How To Change Your Shyness - Quiet, timid, withdrawn people can become more sociable. Catatonics and autisms can be brought back to life, people with 'learning disabilities' can become fully literate. It just takes the right tools.

How To Change Your Shyness

SNEAK PEAK:

Was I Born With It? Nature vs. Nurture
While it is possible that shyness is (partly) caused by your genetic make up, it is my belief that learned behavior (the Nurture part) is much more powerful. There are so many cases of happy, healthy, vibrant and outgoing children having their personalities ravaged by abusive parents or other traumatic situations. And, believe it or not, the opposite is also true. Quiet, timid, withdrawn people can become more sociable in the same way. Catatonics and autisms can be brought back to life, people with “learning disabilities” can become fully literate. It just takes the right tools.

Is This My “True Self”?
The truth is, virtually any aspect of your personality can change. If it doesn’t seem that way sometimes it’s because the methods you’ve been using just aren’t powerful enough. Think about your own experiences for a moment. Have you ever believed in something strongly only to have somebody prove you wrong? What happened to you then? You changed - instantly. A rape or a car accident can change your personality - and not a long, slow change, but immediately and powerfully.

Really, your mind is very flexible, and I will prove that in a bit. It’s just that we also have the tendency to do things in patterns, so we don’t take advantage of our capacity for change. I think the belief in your “True Self” or “Core Personality” is a dangerous one because it is so limiting. We look at the negative aspects of ourselves and say, “That’s just the way I am. I’m being true to myself by behaving this way”. We’re denying ourselves whole realms of growth and improvement with this defeatist attitude. Our personalities are NOT like a balance; improving one thing won’t sacrifice anything else. I’m positive that the strategies I’m going to talk about will work, but not if you’re skeptical and do them half-heartedly.

How Your Mind Works
The first step to changing yourself is understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing now. I’m going to give you a model of your brain that I’ve constructed from all kinds of sources, and we will use it to make changes later.
• Our minds are constantly taking in all kinds of information from our senses and storing it, even the unimportant stuff. When ideas are repeated often enough and with consistency, we form Beliefs, or Generalizations, and these beliefs affect the way we perceive our reality and the way we behave. The inputs that support the belief are called “reference experiences”. For example, during the Cold War, Russians were always depicted as the “evil overlords” or whatever, so children growing up at that time no doubt believed that all Russians were that way, unless they were shown otherwise. If you grew up in a racist household, you always heard that blacks (or whites!) were inferior and all that, and you probably accepted it without question. What’s more, once you have a belief, your brain will dismiss or disprove references that run contrary to it. The only way to change these beliefs once they’re solidly entrenched is to either use powerful references that can’t be ignored (such as a rape or car accident), or to use references consistently and with enough repetition, the same way the original belief was formed. That’s why simply talking about things and getting advice tends to be so ineffective.
• Out of all the input you get, your brain pays particular attention to experiences that cause an emotional response. What happens is, your brain constructs a physical association, or “link”, between the stimuli and the response so that in the future, the same, or similar, set of stimuli will produce the same response. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the link. Also, future experiences reinforce the link or even strengthen it. This affect is called “conditioning” or “anchoring”. The classic example of this is Pavlov’s famous experiment. Pavlov noticed that his dog salivated whenever it was fed. He started ringing a bell whenever he fed the dog, and soon he noticed that ringing the bell without providing food caused the dog to salivate. The bell became an “anchor” to the anticipation of food. Anchors can be changed or removed, however, by changing the emotional response linked to the anchor.
• Your brain will motivate you both to seek out experiences that give you pleasure, and avoid experiences that cause pain, though it will do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. That’s why bad habits are so hard to break.

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