The Seven Stages of Silent To Socially Confident

The Silent Struggle

Ever felt the chains of silence weighing you down in a room full of lively conversations? In a team meeting? In a small group? Or even just one on one with another person who is doing all the talking? You're not alone. This silent struggle is a reality for many, and it’s not just an inevitable trait of personality. Whether you’re silent because your mind has gone blank, robbing you of your thoughts, or whether you’re silent by intention to make yourself more invisible, your confidence and self-esteem are victims one and two.

Invisibility comes in different feelings, such as feeling invisible, feeling not all there, feeling ignored, feeling like a ghost, feeling safe, even feeling powerful, after all, many would choose invisibility for a super power right? But when it comes to socialising it can also feel toxic to your soul and your mental health. In this edition we’re going to dive into this issue with a great sense of urgency and need for breaking free from this toxic invisibility trap with the seven stages of silent to socially confidence.

This is particularly for you if you find yourself the quietest one in any conversation, or you’re just looking for some breakthrough insights in how you can better represent yourself and unlock the doors to social and career improvement.

The Silent Victims

Silence in social settings is often a good barometer of our sense of self-worth. Imagine (if you need to) constantly battling thoughts like:

• ‘Will what I say make sense or will they shake their heads and roll their eyes?’

• ‘What if they laugh or mock my opinions and then gossip about me later?’

• ‘What if I’m challenged to back up what I’m saying and I can’t, I’m going to look stupid’

• ‘What if I speak up and someone else starts speaking at the same time?’

If any of these internal thoughts regularly stop you from speaking up, here’s a reminder of something you probably already know, that little inner voice is just a radio beacon from your past, it has no idea if those fears will materialise today. But it believes they will, and if we believe something will happen, then the chances of it actually happening dramatically increase as happened to me in spectacular fashion during a best man speech.

Having discovered memory techniques for the first time back in the mid-nineties, it led to me saying yes when a colleague asked me to be his best man, such was my confidence in these newfound techniques. The wedding was still months away and at that moment I truly believed I could memorise and deliver my speech without notes. But as the wedding drew closer, so my inner voice grew louder and more panicked with the more powerful belief that my mind would go blank, as it so often did in social settings. It encouraged me to imagine the humiliation of standing before a crowd of people restlessly looking back at me in a widening silence while I desperately rack my brain for any scraps of my forgotten speech.

This imagined scenario turned into reality barely thirty seconds into my actual speech with a side serving of cheeks blushing and hands shaking from the excess of fight or flight adrenaline coursing through me, reexperiencing that feeling you got as a child when you’d been sent to the headmasters office and he would be glaring down at you waiting for an explanation, only now there was a room full of headmasters glaring back.

Who were the victims in that scenario? Well I sure felt like a victim of my brain, but everyone else in the room was a victim too. They didn’t get to hear the full and fabulous speech I had crafted, and the groom got a stain of the memory of his wedding instead of a great and uplifting moment.

The Beliefs Factor

Beliefs have the power to blind and bind. You believe your mind will go blank and it does. You believe you are boring and it causes you to be so. You believe others are gossiping about you behind your back and you go and give them reasons to. While your brain has you bound up, raging at yourself and squinting with suspicion at everyone else, wondering what they’re thinking of you, time is passing and those toxic self-beliefs keep on burrowing into your psyche until they reach the core of your self-image and begin to define you.

The irony is, the quieter you are in company, and the more invisible you try to make yourself in groups, the more visible you become. Don’t believe me? Try a little perceptual positions exercise for a moment. Think back to the last time you were with a group of people talking together. Got something? Now float up above that memory and look down on it, see the animated, engaged body language of those in the group, then see your own body language. Everything about you is a little different right? Everything is coordinating to make you look smaller, and get you closer to the goal of invisibility, from your subdued energy to your posture, to where your eye gaze falls, to the volume of your voice, to the number of words you contribute when you do speak.

Hey look, if you really want to become invisible in a social group, the trick is to do the exact opposite and match the energy of everyone else in the group, because people are more trusting of those they deem to be similar to them. Then they consciously relax and notice you less because there’s nothing to see here, nothing to be on guard against because If you’re similar on the outside, you must be similar on the inside too right? Those that are acting differently on the other hand, must therefore be thinking differently too, and so cannot be trusted.

Okay, so that’s all very interesting but what we’re getting into there is the subject of rapport and body language which we’ll cover in a different episode. Back to the subject of becoming visible, coming out of your shell, and unapologetically owning your place in this world and in your interactions, because if anyone is mocking, rolling their eyes, or gossiping about you it’s down to one of two things only. Either:

1. You’re not with the right people for you, or

2. You’re hiding the real you from the world and throwing soundbites out at it when it looks your way.

If you’re with the wrong people, then the solution is not just to purge those people from your life, but to address the second point and then let the right people be attracted to you. Okay so what does that mean in reality? Simply put, and here I invite you to tune in again if your attention has started drifting, this is not only the secret to transforming your social life, it’s the secret to having a good life.

The Seven Stages

If you’ve been hiding in plain sight and making yourself invisible in social settings, whether that’s by design, or whether your brain has been bullying you into doing it, it’s probably because you don’t like yourself enough, and you don’t want others to see the negatives that you see in yourself. With that in mind, the solution becomes obvious, find a way to start liking yourself with the following seven steps of invisible to socially confident as folllows:

1. Take a time out from your life, during which time…

2. You stop worrying about how others are perceiving you

3. Stop reading books, blogs, and videos looking for tips, techniques and weird little tricks for starting conversations, getting out of conversations, speaking up, being more assertive, having better eye contact, being more likable and on and on and on, after all, you’re only going to forget them once you’re in an actual conversation.

4. Start focusing on yourself, find ways to start liking yourself. Realise your strengths, develop your passions, and develop the relationship with yourself first.

5. Lose the toxic friendships and associations (where you can), and find new groups aligned with your passions and goals. After all you are the sum of the five people you hang out with most.

6. Learn a few assertiveness and conversation skills and put them into practice as you start socialising again.

7. Finally, relax and embrace the imperfection of it all. We’re not robots, your mind will still sometimes go blank, your opinions will be challenged. You might get things wrong, as will others. They will still get distracted and talk over you. And if you embrace these things with a self-deprecating smile instead of becoming defensive, embarrassed, or annoyed, others will relax and enjoy your company so much more. After all, as the saying goes, who’s gonna care a hundred years from now.

What I think this seven stage process exposes is the bad advice you may have been getting your whole life, i.e put yourself out there more, start speaking up more, otherwise known as exposure therapy. This stage of developing yourself into a confident socialiser should always be one of the final stages, never the first. Without the foundation building stages, your personal brand, the person you are presenting to the world will always be built on a house of cards.

One of those tiny life moments happened to me just a week ago, had it happened before going through those seven stages, I would have been left feeling angry, as though I had been the target of a deliberate group snub.

So I’m sitting around a table in a meeting with about fifteen people, mostly we didn’t know each other. The lead person in this meeting encouraged anyone with advice that would help the rest of the group to share it as we went along. At one point I spoke up and began sharing some very good advice. The group was engaged and listening to me, but the lead person soon became distracted by sunlight that was suddenly streaming into the room through some venetian blinds, she muttered something to those nearest her at the table and got up to start closing the blinds. This distraction now spread to the better part of the room and my advice got lost in it. I wasn’t asked to repeat myself and the meeting rumbled on.

I didn’t feel angry, snubbed, ignored or disrespected, I simply reminded myself the lead person was probably anxious which caused her to be a little too much in her own head which then prevented her from being fully present in the room. Now, full confession, putting myself through the seven stages in order to go from full on conspiracy theorist, thinking the whole world was against me, and making myself invisible, to being a secure, at ease, and socially confident, took well over fifteen years, most of that time I was stuck at stage three, convinced the answers were to discover more and more strategies until that illusive and magical final strategy revealed itself and transformed me.

It took that long to realise the magic strategy didn’t exist, freeing me up to move on to stage four where the real transformation takes place. I hope it doesn’t take fifteen years for you to move to stage four, in fact I’m counting on it and I’ll keep reminding you of it if you want to be my constant companion in this podcast. I will also remind you from time to time that should you wish for a roadmap through stages four, five, and six, check out my conversation maestro method and personal brand activation system at www.thesocialskillsdoctor.com

Finding Your Voice

Finding your voice is not just about speaking. It’s about daring to be heard, believing in your perspective, and trusting in your personal brand, or self-image. The world is richer for the conversations you bring to the table. You may not believe that til you hit stage five so just trust me for now. Speak up. Your voice matters. It’s important to remember that everyone has unique experiences and insights that can contribute to a conversation.

If you’ve recognised yourself as having the traits I’ve been describing, if you’ve been making yourself invisible so others don’t put their attention on you to speak, and I can encourage you to take one thing away from this episode today then its this – those beliefs you’ve been using as an excuse to stay quiet, those things you’ve been telling yourself like, small talk is boring that’s why I’m being quiet, I only want to talk about deeper stuff. I’m staying quiet because this person clearly prefers the sound of their own voice. Every time I speak, they interrupt and talk over me so why bother? Yes, you’re not alone in having these thoughts, but they’re just smoke and mirrors put up by your brain to keep you safely within the narrow confines of your comfort zone. Remember stage seven of getting from silent to socially confident.

Until next time, take care and keep self-developing.