SUMMARY

In this post, I’m sharing the power of accepting your social anxiety…

…and I’m even sharing a personal story from a recent social anxiety situation I experienced.

You want to get to a place where you accept your social anxiety, yourself for having it, and the circumstances in your life for having it.

Acceptance is the first step to overcoming your social anxiety so let’s get started!

FULL TRANSCRIPTION

Sebastiaan: Hello, this is Sebastiaan from social-anxiety-solutions.com. I am a former social anxiety disorder sufferer and a social confidence coach. I help people to go from social anxiety to social ease. They can have a good time socially and just be natural and have a good time. Socializing is supposed to be effortless. That’s actually your normal state of being and I am managed to get back to that myself and I help clients do the same.

Now I’ve been putting out videos for eight years or something and I have a confession to make. Exciting what is it?

Well, I got anxious last week. In fact, it happens every now and then that I get a bit anxious. That’s like when something new happens that I haven’t yet encountered then can happen that I feel a bit anxious. For example, I started podcasting two years ago, I had never done that. There were a lot of unknowns.

During my first podcast I actually felt quite a bit anxious. Was it a problem? Not really because I tapped before I tapped during and I was in acceptance of it. There’s the big word. I was in acceptance of the anxiety.

In other words, the anxiety symptoms that came up for me they didn’t make me feel ashamed of myself, they didn’t throw me off thinking. Well of course they threw me off a bit, it’s not pleasant. I didn’t remain completely cool calm and collected because my system is thinking and I’m in danger. It does throw me off a bit, but I mean like I’m not extra judging myself on top of it or I’m not feeling extra bad on top of it and therefore the anxiety could come up and could fizzle out and then it wasn’t a problem anymore.

Now other situations that I can recall right now, I don’t know nothing that stands out at least but last week or two weeks ago I did get a bit anxious and because I have footage of it I thought it would be a good idea to do some video off of it.

Here’s what happened, I go to salsa these days. I started dancing four months ago and I love it. I’m dancing all the time. I was out with my dancing buddies and my dance teachers they were doing a performance on stage and after their performance rudder in between their performances there was a drag queen that came out to do a Moulin Rouge or whatever it was that he or she was doing.

I was standing pretty near to the front of the stage so in the middle of her act she’s pointing at me for me to come to the stage. I’m like “Oh, shoot, we don’t want this”. But what are you going to say? I’m not going to say no and hide in the crowd, so I went on stage and this is what happened.

Okay, now you might not be able to spot that I was a bit anxious, in fact that’s what happens for most people. You’re just a bit anxious and most people don’t really notice it even though you think that they do. But anyway, that’s a different story.

What I want to say with this video with this little example here is because I had done my inner work because when the anxiety came up for me it wasn’t like “My heart is racing, no, there’s a lump in my throat. What if they’re going to see me anxious? What if they’re judging me to be weak right now? I’m such a loser for being anxious. I shouldn’t get anxious.”

If that had been my inner voice and I would have become ashamed like in the beginning like when I was really anxious I would blush when I would feel anxious because I was so ashamed of it. Like all of that didn’t happen, so instead I just had a bit of anxiety and because I just had a bit of anxiety I could still kind of keep my cool. I wasn’t totally in the flow on stage by any sense of the imagination, but I could still kind of keep myself together and sort of enjoy the experience and that was the end of it.

Acceptance of your social anxiety essentially important. Acceptance of yourself while you’re dealing with social anxiety essentially important. Acceptance of the circumstances that are in your life that are difficult because of the social anxiety essentially important.

Long story short – acceptance very important.

In fact, it’s the first step of overcoming your social anxiety. It’s a lot easier said than done. I run an online social confidence community. You can’t sign up for it right now, we opened that up at two months ago and for a whole month our main focus has been on getting to that place of acceptance because that place of acceptance that alone will significantly reduce your anxiety how long it stays around the intensity of it, how you feel about yourself will improve. Just your overall mental health and well-being will improve by getting to that place of acceptance.

This acceptance is a precondition for change. It’s essential because what you resist persists and what you accept you come to terms with. Like you accept the status quo and from that place that’s the place from which you can start to make lasting changes.

From that place of acceptance then you can start to look at “Alright, well, why is it that I felt anxious in that particular situation? What was the threat there? I’m pretty sure it kept a bit after I went on stage.” I don’t know, I don’t really recall what it was that was a threat for me but maybe I didn’t want to humiliate myself on stage in front of all these people. I don’t know what it was but anyway I’m expecting that after the tapping I’ve done next time that a similar situation happens I won’t get anxious because my brain won’t detect a threat there and if my brain does fine, no problem, that’s fine because then I’m not in judgment of myself for the anxiety that comes up. I can still operate, I can still function, I don’t have to hide in my house because maybe one day I’ll feel anxious symptoms. I’m free regardless and if I do get triggered great that’s a healing opportunity because I’m going to do some tapping afterwards to uncover what the threat was and get rid of it, so I can be natural and at ease in that situation as well.

I hope this has been helpful for you. I release videos like this every week and I’ve been doing that for a long time. You can find these videos obviously on my channel, but you can subscribe for it here or here or wherever that button is. Every Thursday I released a video like this.

Now that’s nice watching these videos but in these videos, I just put out a little tiny bit of content, just a quick thing and people like it, it’s helpful but it’s I’d say it’s a tiny bite of what I offer. I’ve been studying solutions to social anxiety from the moment I realized I had a problem which is above age 16 or 17 and I’m 33 now so do the math.

I’ve been coaching people for nine years. Nine years working solely with socially anxious clients, helping them go from social anxiety to social confidence, combining Western traditional psychology and Eastern energy psychology and on my podcast, I interview psychologists, healers, coaches, researchers, best-selling author, scientist, psychotherapists for their best social anxiety secrets. You will get the podcast by going to iTunes or when you sign up for my newsletter because I’ll talk about it of course in my newsletter.

But what you also get when you go to my website is you get a social confidence starter kit where I introduce you to the technique that I used to overcome my social anxiety. I share an eBook with you. A small eBook where I talk about how I overcame my own social anxiety and how you can do the same, what the four steps are to get to that place and I shared 10 videos of that technique and I also guide you through an experience of it.

In other words that’s where you want to be, okay? That’s going to rock your world, that’s going to already start to give you some more emotional control and it can already start to reduce your social anxiety. Just with that information alone, alright? Pretty amazing. That’s of course free and you can get that at social-anxiety-solutions.com. I don’t know the / but go to social-anxiety-solution.com click on the “overcome social anxiety”, tap at the top of a site and you’ll get there or just click below this video.

Alright, I hope it’s been helpful. I will talk to you soon. Bye for now.