Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black.

And I'm Laura Owens. Do you feel uncomfortable in some social situations?

Do you feel self-conscious and insecure? Do you wish

you could do something about that? If so, you'll want to hear what our guest, Dr. Ellen Hendrickson,

has to say. Ellen is a clinical psychologist who has devoted her career to helping her clients

overcome social anxiety. And she's the author of the new book, How to Be Yourself,

Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. Ellen, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be on. Talk to us a little bit about your

background because you have a personal connection to the reason why you wrote this book.

Sure. So there's a saying in academics that

research is me search. And that is because researchers often are, you know, naturally interested

in the things that make them tick. And so I myself have a history of social anxiety. And it's not

something I set out to research, but when I stumbled across it in my studies

and in my training, I recognized myself. And I said, aha, that sounds like something that I know about

as I've figured stuff out myself over, you know, many decades in a PhD in clinical psychology,

but also in helping other people overcome their social

anxiety. It's been just such a privilege and delight to get to work with people with social

anxiety because they are inevitably just kind and lovely people, and I love helping them discover

just that. Well, how do most of us experience social anxiety? What are the things that we feel

when we're experiencing that? So I'm glad you asked that. I think a really good analogy is we've all

experienced some morning when we've woken up and looked in the mirror and realized we have a big

zit on the end of our nose, or we're having

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