Word: shyness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...less communicative than I am. Am I less comfortable on set working with actors than I am in the editing room trying to put it all together? Yes, I would say that's probably true. Am I by nature a shy person? Yes. Have I kind of overcome my shyness to do things that a shy person shouldn't be able to do? Yes, of course I have. But people think of me as a sort of pathological, Howard Hughes-type guy sitting in a hotel room, which is definitely not so. I mean, you've known me for years...
...trouble. Last year Boston's enrollment had plummeted to 56,000, from 93,000 in 1973. Whites account for just 27% of the remaining students. Illiteracy in high schools stands at 20%, the dropout rate at about 48%. But Garrity, displaying an odd mixture of public belligerence and personal shyness, refused invitations from Superintendent Spillane to visit the schools. "The pathetic part," says Spillane, "is that it seems that he's almost in fear of discovering what is really going...
...children and adults who feel constrained by their shyness, there are many ways to break free. Parents, first, must respond to their kids' timid behavior with empathy, taking care not to equate being anxious with being bad, says Dr. Regina Pally of UCLA. "They should send soothing signals that say, 'This is hard. I'm going to help you deal with it. You're not being a baby.'" For shy adults, cognitive talk therapy can place anxieties in perspective, lowering the stakes of social situations and reducing the fears associated with them. Behavioral therapy is a good treatment for social...
...would be a mistake, however, to think that therapy can eradicate all shyness--and it would be a bigger mistake even to try. Shy children may have a smaller circle of friends than more outgoing kids, but studies show they tend to do better in school and are significantly less inclined to get caught up in violence, crime or gangs. "Shyness has a risk factor," says professor of social work J. David Hawkins of the University of Washington in Seattle, who, since 1985, has been conducting a long-term study of 808 children from high-crime neighborhoods of Seattle...
...lives lived exuberantly can yield grand things, lives lived more quietly may produce something even finer. As Battaglia puts it: "Shyness is simply a human difference, a variation that can be a form of richness." Scientists studying shyness never tire of pointing out that Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were unusually reserved people and may have achieved far less if they'd been otherwise. "There's no question in my mind that T.S. Eliot would have qualified as one of the [shy] kids in our study," says Kagan. "Yet he also won a Nobel Prize." --Reported by Sandra...