Many have happened to get into situations where you hesitate to say something or start a conversation. This is due to a lack of the right skills. How to cope and communicate more with the people around you.
Like most people, you must happen to find yourself in situations where you hesitate to say something or start a conversation. At the same time, in front of you there may be a person you know well, and a stranger. This is partly due to a lack of the right skills: you just don't know how to initiate or carry on a conversation. But there is another factor holding back many - fear. You may not consider your feelings to be fear. Perhaps you call them insecurity, or perhaps the moment "seems inappropriate" to you. But no matter what you justify them, it is fear that stops you - no matter how it manifests itself.
Here are some helpful tips and exercises to help you overcome your fear.
Where does fear of communication come from?
Fear is an emotional response to a situation you are in or imagine. Your thoughts about the situation determine how you feel and the emotions that prompt you to act (or refrain from acting).
For example, if you are anxious to share information, an upcoming meeting is likely to make you feel good. This kind of enthusiasm means that you are more likely to perform well and achieve good results. And thanks to past results, the next time a meeting like this is scheduled, you will have a very positive attitude. Naturally, the same happens when you are afraid of something. If you think that everything will go badly, then the situation makes you unpleasant and you are unlikely to be able to prove yourself from the best side. Remember an important formula:
Thoughts - Feelings - Actions - Results
Fear or anxiety
It is important to understand what is the difference between fear and anxiety.
Fear is usually associated with a specific current situation. Let's say you are told, "Stand up and tell us what you have been doing this week." If it is unbearable for you to do this, you will experience fear.
Anxiety is somewhat different, although it has similar symptoms to fear and manifests itself in similar sensations. Anxiety is an anxious feeling associated with a future situation, which in fact may never take place. Therefore, we are not dealing with fear in relation to something, but anxiety in connection with something, and for many, this change of concepts itself helps to make the situation that they have to go through less frightening.
How to reduce or act in spite of fear
There are several ways to reduce your fear level. Some are suitable for some methods, for others - others.
1. Mastering the necessary skills in the area of your fear can help you. By repeating actions over and over again, you experience less and less fear, and often it completely disappears. Light fear is natural, normal, and completely harmless.
2. Fear is based on ideas about the situation and, as a rule, assumptions about its outcome. One easy way to lessen the feeling of fear is to look at the situation differently. Try to imagine the situation that scares you as you imagine something not scary.
By changing the way you think, you change your feelings, and fear is rooted in them. You need to ensure that the emotions generated by your thoughts become more positive or at least less negative.
Body awareness
Reducing fear, anxiety and other negative emotions can be helped by the “body awareness” exercise, which will become very easy to do with a little practice. The process itself is very simple. The key is to manage emotions directly - to manage fear at the sensory level and release it.
It is not your thoughts that keep you from acting: you are stopped by the feeling of fear generated by them, which you feel in your stomach or somewhere else in the depths of your body. But what if the feeling of fear is simply prevented from manifesting itself? You can learn this by drawing on a very ancient practice. The fact is that your anxiety is mainly caused by thoughts about future events that have not yet happened, or may not happen at all. And you need to live in the present moment, then the feeling of fear will recede.
As soon as you feel dread, try the following:
1. Note what you are thinking about now.
2. Stop yourself: bring your attention back to the present moment - to where you are and what you are doing.
3. Feel your feet touching the floor.
4. Feel your hands, pay attention to your breathing and surrounding sounds.
5. Focus as much as possible in the present moment and note negative thoughts, just observe them, not letting them get carried away, and perhaps telling yourself, "I don't need to think about this right now." The split second when you realize what your consciousness is doing, you are in the present moment.
This is important: notice when your thoughts start to drift away by themselves, and observe them. A great way is to get up and do something that might distract your attention.
It's time to slow down
The feeling of fear lingers in you, gets stuck. To reduce and release this fear, follow these simple instructions to improve the skills you learned in the previous exercise.
1. Notice the emergence of any unpleasant, chilling feelings of fear - even the mild one that occurs in everyday life.
2. Notice it and when fear arises, focus fully on it.
3. Feel this fear, focus on it, not allowing your consciousness to carry away after the thoughts that gave rise to fear. Instead, focus on the feeling of fear: just observe it as a sensation inside the body, let it be there.
4. Do not resist it, think of it as you think, for example, a mild itch: you notice it as a sensation, but this itch does not start a cycle of negative thoughts, suppressive and depressing, it is just a sensation.
5. Allow this feeling to be and just say to yourself: "This is it, this feeling" - when you focus on it, it will gradually disappear.
The more often you do this exercise, the better you will get it. You allow the emotion to be without resisting or reinforcing it. And at the same time, you do not allow your consciousness to concentrate on the thoughts that generate this feeling and make you feel worse and worse.
Remember, you can't let fear get in the way of your success and action.
