My friend, Joe Raffetto, in Borrego Springs, California, is always the first guest invited to a party. His generous laugh makes everyone around him feel like the wittiest, most fascinating person in the room. And he's so quick to make new friends, from ne'er-do-wells and rednecks to engineers and ad execs, that his network has produced three marriages and provides him with an endless supply of uproarious stories.
At a recent dinner, everyone cried with laughter as he acted out a story about how his roommate worked a shift as a short-order cook while tripping on peyote ("It was terrible! I had to serve cheeseburgers to giant praying mantises all day!"). Joe's such a virtuoso at commanding a group's attention that I always assumed he was a natural storyteller and never had to work at it.
So I was shocked that night to learn that there was a time when Joe was petrified of talking to strangers, filling his social interactions with "pointless yammering and awkward silences." He thought he'd never get over it.
In thinking my friend had always been a charming devil, I made a common mistake, says Bernardo Carducci, director of Indiana University Southeast's Shyness Research Institute. "We assume that confident people were born that way. That puts us at a disadvantage because then we say, 'I could never do that.' " We compare ourselves to the most popular person in the room—or on TV—rather than to people who are similar to us. When we see a celebrity like George Clooney on talk shows—suave and funny, flirting easily with the audience—we feel inadequate. But we forget that he's done this hundreds of times and has an army of handlers to groom and prep him. When we watch The Tonight Show and conclude that icons of charisma are born, not made, we are not only wrong—we sabotage our chances of achieving our social potential.
The reality is that most socially confident people deliberately learn specific skills, like displaying friendly body language, understanding the predictable format of conversations with new people, and focusing on the topic rather than on how one is being perceived. In Joe Raffetto's case, he learned to become outgoing by volunteering to give speeches about dolphins to schoolchildren.
Once we begin making realistic social comparisons, we realize that excellent social performance is not automatic—even for the most skilled. "Building confidence is like learning to swing a golf club. It boils down to knowing what the critical skills are and practicing them," says Carducci. "Even Tiger Woods still practices for hours every day."
Our bodies may be finely tuned machines, but the signals they send us are calibrated for the Stone Age. "In our hunter-gatherer past, we did not have societies in which one could simply jump from one group to another," says Jon Maner, a social psychology professor at Florida State University. "Rejection or ostracism could very well have spelled death." And so we evolved to be highly sensitive to signs of both social acceptance and disapproval. Situations that were outright dangerous then—like approaching a stranger—are often harmless now, but our bodies don't know that and rev into overdrive. As a result, the nervous system that's designed to prepare us for social encounters often overheats, short-circuiting our resolve and thwarting our best intentions.
The solution, though, is counterintuitive. The human mind is an exquisite maze: Sometimes if you want to go to the right, you have to start out walking left. Trying to tune out anxious thoughts may make us more self-conscious; fetishizing the confidence of a George Clooney or an Oprah Winfrey, ironically, makes us less likely to attain it. But by taking small risks, accumulating a pattern of successes, and taking credit when we do something right, anyone can become dramatically more confident in the most daunting social situations.
Understanding Your Body's Signals
Social anxiety—the distress we feel over being evaluated by others—hits people at different times. Alan, a mechanic, has trouble breaking the ice at parties. "I just never had that ability to walk into a group and start talking," he says. "It always seems halted, and you get the feeling that people are drifting away."
Most shy people would be surprised to learn that 40 percent of all young people today describe themselves that way—and the rate continues to creep up by about 1 percent every year. Researchers attribute the rise in self-identified shyness to reduced face-to-face communication and an impatience with the typically slow pace of building social relationships.
Shyness can also be inherited: In a study by Jerome Kagan at Harvard University, about 20 percent of infants reacted to stimuli like new toys by squirming and whimpering. Many of these infants developed into children who were more fearful than others—if their parents didn't expose them gradually to new and disquieting situations, through which the fear response was extinguished. In other words, even for babies that may have been genetically predisposed to shyness, gentle learning overrides genetics.
New research shows that some who are shy have a variant gene involved in the flow of serotonin, making them especially reactive to stress—which may explain why, before a big event, some people respond to their increasing alertness with anxiety, while others stay cool. All this suggests that shyness may be a temperament that's unlikely to change. But even if shyness has a genetic component, and shy people never see their social anxiety slip to zero, there are proven strategies to help anyone interact successfully.
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