I was shy as a kid - and I mean to the point of crippling my social development. Literally, I carried my stuffed monkey - "Monkey" - around with me on shopping trips with mom until I was seven or eight years old. One of my first memories was sitting and listening as my brother - two years old at the time - talked at me as I sat and listened and refused to interact with him or even utter a word. I was four.
Luckily for me, a few things happened. First, the creation of Facebook and Twitter allowed me to minimize real-life social interactions. I AM TOTALLY KIDDING OF COURSE! What really happened is that I realized that things weren't going to change unless I got myself out of the comfort zone and tried!
So, I started accepting challenges that I knew would improve my shyness. First, they were in high school - I volunteered and signed up for "Mock Trials" as a lawyer, I tried my hand at school-mediated political debates, and I read essays aloud. In college, I continued to get out of the comfort zone, giving optional lectures and teaching a few classes and labs as a teaching assistant. Finally, I took a 'Persuasive Communication' course that changed my world. This was the inspiration for the weekly challenge.
Essentially, the course had weekly challenges involving giving speeches to convince our classmates of something or to procure an action. But the true challenges came from our classmates themselves. In accepting the challenge of persuasively communicating to us, they also posed new challenges to us. Most of the time, I had absolutely no interest in these challenges... but, every week I would give it a shot. I would say the most famous of these challenges was to create a website. Ha! I had no interest in that! Well, needless to say I took the challenge, and I am still getting a whole lot of kicks out of writing this thing.
Well, that's the point of starting up the weekly challenges - to get you out of the comfort zone, often just for the experience. However, on those special occasions, maybe these challenges will change your life for the better and bring you on your way to being a more adventurous, social, or outgoing person. Maybe it will bring you towards being the perfect friend, teacher, husband/wife, superhero, or just Samaritan. And, hopefully if you post your stories as short comments on the site, we can get a whole community of people trying out things and responding as to what happened for them!
Life's an adventure. So get out of your comfort zone and start living it!
So, I started accepting challenges that I knew would improve my shyness. First, they were in high school - I volunteered and signed up for "Mock Trials" as a lawyer, I tried my hand at school-mediated political debates, and I read essays aloud. In college, I continued to get out of the comfort zone, giving optional lectures and teaching a few classes and labs as a teaching assistant. Finally, I took a 'Persuasive Communication' course that changed my world. This was the inspiration for the weekly challenge.
Essentially, the course had weekly challenges involving giving speeches to convince our classmates of something or to procure an action. But the true challenges came from our classmates themselves. In accepting the challenge of persuasively communicating to us, they also posed new challenges to us. Most of the time, I had absolutely no interest in these challenges... but, every week I would give it a shot. I would say the most famous of these challenges was to create a website. Ha! I had no interest in that! Well, needless to say I took the challenge, and I am still getting a whole lot of kicks out of writing this thing.
Well, that's the point of starting up the weekly challenges - to get you out of the comfort zone, often just for the experience. However, on those special occasions, maybe these challenges will change your life for the better and bring you on your way to being a more adventurous, social, or outgoing person. Maybe it will bring you towards being the perfect friend, teacher, husband/wife, superhero, or just Samaritan. And, hopefully if you post your stories as short comments on the site, we can get a whole community of people trying out things and responding as to what happened for them!
Life's an adventure. So get out of your comfort zone and start living it!