By Ellen Hendriksen

🌈 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. This book teaches you how to overcome social anxiety step by step. It’s a hand-holding guidebook.
2. It reassures you that with kindness, reaching out first, and some good techniques, you can make beautiful friendships.
3. This book packs research-proven golden life rules that maybe you didn’t get to learn from your parents and your early lives. It’s never too late to learn.

🚀 Actionable Takeways

1. Specify and decatastrophise in the scene of anxiety.
2. Use self-compassion to quiet down the Inner Critic.
3. Get started when you are uncomfortable. You are ready when you are uncomfortable.
4. Give a structure and a role to yourself in the social setting.
5. Write down your small, medium and big challenge lists. Check them off.
6. Affirm yourself with what you know is true about yourself. Affirm the times you did the right thing.
7. Turn your attention inside out.
8. Drop your safety behaviours.
9. Dare to have an average conversation.
10. Is someone friendly to you? - This is the only criterion to friend candidates. Follow up with the ones who respond to you. Interact with them, repeatedly. Small and reciprocal disclosure. Show them you like them.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

• The author gives definitions to introversion and socially anxious extroversion. I can understand where I fall, and understand my anxiety and the roots of it better.
• The 3 questions to dial down my social anxiety also help me to manage my anxiety in general: What’s the worst can it be? What’s the odds? Can I handle it? These questions are truly the tremendous anxiety relief pills.
• To know some of the life rules (that people are generally kind; that popular people approach first; etc.) is reassuring in navigating my life.

📒 Summary + Notes

Introducing Social Anxiety

The Root of It All

Social anxiety is learned. So it can be unlearned.

Avoidance is the enemy of emotional wellbeing and perpetuates all anxieties. Avoidance makes the anxiety go away momentarily, but it grows and maintains the anxiety.

The fear is the core of social anxiety: fear of judgment, fear the judgers are right.

You’ll feel less anxious by living your life.

You start off by living the life you want with anxiety-by carrying it along with you. And as you do, the anxiety will ebb away.

Social anxiety is like an apple tree

✅ Social awareness: the ability to gauge the emotions, beliefs, and intentions of others and to respond accordingly;

If pruned properly, social awareness→ social payoff

❎ Hyper awareness / social anxiety → behavioural inhibition

non-anxious introvert vs socially anxious extrovert

Behavioural inhibition → both introversion and social anxiety, but they are very different

Differences between introversion and social anxiety:

• Introversion is born while social anxiety is made
  • What’s necessary to trigger social anxiety: learning and avoidance
• Solitude makes introverts feel good. With social anxiety, it just makes you less anxious.
  • Introverts gain energy by being alone, 121, or in a small group of trusted confidants.
  • With social anxiety, being along is more a sense of relief than contentment.
• Social anxiety thrives on perfectionism.
  • Socially anxious: think social performance is black or white; only a flawless social showing can stave off harsh criticism.
• Introversion is your way; social anxiety gets in your way.
  • Social anxiety: We miss out, either we’re physically absent or because we’re stuck in self-monitoring mode, worrying that we’ve said something stupid or that we’ve screwed up.

Non anxious: Perfectionism isn’t an issue. Because there’s no performance nor judgment involved.

You can pause during your presentation, lose your train of thought in conversation, not be 100% prepared to talk about any given subject, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad about you, nor is there anything at stake. Some conversations are absorbing and flow easily. Others may be graceless or banal, but that doesn’t mean you are, too.

Temperament isn’t infinitely stable. Genes, culture, time, and luck make us who we are.

Your brain on social anxiety

For socially anxious types, their prefrontal cortex isn’t as adept as the non-anxious’ at shutting off the alarms.

Tool for social anxiety: CBT

• Research: Socially anxious prefrontal cortex reacts to social threats slower and weaker.
• CBT changes the reactions.

Inner Critic

Social anxiety is about concealment. It’s less about fear and more about shame. Shame makes us want to hide.

Whatever you fear, it boils down to one thing: I am not good enough. And furthermore, everyone will see.

The Inner Critic is present before and after a social moment.

“Post-event processing”:

• overthinking / obsessing / rumination / self-rated performance review from hell
• the Inner Critic looks and finds the imperfections
• keeps social anxiety going strong over time
• Vicious cycle

“Anticipatory processing”:

• Some anxiety before a big moment is expected. But anxiety should match the task at hand.
• The main difference between high and low socially anxious individuals is not the effect of anticipatory processing.
• The difference is that the socially anxious are more likely to engage in it.

Neither post-event processing nor anticipatory processing helps you in the social situations. They undermine you.

The Inner Critic is uncertain and wrong. It underestimates you.

You are enough just as you are. You are stronger, more capable, and more likeable than the Critic has ever given you credit for.

“Think Different” Tools to respond to the Inner Critic rather than letting it convince us to avoid:

1. Replace

To argue back to the Inner Critic: think clearly, not necessarily positively.

Specify

1. Anxiety can be vague with “always”, “never”, “everybody”, “nobody”.

The Inner Critic sends you a strong feeling, and that feeling feels like a fact. Because we fell inadequate, it must be true. Because we fell like a loser, we must be one.

2. If your Inner Critic is more of a feeling, ask what it would say if it could talk. Once the thought is verbal, we can challenge it.
3. Ask your Inner Critic e.g. what exactly is the worst that can happen? What particular stupid thing do I expect I will do? Who precisely do I expect is going to judge me?

Decatastrophize

1. How bad would that really be?
   • How bad is a little bit of judgment? Could we handle it?
2. What are the odds?
   • What are the odds the real catastrophic worst-case scenario happens?
   • How would you take action? What could you do if it actually happens?
3. How could you cope?

It would be really hard. But it wouldn’t be hopeless. You’d make it through. And that’s the point: even if your worries seem overwhelming, you can cope with pretty much anything life throws at you.

2. Embrace

To make peace with the Inner Critic.

We are more likely to reach our goals in a supportive environment than a punitive one.

Acknowledge the Inner Critic for what they are and give ourselves self-compassion.

Self-compassion vs self-judgment:

• Self-judgment looks for what is vulnerable inside us and pounces, whereas self-compassion looks for what is human and meets it with understanding, graciousness, appreciation, and encouragement.
• Self-compassion is a gentle, friendly nudge in the right direction.

Self-compassion sees our inadequacies and failures and not only is cool with them but also provides a safe and caring place for them.

Talk to yourself as you would to a good friend. Soothe, encourage, and support. Show appreciation for your efforts. Validate your fears.

Self-compassion:

• Mindfulness
  • Pay attention to the present moment on purpose, without judgment.
  • Watch your thoughts and experience and realise, oh, I’m thinking X, I’m hearing Y, I notice Z.
  • Choose where to direct your attention.

Feelings aren’t facts. Thoughts are transient, not truth.

• Shift from I am not good enough, to I hold a belief that I’m not good enough.
• Mindfulness techniques:
  • 5-4-3-2-1 ground yourself in your five sensesTo name:
    • 5 things you see around
    • 4 things you hear
    • 3 things you can touch
    • 2 things you smell
    • 1 thing you taste
  • Mindful listening:Allow yourself to listen to every sound without responding. If your mind wanders away, just bring it back to the sounds around you.
  • Mindful breathing
  • Meditations
• Self-kindness
• Awareness of our common humanity

The Inner Critic only wants what’s best for you, but lets you know in an ineffective way. So reason with it. Tell it how strong you are. and remind it that kindness trumps criticism.

Heading Out into the World

Get Started and Your Confidence Will Catch Up

Typically, we think we’re ready when we feel ready. Actually, we are ready when we’re uncomfortable.

Put action before motivation / before confidence. We don’t have to wait until we feel like doing something before we do it. Fake it till you make it, truly and genuinely.

Fear is a prerequisite to bravery. True bravery is being afraid and doing it anyway.

Play a Role to Build Your True Self

Give a structure and a role to yourself in the social setting. The structure and the role should come from within, not from someone else. The structure and role is like the scaffolding, until you outgrow the structure of your role and can do it as yourself.

Arrange yourself in a powerful, confident posture, sitting or standing in a way you imagine someone open, strong, confident, and solid would present.

• Play the role of Host and organise a …
• Play the role of Good Pet Parent by taking your cat to … and assigning yourself the task of learning one other pet’s (and pet owner’s) name.
• Play the role of Icebreaker by introducing yourself to the new guy at work to help him fell more comfortable.
• Play the role of The One Who Puts Others at Ease. Assign yourself the task of finding someone standing alone at an event and saying hello.
• Structure/Role: Find out something interesting about a stranger and tell them something about you.

Don’t choose a structure that allows you to avoid.

It Gets Easier Every Time

As the title says. Go out and do it. Repeat. Nothing terrible will happen (and if it happens, I can handle it). It gets easier every time.

Your Challenge List

Challenge List I: What would I be doing if I felt confident? - Make a concrete goal / Challenge List:

• Say yes to more invitations?
• Introduce yourself to more people?
• Show up even though you’re worried about blushing?
• Look at the audience the majority of the time while I give this presentation.
• Call xxx without rehearsing what I want to say first.
• Go to X’s party and talk to two people
• Tell a story in a group of people where I don’t know everyone well
• Initiate introducing myself to people I see all the time but don’t know by name
• Initiate greetings to my superiors
• Catch up casually with my superiors
• Initiate small talks with at least 2 colleagues during lunch

Dreaming about your post-social anxiety life is the start of your Challenge List.

Let go of your safety behaviours. Safety behaviours will make you look distant and difficult to approach, which pull you to the opposite direction of getting social connections.

If you drop your safety behaviours, people will enjoy talking to you more, spending more time with you and wanting to befriended with you.

People like you not because you do less of the bad stuff (e.g. being less anxious), but because you do more of the good stuff (i.e. without safety behaviours, you will look friendlier, talk more openly, conveyed interest and engaged more actively).

Once all the bandwidth used for rehearsing sentences or managing their appearance was freed up, authenticfriendliness—the good stuff—naturally filled in the gaps.

You set the tone. If you appear confident, not anxious, drop your safety behaviours, you will get a better response. If you approach something as if it’s totally reasonable, it will be.

Challenge List II, without safety behaviours:

• Smile and start conversation with people I think don’t like me. Do this repeatedly.
• Be a guest on a pre-recorded podcast where mistakes can be edited out, but without my usual notes (trust myself to remember the points I wanted to make). Do this as often as is offered.
• Do a live radio interview without my usual notes.

You will be anxious doing these. You won’t stop feeling anxious. You will feel anxious, square your shoulders, and do it anyway.

Affirmation:

• Affirm yourself with what you know is true about yourself. Affirm the times you did the right thing. Remind yourself of your best and your best will show up.

Challenge List III (the biggest stretches):

• Make a speech / presentation in public
• Perform for a house of audience

The more you practice, the easier it gets.

An authentic life includes some rejection, some awkwardness, and some embarrassment. It also includes deep satisfaction in your accomplishments, even when they don’t turn out exactly as you pictured them.

Busting the Myths of Social Anxiety

Turn Your Attention Inside Out

Social anxiety is fundamentally a distortion: it’s a mistaken belief that something is wrong with you and everyone will notice.

• Myth I: I must always monitor myself and my anxiety.
  • Impression management takes up attention. This is a self-focused attention and makes the things you actually want to do go poorly. → Self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • We look inside to ask about how things outside are going.
  • Felt sense: It feels true (we feel like an idiot), so we ask our anxiety, arguably the least credible source of information, for reassurance. No wonder it’s not working.
  • It sets in motion a 24hr long ripple effect of negativity.
• Solution I: Turn your attention inside out
  • Task-focused attention: Focus on what’s currently happening around us (not your phone - that’s distraction). Here and now.
  • Focus on the live people: talking and listening with your conversation partner, rather than the running commentary of your Inner Critic.
  • When you’re speaking, focus on the message, not the delivery
  • Non-violent communication
• Myth I.a: We focus outward on what might be going wrong.
  • Attention to threat.
• Solution I.a: Focus on people’s faces in order to focus on what they say.

Seeing is Believing: How you feel isn’t how you look

• Myth II: How I feel is how I look.
  • Interoceptive awareness is more sensitive in individuals with anxiety.
  • Illusion of transparency: we think our internal state is visible and will give us away.
• Solution II: Film you doing the things that send you into social anxiety.
  • You look the same when you feel anxious or less anxious.
  • You may look a little tense or trip over words. What you think as a huge blunder internally would just be a blip when viewed from the surface.
  • Deep-sea volcanoes might erupt on the ocean floor, but the surface hardly shows a burble.
  • When you put up your safety behaviours though, you look distant and unfriendly.
• Myth III: People will judge me.
  • Vicious cycle: Bodily reaction → identify the body reaction as shameful → anticipate your body reaction will give you away so you avoid.
  • Spotlight effect: we overestimate the extent to which our actions and appearance are noticed by others.
  • Spotlight effect strengthens when we feel particularly exposed or vulnerable.
• Solution III: Bring it on.
  • Not only do most people not notice, but also noticing doesn’t necessarily equal judging. Noticing usually stops with noticing.
  • People only start to wonder when we can undue attention to ourselves.
  • If people judge you, it is them being inappropriate, not you!
  • Expose your body reaction until you accept it being normal.

“I have to sound smart/funny/interesting”: How Perfectionism Holds Us Back

• Myth IV: I have to perform perfectly.
  • “I should always have something interesting to say.” “I should always project an air of easy confidence.” “I have to make a good impression.” “People need to like me.” “People will think less of me if I make a mistake.” “I can’t be happy unless most people I know admire me.” “If people saw the real me, they wouldn’t want to be around me.”
  • Perfectionists have unrealistic criteria for success and broad criteria for failure.
  • Perfectionists have high expectations and low beliefs in one’s ability. The bigger the gap, the more we freak out.
  • Dichotomous (all or nothing) thinking
  • Social media is a performance, and performance pulls for perfectionistic self-presentation.
• Solution IV: Dare to be average
  • Have an average conversation.
  • We like people more when they’re imperfect. Self-deprecation is charming.

Perfectionism is only a problem if your high standards are getting in your way. The nontoxic version of perfectionism is called positive striving and is fine to keep.

Why You Don’t Have a Social Skills Problem

Having nothing to say or feeling conspicuous is not a social skills problem; it’s a confidence problem. Anxiety keeps you from accessing your skills.

Innocuously social

Social anxiety only strikes when there is a fear of judgment. You are probably open, relaxed, or funny with your people who you feel safe with.

• Solution V:
  • Eye contact
  • Volume up
  • Point your feet, body and gaze toward who you’re speaking with
  • Approaching an individual or joining a group: you don’t have to be outgoing (approach and tentatively listen afterwards is fine), you just have to you curious.
  • Break in to a conversation

All You Have to Be Is Kind

The building blocks of beautiful friendships

“Meeting people “ is different from “making friends”. One is an event, the other is a process.

❎ We unconsciously create too stringent a filter and rule out too many people.

✅ Almost everyone is a friend candidate. The person becomes right over time.

1 Is someone friendly to you? - This is the only bar.You’re not friends yet, but you’re friendly with each other. Some of your friend candidates will stay at this level, but three things will move others toward friendship.

• Friendly?If they grunt and stare at their phone when you say hi, then no.If you get a smile and some basic small talk? You have a candidate.

2 Repetition

The first is simply seeing someone over and over again.

Ref: Intimate Relationship

We can make friends with almost anyone. Provided our potential friend is not mean-spirited, given time and repeated encounters, we can—and do—become friends with whoever’s around.

See a steady drumbeat of the same people regularly.

• Classes can work, but only if they’re interactive, not lecture-style.
• Forget about social media, pubs or night clubs—here people bring the friends they already have and hang out together—the group is closed.
• Best strategy is to join a ready-made community open to others.
• Then keep showing up. Give it 3 or 4 months, but longer is better. It takes 6 to 8 conversations (not just “hi”) before people consider each other a friend.
• You may not be taken seriously until you’ve come back a few times. Distinguish yourself by showing up again and again.
• Once you’ve established yourself, give yourself a structure and a role in the social interaction.

3 Disclosure: share what we think, do and feel

Don’t wait for someone to seem “interested” (unambiguously approach you)

The famous 36 questions lead to closeness through disclosure in fast-forward.

Usually what we do when we meet someone new is small talk. Small talk is important—it’s the social niceties test-track of conversation—but by definition, it stays on the surface. It’s not about you; it’s about other things (traffic, weather etc).

Disclosure, however, is about you. Start with what you are doing or thinking. Say hi, ask how they are, and share some titbit about what you’re doing, what you just did, what you’re planning, or what you’ve been thinking about recently. It doesn’t have to be smart, insightful, or articulate—it just has to be about you.

This will feel wrong at first. It will feel like you’re talking too much. It will feel selfish, like you’re taking up too much space or making it about you. But this is only because you are comparing it to being reticent. Try it and see what happens. Sometimes you’ll get a lame answer, “Yeah, that’s cool,” or, “Oh, really?” And then…nothing. But that’s fine—a lot of conversations are lame, but here’s the thing: a lame conversation doesn’t mean you’re lame. Other times, you’ll get a relatively substantial answer, and then you’re off to the conversational races.

Note of caution: disclosure is different from confession. Disclosure is “escalating and reciprocal,” meaning that telling someone about yourself should be a gradual give-and-take.

Count it as a success as long as you manage to share a bit of yourself, even if the conversation rolls off. If you get a response, try again, and try again soon—not weeks later. Keep the momentum going.

4 Show them that you like them

People like those who like them. People also like those who take the initiative. (Prosocial behaviour)

Step-by-step guide:

1. At the simplest, be the first to say hi or lighting up with a smile when they say hi to you.
2. Slightly more advanced is unnecessary conversation.
3. Next is taking socialising out of the usual context and into another.
4. Next, be specific to invite or initiate an event together.

It’s easy to mistake being dominant for being liked, because dominant people get a lot of attention. Their visibility is high. But you don’t need to own the room to be liked. You don’t need to be a big shot, alpha, or self-important.

True, honest, by-the-numbers popularity comes from being kind, cooperative, and trustworthy—warmheartedness.

Path to a happy, healthy and meaningful life

Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. The biggest predictor of a healthy, happy life is the warmth (kind and trustworthy) of your relationships.

Combine your kindness, empathy, ability to listen, high standards, conscientiousness with the skills from this book, and you can lean in to the people around you by reaching out.