Overcome the Cognitive Deficits of Shyness: Getting Your Mind Right
1. Reduce your sense of self-consciousness: The whole world is not looking at you.
Since self-consciousness is a principal cognitive component for many shy people, it is very helpful for such shy people to realize that most people are far more interested in how they look or what they are doing than what anyone else is doing or saying. As an example, realize that if you are dancing on the dance floor, others who are dancing are more interested in how they are doing than how you are doing. And those people who are in their seats around the dance floor are probably wishing they had the courage to be out on the dance floor, and are not just thinking about how well you are dancing. Thus, for shy people, realizing that other people care more about themselves than about you will make interacting in social situations much more tolerable.
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