Does nothing work to overcome your Social Anxiety? And do you feel hopeless, you’ll never be able to overcome it? Then, I’ve made this video for you.

In this video, I’m going to show you why it is that you have NOT failed to overcome your social anxiety, and how you can get out of the cycle of being stuck. And I’m going to show you some information that will shock you, but in a very positive way. My promise is that by the end of this video, you at the very least feel hopeful that you can overcome your Social Anxiety.

Hi, my name is Sebastiaan van der Schrier. I’m a former Social Anxiety Disorder Sufferer, and a Social Confidence Coach since 2009. And I am the host of a popular podcast show called Social Anxiety Solutions. And what I would do is, I help people overcome Social Anxiety so they can feel calm, and relaxed, and at ease in social situations, and connect from a place of actually being at ease with yourself: being on an equal level with other people, and just feeling relaxed and having a good time socially.

Now, I want to start out by saying that you’re absolutely not alone in feeling that nothing works, and you can’t overcome your social anxiety. In fact, it’s very common. I see it from my clients all the time, and it definitely was the case for me as well. Back when I tried to overcome my Social Anxiety, I did all I could get my hands on personal development, affirmations, visualizations, timeline therapy, NLP, hypnosis, journaling, meditation. Of course, facing my fears. I did the craziest things from walking up to women and saying “Hey, you like me. Give me your number” in order to purposely get myself rejected. I did Public Speaking at Toastmasters, high-fiving strangers, forcing myself to talk to everyone in a bar or a club, purposely embarrassing myself by smearing bright red lipstick around my eyes, and on my lips; and going into the city starting conversations with people.

Super scared of doing all of the above. Some of the above, I couldn’t sleep for days, because I had planned this, “I’m going to do this”. Because when I face my fears, then the death of fear is certain. And I’ll be confident and I won’t have that problem anymore.

It did give me confidence after I’d force myself to do it. But the confidence was just temporary – a couple of days, or a week later, I didn’t have that anymore.

So, no wonder I started to feel like “well, nothing works for me”, “I can’t overcome my social anxiety”. Now, I felt quite hopeless and desperate. This was actually helpful because it helped me to find something, which did help me overcome my social anxiety. But that’s a different story.

I did really have that fear that nothing will ever work for me, and I’m a tough case, and I’m broken, and there’s something wrong with me, and I’m just messed up. And “what if this is never going to go away, and I’ll have to live like this forever?” Very, very shitty thoughts to have, which leads to a lot of bad feelings, it was quite depressing. And it wasn’t just that I also really beat myself up about the fact that what I was doing wasn’t working. And I consider myself a loser, I’m less than them, I’m weak, there’s something wrong with me – all of that. And all very unfair, in hindsight, because I don’t think that way anymore at all. And in fact, when I think back to myself, in my teens, and in my late teens, going through all of that, I feel a lot of compassion. And I’m like, “Man, that’s sad. That guy was having a really tough time”.

Now, I want to share a couple of perspectives with you that I’ve gotten to over the years. I’ve logged 5,000 coaching hours, I spent over $100,000 on therapy and coaching, and learning from the best, and so on. And I want to share 3 very powerful insights that I’ve gotten to, that will hopefully shift your perspective, and help you feel more hopeful. And I think, let’s just under promise and over deliver, okay? So, here we go.

1. You have not failed to overcome your social anxiety.

Now, what you’ve tried in the past, I’m sure you’ve tried things to overcome your social anxiety. It hasn’t worked. That’s true. That’s a fact. But that’s all there is to it.

If you draw the conclusion that nothing works for me – that’s a massive generalization. And that simply isn’t true. Because you cannot know that you haven’t tried everything.

Yes, you’ve tried a bunch of things that were recommended that were supposed to work perhaps, or that were supposed to reduce your social anxiety and you haven’t gotten the results. Or maybe it’s just too damn difficult to do it, and you can’t force yourself to do it. And therefore, you feel bad about yourself, and so on and so forth. But that also doesn’t mean you failed.

It just means that the strategies that you’ve tried, or the strategies that you haven’t tried, because they’re too demanding of you, or too scary or too embarrassing, or whatever it is, are not the right strategies for you. Okay? And there are more strategies, and there are more approaches, and there are always different things that you can do, in order to get to the outcome that you want to get to. This is my self “helpy” little speech for you. But it’s true.

This is what I learned from studying personal development so much. While it didn’t help me overcome my social anxiety, I studied it before I actually started getting results in overcoming my social anxiety, so I had like five years of Personal Development Study, and it didn’t resolve these crappy emotions that I had: the shame, the insecurity, the anxiety, the fear, the terror, all that kind of stuff. It didn’t do much for that. But it did make me a lot more optimistic and positive and focused on my thinking, and a lot more realistic as well. That went a bit overboard and went to positive, but that’s a different story. This is factually true. You’ve tried certain things, they didn’t work. And now, there are other things that you can try.

The problem, however, is that when you try a bunch of things, you become less and less likely to want to try more things. Because, okay, I try something, and it doesn’t work. “Man, I don’t want to try more things. Because I just get evidence that it doesn’t work. And, I just get more confirmation that there is something wrong with me and that nothing works for me. So, I’m just not going to try anything”. It’s that kind of stuff.

Further, when you’ve tried certain things, and they didn’t work, it might just mean that you can’t do it on your own. And you need to get some outside help in the form of a therapist, for example.

Another thing is that you might be addressing your social anxiety. And what you’re actually dealing with is depression and social anxiety. And that depression is stronger than your social anxiety. So, you need to get help for your depression: get a proper assessment so you know what it is that you’re dealing with. By the way, depression, I can’t help with it. That – I don’t specialize none, at all; Social Anxiety – that’s my specialty. But it might be that that’s what’s going on. And in which case, you find help for dealing with that particular issue.

But there’s always a solution. There’s always something that you can do that will improve your situation. Just the challenge that you have is you get to this cycle of being stuck.

2. The Cycle of Being Stuck

Let’s talk about that ‘the cycle of being stuck’.

Now, as you look at this cycle, what you see on the top left – the belief “I can’t change” – that’s what you get to if you…sometimes people already have this to start with, “I can’t change, I just am this way, this is my personality, I can’t do anything about it. I’ve always been this way blah blah blah”, which isn’t true.

Anxiety isn’t part of your personality. But a different story.

So, sometimes people already believe I can’t change. Other times they try things, and that is supposed to work and they don’t work. And then they end up really believing I can’t change.

Now, what happens when you believe that you can’t change? You have little to no motivation. And when you have little to no motivation, that leads to no action or half-assed action. And what does that do? That leads to little results or no results.

What does that do? That confirms the belief that you can’t change. Now you’re in a negative cycle of being stuck.

Now to break out of the cycle of being stuck. You need more information, like this video, for example. So, you are acquiring that, and you need to try different approaches and strategies. But you need a particular mindset for that one, I suggest the following:

“There’s no such thing as failure, only feedback”.

So, create a goal of social ease, commit to it, and keep trying new things until something works. There is something that works.

We’re going to talk about that in just a second.

And you want to get outside help. When you get stuck. There’s always something or someone that knows more that can help you more. And then, just keep altering your approach and never ever give up.

Keep focused on the goal. Keep altering your approach, then it’s inevitable you’re going to succeed eventually.

Now speaking of different strategies and approaches, here’s powerful insight number 3.

3. EFT is a different strategy that is proven to be effective.

Now to demonstrate how significant this amount of research is. Let’s look here at this pyramid-shaped diagram that demonstrates the hierarchy of scientific evidence.

And I have to thank my colleague, Steve Wells for this, who’s a psychologist and a leader in the field of Energy Psychology because I got from him.

This triangle-shaped diagram is divided up into six different levels. At the bottom is the weakest level of evidence, and at the top is the strongest scientific evidence.

Now, the bottom level is colored blue, as you can see, and reads ‘anecdotal reports’. That is like “Hey, my friend tried this, and he got a great result, you should try it too”. It’s very weak evidence.

The next level up is purple and reads ‘systematic observation’. This is a lot better, but not strong either.

Above that, you see ‘case studies’ in red. Again, this is stronger evidence. But here, it’s just individuals.

The next level up from that is orange and reads ‘uncontrolled outcome studies’. Now here, you measure groups BEFORE and AFTER treatment. And you can see, okay, they had this problem before we applied this treatment. And now they have improved this much, or they don’t have the problem anymore, which is, again, stronger evidence. But here, the challenge is that there’s no control group to compare the results with. So, while you can say, “Hey, this group had this problem, we did this, and now they’re all better”. People can still say, “Well, if you would have taken another group of people, they might have gotten better anyway without your treatment”.

So, to really make it clear that something is effective, you need to have a control group. Which brings us to the second-highest level in the pyramid of scientific evidence. It reads ‘randomized control trials’, and is colored gold. It’s gold because it’s considered the gold standard in clinical research to measure the effectiveness of a new intervention or treatment. Now in a randomized control trial, you randomly assign participants to two groups: an experimental group, let’s say Group A, and a control group, group B, and you compare the outcomes against each other after treatment.

Let’s look at an example of one randomized control study in 2016.

Here to study tested the effects of EFT tapping on PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in war veterans. PTSD is one of the most severe anxiety disorders and it’s a common condition under war veterans, and it is often regarded as treatment-resistant. And this study recruited 58 veterans who scored 50 or greater on the military PTSD checklist, the PCLM, which indicates clinical symptom levels.

26 of them were randomized into a control group called the “treatment as usual” (TAU) waitlist group, and the other 32 were put in an experimental group. Those in the experimental group received 6 one-hour EFT sessions in addition to TAU – treatment as usual. Now after the treatment, the EFT group demonstrated a significant reduction in PTSD symptoms.

The mean score of participants on the PTSD test before treatment was 66. And after the treatment, the mean score was only 34 (By the way to mean scores like the average), and subjects in the TAU – treatment as usual group showed no significant change.

By the way, it gets even better. Not only did the veterans keep their improvements at three and six month follow up. Also, the psychological conditions such as anxiety and depression had declined significantly, as are the physiological markers of insomnia and pain.

95% of the veterans who completed the study no longer scored more than 50 on the military PTSD test, with a mean score of 34. They no longer had clinical PTSD.

Now, this is one example of a randomized control trial and it is considered very strong scientific evidence.

Now there’s one level above the top of the pyramid and this is the highest level it is green, and it reads ‘meta-analysis’. These can only be done when you have enough randomized control trials. With a meta-analysis, they study all the studies done on a particular topic, say anxiety, and create a statistical analysis of all the studies.

Now a meta-analysis is regarded as the highest quality, strongest evidence of science. It’s often described as the ultimate study. Only 10% of psychology has even one meta-analysis done; tapping has had five meta-analysis done on it.

Here you see three conclusions of meta-analysis that were done that you’d likely find relevant because they showed that tapping has had a large treatment effect for anxiety, depression, and PTSD.

If you’re listening to this on the podcast, rather than watching this, I’m going to explain it to you so you can hear it as well. What we see on screen is the effect size value for anxiety, the effect size value for depression, and the effect size value for PTSD. And effect size value means how much of an effect the treatment had: the lower the effect size value, the smaller the effect; the bigger the effect size value, the larger the effect of the treatment. And, as a bit of context, 0.2 effect size is considered small, 0.5 is considered moderate, and 0.8 is considered a large effect size.

As you can see, or hear, tapping has had a 1.23 effect size for anxiety, which is very large, a 1.31 for depression, also large; and a 2.96 effect size for PTSD, also very large.

If you’re listening to this on the podcast, you can go to my channel and find the video where I will reference the places where you can find scientific evidence. Now, this is really strong evidence of the power of tapping. This meta-analysis that I showed you is really the highest level of scientific evidence, and you need a certain amount of studies of a certain quality in order to be able to do them. So, there was one meta-analysis done for all the studies of tapping on anxiety, there was one done specifically for all the studies tapping on depression. And there was one meta-analysis done of all the studies that were done for tapping on PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And as you can see, all of them had a large effect size. In fact, the effect sizes for tapping were all very, very large.

So, what I suggest is that you try out tapping. It’s a different strategy, it’s a different approach. And it’s amazing what it’s done for me and for the lives of millions of people all over the world. So really, highly recommend that you check it out.

I have a free 30-day social confidence challenge coming up on the first of January 2021. That’s amazing. That’s not your typical 30-day challenge where you get a bit of information. I’ve poured my heart and soul into this. I created this during the lockdown. So, I have lots of time on my hands. And I’m giving you the best of what I got over 10 years as a coach. Since I was 17, I started trying to overcome my social anxiety. I’m 36 now so it’s nearly two decades.

I’m giving you the best of what I’ve got from both Traditional Psychology as well as Eastern Energy Psychology.

The challenge is all about overcoming your social anxiety using tapping. So, you’ll learn how to tap and how to address this social anxiety. You’ll learn about the journey to social confidence because it doesn’t just happen overnight, even with a tool as effective and powerful as tapping.

But when you apply it in the right way over time, you can actually chip away at that problem so that it no longer is an issue in your life. And you can actually be enjoying yourself and there’s no anxiety. I’m not talking about reduced anxiety. I am talking about reducing anxiety when you’re referring to the 30-day social confidence challenge, but I’m talking about an End Goal. You can get to a place where there is no anxiety, and you’re just relaxed and you’re comfortable and you’re at ease. And feel free to express yourself. Whatever comes to mind, you blurt out, you’re on an equal level with people, you connect effortlessly you can be in a moment, you can do stupid stuff, you’re free, you’re liberated. That’s what I’m talking about. And that’s what is possible when you apply tapping in the right way. And actually, when you combine the best of traditional psychology and Eastern energy psychology, it’s not either-or it’s both.

So, if you want to join the 30-Day Challenge, you can go to bit.ly/socialconfidencechallenge

Man, I hope that’s the right one. Yep, it is the right one. That is bit.ly/socialconfidencechallenge

And that’s still a bit far from now. But I’m already starting to talk about it because I’m excited about it. It’s really, really cool. I ran two of them before, back to back almost during the lockdown, because I had a lot of time on my hands. And it’s been really a profound experience for lots and lots of people. And many people said that it was better than anything life-transforming and better than any paid product they had ever purchased. And some said they made more progress than they even had made spending years in therapy.

I am really dedicated to this. And I’ve put a lot of effort, time, and energy into this. So, this is going to rock your world.

I can do a lot more in 30 days of an email and a video, just 20 minutes a day, then I can do these weekly videos. So I’m going all out. You don’t want to miss this. Okay. So there you go.

And what I also wanted to say about that is if you already join now, I’m already preparing you for it, so that you’re optimally prepared once we actually get started. So actually, there’s like a pre-start to the actual start. So go to bit.ly/socialconfidencechallenge to sign up.

Now once you’ve signed up, you’ll have a little welcome video, you can do a social anxiety test, my personal social anxiety test. So, you have a pre-test and then you do the 30 Day Challenge. You have an after test and you can see the results that you’ve gotten after those 30 days. So really hope you’re going to join us. Go to bit.ly/socialconfidencechallenge and I’ll connect with you soon. Bye for now.

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Sebastiaan

Sebastiaan van der Schrier is a Social Confidence Coach and ex social anxiety sufferer. He helps socially anxious people become confident using a unique and painless approach. He is the host of the Social Anxiety Solutions podcast show and runs the first ever online Social Confidence Community.

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