Hopefully, you have a good picture by now of what it means to be confident. It means you’re not trying to impress anyone but at the same time, you are confident enough to be completely yourself, to speak up and crucially – to take action. You don’t hesitate or doubt yourself, you just see what needs to be done and you do it.
We’d all like to be more like that.
But there are many things that might be holding you back. And among the most common issues in this regard, is social anxiety.
Many of us struggle to speak up in public or to go against the grain, because we have a physical panic attack when we feel that we are about to put ourselves out there.
Many of us have butterflies when we are about to go on stage and talk in public. But we likewise also have butterflies when we’re about to tell a joke among our own friends! We can’t approach a member of the opposite sex in a bar without feeling physically sick at the prospect of being turned down.
Where Does Social Anxiety Come From?
This might seem rather extreme. Why would we have such an intense reaction to speaking in public? Why would we be literally at risk of passing out?
Remember: being laughed at or being ignores hurts our social standing and that hurts our likelihood of survival.
So, in a less direct way, being laughed at was just as much a threat to our existence as being faced by a predator back in the wild.
And thus, we get the exact same ‘fight or flight’ response. This is the body going into survival mode and it begins with the sudden release of neurotransmitters and hormones such as adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine and norepinephrine. Together, these chemicals increase our heartrate, send more blood to our brain and muscles and suppress activity in less urgent systems like digestion or immunity (hence why we get butterflies!). Our vision narrows and even the forward-planning part of our brain (the prefrontal cortex) gets temporarily shut down – increasing our ability to act reflexively and in the moment.
Adrenaline makes us shake, we breathe faster and we sweat.
All of this puts us in a state where we are better fighters, faster runners and more immune to pain. Our blood even thickens, so that if we get cut, we won’t bleed out. It’s an incredible survival tool.
But it’s not so useful in an interview or on a date. In this scenario, it is sending the strong signal that you feel vulnerable. That you are desperate for approval and that you are worried that what you are about to say will go down badly.
This also sends the signal that you are lower in the social hierarchy and that the people you are talking to have no reason to try and impress you – rather it is the other way around.
How to Overcome This
Someone confident appears confident because they aren’t worried. If you weren’t worried, then you would be more confident.
In short, you look unconfident because... well, you are.
So how do you fix that? One way is to genuinely have so much faith in yourself that there is literally no reason to worry. You’re so intelligent that you have a witty comeback for everything someone might say. You’re so wise, that nothing you say would be mistaken. You’re so powerful that no one is a physical match for you!
But most of us aren’t at that point yet (this book will help you get there...). Right now, you’re still feeling vulnerable and exposed. So, our objective is to essentially fake it.
And one way to do that is through CBT and desensitization.
CBT is ‘cognitive behavioral therapy’. This is a psychotherapeutic approach (an approach to therapy) that is based on changing your thought patterns. And we can also use it to desensitize ourselves.
A Brief Primer on CBT
To recap quickly on some psychology...
According to old-school psychologists in the 50s and 60s, our behavior is based purely on things we learn. It is based purely on associations and ‘training’. If something good happens every time you do something in particular, then you will be motivated to keep doing that thing in future. If something bad happens every time you do something, then you will eventually avoid doing that.
The most famous psychology experiment to demonstrate this concept was ‘Pavlov’s Dogs’, whereby dogs learned to salivate at the sound of a bell. Every time they heard the bell, they would be fed. Eventually, this led to a ‘Pavlolvian’ response – a learned behavior – that responded to the bell alone.
You are nervous when you go to speak in public because you have been burned before. You have spoken in public and been laughed at or ignored. You’ve learned your place and now your body is telling you ‘shut up in case we get damaged again!’.
But here’s the worse thing: you have also internalized that reaction. You have gotten to the point where you massively expect that to be the outcome and so you play out that event in your mind’s eye. When you go to speak in public, to take action, or to do anything else, you visualize the most likely outcome. This is one of the most important functions of the human brain and it is what allows us to forward plan and to avoid danger.
And when you visualize something, brain scans show that what actually happens is that the same brain areas light up as though that thing were actually happening. So when you visualize walking through the woods, parts of your brain light up that would normally light up when walking through the woods.
When you visualize talking in public and it going wrong, and people laughing at you, parts of your brain light up as though you were being laughed at.
In other words, you ‘reinforce’ the connection without it having to happen. You repeat the reaction over and over again in your brain, so that you are repeatedly being laughed at in public over and over again! And so, it is really no wonder that you can’t even attempt to speak up in public without your body going into ‘panic mode’.
This is the ‘cognitive’ element on top of the ‘behavioral’ explanation of human behavior. And it explains how we make matters worse for ourselves by telling ourselves that things are going to go wrong. By repeatedly imagining the worst or telling ourselves that people will laugh, that we’ll stutter, that we’ll be ignored, we become socially crippled and our body feels in danger.
This is the basic theory behind cognitive behavioral therapy as an explanation of how our brains work.
Cognitive Restructuring
Cognitive behavioral therapy includes its own approach to fixing problems with our thinking, which can all be categorized under the heading ‘cognitive restructuring’. Cognitive restructuring in essence means that you are ‘reprogramming’ the way that you interpret events and the way that you think about future events.
Cognitive restructuring generally incorporates two main components. These are ‘thought challenging’ and ‘hypothesis testing’.
Thought challenging means that you are going to be looking at the things you are visualizing and the things you are telling yourself and then you are going to restructure your mindset by challenging those beliefs – by testing them for validity.
So, for example, you might be telling yourself that if you speak up in public, people will ignore you and you will look foolish. But now ask yourself this:
Are these people not your friends?
And therefore, is it really likely they’d ignore you?
Moreover, would it really matter?
If they’re not your friends, are you even ever going to see
them again?
Isn’t it better to at least try?
These days, the likelihood of being ostracized socially and left to fend for ourselves in the wild is highly unlikely. Meaning that it is pretty safe to speak up in any setting, no matter who you are!
And remember, we have the tendency to inflate risk and minimize reward. So be honest with yourself and rational and you can normally reduce the fear and the anxiety.
Hypothesis testing meanwhile means that you are going to literally test the theory and prove to yourself that there is nothing to be afraid of. Prove to yourself that you don’t need to be worried about getting laughed at.
So this might mean that you intentionally say something stupid, just to see how people react. Or how about you purposefully go to say something in public and then stutter. What you’ll find is that most people are patient and understanding and will react by simply waiting for you to finish. They’ll even give you a big, support round of applause.
In short, hypothesis testing means facing your fears head on and seeing that they aren’t so bad.
And what’s more, is that by repeatedly facing your fears. By repeatedly putting yourself in frightening scenarios, you can actually become desensitized to the fear. If you keep speaking up in public, then you’ll find that you eventually normalize it and it no longer becomes a big deal.
You can practice this in several ways:
Strike up conversations with strangers wherever possible
Talk to shop tenders – be purposefully awkward or strange
Ask people for their numbers
Make complaints if you aren’t happy with customer service
Attend stand-up comedy classes, acting classes or singing lessons. Anything where you have to perform in front of people
Do all this, and over time you’ll become more and more calm. You won’t have the fight or flight response when you talk or perform in public and as such, you’ll come across as much more confident. People will assume that means you have absolute faith in what you’re doing, or that you’re secretly rich or incredible ripped. But in reality, you have just learned not to fret the small stuff.
This is powerful stuff, learn it!
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