I had a wonderful day!!!

[ShyBeliever]

Hi everybody. I just want to tell you that today I felt very confident and happy. I spent all day in my grandmother´s house but in there, were many of my uncles, aunts and cousins. Of course it was family I habitually suffer some kind of social anxiety even with my own family. However everything became different or at least I felt that. When I woke up in the morning I decided to behave in a very specific way. First, when I got out of home I tried hard to correct my body posture by fixing it in a way as if it was the most confident guy (straight head, relaxed shoulders, chest out and especially the constant use of varied facial expressions). I just tried to pretend that I was a normal and relaxed guy without any social problems and that is ready to face all fears and confrontations. At some point my mood changed positively. But when we try this, we soon become aware of our fears and suddently we usually get tired of pretending until we finally quit and let our anxieties taking control of us again. But today I could forgot my fears because I tried hard to focus only in my goals and reasons of that particular moment by making questions to myself like "why am i here?", "what is my goal", "how sould I behave and act to achieve that goal?" (see nick´s post called "3 key steps to social confidence" to know what I´m talking about). These method of thinking enabled me to reserve fewer and fewer "brain space" to think about fears like blanking out, not knowing how to behave and the pessimistic "What if" questions.

So, as a conclusion, we may say that I used a mixture of good body posture and "acting" based on a confident model with the new way of thinking based on nick´s post. The results were very satisfactory at least for today.

Please excuse me if I wasn´t clear but I think it´s always difficult to talk about these things in a clear way. I did my best. If you don´t understand please consult the nick post which I mentioned. Thanks for reading and have a good time.

 

[paul]

yay for success stories! congratulations, hope this keeps up

 

[Nital]

I think this is a good approach and may be what worked somewhat for me to become less sociaphobic. It may be tough at first, but if you can keep it up for a while, the phobia may go away somewhat and you feel as much like you're acting.
I still feel i have some problems being sociable, but i hate the idea of being alone all the time so there is some pressure from myself to try to act normal and be cool.

 

[redlady]

Hi shybeliever - wow!!! I can pretend and act pretty convincingly but i have yet to get to the stage where i don't feel like that is what i am doing - I have yet to reach the 'nirvana' of your experience where my goals and such overtake my anxiety.
This is a very powerful act on your part and one i hope you can continue and gain more control over. I may try it (i'll have to read that post) - i have a tendancy to drown in my anxiety and 'what if's' - it would be such a good feeling to successfully replace that with more positive thoughts and goals.
Oh yeah, i understood what you were saying man - good stuff.

 

[miraculousmum]

i am so happy for you

 

[Lost_Nomad]

thats great! its diffecult to convince yourself of it.

 

[4myself]

yay!

 

[ShyBeliever]

Thank you guys!! I´m really happy for your optimistic reactions. I´ll continue to work hard in order to improve better and better. I hope you´ll do the same and never give up. And now it´s different because I know I have the great support from the fantastic people of this forum. I´m reallly impressed. And, McShy, i´ll think about that :wink: