Are you confident? do you think you need tobe more confident?
1. Think positively
Negative thoughts can wear away confidence and affect your behavior. Clinic director Lynne Henderson and her fellow clinicians help people first to understand their ''cognitive distortions'' or self-destructive thoughts. Common distortions include:
1. Think positively
Negative thoughts can wear away confidence and affect your behavior. Clinic director Lynne Henderson and her fellow clinicians help people first to understand their ''cognitive distortions'' or self-destructive thoughts. Common distortions include:
- All-or-nothing thinking, or seeing everything in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
- Catastrophizing, which is expecting horrible consequences for some perceived social error. A rejection for a date becomes a prediction of a life of isolation. Making a mistake at work will surely lead to instantaneous and humiliating termination.
- Emotional reasoning, which is the sense that ''I feel it, therefore it must be true.'' You assume your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are.
- Disqualifying the positive, which means that positive experiences ''don't count.'' By discounting successes with thoughts like: ''My presentation was okay, but I acted it like an idiot,'' you maintain a uniformly negative view of your own performance.
- Labeling and mislabeling, which is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself telling yourself: ''I'm such a loser.'' This can be extended to other people -- when someone else makes a mistake or behaves badly, you tend to describe that person with language that is emotionally loaded.
2. Challenge those thoughts
By recognizing these distortions and systematically challenging them, you get a more realistic view of yourself and your situation. The clinic's program achieves this through role playing, discussion groups and plain old self-examination. Here are some questions you could ask yourself to challenge cognitive distortions or negative thoughts:- Do I know for certain that (insert negative outcome here) will happen?
- What evidence do I have that I am the cause of (blank)?
- What is the worst that could happen? How bad is that?
- Is (blank) really so important or consequential that my entire future depends upon its outcome?
- Does (blank)'s opinion reflect that of everyone else?
3. Niche picking
In addition to changing negative thinking and behavior patterns that interfere with social success, you can choose social niches for which you're well suited, a strategy the Shyness Clinic focuses on. ''A lot of life is niche-picking,'' notes Henderson. ''It's looking for an environment where you feel comfortable and working to change environments to suit yourself.''- Ask yourself which settings make you the most comfortable. Which ones make you the most stressed? Do your palms get sweaty when you talk to someone you don't know on the phone? Then a position in sales making cold calls is probably not your thing.
- Don't assume that because something is hard for you that it must be worthwhile, and that when things come easily to you that they are less valuable. Salmon swim upstream, but you don't have to.
