How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

by Ellen Hendriksen

Third, social anxiety thrives on perfectionism. We’ll cover this one in chapter 13, but here’s a sneak peak. With perfectionism, far from fifty shades of gray, you think your social performance is black or white. As you see it, only a flawless social showing can stave off harsh criticism. You’re either perfect—you come off as witty, articulate, and cool as a cucumber—or you’re a stammering idiot whom everyone sneers at and turns their backs on. And that kind of pressure is paralyzing; we think we’ll be rejected unless we come off as the paragon of effortless social banter, which instead just makes us clam up. By contrast, with non-anxious introverts (or non-anxious extroverts, for that matter), perfectionism isn’t an issue. Why? There’s no performance involved. And without a performance, judgment is moot. You can pause during your presentation, lose your train of thought in conversation, not be 100 percent prepared to talk about any given subject, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad about you, nor is there anything at stake. Some conversations are absorbing and flow easily. Others may be graceless or banal, but that doesn’t mean you are, too.