The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Building Social Confidence: Using Compassion-Focused Therapy to Overcome Shyness and Social Anxiety (The New Harbinger Compassion-Focused Therapy Series)

Shyness is a universal human emotion, a blend of fear and interest, and is associated with many positive personality traits: a considerate nature, thoughtfulness, and the ability to be a good listener, to name a few. However, withdrawing from others has its drawbacks, and if you're very shy, it's likely that you've experienced some of them: loneliness, depression, and self-blaming thoughts that are much harsher than other people's criticism would ever be. The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Building Social Confidence offers a supportive program based in compassion-focused therapy for moving past social anxiety and the self-critical thoughts that propel it.

The program in this book helps you both accept your shyness as part of your personality and challenge your social anxiety when it keeps you from living the life you want. This book also provides dozens of exercises that will help you practice mindfulness, imagery, compassionate thinking, and compassionate action-critical skills that will help you develop the ability to overcome shyness and make strides toward complete social confidence.

This social fitness training program will help you:

• Quiet the thoughts that trigger social anxiety
• Replace anxious thoughts with compassionate ones
• Identify and achieve your goals for social confidence
• Practice assertiveness skills

Lynne Henderson, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, founder of the Social Fitness Center, and founder and codirector, with Phillip Zimbardo, of the Shyness Institute in Berkeley, CA. She has been a visiting scholar in the psychology department at Stanford University, and is a faculty member in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program. She has directed the Shyness Clinic for over twenty-five years and is an adjunct research faculty member at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology. Her research interests include translating the results of social psychology and personality theory into treatment methods for shyness, the influence of personality variables and cultural influences on interpersonal perception, cultural influences on self-conceptualizations, interpersonal motivation, leadership styles, distance collaboration, and mindful social fitness.

Foreword writer Paul Gilbert, PhD, is a professor at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom, director of the mental health research unit at Derbyshire Mental Health Trust, and author of The Compassionate Mind.