Being Shy Is Just a Bad Habit, and You Can Break It With Regular Practice

"Shyness is a habit, it can be fixed!" reminds me of the "Homosexuality is a medical condition. It can be cured!" attitude of the mid twentieth century.

We all know how that ended.

I hope that as a society, we can find acceptance towards the introverts, much like how many straight people today are finding acceptance towards those who are different from them, realizing that in our essence, we are all the same.

seeing as personality is defined as a preferred set of reactions to external events, your preferred style of social interaction is part of your identity by definition.

this is shorthand for saying "I prefer alone time to recharge" or "I am energized by the company of others," which is a fundamental aspect of identity.

factor analysis of personality breaks down personality into related sets of consistent behaviors. introversion/extroversion exists in even the simplest model. the distinction was first noticed by Jung. it was even observed in dogs by Pavlov, who found that dogs that were active around other dogs fell asleep when left alone, where as dogs that seemed exhausted by the same events perked up when isolated.

introversion/extraversion is not a constant preference. sometimes introverts like parties. but individuals have a preference for one or the other that forms a preferred set of responses to external events, which makes it part of the definition of personality.

this is an article based on folk psychology written in ignorance of thousands of articles on this subject, starting with Jung, experimentally noted by Pavlov in animals, and made rigorous in the work of Hans Eysenck. Eysenck used factor analysis to rigorously define extraversion and identified it as a basic dimension of human personality.

this is an incontrovertible finding of modern psychology. extraversion/introversion form one of the parts of the five factor model, which uses factor analysis to identify five core factors of human personality. some models have more, some less - that's the art of the technique. but they all have introversion/extraversion.

there is a distinction between shyness and introversion, where the former is mostly likely meant to mean socially anxious. however, introversion is an enduring personality trait that factor analysis consistently identifies.

Well, yeah. Admittedly the phrase "being good with people" is kinda vague. In most jobs you have to deal with people in some way or another. But when people use this phrase, they often mean something similar to "extroverted", "talkative", "persuasive", etc. Like for jobs in sales, these qualities (?) are often required and expected. However, I don't see how they matter much in a desk job, assuming you manage to communicate well (in some form or another) with your co-workers and clients.

Mention introversion and shyness, especially around geeks, and many people will come out saying, "I like being shy," "I'm an introvert, that's just the way I am," and things like that.

Different people learn social skills differently. For me they were incredibly hard to learn, but my life improved so much with each bit that learning each bit motivated me to learn the next. Now nobody can believe I was ever not outgoing.

Saying "I'm X" doesn't mean you have to be X forever. But putting it that way reinforces your X-ness. Some people say shyness is like gayness, something your born with. I haven't observed that to be the case, not that I've researched it.

To me the problem with being shy isn't that others look down on it. It's that it prevents you from solving many problems. Most of life's hardest problems as well as greatest solutions are social.

Saying "I like being shy"... well, everyone likes being shy sometimes. But I doubt anyone who also knows a million other ways of being would prefer losing everything but shyness. Do you like having no option other than being shy?

To anyone who says you can't learn social and emotional management skills to overcome shyness, that wasn't the case with me or others I know. You can say those cases are anecdotal, but so is yours.

Sure it's part of your personality, but that doesn't mean it has to be part of your identity. There are people who don't consider their gender part of their identity, there are people who don't consider their (lack of) religion part of their identity, and there are definitely people who don't consider intro-/extrovert part of their identity.

(Note that "identity" has the same meaning as in pg's article, above.)