How to Overcome Awkwardness

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is John Bosworth. I'm a licensed mental health counselor in St. Pete, Florida. I'd like to speak a little bit about how to overcome awkwardness. When I work with people that feel awkward or they say that they feel awkward in a certain situation, I try to break it down into two components. One component is the practical side, okay? And by the practical side what I mean is we can work in necessary skills. Let's say that you're feeling awkward in a situation where you're approaching a female or a male and you want to ask them for a date. A lot of people will explain to me that thy feel awkward. What they really mean probably by awkward is they don't really feel like they know what to do or say. But they also have some anxiety or some fear surrounding approaching that person, okay? And then in the work place we can have awkwardness in almost every situation really but we'll use interpersonal relationships and workplace relationships because that's what I see a lot of in my practice. But in workplace it could be approaching the boss for a raise or he'd ask how you did on some project or presentation. So again let's go back to practical aspects, we can work on practical aspects by role playing. So for instance if you're going to, if you want to ask the beautiful girl out on a date, you can get a friend or your sister or you know, another, anybody that you know that you'd feel comfortable with working on and practice what you're going to say. Come up with some ideas to talk about and literally practice what you're going to say. On the emotional side what you want to do is look for some of the thoughts, become aware of some of the thoughts that contribute to your awkwardness. So a lot of times the more we do something usually the better we get at it. And that entails looking at some of the thoughts that produce anxiety or some discomfort in the situation that you feel "awkward at." So most of those thoughts might entail things like you know, I need to be accepted or I need to be approved of. Kind of check in those thoughts and recognizing that you really don't need to be approved of but that you would like to, reduces a lot of anxiety. So let's review, let's look at practical things that we can do to reduce awkwardness and then let's look at the emotional component, and try to reduce that a little bit to get your confidence up. My name is John Bosworth and we're talking about how to overcome awkwardness."