How To Overcome Shyness and Social Anxiety While Still Being Your Natural Self

Imagine finding yourself in the only social event you will go to for the day, ready to talk to people. You’ve prepared yourself for the moment. You know you’re deathly shy and scared of talking to new people. But if you don’t take action in this one moment, you will regret it. There won’t be many more chances to make new friends or meet a hot date.
But despite your preparations, you freeze up when it’s time. You find yourself doing anything except talking to other people. Then, the event is over.
You are kicking yourself in your head and you dwell on the fact that you did nothing for the next hour … or even the entire week.
I’ve been there. I’ve had crippling shyness. It sucks. It still sucks. But you are not alone. There are hordes of perfectly kind, mentally healthy people who are just too shy to do meet others. To this day, I still run into people (even successful, attractive young women) who struggle with these issues and fail to reach their potential.
I’m going to show you a path you can take to overcome shyness and social anxiety and achieve the friendships and relationships you have always wanted. Sound too good to be true? I understand. With such a sweet deal, you have to do something in exchange. And that is to be patient and consistently work through the process. It will take time.

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Out of all the introversion and shyness books I’ve read, the book Single, Shy, and Looking for Love: A Dating Guide for the Shy and Socially Anxious by Dr. Shannon Kolakowski (affiliate link) is the best. Don’t get put off by the title. It’s a great book even if your social anxiety issues have nothing to do with dating; there are many great passages in the book on how to stop being shy and why you have it, for whatever goal you’re after (to succeed at work or make more friends).
ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
The book revolves around a new method of dealing with social anxiety called acceptance and commitment therapy (Dalyrmple and Herbert 2007). You allow your fears to be and see them as feelings that will come and go rather than try to cope with them. There are six parts of ACT:

Accepting and embracing experiences rather than avoiding them.
Being present in the moment.
Cognitive defusion: seeing how your thoughts affect your behavior.
Self-as-context: figuring out how your self-concept affects your coping style and breaking free of past constraints so you can be yourself.
Values configuration: figuring out what you really want.
Committed action.

How to Deal with Anxiety with Rejection
Symptoms: You feel lonelier and disliked after the slightest conflict. You’re likely to expect potential romantic candidates to reject you. You have strong anxiety associated with the expectation of rejection.
Action Steps:
Practice meditation with mindfulness awareness of your emotions as they pass through. There are plenty of guided meditations on Insight Timer that have this theme. Labeling emotions leads to lower fear and anxiety even if you can’t accept them (Kircanski, Lieberman, and Craske 2012).
Find out which situations involving potential rejection trigger your anxiety so you can be more aware of how you’re feeling when it happens. For example, I get anxious when: