<div class="bbWrapper">The problem with most advice of this kind is that it comes from people who were at, say, 5/10 and were able to push themselves to 7/10, and think they overcame shyness. There are two problems here:<br />
* most people saying "just try X, it has helped me" were not that bad and have no clue, how bad social anxiety can be. If somebody tells you they've got over social anxiety in two weeks, as I see in the comments above, they were not that bad. It's like saying, "I had to score in the 99-th % on the quant part of the SAT/GRE/GMAT (insert your favorite standardized test), but because I was not good at math, I had to study 10 hours/day for 2 weeks." You'd be like, really, that person was bad at math? Many would need 10 hours/day for 2 years, combined with very skillful guidance.<br />
* similarly, most people giving this kind of advice have only improved marginally<br />
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Ask yourself,<br />
- how many times in the last year have you had food with another person? What about the previous five years?<br />
- how often do other people call/text you socially, without a particular reason such as a work project? How many of such people?<br />
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If your answers are 30 and once a week, that is one thing. In other words, you have a friendly chat once a week, perhaps with 2-3 rotating friends overall, and you sort of go out every couple weeks, or at least have a sandwich with a buddy. You can call yourself not very outgoing, but still you have a decent amount of experience under your belt.<br />
If your answers are 1 and once in 6 months, that is another thing. That means you are just not in the habit of socially interacting with people and basically lack skills — which, naturally, makes every interaction anxiety-provoking. In this case you lack skills when it comes to thousands of common-sense nuances that others may call manners or common sense or social intuition, but are really just little bits that you will have to learn at some point, and better sooner than later.<br />
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If you are in the second category, no amount of visualization, meditation, self-reflection and the like will help you. Absolutely nothing else other than quantity of practice, which ideally should be combined with guidance. And by quantity I mean at least TEN times more than you are used to, if you want to have a chance at becoming comfortable.<br />
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Some practical ideas:<br />
* never reject a social invitation. Somebody invites you to a birthday (if it ever happens)? Say yes. Boring barbecue party? Yes. Bar where everyone gets trashed? Yes. Don't listen to anyone who tells you it's a waste of time — it's exactly who you get more social.<br />
* talk to everyone and embrace small talk.<br />
* find people who have strong social skills and spend as much time with them as possible. Pay them or do stuff for them if needed. Some good candidates are salespeople and promoters of various kinds, restaurant and hotel managers and managers in general, politicians.<br />
* it's not so much about doing weird stuff in public. It's about doing normal stuff that feels weird to you until it doesn't. If you feel uncomfortable going to a loud venue, guess how do you fix it? By going there, and not once and not five times. Understand it's a process. With a lot of practice and exceptional guidance, becoming more social takes years. Without a lot of practice for many introverts it will just never happen.</div>
