Article 10686 of alt.support.shyness: From: Marc MeunierRecently there have been a lot of posts along the lines of "How do I become more confident", "How do I get from A to B", "How do I reverse my conditioning" etc. There have also been some musings that we need a FAQ. As it turns out, I've spent the last few months researching the psychology of behaviour change and I've decided to sum up everything I've learned to share it with you. I've tried as much as I can to stay away from the same old cliched self-help "advice", and instead filled it with lots of practical, scientific stuff that you can take advantage of immediately. I've worked pretty hard on this and there should be something here for everybody, even the seasoned shys. If you guys like, this could even become the foundation for a shyness FAQ. So please, everybody take the time to read this, I know it's long, and try out the strategies I've discussed. Your feedback would be greatly appreciated. Enjoy!Newsgroups: alt.support.shyness Subject: How To Change Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 11:00:22 -0700 Organization: Netrics Inc.
While it is possible that shyness is (partly) caused by your genetic make up, it is my belief that learned behaviour (the Nurture part) is much more powerful. There are so many cases of happy, healthy, vibrant and outgoing children having their personalities ravaged by abusive parents or other traumatic situations. And, believe it or not, the opposite is also true. Quiet, timid, withdrawn people can become more sociable in the same way. Catatonics and autists can be brought back to life, people with "learning disabilities" can become fully literate. It just takes the right tools.
The truth is, virtually any aspect of your personality can change. If it doesn't seem that way sometimes it's because the methods you've been using just aren't powerful enough. Think about your own experiences for a moment. Have you ever believed in something strongly only to have somebody prove you wrong? What happened to you then? You changed - instantly. A rape or a car accident can change your personality - and not a long, slow change, but immediately and powerfully.
Really, your mind is very flexible, and I will prove that in a bit. It's just that we also have the tendency to do things in patterns, so we don't take advantage of our capacity for change. I think the belief in your "True Self" or "Core Personality" is a dangerous one because it is so limiting. We look at the negative aspects of ourselves and say, "That's just the way I am. I'm being true to myself by behaving this way". We're denying ourselves whole realms of growth and improvement with this defeatist attitude. Our personalities are NOT like a balance; improving one thing won't sacrifice anything else. I'm positive that the strategies I'm going to talk about will work, but not if you're skeptical and do them half-heartedly.
The first step to changing yourself is understanding why you're doing what you're doing now. I'm going to give you a model of your brain that I've constructed from all kinds of sources, and we will use it to make changes later.
Now, going by that model, it's easy to see what causes our shyness. We have dangerous generalizations about ourselves and about other people, like "I'm not attractive", "Women/Men don't like me", "I'm not interesting", "I never know what to say" etc., which taint our perceptions and our behaviour. These generalizations are subconscious and firmly entrenched. On top of that, we have such painful anchors to being evaluated, being embarrassed and being rejected that we avoid the short-term problem of meeting people and asking for dates, even though the long-term goal of intimate relationships is very enticing.
The problem is wired right into our nervous systems, which is the culmination of everything we've ever done. Our conscious motives are peanuts compared to that.
If I've painted a morbid picture here, I apologize. It's easier to change than it sounds, but simply working with your consciousness WON'T work. You've got to work with your subconscious, and your nervous system. You've got to change your generalizations and your anchors, and the rest will come naturally.
I've omitted one vital piece of information till now. Remember how your brain is always taking in information and processing it?
***YOUR OWN THOUGHTS ARE PART OF THIS INPUT***.
This might sound silly at first, but it's true. When you go over an experience in your mind, you get the same emotional response as when it actually happened. It's a reinforcement. Consciously you can tell the difference, but your subconscious just processes and stores it along with everything else. Even if you don't believe this, at least admit to yourself that it might be possible, because it's central to many of the strategies I'm going to talk about. Remember, what we're after is results, not understanding.
Your thoughts are powerful tools for change. It's just that you've been using them poorly until now.
Now think of the implications of this. Every time you've relived your failures and rejections, every time you've beat yourself up with your self-talk, every time you've felt sorry for yourself, you've been reinforcing the problem, and possibly made it worse.
Now, I'm not saying you should never feel bad. It's a natural thing and it's bound to happen no matter what you do. But being excessively negative is unhealthy for you. Starting now, don't allow yourself to dwell on painful events from your past. If you find yourself feeling down for more than five minutes, do something - anything - to snap yourself out of it and move on.
Also, if there are any situations or people that are consistently making you feel bad about yourself, either do something to improve them or remove yourself from them.
For example, half a year ago I was hanging around with a certain group of people. One or two of them were my friends, but several of the rest quite obviously didn't like me, had no objections to showing me so, and nothing I could have done would have changed that. For a while I felt sorry for myself; I kept thinking "no one cares about me, no one likes me", etc. Finally, I realized what I was doing. I said to myself, "Fuck 'em all, what do I need them for anyway" and went and found a very accepting, caring and supportive group to hang around with instead. That one decision made a great difference in my life.
But, I digress. By now you must be nearly mad with anticipation - "What do I DO? Tell me what to DO!!!" :)
Here are some helpful things that are fairly simple that you can incorporate into your everyday life immediately.
When you ask yourself a difficult question, your subconscious goes to work looking for an answer, and it will always come up with something - even if the question is a self-defeating one. For example, if you ask yourself, "Why aren't I dating?" you'll get something like, "I'm too shy." or "I'm a loser". If you ask yourself, "Why don't people like me?" you'll get "I must be too ugly or unattractive" or "I mustn't be interesting enough". Even worse, your subconscious may then go to work looking through your databank of references and finding ones that support this idea so that it becomes a belief!
Remember, everything that's ever happened to you is stored in your memory. You've got references to support virtually any belief, but once you've got a belief, your brain tends to filter out the references that run contrary to it. There are probably lots of times when you were outgoing, but since you believe in your shyness, you don't notice or remember them - but your brain is quick to point out the times you've failed in a social situation. So the trick, then, is to ask yourself empowering questions.
Yourself:
Conversation:
Shit On By The Opposite Sex:
You get the idea.
Now that you know how anchors are formed, you can create your own! They can be really useful for changing your emotional state when you need it. I bet you feel really confident when you do something you're good at, like playing a sport, a musical instrument, or a game of chess. Wouldn't it be great if you could have that same feeling of confidence when you're at a social gathering or approaching someone for a date?
Here's how to create an anchor. Get yourself to feel the feeling you want to anchor, either by doing something physically or creating the experience in your head (trust me, it still works). At the same time, do something else, which will be your "trigger" for the feeling. The trigger can be a sight, a sound, a movement, or a touch. Once you've done it enough, it should become permanent. Keep in mind that if you'll be using anchors in social situations, you don't want your trigger to be anything embarrassing. It can be something simple like touching your finger to your forehead, tugging on your ear, scratching your nose, stroking your mustache or your chin, or a phrase... Now that you've created the anchor, whenever you want the emotional response just perform the trigger, and if you've done it right, your emotional state will change, as if by magic.
When we find a behaviour that works, we tend to get "locked" into it; we repeat it whenever that situation comes up. This is called a Strategy or Pattern. Avoiding people at social situations is a pattern, and so is not showing your feelings, and so is not asking for dates or doing it poorly, and so is feeling sorry for yourself afterwards. Remember, if your nervous system is geared toward shyness, your subconscious considers these things good, that's why I said these behaviours "work". But what you can do is, whenever you find yourself in an unproductive pattern, you do what's called a Pattern Interrupt. A Pattern Interrupt is anything sudden and unexpected that totally defies the pattern and therefore breaks its hold on you. It can be physical, like suddenly screaming at the top of your lungs or dancing wildly about the room. These are great if you're in the privacy of your own home or you don't mind making a fool of yourself. If you need something more subtle, you can do the interrupt in your head, such as experiencing a series of bizarre and totally inappropriate images or sounds.
Here's one way I used this successfully. I was trying to ask someone out and was doing a lot of "Ummm.... Uhhhh...." and just generally feeling idiotic and screwing it up. All of a sudden I just said "FUCK!", with feeling (She was the type that doesn't mind swearing). Instantly my internal voice went from "Argh, what do I say, what do I do, what if she turns me down..." etc. to "Just quit your damn stalling and DO IT, dumb-ass!!" and I asked her out. I didn't get the date, BTW, but I think that was because we came from VERY different worlds, and she just didn't have a good impression of me. Actually, I was quite proud of myself for getting past the fear and taking the risk. Here's another example. Supposing you really got a rise out of "Dead Poet's Society". A combination anchor/interrupt would be to declare "CARPE DIEM!!!" or "SIEZE THE DAY!!!" with gusto.
For any decision you make, your brain weighs the pleasures and pains of taking action and not taking action, but it will motivate you more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. If you're not getting the results you want, it's probably because you've linked too much pain to the action. There are two ways you can get around this - either find a way to lessen the pain associated with the action, or associate even more pain with not taking action. This changing of the rules is called Leverage.
For example, I would think all of us link pain to losing money. So what you do is, when you go into a social situation, bring a few buddies with you. Decide on a goal that you're capable of meeting ("I will meet X new people" or "I will ask for X dates" or "I won't leave without X phone numbers"), and make a bet with your friends that if you don't meet your goal, you owe them, say, $20 or $50. Make sure these are people who will hold you to your word. Now, normally, you probably link quite a bit of pain to meeting people, but I would think the pain of losing $50 would be even greater! If your goal was to meet five people, you'd probably introduce yourself to the first five people you ran into!
I think that really, we don't link much pain to our shyness at all. If we did, we wouldn't have this problem. There is the loneliness, but it's what we've been feeling all our lives. We're used to it, it's nothing new. And by avoiding people, we feel safe. Change is perceived as the threat; it is dangerous because it would place demands on us we might not be able to meet. Reversing this imbalance can go a long way toward getting what we want.
It's common knowledge that the way you're feeling is reflected in your body. If you're depressed, you frown, your shoulders droop, your back is hunched, you tend to look down at the floor. If you're happy, you smile, you stand straight, you look up.
What you might not know is that this works in reverse. By changing your body, you can change the way you feel. If you don't believe this, try it out. Smile and laugh for no good reason. Dance around a bit. Feels good, doesn't it? Now frown and hunch over. Bury your head in your hands. Sucks, eh?
A good example of this is when a friend confided in me that I had a "geeky walk". It was true; I used to drag my feet and I would look down as I passed people. So what I did was figure out how to "walk confident" (And this took some practice...) and I made the effort to keep my gaze steady and make a little eye contact with people. Sure enough, not only did the physical change make me feel more confident, but the way people responded to me as well. I began to get smiles and glances from some of the women (or maybe I always had and just never noticed before), and that is a GREAT feeling!
Also, in case you're not doing this already, regular exercise does wonders for your self-confidence.
Words can be amazingly powerful if you know how to use them. Read any book on the psychology of linguistics and influencing people and you'll see what I mean. I won't go into that in too much detail here, but I want to say one thing - Speed Seduction!!!! Kidding, kidding...
Words can be anchors, and quite effective ones at that. But different people respond to different words differently. For example, go up to a person who's very religious and go, "Jesus H. CHRIST that pisses me off!!!" and see what kind of response you get! Go up to street trash and say the same thing and they'll probably say "Yeah, right on, man!"
So if you consistently use words that make you feel bad, either in conversation or in your self-talk, replace that word with something that gives you a neutral response, or even a positive anchor. Examples:
Sure, this is a bit silly, but the silliness of it might even make you feel better. You can also create a positive response where there wasn't one before, or enhance a positive response the same way - use more powerful words.
On second thought...
While the uses to which Jeffries and his followers put Speed Seduction
are just a wee bit... despicable Your language, and your behaviour in general, not only anchor yourself,
but other people as well. There's no way around it. If you consistently
create an emotional state in somebody, they eventually anchor that state to
you, even if you weren't doing it on purpose. If you whine and complain,
put yourself or others down, or just talk about shocking or inappropriate
things consistently around somebody, they will definitely resent you on some
level, even though they might not be aware of it.
So the theory behind SS is to use your language to put someone in a
romantic or sexual state consistently and then anchor it to yourself. If
this sounds devious and manipulative, remember that the people who are good
at sex and relationships do this naturally anyway, without even being aware
of it. "Chemistry" is a myth perpetrated by the outgoing to keep us shys
down.
So next time you're with someone you want to get involved with, ask
yourself "What kind of things would this person find romantic/sexual?" and
then keep bringing those things up, just to see what happens :)
Metaphors are an especially powerful extension of Transformational
Vocabulary. Remember how I said that your subconscious works on imagery,
symbols, and metaphor? By using metaphor you can sometimes communicate
directly with your subconscious and achieve surprising results.
For example, there was a man who was 170 pounds overweight. He was very
spiritual; when asked he said "his body was just a vehicle; it's the soul
that's important". He was persuaded to accept a new metaphor, "My body is a
temple". Now for a religious person, a temple is something to be revered.
You would never damage or deface it. What happened? He lost 130 pounds in
the space of a few months, that's what.
What are your metaphors? Fill these out right now:
Now, what _should_ they be? For it to work, they have to be things that
have powerful, personal meaning for you. You wouldn't choose a crucifix or
a temple, for example, if you weren't very religious. Examples:
Now just adopt these new metaphors and see what you get. Sometimes just
making the change in your head is enough, but you might have to do a little
anchoring and reinforcement to get it to stick.
Okay, now the really good stuff. Here we're going to work on changing
your beliefs, and your pain anchors, which should get rid of your shyness
for good. But first, we need to know exactly what they are.
First, brainstorm your beliefs. Examine the thoughts that run through
your head when you're in your shy-pattern. Also look at the way you talk
about yourself to others and your self-talk. It's important that you be
completely honest with yourself and be as thorough as possible. Examples:
Now, your anchors. Make two lists, pleasurable experiences that you move
toward, and painful experiences that you avoid. Rank them in descending
order starting with the experiences you take the most action to gain/avoid.
Again, it's important that you're very honest with yourself. Don't list
them in the order you'd like them to be in ideally, but examine your actual
behaviour.
When you're done, you should notice some definite conflicts that would
cause your shyness. In my case, on my pleasures side Love and Intimacy were
high up, but Safety, Security and Comfort were at the top. On my pains
side, Evaluation, Rejection and Humiliation were at the top, while
Loneliness and Depression were toward the bottom (remember, we're looking at
the amount of action we take to _avoid_ these feelings).
Here's something you can try that may help. Think about the way you
_want_ to be, your ideal self, and brainstorm what your pleasures/pains
would have to be for you to be that way. Think about what anchors you'd
need to add and remove, and then reorder the lists accordingly. This alone
might cause some nifty changes...
You've got three basic choices when it comes to beliefs. Remember, your
brain tends to filter out references that run contrary to your beliefs, so
one approach is to go over your beliefs and references consciously and sort
them out. This is referred to in clinical psychology as Cognitive Therapy,
and, in my opinion, is the _worst_ way to go about it. I'll share the
process with you anyway in case the other options don't work.
Go through the following questions with each of the beliefs you need to
change:
Ugh. That hurt even writing it. But that might've at least weakened the
beliefs and their hold on you, if nothing else.
Option two is probably the best but the hardest to achieve. Remember,
"powerful experiences" such as a rape or car accident can smash through
beliefs as if they were paper. Unfortunately, it's hard to come up with a
power experience to cure shyness (short of a woman coming up to you, saying
"you know, you drive us all WILD, baby!" and making love to you right there
- I wish).
Instead, most of us progress in small steps - starting conversations,
getting comfortable with conversations, getting a date, becoming comfortable
with dating, starting a relationship, becoming comfortable with
relationships, etc. which could take months, years, or a lifetime.
So we're left with option three - use positive references consistently
and repeatedly.
Start a new list entitled "Affirmations". Go over your list of negative
beliefs, and for each one, create a positive statement to counteract it.
Include a reference from your life if possible. It's important that you
follow these rules:
Right now you're probably asking yourself, "So why am I telling myself
all this stuff that obviously isn't true?" Remember, your own thoughts are
part of the input your brain takes in, and it doesn't question anything, it
just processes and stores everything. At first your beliefs will reject
these statements, but with enough consistency, repetition and references,
your beliefs will eventually change. Studies show it takes about a month of
daily repetition, but that depends on how often you go over your
affirmations. The best thing to do would be to print them out on a card and
keep them with you during the day, and just read over them whenever you get
the chance. As you read them, imagine how good it will feel to be that way;
really get into it.
Within one month of implementing this technique, the author of the book I
got this from went from hiding behind plants at parties to dating
regularly. He is now in his second marriage and makes his living as an
author and motivational speaker.
Hypnotherapy is similar to the technique above, but it communicates with
your subconscious much more directly, and you can get results within a few
sessions if all goes well. The downside of it is that it is expensive
(around $100/hour) and if your therapist misses something important you've
wasted a lot of money for nothing. The alternative is to learn
self-hypnosis. Probably the best thing to do is get a therapist to teach it
to you, but there are lots of good books on the subject as well. I won't go
into it in too much detail here because it's somewhat difficult to do and
I'm not at all qualified to teach it, but here are the basics:
These two techniques, affirmations and self-hypnosis, are effective ways
of improving anything in your life, not just shyness. I'd suggest setting
aside 15-30 minutes every day to work on these, it's well worth the effort.
NLP is a fascinating concept that I'd like to share with you. It's
probably vastly different than any psychology you're used to, and in fact
its is rejected by many clinical psychologists for being "unscientific", but
it has all kinds of applications in therapy and self-improvement, so I
believe it's worth learning.
NLP was founded by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, a mathematician and
linguist respectively. Needless to say their approach was quite unique.
What they did was study with some of the world's best therapists (Milton
Erickson, Virginia Satir, and Fritz Perls mainly). Whenever something
happened to cause a change in the subject, rather than examining what the
therapist _said_ he did, and what the subject _said_ happened (both
conscious functions), they observed what the therapist was doing
_unconsciously_, and what happened in the subject's _subconscious_. Then
they modeled their therapeutic approach after these otherwise unnoticed
processes that they had observed. They learned to produce changes in a
person in minutes that would take conventional therapists months, or years
to accomplish. For example, NLPers can cure a phobia in less than an hour,
and often in less than 15 minutes. If you don't believe this, there are
lots of NLP practitioners on the net that you can talk to who can share
their own experiences with it.
I'm going to share some of the NLP I've picked up that I believe is
relevant to shyness; for more information, check out books by: Richard
Bandler, John Grinder, Robert Dilts, Tad James, and Steven and Connirae
Andreas.
First, the assumption that your subconscious doesn't differentiate
between real experiences and mental ones is extremely important in NLP.
Very rarely, if ever, will they get you to physically DO anything; rather,
they'll sit you down, get you to imagine some things, create some pictures
and experiences in your mind, do some anchoring, and when you're done,
you've changed. It's almost magical.
Anchoring, BTW, is a fundamental part of NLP. Being able to control your
emotional states is a _very_ powerful tool. Often what they'll do is get
you to experience something unpleasant, then experience it again with an
anchor, like confidence, happiness, or courage. This will totally change
your evaluation of that experience!
Submodalities are the sensory qualities of the things you perceive in
your mind. Changing these can change your emotional state to a certain
extent. For example, images that have very bright, vivid colors, that are
large, and that are close up tend to be more emotionally intense than dim,
black and white, small, faraway images. Similarly, for sounds, there's
volume, tonality, speed, duration, harmony/cacophony, and for kinesthetics
there's temperature, texture, vibration, pressure, movement, weight, etc.
Of particular interest are the techniques for overcoming fear. All fear
really is, is a warning signal that you're about to experience something
that you've anchored to pain. A phobia is the same thing but with a much
stronger anchor. So all you need to do to overcome fear is to break that
anchor - change the feelings you've associated with that situation. This is
called "dissociation".
So without further ado, here is the NLP Fast Phobia/Trauma Cure! This is
a dissociation technique that relieves fears/phobias and removes unwanted
emotional residue from a traumatic situation.
Now for some notes. It's essential that you remain impartial (emotionally
detached) throughout the movie. If you find yourself still experiencing the
fear, you're going to have to experiment with it a bit until you get it
right, especially if you have a very vivid imagination. Remember to stay in
your seat and don't become part of the movie till it's over. Some things
you can try:
Be creative. This technique WILL work under the right conditions, but
it's different for everybody.
NLP has a very fast technique for changing beliefs. It's based on the
observation that whenever a belief changes, there's a transition from state
to state that looks like this:
Conviction -> Doubt -> Disbelief -> Open to a New Belief -> Uncertainty ->
New Conviction
and the assumption that those states can be anchored just like anything
else. Here's the pattern:
Once you've gotten rid of your disempowering beliefs and anchors, you're
ready to take on new behaviour. You could just do this by practice, but
you're bound to fail and embarrass yourself for a while that way. The New
Behaviour Generator can help with that.
I can personally vouch for the NBG, because I have some experience with
acting, which is very similar. When I do a play I tend to model myself
after my character backstage as well as onstage, and the last time I did a
play I noticed several women gravitating toward me, and I had all kinds of
dating opportunities. It's too bad that the effect didn't last, but it was
because I still believed in my shyness deep down. Now I know better! :=)
I think the strategy of mental rehearsal is a very important one that we
tend to overlook. We often fantasize about what it will be like once we
have a significant other, but rarely do we imagine things like approaching
people, starting conversations and asking for dates because these things are
painful to us. Or if we do imagine those things, we tend to see the worst
case scenario, which just makes us feel worse. Starting now, make it a
habit to use the NBG, or at least visualize yourself socializing
successfully, and dealing with rejection and embarrassment effectively.
Well, that's everything. I think if you go back over all the strategies
I talked about, you'll notice that most of them are quick and easy. That's
because they attack the cause of the problem, not the symptoms. Now all you
need is a little motivation to start using them regularly. I understand
that you have reason to be skeptical about a lot of it (esp. NLP), but my
advice is this: don't trust the scientific authorities or anybody else, or
even your own beliefs, conditioning and common sense. TRY THEM OUT, and
trust your own senses. Test them yourself. I think you'll be pleasantly
surprised.
Good luck!
To get in touch with the author of this essay, Marc Meunier,
his email address is meunier@ionline.net.
Metaphor
Part 3: The Heavy Artillery
Sample pleasures Sample pains
Love Success Rejection Anger
Freedom Intimacy Frustration Loneliness
Security Adventure Depression Failure
Power Passion Humiliation Guilt
Comfort Health
Changing Your Beliefs
Affirmations
Samples:
Hypnosis
Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP)
Submodalities
Fear
The Belief-Change Technique
The New Behaviour Generator
Conclusion
References
To assist web-search engines in finding this page: shyness shyness
shyness shyness shyness shyness shyness shyness shyness social phobia social
phobia social phobia social phobia social phobia.