Challenge Your Comfort Zone To Overcome Shyness.
To feel comfortable and not shy in a variety of social situations, you need to challenge your current comfort zone. This is the third comfort challenge you can use to help overcome shyness. You can find the first one here and second comfort challenge here.
Before you read the next comfort challenge make sure you have tried the first two as they ease you into the idea of challenging your comfort zone.
This comfort challenge is to get phone numbers.
This challenge is from Tim Ferris’s book ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ and he gives you an example on how to ask, suggesting that you say you are off to meet friends and in a hurry but wanted to ask for their number. And to finish with “you can give me a fake number if you like”. I like this, because it gives the other person a safe out, but you still achieve your goal.
My experience.
I’m not if this counts as cheating or not, but I chose to challenge my comfort zone on Christmas eve. I did this for two reasons, first people were in good moods (mostly) and people were in a hurry (mostly) so I thought they would be more likely to not ask too many questions.
Even though I feel my shyness is at a much more capable level, this challenge scared me. I am female so I think that might have been part of it. My theory is that if I was a male, I probably would have more practice in asking for numbers. Also, because I didn’t actually want the numbers, I didn’t want to give people the wrong impression. Ok, all that aside, how did I do?
Even though Tim Ferris recommends asking at least 3 people in the first 5 minutes to get over the discomfort, I spent about 15 minutes looking at DVD’s and books first. Then I decided to just do it or go home. The first person I asked said his wife wouldn’t like it, and the second who I asked straight away after said he had no pen or paper, so I said I had a good memory. Afterwards, I realized this might be good, just in case he wonders why I didn’t call, he would assume I forgot it. After that I felt too funny asking for numbers giving the impression that I would call, knowing full well I wouldn’t. So I switched to asking if they would be willing to be interviewed for my website. Within the next 20 minutes I had asked 5 more people.
It did get easier especially when the focus changed to something I was more passionate about – this website. I wouldn’t say I do it with no problems, but now that I’ve done it once and it worked out well, I do feel more comfortable about it. I also got email/phone number from two people interested in sharing their shyness stories. So we’ll see how that goes.
Overcoming shyness is all about extending your comfort zone. Each time you do this you will experience some discomfort, but the trick is to make the discomfort enough that your comfort zone extends but not too much that you give up. If this challenge seems too much right now, try the first or second comfort challenge or vary this one. For example, ask people for the time or directions.
Good luck and let me know how you get on.
