Take A Good Look At What You Fear Most
"If you're shy, you tend to keep your speech to only the most important things and only say something when you have to," says Alan. To begin forming closer bonds with others, change one circumstance at a time, suggests Carducci. If you start volunteering, you've switched from home to a new setting. "Once you're there, all they expect of you is your time. You meet the same people again and again, so they get used to you and you get used to them." Eventually, you might ask someone to do something in a different context, like go out for coffee.
Erika Hilliard, author of Living Fully with Shyness and Social Anxiety, describes how a client took an incremental approach to forging stronger relationships at work. The woman tended to keep her face blank, so her first goal was to look up and make eye contact. A few days later, she added a greeting. "Even after she just had an open face, she could not believe the difference," says Hilliard. "People she had thought were stuck up were talking to her, and she was exhilarated."
Use your particular anxieties as a road map to the areas where you most desire change. Conan O'Brien has said he knew that performing live comedy was what he had to do because there was nothing in the world that terrified him more. But when he first debuted as host of NBC's Late Night in 1993, ratings were abysmal and reviews were even worse. Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote that O'Brien was "a living collage of annoying nervous habits" and implored him to "get the heck off TV." But he stuck it out, and years later, the critics ate their words. Shales himself wrote that O'Brien became "one of the greatest examples of a self-makeover in television history."
It's such a remarkable testament to the power of practice that the story gets repeated again and again—though O'Brien himself would just as soon forget those days. "No matter what I accomplish, they'll be bringing up those early tough times," O'Brien told NPR. "If a giant meteor was headed towards Earth, and I quickly constructed a rocket ship and flew out there and deflected the meteor, saving the Earth from certain destruction, the headline would be O'Brien saves earth, after rocky start."
Some are brave enough to try "implosion"—tackling a challenge so intimidating that once you've made it through, your original goal no longer fazes you. Legendary psychologist Albert Ellis pioneered the "shame-attacking exercise" in 1933 at age 19, when he decided to approach every woman who sat down alone on a bench at the New York Botanical Garden. "Thirty walked away immediately," he told the New York Times. "I talked with the other 100, for the first time in my life, no matter how anxious I was. Nobody vomited and ran away. Nobody called the cops."
And Ellis learned he wouldn't die from rejection. Of the first 130 women he went up to, he got only one date, he said, but "with the second 100, I got good and made a few dates"—and, eventually, got to be "one of the best picker-uppers of women in the United States."
Comedic superstar Will Ferrell, who once considered himself painfully shy, forced himself to do crazy things in public. "In college, I would push an overhead projector across campus with my pants just low enough to show my butt," Ferrell told People. "Then my friend would incite the crowd to be like, 'Look at that idiot!' That's how I got over being shy."
The difference between O'Brien and Ferrell and people who remain inhibited may simply be that, instead of assuming that they were stuck with their anxieties, these luminaries chose to believe that they weren't. Then they figured out how to challenge and transform themselves. The lesson? Even exquisite discomfort has a silver lining.
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