Social Courage makes having social anxiety, not a thing that you live within the silence. Eric Goodman provides a program with Social Courage that will give you the tools to meet your goals. You are not alone, that is the main thing to hold on to while your read Social Courage, everyone experiences certain degrees of social anxiety. The case studies alone can help you feel comfortable while you try and practice with the tools provided. Very useful and educational book, you will gain so much from reading.

This is a good book on CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) techniques for social anxiety. I am reviewing this book from my perspective, having gone through many sessions of CBT with a therapist myself years ago. To start, I found it to be delivered in a friendly and encouraging tone, though I can see how the narrator could be "too much" and easily have the opposite effect.

There are different aspects of anxiety looked at in this book: from how the anxiety may have come about, to how we react with things such as safety behaviours and comfort zones, to how we can take steps to tackle the problem. Along the way through there are lots of example scenarios littered about to demonstrate how different behaviours and ways of thinking actually translate to real life situations and how real life people react; I found I could relate to many of these. After each topic there is generally also an activity or page to work through which gets you to think about your own anxiety and steps you can take to work on it.

I did not like how this book insists that social anxiety is normal and that everybody suffers from it. I understand that nerves are natural and everybody will be uneasy in certain situations, but I would not call this by the same name as social anxiety. I feel this belittles our experience in the same way that youtubers and general media seem to? Maybe it's just me? I don't know. I also didn't appreciate how the only cause suggested for anxiety is past bullying or rejection - this is not the case for myself and I guess many others.

Overall, this is a decent book and is worth a look if you haven't yet tried CBT methods for tackling your anxiety. I didn't find it so helpful but this way of changing your thinking patterns can be amazingly helpful for some so it's worth a shot (and it's also a heck of a lot cheaper than a therapist)

I'm gonna be honest here and say I had to drop this book because while it's informative and helpful (it gives you insight on your type of anxiety, offers examples and ways to apply cognitive therapy to help you out, even offering coping strategies) it gave me anxiety reading it. Maybe it's because of the book, maybe it was because of the tone or maybe it was me, or not veing ready right at the moment to tangle with it.
I have read other books about anxiety and found them helpful, so I am not sure what was going on here...
While at the beginning the tone the author uses seems informal and enthusiastic, it ended up feeling like he was overly so, like he was downplaying things in his effort to be enthusiastic...
I feel I can't offer a truthful review of the book as a whole as I had to stop reading, but I wanted to share those insights with you. As always, check it out if you feel like it can help you out, but if you feel like this book is not for you, it's okay, there are other books on social anxiety that might be better for you.