Making a Plan for Change
91strategies described in chapter 9. At the same time, continue to practice the 
cognitive and exposure techniques from the earlier chapters.
UÊIf there are social skills that you would like to improve, this will be the time 
to use the exercises described in chapter 10. Again, we recommend that you 
do not stop using the skills that you learned earlier, particularly the cogni -
tive and exposure-based strategies.
At this point, several months will have passed and your anxiety will be likely to have 
improved signiﬁcantly. We recommend that you read chapter 11 at this point, which 
discusses ways of maintaining the gains you have made so far.
If you are curious and you want to read later sections in the book now, that’s ﬁne. 
However, it’s important that you go back and practice the strategies in each chapter 
before moving on to the next set of techniques. These strategies are the building blocks 
that eventually will lead to an improvement in your social anxiety. 
After completing this chapter, a number of issues should be clearer to you. First, you 
should have a better idea of whether this is the best time for you to work on overcoming 
your social anxiety. Second, you should have formulated a number of treatment goals, 
both for the short term and the long term. Finally, it is likely that you will have consid -
ered the various treatment options and identiﬁed your own treatment preferences. The 
remaining chapters in this workbook provide more detailed instructions in how to take 
advantage of particular strategies for managing social anxiety.