Archives for December 2012

December 31, 2012

“Why Do People Stare At Me?” A Qualified Answer

I got an interesting question a few days ago from a reader of the social confidence newsletter. He noticed that very frequently, in buses, on the street, in the supermarket, while waiting in line, people look intently at him. So he asked me: “Why do people stare at me?”

It’s not that “Dang! You’re hot!” kind of stare that a very attractive woman may get, it’s more like that “Wow! You’re weird!” kind of stare.

This isn’t by any means the first time someone asks me: “Why do people stare at me?” As a social confidence coach, I get this question a lot. In this article, I’d like to provide a thorough, qualified answer to it, and show you how to amend this situation to boot.

In my experience, there are 3 major reasons why people may gape at you. In more than 95% of cases, one or more of these reasons offer the complete explanation.

1. There Is Something Quite Odd about Your Appearance

First and foremost, your appearance may be markedly bizarre, and this is what gets people’s attention and makes them gawk.

I’m not talking about the way you look physically per se. Being fat, skinny, short, bold, Asian, Indian or whatever rarely gets stares in this multifaceted society. I’m talking about the way you dress and take care of yourself.

It’s common for people who get lots of stares to be utterly careless or clueless regarding clothing, grooming and personal style.

It’s like they never look in the mirror. They go out with unkempt hair and baggy clothes, they choose horrible clothing combinations, and their overall appearance is extremely sloppy. This is what gets noticed and it often makes others gawk.

staringNext time before you go out, take a good look at yourself in the mirror. Note your clothes, their fit, your hair, your posture and your overall look. Try to observe yourself as if you’re observing another person that you’re seeing for the first time.

And notice: is something off about your appearance? Do you look eerie or unappealing in some way? If so, it’s time to start taking better care of the way you dress and present yourself visually.

You may be a very cool person on the inside, but if you dress sloppy, the first impression you create will be the very opposite of that.

2. Anxiety Is Messing Up the Message Your Project

It’s no coincidence that almost every person who perceives that others often stare at them feels nervous in social settings. Some of them have actually being diagnosed with social phobia or even AvPD.

You see, when you’re in a social setting and you feel anxiety, this will screw up your non-verbals, especially your facial expression. You’ll have this frozen, terrified look on your face, your eyes will be very wide open and your face color will likely be very pale.

This gets people’s attention and shocks them. So they’ll have the tendency to stare at you, perhaps even say to others: “Look at this guy/girl! He/she looks like they saw a ghost or something!”

Then you’ll realize others are gawking at you, which will make you self-conscious, which generates even more anxiety, so you look even more terrified, and the whole thing spirals.

In my experience, this is the most common reason why people stare at you. It is fundamentally an anxiety-related issue. And the only real solution is to deal with this root cause: to overcome your anxiety related to social settings.

Fortunately, effective, well-researched methods for overcoming anxiety exist today. Your job is to learn them and apply them.

I don’t want to go into this extensive topic here, but I do encourage you to check out this free presentation I designed, in which I cover this exact topic and I’ll show you the steps to take in order to build rock-solid social confidence. Please make sure you watch it.

3. It’s Largely Just In Your Head

It is also very possible that people in general don’t stare at you that much. No more than they stare at anybody else (yes everybody gets occasional stares), or at least not much more

However, your mind makes it seem that people stare at you all the time, when this actually occurs infrequently. What happens is that, since staring makes you feel uncomfortable, you notice it a lot and you remember it vividly.

You’re very aware of the situations when others gawp at you, but completely unaware of the many situations when they don’t. This makes your mind overgeneralize and create the erroneous impression that people stare at you all the time.

Nevertheless, the reality is far from that.

This is something you can overcome by paying more attention to the situations where others do not gawk at you or they don’t even notice you, bearing them in mind, and then trying to objectively asses how frequently do others truly gawk at you.

You’ll likely find out it’s only in a small number of cases.

That’s it: my answer to the puzzling question: “why do people stare at me?” Take this info, put it into practice and see what happens. I think you’re gonna love the results you’ll achieve. And above all, work on building your social confidence. I will make the biggest difference.

Image courtesy of Chibcha

Filed Under: Communication Skills, Lifestyle Tagged With: , , , , , 42 Comments
December 19, 2012

Good Comebacks When Someone Makes Fun of You

I write a social confidence newsletter which currently has over 10.000 subscribers. One frequent question I get from subscribers is: “What are some good comebacks to use when someone makes fun of you?”

This question reminds me of my days in middle school and part of high school when me and my peers used to constantly tease each other and we would always try to have really good comebacks to what the other person said. It was a permanent battle of comments and I was pretty lousy at it.

So when I receive this question about good comebacks, I assume it’s from some 13-year old who’s in an environment with a bit too much testosterone, where putting other people down is a way to feel powerful or achieve some form of status.

Many times, this is the case. But equally often, the question comes from a full-grown adult who is dealing with teasing or denigration from others and still doesn’t know how to handle it. I guess some things never change.

So, whether you’re a teen or an adult, I want to address this issue and give you the tools to handle such situations.

Good Comebacks for What? 

I know you think that what you need is some clever comebacks. If someone could give you some very witty lines that you can use in every situation, you’d always come out on top and you’d show those people who make fun of you.

But that’s not what I’m gonna do.

comeback

Because, no matter your age, this game of who-has-the-cleverest-comebacks is silly. It’s a strenuous clash that goes on relentlessly and nobody truly wins. Sure, it can be fun sometimes, but it’s not regularly.

This is why the best advice I can give you is to not engage in these battles of comments. If you engage, you just add fuel to the fire. As a rule, when a person makes fun of you, focus on disarming the situation rather than making fun of them back. It’s much simpler and it yields much better results.

Coming from this perspective, good comebacks are not aggressive or derogatory. Rather, they reflect a disinterest in playing this game, and not because of fear or shyness, but because you don’t find it worth your time.

Today, my most common reaction when someone makes a joke about me is to make some lazy statement in response like: “Yeah man, whatever” or “You don’t say?”

And if they ask me a sarcastic question, I just give a ridiculous answer that shows I’m not taking it seriously. Like, if they ask me: “Why are you so thin?” I might answer something like “I’m going for the world record for slenderness.”

Interestingly enough, if a person makes fun of me once, they usually never do it again. Or they then do it rarely, and in a gracious manner.

One thing I’ve learned quickly is that trying to find slick comeback lines and using them robotically is the wrong approach. What is the right approach?

The right approach is to gauge your social confidence level in situations where others make fun of you. Because if you have confidence and a good self-image, I promise you that you will create just the right effect.

You’ll naturally come up with good comebacks, you’ll always have something effective to say and you’ll deliver your lines with such poise that others will not want to mess with you.

The fact of the matter is that most people who wonder about good comebacks they can use are pretty insecure and they approach social situations in a weak, defensive way. And this is the real problem.

If this is you, the best thing you can do is work on building your social confidence. The rest will take care of itself.

Now, since this is a different topic altogether, I address is separately in this special presentation. Make sure to watch it, and you’ll learn not only what makes you lack social confidence, but also how to develop it.

I’ve gone from being very insecure to feeling at ease in social situations myself. And now, the very idea of trying to find good comebacks and memorize them for future use makes me laugh.

But I understand where you’re coming from. It’s just that a couple of clever lines will only give you a temporary fix, and even that one will only work occasionally. The real solution lies in building real social confidence. Make this your priority.

Image courtesy of World Series Boxing

Filed Under: Inspirational, Personal Development Tagged With: , , , , 3 Comments
December 6, 2012

Shy Guys: Their Psychology and Their Recovery

Most statistics state than shyness is somewhat more common for girls than for guys. Nevertheless, make no mistake about it, there are heaps of shy guys out there, and many of them are in fact extremely inhibited.

These guys feel anxious in social situations and they feel particularly anxious around girls, especially the ones they find attractive. They have trouble engaging in conversations and keeping them going, they hide their sexual side, they are often invisible to the girls they like, and if they’re not they often get friend-zoned by these girls.

Unsurprisingly, their social life in general and their dating life in particular look pretty gloomy. And taking care of this issue is one of the most valuable actions they can accomplish.

As a social confidence coach, I work with shy guys on daily basis. Over time, this allowed me to see certain recurring patterns regarding why they are shy and how they can fix this. So, in this article, I’d like to share with you my most important findings.

The Making of Shy Guys

Generally speaking, shyness is the result of an overestimation of the risks social situations pose for you. But what these perceived risks are exactly, why they are perceived and what they signify varies from one person to another, and it varies based on gender as well.

I discovered that shy guys have two limiting beliefs in particular, which feed their timidity.

Firstly, shy guys perceive themselves as losers.

Success and status are very important for men. On average, they are significantly more important for them than they are for women. Men are especially competitive, achievement-seeking and results-oriented.

If a guy doesn’t see himself as successful and as having a good status, if he thinks other guys are better than him, he will tend to feel inferior and insecure.

Of course, success and status are very relative and the problem is that shy guys distort the reality in their heads and make themselves seem much, much worse than they are. And this generates unreasonable coyness.

Secondly, shy guys perceive themselves as sexually unattractive.

Even if they may seem themselves as successful, they still don’t see themselves as sexy. Deep down, they believe that a woman could never be sexually interested in them.

This is why they regularly try to compensate for their alleged lack of sexual attractiveness by being extremely nice with girls they like, paying a lot of attention to them or buying them expensive gifts.

Yet again, this lack of sexual attractiveness is merely a figment of their imagination, a result of some very faulty stereotypes used to understand human sexuality. It has little to do with the objective reality.

Now that you have a better understanding of the problem shy guys have, let’s talk about the solution.

From Shy Guy to Social Guy

A lot of shy guys appear to deem that their lack of social confidence is the result of their shortages in terms of success, status, looks, charisma or sexual experience.

Although these shortages may be to some degree real and they can be contributing factors to shyness, their role is only secondary. As I already alluded to, as a shy guy, the primary source of your shyness is your faulty thinking, not the way you are as a person.

Whatever your condition may be, trust me, I know several guys in the exact same condition who are very confident socially and have no problems making friends or enticing members of the opposite sex.

But your thinking amplifies your flaws, even invents false ones, and embellishes their meaning. This takes places automatically when you’re in social situations, and generates your feelings of anxiety and hesitancy to just be social.

Obviously, the solution is weeding out these automatic thinking patterns and replacing them with more accurate ones. It’s a step by step process which entails:

  • Indentifying unrealistic thoughts you have in social settings;
  • Challenging and correcting these thoughts;
  • Gradually developing a more social behavior;
  • And being persistent with this process.

This is a just a gross outline of the process. I’d like to show you in more detail how to implement it effectively. For this purpose I have created a special video presentation for you.

Go here now to check out the presentation and learn how the psychological process of changing your thinking and eliminating limiting beliefs works. You’ll get a lot of value out of it.

Unfortunately, shy guys miss out on a lot on life. I should know: I used to be one. You notice other guys making friends, having girlfriends and enjoying social interactions, while you’re just being an observer, waiting for something to simply fall in your lap. But it almost never does, and if it does, you’re not able to leverage it.

The good news is that you can change all of this. You can take charge your thinking, eradicate your limiting beliefs and gain the social confidence you want. All you need is the right guidance and the wiliness to apply it consistently. The improvements will follow naturally.

Image courtesy of Ed Yourdon

Filed Under: People Skills, Psychology, Success Tagged With: , , , , 6 Comments