Defeat Social Anxiety (in 5 steps)

hey if you struggle with social anxiety I've taken thousands of students through this process and it works here's exactly what I would do to overcome it let's talk high level first and then we'll go pragmatic we'll go super pragmatic and I'll give you five or so steps on how you can approach this and how you can work on this when we are anxious in any situation I have this belief that we are anxious because we are unfamiliar with that situation we are anxious in that situation because we haven't experienced that situation frequently enough and and

it goes back to to some experiments that I remember reading about and it was an experiment where a lot of scientists and a lot of doctors have discovered that one of the main reasons why a lot of children in today's world have peanut allergies is because of a lack of exposure to peanuts when they were young and maybe their parents didn't even eat peanuts when they were you know being in mom's belly right and as a result of a lack of exposure to peanuts it's it's it's created generations of children now who are allergic to

peanuts and and to me I think the same thing is happening now currently in our society where we are so absorbed by these devices we are so engaged and addicted to screens that we no longer socially interact on a daily basis on a weekly basis sometimes on a monthly basis and as a result of spending more time interacting with people online on our phones as opposed to socially inperson interacting we've kind of created the same situation with peanut allergies we've done the same thing with social interactions and now we have a generation of people who

find it really difficult to socially interact so what what I'm getting at is how would a psychologist approach this and and I've been very lucky to have someone like Dan on my team who's a psychologist of 14 years and I've been able to learn so many psychological Concepts from Dan not a psychologist but from what I've been able to learn and in my conversations with Dan what I've been able to learn is that it's exposure therapy so if someone's afraid of heights a psychologist would take them through exposure therapy so if you're afraid of heights

and they'll they'll take you to level5 and then they'll they'll kind of get you to experience that and and help you realize there's nothing to fear then they'll take you to level one then maybe we'll stay at level one for a couple of weeks then we'll go to level two then maybe we'll stay there for a couple of weeks and and again it's just it's a form of exposure therapy and this is a very boring thing to do and I think paired with our desire to have tips and we want Solutions that are quick solutions

that give me rapid success and and if anything takes time we find it oh boring don't want to do it so as a result of that the answer that I'm giving I'm going to give you right now you you may find it's too slow and it's too boring but this is actually the way forward to cure it I believe it's slowly expose yourself to it slowly expose yourself to more social situations I'll give you another example from my life my son loves animals Xander my my my boy he loves animals anything to do with animals

it's his obsession ession he loves it and I love that I love that about it and something my son's always been scared of is he's been scared of snakes and I'm I'm I'm I'm petrified of snakes I'm super scared of snakes and you know I live in Australia it's like there's a snake everywhere so I'm I'm so scared of snakes it really cripples me right for the longest time it's been a massive fear so I kind of went all right I want to teach my son how to be brave I want to teach my son

how to be courageous so my son and I both scared of snakes but my son loves animals and he does love snakes right um and and and and so what we did was we started to watch documentaries on snakes we started to watch so many documentaries and we started to realize that oh wow snakes are just like any other animal they're just as scared of us as we're scared of them snakes aren't just waiting in the bush for a human to come across and then just to kill us right and then we also learned really

interesting stats that that you know 0% of people actually nobody dies from a snake bite people die from snake venom not from the snake bite so you know you start learning all these interesting things you're like oh okay interesting and then you learn also if you get bitten by a snake as long as you know what snake has bitten you they teach you all these techniques on how you you you know you wrap the bandage around you in case you do get bitten what do you do so you learn all of these things and the

more we learned in these documentaries the more we started to realize oh okay all right all right all right it's it's actually not that frightening snakes are just like any other animals right unless you threaten them they're not going to they're not going to bite you and then after that we went to the zoo and my son and I would just sit right in front of the snake enclosure and just watch the snakes and would look at the snakes and in the end I kid you not we started thinking oh wow the C snakes are

kind of cute and we got to the point where we did this for over TW period of 12 months to the point where just last year my son and I put a snake around our neck gently gentle gentle gentle gentle gentle good job thinking see just a little Wiggly yeah and it was one of the most proud moments that I had for myself because as a father I got to show my son how we can face one of our greatest fears and it was so cool I mean I admit to you when I had that

snake around my neck I still had this scary thought that I would be that one person that holds a snake and then all of a sudden he's going to bite me right in the throat and destroy my speaking career and my teaching career the snake didn't do it of course but I was thinking that the entire time we got through it my son was super excited he pet the snake I held the snake and now we've been able to get rid of this fear that was controlling us there are times where my son and I

wouldn't even go for a hike right in a certain destination because we've heard that there were snakes there before now we go for hikes we've been able to face that fear now and it's opened up so many doors of opportunity for us to do things that we wouldn't have done before because we feared snakes I I bring up this story to tell you because don't let the fear don't let the anxiety in social situations stop you from going out because there are friendships that you could be making you may have a best friend that's out

there seeking you waiting for you to overcome this fear and once you overcome this fear all of a sudden one of the best friends best relationships you're ever going to have in your life you're going to be able to have in your life as a result of you overcoming this anxiety here's my five-step process hey by the way if you're new to my channel and you're enjoying the communication content you may not know this but I Run free 2 and 1/ half hour live master classes where you can learn in a structured way with me

so if you want to trial learning with me click the link in the pin comment section to save your spot hope to see you in class the first thing that I think you you have to do is you must start small it's like me if I went from being scared of snakes to go holding a snake I would have been paralyzed in fear the snake probably would have felt it and would have bit me in the face okay so here's how you start small with social anxiety here's what I would recommend the first thing that

i' would recommend you do start really small send some of your friends a voice message yep and play with your vocal foundations play with your voice while you're doing it don't just send them a hey I just want to send you no no no play with your voice so send a voice message and do that once a day start small and then as you start to send voice messages and you become more comfortable with you using your voice your instrument then after that all right I want you to take it up a step send them

a video and you might feel weird about this you might be like oh V this is so weird why would I send them a voice note do you know how beautiful it is to send a video or an audio to one of your friends and just say hey hey and I do this to my friends as well we send voice messages all the time where I say hey Lenny just want to send you a quick video man I've been thinking about you this morning I know that one of the things you're struggling with right now

in life is this I just had a thought not a recommendation I just had a thought I wanted to share with you here's the thought and when you do that as a video it's beautiful it's only weird because you think it's weird it's not weird if you don't think it's weird it's like confucious says if you think you're right you're right if you think you're wrong you're wrong I'm going to add to what confucious says if you think you're weird well then you're weird if you think you're not well then you're not right so please

don't let that judgment let don't let that part of the brain stop you from taking action on these steps so now you got the first two steps send voice message Second Step send a video third step let's take it a step further third step is you go to the grocery store and instead of going through the self checkout section now I want you to have interactions with another human being instead of the self checkout go where there's actually a grocery store person right with the grocery store clerk go to them and while you're standing there

waiting for them to scan your goods through the groceries talk don't just stand on your phone talk ask them questions bring three questions along that you've pre-prepared hey how's your day and then they're going to ask you the same question in return prepare a response don't just say good no tell them how your day was right tell them the most exciting thing that happened to you just go oh Ashley hey thanks for asking I'm having a great day one of the best things that happened to me today is I got to run a a class

teaching public speaking and it just made me feel so fulfilled you know it made me feel oh just made me feel so good inside how about you what's the most exciting thing that's happened to you today and that could be the second question you ask them what's the most exciting thing that's happened to you today and even if they go oh not much I've been stuck at work all day it's Ah that's all right that's all right hopefully this conversation is going to be the most interesting thing that happened to you right and then prepare

one more question to fire at them and I love asking this question and if you think this question is weird that's only because you think it's weird I don't think it's weird so it's not weird so I asked them okay hey we're going to we're going to be here for few minutes anyway I love asking people this question do you mind if I ask you a a curly whirly one what's been what's what's been one of the biggest lessons you've learned in the last 12 months I love learning from people I love learn because I

believe everyone has something to teach everyone has something valuable and you will be shocked at some of the lessons I've been able to learn just from asking this question and every time I ask this question I see people lied up cuz they go oh my goodness this this person cares about my opinion this person cares about what I have to say and then guess what the moment you ask that it's going to get them to think they'll say something and then at the end they'll be like how about you what's been one of the most

powerful lessons you've learned and then answer and then once you've done that at the grocery store do that once a week twice a week however many times you go to the grocery store then go to step four now plan opportunities where you can go for a walk in the city and when you go for a walk in the city go for a 30-minute walk it's good for your health it's good for your mind it's good for your body then while you're going for that walk your kpi key performance indicator is you've got to greet at

least 10 people in that 30-minute walk greet 10 people and once you get over the greeting and you are comfortable with that now greet someone compliment someone greet someone then compliment then ask a question greet someone compliment ask a question and then ask for a recommendation of where you should go to eat where you should go to be able to find good coffee right so so ask for recommendations and just normalize this expose yourself to social situations more and more and more and more and more and more and then slowly don't be afraid to level

up these scenarios go to work find an opportunity at work where you can say to your manager say to your managers go go hey James do you mind if uh in the next team meeting I take five minutes to share some of the results that I've found in my line of work I think these results will be so powerful to share with the team to align the team on on why what we're doing is so important do you mind just giving me 2 to 5 minutes is that okay listen this is the only way it's

the boring way but it's the only way it's like in in life I hope you don't mind me sharing a little bit of My Philosophy but I I believe in slow wealth when I when I think about wealth creation I love slow wealth I hate fast wealth I I don't like get rich quick strategies because if you can gain wealth quickly those types of strategies also cause you to lose wealth quickly whereas when you build wealth slowly and you just slowly build your wealth do you know the best thing about slow wealth is that even

if you start to lose your wealth you lose it painfully slowly and I've now learned the power of doing things slowly whereas when I was young I just want things quick no no I want it now I want seven I want seven second ABS I don't want seven year ABS I what PS I don't have ABS I'm very Dy okay but then the thing is I I've just learned about slow progress right I've learned about okay you know I I have no desire to have abs but for me I just want to be healthy so

for me I take the slow approach I'll exercise 35 to 45 minutes a day and I'll do that four times a week and I'm just going to slowly work on my health and then if you slowly work on your health it's also really slow as you lose it right it's not like all of a sudden I'm going to be able to put on 50 kilos no no it doesn't work like that so so understand the power behind slow progress and and know I started to learn the importance of slow progress through the idea of uh

compounding interest when I started to learn the power of compounding interest I'm like wow putting a little bit aside every single month now being 14 years into that process this is one of the most powerful forces I've ever experienced in my life right and and now my mind has opened up to slow progress slow slow progress is still progress so don't look at these steps and go oh wow it's it's so slow it's painfully slow no don't don't throw shade on slow progress it's one of the most powerful forms of progress in the world hey

if you want to learn more about communication skills and go deeper down the rabbit hole with me click the video you see up here and if you want to come trial learning with me and you want to learn in a more structured way come join one of my live classes it's absolutely free click this link here hope to see you in class