When I first set out to find a solution for my own debilitating shyness, I soon became disappointed by the amount of ineffective advice and methods out there claiming to improve social confidence.

Over the span of a couple of years I used a plethora of confidence-building methods and I spent close to $2000 on books and courses. I tried NLP, EFT, Sedona Method, hypnosis, subliminal messages, meditation, positive thinking, positive affirmations, herbal remedies, you name it!

But none of them was genuinely effective. At best, these methods gave me small and short-lived bursts of confidence. At worst, they actually made me more anxious in social settings. I was getting increasingly frustrated, tired and disillusioned. At one point I was almost ready to give up.

At that time I was still in college, studying for a degree in psychology (which I now have, by the way). And fortunately for me, reading and studying, I eventually found out about the scientific method of research. This subject swiftly triggered my interest I delve deep into it.

Thus, I learned that when trained scientists and experimental psychologists devise a new technique meant to create some personal change, they don’t just have a couple of their friends try it, and if they declare seeing some vague benefits, proudly promote it as the next miracle cure.

Instead they put that technique to rigorous scientific tests, conducted in a controlled environment, with careful measuring and data interpretation, in order to establish its effectiveness. If and when its effectiveness is thus confirmed, they publish studies in which they present that technique.

Then, select practitioners test that technique even further with their clients and report back, making it possible for the technique to get refined even further.

After learning all of this, I decided to concentrate on discovering the amount and quality of research done on the self-help methods I had used to try and improve my social confidence. Soon, something critical became apparent.

Few of the Social Confidence Building Methods Out There Have Serious Scientific Support

Any way you slice it, there are a lot of methods out there that make bold claims about improving your social confidence but lack the rigorous scientific testing to justify and sustain these claims. There are several common problems with them:

• Many methods for gaining confidence are only supported by vague and scarce anecdotal evidence. Like that story of “that guy” who used a certain method once and “it went great” (whatever that means).
• Some methods seem to work in isolated cases, but the results can’t be replicated consistently. They may work for one person, but not for the next one.
• Other methods have been studied scientifically and gave poor results in these studies, but only an elite group of psychologists and counselors ever found this out. Often these methods still gained massive popularity due to heavy or misleading marketing.
• And other methods are backed up by made-up studies or real studies with falsified data, but again, few people know about this. Subliminal messages represent one such example.

So many methods for gaining social confidence are unlikely to be effective for any given person considering their lack of scientific testing or support, and some of them clearly won’t be effective.

How I Found a Reliable Way to Overcome My Social Insecurities

With this realization in mind, I began searching for the social confidence boosting techniques that have been rigorously tested and do have serious scientific backup.

I switched from reading inspirational articles and self-help books, to reading peer reviewed psychological studies, examining the scientific research on confidence building, and interviewing some of top psychologists and counselors out there who’ve worked with shy and socially anxious people.

Slowly but surely, I unveiled a select set of scientifically supported techniques for gaining social confidence, and I acquired a deep, reliable understanding of how human emotions really work.

As I gathered them, I put these techniques and this understanding into practice in my own social life. And I finally began seeing significant improvements in my social confidence level. There was some individual variation, but for the most part, this new knowledge I was applying was genuinely and steadily making me feel more comfortable in a variety of social situations.

After a while, I was finding it easy to attend all sorts of social events, to start conversations with people and keep them going, even people a few months back I couldn’t even imagine talking to, to get and hold people’s interest, to make friends and have fun interacting with people. I had seen the matrix.

How I Created a Solution for Shyness and Social Anxiety Used By Thousands of People

As effective as many scientifically supported ideas for overcoming shyness and social anxiety are, there are 3 major troubles concerning them:

1) They’re hard to find. The highly effective ideas for overcoming shyness and social anxiety and the underlying research are frequently buried in a mass of shady self-help advice, which makes it difficult and time consuming to uncover them. I had to do months of investigating to find a solid portion of them.

2) They’re usually described in a dense scientific jargon, which researchers, academics, some trained psychologists, counselors or myself can relate to, but is hard to understand accurately by your regular person who just wants to know how to stop being shy or socially anxious.

3) They lack integration. The few first-rate techniques for gaining social confidence are spread over a variety of books, studies and branches of psychology. And in order to have optimal effectiveness, they need to be put together like the pieces of a puzzle, and used combined into a system.

Considering all of this, I decided to organize the top know-how I had used to overcome my shyness into a coherent and effective method for gaining social confidence, presented in a simple and accessible language, that shy and socially anxious people everywhere could learn, use, and they could see results similar to the ones I had achieved.

Soon after creating this method, I began doing social confidence coaching, teaching my method to others, supervising them in applying it and measuring the results.

This was in 2008. Since then I’ve coached one-on-oneover 200 individual clients in using this method for dealing with their social insecurities, and I’ve supervised their progress personally. All this experience allowed me to refine the method further and make it even more effective.

How the Conversation Confidence Guide Emerged

Private coaching is not exactly a cheap service though. So in late 2011, after a few years of coaching, I decided to expand the access to my method for gaining social confidence by creating a practical, comprehensive and affordable guide in which I teach it step by step. This guide is called Conversation Confidence.

To date, the Conversation Confidence guide has been purchased by over 2000 people from over 50 countries, on 6 continents. Over time I received feedback from many of the buyers of this guide regarding their progress, which, along with my growing social confidence coaching experience, I’ve used to further improve the guide and the content I teach in it.

Today, the Conversation Confidence guide is at its third version, and I believe it is the best program for building social confidence out there.

What you’ll essentially find in this guide is a method for overcoming shyness and social anxiety created starting from techniques and principles verified to be effective by scientific research, which has then been used in real life by myself and by a few thousand shy and socially anxious people I taught, and repeatedly optimized based on the reported results.

You can go to this page to find out more about the Conversation Confidence guide and get your copy.