Overcome shyness & nerves: 8 Steps to greater self-confidence in social situations Part 1

Mark Twain said “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”

This doesn’t help anyone lacking in self-confidence and whose mouth goes dry when attempting to make even the most basic conversation in social situations. If you are one of these people, you are certainly not on your own. It’s a common feeling that ‘everyone else appears so confident and self-assured’ that we frequently feel we are the only one in the world who is too shyly tongue-tied to join in.

Contemporary research in psychology doesn’t really help either. According to behavioral geneticist Corina Greven of King’s College, London and her colleague Robert Plomin of the Institute of Psychiatry, self-confidence is more than a state of mind and is, it seems, a matter of genetic predisposition. Their research, published in the June 2009, issue of Psychological Science, is a rigorous analysis of the heritability of self-confidence and its relationship to IQ and performance.

Greven and Plomin found that children with a greater belief in their own abilities often performed better at school, even if they were actually less intelligent. They also concluded that same held true for athletes, with ability playing a lesser role than confidence. I’m sure this will ring true for many of us who can easily think of people who forged ahead more successfully in life than their more intelligent and perhaps more academic peers.

If Graven and Plomin are right, it would seem that coaches, psychologists, trainers and parenting experts, who have traditionally argued that nurture has more influence on developing self-confidence than nature, have been barking up the wrong tree for years. However, the fact that a great chunk of self-confidence may be inherited does not mean that it is set in stone or that those lacking the genetic advantage of innate confidence cannot do anything to improve their situation.

‘Each to each a looking-glass Reflects the other that doth pass.’ (Cooley, 1902)

Even if you are not born with it, it is possible to learn how to be more confident. Self-confidence all boils down to how we feel about ourselves and this, for the most part, is a reflection of how we are raised, how people interact with us and our emotional reactions to life experience.

I use the word ‘reflection’ precisely because it is the basis of ‘The looking-glass’ theory, a concept of self in social psychological theory developed by Cooley (1902). The theory states that an individual’s concept of self develops from interpersonal interactions and from the perceptions of others. Essentially the theory states that we tend to base our self-perception on the perceptions that others have of us which leads us to reinforce society’s (other’s) perception of ourselves. In other words, we shape ourselves after the perception of others and in turn confirm this perception and this leads to the expectancy effect. We tend to behave in ways that others’ perceptions have led us to behave creating a circle of behavior, reflection, reinforcement, expectation and repeated behavior. In a sense our behavior is conditioned by the way we think and believe others see us, not by how we actually perceive ourselves. And herein lies a solution. To stop for a moment, take stock of what we expect of ourselves and what we are actually capable of doing instead of believing only what others have led us to (mis-) believe what we are capable of doing.

To be continued.

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