our essential shyness
Where are you shy?
Shyness is a topic that we do not allow much consideration in our culture. We have a tendency to overvalue courage and boldness. We encourage charging head on in our lives and in the world. A direct, full-frontal approach, we think, is best. We equate shyness to inaction and lack of progress. And so, we assign little to no value to shyness.
Instead, we expend our efforts trying to convince or cajole others, and ourselves, out of our feelings of shyness. We afford ourselves neither time nor patience for shyness. We treat shyness as if it were an unwanted nuisance, in the way of where we want to go and how we wish to be. An insignificant unpleasantness to be dealt with, cleared out, or gotten past as quickly as possible.
And yet, there is value in shyness.
Shyness is an indicator. A signal or a sign. A gage that points to the value of something to us.
We don’t become shy of people or things that don’t matter to us.
The moments of our greatest shyness are those when we are in the presence of something or someone on which or whom we place significant worth, according to the poet, David Whyte. Our shyness comes full blown when we are faced with that which we desire most. We’ve all felt the heat, the hesitancy, and the awkwardness that arises when we are face-to-face with something we desperately want – be it an object, an experience, or a person.
And we are often surprised by our shyness. It catches us off-guard. Alarmingly so at times.
This is most especially true when we begin to allow ourselves to listen to the whispers of our hearts and our creative callings. These subtle mumblings, tugs at our hearts, or impulses that seem to pull on us without our knowing why. In the midst of these whispered intimations, shyness haunts us with such a subtle, but omnipotent presence that we are even shy of ourselves. The heart of this amorphous and intangible shroud of shyness that surrounds what we feel we may be called toward is the fear of not yet knowing who we will become if we pursue it. And there is, within this shyness of ourselves and our heart’s callings, an innate knowing that in pursuing what we want, we will be broken open. We will somehow, no matter how careful we try to be, shatter the safe shell we have created around our lives. And we will shatter the carefully constructed identity that we have thus far built. We know somehow that we will at some point, find ourselves in a new and unfamiliar version of our lives, naked and unknown to ourselves. We will have become versions of ourselves that we don’t yet recognize.
This is true and necessary because our hearts are always at least one step in front of us. Our hearts, and our souls, know before we do where we belong and what comes next for us on our journey through this life. And we are left running to catch up to them, not quite knowing the way, but following as best as we can.
This is why true courage comes in walking through the shyness as one walks through a field in the fog. Sensing the direction if not always seeing the path.
If we can learn to embrace this essential shyness of ourselves as an invitation - one that beckons us into a fuller expression of ourselves and a truer version of our lives – we can begin to attune to both the sensations and the intimations of shyness.
Where I most recently danced with my own essential shyness was in my transition out of high tech and into fulltime coaching. In truth it felt more like several years of wrestling, so perhaps it was an exceptionally passionate tango rather than a dignified and stately waltz.
One place where we almost always encounter our essential shyness when we begin to move out of the role or persona we have created and inhabited for some period of time or portion of our lives in order to move toward the next as yet unknown next iteration of ourselves. This transition arises when we enter into or move out of a committed relationship, when we leave a career to which we have committed a significant part of our lives, when we become parents - anytime the circumstances of our lives necessitate that we move from one identity into a new one.
Often this transitional period can resemble Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, or perhaps Dante’s journey through Purgatory, or even a bit like the Buddhist concept of crossing the Bardo. It is a liminal space, like a caterpillar in a cocoon, where we begin to dissolve apart at a cellular to reconfigure ourselves as something or someone entirely new. And like a butterfly, we need to acclimate to how to move in this new version of ourselves.
My own shyness in leaving the realm of high tech and moving into coaching was not insignificant or subtle but pervasive and, at time, seemed overwhelming. It showed up in so many ways – I was shy of being seen, shy of speaking up about what I believed in, shy of putting myself out in the world as a coach… But if the degree of shyness is an indicator of the veracity of the calling, then this has been and continues to be a true calling - in capital letters.