The main thing you have to realize is where the feeling of insecurity you get comes from. The cause of it isn’t a problem with you, because the feeling only comes when certain people look at you.

The cause is the other person or people, which means the real question is: Why do some people make you feel insecure when their eyes are on you?

Understand this: We are only affected emotionally by people who we perceive to be higher status than ourselves. How insecure would you feel if a toddler was looking at you? How about your boss, the president and your favorite movie actor?

If you don’t want to have the feeling of insecurity anymore, you have to genuinely believe you are higher up the social ladder than whoever you are talking to. You don’t care what a toddler thinks of you or if he’s judging you.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a great short-term solution.

I really do understand what you’re going through. I KNOW I used to have the same automatic reactions. I didn’t really realize how obvious I must have been until I started becoming less shy and started seeing my old behaviors in other people.

So what do shy people usually do when a group of people or someone they find attractive or someone who (they think) is high social status makes eye contact with them?

They immediately BREAK eye contact. Their eyes start darting all over the place, unsure of what to look at. Their body language becomes “closed”: folded arms, take up less room, slouched posture. They don’t know what they should be doing with their hands. The most important thing to realize that this is always an UNCONSCIOUS reaction.

In order to overcome it, you have to start CONSCIOUSLY forcing yourself to have certain physical reactions. Reactions that aren’t insecure. Over time these will become your natural ones. Once you start getting practice and experience, and start knowing that you won’t “mess up” when someone looks at you, then a lot of the insecurity goes away.

The way I first started out doing this was whenever I walked past a stranger and happened to make eye contact, I STOPPED myself from breaking eye contact immediately. I held on for a couple of seconds, and usually they looked away first. I can hear you saying to yourself now: “Great tip, Sean. Stare at people.” That is strangely close to the truth, but you have to be CONFIDENT, not creepy.

You are creepy if you hold eye contact with someone and you’re fidgeting, you body language is not confident and the person gets the feeling that you’re scared.

You are confident if you hold eye contact with someone and you have relaxed body language, are feeling calm and the person gets the feeling that you don’t really care about how they may judge you. Think about the difference between making eye contact with an ugly homeless man vs. a tall, successful businessman.

NOTE: Don’t do this with someone who knows you’re shy. It will come across as weird. This is related to the high/low social value thing I mentioned above. The key is that the other person doesn’t know you’re shy. The only thing they can judge you by is your body language, eye contact, etc.

Anyway, what I found worked best for me when it comes to getting rid of feeling insecure when around other people was to “fake it til I made it”. I noticed how confident guys would walk, how they sat, how they held themselves, etc…then I copied them. So whenever I started to feel insecure, I would make sure I was showing confident body language. By doing this on the outside, I started to feel the confidence on the inside.

I think what was going through my head was something like this: “Oh man, she’s looking at me.” [Made sure I had confident body language.] “Wait a minute, she can only see me from the OUTSIDE. She doesn’t know I feel insecure right now. She thinks I’m normal and unaffected by her. Whoo. I guess I can relax a little, as long as I know how to keep PRETENDING to be confident.”

Wow, I didn’t expect to write such a long reply.

So here’s what I did in a nutshell:
1. Looked at what confident guys did.
2. Whenever I felt insecure, copy what they did. (This way I wasn’t focusing on trying not to feel insecure, but on appearing confident.)
3. Grow out of insecurity by realizing that people can only see me from the outside. By being able to decide to look confident when I wanted to, it actually made me relax.

Good luck,
-Sean

P.S. If it’s a situation where you’re talking to someone, the process is the same. Practice talking into a microphone. Buy a vocal training course. Get better at talking and you’ll become more confident by being able to outwardly project a confident image and voice. Even if you still believe other people judge you, at least you can believe that they judge you in a good light.

The only place when you should make more eye contact than normal is if you’re talking to someone of the opposite sex, and trying to show them you’re interested in them. Outside of that situation, staring = creepy.