Nick was born on 23 March 1979. He suffered from severe social anxiety himself up until his early to mid twenties and has now devoted much of his time to helping others who are suffering in the same way. Originally starting as a founding member, he has had significant involvement in the running and development of SA West; one of the most successful and longest running social anxiety support groups in the UK. From overcoming his own social anxiety, talking to hundreds of sufferers from support groups and internet communities, and from researching a wide array of relevant literature he has come to gain a solid understanding of social anxiety and how people can build up their social confidence.

Nick's philosophy of life is to make a significant positive contribution to the preservation and development of life that will live on beyond his time. He has decided to persue this endeavour by adding value to people's lives through helping them change their psychology to improve their quality of life. He states, "there's nothing I enjoy doing more than helping people improve their lives, it's wonderfully fulfilling endeavor and I'd encourage everyone to be involved in something similar. Life's meaning is simply its given meaning, so should not the meaning of life be to make our lives meaningful, and what better way to do that than helping others add something positive to their lives."

Nick holds a first class honours degree in psychology from the University of the West of England, an intermediate certificate in Counselling and a qualification in adult teaching. Accademic learning aside, Nick states that his most influential education has been working through his own difficulties and talking to hundreds of people with social anxiety through his work with the SA West support group. He says that, "there is no better education than real life experience". He has also won the University of The West of England BizIdea Social Enterprise prize which helped to inspire him to make his knowledge available to social anxiety sufferers accross the globe.

Nick is one of the few who loves their work enough to want to put most their time into it and therefore he has fewer hobbies than most. He says he's a thinker who likes to think about thinking and that he's very interested in psychology, philosophy of mind and anything that helps him understand himself and other people. He also has a keen interest in health and fitness as well as personal development in general. Martial arts, running and going to the gym are his favourite ways to stay fit and healthy. He plays accoustic guitar and love music's ability to tap into our emotions.

Nick was born in Surrey, but spent most of his childhood in an isolated part of Devon. As far back as he can remember he had suffered with social anxiety and shyness. Even his mother and the nurses on his maternity ward commented on his unusually quiet personality when he was born. He can clearly remember times when he hid in his room from his parents visitors and refused to come down stairs to meet them and how he felt acutely embarrassed about these situations. Nick struggled to form friendships as a child and often spent much time on his own doing his own thing. He reports feeling lost at childhood parties and states that he wasn't sure how he should interact with the other children. Nick's low confidence and social difficulties as a child also affected his school work as can be seen below in this section taken from his school report.

His social anxiety continued into his teens making this a difficult time for him. At secondary school he continued to struggle to form friendships and spent a lot of time missing lessons due to his social fears. From having an interest in computer programming from a young age, he went on to study computing at college with reasonable results, but decided against going to university due to it's large social focus.

He talks about how he didn't really know what university was about or why he'd want to go there, but the thought of moving away from home and being mixed up with thousands of people he didn't know terrified him and so it wasn't something he considered.

Finding it almost impossible to phone up companies or attend job interviews, he remained unemployed for about 7 months, but outside pressures eventually forced him to appy for jobs and after missing his first interview due to a panic attack, he managed to secure a technical support and programming position with a small software company.

Working life was very difficult for him and although most people were kind at the company he worked, he barely said a word to them for the first three months. It was only after overhearing a comment about him only ever saying ok to people, that he managed to force him self to talk more.

Feeling very isolated and unhappy in his personal life while finding his work unfulfilling, at age 21 Nick decided to leave Devon and move to the city of Bristol with high hopes of better work and a better social life. Unfortunately, this only severed to worsen his social anxiety and unhappiness. He then spent two years living with family or friends of family while being mostly unemployed except for odd short bits of work given to him by the people he was living with.

The fears from social anxiety even made it hard to speak to members of his family and at his worst he wouldn't answer the door or the phone. As many people with social anxiety know, just getting food form the supermarket was a major ordeal in itself and fun was limited to being on his own in his room with a bottle of wine.

It wasn't until a someone who experienced panic attacks pointed out to him that he might be experiencing anxiety that he started to investigate his difficulties. A lucky internet search put him in touch with websites such as Social Anxiety UK where he met sufferers who were going through very similar experiences.

Thinking he was the only one who found socialising so difficult, he didn't reach out for help until he read descriptions of social anxiety. These seemed to perfectly describe his experience and he found that knowing there was others who could understand his difficulties had a significant impact on his way of thinking about his difficulties.

After finding out that effective and affordable help for people with social anxiety was hard to come by, Nick was inspired to find the solution for not only his own difficulties, but also the millions of other people who suffered along side him. While using most his time to to learn as much as he could about social anxiety and personal development he found out about two people starting a social anxiety support group in his area.

He had made a small amount of progress but was still very nervous about meeting up with the two people who were starting the SA West Support Group, but after a bad patch he felt motivated to take some brave steps. He states that he was really glad that he took those steps and invested the time to learn and work out how he could overcome his difficulties, as this lead to him reaching a point where he had made enough progress to know that he wouldn't ever go back to his old socially anxious ways.

After six months attending the support group along with a bulky digestion of self-improvement materials, Nick felt confident enough to start working again and find more suitable living arrangements. He eventually took on the role of running SA West and facilitating its sessions as a volunteer and continues to invest his time free of charge and have a major involvement in the organisation today.

Even though it's hard to put an exact date on such things as they are an ongoing process, Nick considers himself to have overcome his social anxiety at age 23. He gives the following advice, "It is difficult to say how long it will take other people to overcome their social anxiety as everyone is a different person in a different situation and people should be wary of anyone who gives them a time span for overcoming their social anxiety. The best advice I could give people is just to start working on it straight away, make overcoming it their number one priority, and to do what ever it takes for however long it takes. As long as people work hard at it with the right information, nearly all people will be able to make significant progress in a relatively short space of time and gain better than average levels of social confidence."