I’ve worked with some people for whom public speaking or approaching a stranger brings on intense negative emotions and physical feelings. It can be debilitating and cause a large amount of stress. It’s a lot more common than you would think and you’d be surprised who suffers from it. When I went travelling in Australia I met a man who used to be in the special-forces branch of the army. He was in his 30’s but already retired. This man, who has probably done night time parachute jumps and could survive in the jungle with a pen-knife, was scared to death of going up to a strange woman in order to talk to her.

It was a text-book case of someone talking themselves into a negative state. Amongst other things he described it as ‘nerve-racking’. And spoke in universals as if it were true for everyone. Just talking about it created very negative physical feelings in his body. His hands cramped up, his face was grimacing, all the muscles in his body were becoming tight.

Now when I want to help someone for whom anxiety in a social setting is a problem I like to take two approaches. The first is remedial change work which is working on the immediate behaviour that is the problem. If someone goes into a negative state every time they have to do public speaking or want to approach someone then there is a specific way they do this. They will speak to themselves in a certain way, describe their feelings, thoughts and the outside world in a specific way. They’ll make particular images in their mind, play sounds to themselves and create feelings in their bodies. That’s stuff you can easily work on with NLP and EFT.

But a problem which people often have is that using the above methods they’ll initially get some good results but then snap back to their old way of being after a couple of days or weeks.

In this case you need to get some generative change happening. That means changing things so that you automatically start displaying more useful behaviours. You start looking at what underlying beliefs are creating these negative states. Beliefs like ‘Talking to strangers in unnatural’ and ‘People get bored when I speak to them’. Working on these kinds of beliefs will get you better results by making a more fundamental change.

But there’s a deeper level that you can work on that in my opinion leads to a more profound change. That is working on the fundamental beliefs that govern your identity and how it can change. Once you start working on this all other change work will happen much easier and you won’t get that bounce back to your old behaviours.

You need to investigate questions like: ‘Do I believe people can actually change? Do I believe I can change? How long do I believe change needs to take?’ etc. For me this is like ensuring that the plants and flowers you wish to grow have fertile soil to live in.

This will really loosen up your ideas about your identity and what you are capable of. Your whole behaviour will automatically adjust to whatever you consider your identity to be, because anything else just isn’t you.