I am sure this should go here....
Whenever you know you have to meet new people, such as new school, new job, new town, etc. Do you have an kind of anxiety? If so how do you get over it?
I get really bad anxiety when I am doing such. Its almost where I will even try to avoid such, and therefore forfeit a great opportunity.
Any tips?
As far as I can tell, I have little or no anxiety when meeting new people. When I go to new schools, new jobs, new towns, it's like an adventure.
However, I am indeed an introvert. I do not flourish in crowded social situations, but rather, I expend energy in them. I require quieter times to recuperate.
Confidence is pretty important, but admittedly, just telling someone to be confident doesn't amount to much.
-When you go to a new school, or visit a new group of people, or get interviewed by a new employer, or move to a new town, it's not necessarily so much about you, but rather, about them.
You're interviewing them to be your friends, co-workers, and neighbors, as much as they're interview you to be their friend, co-worker, or neighbor. I think it's key to remember that.
-Some of my best job landings came when, in an interview, it turned into me interviewing the employer rather than the employer interviewing me. That is, my stuff is already on the table- my grades, my work experience, etc. They only picked me to this point from a pile of resumes because on paper I was what they wanted. Now, I'm determining whether this place I'm sitting at is the best place to potentially spend the next few years of my life. It's actually a much greater risk to me to spend several years in a place I don't like, than for an employer to hire one employee out of many that isn't the best fit. So it's really more important to be the interviewer rather than the interviewee, both in actual interviews, and in new social situations. It's more important that they impress you, than that you impress them.
-If you view it as one-sided, it will be one sided. If you view it as going both ways, it will go both ways. The primary thing is that you're reviewing a situation to see if it meets your goals, and the secondary thing is that people in the situation are reviewing you to see if you meet their goals.
I think many people view it simply as, the people they're meeting are doing a one-way review. So the most concise piece of advice I'd offer is, take whatever you're feeling, and flip it 180 degrees.
