Sebastiaan: Hi, my name is Sebastiaan van der Schrier from social-anxiety-solutions.com. I am a former social anxiety disorder sufferer and a social confidence coach and the creator of the first-ever online social confidence community where you use the best of traditional psychology combined with energy psychology to overcome your social anxieties step-by-step. It’s not open for registration at this moment.

And I’m also the host of the Social Anxiety Solutions podcast where I interview psychologists, coaches, researchers, best-selling author, psychotherapists for their best social anxiety solutions to overcome your social anxiety.

And today I want to talk to you about an interesting concept and that interesting concept is short term fixes versus long term permanent change.

Okay, so, here’s a little story. When I tried to overcome my social anxiety in the beginning, I tried whatever I could find. Changing my thoughts, forcefully facing my fears. Yeah, I won’t go into the whole story but I did a whole bunch of wacky things from public speaking to approaching girls and groups of girls and getting myself purposely rejected and smearing lipstick all over my face, over my lips and eyes and starting conversations with people to force myself to face my worst fears and all that didn’t work and I did hypnosis, neuro linguistic programming, timeline therapy, journaling, Tony Robbins whatever. And it all didn’t work. I mean facing my fears did give me a boost of confidence, but it was short-lived like in a week it was gone. So, it wasn’t an actual solution that solved my social anxiety.

Until I eventually found a technique called EFT – Emotional Freedom Techniques. And it looks really crazy, I’ve never heard about it, it’s a tapping technique where you tap on certain acupressure points in the body. When you do that while you’re focusing on the problem that you’re having the emotions connected to the problems start to dissolve and release.

Now when I first saw this, I thought it was a scam like yeah, right, sure, of course, tapping on your face, that’s going to solve my social anxiety yeah right. But I did my research and by the way I didn’t go to Wikipedia which is a man-made thing because it says it’s pseudoscience but it’s actually backed up with there are over a hundred peer-reviewed studies done on the effectiveness of EFT and there are over 20 double-bind studies published in peer-reviewed journals such as the APA  -The American Psychological Association and it works and it’s proven to work. They just don’t know exactly why it works.

There are different theories and they’re not 100% clear on which one is it. But it’s being used by millions of people worldwide, more and more people are using it because it is so powerful, it is so amazing.

I use it to overcome my own social anxiety. I had to help with some brilliant therapist to help me apply it in the right way, but I’ve also helped hundreds of socially anxious clients overcome their social anxiety. It is really amazing.

Short-Term vs Long-Term Thinking

Now the topic of this video is short-term thinking versus long-term thinking because when I found out about tapping and I eventually had my first shift with it, when I first noticed emotions release in my body and instead of feeling ashamed talking about the fact that I didn’t have a girlfriend or how I haven’t had sex either completely or in a while in front of these people on the workshop and I felt totally ashamed and after two minutes of tapping I could freely talk about it like I was talking about what I had for breakfast that shift made me think wow, now I can quickly overcome my social anxiety, I just have to tap a little bit focus on the right thing and boom. Probably next month I’ll be social anxiety free.

Well, that wasn’t the case at all.

It took me quite a long time with a lot of persistence to overcome my social anxiety completely. Now, I say completely because I’m not experiencing anxiety in social situations but if I try something new, some anxiety might come up for me.

I was speaking to this guy the other day, two days ago at the dance like salsa dancing, something I’ve got into about a year ago which is spectacular.

And he was saying that he’s now getting into public speaking. I’m like, oh, I did that about 12 years ago at Toastmasters and it was freaking scary. I was shit scared, but I did it and he’s like, oh, is that what you used to overcome your social anxiety?

And I’m like no. And he’s like dancing? I’m like no, I wouldn’t start salsa dancing when I’m socially anxious. It’s way too far outside my comfort zone.

So, what was it then?

It was energy psychology and blah, blah, blah, I gave him a little bit of my story and so he asks me so, you have no social anxiety anymore at all? I’m like not that I know of but who knows. He’s like so are you comfortable with public speaking?

Like I don’t know. I’m comfortable on video, I’m comfortable doing webinar, I’m comfortable in group situations, I’m comfortable when I’m the center of attention but I don’t know how I’ll do when I have a prepared speech. But if I go and do that and I will be doing that at some point in the future when the time is right, and everything business-wise is set into place I definitely am going to start speaking.

When anxiety comes up after doing the long-term work

If I then notice that I have anxiety for one, it won’t freak me out. I won’t be beating myself up about it because I know what it is.

For one, it isn’t me, it’s just my brain is perceiving a threat, my brain is perceiving danger, so I know what’s going on inside. That perception of danger activates the fight flight freeze response, my body is filled with cortisol and adrenaline, blood rushes away from my digestive system into my outer limbs preparing me to fight the danger, run away from it or hide, go into protection mode.

And that’s what’s going on, my body is put in survival mode.

So, I know that that’s going on, it’s very unpleasant, I won’t like it, but I won’t be ashamed of it. I won’t judge myself for it and I’ll just go home, I’ll either resolve it by myself or I’ll contact one of my mentors or my coach and I’ll work through it and soon enough I’ll be comfortable public speaking.

And it’s very comfortable to know that that is possible. So, that’s where I’m at with it but that has taken me quite a long time.

Perspective on what it takes to overcome social anxiety

Now when I started with the tapping, I thought that’s a quick fix. Well, it’s not a quick fix.

It is a technique to quickly let go of negative emotions that are unhelpful and excessive. Yes, however, you need to understand how this technique works. Now it’s very simple you can learn it in 10 minutes but that’s learning the basic step in salsa. Maybe in 10 minutes you can learn the basic step in salsa but to actually be an amazing salsa dancer it’s going to take you a long time.

That may or may not be the case for your journey to overcoming your social anxiety but it’s not going to happen in applying tapping half-assed with your basic knowledge a couple of times. That’s just not going to cut it. You can use it to overcome your social anxiety completely, but you need to have a thorough understanding of how the technique works, what to do when it doesn’t work, what to aim at, how to overcome resistance, how to ask yourself the right questions etc. etc. etc.

And then once you actually know how to technique works properly you can use it on the right targets and persistently chip away at your social anxiety and get rid of all of the beliefs that are causing that perception of danger. Then you can get yourself to a place where you’re free of your social anxiety.

Now when you start out you’re tapping you might notice that in the beginning your overall anxiety that you experienced might be on a scale of 0 to 10, it might be an 8 out of 10 and you start tapping and your first progress that you make after a couple of sessions or a week or two weeks of tapping it’s like your overall anxiety is starting to shrink in intensity.

So, it’s no longer an 8 out of 10, it drops to a 5 out of 10. And then you use the tapping for something specific and now you’ll find that instead of being shit scared when you’re the center of attention that fear dissolves in you are okay being the center of attention. Great, right? Now you focus on the next problem. Maybe you feel inferior around your boss. Now you work on that for a couple of session or a period of time and now you become comfortable being around your boss, your employer.

Then the next phase eventually you’ll get to the place where you have no anxiety anymore, but you might still not be enjoying social situations. Okay, that’s then the next phase to work on. And then the next level might be well I find myself still being quite serious and I still notice that I’m altering my behavior in order to try to get approval. Okay, boom, now that’s the next thing that you’re going to work on.

And so, you want to work towards getting to the place where you’re totally free to be yourself and that is a longer-term project, that is not a quick fix. We’re living in a society where it’s like okay, I want to read a book. Boom go on to amazon.com and it’s on your Kindle in a minute. Or I want to watch this specific TV show. Okay, go to Netflix, boom, there you have it.

We are programmed to get everything we want quickly. But with inner growth overcoming big inner challenges which overcoming social anxiety is, there are exceptions but it’s not the rule that you will overcome your social anxiety just like that. It’s a process and you progressively reduce your social anxiety over time. So, there you go.

And that’s actually to give you an idea.

I run the first-ever social confidence community and we go through ten modules, one module roughly a month. So, it runs for about a year. So, that’s a lot of tapping that people are doing. That’s to give you an idea of what’s happening but the kind of results that these people are getting is why it’s worth to put in that effort. How will you feel if instead of feeling super anxious when you’re going to school you actually feel comfortable in school now?

That’s a big difference.

What if going to your job, hating this kind of person, feeling super uncomfortable and awkward around that person is not there anymore and you’re calm and at ease and you’re no longer reacting to that person’s negativity? And instead, you just feel calm, you’re just not bothered by it and it doesn’t faze you.

What would that be like? Or what if instead of blushing all the time and getting red for no particular reason you just feel at ease?

In situations where you would usually blush, you’re thinking like oh, hey, I haven’t blush, I wasn’t uncomfortable. What would that be like?

These kinds of shift and changes happen when you address what is underlying your social anxiety.

So, that’s just a perspective that I wanted to share with you.

So, I hope it has been helpful to get away from your quick fix mindset and take the time to really resolve your social anxiety because the freedom that you’ll get from actually dealing with this problem and it’s just a problem that you can deal with.

There’s nothing wrong with your brain, your brain is working perfectly fine. It’s just operating based upon software that’s put in there as a result of your upbringing the things that happen to you and the emotions that are stuck there. But once you process that, once you shift and change that, once you update that programming a different program will run in your brain and your brain will react accordingly.

When there’s no perception of threat your brain doesn’t have to activate this fight flight freeze survival response to protect you from the threat and there won’t be any anxiety.

Now you can get to that place but it’s going to require your time, your efforts, your energy and it’s so worth to do that because when you can wake up you feel good, you can look forward to interactions, you can look forward to the weekend.

I very much look forward to this weekend. This weekend I’m going to go to the south. I’m going to stay in the south for a couple of days. I’m going to go salsa dancing, meet up with my friends, we’re going to hang out at the beach. It’s going to be a great time.

The relationships that you have with others, that is something as you know that is there for the rest of your life. So, the better your relationship is with yourself, the better your relationship is with other people. And so, putting in the time to improve the relationship with yourself to clear and neutralized your social anxiety so you’re at ease with you and you’re at ease with others and you can connect with people that’s going to benefit you for the rest of your life. So, it’s very much worth it to put in the effort to do that work.

All right, now, big promotion. I do run the social confidence community but it’s not open for registration because we’re in the middle of it, but I just wanted to share this perspective with you.

Okay, so, what you can check out if you want is my free social confidence starter kit which you can get on my website social-anxiety-solutions.com. I’m sure there’s a / somewhere and I’m actually looking it up as we go now. So professional Sebastiaan, I know.

But I know there’s a tab on my side that says, “Overcome SA for free”. When you click on that, that’s where you can get my free social confidence starter kit. What does that consist of? It consists of 10 free videos where I teach you the technique that I used to overcome my social anxiety and that I’ve helped hundreds of clients with overcome their social anxiety since 2009. I have logged 5000 coaching hours. And you’ll also get my eBook “How to overcome social anxiety completely?” That’s right, completely. So, that’s the logic behind it and how to do it and so on.

And in these 10 videos I teach you the technique and I also guide you through an experience of it so you can feel the shifts and changes in your body. And I had someone comment once that just with that alone they resolve 40% of their social anxiety. Just quite profound for something for free.

Alright, so, go check that out now. It is social-anxiety-solutions.com/social-anxiety-starter-kit. That’s why I don’t call the URL or just click below this video.

Alright, I hope it’s been helpful. I’ll talk to you next Thursday. I release videos like this every week. Subscribe. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

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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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