How to overcome social anxiety and bring more confidence to your conversations | Andrew Horn

So we've all had that moment where you're at a bar, you're maybe dancing a little bit, moving around, and you see someone looking at you out of the corner of your eye. Then your movements become a little more constricted, you become a little more in your head, you're worried about what they might think about you. So that's that external motivation.

In any moment, you can ask yourself, “Am I doing this because I want to or because I think people will like it?” If we're basing it off of the reality that someone else will like it, we'll never really know. We open ourselves up for that social anxiety, the fear of negative judgment, the unknown of external validation. So we can always ask ourselves, “What do I want to do right now? What is interesting to me? What will feel good to me?” And act off of that to eliminate social anxiety, to bring more confidence into our conversations.

So that's how we find our authentic voice and use it. And your authentic voice is a deep down understanding of who you are, what you care about, and what you believe. It's only when we have that foundational understanding that we're able to bring confidence into social situations. Because if we're not basing our actions off of this internal understanding, we're constantly looking for external validation, for other people to tell us what is cool, what is acceptable, what is appropriate.

And if you look at the actual definition of social anxiety, it's literally the fear of negative judgment. So again, it's based in that external validation. And I love Carl Sagan who says we can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers. And so to find our authentic voice, we need to ask ourselves these courageous questions. Ask yourself, “What's the dream? If I could not fail, what would I do with my time?”

Ask yourself, “What am I not doing that I would like to be?” Ask yourself, “What is most challenging for me right now?” And we can trust questions in conversation. Just ask yourself the last time someone asked you a question, looked you in the eyes, and listened to you, how did it feel? Universally good, it always will. So whenever we're asking questions, we can trust that we're learning and growing and that we're leaving a good impression.

There's one simple question we can ask ourselves to fundamentally transform our conversations. So 60 seconds, whether it's going on a date, whether it's going into a big conference, whatever it may be, ask yourself, “What am I most excited to learn about the people that I will meet?” What am I most excited to learn about the people that I will meet?

So what you will do is you will establish something I call the curiosity compass. You'll establish a series of questions that are authentic to you, that you genuinely want to ask these people. And basically, what happens now is you're focusing more on being interested than on being interesting, which is one of the oldest techniques in the book to actually feel more confident in social situations.

When you've identified your curiosity compass, it's much easier to exist with anyone and feel comfortable. Having these questions just lodged to memory is going to make you feel better when you're in these social situations. Outside of the question of what do I most want to learn about these people, I also think it's important for people to think about what I call your go-to questions.

So your go-to questions are three to five questions that you generally always want to know from people. So this could be, “What are you most excited about?” This could be, “What's the dream?” “What's your priority right now?” “What's the next big thing you have coming up?” It could be, “What's something awesome you've learned recently?” And what happens is you think of Yogi Berra, the amazing New York Yankees catcher, and he used to say, “You can't think and hit at the same time,” because hitting is this incredibly fast, just volatile act.

So once the ball comes out of that hand and it's coming into the batter's box, you're not thinking about it. Everything in your body has just been trained to reac...