I’m not going to tell you to get over it. To just brave up and get outside your comfort zone. Nor to accept defeat.
If you suffer from severe social anxiety, it’s a non-starter to suggest you start cold calling potential co-op partners or approaching strangers at Starbucks. I encourage this kind of direct engagement because it gets you booked solid faster.
But it’s not the only path to success.
I have a lot of heart for my fellow artist-entrepreneurs who suffer from social anxiety. How to grow your art and business when so many ‘normal’ social interactions are anywhere from hard to impossible?
It’s okay. Your path just looks different.
Your path is more passive. Your path is more digital. Your path is slower, but equally persistent, with just as much hustle, and potential.
I know you’re not using social anxiety as an excuse to be lazy, or to not ‘brave up.’ I know that just answering the phone or being the first to reach out by text or e-mail is a BIG deal, with powerful physical and emotional reactions.
Some of us are in wheelchairs. Some of us have weird senses of humor. Some of us are almost blind. Some of us are socially anxious.
- Step 1: Give yourself grace, and let go of the sense that you even need allowance or forgiveness for your social anxiety. It’s just a reality, one ingredient in the recipe that makes you the unique artist and person you are.
- Step 2: Let go of all the BS stories that make you feel bad for how you are, that make you feel unworthy or incapable of success. If you wouldn’t tell someone in a wheelchair or with no hair or with a lisp that they can’t be a professional photographer because of how they are, then stop telling yourself the same.
- Step 3: Let’s brainstorm. If you accept your social anxiety and stop feeling bad about it, if you let it be okay, what are the new rules of your game as an entrepreneur? How are you going to rewrite your story and game plan and road map as a professional photographer to work with your social anxiety instead of through or around it?
Take this idea as far as you can for now. Then start executing on it.
Stuck here? Not sure how to untie this knot? E-mail me and let me know, and we’ll work on it together.
James Michael Taylor
www.parttimephoto.com
P.S. I have a book in the hopper on how to deploy my Freemium Photography business model specifically for those with social anxiety. Would you like to see me move that book up in my writing queue? Drop me a line and let me know!