Dr. Aziz breaks down why shyness keeps you from approaching strangers. Fear of judgment and negative evaluation creates an avoidance cycle: you anticipate rejection, so you stay in safe, familiar spaces and miss chances to connect or share ideas.
The way it shows up in the beginning, and this is what I lived in for many years, is what you might think of as more classic shyness or social anxiety, where it's just like, go and walk over to those people that I don't know? No. You know, go approach, introduce myself, whether it's professionally, networking, dating, just go say, jump into that group of people? Are you crazy? It's gonna go badly. And so you avoid stepping into opportunities. You avoid the risk of going into the uncertainty of social situations, whether that's those simple examples that I gave, but it could also be larger social environments like in the general workplace. And if you post something or share your idea, that we could avoid that too, right? And all that's behind all of that first layer of avoidance is what's going to come back my way is going to be judgment, is going to be disapproval, is going to be dislike, and I don't know if I can deal with that.
