How to Overcome Shyness: Tips

Being shy can be pretty debilitating. And surprisingly, most people have experienced it at least once in their lives. In this part of “How to Overcome Shyness”, I want to share some tips with you on overcoming shyness.

We know from part one that there are three types of shyness: situational shyness (in specific situations), transitional shyness (during transitions or the process of change), and permanent shyness (in most social situations).

In the last post, I covered the four main causes of shyness: need for control, lack of trust, fear of being judged and being critical.

Now that we know the what and why behind shyness, I want to share some tips with you on how to overcome it. If you have kids, escort them in this exercise and help them practice the tips. You may have to be their facilitator.

This post is part 3 of 4 in the series How to Overcome Shyness

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Relationships Set in Sand, Not Stone

Write your hurts in sand. Carve your blessings in stone

Relationships are very sensitive and needs to be cherished. Sometimes in life, they will be threatened. Every conflict puts a relationship to the test, and we have plenty of conflicts in our lives.

As part of my work as a state director of Together for Humanity Foundation, I often lead discussions with kids and teachers about ways to deal with conflict and how it impacts our relationships. One story we tell the kids is the story of the Sand and Stone. This is a story that is important to keep in mind for every relationship: parent-child relationships, couples, friends, work colleagues, countries, enemies and for any two people who are in a relationship.

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The Parent You Wish You Had

Recently, our daughter Noff celebrated her 12th birthday. When the kids were little, we decided that we would celebrate their birthdays every year, with as many kids as possible. Often, we extended the celebration over a month. We think our kids are such a gift that one day of partying to celebrate their births is just not enough.

Every year, we invite kids over to our house. We prefer celebrating at home to the MacDonald’s parties. We have found that at MacDonald’s, the birthday boy or girl is usually anonymous. Everyone is mostly there for the ice-cream cake. We want our kids to feel special and make a huge effort to make their parties fun and happy. Everyone in the family helps and each year we try to do something different and age appropriate. Our parties have become such a hit that the kids are excited to come every year.

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Compassionate Relationship: Failed Sympathy

In the last chapter on tests in relationships, we talked about the risks of hidden apathy. Today, I will cover the risks of sympathy.

If you remember my example story, I was very, very sad when a contract I had been working on for about 3 years was suddenly stopped 2 month after it started. I was so excited and happy when it started that I was extremely sad when I was told the organization will not continue the project. To manage my feelings, I shared the story with people I have a relationship with. Lucky for me, most of my relationships were very supportive and I made sure not to share with those who were not.

Here are more examples of getting things wrong and failing the relationship test.

This post is part 4 of 4 in the series Compassionate Relationship

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Compassionate Relationship: Hidden Apathy

Here is an example of a relationship test at a level one – when one person is experiencing pain from an external source, which has nothing to do with the supporter/listener. Notice how easily things can go wrong and the relationship test can fail.

Last year, I was offered a position working within a team of people doing something that I absolutely loved. I had been working with them for over two years before that in an external capacity. We had been going back and forth for about a year, in discussions about me joining their team to write and implement a very special project. This whole time I was very happy and excited, waiting for the technical things to be sorted out so I could start the project. After two years of talking, it took a year to sign the contract and then I finally started writing the project. I was very hyped. But two month into the project, things changed in the organization. The person managing the project left and the wisest decision for me was to stop the project. I was soooooooooooooooooooooo disappointed. I was very sad and even cried. To manage the overwhelming challenge I was facing, I shared the story with other people, which put our relationships to the test. Lucky for me, most of my relationships were successful. While sharing my challenge with others, we both passed the test of support. But this is not always the case for every challenge. Here are some examples of relationships and how things can go wrong.

This post is part 3 of 4 in the series Compassionate Relationship

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Compassionate Relationship: Empathy, Sympathy and Compassion

Most people have conflicts in their relationships and fail to resolve them because they confuse between empathy, sympathy and compassion. This confusion can be caused by either person in the relationship. It can be a result of ineffective expectations or insufficient support. Regardless the reason, life, the ultimate examiner, would give a “Fail! Big time!” on this test.

Understanding the difference between the three is essential to passing the relationship test. Here is my version of the difference.

Empathy is when you notice and understand the other persons’ situation, experience, perspective or feelings. It does not mean you share their feelings, agree with them or have been asked to share your judgment, thoughts or ideas. It definitely does not mean you need to solve their problem.

The best way to proceed is to say, “I can see that you are very disappointed and upset”, or just be a sounding board and repeat back to them what they said, “So you are sad because he was rude to you. I can understand why”. Often times, people only want empathy. Someone to talk to that will understand their perspective and feelings. Empathy is a way to give support with your presence.

This post is part 2 of 4 in the series Compassionate Relationship

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Compassionate Relationship: The Relationship Tests

Our lives are full of relationships. Each of them is a test we need to pass in order to have a happy, healthy, successful and fulfilling life. Relationships are such an important element in our lives that we start the process even before we are born. We have 9 months of close, physical contact with our mom and through her, with our dad or her partner. The success of these early relationships will have a huge impact on our long term relationship with our parents – the most important test of our lives.

Life is full of tests because at every stage of our lives, we will have relationships with other people. It can be our families, our friends, colleagues, clients, people that provide us with a service or even people we meet for a short time whose name we may never know.

This post is part 1 of 4 in the series Compassionate Relationship

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Inspiration for Success: The Climb

Some goals are very hard to reach. That is why climbing is often used as an inspirational metaphor. Imagine yourself wanting to reach the top of a very high mountain. You know that it is going to be hard and maybe even long. You can prepare yourself for some of the paths you will need to take to reach the top of the mountain, but for others, you can’t.

In life coaching, we say that we can only work on the things we can prepare for. Why? Because “we do not know what we do not know” so we cannot prepare for it. We are not fortune tellers. Often we are able to think of a few challenges we might encounter on the road to wherever we are going, but we never know exactly what we will face. We cannot carry absolutely everything we might need for any possible unforeseen event.

Every mountain requires a climb. Sometimes the hill is steep and sometimes it is moderate. Some people have smaller legs and they need more steps, while others have giant legs and require less energy. Sometimes, you are physically strong, have lots of muscles and can run up the hill. Sometimes, you are a bit weaker and must rest every 2 meters. Regardless of your circumstances, climbing requires effort. The thing that determines if we make it to the top is whether we believe we can. Because as the saying goes, “if you believe you can or believe you can’t, you are right”.

This post is part 1 of 2 in the series Inspiration For Success

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Emotional Credit Line

Now, perhaps more than ever in our lifetime, things are tough. Money is tight, prices are up, revenues are down, globalization, the Internet and mobile technology change almost everything we know. As a result, pressure is mounting and many parents struggle to cope with it.

In the past week, two things happened that made me think of using buffers or “lines of credit” as a strategy for reducing pressure, both financial and emotional, and keeping ourselves sane, while being better parents for our kids.

The first thing was Eden’s presentation of her research on corporal punishment. You may remember we invited our readers to participate in this research, which examined the links between parents’ disciplinary methods and things like the number of children in the family, age differences, financial situation and more.

When she analyzed parents’ and children’s’ responses to her survey, it occurred to Eden that stress may be a mediator between the various characteristics of each family and the amount of physical punishment used by the parents. Turns out, it is. She found that when parents experience more stress in their life, due to having more kids, having them close together and/or not having enough money to support them, they used less positive reinforcement with their children and were more abusive towards them, both verbally and physically.

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Attention is Golden

As parents, some of the things our kids want to tell us are, well, childish. Although we love them, we are sometimes busy or preoccupied and paying close attention to what happened at the playground is not top of our list. As partners, friends, siblings and descendants, people talk to us about a wide variety of things that matter to them and paying attention can be difficult.

But it is worth the trouble.

When I worked at the National Semiconductors headquarters in Santa Clara, CA, the company provided easy access to great training and one of the courses I took was Active Listening. The instructor was a soft-spoken lady who impressed me as a good listener and someone who knew a great deal about people, and during the course I realized just how poorly I had been listening…

At the end of the class, I left with a list of actions and behaviors that constituted active listening and with the advice that it was important to practice them, but I felt something was missing from those instructions.

Over time, particularly after I trained to be a life coach, I read more about relationships and emotional intelligence and I think I have found an underlying description that unites the techniques and makes the whole thing seem like common sense.

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