If you suffer from being shy, then you will not need to be told how adversely it can affect your enjoyment of life. Your social life suffers, you may have difficulty progressing in your career if it requires a lot of personal interaction to succeed, and you may dread meeting people so much that you avoid situations where you may have to do so.

If overcoming shyness is important to you, then you have already made a good start in gradually taking steps to becoming, and feeling, less shy. Translate that importance into a decision to overcome your shyness, then you are really on your way.

Much of the process to overcome shyness is replacing negative thoughts about yourself with positive thoughts. In theory and practice, that is quite simple, but simple is not necessarily easy, especially if your shyness is extreme. Professional counseling or guidance may well enable you to better structure your program of overcoming shyness. Your counselor, though, is likely to give you self help exercises, so self help is very much a part of relieving shyness problems.

Increasing Positive Thoughts About Yourself to Help You Overcome Shyness

The more positively you think about yourself, the more confident you will become, increasing your chances of carrying that increased confidence into situations where you might previously have felt shy. It is therefore a good idea to regard positive thinking as a useful tool in your overcoming shyness arsenal.

What are the positive things that you can be thinking about yourself? As every individual is different, this will vary from person to person. However, it is worth bearing in mind that, generally, shy people have some characteristics that may actually give them an advantage in life as compared to an extrovert. Your positive thinking program can begin with those positive characteristics:

1. While a quiet person need not necessarily be shy, a shy person is normally quiet. Being quiet does have some advantages that can help you to be a success; and being a success does help to increase your all round confidence, which may help you to overcome shyness in the long run.

Quiet people tend to observe, learn, and process information about their surroundings, and especially the people around them, better than an extrovert, locked in their egocentric world, would. This means that the quiet person may be better equipped to succeed in some activities and careers. It is worth considering your own life and ambitions, and find those areas where you can use this characteristic to your advantage. Think about those advantages regularly, at least daily if possible.

2. An extrovert may be uneasy and uncomfortable with a shy person, as they cannot really relate to somebody who is at the opposite pole to them. A shy and quiet person, though, may have the potential to better understand all types of characters. This increased awareness of other people, when coupled with an increased confidence, can become a powerful asset both socially and career wise. Most people appreciate somebody who is understanding, and this is a positive strength you can build on over time.

3. Recent research has suggested that shy people may be extra sensitive to a variety of external stimuli, not just the situations they fear, such as social gatherings with many new faces present.

One possibility arising from this research is that shy people may be more sensitive to reward situations. This may give a shy person an increased likelihood of success in a situation where they perceive some sort of reward at the end of it, or even close at hand.

While this research is fresh and with much to follow up, the notion that you, as a shy person, may have another characteristic you can turn to positive effect, is something you can consider as part of your positive thinking program.