Social anxiety is driven by a profound feeling of inferiority and unworthiness.
When you feel unworthy, you are afraid of rejection and criticism from others because they would confirm your perceived unworthiness.
You are afraid of people because deep down, you are afraid they would confirm your profound feeling of being inadequate and inferior to them.
If you felt good about yourself, you’d have nothing to hide. Social interaction would become easy, relaxed, and pleasant.
The truth is, you can only be hurt by remarks and judgments for which, deep inside, you think are true (at least to some extent), and touch the aspects of yourself that you don’t accept.
A truly confident person doesn’t care if someone accuses them of being awkward, fat, or ugly. The confident person will either disregard it for being untrue, or if the remark is true, he or she accepts it and doesn’t feel any less because of it.
A confident person trusts their own positive opinion of herself or himself more than other people’s opinions, and doesn’t link negative criticism and judgments to their fundamental worth as a human being.
In order to overcome social anxiety, you need to start being kind and loving towards yourself, and most of all, accept yourself unconditionally.
Why Unconditionally?
If we dig even deeper into the subject, it’s not someone else’s negative judgment that hurts you (after all, their judgment might be true!). What hurts is the fact that you don’t accept that particular characteristic about yourself, and link it directly to your worth as a person.
For example, let’s say you are overweight and feel really bad about it. If someone calls you “fat” it will bring you down emotionally and make you feel even worse about yourself.
But there are people who are overweight and accept it (I know someone like that personally). They might still want to lose weight for the reasons of health and well-being, but they know that their weight does not determine their value as a human being, so they fully accept themselves as they are in that very moment.
If someone called them “fat”, they wouldn’t worry about it. They know they are fat and they are fine with it because true self-confidence comes from within and does not depend on external elements.
Self-confidence comes from accepting yourself unconditionally, here and now.
In other words, it’s not your characteristic or the criticism itself that puts you down, but the way you see that specific characteristic.
How To Fully Accept Yourself?
There are many techniques that can help you with that. If you are truly committed to change, I invite you to check out my ebook “Bye Bye, Social Anxiety” which is a 120-page guide, packed with powerful techniques and concepts that will help you become confident and calm.