~3 Months of Experiments
A lot of positive change has come since I last wrote.
As I mentioned in the last post as well, I had set overcoming social fear as my number one priority, and in doing so over the last ~3 months I have kind of become a completely different person. I believe that if I keep going on the same trajectory despite all the hardships for the time frame of a few more months, I would become crazy confident and reach my goals. Of course, nothing ever goes as planned, but when something works, you gotta double down on it and just focus on what you can control, not what you can’t.
I just wanted to come out here and say to anyone that has social anxiety that it is very “easy” to get out of it in hindsight. You will kick yourself for not getting started any sooner. The way it works is that you make a daily habit out of facing your social fear everyday. Just like going to the gym, you start small and face fears that are right on the edge of your comfort zone, eventually you will get very comfortable with that level of fear. Then you consistently keep turning up the notch such that you are always right on the edge of your comfort zone where it is not so hard that you quit and not so easy that you don’t grow.
It all sounds good in theory, but I would like to mention the most important things to keep in mind when doing this. I’m assuming that you are okay with gradually facing progressively more fearful social situations. So once you start doing it, what is most likely to make you stop and fail?
One reason you will not want to do it consistently due to lack of motivation. You will lack motivation not only because it’s something you fear, but more importantly because your mind will try to justify by saying “it’s not me.” An example would be a social situation like going to a party, or talking to a cute girl, and you will say “I’m not the kind of person that goes to a party” or “These days guys not supposed to talk to cute girls because it’s rude and considered sexual harassment.”
So when it comes to motivation, your mind will make up excuses based on your core beliefs of yourself, or of others, or of the world in order to not do that task and laze around. Try to get off your ass and do things and stop the stories you keep telling yourself. Do not ascribe yourself to a narrow identity. Do not assume who you are or what the world is, without trying and taking shots. To be specific, the way I motivate myself is a very simple system of tracking my habit. No matter what, I do something that scares me socially and I write it down in my daily habit logs. To be honest, I am not able to always do something that scares me, but yeah, the ideal is to do it everyday, or at least give the best effort given the situation.
Which brings me to the another reason you might fail is due to your perceived lack of opportunities. This happened to me a lot where I was totally ready to face my fears. I was also motivated as fck, but I did not know where to go and what to do. I had reached a point where I could easily talk to people that I would encounter in my day to day situations, but to practice a higher level of social confidence, I needed situations that just weren’t there every day.
Or was I just making excuses?
I was just making excuses. And so will you be. See, when you start doing things, maybe you won’t get an opportunity to socialize every day. But finding and going to social opportunities in an EFFORT. It is like a full time job. Even people who don’t have social anxiety and do not put in the EFFORT quite often end up alone and depressed for long periods of time. After I had crossed the average person’s social confidence (and believe me the bar for the average person you meet is very low, most people are kinda shy and closed off because they are normal and have enough friends to not have to have to build a lot of confidence to avoid being lonely) it got difficult to train further because most people are okay with a certain amount of socialization and so society has largely not been modeled around socializing, especially in the current age of high screen times.
So what you need to do is put in EFFORT and stop making excuses that you don’t have friends or opportunities. SET YOUR OWN BAR MUCH HIGHER THAN THE AVERAGE PERSON’S. Start exploring things you can do in your city on the internet. Make a list of places, events, etc. there are a lot of apps you can use to find out things to do. Examples could be sports, meetups, nightlife, or just randomly roaming around, etc. Whatever it is, start getting off of your ass and going out on the weekends. Open up as many avenues as possible. I call it “social interaction surface area” and you should maximize it. The surface area itself wouldn’t be the ultimate metric for success, but it is definitely proportional to it. Within that surface area, you take as much action against your social fears as possible. The scariest thing is talking to strangers. Once you become extremely cool and relaxed and authentic in talking with strangers, you can just go up to any one within your large social interaction surface area and talk to them.
Once you build social confidence and start talking to people, you might also realize that most people are not up for forming deeper connections with you. That is okay. It is a numbers game. Whether it is a friendship or a relationship, a guy or a girl, it will take time. DO NOT TRY TO BE BEST FRIENDS WITH EVERYONE. Once you truly click with someone, and you’ll know when you do, you can start deepening the relationship by sharing contacts and meeting at places other than your initial demographic. This also brings me to the point of demographics. You will have more luck converting an acquaintanceship to a relationship if you already choose things that kind of reflect who you want to be. An example would be living in a place where people of your kind would usually live in. Or attending events where your kind of people would also be there. Key here is the kind of person you “want to be”, so don’t go to places based on “who you are now”, but on who you “want to be”, even if that sounds scary.
Keep in mind that stepping out of social anxiety is different from being rude or aggressive or edgy. This is a mistake a lot of people make. Since a lot of confident people are assholes, they think they need to become assholes too to compensate. This couldn’t be further from the truth. You can be super fcking confident and at the same time, be very nice and charismatic. Which is different from being a “nice guy” who is not confident at all and his niceness is actually his weakness to stand up for himself.
I would say there are many many many lessons I have learned in this journey of mine of building social confidence, but I’ll stop for now, maybe write another post if I remember or learn a new lesson, as this journey is endless.