[jsot]

Throughout my short life up to today I have been very shy. Whenever I'm forced to be somewhere with a lot of people I don't know it's easy for me to get nervous and shut myself off from the world. Over the years I've gotten better about this but my social awkwardness has caused me to be low on friends and the ones I do have I rarely see outside of school. Part of my goals this school year is to try to overcome my fear of people and not be that weird kid who is always by himself. It's not that people dislike me or anything, even if I'm not that great at making friends, none of my acquaintances has anything against me, but I'm not exactly good at taking it beyond that.

But I've been researching this and everyone seems to say that you need to like yourself before anyone is going to like you. And that's where my problem is, I can't really get the liking yourself part down, sometimes if I try really hard I'll start to really feel good about myself, but then, something happens and I'm back to where I started, or worse.

So my question is, how can you make that positive self-image mindset a permanent one? Do I just need to go out and try stuff to build confidence?

Thanks for any responses.