The Shyness & Social Anxiety Workbook
180to cope with social and performance situations. Ideally, exposure practices should be 
designed to test the validity of your anxious assumptions. For example, if you are fearful 
of saying something foolish during a conversation at a party, it’s not enough simply to 
attend parties, although just attending may be a reasonable ﬁrst step. To more thor -
oughly challenge such an anxiety-provoking belief, you also would need to talk to other 
people at the party. By having numerous conversations with others, eventually you will 
learn that most of what you say is not foolish at all.
After reaching a certain level of comfort talking to other people at parties, the next 
step might be to practice saying something silly or foolish purposefully and to evalu -
ate the consequences. This exercise would help to challenge your anxious beliefs at an 
even deeper level. Chances are that even if you did say something foolish at a party, the 
consequences would be minimal. With this type of exposure practice, you would learn 
not only that you can engage in effective conversations with others, but that even if you 
make a mistake from time to time, it doesn’t really matter.
The strategies discussed in this section are useful for increasing the intensity of your 
exposure practices by testing out the validity of your “What if?” thoughts. Rather than 
dwelling on questions like “What if I make a mistake?” or “What if I draw attention to 
myself?” we suggest that you try to answer these questions by purposefully making a 
mistake or purposefully drawing attention to your behavior. In all likelihood, you will 
discover that nothing terrible happens.
Purposefully Making Mistakes or Trying to Look Stupid
When you have begun feeling more comfortable in some of your feared situations,