Whenever opportunity knocked, Montreal graphic artist Ana Garza-Robillard found herself too shy to answer.
Even when
I was a child, I was always afraid when I had to meet people," she says.
That's one big reason why, when it came time to
plot a career, Ms. Garza-Robillard decided to work independently by setting up her own graphic design business in Montreal,
now known as Mobius2 Creative Studio.
But she soon found that, even when you work for yourself, doing business requires
meeting a lot of people.
Just following up with clients put her out of her comfort zone, so she preferred to deal with
them by phone, she says. And she regularly avoided making pitches to new clients or making presentations at trade events that
could have raised her profile.
"I realized that I was wasting big opportunities by being so shy. I was afraid to make
new contacts and just talked with people I already knew," Ms. Garza-Robillard says. "Unless I did something, I was not going
to get anywhere."
Ms. Garza-Robillard is not alone. Up to 40 per cent of people experience feelings of shyness to the
extent that it can get in the way of their career success, says Ilise Benun, president of Hoboken, N.J.-based consultancy
Marketing Mentor and the author of a new book, Stop Pushing Me Around, about conquering shyness.
Shyness comes from an
underlying fear and uncertainty that makes those suffering from it avoid situations involving unfamiliar people or situations,
Ms. Benun says.
And it can have all sorts of repercussions at work: Shyness may make people beg off making a speech or
presentation, avoid asking for a raise even if they believe they deserve it and be too unsure of themselves to aspire to leadership
roles.
Almost everyone is shy to some extent in certain situations. Ms. Benun says. It's extremely common for people who
are dynamic in their everyday job to turn very uncertain in an unknown situation out of fear they will make a mistake or look
incompetent.
This can actually make people stay at a job they dislike, rather than face the prospect of interviewing for
a much better position somewhere else.
The good news is that shyness is not genetic but, rather, behaviour you develop
based on experiences in your life, says Ms. Benun, who regularly runs assertiveness workshops in Canada.
That means if
you learn to identify situations in which underlying shyness is holding you back, you can minimize its paralyzing effects.
Here's her formula for emerging from the shell of shyness:
