Small talk: Are you too shy?

Not everyone has an obvious reason for being shy. Twenty-nine-year-old Maggie*, a magazine photo editor based in Toronto, has always struggled with shyness. “I’ve been shy my whole life, and I think a lot of it was due to the fact that my mom was a very shy lady,” she explains. Maggie describes an episode of shyness as an out-of-body experience. “I feel kind of mentally gone, like a vacuum has replaced my brain,” she says. “It almost feels like a panic attack.” A university presentation still haunts her. “I totally lost it: nervous stomach, racing heart, overheating, shaking. By the time I finished my presentation, there was complete silence and my classmates were either looking down or giving me the most sympathetic looks.” As Maggie explains, “A negative self-evaluation is totally running the show — there is a level of self-involvement that’s unhealthy.”

After that disastrous seminar, Maggie began seeing a psychologist for six months. Therapy helped, but she was the one who had to make the personal effort to take chances socially — particularly when it came to dating. “Forcing that change was a huge shock to my system, but it was necessary,” she says. “I wasn’t dating the guys I wanted to date — just the ones it was easier to talk to.” Maggie has her shyness under control now (“On a scale of one to 10, I’m at two or three where I was once at seven or eight”), but she admits to keeping a naturopathic “rescue remedy” in her handbag just in case her nerves strike.

For 24-year-old Dylan*, it was leaving Vancouver to accept a new job in Toronto at a major sports network that resulted in a period of uncharacteristic shyness. “I literally didn’t know a single person,” he says. “It got to the point where I would come home on Friday and not leave the apartment until I had to go to work on Monday.” For the first time since he was a child, Dylan found himself struggling to turn stran­gers into friends — a process he likens to the white-knuckle world of dating.

“I remember looking at my phone and thinking ‘If I give him a call and suggest that we go to a baseball game…,’” recalls Dylan. “It was horribly embarrassing.” Formerly confident and outgoing, Dylan began to wonder, ‘Why would anybody want to be my friend?’” The angst of asking another guy out — even platonically — stands out as a marker of how timid he had become.

Now, nearly a year into his new life in Toronto, Dylan is slowly starting to feel more at home. He believes that a lack of social exercise exacerbated his sudden shyness, and he’s now committed to staying socially strong. Even professional socialites have had to overcome bouts of shyness. Co-founders of The Society — a culture club for the under-40 set in New York and Toronto — Amanda Blakley and Ashleigh Dempster are living proof of the virtues of regular social exercise: Both used to be shy girls. Blakley was “painfully shy” as a child, and Dempster says that she was “naturally shy.”

“The more I put myself out there, the easier it was to overcome,” says Dempster. “When we first started The Society, I would magnify every uncomfortable situation and awkward conversation. Now I don’t sweat the small stuff because it’s only me analyzing the dorky things I might have said. The truth is, most people are so consumed with their own insecurities and social anxiety that they aren’t noticing dorky things that come out of your mouth.”

*Name has been changed.

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