Shyness and Social Anxiety Workbook for Teens (10 page)

Now try this exercise thinking about yourself. Close your eyes, and imagine your birthday party in the future. Picture someone who knows and cares about you. It could be someone that you know now or that you imagine you might know in the future: a friend, a romantic partner, a husband or wife, or a child you may have someday. This person is telling everyone at the party how he or she feels about you. What words or phrases would you like to hear used to describe you?

On your twenty-first birthday: What’s so cool about you is …

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On your thirtieth birthday: You’re the most important person in my life because …

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On your fiftieth birthday: I’ve always looked up to you because …

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The words and phrases that you imagined other people said about you reflect personal qualities that are important to you. They show how you want to be in the world. These are your true values.

Write down these words and phrases here:

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You will use this list of values to help guide your behavior in future exercises in this book.

Your values can act as a compass in life. They can help you move in the direction that you know in your heart you want to move in. Imagine that you are on a boat in the sea of life. North is toward your values. South is toward perfectionism and avoidance. When you move south, you may feel safer, but you will not end up where you truly want to go.

If what we think determines how we feel, and if how we feel guides our actions, then our thoughts, being the first link in the chain, play a pretty important role in our lives. Our success and happiness are riding on those thoughts, but can we always believe them? There are many different ways to interpret the situations we find ourselves in.

Let’s look at how three different thoughts about one situation can spark three different sets of feelings and actions.

You may very well be wondering, “So how do I know what thoughts to trust? How do I know what to believe?” These are good questions. The answer is that we can’t really know for sure. A better question is, how do we evaluate the various thoughts that drive our actions?

There are two ways to evaluate a thought. The first way is to check the accuracy of the thought by looking for distortions. The second way is to examine what that thought leads you to feel and ultimately do. Does that action move you toward or away from what you value?

Remember Elisha eating in the mall food court in chapter 3? She was eating lunch alone when a group of her friends happened by. Let’s retrace her thought-feeling-action chain, this time identifying the disastrous distortion that set it off, and the result of the action; did it take her toward avoidance or toward more important personal values?

Of course, we don’t actually know what Elisha’s personal values are, but it’s a good bet turning down social situations that might involve eating will make her less connected and more alone.

Let’s do this exercise with Liz, who thinks she’s a boring conversationalist.

What does Liz’s withdrawal from the conversation tell us about the reliability of the thoughts that drove her action?

Remember Bella, the girl introducing herself to a group? Let’s break it down for her.

Take a look at a personal situation that makes you anxious. If you need ideas, go back to the chain reactions you filled in on page 24.