Many people consider public speaking more terrifying than death. If you’re one of them, you probably work fairly hard to avoid finding yourself in front of an audience. Other situations in which the spotlight effect can rear its ugly head (e.g. approaching a stranger at a party or asking someone out on a date) are also common sources of anxiety.
If you tend to avoid anxiety-provoking situations, perhaps you remain hopeful that one day you will overcome your fears. For now, though, you continue to tell yourself that you just aren’t ‘ready’ and will try ‘next time’. This implies that through some miracle destined to occur in the not too distant future, you will have mastered the thing you are avoiding doing right now . . . without ever having tried.
That’s preposterous.
The fatal flaw in this strategy becomes patently obvious when applied to any other practical endeavour. How much progress are you likely to make on your golf swing if you never pick up a club? Expect to ace your physics exam without any test prep? Not likely. Want to perform a guitar solo before learning some basic chords? Forget it. Social skills are no different. Only through trial and error are you likely to make progress.
By failing to try you’re not only failing to improve, you’re becoming more fragile. Every time you eschew an uncomfortable situation, you make the next encounter that much more difficult to handle: your capacity to evade stressful situations is growing in inverse proportion to your capacity to face them. Put another way, the better you get at avoiding, the worse you get at confronting. This is one way mild anxieties grow and evolve into crippling phobias.
In sum: If you want to remain fragile, keep avoiding that which you fear. If not, perhaps it’s time for a change.
This is an excerpt taken from the article, When the Cure is Worse Than the Disease.
