The Shyness & Social Anxiety Workbook
2ﬁne-tuning your communication and performance skills. The ﬁnal chapter of the book 
discusses strategies for maintaining your improvements.
This book is different from other self-help books in a number of ways. Of the many 
books on social anxiety and shyness that you will ﬁnd in your local bookstore, this was 
the ﬁrst to be written in a workbook format. It is ﬁlled with exercises and practices 
designed to teach you basic strategies for overcoming shyness and social anxiety. We 
encourage you to ﬁll in the blank worksheets and forms located throughout the text. In 
addition, we encourage you to make copies of the forms for your personal use so you 
can continue to use them over the coming months.
This book also differs from many others because the strategies we recommend have 
all been investigated extensively in well-designed clinical studies. In addition to specializ -
ing in helping people deal more effectively with their anxiety, we also are actively involved 
in research on the nature and treatment of anxiety. It is a well-established fact that when 
the techniques described in this book are used in a therapeutic setting, people generally 
experience a signiﬁcant decrease in their social and performance anxiety (Rodebaugh, 
Holaway, and Heimberg 2004). Essentially, we have taken strategies that have proven 
to be useful in therapy and adapted them into a self-help format. Recently, investigators 
have also shown that our self-help approach (using the ﬁrst edition of this book) can 
also be effective for reducing social anxiety (Moore, Braddock, and Abramowitz 2007). 
This workbook is designed so that it can be used alone or coupled with regular visits to