Social Anxiety to Social Confidence

In an age that is focused around efficiency and productivity it is not surprising that many of us are looking for shortcuts to get to where we want to be. If you were hoping that this blog entry will give you some quick answers then I am sorry to disappoint you, but if that is what you were looking for then this is still an entry relevant to you.

If there was a super-quick easy solution to social anxiety without any drawbacks then we would have certainly heard about it, as well as the people whose lives it has transformed. Unfortunately, there is no easy quick solution to social anxiety, but this does not mean that results cannot be produced in a relatively short space of time. What it does mean is that if you want quick results, you are going to have to heavily invest your time and energy into making the changes you want and do so as soon as possible.

This alone will not guarantee results though. If you are investing heavily in the wrong strategy then results will still not materialise. If you invest heavily in the right strategy though, then you can get to where you want to be faster with less effort, but avoid getting caught up in seeking answers that require little or no effort. These quick-fixes are rarely, if ever, quick at all. They might take up little time and effort, but the result they produce will be a disappointment at best.

A saying I live by is that the long route is the shortcut. I strongly believe that if I take my time to do things properly and carefully then my investment will give me returns that are greater or equal to my investment in the long-term. It may be that sometimes this is not true and my efforts are wasted, but overall, living by this rule takes my life forward faster. The rewards gained from working this way are not always obvious, for example, even when it seems we have failed an opportunity might arise because someone has noticed we like to work diligently or it may just be that the reward is what the process makes of us and teaches us.

It is tempting to be lured by grand promises for little effort, but if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is. Shortcuts generally only lead to dead ends or get us lost, or worse, get us deeper into trouble that we originally were. Because of this, shortcuts just tend to delay our progress, waste our energy and add to our feelings of hopelessness about making progress, rather than get us somewhere quicker. If you take the time and effort to do things properly and carefully from the start then you will not waste time and effort on shortcuts and you will likely take the shortest route to the life you want. For this reason, the long route is the shortcut.

Tags: effort, Investing effort, Investing time, Quick fix, Shortcut

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Overcoming Social Anxiety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.