Accountabilty and Social Anxiety
July 3rd, 2006 by Ryan Oelke
One of the most important parts of working with my social anxiety is accountability. The most change I experience is when I have someone to be accountable to in making that change. When I was working in therapy, I made a lot of progress. After that, I moved and didn’t really do anything consciously about SAD until talking with Aaron, and now this blog.
Emailing back and forth and writing for this blog, I have a lot of positive energy and I feel motivated to follow through with techniques. Even with accountability, I find it takes a lot of courage and dedication for me to try these techniques. This Friday I’m leaving for a six-week meditation retreat, but when I return I know I have this blog and my friends to return to. I don’t feel that I’ll will “ignore or forget” about this very important part of my life. I’m glad this is the case because without it I’m sure I would not work on my SAD.
Actually, for me I’ve found that without accountability, I tend only to work on it if the intensity really flares up, which is obviously the hardest time to work on it (usually). I want to practice things like slow talk when things are going well, so that when I face a tough situation, I’ll have prepared, feel more comfortable, and boost my confidence.
What’s your experience with accountability? What are ways you find accountability and how does it affect your progress and experiences?
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duff wrote on 07/3/06 at 10:43 pm :
I’ve found that accountability is HUGE to making changes, both personally and in helping my coaching clients. That’s one of the main reasons change takes place in therapy and coaching–weekly accountability!
With social anxiety, I didn’t seem to need accountability so much though, probably because I was totally desperate and thus had plenty of motivation! Plus I had a neurotic fear that I wasn’t enough which drove me to frantically “work on myself” so that I could be loved!
Still working on that one….
Seriously, I literally couldn’t function socially at all for years, and eventually got suicidally depressed. So dealing with my emotions–including my strong social anxiety–was literally a matter of life or death for me. It didn’t necessarily make things easy, but sure did provide motivation to build skills!
Francis wrote on 07/5/06 at 4:11 pm :
Very good point. I don’t have any accountability with my SA. I did when I was going through CoDA, therapy and weekly meetings. But now, I just kinda float around, playing with the idea of doing something about my SA.
And for me books are great, information helps a lot… but it doesn’t keep me doing anything.