You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 82.
Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.
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Hi, my strong friends. All right, today, we are going to talk about the very fun topic of social anxiety. Okay. So if you haven't met me yet, you're going to learn that I like to use a lot of sarcasm. My 12 year old daughter, sometimes she doesn't quite get sarcasm or understand what it's about. But using any kind of comedy as we talk about things, makes it a little bit easier to talk about. So when I talk about, "let's talk about the fun of social anxiety", I think, you know that I'm being very sarcastic because social anxiety sucks. It's so incredibly uncomfortable. And for some people it can be downright debilitating.
As you're thinking about your life and your business, being social may not be your favorite part. But, unfortunately, it's kind of necessary. As we think about the five essential elements of wellbeing, in order to feel good and have a balanced life, there's five different areas:
If any of those are out of whack, our wellbeing is going to take a hit. We're not going to feel good. But when you look at those - career, social and community - all of them involve other people. So if we have a hard time being social with other people, we have three elements of our wellbeing that are going to be out of whack.
As an employee, you can choose a job that has limited exposure with other people. There are definitely jobs out there for you as an entrepreneur. It's also possible for you to exercise some control over the number of people that you interact with. However, social anxiety is still going to get in the way as you are developing what your business is. Because there's two parts of it.
#1 You need to do customer research in order to figure out what it is that people actually want, and that they're willing to pay you for, as an entrepreneur.
#2 There's going to be a time where you need to get customers.
As an employee, you kind of luck out. You don't have to worry about trying to get all of the customers in the door. There are jobs where you can work behind the scenes, where you're only working with co-workers.
But as an entrepreneur, that's not quite the case. You have to be able to interact with people. Now it's possible that you may end up having some type of a product or a service where you have very limited interactions with the public. It's totally possible to create that type of a business for yourself. But you're still going to have to do the customer research. Which means that you have to interact with other people.
Social anxiety is a big obstacle. That's getting in the way for many people. Now I know that some people like to say, well, I'm an introvert versus an extrovert. Well, I'm an extrovert, yet, I still have social anxiety. I've had it at different times throughout my life and with different severity. Other people, when they look at me, they think that that's not quite possible. They see me as outgoing. That I like to go out and talk with lots of people. But I had to do a lot of work in order to get there.
And even the type of people that I talk to, there are some people that are a lot more approachable for me. And there's other ones that really trigger my social anxiety. I decided a long time ago that my dreams were really important to me and that I was willing to work through all of my triggers so that I'd be able to talk with anybody. I know that your dreams are really important too. So that's why I decided to do this episode so that we could talk about:
Those other people could be your immediate friends and family, or it might be just the random stranger that you encounter out in the world. Or it could be a future client. But first let's take care of you. This is really important obstacle to try to work through.
So first, how do you know that you're experiencing social anxiety? So I came across as really great list of what all of the symptoms are of social anxiety. So I'm just going to read this list to you. I didn't come up with this myself. I found it through an expert.
Oh my gosh, you guys, I never realized this was a symptom of social anxiety. I realized it was happening in my body, especially when I was working in corporate and all of a sudden I needed to go and place myself with the head of the site. So vice-president of the site plus all of the senior directors and I'm there and I have to coach them. This is a group of people that I hadn't really interacted with before. So at the very beginning I was there, oh my gosh, my teeth were chattering. My body was shaking. Everything was cold. I was still there and I was doing it. But man, body shaking so weird.
And I think a lot of us feel that way because I hear people out in the world and I interact with them when either they're my clients or we're just getting to know each other. That feeling of low self-esteem is huge.
When you have social anxiety, you can also start to see the impact of this in your life. You may have a very, very small circle of friends. Or you might decide that only your family is going to be your friends. Or even worse, you may live in a house full of your family members, but you decide to just be in your bedroom. I know because I've experienced this. I had a family with five kids in it. Everybody was living at home. We have some kids where they really did not have any kind of social anxiety. So they had friends. They like to go out and play with them or have them over. And the kids themselves would be out in the living room with us. And we had other kids that just chose to be in their bedroom and have nothing to do with us.
That was really tough because we want to interact with them. But their comfort level is just to be by themselves. One of those is my 12 year old daughter. She has autism. Social anxiety is something very common in people that have autism. There's a lot of sensory issues, things that are triggers that may not be triggers to other people. Also, when you have some type of a neurodiversity, you're processing the world a little bit differently. Other people in the world, they don't understand you. They start to see you as being different. They may say things or do things that make you feel judged or make you feel excluded. My daughter has felt that way a lot. Throughout all of elementary school, there were times that other kids would act differently towards her. There were some that would be downright mean, like pouring sand on her head because she's different. She processes the world a little bit differently.
I'm going to share a few examples about my daughter and things that we've done to try to help her with her social anxiety. We need to get her to a place where she's functional in the world.
Just like you being out in your business or in a job or trying to have a social life in some way. We need to get you to a point where you're functional.
Sharing some examples of what I've done with my daughter can show some examples of when she was not functional and the little baby steps that we've been taking to try to help her get to a place where she can be part of this world. Because trust me, she'd really like to just go live off somewhere in her own house with a whole bunch of cats and never have to see anybody else out in the world, because then she would be comfortable.
But we know that the world doesn't work that way. We have to be able to provide an income for ourselves so we can keep a roof over our head. So that we can feed our pets, even if it's a whole bunch of cats.
With my daughter, I've noticed that there's four different severities with her social anxiety.
My daughter experienced the panic phase this last week. We're in the second week of in-person school. She loved having virtual school during the pandemic. It meant that she didn't have to interact with any of the other kids. She could just show up, learn the material. And that was it. And it worked for her. But she was feeling kind of lonely. She wanted to have a little bit of interaction, but didn't want to have it at the same time. So now that school is back in person, she doesn't really have a choice. Although we can always choose to do homeschooling or virtual at some point, if we want to.
But again, trying to help her learn how to be functional in the world is really important. So second week of school, she goes and an incident happens and it sets her into a full on panic attack.
A panic response for her looks like running away from school. She wants to cry very loudly because she's feeling a lot of pain from the event that happened. The school calls me up, come and see if you can calm her down. I go and I see her and she's hyperventilating. She can barely breathe. She's starting to cry, almost hysterical, crying. And I know she's about to get really, really loud. So at that point I knew I needed to move her away from the school. So I get her into my car, take her over by the ocean.
Being right next to the ocean, the water, that calming effect of it moving, it helps you to get into the present moment. It also takes away a lot of that negative energy.
When someone's having a panic attack, first thing to do is to help them to feel safe.
That's what I had to do with my daughter. Some of the other symptoms that she was having was that her arms were starting to hurt really, really bad. And her hands had formed almost into claws. She couldn't get her fingers to relax because she kept thinking over and over about this event that had happened. It was causing her more and more of those panic feelings where she didn't feel safe. All I could get out of her at that point was that there was something that happened with the swings and some other kids at school, and that she felt bullied.
I know that from being at her previous school, she had some incidents where kids had bullied her and she really wanted to get away from that. That's part of why we moved out here to the coast. We wanted her to be at a school where bullying doesn't happen. So now, second week back at school, bullying event has happened and she's having this panic attack.
Now, when you're at work or you're in your business, there may be times where somebody shows up and they say something or they do something and you feel like you're being bullied or attacked in some way. You may start to have that same panic response. If you do have that, just know your very first thing you want to do is to help yourself feel safe. Move yourself away from that situation, because it's not going to be healthy for your mental health.
It's okay at that point to isolate yourself. This is not the time to try to coach yourself through any of it or even talk about what happened.
The important thing is just to help yourself to feel safe. Check out Podcast Episode #52 Anxiety Relief: The Gift of Present for some present moment exercises.
So that's why I took my daughter down by the ocean and helped her with some Present Moment Exercises so that she could anchor herself. So she could realize that she was in a car ,with mom, right next to the ocean. Nobody was hurting her at that moment.
She calmed down the rest of the day. I knew she was too close to that original event for us to be able to talk about it safely. She needed to have enough time and distance away from that event so that she could talk about it.
We waited until the second day, and then we got into using the mindset tools.
Now this was a really pivotal moment for me. I've always thought that school is number one priority. So I would send her back to school (in the past). But now I have realized that yes, sometimes you have to pause school. You have to pause business. Because that triggering event could happen again. And to go into that whole panic response is not going to be healthy for you. I knew it wasn't going to be healthy for my daughter either.
We paused everything.
We put school on hold.
I put my business on hold.
I sat down and I used the same tools with her that I use with my clients. The tool that I used with her is the self coaching model. This is the one that has the five pieces to it.
Circumstance
Thought
Feeling
Actions
Result
The important thing for us to figure out at that point was what exactly were the facts that happened?
How was she thinking about it? How did it create that feeling of panic? And then to look at everything that her body went through as a result of those feelings of panic, and then what her final result was.
Why is this the right tool to choose? Because we may not be able to change the circumstances in our life. We can't always change the other person. We can't change their actions. We can't change their words. We may try to, we may really want to, and we may go about doing some actions to try to make that happen. But our best source of defense is to capture our own thoughts.
We can create other thoughts that give us a different feeling in our body so that we don't go into that panic attack.
It was important for me to take some time with her, to lay out this whole model and to help her to populate those different pieces of it so that she could see that her thoughts were what were creating the feeling of panic and to isolate the exact thought that created that panic.
It was also very important for us to focus on the action section. So this is her actions of wanting to run away from school, but also paying attention to what had happened in her body. The hyperventilating, her arms hurting really bad, her hands getting into like claw type things.
Trying to get someone to change their thoughts is not always an easy thing. They have to be motivated to not want the outcome for themselves. Otherwise they're going to focus so much on trying to change the circumstance that they're going to cause even more distress or panic in their body.
When we can find the motivation on why they would even want to change thoughts, what's in it for them, then they're more likely to be willing to go back and do the thought work. She saw that when she was having this thought (her thought was "they're bullying me"), that was causing the panic feelings.
The feeling of Panic was causing all of those actions for her to run away and all of the pain responses in her body.
She didn't want those pain responses in her body.
She could agree with that. It took a little while to get there. And she wanted to argue with me that her thought was true. And I told her, you know, yeah, it's quite possible that that thought is true. But look at what it's doing to you in your body. Do you want this for yourself? So after we got to the point where she realized that she really didn't want that response in her body, then she was willing to consider thinking in a different way. Not for the other kids, not to let them off the hook, not just to be happy and to be there in school. It was because she didn't want that response in her body.
So then we were able to work through and find another thought.
Circumstance: Other kids breaking the time rule on the swings.
New Thought: They like the swings as much as I do.
Of course they don't want to follow the rules because they want to spend more time on the swings. It didn't have to mean anything about her. It didn't have to mean that she was getting bullied. It could just mean that there's kids that also like the swings as much as she does. When she could believe that, and she did, she could see it because yeah, she loves swings as much as they do. And they have waited almost two years to get to those swings.
She realized that her body relaxed.
As soon as she wasn't thinking that thought "they're bullying me" and she replaced it with something else she could believe in, she wasn't having that response. She wasn't feeling panic. She was just feeling kind of neutral and even amused or some comradery. And that felt so much better.
Yeah. She wanted to have a turn on the swings. Maybe there's other ways that we can experiment so she can get some more time on swings. We explored some of those options too.
It took us about two hours to do this work. But it was such an important investment of time.
Because now when she goes back to school she can function and not go into a panic response. She was able to go back that day. She gave me a great big hug and she went back to class with a smile on her face. She came home from school and I asked her how was school? She looked at me with a genuine smile and she said better. And she was grateful for that.
She realized that taking those two hours showed her that she's important.
She invested her time in herself.
She made herself important. She made her mental health important. That was more valuable than anything else. She's able to go to school and feel safe and not have to worry about going into panic.
Next time that she sees kids that don't want to get off the swing after their one minute time limit, it doesn't mean she has to go into full on panic. She could allow it to mean something else so that she could feel comfortable in her own body. You have that ability too. I know that was a bit of an extreme example.
You may not go into full-on panic response. But you may end up feeling a lot of discomfort or even distress when you're trying to get out into the world and be more social. So I gave you the example of when I had to start coaching the vice president and all of the senior directors when I was in biotech. I was having body shaking and teeth chattering as I was talking to them. And I'm sure that I looked like a total idiot.
When I'm looking at those four phases, was I feeling comfort, discomfort, distress, or panic? I was feeling a lot of discomfort. There was a tiny bit of distress because I was worried about what they would think about me as I'm sitting there with my chattering teeth and my shaking body. But I also knew this was where I wanted to be. And that I need to challenge myself.
It's almost like getting into icy cold water. You know, that once you put your foot in, it's going to be really, really uncomfortable. You may even find yourself chattering from how cold it is, your body shaking a little bit, but eventually your body gets used to it. And so then the next time that you're in there, you get warmer a lot faster. You might even be able to go in a little bit further.
Finding that balance for you, of how much discomfort can you handle so that you can grow, so that you can get comfortable in this situation, is going to be important. Putting yourself into major distress or panic is not going to be healthy.
Now I experienced Distress when I decided I was going to take the official leap and leave my corporate job, sell my house, and then come move out here in a new house. That was jumping in the deep end, right? This wasn't just inching into the water. This was full on, just run off the dock, right into that cold lake full of water.
I went through a lot of emotional distress. I was in panic mode a couple of times, but that was more environmental. Like I thought we were going to get away from fires. And then first time out here, there were fires within a couple months. But for the most part, it was just distress. Was I willing to take on the level of distress of everything I needed to do? Um, I thought so. In reality, it made things take a little bit longer.
I probably could have chosen a different experiment because having a healthy tension of discomfort is going to help you grow and keep you still moving forward and being functional.
Was I able to be there with the leader of the site and all of the VPs shaking and chattering, but still doing it? Yes. That was the discomfort zone. Some symptoms, but still able to move forward.
When I got into distress mode of changing everything and jumping full on, there were times that I ended up curled up in my bed, crying for a couple of hours and not wanting to go forward. That's not helping anything because my business ends up being put on pause for hours. There was never a time where I had to take a whole week off. But there were definitely times where I had to take several hours off because of the distress.
In order to be able to get back into the game of figuring out all of the business stuff, I had to turn back to my coaching tools and coach myself through it, or reach out to other coaches to help me to get through it because it's totally possible.
You can do these really big leaps. But make sure you're allowing yourself a support system or extra time so that you can get through all of it.
What I can tell you is that if I had stayed in my comfort zone and I didn't do anything at all, if I had never decided to go into business, if I pulled back and I started thinking, oh no, that's okay. I'll just stay at an easier job. Or even when I was a coach in corporate, if I had decided, Nope, this is too uncomfortable. Being up here with the vice president and the senior directors, I'm just going to go back and I'm going to work behind the scenes. Yeah. I could have had financially fine job. I could have just kept going, keep my head down. That might be okay for some people.
But not for me. I really wanted to make a difference in the world. I really wanted to help people. And the only way that I'm going to be able to make a big impact is by allowing myself the discomfort and getting out of that comfort zone and going and doing things that I've never done before.
This is why it's super important, if you decide that you're going to be a coach or a healer or an educator out in this world, to have a very strong why.
If you're going into this type of a profession, strictly for the money, you're going to quickly find yourself in a discomfort zone and decide the money's not worth it.
And you're going to walk away from it.
But if you have a strong why of wanting to help other people or to make a difference in the world or an impact, that's a much stronger why. You're going to keep going.
So I know that I am now learning when people come and they want to work with me, I need to consider that. What is their motivation? Are they just in it because they want to make money? If that's the case, I'm probably not the coach for them. If it's because they really want to make a difference in the world, they really want to help people. Then yes, I am the coach for them. Because not only will we work on all of the processes and everything, but there are triggers. You're going to experience triggers and we're going to work through each of those triggers.
Because you need to be able to get comfortable doing your job.
So if it involves you getting out and having to talk with people, let's start working through that.
Let's start walking into that cold water, because the only way that you're going to be able to do this is by getting uncomfortable. It doesn't mean you have to go into the full distress. And definitely not in the panic. I do not want you to ever go into the panic. But if you do (go into panic), know that I know how to help you to get out of the panic and to get yourself safe. And to get yourself in a non triggered form so that you can go back out and do things just like my daughter was.
So if I was to give you five takeaways for how to deal with your social anxiety, they would be these five things.
You can go back to Podcast Episode #1 - How to Have a Painfree Mindset of my podcast series to learn about the model in a lot more detail. Or you can reach out to me for a free consultation. I'm more than happy to teach you how to use this for yourself.
A lot of times, our anxiety is because we're worried about what other people are going to think about us. As soon as we can start thinking about them, and how to help them, or what they might be going through, all of a sudden, the anxiety goes down. There's no fear of getting rejected. There's no fear of getting humiliated. We're often more likely to go out and do things to help other people.
So even with my daughter, as soon as she started thinking about the other kids and how much they would really enjoy being on the swings as much as her, how they had been waiting for two years to get back on those swings, all of a sudden it wasn't about her anymore. She wasn't feeling the anxiety or the panic.
Get your feet in the water. Go find one new person that you haven't talked to before. Go and see what that's like and pay attention to what your body is doing. Are you just feeling the discomfort, but you can still keep going? Are you starting to feel the distress or is this setting you into panic mode? If any of those feelings come, go home. Write down the thoughts that were coming up for you and specifically, what was the circumstance? Was it a specific word that they said? Was it an expression on their face? What was it? Because then you're going to go back to Step 1: Use your self coaching model so that you can work yourself through this. There's always another way of thinking about a circumstance so that you're not feeling discomfort or distress or even panic. Once you've done that, you're going to go back out into the world and try it again.
Maybe you're trying it with that same exact person. You need to try out your new thoughts to see: Did you find the right thoughts that are going to work for you?
Hopefully you did. If you did, that is a successful experiment.
And guess what? You're going to now feel comfortable with that person.
If you find that when you go back out for that experiment, that second round, that you're still feeling discomfort, distress, or even panic, then you know that you need to go back and rework that original self coaching model because you didn't find the right thought yet.
If you're not able to do it on your own, ask for some help.
I'm available. There's other people that can also help to coach you through it. When you write it all down, when you get it out of your head and you can actually see it, you can start to see your thoughts as just things.
They're just words on paper that can be erased and you can put in other words, and then you can see the difference that it will have for you in your body. And just in how your mind is feeling. Okay? So those were the first three tips.
Buffers are things that we use to try to keep us from feeling our feelings. You want to feel those feelings, because then you're going to know what to do with them by going back to Step 1.
if you're using buffers like alcohol or smoking marijuana, or escaping to watch TV or do something else, you're teaching your brain that that original thought is permanent. And that you cannot cope with it. And that you have to have all of this medicine, or however you want to phrase it, that this is the only way that you can function in life.
If you keep doing that to yourself, you're not going to be able to function in life.
You're going to be exactly where you're at. Or you might even regress further. You might end up finding yourself alone in a room and wanting it to be like that for the rest of your life. That's not going to be healthy for you.
If the self coaching isn't working for you, or it's just too much, it's too hard to do, there are some alternatives that you could try.
Guided meditation, yoga and exercise are all great ways to get your mind thinking about something else. It's also giving you some relief. This is a practice. This is practicing getting away from that original thought so that you can feel safe and so that you can process your emotions. Your emotions are just energy in your body. They're just vibrating in your body and they need to get out. When you do these things, it gives you that opportunity.
The final alternative if it is just too much to deal with, is to try some medication. It's totally okay to have medication. The whole point is to get you functioning in the world. If you need a little bit of medication to help you so that you can get functional, so that you can go out and do these new experiments, have the time to do some self-coaching. So that triggers are not triggering anymore, than by all means, use it. It's okay. It doesn't mean that you're broken. It just means that your emotional load is pretty heavy and that it's okay to take some of that load off of your shoulders.
It doesn't have to be permanent. You don't have to stress out over all of the side effects. You can find the medicine that seems like a good fit for you. Give yourself a little bit of a break for awhile so that you have time to do the rest of this work. Because when you do all of the mindset work, these are permanent changes. All of the other things, the buffering, the medication, these are temporary. They're not solving the root cause of the problem.
The root cause is the thoughts and how you're thinking about those triggering events. If all of a sudden you're thinking about them in a completely different way, that does not cause you any discomfort, distress, or panic, then you're going to be functional in the world. Again, these are going to be permanent changes. You won't have to deal with this forever. Do what you need to do so that you can take care of you first.
Once we get this social anxiety stuff decreased, you're going to find that you can do a whole lot more in the world. There's more people that you can help.
There's more that you can do with your business. Your business can actually flourish. You can actually do all of the customer research so that you know exactly what they need and what they're willing to pay for.
If you want to be an employee somewhere, you're going to be able to function a lot better in your job. New job opportunities are going to open up because now you're going to be able to interact with more people. It's not going to be a painful, scary thing to do anymore.
Or you might decide that yeah, you can have a few more friends in your life. Having more friends, that's one of the other five essential elements of well-being - your Social. You don't have anybody in your life. Then of course your wellbeing is going to be out of whack. You want to have more people there for you.
All right, my friends, if you need any help with trying to resolve any of these obstacles that are getting in your way, whether it's social anxiety or any other kind of triggers, I'm here for you. You know, I'm going to help you to resolve all of your emotional triggers so that you can have that business that you actually want in life. You can have those relationships. You can have a great and wonderful life.
I have a couple of one-on-one spots that will be opening up in October. If that's something that interests you feel free to reach out for a free consultation.
We can get to know each other, see what's going on for you. We can get you scheduled in so that you can snag those spots right away. Go to Contact Me There's a button to schedule a consultation with me.
All right, my friends, have a wonderful week. I will talk with you soon. Bye bye.
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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove podcast. I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out Unshakable Men and Unshakable Women. The Unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, the coaching and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to my freedom grove.com/workwithme. I can't wait to see you there.
Free Yourself from Anxiety with Mindset Management is an online, self paced course that uses visual aids and more examples to show how Mindset Management can work for you.
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