How You’ll Have Seamless Conversation with People as an Anxious Overthinker (Final Guide)
You’re a young guy who wants to have seamless conversation with people without constantly being anxious of what you’ll say next.
You want people to listen to you and to feel accepted by people, but you just can’t come up with topics of conversation and you fear saying something wrong or embarrassing.
By the end of this article, you will have an increased feeling of hope, a clear understanding of how to accept yourself as an individual and a slight increase in self-confidence. You’ll be one step closer to a more comfortable, less fearful social life despite your brain frequently overthinking.
The most likely reason as to why you’re worried about judgement is because you haven’t accepted yourself. Otherwise, you would be completely content with saying or doing whatever you like.
What self-acceptance achieves is faith in your brain to transform its cognitive differences into advantages. **Low self acceptance leads to self doubt and hesitation to speak and act.
At some point, I realised that whenever my levels of self-doubt and hesitation to speak were high, I was more likely to worry about people’s subjective perspectives on my words and actions. Therefore, I froze and said or did nothing.
This made me realise that I wasn’t accepting myself for who I was and what I wanted to say.
If I felt a sense of self-acceptance, I would’ve said whatever I wanted, no matter how positive or negative the other person’s response was (try not to call people a*sholes though).
Because this is so important, how do we increase the levels of self-acceptance and self-respect within our minds?
The solution I’m going to prescribe you is unconventional - go to your notes app on your phone and type in, “whatever I want” and come back. Now, go to your camera app and record your face or something around you for a second or two.
Which one felt better?
You need to understand that curating content through a written, verbal, visual or audio-visual format reduces the level of friction you feel towards saying what you want, or in other words expressing yourself. This helps you accept whatever outcome arises from your words and actions.
Content curation increases your level of authority surrounding the topics you speak on through writing concise and valuable ideas, therefore building trust in your own knowledge and capabilities just as people facing your same problems will trust you.
Content curation is also known to drastically increase your motivation to learn, reflect and observe, resulting in you frequently progressing leaps and bounds beyond the man you once were.
In a very practical sense, content curation means you’re overcoming your own problems, you feel good because you’re helping others, you’re building something monetisable and therefore you’re learning marketing, sales, how to influence people’s decisions, deception and psychology. You’re incentivised to go out into the world and truly live. It’s awesome.
So how do you get started?
The little activity I just gave you is step 1, step 2 is to create your Digital Notion Diary.
Create a Notion account and follow this video guide to create a boardview.
Download the app and sign in with your phone if you haven’t already.
The Not Started column: Write any thoughts or ideas you have that come up.
Once you start writing anything about it, drag it to the In Progress column.
Only once the entire piece is written and finalised can you move it to the Done column.
Add a post to the Not Started column titled, “No Social Fear” or something and then write inside one thing you’ve found interesting, valuable or memorable about this post thus far.
Move it to the In Progress column.
Mine as an example:
History demonstrates the chances of content curation increasing your comfort in self-expression are very high, likely due to the constant learning, reflecting, observing and life experience it incentivises.
This means that from the moment you begin writing a post in the Digital Notion Diary, you’re more likely to perceive your own words as more interesting and valuable, which in time will weaken your neurological pathways related to self-judgment.
Basically, with the Digital Notion Diary and the ideas you’ll read below, you’ll find it progressively easier to speak your mind.
You fear saying something wrong or embarrassing often because you’re interacting with the wrong people and have no faith in yourself. You’ve not seen evidence that you have value to give by talking, doing or expressing and you’re interacting with people you don’t overly resonate or feel aligned with.
Therefore, whenever you wish to speak you get a tightness in your chest that stops you - this is known as Vocal Anxiety.
Vocal Anxiety is the hesitation, uncertainty, awkwardness and fear in your voice when you speak. It is the reason non-anxious people can access more natural and easy conversation than an anxious person saying the exact same thing.
Therefore, to get you to the point where people listen and respond to you, we need to reduce your Vocal Anxiety.
Step 1 of this solution is to find the right people, which I’ve stressed to a couple of the guys in my community during coaching. It doesn’t matter how funny you are, how interesting your questions are or how you sound if you’re surrounded by people who aren’t on the same vibe or wavelength as you.
I remember back when I was serving customers at the registers of Target 2 years back, a surfer girl around my age walked up to buy something and I said, “heyy, how’s it goin?”
She literally stared at me so blankly like I was an alien who had just called her a walrus. To this day I remember the interaction, because it felt like we were so far from being on the same vibe, that she couldn’t even comprehend a simple “how’s it goin?”
Now, I have some people in my life that I have hella laughs with, saying the most random stuff.
I will not specifically write about finding your people in this post, however, you can use most of the insight from the rest of this Procedure as guidance until a dedicated Procedure gets published within the next month or so.
Click here to receive it in your inbox before the public gets to see.
Step 2 of reducing Vocal Anxiety is to accept the way in which your brain functions and to develop the comfort to be yourself where you’re completely unconcerned with the outcomes of your social interactions because you know that those outcomes don’t define you as an individual. You know your positive qualities and overall value.
We’ve already explored how to develop self-acceptance. Now it’s time to progress onto the next step of building faith, trust and self-respect in order to increase how comfortable we are to be ourselves and do as we please.
You’re anxious about not meeting others expectations when you talk or do things, likely because you don’t respect the man you are and aren’t comfortable expressing yourself the way you’d want. You want to be respected and to feel like you’re enough.
Remember earlier when we spoke about content curation as a means to continuously learn and grow? I also mentioned that the content builds you into more of an authority figure as it concerns the topics you write about, which increases the feeling of trust and confidence you have in your own self-worth.
If you haven’t followed the video guide on constructing your Digital Notion Diary, do so now so you can return to me and truly comprehend the next part of this Procedure.
Remember that humans respect qualities, traits or characteristics. If you don’t demonstrate on a daily basis the qualities that you personally value, then it’ll be stupidly difficult for you to build any form of self-confidence or comfort with self. if you can’t immediately think of which characteristics you value, you’re unfortunately a step behind.
Come up with 1 trait right now that you respect. Mine are honesty, calmness, accountability, adaptation and listening.
Do something today or tomorrow that aligns with that trait. Now you can say that you are that kind of person. This will start to increase your feelings of self-respect, especially as you choose more trait to demonstrate.
An example of identifying yourself as a certain kind of person might be washing the dishes and realising you’re holding your breath. You could observe that and relax before saying, “I’m the kind of man who can notice their stress rising and then immediately calm themselves down”.
To come up with more qualities you value and how to demonstrate them in your daily life, refer to the 10 Q’s to Find Your Purpose.
This method of building self-confidence is how your best chance at decreasing your fear of meeting others expectations.
The issues explored today such as wanting to meet people’s expectations, fear of saying something wrong or embarrassing and worrying about judgment often make you believe that “good” topics of conversation and the “correct” behaviours are what you need to have a good social life.
You now understand that self-acceptance, building faith and trust in yourself and being surrounded by the right people are the solutions that were previously buried below the surface.
Continue writing up ideas and lessons in your Digital Notion Diary and post the ideas publicly in some way, if you want all the luck on your side.
All the principles discussed today will make you less worried about being likeable or interesting, meeting others expectations and your social interactions will become more two-sided.
Plus, you’ll have an increased ability to come up with conversation topics since you’re no longer in your head and won’t be overthinking about topics of conversation.
Due to not being in your head as much, you’ll connect more with people by having a greater capacity to listen to them, which will help you find the people who won’t judge anything you say or do.
You’ve been lost the past 2-3 years because the lack of answers you previously had for all these issues makes life feel confusing and overwhelming.
This causes anxiety to build exponentially which results in self-loathing because you’re not making steps towards at any particular solution to these problems.
You’ve found the answer - and have progressed to the next step in overcoming social fear and feeling joy because of it.
Join the Peaky Pines Community in Discord to chat to people just like you and I.
Talk soon my friend,
Riley.
