How to overcome Social Anxiety
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“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need.”
Social anxiety is the blocker to success for every introvert out there. The best ideas, the best version of ourselves, the best that we want to put forward are all blocked when we start to feel socially anxious. Our heart starts to beat faster than normal even though we’re not exercising, we start to sweat, our minds go blank, and we find it difficult to breathe. Some of us start to stutter and our body shrinks as it does in the form of self defence. If you’re like me, when social anxiety hits, all the best preparation goes out the window and we spew forth this verbal diarrhoea of concepts and ideas in no particular order. What was a logically thought out argument that counters every point of resistance, now sounds like verbal garbage. In the end, you’re just happy the spotlight has moved off you and then spend the rest of the week or month trying to recover from disappointing yourself.
I found that since Working From Home (WFH), it’s been easier and more frequent to fall into the trap of social anxiety. Even standard weekly meetings that I’ve been to hundreds of times, even though I’ve prepared for the meeting, when the moment comes for me to speak, the feeling of social anxiety sweeps over me like a tidal wave. Perhaps it’s the home environment, the lack of professional work clothes, or perhaps it’s just the fact that I can see myself on the video conference and become self conscious. Whatever it is, it’s starting to dent my self confidence and a solution is needed to sustain the best version of myself during this remote working or WFH period. I don’t want to waste opportunities to shine in a meeting but most importantly, as an introvert, I don’t want to waste the weeks that follow where I wallow in my self disappointment and lose sight of opportunities that arise.
THE DREADED INTERNAL FOCUS LOOP
“ You have to treat yourself like you matter because if you don’t then you don’t take care of yourself and you become vengeful and cruel and you take it out on people around you and you are not a positive force. None of that is good…you suffer more and so does everyone else around you.” - Jordan Peterson
The biggest blocker to you getting out of social anxiety is that you are focusing internally and focused on yourself. You can’t stop yourself from feeling socially anxious. Like fear, it is perfectly normal to feel anxious when speaking in a public forum or when a key point to be made needs to be spot on. For us introverts, this is built into our DNA. As introverts, we are deep thinkers, and as deep thinkers, we grasp the gravity of the situation and the importance of ensuring we cater to everybody’s needs so that our point is made. If you’re a people pleaser as well, then you’ve got the added burden of making sure that whatever you say not only gets the point across but also that nobody dislikes you at the end of your sentence. With so many factors to be taken care of at the same time, it’s no wonder that social anxiety just adds to the complexity. For an extra layer of complexity, WFH means that you also have to deal with the random cut outs or people not hearing parts of what you’ve said. As nice as it is to work from the comfort of my own home, the environment and its inherent limitations is just not conducive to introverts being the best version of themselves.
Unfortunately, the more that you try to re-sequence your thoughts, go to your mental stronghold, your favourite quote or whatever else that’s worked for you in the past, the more thin your brain capacity is stretched. In the end, you run out of time in the real world to recompile your thoughts and when it’s your turn to speak, you force it out in a jumble of words and sentences that means very little to anyone.
From personal experience, the sad thing is, your brain actually recognises when what you’re saying is not the best version it could be. It tries to correct the direction. But you start to feel self conscious since you can see yourself in the video call. You can also see Bob showing disinterest, someone’s video has gone out (maybe they’re so bored with what you’re saying they turned their video off), and you can see the hint of frustration showing on your boss’ face (even though with the low resolution of the screen, it could be anything).
By analysing my last poor performance on a video call caused by social anxiety, it’s no wonder that after speaking for 5 minutes, it was pretty clear nobody had a clue what my key message was. So what’s the solution?
START LOOKING EXTERNALLY
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave person is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” - Nelson Mandela.
Just like Nelson Mandela’s definition of courage, the trick isn’t to stop feeling socially anxious. If you tell yourself to stop feeling this way, you’ll just end up being focused on feeling anxious. It’s like if I say “don’t think about a pink elephant”, all you have in your head right now is the image of a pink elephant (mine’s flying by the way).
The starting point is to recognise that you are feeling socially anxious. Once you’ve acknowledge that mentally, you can then get your brain to focus on the actions needed to get out of it.
The simple action is to just focus on the people you are speaking to. Genuinely look, don’t just glance. Look at their facial expression, look at their video background. If there’s multiple people on the call (Microsoft TEAMS can have nine videos concurrently), focus on one person at a time. This is important because your attention can only be focused on one person at a time. If you try to focus on everyone on the call, it’ll be just a glance and you’ll have every chance of mistaking people’s expressions.
If something on the video doesn’t look right, if somebody looks disinterested, focus on it. Change tact with what you’re saying to see if your theory is true. Nine times out of ten, it’s not. If so, ask that person, is what you’re saying making sense? Do they have a different view?
Guess what? By doing this, you are now in control of the conversation. You are speaking to each individual on the call rather than a group, you are focusing on each of their reactions and getting an accurate estimation of their reaction to what you’re saying, and you have the power to clarify what you’re seeing on screen.
Importantly, since our mental capacity is limited and often directed towards what stands-out the most, before you know it, you’ve forgotten that you were feeling socially anxious. You are now breathing normally, your brain now has capacity to think laterally, and before you know it, you don’t want the segment to end because you’re actually enjoying it.
MY PERSONAL EXAMPLE
A fortnight ago, I had to facilitate a virtual office wide meeting with the Chairman. The office I look after has 30 staff members from six different Divisions. For a few weeks, there was an undertone of this office feeling disconnected from the broader organisation, and there’s been a few people related incidents due to poor leadership behaviours. The purpose of the meeting was one of multiple actions to set the office in a new direction. Nothing is louder in saying you are important than a rather intimate virtual meeting with the Chairman to talk on a personal level.
I was so nervous ahead of the session, I couldn’t sleep the night before. I was hoping that Chairman would cancel, only to have him call me the night before to say it was a good idea and he’s happy to chat way past the allotted time. We kicked off the session and I tried my best talk show host approach. The moment it started, I could feel my heart beating fast, sweat starting to emerge on my scalp, and the mind starting to go blank.
However, having gone through the above, I realised I was feeling anxious so I started to focus on each person and made myself say something humorous about the person or their background. I even mentioned that Chairman’s treadmill was at an odd angle and whether that was the angle needed to get a sweat on. Maybe it was the laughter or the fact that I could see people relaxing with this approach, but within a few minutes, I forgot how anxious I was and actually started to enjoy the role of being the host. Afterwards, multiple attendees commented on how well run it was and how it felt like being on Oprah but more genuine. So the solution works. I just need to remember, to start focusing on individual attendees and get out of social anxiety.
Commanding genuine respect, one that doesn’t rely on your position power is one of the hardest things to do for an introvert. There are five simple actions we can adopt straight away that can help us to establish our presence in the room and command the attention and focus on what we have to say.