Others-conscious

One day, I stepped onto a bus and immediately felt all the passengers looking at me. Noticing my wrinkled shirt and how I stumbled into my seat as the bus jolted forward. As I was sitting there, I noticed someone who looked familiar. For the rest of the ride, I tried to figure out where I knew them from. After I got off the bus, I realised how relaxed I was compared to when I got on. My mind was too occupied with the other person to be thinking about how others were evaluating me.

Being self-conscious is focusing on what you imagine others think of you — evaluating how you look and act. It's a survival instinct we evolved when living in tribes, where fitting in was life or death. So our brains developed a constant background process asking: I am fitting in? It makes us anxious which is bad because we need to be comfortable to talk well.

Key to reducing self-consciousness is to understand we have a limited cognitive load — a limit to how many things we can think about at once. Others-conscious is to think about others instead of yourself. To hypothesize what someone near you is thinking and feeling, instead of what they're thinking and feeling about you. Notice details like what are they're wearing, carrying, doing. Do they look stressed, sad or excited?

This primes us for conversation by building empathy and providing ways to open — like with a compliment.

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