The Self Consciousness ‘Habit’(*)
Last week’s newsletter and blog article on Self Consciousness produced quite a few e-mails, including one from Bob (not his real name) who is in his mid-30’s, has had the self consciousness habit all of his life and finds that it’s getting in the way of his finding a life partner. He said he found the simplicity of last week’s explanation of self-consciousness enlightening and is now actively putting the tips into practice – and wondered what else he could do.
The answer?
The answer, in a nutshell, is: relax, stop trying, be yourself and others will find you more interesting and attractive.
See, that was simple, wasn’t it.
Not only that but as a strategy it works for many people. And yet… as always with advice, there are important missing pieces; pieces which distinguish between platitudes and useful directions!
For example:
- The advice isn’t tailored to Bob’s personal circumstances (although there’s nothing we can do about this short of moving onto personal coaching mode)
- There is no rationale for why this advice might be useful (that’s addressed to some extent below)
- The advice lacks specific and practical ‘how to’ steps which Bob could choose to follow (that’s also addressed below).
This was to illustrate how so much advice, and so many positive thinking books, fail their audience i.e. they don’t deal with points 2 and 3. On the other hand the precision of NLP enables us to define step-by-step methods for doing things such as ‘be yourself’.
The snippet that hit home for me was the chronic embarrasment syndrome. This I do feel stops me from trying things over and over again. Any other info or tips on this subject
Hi Mand, giving something like rampant shyness a title like “chronic embarrassment syndrome” has the effect of making it appear insurmountable – and really the realm of ‘experts’.
That’s the effect of a lot of diagnostic labelling – it’s sort of marks things out as being something only Experts can deal with – not us mere mortals. And that we need to seek out the help of Experts and pay them loads of money in order to overcome the behaviour which they have labelled so portentously.
The shyness habit is just that – a habit. The fact that it may have been around for a long time simply means we’ve got pretty skilful at doing it i.e. at engaging in shyness behaviours.
If you make something too complicated you’ll always be ‘going to’ deal with it.
If you KISS – keep it short and simple – you can get started and improvise and improve as you go. The Self Consciousness article (below) is a good place to start.
Simply start doing things which slightly push the boundaries that shyness has created – little and often. Then little and more often. And so on.