Ellen Hendriksen > Quotes

“In truth, you gain confidence by doing things before you're ready, while you're still scared. Go through the motions and your confidence will catch up.' If you wait until you are ready to do the things that scare you because you feel like you aren't ready, you will never get around to doing them. We gain comfort and confidence through being uncomfortable.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“Ultimately, social anxiety is the fear that whatever we’re trying to hide will be revealed to everyone like a gust of wind sweeps away a bad toupee. We think there is something wrong with us and therefore try to conceal it.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“social anxiety is seeing our true self in a distorted way and believing the distortion to be the truth.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“Ending conversation is another safety behavior—we’re trying to save ourselves from the anxiety. But we trade the anxiety of the moment for loneliness in the long run.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“Seldom does anyone actually say, “Wow, you sure seem uncomfortable. You’re weird and don’t deserve to be here.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“First, we hold ourselves to strict, near-impossible standards but are understanding and compassionate to everyone else. As if that double standard weren’t bad enough, we also try to see the best in others, but assume others will see the worst in us. When you think about it, our assumption that others will be judgmental and rejecting is actually quite ungenerous of us.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“We like people more when they’re imperfect.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“Meeting people” is really different from “making friends.” One is an event; the other is a process.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“Jia, who said to me: “It was surprising how easy it was to get a yes. I realized how many opportunities I missed because I was afraid of people rejecting me, but I was just rejecting myself.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“I love working with people who experience social anxiety because they are invariably brave and amazing, and I am privileged to help them discover exactly that”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“I once had a client who, terrified of the tight space and restriction involved in getting a head-and-neck MRI, readied himself by lying on the floor with his head under his bed. When that got boring, he upped the ante by lying under the bed with his head duct-taped to the floor. The only problem was that he neglected to warn his wife about his practice and when she found him taped to the floor she had to be coaxed out of calling 911.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“Purpose isn’t discovered, all at once, like a treasure chest, nor is it something we keep to ourselves, without connection or benefit to others. Instead, it’s an ever-evolving sense of what’s important to you.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists

“friendship is fostered, not found.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“deep-sea volcanoes might erupt on the ocean floor, but the surface hardly shows a burble.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“Indeed, procrastination can have big implications if we put off, say, getting a colonoscopy or a mammogram, ending a bad relationship, or getting out of a toxic job.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists

“line the day before Thanksgiving.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists

“As for me, I am still perfectionistic—I still have high standards and expect a lot of myself.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists

“Even if you’re one of the 21 percent of capital-S Socially Anxious folks for whom anxiety manifests as sarcasm and criticism, I know that underneath all your prickles you likely have many of these qualities, too. Like a puffer fish, you’re prickly only because you’re scared.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“The biggest don’t-feel-good rule I encounter with clients is having fun means I’m out of control.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists

“Mistakes are part of the package deal of trying something new.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists

“This second myth is unbelievably common. But why? What’s to blame for the idea that how we feel is how we look? For the primary culprit, look no further than your body. To explain,”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“Ultimately, the message is you’re not enough the way you are; you need achievements and signifiers to be enough.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists

“As one of my clients, Anthony, exclaimed after we stood on a subway platform for an hour of looking at faces, “But wait, these are just people!”.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“There are at least two answers to Gus’s question: connection and enjoyment. To come home to our lives—to shift away from overvaluing our performance—we’ll move some of our proverbial eggs from the basket of performance to the baskets of connection and enjoyment.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists

“Social Anxiety crosses the line from an annoyance to a problem if it causes distress or impairment, which is the technical way of saying it freaks you out or stops you from living the life you want.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“This fear is the core of social anxiety. It’s the sense that something embarrassing, deficient, or flawed about us will become obvious to everyone. Jim feared what I call The Reveal. Social anxiety isn’t just fear of judgment; it’s fear the judgers are right. We think there is something wrong with us, and we avoid in order to conceal it. In our minds, if The Reveal comes to pass we’ll be rejected, humiliated, or exposed.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“Share what you think and feel and do. Show others that you like them. These are the building blocks of beautiful friendships. Epilogue In 1938, researchers at Harvard wondered: What makes a good life?”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

“We worry we’ll say the wrong thing, do something awkward, and get roundly, deservedly criticized for it. Therefore, so many of us feel stressed in class, at parties, in groups, at work, with strangers, on social media. We are convinced we are too much of something: too weird, too awkward, too annoying. Or that we are not enough of something else: not confident, not socially skilled, not competent. Finally, our bodies betray us; we are sure everyone notices our graceless blushing, sweaty palms, or trembling hands.”
― Ellen Hendriksen, How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety