 If you're someone who struggles with social anxiety, what steps can you take to help yourself to meet with new people and go to new places and succeed? That's what we're gonna be thinking about in today's episode. Let's jump right in. So first of all, a massive disclaimer. This like quite a lot of content that I create is something that I've put together because I needed help with it myself today. So I've relatively recently relocated and my children's level of need has increased quite a lot. I think it's fair to say in the last year or two. These two things combined mean that relatively locally I've been introduced to a lovely group of special needs parents, as in the children have special needs. I'm sure many of the parents like myself do too. And today there's a meetup for that group. So I've been WhatsApping them a little bit or watching them WhatsApp. I'm not very good at WhatsApp. And I'm super keen to meet them. However, the day has dawned and I'm terrified. I'm the most socially awkward person in the world. It might not come across that way. If you see me, you've probably mainly seen me in a professional context and the mask is on. But I find these things really hard. And I've been worrying about it all night and I've woken up very anxious about it. And so I was thinking, well, what would I advise to someone else? And so I worked through my tips for this and I thought, they're not bad. Let's share them with everyone else too. And for me, the process of working through it, of teaching it, of talking about it will help me to work out what to do as well. So bear with me and hopefully these tips will help you too. By the time that you're listening to this or watching it, then hopefully I will have been and it will have been a great success or maybe it will have been a terrible disaster or just checking in with my autistic black and white thinking that maybe it will have been something in between, that's a possibility too. We'll see, we'll see. Okay, so the 10 tips. Number one is to plan ahead. So we should make as much as we can about this situation predictable and know what to expect. So actually learning as much as we can about the event when it is, where it is, how long it's gonna go on for, how many people are likely to be there. For me, knowing if there's gonna be sort of food and drink and things like that can be really helpful because I find that super stressful with my history of eating disorders and also my ability to throw things all over myself which is just really embarrassing. If you've seen me speak, you'll know that I will always have water with me and I will always have water, never in a glass, always in something with a straw because otherwise I will spill it down myself, spill it over everything. I'm really, really clumsy. Yeah, my ability to manage food and drink is poor. So I try to remove that. So knowing ahead what's gonna happen, I will do things like actually try really carefully to plan the journey. I need to know where I'm gonna park my car if I'm driving. Today, I'm lucky because this is very local to me. I can walk there, it's somewhere that I've been before and I know these things really help and make it much more possible for me to go today and not to bail, which is where my head's kind of going at the moment. If you're not able to like practice the journey or visit the venue or anything like that that would help you, then things like Google Maps can really help or looking at the website of a venue if you're meeting somewhere. But just finding out as much as you can. So one of the things that can make us really nervous is all the uncertainty around new people and places and just removing as much of that uncertainty as we can by planning ahead is really, really helpful. Number two is to have an ally. So you might actually go with a buddy. So rather than going to a new place or to meet new people on your own, you might actually take someone with you. So my husband's actually trying to move stuff around so he can potentially come with me today, which is partly to help me, but it's also because he is also a parent of special needs children locally and would like to meet other such parents too. So it's not like, I don't feel totally guilty about using up his time though he'd willingly give it anyway. But it really helps me when I'm going to new places for him to come and he also will offer to do things like go ahead with me to a venue and have a look at it and think about it and think about the problem. So having someone to sort of talk it through and potentially arrive with can be really helpful. The other alternative is if you're going to some sort of organised event like this one is today, often the person who's organising it will really happily like meet you or be there to greet you or specifically introduce you to someone or I could in this scenario reach out to the WhatsApp group and see if there was someone who wanted to arrive with me because there probably are other people who are feeling similarly nervous about this. There'll be others who already know each other but I'm pretty sure if I asked that somebody would help me. The asking is kind of a hard thing. I find that really difficult to ask for help but it's something I encourage other people to do all the time. So maybe I need to role model that one. The thing is when you ask for help in any way whether that's please can you help me by arriving with me today or I've read a really fantastic research paper you've written on X could you tell me about it or whatever it might be. When someone has something that they could give to help you usually if you ask they really willingly do so and they really want to. Like people love to help but we get anxious about asking so maybe we need not to be so anxious about asking. So have an ally either someone who's going to come with you or perhaps someone that you'll meet when you get there. Number three is about proactive calming. So this is about acknowledging that this is going to be potentially quite a high anxiety moment. And so in order to best manage that and get the most from the situation we want to try and get ourselves to a place of relative calm ahead of the situation. So I will walk there. I find walking to be super, super regulating and that will really help me. I will probably listen to either a podcast or some calming music while I'm on my way. I will do my breathing exercises. I'll try and have quite a gentle morning ahead of going. So it's all these things that just try and make sure that we're sitting in plum within that window of tolerance our ability to cope day to day before we arrive at the event. Like if you kind of leave yourself really hurried and rushed and you don't know where you're going and things might have gone wrong and you've had 83 things to do that morning and you've had a stressful phone call and a difficult doctor's appointment and whatever, you know, if you kind of built the stress up that morning and then you're arriving to try and do this thing that's hard then it's really unlikely that you're going to feel comfortable doing it. Maybe you won't feel comfortable anyway but your ability to manage that and emotionally regulate the situation is going to be much poorer. So trying if you can to proactively calm thinking about what the lead in to that event, that moment, that new place, those new people is going to look like so that you're as calm as you can be before you step in the room. Tip number four is to aim small. So I talk about this all the time with kids about actually, you know, we want to aim high and have great aspirations for ourselves and for our children but when it comes to tackling anxiety then little steps are the best ones because they're the most sustainable and we feel like we can do them. So this event today is scheduled for like two hours which is a really long time if you're highly, highly anxious and probably what will happen is that my anxiety will habituate, I'll get talking to someone or they'll get talking to me and it will be okay and maybe I'll find that I want to stay and that's great but my aim is much smaller. My aim is to get there because again, I'm just thinking about just bailing because that would be easier but I want to go, I want to show my face, I want to say hello and I'm going to try and stay for 10 minutes and if I do that and then leave then I will feel that I've done really, really well today and that's okay and if that's what happens and I do that I genuinely will feel really proud of myself feeling quite anxious just thinking about it but yeah, turning up just showing my face will have been a really good outcome today so aim small and don't beat yourself up if you don't manage to do all the things and be like the bell of the ball when you go to your new place and your new people just be realistic about what would be a good achievement for you today and just notice that success if you do manage it. Number five, oh God take a breath I'm feeling quite anxious just thinking about this today. Number five is about being honest. So one of the things I've found to be really helpful is brutal honesty about the issues that I face partly because we're actually never alone so we're all masking all the time and particularly as an adult with other adults we tend to just pop the mask on and everyone's doing okay and it's all jolly and wonderful and great not just about anxiety but about all things in life and actually if you're brave enough to say I'm gonna find this a bit of a struggle actually generally two things will happen one is that people will just be really nice and they'll ask well what can we do to help and then they'll do those things willingly if you're able to let them know what would be helpful and secondly you'll find that there are other people who are facing the same challenges and so you'll be less alone in it so I will today try and be brave enough to be honest about two things one will be about saying I'm actually really anxious I'm very socially anxious person and my autism makes it difficult for me to navigate these kinds of situations but I do really want to come so I'll be honest about that I know I'm gonna be in a room full of parents of children who've got special needs and additional needs and lots of them will have those needs themselves but also they'll be really really good and clued up about how to support children with special needs and kind of the same stuff applies so I will be amongst people who will be able to support me here the other thing which is one I've really only tapped into for myself recently that I probably really do need to be honest about in this situation it's a local meetup with local people is my inability to recognise faces which I hadn't quite realised the extent of this issue until quite recently so I've moved now to a lovely town that's really friendly and quite small and it's the sort of place and I haven't lived anywhere like this since childhood it's the sort of place where you just bump into people that you know all the time except for me I don't know them I literally people will say oh hello Pukie, how are you doing? they'll be chatting away and I've got no idea who they are and it's really really difficult and I feel like I just end up going along with the conversation and if I've got someone with me often I'll have Lyra with me and afterwards she'll tell me who that was or my husband will be with me and he'll tell me who it was but I just don't recognise people at all and I'm aware that by going and meeting new people today who live locally I'm going to get more of that problem because they will remember me and say hello and that's lovely if I were to know who they were so people in context I love little social interactions actually they boost me so like the postman wears a uniform I know who he is I chat to him our courier Colin is an amazing guy and we've had loads of really lovely conversations and again he comes with his van and his packages I know exactly who he is I know the context of our previous conversations I'm able to chat away with him chat away with the guys in the butchers they're normally there holding a cleaver while I go in to buy cuts and meat that I don't understand because I'm vegetarian and I can chat away with them but people out of context I just don't know I don't recognise them anyway I wasn't aware of this issue like I knew I was rubbish at faces I can't tell my husband always jokes about how I can't tell Tom Hughes from Tom Hanks which is true genuine mistake I've made many times I know that it's yeah anyway it's hard but the point is if I'm honest with this group today if I'm brave enough to say just so you know I might not recognise you if I see you around would you just remind me who you are then we can have really good conversations and yeah and I've done this once or twice before when I've been speaking at big events and that's been in the context of lots of people might be coming who I knew from say Twitter and I do meet lots of people in my work all the time and I'd just say hey if you're going to come say hi to me please do but just remind me the context of how we know each other and people do that and it really helps so yeah be honest be honest about the issues that you're facing and if you can share strategies with the people that you're with about how they can help you if you know what that good support would look like let them know and they'll probably willingly do it oh another podcast there about faces and stuff I probably need to go learn more about that and I have quite a lot of strategies already that I didn't even realise I was using until I started looking into it's called prosopagnosia and I've always dismissed this as a possible issue that I had because I had a lecturer who had like full on prosopagnosia like he couldn't recognise us and he had pictures of us and he we had to like wear our hair the same way each time and tell him who we were each time we met him like he couldn't recognise his own wife or his own face in the mirror and yeah I'm nowhere near that kind of level which meant I dismissed my issues same way I didn't realise I was autistic until I was in my mid 30s because I'd worked with lots of autistic kids but like to me autistic kids through my early adulthood look like boys who were non-verbal and often faced quite significant behavioural challenges because of the context in which I'd worked with autistic children and that wasn't me so I never made the link anyway anyway we move on we move on number six is six six tip is preparing what to say so actually thinking a little bit ahead planning for this social situation so you've got that you're in the room you're surrounded by the people you want to engage and again for me and for many people who struggle with social anxiety and then sometimes you find all your words leave you and you have nothing to say so I'll often go like entirely mute but what can help with that is having some pre-prepared scripts things that you've worked on you've practiced you've got a bit of muscle memory going there and you've taken the stress out of having to do thinking so all you've got to do is the actual speaking you're not having to grapple around to form the sentences because you've done it before so I would think about questions that I want to ask so for me to manage these social situations the best way of doing it is to think of a few questions that I can ask to get other people talking about themselves I'm not very interested in talking about myself because I know about me but I love learning about other people and so that can really take the pressure off then I don't have to find loads of the right things to say I just need like maybe two or three questions and some prompts that I can follow up with so I'll often yeah just have something like oh I'd love to know a little bit about you and your child what is it that brings you to this group I'll have a question something like that and then that will usually get people going and then I'll use prompts like oh I'd love to hear a bit more about that or can you tell me a bit more or how did that feel the kinds of prompts that we use when trying to encourage deeper conversation so preparing a little ahead about the things that you might ask and the prompts you might use to encourage conversation in others and leaning into listening people love to talk about themselves actually so if you feel very nervous about talking then just practice being a good listener and you'll be everybody's best buddy people love it the other thing I would think about ahead is what I am going to say about myself so again one of the things that can happen for me and I know for many other people who struggle with social anxiety and that autistic mindset too is knowing what and how much to share and thinking ahead about right who do I want to be to this group for me this has a slightly additional challenge today because I'm attending as a parent and a carer rather than as a professional so I've never been to a group like this in this context and I need to be quite a different person than I normally would be so I've been to loads of these kinds of groups but I'm normally running it or presenting at it or I'm there in a professional context and today I very much want to be there as a parent as a carer as one of the people who need the support rather than giving the support I'm sure those lines will get blurred over time but I need to think about how I present myself and what's the story that I want to tell about why I'm there I also personally want to think really carefully about what I say about my children because I've done a lot of thinking in my work lately about the strengths-led approach and I don't want to turn up to this group saying you know I've got my children these are their issues I want to talk about their strengths and there are some pretty meaty issues right now but there's also some amazing strengths and it's really important to me that people hear that side of my children too and first probably so preparing what you have to say was number six number seven is to challenge yourself so I will often go into these sorts of events or encourage my children who sometimes face similar issues to go into these sorts of things with a little challenge make almost like a little game of it so I will challenge myself today to speak to three new people if I've done that I will have succeeded and get the virtual trophy and the wild applause of the imaginary crowd you could set yourself a challenge depending on what you find difficult and what your motivations are for being there I set my daughters challenges when they're in a new setting of things like try and learn the names of three people or find out if anyone's got a dog or we try to make it a little bit fun and we'll set challenges which will encourage interaction and engagement with other people rather than just sort of sitting on the sidelines which is what can happen sometimes if we don't challenge ourselves so assuming you want to be there and assuming that you want to build some connections then thinking of an appropriate challenge for yourself can really help you to know if you've succeeded I suppose and encourage you to actually get on and do the things that you want to do but that can feel so so hard at the time number eight kind of links up to that and that is to know your why like why are you going at all so my head's going bail, bail, bail don't go, don't go but I'm able to argue back with I actually really want to meet these people I want in my new home to have local friends and these people get it and they're facing some of the same challenges and I want that I want to have that network of support but I also want to make some friends and I also want to find out about what's available locally and what people can recommend for my children this will really help them I've got so many reasons why I want to go and actually those reasons when I put them all together are so much bigger than the fact that I feel kind of scared about it and when I weigh it up like that pros and cons pros and cons always helpful then it's really obvious that yes I need to find a way to get myself through that door and go and show up today for myself and actually for my children as well but it's really helpful to just remember that know your why, why are you doing this and sometimes when we do that kind of pros and cons and why are we going we realise well actually I'm going to this event because I feel like I should or everybody else does or other people seem to enjoy it and it might be that there is no why that comes from you and that maybe the answer is well maybe this one's not worth it and I do turn down and say no to and not turn up to lots and lots of social opportunities which for other people would be great fun and they'd have a really nice time and in the past I might have made myself go to them and then I'd have been really anxious and miserable and then totally burnt out the next day and if for me the cons outweigh the pros then I may well make a decision that this one isn't really worth it for me I can't afford that emotional energy right now the pros do not outweigh the cons and that is okay as well I am recording this around Christmas time and this is the time when there's loads and loads of those really overwhelming opportunities and other people do really enjoy them and perhaps you feel that you should go but feeling you should go for me that's not enough reason to go I'll just leave that there you think about your own pros and cons and make a decision but know your why and if you do want to go tap into that really understand why it matters to you maybe write it down and remember that's why you're there and make sure that you get out of it what you want to tip number nine is to reset afterwards so this is about accepting that okay you did it you went maybe just for 10 minutes maybe for the whole two hours or whatever but you showed up and probably you're in quite a heightened state of anxiety and particularly if you are newer diverse like myself then you may be at risk of sort of burnout from this sort of overwhelm and so what we need to do there is think about what happens afterwards so I would not be planning to have a really busy day or lots of other social interaction in that same day or be doing other hard things directly afterwards so for myself I would be thinking about can I get myself out and go for a climb or go for a walk or go for a run or go for a sing or go for a fly I've got loads and loads of different things that I'm able to do to help me to reset in these scenarios but none of them involve going and doing more stressful things so that for me is something I need to think really, really carefully about how I can remove the emotional load and enable some reset after these kind of stressful events so I don't totally crash personally I have to think about this really carefully if I don't build in reset time and allow myself to recover from this sort of event then I just end up in bed with migraine sometimes for days so being proactive about this matters to me and it may well matter for you too as a minimum make sure that you've got some sort of transition and buffer between this event and what's happening next for you so if I had to be somewhere else later that day then I'd be thinking about can I walk between the two can I listen to some calming music can I take just a little bit of time out can I get up on the downs and enjoy nature and just take a few moments to breathe and relax and try and move between those two things rather than going from a state of high anxiety into the next thing in a state of high anxiety which is more than likely going to end up in meltdown or shutdown okay final tip tip number 10 is that the first time is the hardest so do it again soon so with this particular group assuming that I get there today and I manage it I think they meet monthly and I would plan right away can I go to the next one the first time is by far the hardest and whilst you're feeling that positive of what happened the first time and what you maybe got from it in the next day or so I would be thinking about planning in next time and I will note there what I liked about last time and any sort of tips for myself for next time including things like for me it'll be little descriptions of who was there and which children they're linked to what they look like to help me and make me less anxious next time I might just have the names of two or three people that I'll want to look back out next time my notes on my phone are hilarious like that it'll be like Jane has long blonde hair you know wears bright clothes has three children called XYZ and I'll put all this detail because the more I put the more likely I am to be able to recognise remember and connect again with that person next time but yeah do it again soon it's so so hard going to new places being with new faces for the first time and it's not easy subsequent times but it's easy are so plan to repeat and the more that we're able to do these things the more possible they feel and the more that we do of the things that feel more possible and more manageable the more actually we are able then to try the new things as well the more we're able to be brave so there you go 10 top tips I think I've persuaded myself to go today wish me luck and I hope that these were helpful for you too I've done them from the point of view of an adult myself who struggles with social anxiety but lots of these tips could really easily be adapted and applied to children or young people that might be in your care as well so you know if you're supporting someone then hopefully there are some ideas in here as well good luck do connect with me on the socials and let me know what helps you in these situations because it's so helpful if we can be learning from each other and I so often learn really great stuff from you guys and try to build it into my future sharing okay have a great day be brave but be kind to yourself too until next time over and out