Do you have a fear and phobia of meeting new people? Are you somebody who wants everybody to like you? Do you become anxious in a social environment? A couple of years ago, I would have answered yes to the above questions, however have now managed to gain enough confidence to deal with and enjoy these situations. In this article, I will write about how I have managed to achieve this.

There are many people who feel uncomfortable when it comes to meeting new people. They become quite shy and seemingly afraid at how these new people will react to them and treat them. They may ask themselves certain questions such as, what if this new person does not like me? What if they think that I am stupid or boring? They may have a lack of confidence about their own social skills and their ability to make a good impression, people always say that the first impression counts and this just adds to the pressure. All of this stress and fear is not good and is certainly not going to help them in the situation, whenever has worrying about something ever helped anyone?

I had a speech impediment known as stuttering or stammering, this had a major negative impact on my own confidence and caused a huge amount of frustration for me to live with. It was not as if I would stutter on every word or in every situation and at times I could talk quite well, hence the frustration.

Whenever I had to meet new people, I would or the demons in my head, would always ask myself questions, how will this person react if I stutter when talking to him/her? What if I have a block and am unable to say anything at all, how will I be able to explain that to this new person? I certainly therefore had a fear and phobia of meeting new people. This may seem a trivial problem to people who are confident at socialising but was something that caused me a great deal of concern and stress. It made attending interviews, dating and employment some what of a struggle.

I eventually decided that I needed to improve my life and to gain confidence. I attempted to do this by reading a lot of books about self confidence and physcology, I also at the same time went about eradicating the stutter. After about a year of working extremely hard I managed to achieve fluency and had learnt a lot about stress, fear, phobias and confidence.

I now love to meet new people and have the attitude that I do not care whether they like me or not. Some people will take to me others may not. Some people will think I am interesting others will think I am boring. At the end of the day life is too short in my humble opinion to care too much about what other people think of us.