Why do we feel shy?
According to Dr. Bernardo J. Carducci of the Shyness Research Institute, shyness exists because of three factors:
1. Excessive self consciousness. Self consciousness is that ‘everyone is watching me’ feeling.
2. Excessive negative self evaluation. The thoughts that there is something wrong with you, you say and do the wrong things. Basically you see yourself in a negative light.
3. Excessive negative self-preoccupation. You are overly aware of what you are doing, and see it in a negative light.
So when you are feeling shyness it is because we are very, very aware of ourselves and any action we take we evaluate in a negative way. In this situation is it easy to see why we would say very little, avoid eye contact or display any of the other symptoms of shyness.
This is why we know shyness can be overcome.
… sometimes we can find ourselves so caught up in an activity that we our attention is drawn away from what we are doing or saying. We are so involved in the other activity that there is no time to think about what we are doing or saying. Then later, as we look back, we realise that we had a great time and didn’t feel that usual shyness. So if we can do this once, we can do it twice, and if we can do it twice we can do it again, and again… so this really is the good news – that shyness can be overcome.
October 17th, 2008 at 1:59 am
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October 19th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
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December 2nd, 2008 at 6:47 pm
[...] This site, Don’t be Shy found at http://www.doingitforme.com is a really interesting blog that deals with understanding shyness. There are lots of good posts and I’d recommend to take some time to browse through it. Start with this post, Why Do We Feel Shy?. [...]