Getting to Know Your Social Anxiety
41UÊTry to work on fears that interfere the most with your day-to-day life. Being 
able to confront the most disabling fears will have a much bigger impact on 
your life than working on fears that are less important to you.
UÊIf one of your treatment aims is very important to you but is just too over -
whelming to deal with, divide that goal into smaller, more manageable 
objectives. For example, if you are afraid of dating, you could work on your 
fear by breaking the situation down into steps such as saying hello to an 
attractive classmate, sitting beside the classmate for several weeks in a row, 
speaking with the classmate after class, offering to study with the classmate, 
and asking the classmate to have dinner with you after class.
CHOOSING THE BEST STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE
A self-assessment also can help you to decide which treatment strategies to use. In many 
cases, the speciﬁc treatment approaches you select will be directly related to factors you 
identify in your self-assessment. Consider the following examples of how an assessment 
can help you to select the best approaches for treatment:
UÊIdentifying which situations you fear and avoid will help you to choose 
which situations to select for exposure practices (as described in chapters 
7 and 8).
UÊIdentifying the extent to which you are fearful of the physical feelings that 
you experience when you are anxious will help determine whether you 
should practice exposure to uncomfortable physical sensations (as described 
in chapter 9).
UÊAssessing those areas in which your social skills can be improved will help 
you to decide whether to spend time working on the skills involved in asser -