SHYNESS
(November/December 2003 Issue)

Many would claim that shyness is a permanent condition, genetic in origin. Resistant to treatment. Those who are shy often believe they are destined to remain so. They would read about the 60-30-10 Rule (which recommends that 60% of one’s time in job hunting be allocated to face-to-face contact) and say: "Not for me."

Nonetheless, shyness should not be used as an excuse for avoiding in-person contact. Counselors and their clients can recognize shyness as an acquired condition, not a permanent one. Babies are not shy. They scream for what they want. Somewhere along the way, some children learn to be socially passive and this makes job hunting, and "social" tasks such as information interviewing, much harder than they should be.

Most people are probably shy at one time or another. Situations can be found in which any person may feel intimidated. What do non-shy people do when faced with shy-type feelings? They speak up anyway and risk saying something wrong, because they know it's the only way you learn for the next time.

So, shy clients must be nudged into the social arenas and coaxed to engage others, even though it scares them. That is why information interviewing has proven to be such an all-purpose useful tool of our trade. It is a non-threatening way to engage women and men in the job market, learn the languages of fields a person may want to enter, and become comfortable with conversations. In short, information interviewing can help anyone gradually overcome the shyness affliction.

Self-proclaimed shy individuals may have a great deal to gain from overcoming their shyness. People who tend to spend time alone develop skills from working by themselves (researching, introspecting, organizing themselves) that they can add to their newly developing social skills. Looking at it in reverse, talkative, social people may have a harder time acquiring the "alone skills".

Shyness can be a preference rather than a fixed condition. Working alone or with small groups of people may represent a shy person’s comfort zone. However, in a marketplace that is chaotic (and this is looking more and more like a permanent feature of any job market), a job hunter must broaden her/his comfort zone to include many different work environments in order to have the greatest number of job opportunities. That does not mean you have to be ready to adapt to the frenzied wildness of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. But it does mean that learning to be un-shy in a variety of offices or work settings will be helpful.

Shyness seems to grab a hold of us in adolescence, and for some people it holds on a long time. There are any number of possible contributing factors - parents who do not communicate with their children, destructive peer groups, physical conditions that lead to being teased, being left alone a lot, and others. Shyness can result from many sources.

Clients may spend years climbing back from early social difficulties. Sometimes they stay rooted in their state of shyness, by practicing "staying away" from social situations. Thus, they make it harder on themselves. When faced with job hunting, they dread the thought of interviews, information or otherwise.

This makes the job search the absolutely perfect time to help shy clients overcome their self-learned condition. Job searching is intensely social and that will be a good thing for your shynik clients, because they need to be faced with the utter necessity of engaging other people. There is no choice. You want a job. You gotta meet people. Nobody gets hired by writing letters or burying oneself in the library doing research. Some people try awfully hard to do it that way, but it doesn’t work, they get no work and they cry a lot.

Shyness is like a lot of human difficulties. It can be overcome with practice, practice, practice. Put yourself in a hundred party or social situations with people you don’t know, commit yourself to meeting and talking with ten new people at each occasion, and presto, your skills will begin to improve. Arrange and conduct X number of information interviews per week and you will become more comfortable in the job market. Each week, introduce yourself to people who are a little more difficult to approach.

People don_t bite. Most often they are friendly. Often they are helpful. Shyness just gets in the way, hindering a person’s career progress. Counselors can help their clients make shyness a part of their past and social ease a key to their present.

Howard Figler, Ph.D., is the author of The Complete Job Search Handbook and The Career Counsleor's Handbook. He can be reached at: hefigler@pacbell.net