You wouldn’t scrawl “I am shy” on a heavy sandwich board and wear it around town. Revealing your shyness to too many people can drag you down just as much. Besides, labeling yourself shy is inaccurate. You are a complex mixture of an immeasurable number of qualities. To choose just one puts unnecessary emphasis on it.
Calling yourself shy could also be a perilously self-fulfilling prophesy. When you tell people you’re shy, you are not just telling others. You are telling yourself as well. And you are the person who really counts.
I don’t think I was destined to be a singing diva. However, someone slapped a label across my lips when I was in the seventh grade. Nary an on-key note has come out of my mouth since then.
In seventh grade, I sang in the church choir. One afternoon during a rocky rehearsal, the choirmaster turned his stern face directly toward me: “Someone is off-key. I want that someone to just mouth the words.” There was no mistaking who that off-key someone was. From that day on, I sang like a crow with a cold. To this day, with great embarrassment, I silently mouth the words to “Happy Birthday.”
A few years ago, I was listening to the radio with an old classmate who knew I was severely musically challenged. The station was playing the Top 40 songs that were popular when I was in sixth grade. Just for fun, I started warbling along with the radio. When I’d finished, my friend said,
“Leil, that’s perfect!”
“Perfect what?”
“Perfect pitch.”
“Couldn’t be.”
“’Twas!”
Tentatively, I tried a few more songs from my pre–seventh grade years. We were both staggered because I was right on-key. But here’s the mind-boggler. I could not sing even one song that came after that fateful “someone is off-key” day.
The choir master had labeled me tone-deaf. Therefore, I was tone-deaf—a self-fulfilling prophesy.
The American Association of People with Disabilities doesn’t let their members burn themselves with the “handicapped” branding iron. They wisely decree, “Someone in a wheelchair is not ‘handicapped’ or ‘disabled.’ They are just like able-bodied people. They simply carry one more piece of baggage, their disability.”2 Some members ask people not to use the word handicapped in their presence.
Don’t call yourself shy. Think of yourself as a self-assured person who carries a surplus bag—one you’ll soon shed—called “Shyness.”
It’s not only when you’re a kid that hearing people refer to you as shy is destructive. It’s a punch in your ego at any age. Think about it. You could be the most fabulous-looking person to grace the planet, but if enough people called you ugly, you’d start to believe it.
It’s not only your inner voices that you must silence. Outlaw using the “S” word with the outer voices that you hear every day—that means your mother, father, sisters, brothers, kids, nephews, nieces, cousins, and friends. Don’t let them call you shy to your face—or behind your back.