How to Stop Being Shy

Shyness is a common feeling, and whether you’re meeting new people or going to job interviews, shyness can seriously hinder our self-confidence. Luckily, a few tips and tricks that, if practiced regularly, can improve your self-image and prevent shyness from interfering with opportunities that come your way in the future.

Tips to Help With Shyness

There are many tricks and tools you can use to stop feeling shy. The key to succeeding is to practice these regularly, psychology suggests that repetition is the key to helping yourself overcome shyness and improve your life.

1. Don’t Label Yourself.

If you label yourself as a “shy person” your mind will automatically program itself to the traits of a shy person. If you ever find yourself thinking that you cannot do a specific task because you are too shy, stop yourself and tell yourself that you are not a shy person and do whatever it is that you were going to do.

Give yourself realistic reasons and solutions to the problems you might be facing regarding your shyness. This will break down your anxiety and make you feel calmer, allowing you to fully appreciate new experiences.

2. Positive Affirmation.

Being shy could be tied to your self-image anxiety. Practicing positive affirmations could improve how you see yourself. Sit in a comfortable space and tell yourself true positive things about yourself. Try doing it in front of a mirror and looking at yourself.

Something as simple as “you are pretty” or “you are confident” could change the way you feel about yourself. You might feel silly initially, but with time, it gets easier, and the more you positively enforce yourself, the better you feel about yourself, leading to a much more confident you.

3. Choose Your Relationships Wisely.

Toxic friends or family members can seriously damage your confidence and could be why you are so shy. Do you have that one friend who always criticizes you or teases you? Stop allowing them to do so.

End the relationship if you must, and as hard as that is, you cannot allow people like that to constantly pick off at your confidence. Allowing someone to constantly insult you or make you feel ashamed is not okay. Your shyness might stem from their constant badgering of your character.  

4. Set Clear Boundaries.

It is perfectly normal to tell the people around you what you allow and what you don’t. Do you shy away when people make fun of your accent or the way you dress? Tell your friends and family members how you feel in a calm private setting so that they understand why you feel uncomfortable about a certain subject.

People who love, respect, and support you will understand and stick to the boundaries you set down. If you don’t feel comfortable setting these boundaries in a group, do it, one person at a time. Invite them over to your place or a place that you feel comfortable and just talk to them openly. Nothing bad will come from you expressing your feelings. 

5. Don’t Be so Hard on Yourself.

It’s hard to push yourself out of your comfort zone. It’s even harder when you’re trying to change a certain aspect of yourself that you have lived with your whole life. But don’t beat yourself up over making small mistakes or not getting it right the first time. It’s easy to blame ourselves because we feel that we are the only ones that can change ourselves, and although that is mostly true, you still need to be kind to yourself.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you didn’t go out because you felt shy around new people, even after you started this journey of self-improvement, that’s totally fine. Change doesn’t happen overnight, don’t blame yourself.

Allow yourself space to take a step back and assess your comfort levels, don’t over exhort yourself, remind yourself that you are only human, and make mistakes is part of the learning process.

How Getting Rid of Shyness Will Improve Your Life

Often people who actively work on their shyness tend to notice a trend of positive changes in their lives. It starts with small, sometimes unnoticeable changes, but when you look back on who you were compared to where you will be, you will most probably feel like you’re looking at a different person.

1. Increase in Confidence.

Yes, this might be obvious but, people mistake a lack of confidence for shyness, and, although the two are commonly linked, that’s not necessarily true. You will probably notice that you don’t shy away from clothing you would normally not wear, like that yellow crop top that’s been sitting in your closet for a year.

You might even find yourself finding new hobbies you were too shy to do, like rock climbing or creating a podcast about something you’re really passionate about. An increase in confidence will bring many interesting experiences to your life that you were previously too shy to take part in.

2. Standing up for Yourself.

The great thing about not being shy anymore is that you have the confidence to call out fake or toxic people, whether in the workplace or your social group. Shy people usually avoid confrontation and allow harmful people to walk all over them.

Having the self-confidence to stand up to those people will either result in them leaving your friend group or changing the way they act toward you and others, so not only are you helping yourself, but you’re also helping other people who fell victim to their tyranny.  

3. Gaining Respect for Yourself.

Many people don’t see that when your shyness prevents you from doing things you actually want to do, you start losing respect for yourself and your needs. People are curious and always want to improve themselves. You can only do that by experiencing new things. Life is full of amazing adventures and ways to improve the quality of your life, but shyness harms our chances of going out there and discovering those experiences.

Have you ever wanted to go on a trip to a country you’ve never gone to before? Or tried to learn a new skill like painting or how to speak a different language? These are desires to improve ourselves and discover what we are capable of.

Once you’ve overcome your shyness, there is literally nothing holding you back, learn that language, create that painting and go on that trip, for all you know, it could be the thing that changes your life forever. 

4. Improved Your Health.

Shyness can lead to a string of mental health issues like depression and anxiety, but it also leads to physical health issues. When you work toward improving even one aspect of your life, it almost automatically starts improving other aspects of your life that you didn’t know how to deal with.

It might happen without you knowing, but most of the time, you find yourself realizing how much better you feel. Your nervous ticks might go away, like biting your nails or pulling out your hair. When your mental health improves, so does your physical health. Mental health issues can manifest in pain, weight gain or loss, or sleep deprivation.

5. Better Understand Yourself.

When you start working on something that gets in the way of living the life you wanted, you start a process of great leaps of progress, but you will occasionally take a step back and have a bad day or feel your shyness winning. That’s okay, and it’s part of the process.

Once you start making progress, you learn things about yourself that used to frustrate and confuse you. You might have always been frustrated with yourself because you could never send food back that you didn’t enjoy, or you might have burst into tears because you didn’t go to a party, and that may have led you to think that you’re crazy or broken.

But once you start working on yourself, you can take a step back and understand why you felt the emotions you were feeling, or why you felt shy again and allowed yourself to feel shy, and with that understanding, you can stop triggering negative emotions and rather be kind to yourself.

Wrapping Things up

Shyness is nothing to be ashamed of; even the most confident person you can think of is self-conscious or shy about something in their life. These tips are just the tip of the iceberg, and with a little bit of determination, you can overcome the butterflies making you second guess yourself.

It’s okay to be wary of something or anxious about a new experience, but don’t let your shyness rule your life. You are allowed to make mistakes, wear clothing you feel great in (regardless of what people say), and most of all, you’re allowed to be human.

Don’t force yourself to overdo it and make the process one step at a time and give yourself credit whenever you manage to step outside of your comfort zone, even if it’s just one small step. There is no exact timeline that tells you when you’re going to overcome your shyness, but one certain thing is that nothing happens without effort.

You are capable of so much more than you think. It only takes a bit of time, patience, and practice.