“If I intervene in the conversation of my friends, they will think that my comment is uninteresting, and they will not listen to me.” This thinking can lead you to not participate in the conversations.
So, what you will have to do is be very attentive in those situations in which your shyness is manifest to be able to realize these thoughts and then write them down.
5. Work to change them.
Once we have the automatic thoughts registered, the goal is to be able to change them. The first step for you to take in doing this is to realize that the thoughts that come to your head have no certainty of being true.
That is, you have no evidence that if you say something in the elevator, your neighbor will think that you are ridiculous, or that your friends will think that you are ridiculous, or that the people at the table next to you will think that you are ridiculous when you ask for the bill.
So, all these automatic thoughts do is increase your shyness and prevent you from properly interacting. If everyone had these kinds of thoughts, no one would relate properly.
Once you see that these thoughts do not have to be true, change them to more appropriate ones. For example: “If I ask for the bill and the waiter does not hear me but the people at the next table do, they will think that the waiter has a lot of work and is not serving his customers well.”
Record an alternative thought for each of the automatic thoughts you recorded in point 4.
6. Use Alternative Thoughts
Once you have an alternative thought for each automatic thought, read them several times to clearly remember the association between the two.
Thus, from now on, whenever you are in any of the situations described in point 3 and you detect one of the automatic thoughts that you recorded in point 4, you must immediately think of your alternative thinking described in point 5.
So, whenever you are in a situation where your first reaction is shyness, your automatic thinking with which your shyness manifests itself will no longer be irrefutable, and you will have to deal with an alternative thought.
This fact will, in each situation, give you a greater capacity to properly assess what could happen if you express yourself, increasing the chances that you will do so.
7. Point out the simplest situations.
To practice your training in thoughts, it is convenient that you first expose yourself to those situations that give you less cut.
Thus, if you perform the exercise of modifying your automatic thinking in simple situations, you are most likely to dare to express yourself and manage to overcome shyness.
8. Change your beliefs.
Once you are able to modify your automatic thoughts, you will have to focus on modifying your more general beliefs .
You must detect all your beliefs like the following: “I am shy, and that is why I do not relate”, “if I express myself too much, they will think that I am ridiculous”, “if I show in excess how I am, people will not like me,”, etc.
Once you have detected them all, verify your certainty. Why do they have to be true if I have already managed to relate properly in various situations? Why will these beliefs be appropriate if no one has ever told me that I am ridiculous?
Look for the reason you hold these beliefs, and you will see that you have already begun to leave behind your shyness.
9.Relax
Although the exercises we have done so far will help you lose your shyness in many situations, you will probably continue to experience anxiety and nervousness in many of them.
So, if you notice that sometimes you get too nervous, you should learn to relax . You can do the following exercise for about 10 minutes when the anxiety takes over.
Breathe deeply with the diaphragm, noticing how the air enters and leaves your belly.
In each deep inspiration, he repeats a word or phrase that conveys calm, like “everything is going well” or “I am calm,” and imagines a calm landscape. If the situation allows, you can play back some relaxation music at low volume.
10. Point it out gradually.
Finally, through all the strategies discussed in the previous points, gradually expose yourself to different situations. Obviously, if you start with the situation that causes you more anxiety, it will cost you much more than if you start with the easiest ones and, as you work well on them, you continue with the more difficult ones.
For this, you can use the list you made in point 3 and expose yourself intentionally to all situations progressively. And what have you done to overcome your shyness? Share it to help readers. Thank you very much.
