Has anyone beaten shyness?

[saakeli]

Like the title asks, has anyone ever managed to master their own shyness? I've been trying since October 2006 but there are some problems, the worst is that I do remember the goal of being confident and open, but forget it more or less intentionally when things get "scary".
And if the mission is not forgotten, it backfires right on the first larger encounter, resulting panic and back to square one.

Anyway, if any of you have ever beaten your shyness, I would like to know how did you do it without medication.

[Angela]

I was the shyest person on the planet, and now I can't remember what it felt like to be shy -- Landmark Forum and Advanced Course.

[hkalchemy]

I used to be very shy - didn't make eye contact, tried to get away from people etc. Taking to 2-3 people in a group was a nightmare and as for public speaking ..... I would rather have dies. Literally.

Now I regularly speak to large groups of people and I have no social phobia. I am, in fact, the most 'public' figure in my organization - it's my job to speak to big groups of people. I consider this to be one of my greatest achievements.

How did I do it? I was offered promotions which required me to be in a public role. I was terrified, but I forced myself through. And I just kept going through the fear and the pain of it all.

There is no easy solution. Just keep going. Good luck.

[mcbrewster]

I was terribly shy until I reached my early thirties and decided to love myself, which made a huge difference. When you learn to love yourself unconditionally you lose your fear of what other people think of you. You are wonderful …believe in yourself!!!!

[Anand Dhillon]

I used to be really shy. What worked for me at the behavioral level was progressive desensitization approach. It looked something like this:

• Making eye contact with others
• Making eye contact and smiling
• Saying hi
• Saying hi and making a short comment
• Saying hi and having a 30 second conversation
• Having a 1 minutes conversation
• Having a 3,5, 10 etc. minute conversation
• Injecting humor
• Etc.

The key is taking baby steps and not jumping to the next level until you are completely comfortable with the current level. I was stuck at some points for several weeks at a time. It's important that you have some environment where you can practice. I was in school at the time so that's what I used. For you, it may be joining a club, talking to people at work, going out to a bar etc.

Using this approach, I was able to go from shy to above average social skills in slightly over a year.

If I were to deal with shyness now, I would also include some inner work along with developing the social skills. I recommend The Work of Bryon Katie (www.thework.com).

Chances are, you are probably afraid of disapproval at this point in time so I recommend going through all of the exercises in the book, I Need Your Love - Is That True? by Byron Katie. It covers ridding yourself of the need for approval in depth. Doing all the exercises fully will probably keep you busy for a couple of months but will have a profound effect on your interactions with others and your self-esteem.

[The David]

Originally Posted by Anand Dhillon

[*]Making eye contact with others

I might put that one after 'etc.'

[Jarrod]

I wrote about this a month or so back: Overcoming Shyness Using Warrior Techniques

While external activities help the real change comes from observing what is going on within.

[AlexG]

Time to plug-in my site 10 Practical Ways to Overcome Shyness

But seriously, yes you can. It will take work of course but it is absolutely possible. Me and other people who responded are an example.

Never use medication to overcome something internal like this.

[abcZen]

Let me ask you something before I continue.

Are there ever moments in your life, with friends, family etc where you are confident, funny, outgoing etc? i.e. not shy?

[munish]

Originally Posted by saakeli

Like the title asks, has anyone ever managed to master their own shyness? I've been trying since October 2006 but there are some problems, the worst is that I do remember the goal of being confident and open, but forget it more or less intentionally when things get "scary".
And if the mission is not forgotten, it backfires right on the first larger encounter, resulting panic and back to square one.

Anyway, if any of you have ever beaten your shyness, I would like to know how did you do it without medication.

Join Toastmasters Club.

[frogcat]

I also suffered from shyness. I didn't necessarily have a problem with my behavior, until I realized that my shyness led to loneliness. My motivation to overcome it came from my sex drive. I wasn't able to attract the women I wanted to have in my life and I decided to self-improve.

So... I got involved in the whole "fast seduction" thing. I got lots of practice going out in the field doing approaches. Back in my day, there weren't any coaches. There was tons of free info, though learning was slow on my own. Learning from others helped me progress.

From it, I learned about Emotional Freedom Technique which is good about eliminating individual fears. http://www.emofree.com/ Also free.

At roughly the same time, for work reasons, I joined Toastmasters. Very supportive group, and helpful for speaking in public. But I don't think it directly addressed some of my shyness issues.

Nowadays, I'm happily married with children. I don't really think of myself as shy, though I'd certainly agree that I'm an introvert.

[Spartan]

How old are you? Shyness disappears with age usually.

[seeker5]

Originally Posted by Spartan

How old are you? Shyness disappears with age usually.

Shyness does not automatically disapear with age. Only those people who do something about it will see their shyness dissapear. Otherwise, shyness increases.

[Bitsy]

Saakeli (aika hauska nimen valinta ),

There are so many good suggestions here, you hardly need my story, but since I am guessing from your user name that you are Finnish, I want to share my experience with you.

I was really shy, insecure and afraid to speak to people. I still am shy to some extent, but it's not so much shyness as, it turns out, I'm a fairly quiet and also soft-spoken person. Do you know what got me to break out of my shyness? A couple of painfully lonely and solitary years in Finland, combined with the fact that I amassed volumes of stories from my life experiences. The first noticeable and major change occurred when I returned to Canada in 2000 after 3 years of being in what felt like solitary confinement in Finland. I was literally so starved for social stimulation that I was a regular chatterbox (at least by my standards) when I went back to visit Canada. I was talking to anyone I saw, strangers. I had a lot to say from experiences, observations and so on.

I still don't speak in large groups, but sometimes I talk and talk and talk if I just meet someone and it is just one or two other people.

I want to emphasize, however, to shy people that silence can be golden and if you are by nature quiet, or, like me, are an observer of people, or simply don't feel that saying a lot of empty and unnecessary things that people say in social situations is worth the energy and effort it will take you to say them, I recommend learning to like that about yourself and learn to accept it as a good quality. Sincerity is a good thing. I urge you not to succomb to social conditioning and values and end up over-compensating for your shyness so much that you end up pretending to be a way that is not natural for you.

[Wet]

Things that helped me overcome shyness:

Taking dance classes.

Going to a party, getting drunk, and doing really dumb/embarrassing things, and being able to laugh at them later.
(Only had to do that once)


I would really encourage you to go take some dancing classes, It took me quite sometime before I was comfortable talking to people, but I eventually loosened up, started having fun, got invited to a party, got drunk, made an ass of myself, and had good times all around!

[crescive]

I agree with Bitsy about not feeling like one must talk a lot or loudly to be considered fun and outgoing. Especially the bit about "saying a lot of empty and unnecessary things that people say in social situations." As anyone who has everyone been out to a bar can tell you, there are so much meaningless BS conversations that people have to try to appear like they are engaged in conversation, which is just another way of covering up insecurity. Truly overcoming shyness is about feeling comfortable with yourself, enough to not be afraid to go out by yourself or feel awkward when you're not talking to someone or doing something. Truly being secure and confident is just allowing yourself to be who you are. Shyness is just one perception of a more quiet or introspective personality but from another perspective it could be seen as sincere, pensive, cool, and composed. In social situations try to find common ground with the person you're talking to. Just try not to be who you're not and learn to see your shyness in a new way, have confidence in that, then engaging with others will feel more natural.

[ar81]

I was extremely shy, extremely.
I realized that I was not shy when I talked to my family, so I cheated my mind to reproduce that feeling elsewhere, and later I discovered that I was not shy anymore.
Today I can meet strangers, I can talk in public.

[gr8tocre8]

Originally Posted by saakeli

Like the title asks, has anyone ever managed to master their own shyness? I've been trying since October 2006 but there are some problems, the worst is that I do remember the goal of being confident and open, but forget it more or less intentionally when things get "scary".
And if the mission is not forgotten, it backfires right on the first larger encounter, resulting panic and back to square one.

Anyway, if any of you have ever beaten your shyness, I would like to know how did you do it without medication.

The key to not being shy is being comfortable with who you are. When you are truly comfortable with yourself, shyness vanishes. But how do you do that? There are many, many wonderful ways. What worked for me was simply being in action. Very often, when we're not happy with ourselves, we are not very in-charge people - we don't take action where we want to take action.

Begin with small steps - pick one thing each day that you'd like to take action on - I could be as simple as cleaning your car. As you keep doing this, your self-confidence will start increasing, because you'll start believing in yourself again (or for the first time). When this happens, you will start noticing your shyness fading away.

[James45]

Originally Posted by gr8tocre8

The key to not being shy is being comfortable with who you are. When you are truly comfortable with yourself, shyness vanishes. But how do you do that? There are many, many wonderful ways. What worked for me was simply being in action. Very often, when we're not happy with ourselves, we are not very in-charge people - we don't take action where we want to take action.

Begin with small steps - pick one thing each day that you'd like to take action on - I could be as simple as cleaning your car. As you keep doing this, your self-confidence will start increasing, because you'll start believing in yourself again (or for the first time). When this happens, you will start noticing your shyness fading away.

I'd like to expand on this and input my own point of view.

I belive shyness is a result of increased social restirctions (including implanted limiting beliefs from early childhood) - imposed interally or externally - which represses your true, inner self.

I believe in approaching such challenges from a high-level, top-to-bottom manner.

Everything stems from your beleifs, so if you believe that people, in general, are mean and cruel and will kick your ass as soon as you open your mouth to say 'Hi', then oviously, your going to be fearful (e.g. shy) of expressing yourself.

Like many, these beleifs are subconsciously wired, for better or worse. So the first action to take is to ask why you think you feel the way you do around others or in certain situations.

I'd then recommend reading these articles:

Questioning Your Beliefs
8 Guidelines for Choosing Effective Beliefs
Empowering Beliefs
Installing Empowering Beliefs

It can literally take an instant to see the world through a different perspective, and an instant to realise your fear is truley ridiculous.

[Dannyboy1]

Accept it and move through it. Practice practice practice. The more you talk to strangers, the easier it will get. You must let go of your attachment to how you want others to feel about you and just let them feel what they will. Desensitization is the answer.

[Bharat Keshwala]

Me too. I used to be a really shy guy, overcoming my shyness was probably the greatest achievement of my life, sounds lame, but it made life more worth living.

It takes different things to over come it, for me it was experiencing the benefits of not being a shy guy. It kind of happened by accident but one day in High school I bumped into an old friend from when I was like 10 years old, he was also a shy guy, we had a conversation and became good friends again over time. The next year we ended up in most of the same classes, and it turned out we both had a great sense of humor, we just never got to show it because of our shyness. But by being funny between ourselves other people heard, and we quickly went from being the "losers" nobody knew, to the guys that everyone wanted to be friends with.

My story doesn't mean I was funny so I made lots of friends, but that is when I first noticed how much of an obstacle my shyness was, and I thought about how much other stuff in life I could be missing out on because of my shyness, this became my motivation.

[evacorges]

I was a very shy teenager. What I realised was that people often keep their first impression and stick with it. Every time I went to a new school I felt insecure and totally out of my depth, so I was very shy. And people treated me that way, reinforcing that behaviour.
When I went to university, I thought "here's my chance to start over, if people do not perceive me as shy they will not treat me that way - any shy behaviour I show afterwards will be interpreted differently by them (e.g. as having a bad day)".
And this turned out to be true. I borrowed my brother's lucky jacket, wore my solid shoes, took a deep breath and introduced myself to all the people in my introduction group, about 8 of them. Turned out I was the first to do so - the rest had all stood in a clump but not talked at all yet. So they perceived me as a social person, and I was halfway to my goal of not being shy anymore.
It took several years to lose it completely, but this was the first and most important step in winning.

[marty]

Who would believe a fuzzy catterpillar would one day fly?

[Living2xcess]

I have had social anxiety nearly my entire life and I have learned how hard it is to overcome shyness. It is definitely achievable, but you have to focus on your self image in order to overcome it. I still frequently have spurts of shyness, and am still looking for ways to further improve my communication skills also.

[Conan Stevens]

MY PERSONAL STORY:
unpopular geeky kid at school to movie star

DOn't take baby steps jump in feet first and go over the top, it is the fastest and easiest way to fix any fear - it is how I beat my fear of heights, straight off a 50 meter cliff.

Gain self confidence, get a new stylish haircut from a new hairdresser, get some new stylish clothes, work out, get in shape, do everything you can to gain self confidence...

... and stop worrying about what other people think of you. They aren't thinking about you and in general don't care about you, people have their own stuff going on in their heads and very little if any has to do with you so stop trying to guess what they are thinking about you.

And do as Eva said, that is great advice