How to Stop Being Shy with Ramit Sethi

All right, here's a question from Kara about being shy. I would like to change the behavior label of being shy. I am an idea person and do not share them for fear of being judged. I am often very hesitant to talk to people unless we can cut the BS and talk for real. I wonder if I should be more open to small talk to connect with people. I also hesitate to share my ideas because I find it reduces my excitement when I have to answer a bunch of questions feeling slightly isolated. Please help. Okay. I really like this question and I'm really sensitive to it because we are all shy to some extent and there are spectrums and there are places where we are shy. Okay. For example, there's a thing called situated identity where people are very shy in certain cases and very, very extroverted or unshy in other cases. And there are tons of semantic labels about introversion, extroversion, shyness, etc. So I don't want to get into all that. What I want to focus on are a couple of recommendations for you. First of all, search for a great article called the caring of your introvert. You may be able to recognize yourself in this article and it can shed some light on why you think the way you do and why you behave the way you do. Second, this is going to give you the information you need, right? You're going to do this. You're going to search for shyness and getting over shyness, and you're going to read a bunch of tips and strategies. And this is going to give you information, but we need to turn it into reality for you. One thing I'm going to suggest for you is to change the way you think about shyness. I noticed in your question you have some very interesting invisible scripts. You said, I am often very hesitant to talk to people unless we can cut the BS and talk for real. Isn't that interesting? Have you ever noticed two very socially fluent people, they come up to each other. What do they do? Hey, man, what's going on? How are you doing? Oh, what's been going on? Yeah, just went on vacation. Oh, that was awesome. Where did you go? Oh, I went to Thailand and I was petting the tigers. They're just going back and forth, even if it's a business meeting. You call this bs? What do they call it? They call it building a relationship. So you're right on track when you say, I wonder if I should be more open to small talk, to connect to people. That's how people connect. They connect in an entirely different way than what you have scripted. What you've scripted is. Let me get to the point, cut the bs. But that's not bs. It's very important filler material. Just like when you go to a restaurant, you don't just sit down and get the food right away. Waiter comes over, you get a drink, you slow it down. It's important to have that relationship space where when you're talking to other people. The other thing I'm going to suggest to you as you start googling around is to study others. You have three or four friends who are very socially fluent. They go to bars, they know how to meet people, they're at the office, everybody likes them, study them. What do they do? What do they say? What does their body language look like? These are going to be small, subtle ways that you can start improving to get to the goals of what you want to do, which is to connect to people. As for the ideas, I'm not even going to touch that right now. I want you to become a little bit more socially skilled so when you go out to meet people, you can go look them in the eye and say, hello, great to meet you, how's it going today? That could be a very simple goal of being able to do that at a conference, at a restaurant, at a bar, anywhere. Once you get beyond that, send me another email and I'll help you take it to the next level. Thanks for the. It.