Welcome to Lazygirl, strawsweeper, and shasah to the social courage growth club
. Your club membership pins are in the mail, along with the club dues
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It's awesome reading the stories of people like ABdude, cylon, and shasah! Thanks for sharing.
Aybee, that's an interesting list of things you want to do. My list is completely different than yours, but that's ok. We are at different places in our lives, however, we'll both be working on growing that same social courage muscle.
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For my social courage growth, I'm going to be an official people greeter for a little while. You know, how Wal-Mart has people that greets people? Well, I'll take that on as an official human greeter. My job will be to greet as many people as possible.
That's actually something similar to what I did a few years ago. I was tired of being scared of even minor rejection, so my goal was to get rejected 10 times a day. If I said hi to someone and they didn't respond, that was 1 rejection I could check mark. If I asked someone if I could do something for them, and they didn't want me to, that was another rejection to add. It seems crazy looking back I wouldn't offer things to people, even to my closest friend because I didn't want to get rejected...! Anyway, I did that for a while, aimed to get 10 little rejections a day. It was awesome, anytime I'd get a little rejection, I'd cheer inside myself because I'd get to add another checkmark on my list of 10/day . After doing this for a while, it didn't bother me anymore these little rejections and it helped me improve my acceptance of rejection that before I couldn't accept.
However, I never went beyond it and took it to the next level. So now I will, but I'll start first by doing something on a basic level to get my social courage muscles warned up again. I'll start and be an official human people greeter for a while and aim to greet 10 people a day that I've never greeted before. The more people don't reply and ignore my "hi", the better! I'll count those too and cheer each time I get no response, or a grunt/non-happy response. I'm not in the habit of greeting people I don't know, so this will be a good way to start.
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I know it's more important to do constant social growth exercises rather than one big one and think that big one will carry you over. For example, when I was in High School, I was asked to give a 4-5 minute speech to 1000 people at my graduation ceremony. That scared the hell out of me, made me sick just to think about it as I was just about the shyest person at my school who was terrified to speak in front of anyone. I eventually accepted, and practiced a good bit for a few months. I delivered that speech, and it went well and had a great time. So, the next semester, when I went to college and had a speech assignment, I thought: "Well, I went and gave a speech to 1000 people, so given a minor speech to 20 people should be absolutely no problem". How wrong I was. The day of my speech, I was all shaken up, and had the worst problem just standing there and trying to speak. I'm not sure if I was even able to give the whole speech. I know it was the worst one of my entire class by far. It wasn't until I did toastmasters for a few years where I practiced every week before I could become much more comfortable given speeches to groups of people. Therefore, given speeches to 5-15 people in toastmasters many many times helped my ability and comfort in giving speeches much more than giving a speech once to 1000 people. So, I'll use that same principle with the social courage growth process - going for repeatedly constant courage growth rather than aim for one big one act.
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Originally Posted by Thomas Afaik the forums allow for private subforums? I don't think that the conversation groups (via the profile) are very accessible, but I'd be all for using a opt-in private forum (however, that only solves indexing by search engines rather than being 'private'). |
Nope, we don't do that here unfortunately. It'd require too much overhead to the admins.