Social Anxiety Self Help: How To Jump-Start and Super-Charge Your Decision to change
I have heard that when Jim Carrey moved to Hollywood from his home in Canada, he wrote a check to himself in the amount of $10,000,000 postdated a few years out. He had no connections, no job, and no special reason to believe that he would be able to convince any producer to invest in his yet unproven talent. Only three years after moving to Hollywood, shortly after the success of his Ace Ventura movies began, he actually cashed his check. How did he do it?
This is a man who committed himself to self-discipline in thought and action. The level of self-disciplined effort he put forth in building contacts and going through auditions was only possible because he had adopted an attitude of absolute certainty that he could and would achieve his goal. One of the most important techniques for developing increased self-discipline and willpower is to be very specific about a goal that you intend to achieve, and to be absolutely certain that you will achieve that goal if you stay true to the course that you have identified for achieving your goal. Think about the power of this combination: certainty and specificity. If you were certain that by working for 30 minutes each day on deliberate practice to reduce social anxiety you would be a person who no longer suffers from social anxiety within four months, you would do it. If you are very specific about what you have to do during those 30 minute practice sessions, the motivation that came from your certainty would flow into definite action, causing your goal to be achieved in real life. This is a critical element of social anxiety self help. You have to have a specific plan that you have committed yourself to 100%.
Jim Carrey says that he wrote the check to himself and practiced developing an attitude of certainty that he would cash that check if he worked hard enough at developing the right connections and skills to land his dream job. It was his absolute certainty that allowed him to push himself beyond his normal limit in order to achieve what he believed was truly possible. One of the ways Jim Carey was able to maintain his sense of certainty was by using affirmations. He said that any time he was not able to actively work on a project, he would sit on the edge of a bridge in Hollywood, looking out over the city. He would reach his arms out towards the city and say something to the effect of: “I can feel the offers coming my way. They are out there now, I just can’t hear them yet.” These affirmations would be useless if he did not practice self disciplined action in pursuit of what he was trying to get his brain to accept as his future reality.
Here’s another self-discipline trick: turn big tasks into small chunks. By breaking down the task of overcoming a certain social anxiety symptom (or all of your social anxiety symptoms) into small chunks, you will find yourself much more capable of taking action rather than feeling paralyzed by the enormity of the task before you. If you can visualize small steps just prior to a practice session, you are more likely to get up and go do your practice session than you would be if you looked at the entire problem in your mind’s eye all at once. The reason is that by considering the whole problem at once, you feel overwhelmed by all of the tasks that your mind sees standing in the way of accomplishing the ultimate goal. As a result, your motivation and energy gets sapped right out of you (because our minds are geared toward instant gratification). So you should only think about the big, long-term goal when motivating yourself to sit down and make a plan of action. But when it comes time to actually get off the couch and go to work on a specific task, you should switch to focusing on the small segment of the project that lies before you.
Don’t wait until the time comes to break the task down into small chunks. You should take the time out ahead of time to analyze your symptoms and determine a set of very specific tasks that will be needed in order to overcome the symptoms.
If you don’t know how to recognize the specific actions that need to be a part of healing from social anxiety, you should consider obtaining professional consultation with a psychologist who specializes in social anxiety. Alternatively, you can obtain very specific information from my e-book, Social Anxiety Secrets which you can learn more about by clicking on the picture of the book that says “available for immediate download” beneath it. It’s a social anxiety self help resource that takes you step-by-step through the process of planning and executing an attack on social anxiety symptoms. The book also contains a lot of information about motivation in getting yourself to take the kinds of action that will be necessary to become a person who can say, “I no longer have social anxiety disorder.”
Be Courageous!
Dr. Todd Snyder
