In my years of teaching people how to overcome their shyness and social anxiety, there’s a weird pattern that I keep noticing again and again…
…and again and again and again…
…and it really amazes me.
I Call It “The Genius Failure Paradox”
“The Genius Failure Paradox” is the tendency for UNUSUALLY intelligent people to have very LOW levels of social skills or confidence.
After contemplating this particular paradox, discussing it, and working on it for an awesome amount of time, I’d like to share my thoughts about it with you.
I assume that if you’ve read this far, then you probably see yourself as smarter than the average man or woman.
You know that you’re a little different than other people.
You probably realized at a young age that you saw things differently and thought differently than others in school…
And you’ve probably realized that your smart mind gives you an advantage over others in many areas of life…
But unfortunately, this smart mind of yours can actually be WORSE than USELESS when it comes to…
Your Social Life
By the way, I did say WORSE than useless.
It can actually be like having a hammer when you need to tighten a bolt. If you use the tool you have for the job, you’ll most likely make the situation WORSE.
Of course, it’s hard for a smart guy to even IMAGINE a situation where his smart mind could HURT his chances for success…
But trust me, this is one of those situations.
So relax, open your smart mind, and let me share with you the ten reasons why smart people fail in social situations… and what to do about it.
REASON #1: They Look For Information, Not Skills
It BLOWS MY MIND how many smart people I meet that just don’t GET IT when it comes to basic social skills.
When they want to overcome shyness or social anxiety, they look for that one magic piece of information that will let them fool other people into liking them, instead of actually becoming a genuinely outgoing person on the inside.
It’s as if they have logically reasoned that social skills are for lower beings who need to play games… and not worth the time it would take to learn them.
Social skills are just that… SKILLS.
They’re not social INFORMATION.
They’re not social THEORIES.
They’re social SKILLS.
And you don’t get them by THINKING about them. You get them by GETTING them.This means you’ll learn more by in one hour of actually getting out of the house and talking to people than you will in ten hours of “education”.
You get better by DOING. Period.
This leads me to…
REASON #2: They Think Too Much
Do you ever notice how so many people out there who are great at being confident and making conversation also happen to be…
Downright stupid!
It usually doesn’t take long to realize that the people who are the most sure of themselves also often happen to be unintelligent.
Why can people who SUCK at thinking be total ROCKSTARS when it comes to socializing?
And why do YOU, a smart person, find it so difficult to act confident when you probably deserve to do so more than most people?
It’s because making conversation and socializing can’t be “figured out” or solved by thinking.
But that’s what most shy and socially anxious people try to do.
If they can’t think of what to say, they go on thinking and thinking and thinking…
Never realizing that THINKING TOO MUCH is one of the main reasons they have a problem to begin with!
If you are standing around a group conversation, and not talking, it may be tempting to retreat into your head and get carried away in thought. You have to use some discipline to resist this temptation. Force yourself to “stay with” the conversation and stay involved with it. Once your focus is in the right place, then it becomes a lot easier to come up with things to say.
REASON #3: They Psych Themselves Out
Smart people do something that fascinates the hell out of me…
They come up with all the reasons why everything WON’T WORK when it comes to social situations.
They actually figure out why what it is that they would like to do will probably fail…They use their amazing creative imaginations to imagine all kinds of horrible pictures and scenes…
And then they use those imaginary outcomes to create negative emotions… which ultimately stop them from having success.
THEY DON’T EVEN TRY.
Now, if you’ve thought something through and come up with a good reason why it would fail, it makes sense to not do it, right?
I mean, why would you want to do things that are going to fail?
It is sound logical, but HORRIBLE thinking when it comes to the REAL WORLD… and overcoming shyness and social anxiety.
Because shy and socially anxious people have a tendency to OVERESTIMATE. You overestimate the probability that something bad will happen, and you overestimate the consequences if something bad did happen.
Usually, failure is not as big a deal as your mind makes it out to be. The little failures are necessary to improve your skills.
Using your mind to come up with all the reasons why things won’t work in this area of your life and then avoiding them … this is what leads to ULTIMATE FAILURE.
You must learn to overcome this habit if you have it.
REASON #4: They Can’t Deal With Fear And Other Emotions
A smart person’s STRENGTH is his MIND.
His WEAKNESS is often his EMOTIONS.
Smart people are often IMMOBILIZED by FEAR.
Totally stopped.
FROZEN.
And since many smart guys aren’t comfortable dealing with things they’re not good at, they just repress or RUN away from fear.
Many people would rather DIE in lonely isolation than admit that they don’t know how to deal with their emotions… or, GOD FORBID, ask for help!
Hey, I went for YEARS like this.
I know what it’s like.
But the reality is that anyone can learn to handle and even MASTER their emotions (even fear)…if they just take the time and effort to learn HOW to do it.
If this is you, then do yourself a big favor… take the time. Take the effort.
Don’t worry about whether someone else will look down on you for studying “self help.”
What matters is you doing the things that YOU need to do FOR YOU.
…I think the reason why I’m so fascinated with “The Genius Failure Paradox” is because I have had to struggle with all of these issues for a lot of years of my life.
Now, I’m not saying that I’m the smartest guy on the planet…
But, I don’t think mamma raised no fool.
And it always bothered the hell out of me that even though I was so good at figuring things out…
…I couldn’t figure out what I was missing when it came to being social.
Something tells me that you know what I’m talking about.
Well, after beating my head against the wall for a few years… trying all kinds of crazy stuff… I finally got the “bright” idea to start studying people who were “naturally” good socially.
By carefully studying what the “naturals” did in social situations… and learning how they minds worked, I began to realize that overcoming shyness and social anxiety wasn’t entirely LOGICAL.
I realized I was doing many things in a fundamentally wrong way, and the more I tried to “fix” my problems, the less progress I made.
It was only after I started to change my core personality and truly become more extroverted that I started to make progress.
Much of what I learned was very tough for me to accept… because my logical brain just didn’t want to buy into it.
It’s like that quote that goes “You cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking which created it.”
That’s what this is like.
It took me quite a long time, but I continued to learn, test, and refine what I was learning until I personally figured out how to overcome shyness and social anxiety…
I learned how to become confident whenever and wherever…
I learned how to build a social circle of friends from scratch…
…and most importantly, I learned how to GET RID of that “empty” feeling that I carried around my whole life because I didn’t know how to not be a hermit.
And once I got this area of my own life together, I decided to start helping other shy and socially anxious people get this area of THEIR lives together.
If you want to know more can go here
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