Royane Real
Overcoming Shyness
By Royane Real
Author of “Your Guide to Finding Friends, Making Friends and Keeping Friends
Do you suffer from shyness?
If you are a person who is shy, you have probably wished many times that you could just wave a magic wand, hoping that suddenly all your shyness will just be gone. Perhaps every time you face walking into a room filled with people you wish that you could just suddenly be confident and filled with self esteem. You wish you suddenly knew how to be friendly and popular.
Instead, your shyness somehow manages to cling to you, every where you go.
Being shy doesn’t need to destroy your life. Many people who are inwardly shy can still go on to make very successful lives for themselves. Shy people can still have many friends who care about them deeply.
But creating a happy social life and successful career doesn’t happen easily and automatically when you are shy. You will have to keep trying and experimenting with different behavior and different thinking to see what works for you. You cannot magically change from being a very shy person to suddenly being outgoing and extroverted.
Changing from being a shy person to becoming a person who is more socially confident takes a lot of work and practice. In many cases it takes a lot of time. You may even need a therapist, coach, or friend to help you get over some of the rough places where you do not know what you should do next.
I know, I used to suffer from severe shyness for many years.
A lot of shyness comes because we are filled with negative self judgments about ourselves. And we start to believe that other people around us are judging us harshly too.
This may or may not be true.
In some cases, we simply need to stop judging ourselves in advance. We need to stop believing that others are judging us negatively. Maybe those other people really are judging us, or maybe they aren’t. But is that really so terrible? Our self esteem really comes from inside ourselves and is not created by others.
We can’t really make other people like us. If we try too hard to be nice, lots of people still won’t like us. Some people will like us and some people won’t. We have to accept that, and start looking for the people who will like us and accept us as we truly are. But that means we have to get out into the world and start mingling.
We need to stop hiding behind our shy behavior and make more of an attempt to talk and interact with others. We have to be willing to show more of our true selves.
Fortunately, there is a lot more research into effective treatments for shyness than there used to be.
Most of us shy people cannot simply will ourselves to become less shy, but we can start learning how to think and behave in new ways, if we get some guidance along the way.
The above article was written by Royane Real, author of Your Guide to Finding Friends, Making Friends and Keeping Friends
If you want to learn how to improve your social life and overcome your shyness, download it today. It’s available at http://www.lulu.com/real )
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