I was exactly the same when I was your age, so can completely sympathize with you. It’s mainly an age thing (at least it has been for 90% or so of the people I’ve met who are shy, lacking in confidence), so you’ll be glad to hear that hopefully over time you’ll learn how to deal with this. I’m not saying that you’ll necessarily become the most confident person in the world when you get a bit older, but it will get better somewhat. It’s taken me years to deal with my shyness and lack of confidence, but I’m getting there.
Apart from just sitting there and waiting to get old, there are some things you can do to help you gain confidence, relax more in social situations and generally be more comfortable with opening up to people that aren’t your close friends/family. One thing I really want to say before I get into it is that what ever you do, don’t try and compensate for this by drinking or use other such “3rd party” methods of relaxing, gaining confidence. I made this fatal error when I was younger and have regretted it ever since. There’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of fun here and there, but if you start drinking or the likes purely to try and remedy a characteristic of your personality you have that you want to change, then dependency can really catch you out. I only bring this up as I got a bit too into drinking at a relatively young age to deal with the exact same issue you have and although it temporarily worked, the years of rebuilding my self after was way worse then the original problem.
The way I deal with my shyness/lack of confidence is something I’ve learnt and picked up over many years of asking myself a similar question you just asked. I’d ask myself how I can be more confident and have been over a million and one ideas in my head as a result. I have however listened to some self esteem boosting hypnotherapy tapes what is a kind of counseling i guess. This wasn’t till relatively recently though, most of the “heavy lifting” had already been done. The main thing to do is step out side your comfort zone. There are ways to make this easier, but the goal is to get over your fear by subjecting your self to it so as to condition your self into becoming used to it.
A good place to start is to say “hello” and smile to people you see walking down the road. See a nice old lady/man and say “morning/afternoon/evening”. This will start to get you used to talking to strangers in a non threatening environment, and a simple hello/morning wont tie you down to a long conversation so you don’t have to worry about clamming up and getting stuck for words as you only have to say one or two :wink:. I know it doesn’t seem much, but it’s a first step to get you heading in the right direction at this stage.
Once you’ve got used to saying hi to random strangers and it doesn’t phase you anymore it’s time to step it up a little. The ideas I give you as you read futher down the page you’ll probably look at and be like “I’ll never do that” but you just have to keep in mind that you’ll be building up to them bit by bit, and not jumping in head first at the deep end. As you gradually step further and further outside of your comfort zone, what you’ll actually notice is that your comfort zone is expanding the further out of it you get.
There’s so many things you can do now. From trying to start up a small conversation at a bus stop with some one, standing next to someone whilst waiting in a cue for something, sitting next to someone on a train to walking upto someone random and talking to them (I’d sugest to do the first ideas first before trying the walking upto a random person, as the fact that you’re waiting for a bus etc will help take away any panik feeling that there’s no reason to talk to this person). The idea here is to do exactly what you were doing before, but take it a step further. You want to say hello or good morning/evening etc. then ask a question, or make a comment about something. It’s up to you what you say, I’ll give you some ideas, but I recon at this stage it might be a good idea to know what you’re going to say before you enter into the conversation, so to get the ball rolling you don’t have to think on your feet to start it off and will be less likely to close up. You could start off by saying something like “hi, how’s it going, do you know the time of the next bus?” or “hi, have you been waiting long for this bus?”, just some small chit chat to begin with, just to get you moving on from just saying hello.
Once you’ve got a little more comfortable with the small chitter chatter with random people with a common objective (eg. getting the same bus, or being in the same cue) you can maybe move onto the totally random person. This one is a real challenge, so you might want to ease your self in by talking about practical stuff to begin with. What I mean by “practical” is stuff like asking for directions, asking for advice such as a recommendation for a good local restaurant or even asking a girl for her phone number (after chatting for a while ofc, I doubt it’s very often people give out their phone number to someone that’s only just said hi, you’ll at least need to talk to them for a handfull of minutes I would imagine). You might want to leave the chatting up a girl bit till after you’ve done meeting some normal random strangers a good few times.
That’s just a rough guide of how to get used to talking to people a bit easier. It might take a little time for you to feel comfortable with the later few of conversation scenarios, but do try and motivate your self to keep on at it and trying. Don’t worry if you can’t do one of them at some point, keep trying again and again, as practice makes perfect. 😉
Along side doing that as much as you possibly can there’s some other things you can do to calm your nerves and help you relax in general. You should have a look into meditating. It can really have some profound effects on the brain not only while meditating, but lasting effects, if you do it regularly, that will help you be more calm not only whilst conversing with other people but also generally in your day to day life. I’d suggest for you to do some research into good meditation practice and maybe start off with some prerecorded guided meditation sessions as meditation isn’t just sitting there with your eyes closed, there’s an actual technique to it.
Also, like I mentioned before, you might want to try doing some hypnotherapy. This can help with all manor of things, from boosting your self confidence and making you feel more self worth to helping you to relax and talk to people more fluidly.
Another idea is to get some hobbies that involve being around other people. It could be anything from martial arts to salsa (the later will build up your confidence around girls too). A really good idea for hobbies to get you chatting to people easily is one that requires communication to do the activity, something along the lines of orienteering or some kind of problem solving activities where you will need to communicate to do well in it. Hopefully the activity should distract you enough to not worry as much about talking to people and subconsciously help get you used to talking freely with people you don’t know.
I hope you can at least get something that helps you out of that lot, please do try them all though, I know how much of a head fuck it is when you feel like you can’t express your self due to being shy. Don’t worry if something doesn’t go right at first when trying these ideas as we can all get things wrong at first, until we’ve mastered them, there’s really no need to beat your self up about it, just get back up and try again till you’ve done it. 🙂
Take care man
