Social Anxiety TRICK: Focus on THIS ONE THING to Instantly Feel More Confident in Groups | Ep. 475
In this episode, I share a powerful mindset shift that helps you stop performing in social situations and start connecting, even when anxiety comes along for the ride. If social situations leave you replaying conversations for hours afterward, this episode is going to give you a completely different way to respond.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
- Why social anxiety convinces you to monitor yourself, and how that actually fuels more anxiety
- The simple outward-attention shift that instantly reduces self-consciousness
- How curiosity becomes your antidote to the spotlight effect
- The most powerful question you can ask in any social setting
- Why letting yourself feel anxious (instead of hiding it) makes you appear more natural and confident
- How to practice this skill in small, doable steps so it actually sticks
The Opposite of What Social Anxiety Tells You To Do (And Why It Works)
Hello, my loves.
It has been a while since I’ve sat down and recorded a more traditional heart-to-heart episode. I’ve been diving straight into skills and research lately (which I love).
So today, I want to give you one powerful social anxiety shift that I use personally and with my clients all the time.
And here’s the truth:
It’s the opposite of what your anxious brain tells you to do.
The Core Mistake Social Anxiety Makes
When you walk into a room, social anxiety tells you:
- Monitor your voice
- Monitor your hands
- Monitor your facial expressions
- Monitor your words
- Monitor how they’re reacting to you
It convinces you the problem is how you’re coming across.
So what do you do?
You turn inward.
You start managing every micro-expression.
Every sentence.
Every movement.
And the more you monitor yourself, the more anxious you feel.
Social anxiety feeds on self-focused attention.
The One Trick That Changes Everything: Shift Outward
This is not about “faking confidence.”
It’s not pretending you’re calm.
It’s not about perfect conversation skills.
It’s about shifting your attention outward.
When we move attention away from ourselves and toward the external world, anxiety decreases. Presence increases. Self-consciousness softens.
Here’s exactly how to do it.
1. Focus Outside Your Body
When you enter a room, your job is simple:
Notice what’s around you.
- What color are the walls?
- What shoes is the person wearing?
- What color are their eyes?
- What’s the lighting like?
The goal is not to distract yourself it’s to redirect attention.
The more you focus inward, the more anxious you feel.
The more you focus outward, the more grounded you become.
2. Listen Like You’re Genuinely Curious
Instead of monitoring how you sound, shift to:
- What is this person actually saying?
- What’s the tone of their voice?
- What emotion is behind their story?
Engage with them.
When you really listen, two things happen:
- Your anxiety drops.
- You naturally become more interesting, because you’re actually connecting.
Presence creates confidence.
3. Use Curiosity as Your Antidote
Curiosity is the antidote to self-consciousness.
When your brain says:
“Do they like me?”
Ask:
“Do I like them?”
“What’s interesting about this person?”
If your brain says:
“Am I talking too much?”
Pause and ask:
“What follow-up question could I ask?”
If it says:
“Do they think I’m stupid?”
Shift to:
“What do we have in common?”
Curiosity pulls you out of performance mode and into connection mode.
Understanding the Spotlight Effect
Research shows that people with social anxiety engage in:
- High levels of self-focused attention
- Post-event rumination
- The “spotlight effect”
The spotlight effect is the feeling that everyone is watching you and judging every tiny detail.
Here’s the truth:
Most people without social anxiety are not thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are.
But we can’t control whether that spotlight feeling shows up.
What we can control is where we put our attention.
The Most Powerful Question You Can Ask
This is one of my favorite shifts:
“How can I serve in this moment?”
Recently, I attended a marketing event. Everyone seemed to already be in their groups. I felt that familiar surge of discomfort.
My brain said:
“You should leave.”
Instead, I shifted.
Maybe someone else here feels anxious too.
Maybe someone needs an OCD referral.
Maybe someone needs a warm face.
So I walked up and introduced myself, not to prove I was cool, but to serve.
When we focus on contribution instead of evaluation, anxiety softens.
4. Let Anxiety Come With You
This is critical.
If you try not to feel anxious, anxiety will come back stronger.
Instead:
- Let your heart race.
- Let your hands shake.
- Let your voice tremble.
The more you try to hide it, the more rigid you appear.
When I do exposure work with clients, at grocery stores, at Starbucks, in real-life interactions, I see this clearly:
The more someone tries to appear calm, the more tense they become.
So I often say:
Drop your shoulders.
Relax your jaw.
Soften your eyes.
Be a little spaghetti-like.
Let anxiety exist without fighting it.
Confidence is not the absence of anxiety.
It’s the willingness to feel it and engage anyway.
How to Practice This in Real Life
You will not master this overnight.
This is a muscle.
Start small:
- At the grocery store, notice five details around you.
- At a meeting, focus on one speaker’s words.
- At a gathering, ask three curious questions.
- If events feel overwhelming, stay for four minutes, then next time, five.
We do not measure success by how anxious you feel.
We measure success by this:
Did I notice when my attention turned inward, and redirect it outward?
If you do that 3, 5, or 10 times in a single event?
That is a massive win.
A Note on Rumination
If social anxiety doesn’t end when the event ends, if you replay conversations, analyze mistakes, or spiral into “why did I say that?” loops, that’s rumination.
And that’s exactly why I created The Rumination Reset.
It’s a focused, science-based course that teaches you the same skills I teach my clients to interrupt mental looping and post-event overthinking.
It’s not a quick fix.
But it is structured, practical, and deeply effective.
If rumination steals hours of your life, this was built for you.
Final Words From Me to You
If you walk into a social setting and feel:
- Awkward
- Shaky
- Hyper-aware
- Self-conscious
There is nothing wrong with you.
This is simply your nervous system doing what nervous systems do.
Your job is not to eliminate anxiety.
Your job is to gently teach your brain:
“I can shift my attention outward. I can be curious. I can let anxiety come with me.”
I’m sending you every ounce of my love.
You’ve got this.
Transcription: Social Anxiety TRICK: Focus on THIS ONE THING to Instantly Feel More Confident in Groups
Hello, my loves. It has been a while since I’ve sat down and recorded a more traditional chat audio with you. I’ve been doing my best here on the podcast to just dive into the information, dive in, give you as much high quality evidence-based skills as I can. But I’ve really missed just checking in on you and saying, how are you doing?
What’s going on? Is there any tension you’re holding in your body? Is, are you being kind to yourself? I hope so. I just wanted to check in. There has been so much happening over here, over at CBT School and in my private practice. We now, as many of you may know, we have a YouTube channel, which I am really putting so much time and effort into as well as the podcast.
I have recently launched a new course, which you may also have known about, called The Rumination Reset. This is a course that will help you to stop ruminating. It is all science-based. It is me teaching you the exact skills that I teach my client. This is a smaller course. It’s just a focused solution for a specific problem.
If you struggle with rumination, if you struggle with overthinking and catastrophizing and mental compulsion, please do go over to cbt score.com, or you can click the lyric link in the show notes and sign up for the rumination reset. It is my new favorite little. Baby course. In addition to that, I just wanted to let you know that we are pushing ahead with the content here.
In fact, where I am really considering doubling down and doubling the content I put out and really pushing to make sure you get access to actual skills that actually help. The more I’m on social media, the more I see absolute craziness and horrible advice in. Very concerning, like quick fixes. And I am on a mission to help you suffer less, not suffer more with those types of skills and faulty strategies.
So that being said, let’s get over to the show. I hope you’re doing well. I am sending you every single ounce of my love, and I’ll talk to you soon. When you walk into a room, do you have thoughts like, where will I stand? Or what if I say something weird or do I look awkward? Maybe once you experience that, you start having an increase in heart rate, maybe your brain starts darting, going back and forward looking around, feeling hypervigilant.
You feel like everyone’s eyes are on you. What I want you to learn in this episode is one. Powerful social anxiety trick that I use all the time for myself and with my clients, and one thing that will instantly make you feel more confident when you’re in groups. Now, of course, this isn’t gonna take all of your anxiety away, but it is a very important mindset shift that I want you to make.
Now, the thing to remember here is it’s probably the opposite of what your anxious brain is telling you to do, and let me explain why this one trick. Is the opposite. Now, one thing to know is that the tool I’m going to give you is probably the opposite of what your anxious brain is telling you and has told you to do.
Hello, my name is Kimberly Quinlan. I am an anxiety specialist and I am on a mission to equip. 10 million people with science backed anxiety skills. I have a podcast and a YouTube and an Instagram, and I have all of these resources, and I’ve decided this is the year where I am going to double what I have done in the previous years and really get out there and help.
You manage your anxiety, so let’s talk about it today. Social anxiety tells us that the problem is how we are coming across, and this is a major error in thinking now. It tells us to monitor your voice, to monitor where your hands are and where you put your hands. It tells you to monitor your face and what expressions you have.
It tells you to monitor what. Words you say. In fact, it tells you that there are very, very specific words you need to do to appear cool or collected or comfortable, and it tells you to also monitor how they are reacting to you. Now, what happens when we do that is we turn inward. We spend a lot of time focusing in our brain.
We end up being hyperfocused on ourselves, and we then start to manage. Every micro expression and every sentence. You know what this is like? It can be so painful. The thing to remember is the more we monitor ourselves, the more anxious we feel. Social anxiety feeds on being self-focused and putting all of that attention on ourselves.
Now, what can you do? What are we here to learn? Today’s trick is not about. Acting confident. It’s not a fake it till you make it approach. However, I’m not completely opposed to that. It’s not about having better conversation skills. However, again, that is helpful too, and it’s not about pretending that you’re calm.
What we’re going to do here is we are going to focus not on what we say, what our hands are doing, what people are thinking, what our face is doing. We are going to focus on four specific things. Number one, I want. You to focus outside of your body. I want you to be thinking about what color are the walls?
What color are their eyes? What shoes are they wearing? What handbag are they wearing? Bring your attention. Outside of what you are doing, and put your attention on them, on what’s going on around you, because we know the more you focus on you, the more freaked out you’re going to feel. Number two, I want you to actually put your attention on what the person is actually saying.
What is the tone of their voice? What are their expressions? What are they actually saying? Do you agree? Get really engaged in what? They’re saying what they’re doing, not what you are doing. The next thing is ask yourself what’s interesting about this story? You don’t have to agree, but start to get curious.
What is happening with them? What are they trying to project? What are they trying to share? What is their intention? Get curious about them instead of being completely hypervigilant about you and ask questions. To them, right? The best thing you can do is once they’ve shared their thoughts, people love talking about themselves.
They love feeling like people are interested in them. The easiest way in social settings to keep the conversation going and be engaged is to ask questions. Now, what often happens is if you say. Interesting. You are talking about gardening. When did you learn to garden? They might share a story about their grandpa or their mother, or their father or the man that lived down the street.
Then you now might have a story about your grandpa or your mother, or your father or your person who lived down the street, and you might find that you have relatable things. Instead of you focusing on all of the nitty gritty, now you’re actually attuning to them. Actually connecting with them, you’re actually engaging in getting to know them instead of trying to just be perfect on the outside and the inside.
Now, when we shift our attention. Outward. Our anxiety goes down, our self-consciousness drops, our presence increases, and that is our goal. Now, there are four specific things I’m going to have you practice here, and these are four things I need you to know. Number one is going to be that research shows that people with social anxiety engage in.
High levels of self-focused attention and post-event rumination, whereas folks who don’t have anxiety don’t do that. Now, what happens with social anxiety, it’s called the spotlight effect. When they walk into a room, they feel like the whole world is watching them, that they’re on the spotlight and everyone is meticulously judging every little thing about them.
But the truth of the matter is a. Folks who don’t have social anxiety don’t experience that spotlight effect, and we can’t control that piece of it, but we can control what we put our attention on. Again, if we’re going to focus inward, we’re going to get more anxious. So our job is to practice. Focusing outward.
Number two is get curious. Curiosity is the antidote to self-consciousness, and I’m gonna give you some examples here. So if you have the thought, do they like me? A curious response would be, what’s interesting about this person? Or do I like them? Do they, are they interesting to me? What about them kind of makes me con, you know, aware or cautious?
Maybe they’re a little judgy or they’re a little loud and you can be just curious about that. Maybe you’re having the thought. Am I talking too much? A curious response would be what follow up questions can I ask? So if you do feel like you’re anxious and you do start to like rattle off a lot of stuff, pause.
And ask them a question. If you have the thought, do they think I’m stupid? You might reply with What do we have in common? Instead of isolating yourself with mi, the only one who’s not good, focus on what are the common wonderful things we both have in common. The next thought maybe is will they tell everyone about the mistake I made or how awkward I was or how anxious I was?
Now, as you know, I have a private practice. I have six amazing therapists in Calabasas, California. However, we do not take insurance now, if you are looking for insurance covered OCD or BFRB treatment. I wanna let you know about no CD. No. CD provides face-to-face live video sessions with specialized licensed OCD therapists.
Now their therapists use exposure and response prevention. We know this is the gold standard for OCD, so you can be absolutely confirmed that you’re in the right place there. And they have a clinically proven app that helps you stay connected to your therapist and others who have OCD between sessions.
So you’ll always feel supported. Now, the cool thing is no CD is available in all 50 US states and even internationally, and they accept most insurance plans making it affordable and accessible. We love that. Now, if you think you might have OCD or you’re struggling to manage your symptoms, you can book a free call.
Just click the link in the show notes@nocd.com. I am. Honored to partner with no cd. I want to remind you that recovery is possible. Please do not forget that. Now, big hugs, and let’s get back to the show. And then I want you to ask this question, and I find this one to be the most valuable is how can I serve others in this moment that is going to be.
So important. The reason it’s so important is if you are there only focusing on yourself, again, we get more freaked out. But can you be there to benefit the world in some way? And don’t get too overly perfectionistic about this either, but could it be sometimes I know when I’m anxious. I actually recently just went to this marketing event, um, and it was all therapists and everyone was sort of already, you know.
Talking to someone or in their little groups and I was get starting to get really like feeling uncomfortable and I started to think, well, maybe I, maybe I should just head out. This is too much. Like everyone’s found their people already and I thought, no, somebody else here is probably anxious and wants to meet someone who’s lovely.
I’m lovely. I’m nice, so I’m going to go and on the effort to make somebody else feel more comfortable. I also think there are probably people here who need an OCD therapist to have referrals for or to consult with, so I’m gonna go do that in the service of being helpful to other therapists in my area instead of thinking about.
You know, how ridiculous am I think about how you might be able to serve others or make the world a better place. Now, the thing to remember here is you’re going to need to do this over and over and over. Your anxious brain is going to say, no, no, no, no. You’re so bad. You’re so terrible. Everyone’s thinking of you, and you will need to bring your attention out of your brain, back to the outside, to the person in front of you as many times as you can.
Now if you are someone who struggles with this, what I would strongly encourage you to do is to consider taking our online course called the Rumination Reset. This is a course that I created to solve one specific problem, and that is rumination when you get stuck. Ruminating and you don’t wanna be ruminating.
You wanna be enjoying your life, but you have this feeling of like, you just can’t seem to get control. You can’t seem to get and manage this strong urge to ruminate. Before you know it, you’ve lost hours, minutes, days. This course, the rumination reset is for you. It is a shorter course that will teach you the specific science-based skills I teach my clients.
To overcome and manage rumination. Again, it’s not a quick fix. You will have to do the homework, but I have worksheets, I have PDFs. There’s a workbook. It is fully laid out so that it makes a ton of sense for you. And we have some bonus modules there about different conditions and how rumination shows up, whether it be depression, anxiety, panic, OCD, uh, social anxiety, health anxiety, relationship anxiety, and all of those.
So number three is let anxiety come with you. We talk a lot about this on your anxiety toolkit, and so the thing I want you to remember here is that if you’re trying to not have anxiety, it will come strong. It will come with a vengeance. And so another important skill when you’re in a social setting is to allow yourself to be anxious.
Let your heart race. Let yourself, your hands shake if they’re shaking. The more you try and control it and hide that, the more. It will come across as awkward often. And I will tell you this, I do a lot of social anxiety exposures with my one-on-one clients. We might go to the supermarket, we might go across the street to the Starbucks, and I have them practice engaging with people using these exact skills.
And I’m usually. A little bit away observing how they’re acting so I can give them feedback. And what I notice is if they’re having anxiety, and let’s say they’re shaking or their voice is trembling, the more they try and hide it, the more awkward they appear. It’s sort of counterintuitive, and it’s not that they’re doing anything wrong.
It’s totally normal to have awkward. Interactions with people. That is a normal part of being a human being. That’s not just people with social anxiety. But what I notice is the more you try to appear like you’re fine, the more you sort of seem rigid and, and unfocused and unla. So I will often tell them, let yourself shake, but relax your hands.
Relax your jaw, soften your eyes, drop your shoulders down. I once had a client say to me, oh, you want me to go and look like a spaghetti? And I went, pretty much, yeah, like I want you to sort of let your shoulders and everything go a little more soft and spaghetti, like instead of holding your shoulders up around your ears, just drop them down.
Let yourself feel anxious. Stop holding tension there as much as you can. Okay, so now we’re gonna move over to number four, which is you are going to practice these skills in small, safe ways. Now what we know is this is not something you’re gonna master overnight. Just listening to this alone is not gonna change a huge thing for you.
It’s going to be little mini micro practices that you do. So I want you to start small. I want you to go to the grocery store. And notice the details around you. I want you to go to that work meeting and focus on one speaker’s words. I want you to go to that gathering and set a goal to ask maybe three curious questions.
If going at all is so hard for you, maybe you say, I’m just going to go for four or five minutes and next time I’ll go for five to 10 minutes. That’s a huge win. I want you to remember, small baby steps is what’s gonna win. You hear. Okay, so they might notice that we do not measure success here by how anxious you feel.
We measure success by the question, did I redirect my attention when I noticed it turning inward? If you are able to catch that and redirect yourself outward. 3, 5, 10 times you are doing such important work. Again, this is a practice. This is a muscle you strengthen because you will naturally go inward and you’re gonna have to practice taking your attention outward.
Now, let’s recap. The trick is to try to shift your attention. Outward from how am I doing and what are they thinking about me to what’s going on outside of me and what are other people doing? Now I want you to remember, use your curiosity, engage externally and let anxiety come along for the ride. And my message to you, my love is, please hear me on this.
If you walk into a social setting and you feel awkward, you feel shaky, you feel hyper aware, you’re not broken. I don’t want you to feel like there’s something wrong with you because there’s nothing wrong with you. This is just about you teaching yourself a new way to respond to anxiety. Now, as I mentioned before, I am on a mission to double my impact this year, and so if you have the time and it feels aligned with your mission, please do share my episodes or any resources we have over at CBT score.
It would mean the world to me to. A bigger impact in the world of anxiety. Think of it like a chocolate bar. It’s more yummy when you share it. You know, we wanna share the love, we wanna spread the deliciousness. And so if you’ve had someone in your life that you think that would benefit from these.
Episodes or resources or anything that I do, please do share it with them now. As always, I know how valuable your time is. Thank you so much for spending time with me, and please do go to CBT school.com for any of our resources. Thank you again for being here and I’ll see you in the next episode. Please note that this podcast or any other resources from cbt school.com should not replace professional mental health care.
If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for supporting cbt school.com.
