The Right Way to Deal with Chronic Shyness

Shyness as a psychological condition is bad enough, but chronic shyness is even worse. In order to deal with it effectively, you’ll need to explore a whole new territory.

If you are chronically shy, then you’re past the phase of feeling somewhat uneasy when you’re talking with new people. Individuals with chronic shyness don’t feel comfortable in almost any social situation and they avoid strangers like the plague.

To add to this, when they are in social situations, they’re usually completely silent and they’re constantly worried that people are judging them. The chronic version of shyness doesn’t only make social encounters hard; it makes them a living hell.

What is a person to do in this situation? Here are some ideas that as a communication coach, I’ve seen extremely shy people use to great success.

Hope and Be Realistic At the Same Time

It’s common for chronically shy people to give up hope altogether and believe they’ll always be like that. However, this idea is not grounded in reality.

The fact is that many people who are extremely shy make significant improvements. Any form of shyness is essentially a cognitive and behavioral condition. By changing the way you think and learning new types of behavior, you can overcome it.

At the same time, you don’t want to go to the other extreme and start believing there is some magical solution out there that will turn you socially confident overnight. This will only make you buy into quick fixes, perhaps spend a lot of money on them, and then when they fail to provide the promised results, you lose all hope again.

Overcoming chronic shyness does take time and steady practice. Substantial progress is usually achieved within 6 to 12 months using cognitive-behavioral methods, which are some of the most effective and well documented methods for emotional transformation out there.

It is this mix of hope and realism that will put you on the right path. It will get you motivated to change and help you hold your ground in front of personal development challenges you may encounter.

Make Really Small and Continuous Steps

When you have extreme shyness, you can’t demand of yourself to just start talking with strangers and be really outgoing all of a sudden. Pushing yourself too much out of your comfort zone will only reinforce your anxiety in social situations and strengthen the shyness.

The way you want to do this is by being absolutely gentle. You want to set for yourself very small personal development steps and to stick to them. Perhaps you start by smiling more in social situation, then saying a few more words than usual, then moving on to something slightly harder.

Overall, you’ll make huge progress this way. It’s not because you’re taking huge leaps at a time, it’s because you keep taking those small steps persistently, day by day. And thus, all those steps add up to quite a lot.

Challenge Your Limiting Beliefs

If you want to beat chronic shyness, you’ll need to address your thinking along with your behavior. People who are extremely shy have a lot of limiting beliefs about themselves and how others see them, and they often have low self-esteem.

Identify your limiting beliefs and weed them out by consciously changing your thinking. As you practice this and you keep at it, you’ll find it easier to see things in a brighter light and to become more sociable. This is what annihilates shyness once and for all.