by Michelle Wilkinson
Social anxiety is often intertwined with depression and low self-esteem, which is bound to have an impact on your job search. If you don’t believe in yourself, how on earth can you convince anyone else that you’re worth hiring? When you have social anxiety it is incredibly difficult to be in social situations without panicking and, thus, you can find your employment opportunities limited to jobs that don’t require much social interaction. These jobs are few and far between, so it can be a real challenge to find employment when you have social anxiety.
You may not know whether to alert a potential employer to the fact that you suffer from social anxiety or not, but don’t know how else to explain away the gaps in your C.V. You may well be incredibly intelligent and have achieved good grades at school, but you have such little self-confidence that you find it hard to highlight your qualities. It’s not so difficult when you’re filling in an application form, as all you need to do is write about your accomplishments, but it’s not so easy when you’re sitting face to face with your interviewer. It is at this stage when your social anxiety can make its presence felt and interfere with your ability to perform well.
Whatever type of job you apply for will require an interview, though, and so you have to overcome your anxiety and find a way to deal with the situation so that you can get through it and be offered a job at the end of it all. You may face a number of rejections, which only makes it harder to keep applying for jobs, especially when you already have low self-esteem, but the more interviews you attend the easier they should become and the better you will perform. This will therefore increase your chances of being offered a job.
When you suffer from social anxiety, if you don’t have much confidence in yourself you’re likely to apply for low-paying jobs which don’t challenge you, as you become convinced that these are the only jobs you’re capable of. You can end up trapped in jobs that are well below your level of training, but then it is your choice. If you let social anxiety overwhelm you, then it is you who suffers. The best idea would be to tackle your social anxiety head on so that you can conduct a job search with confidence, searching for jobs which you know you’re capable of, but which actually require you to push yourself a little bit harder.
From Helium
