I used some of the money I got for my birthday today to enjoy a trip to the bookstore, something I haven’t been able to do in a while. This is one of the books I picked out. I haven’t read it yet but it gets a 4½ star rating at Amazon and the reviews are good. Out of eight reviews, six are 5 star reviews. The other two are 3 stars and the reviewers admit that the techniques in the book work, they just didn’t care for the author’s presentation of the material. So far, I’ve leafed through it and read bits and pieces and it seems like a good book to me. I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy reading it and I hope the techniques work for me.

The basic idea behind the book is to teach people to use basic acting techniques to develop self-confidence and learn how to handle themselves well in difficult or uncomfortable circumstances. If this stuff really works, it could be a huge help to me in battling my social anxiety disorder. One of the things my counselor has suggested for me to try in the past is to “act as if” I feel confident. She keeps telling me that if I do that enough, it will take my mind off of my anxiety and eventually I will actually start to FEEL confident as well. This book seems to suggest the same thing. I haven’t had much success at acting confident so far because I haven’t really been sure how to go about it and when I’m in the midst of anxiety, I can’t concentrate well enough to think about it. This book has step-by-step techniques with actual exercises to practice on, so maybe I can work on developing the skills when I’m NOT anxious and then when I’m actually in the anxiety producing situation, I can just do them and not have to think about them so much. They’ll be almost like a habit.

Anyway, if you have anxiety problems or just want to develop better confidence in some areas of your life, I suggest you give this book a try. At the very least, the exercises seem like they’ll be fun and you just may improve yourself in the process. I’m definitely going to give it a try.