To explain this lets look at a chair. One could argue that the seat of the chair is the most important. Another would make the same argument for the legs or backing of a chair. However, we can all agree that we need all parts of the chair for it to be functional. The same logic goes towards office meetings or any group project. Often the ones who talk the most are the ones who seem to be the most important but every group needs those who help to actively listen to them, encourage them, summarize the information, suggest different opinions, test the reality of ideas etc etc.

I find that those who are shy will often take the role of the active listener, and opinion seeker when the group already has enough people who wish to give a magnitude of ideas. These same shy people can become the opinion givers when the situation presents itself that there is no one who wishes to share their ideas. Now the real issue with managers or leaders of these meetings or groups is to figure out who plays which role within the group, and how they can fit in to have an effective group.

Humans use words to describe the world around them. When we look at the tall, wooden brown things on our lawns  we call them trees. The problem is that when we label anything, we then see the words we use for them, and not the whole diversity of the forest. What if you were to meet someone new, and all you knew was that he/she was an introvert. Immediately our brains pull out this list that assumes that they don’t have many friends, they will not want to converse with others, they won’t like you etc. Already without meeting this person you have judged them and it limits the potential of anyone.

The terms introvert and extrovert may be used to describe where these people go to find energy within their lives. The introvert likes self-reflection, while the extrovert likes reflect through others. Both can have enriching lives and both have there pros and cons. One introvert could be the class clown who needs time in life to self-reflect. Similarly it could be someone who stays away from meeting others. An extrovert could be the shy guy who enjoys relating to others whenever he can, or he could be the annoying manic who needs to talk to everyone all the time.

So the next time you ask someone if they are an introvert or an extrovert, what do you really think you’ll learn from this? I know I never ask anyone this question because I don’t want to limit the whole specturm of personality down to to such simple words.

Everyone has a spot in their own lives where they use to go into nature just to be away from everything. It can be in the forest, near a creek, on a mountain, anywhere. In fact my favourite place when I was in highschool and when it was winter was to go into an open farmer’s field near my house and to just sit there at night listening to the snow blow by. I’d watch the snow piling up, hear only the snow falling, I’d feel the cold breeze and the wet snow. These places in nature help to open our awareness of all our senses in a calming environment. It is sort of like meditation but I find it much easier because you are completely immersed into a calm sense.

These spots in nature for us can help us in life as well. When we are in these places we focus on being complete stress free and open to the world. It is a state of mind that we can transfer over to the real world situations. When we feel stress or anxiety in our lives we can think about the spot in nature and attempt to calm the mind. This strategy works best when we go to this spot often and really engage in using all ours senses to feel, smell, see, hear and taste the environment. So next time you are in nature try to open up your awareness and bring this enlightenment back to the real world.

I want my readers to write down their fears in life. For example a fear of heights, a fear of speaking in public, a fear of commitment. All of these stem from the basic fear of the worst happening. For example when we speak in public we fear that our pants will fall off and we’ll stutter on every word. We fear that if we go sky diving that our parachute will malfunction and we’ll die. In the extreme cases this may happen but it is highly unlikely.

Yet these fears represent the situations that are highly meaningful to us. I always see parents fearful of their children when they are on the play structures or in the grocery market. The fear comes from the fact that it is their child and they care so much about them. Otherwise situations that have no meaning quite often have no fear associated with it.

Just think about the last school presentation you did. Afterwards, even if you did a really bad job, you feel a sense of accomplishment in that you were able to face your fear. In that sense there is no failure when you are facing your fears. This is food for thought for those who wish to pursue in their New Years Resolutions with facing shyness as a goal.

Many posts to come in the new year. Look forward to enjoying them.

In one interview Viktor Frankl said that distress can be summed up through an equation:

Distress=  Suffering – Meaning

What this means is that distress comes from suffering without meaning. When he was in the concentration camp he witnessed much suffering and found that those who were better adapted were those who had meaning in life (family, friends, a personal goal in life). Suffering with meaning is seen as the most adaptive way to cope when a person is subjected to such conditions.

People who suffer from social anxiety suffer from embarrassment and anxieties everyday. In many ways they feel distress which can lead to learned helplessness and giving up on meeting people or further the relations with people they already know. What we can learn from Viktor Frankl is that through finding meaning we can stop the distress we experience. Meaning can come from many areas but usually it come from realizing that we care for meeting new friends, getting to know our family and friends more and lead a fulfilling social life.

Level 1— Making eye contact with people in my community such as store clerk.

Level 2— Talking to friends and family.

Level 3— Saying hello to people in my community.

Level 4— Starting a conversation with someone in class

Level 5— Being more involved at work, talking to customers, co-workers.

Level 6— Calling up an old friend you haven’t talked to in years.

Level 7— Joining a club and meeting new people.

Level 8— Rising my hand in class, making suggestions in work meetings.

Level 9— Talking to unfamiliar people at parties.

Level 10— Asking a person from the opposite sex out, Oral presentations.

Now your list will be more privately written and should appeal towards your own goals. Remember that just like weight lifting everyone has their own goals. For each level write down the areas for which you would like to work on and how it ranks amongst your level of anxiety. Having this list is the first step towards using these “mental weights” in your own life.

The idea is that when you can master the lower level situations that it will become less difficult to do the most anxiety prone ones. The may be able to triumph over your fears in small doses at a time. Any attempt at these levels is seen as a accomplishment.  For example if you made eye contact with the store clerk and said hello but your face went red and you stumbled upon your words, see this as an accomplishment!

Over time you will be able to overcome these fears. With the higher level goals you may have to create your own situations for overcoming them. In the case of doing a presentation, you may have to put into place a situation where you can do that, or find a place to do it. In fact Toastmasters is a great place to practice the presentation skills in a compassionate understanding environment. In latter posts I will talk more about this type of therapy.

The self-preservation theory of social anxiety states that people become shy when they are concerned with the evaluations of others. These individuals are motivated to preserve the desirable impressions they make on others but they doubt that they can successfully make these impressions through social engagement. In turn they will become very quiet and they will not say much at all. Many people may think that these individuals simply do not care or are displaying apathy, however they are just fearful. Like perfectionist these individuals will try to hold on to the ideal image of themselves. A situation that creates embarrassment would cause them to sink deeper into their “shells”. Along with this these individuals feel a lack of competence in their abilities to present an ideal image when talking and they see every social engagement as a potential for threatening their self-esteem.

For many who are shy the hardest part of proactively engaging in social situations is that people will find out that they are shy. Otherwise if they do not talk they will be labelled as just quiet, or not interested. In everyway shy people must become comfortable with the situations that create the embarrassment if they wish to help themselves. The redness of the face, and stumbling on words will happen quite often, and there is no way around that. However, the path towards being comfortable in social situations requires that you face these challenges head on everyday.

Self Determination Theory takes the perspective that human beings have a free will to master their inner forces rather than being passively controlled. While many of us fall into being passive and alienated in life we still have the ability to become proactive and engaged in our lives. Self Determination is based on the assumption that people are active organisms with the innate tendency to fulfill psychological growth. Therefore it is human nature to be positive and persistent throughout life and the fact that people show considerable effort and commitment should be considered normative, rather then exceptional. Self Determination Theory postulates that people have three inherent psychological needs; the needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness. These psychological needs are defined as universal necessities that affect many aspects of happiness, creativity and goal progress. When these needs are not nurtured the person can show signs of self-derogation with depression and problems with self-regulation.
The need for autonomy is the person’s drive to act upon their own choice and to feel a sense of control over the outcomes. The greater the autonomy the more this individual will act accordingly to self-endorsed values and intentions. Teachers who use autonomy-supportive teaching styles create greater intrinsic motivation and curiosity amongst their classrooms. Similarly, parents who adopt the autonomy-supportive parenting style have children that are more likely to spontaneously explore their surroundings. Competence is the inherent desire to people effective within their environment. People who have a high need for competence will attempt to engage in their world and gain mastery over their surroundings. Positive feedback has been seen to promote feelings of feeling responsible for the success of the performance. Competence is seen as having a propensity to having an energy source that operates in situations that are challenging. Relatedness is the universal drive to interact with and feel connected to the people around oneself. It is the sense and desire to experience, self-organize and integrate the self into the lives of others. This need is seen as one’s desire to bring meaning into their lives through integrating with others.
When treating shyness it is important to question whether you are incorporating these psychological needs into your attempts for being more social. When these needs are considered then the motivation that arises for overcoming the fear of shyness is intrinsic and not extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation is having a desire to do something only to avoid a punishment or to seek an external reward such as money. People who focus on extrinsic motivations will eventually burn out and feel alienated by their goals and pursuits. The perfect example of this is with the movie Office Space and how the main character only has his job for a means of money. Eventually in the movie he quits and turns to crime, but it’s a comedy so it has a funny ending if you haven’t seen it.
Anyways, there is a lot of research on this one topic and I will have to write many posts on this. I believe highly in the Self Determination Theory and believe that facilitating intrinsic motivation towards our social engagements is a great step to helping with our shyness.
References:
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human
behaviour. New York: Plenum.
Deci, E., & Ryan, R. (1987). The support of autonomy and the control of behaviour. The
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 53, 1024-1037.

Traditionally shyness has been depicted as a ‘female trait’ alongside with compassion, gullibility, moodiness, unpredictability and soft-spokeness. However, since the 21^st century the boundary between female and male shyness has been disappearing. Shyness has become more widely known as a social problem for both sexes, and in this post I will examine how this change came about.

In the 1950’s women were encouraged to be the so-called “good wives” for their husbands. The term “good wives” meant that women had their place in maintaining an orderly house while the men worked hard for creating money. Women were expected to be more modest and shy towards their husbands, and conversely men were expected to be assertive in nature. There was a large distinction between male and female roles which was created by the society they lived in.

By the time the 1980’s came about shyness was considered a failure to develop skills of self-disclosure, and assertiveness. Shyness was stereotyped as a ‘feminine trait’ and was seen as undesirable, especially for men. Therefore shyness was thrust upon women to adopt, while men were pushed away from this trait. Women having to accept the role of being shy created an internal struggle for seeking independence from such societal norms. Over the course of time women fought and were accepted to be considered equal amongst men and the role of women changed completely. *I know there is a whole history there and I have included references for those who wish to look further into the history.

The question that arises is ‘What is the new modern day woman’? The picture of this post is of Angelina Jolie because I believe she embodies what it means to be this modern day women. She is strong, assertive, beautiful, inspiring, and responsible; yet she is also caring, kind, compassionate, and sometimes even shy. Statistics show that there is a greater prevalence of shyness amongst women in the population, but I would argue that women feel more comfortable disclosing that they are shy while men are afraid to. And so the distinction between male and female shyness I believe should be non-existent. Men and women who have shyness share more similarities then differences and there should not be this cultural push to label one sex as ‘more shy’.

References:

McDaniel, P.A. (2001) Shrinking violets and casper milquetoasts: shyness and

heterosexuality from the roles of the fifties to the rules of the nineties, Journal of

Social History, 2001, 34, 3, 547–68.