Ep: 8 Stop Letting the Fear of Judgment Hold You Back (It’s Not Shyness… It’s This)

If you’ve ever told yourself “I’m just shy”…
but deep down you crave connection, visibility, and more from your life…

This episode will gently challenge that story.

Because what if it’s not shyness at all?
What if it’s fear of judgment… and it’s been quietly holding you back from the life you actually want?

In today’s episode of Quiet Courage, we’re unpacking the hidden connection between fear, self-worth, and the behaviors we label as “shy”—and giving you simple, practical steps to start showing up anyway.

💛 Let’s stay connected:
on Instagram

📖 Resources mentioned:

• Finding Joy in the Darkness (Kaycia’s story + deeper look into loneliness & growth)

• Valor Essential Oil (Kaycia uses this tool for courage & grounding) 

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why “shyness” is often fear of judgment in disguise
• The avoidance loop that keeps you stuck (and how to break it)
• How low self-worth fuels fear of rejection
• A powerful mindset shift: from “Am I enough?” → “How can I serve?”
• Real-life story of loneliness, motherhood, and starting over
• Simple, actionable steps to build confidence (even if you feel awkward)

Action steps to start today:

1. Start small (one conversation, one moment, one step)
2. Use supportive tools to calm anxiety and build courage
3. Stop labeling fear as a personal flaw—it’s not who you are

If you’ve been holding yourself back from speaking up, making friends, or showing up fully…
this episode is your reminder:

You are not lacking ability.
You’re learning how to feel safe being seen.

And that changes everything.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to Quiet Courage, the podcast for anybody ready to show up and be seen. I'm Keisha, and here we explore self-worth, courage, and personal growth with action steps, personal stories, and encouragement to help you claim your power and live confidently. Remembering, your worth isn't something you have to earn. Here we practice living in it every day. So let's take small brave steps together and start building the lives we've been dreaming of. Hello and welcome back to Quiet Courage. I'm Keisha, your host, and today we're going to talk about how to stop letting fear of judgment hold you back. And specifically how it masks itself as shy behaviors. If you missed last week, we talked about unseen boundaries, how to protect your time, energy, and values. So if you're interested in that, go check it out. And now let's jump in. So the fear of judgment and rejection is pretty darn common for a lot of people. And what I've found over my experiences is that this label of shyness is often strongly tied to the fear of being judged, embarrassed, or rejected. And that, in my opinion, I don't think it's actually being shy. I think that's just a label that does not serve people. But I do think the act of being shy and reserved and not putting yourself out there is tied to this fear of judgment and rejection. Because oftentimes people want to connect. Probably about 13 years ago, I was in like the loneliest season of my life. And I desperately wanted to make friends. And I I just felt blocked every time I'd go and like think about starting a conversation with a stranger or building a friendship. I would have this anxiety build up. And what I realized is that it is tied to this fear of being judged or embarrassed, or like, what if I make it awkward if I don't know what to what to say? I was kind of like paralyzed in this fear, and I had this deep need to connect, but also this fear of connecting. And maybe you're there right now where you really want to reach out and extend your friend group and and build fun, cool new relationships, but you're also kind of afraid of like, oh gosh, what if I make it super awkward? What if I go try to have a conversation and I completely forget what I'm gonna say? All these like what ifs come into your mind. That can be a form of like fear paralyzation, right? Where with what you want to do is not aligning up, is not lining up to what you're actually doing. So I was there for a long time. When I had just had graduated college, my husband and I started moving around from state to state. The first state that we moved to was Iowa. I was unfamiliar with the area, didn't know anybody in town besides my husband who was working a lot and had a little a little two-year-old at the time. And I needed the skills and the confidence to make friendship, but I didn't understand at the time that courage comes before the confidence in going to make friendships. So for example, I would look I would look constantly for opportunities to go someplace and to make a friend. Um I was a first-time mom, so I wasn't at as skilled at finding those opportunities. But one thing we did do is go to the library. And they had like this uh there was like a family time, and I was around other moms. And so that was my like prime place to make friendships. And I would go every week I'm like, all right, I'm making friends, I'm gonna talk to somebody today, and each time it was like this wall of fear would just build inside of me, and I actually wouldn't talk to anybody, and I was it was such like a a weird state to be in where I was so incredibly lonely. I didn't have those like fr I didn't have any friendships within the state, and I was a new time mom, I was shy, like I needed someone to talk to, right? However, I was also had such fear built up that I was so scared of conversation that I never put myself out there to make a friendship, and so that fear prevented me from making friends and showing up. If you want more information about that season of my life, I wrote a chapter about it in the book called Finding Joy in the Darkness. I'll link that in the show notes. For me, a lot of it was connected around low self-worth, and you may identify with this too. I was constantly asking myself, am I good enough? And I was asking that in many different forms. Will I have the right words to say? Am I gonna talk to somebody and then mess it all up? Or like, do they want to talk to me? Like all these different forms of basically this general question, am I good enough? Am I worth enough? And so in this is why this is such a strong point for me that I want to get across to every single listener, is that your worth isn't something you earn. You already have worth, you're already enough, and here we're just gonna practice living in it every day, right? Showing up, not asking ourselves, am I worthy? Am I enough, but showing up in your worth because you are worthy, you are more than enough, right? We're just learning the skills of showing up in that space. Some other thoughts that kind of went through my head were like the worry about making it awkward, which PS, I still make things awkward. Like, I don't know if that's my super skill, but now I I I can frame it differently. I'm like, well, LA still remember me, whatever, and just let it roll. But what all this does, all this questioning and all this fear wrapped around stepping up, creates a avoidance loop. So an avoidance loop is where you avoid speaking up, right? Because you want to feel safe. And then after the situation, right? For me, it was like after library time was done, I would feel regret because that was my opportunity to connect, and I didn't connect, and now I feel crappy about myself, which then would relate to a confidence drop. And I lived there for years in this avoidance loop. And maybe you identify with this too. Of you avoid speaking up because you're because you have this wall of fear and you just want to be safe in the moment, and then you're like, oh crap, I did it again, like I didn't speak up for that meeting, or I didn't go make a friendship, or I just hid and kind of I didn't go out because I wanted to feel safe, right? You feel that regret, and then it is a drop in your confidence. This loop ref reinforces that I can't do this. But the truth is, is you can do this, you can let go of the fear and judgment, and it has actually nothing to do with your worth. People who identify with being shy, they're not lacking in the ability to do big things, they're lacking in their safety in being seen. As soon as we're able to adjust our perspective on being seen, it gets a whole lot easier. And also, like, it's not like you have to master this right away. It's literally one small step at a time. But you can see huge impacts in the way you show up in your life if you are just consistently make a few steps at a time. So for me, a perspective shift was really important here, and I feel like this may benefit you as well. I realized that I was focusing a lot on myself and all these fears was focused on mine, on me, right? Of how I show up and how people are gonna judge me and if I'm not enough and things like that. But what I realized is what if the people that I'm avoiding talking to, what if they actually need a friend? Maybe they need to feel seen. And so this perspective switch that it's not all about you, and start looking to the people at the people around you and saying, Okay, how can I serve them? Like maybe they don't feel like they're good enough. How can I just like brighten their day? It really takes the pressure off because then you're not focused on being perfect, and you're not focused on being quote unquote enough or things like that. You're focusing on adding value. We can all add value imperfectly. You don't have to show up perfectly to make somebody else's day. Just seeing them and acknowledging them will often make somebody's day. So, what are the action steps that go with this? Action number one is start small. Don't don't be like, all right, I'm super shy, but tomorrow I'm gonna walk up to this big group of people and I'm gonna talk to everybody, and I'm just gonna jump in the circle and I'm gonna just just go. Okay, don't do that. Reason being is because I'm just speaking from past experience, but you may fall flat on your face. So I I've tried this. I've been like, okay, I'm done being shy, I'm gonna go to this group of people, and I'm gonna start chatting. And inside this group of the circle of people that I stepped into, they're all chatting on conversations, and then I'm like, oh, I can say something. And I open up my mouth to say something, and somebody else says something, and somebody else says something, and then the conversation conversation keeps rolling, and then what I thought of that I was gonna say four or five comments down the road is not even doesn't even pertain to the conversation anymore because it's switched and it's turned, and so then as the conversation is flowing, there's a gap, and I like take a breath because maybe it's I'm just a s a slower speaker than everybody, but I feel like there's oftentimes when I take a breath to speak, and somebody else has already filled that void. So I took a breath to add some value, and again, somebody spoke, and then another person spoke, and then another person spoke. And so basically what I ended up doing is standing in the circle with a group of people, looking at other people as they're talking, and opening my mouth as it's gonna say something, and then closing my mouth, letting the conversation go, and then opening my mouth because I was gonna say something, and then closing my mouth because the conversation just slid right past me again. I just awkwardly stood there trying to be this version of myself who I like wasn't quite confident enough to do or didn't have those conversation skills built up enough. So don't just go jump into a whole big group of people. So what I do when I am moving to a new location or ready to make a new friend is I look for people on the outsides of their circles, people who aren't necessarily in the circle at all or who are standing off to the side. Specifically, I look for one person to approach, so I'm not interrupting a conversation, but also it's way less intimidating than jumping into a whole group of people. I really look for the opportunity to make their day a little lighter, and so if you go into that conversation with the perspective of, hey, I'm just gonna see how this person's doing, like ask me a few questions, and why I want to just show them that I value them. It takes a lot of the weight off of showing up for that conversation. Okay, the second thing that you can do is get some tools that support you. When I was learning to stop letting the fear of judgment hold me back, a tool that I used a lot was the Valor Essential Oil. It is for courage, and I would honestly roll it on the bottom of my feet before I'd go out in public, put my socks on, and then go out in public. Eventually, I would like put like a drop on my wrists and then some drops behind my ears, and so I could smell it. For me, it helped me reduce the anxiety that I was feeling. And so I would use that every time I was gonna go out and take another small courageous step. I would roll it on and slather it on. So if you're looking for a tool, that can also be one. I can link it in the show notes. And then the third thing is stop labeling your fear as a reason that you are less than. You didn't make friends and then you label it as like, oh man, I just like suck at making friends. Or you didn't speak up at the meeting and you label it as oh man, I'm not good at the meeting. You decided to not post about your business because you're afraid of what people think, and now you're labeling that decision of oh, I'm just like, I'm just too shy to do this, right? Stop labeling the fear as a reason that you're less than it's not. You didn't feel comfortable enough to reach out and start a conversation or to add value or to post about your meeting, but it has nothing to do with your worth or your ability. Instead, remember that you are capable, that you can learn the skills of conversation, you can learn the skills of showing up for your life, you can learn the skills of adding value one small step at a time. And all you have to do is make the next courageous step. So again, the recap of the action steps for this week are number one, start small. Don't jump in over your head like I did when I was like, I'm gonna be super confident, I'm gonna talk to this whole group, right? If you're working on just stepping up and showing up, then start talking to one person, right? And two is get some tools that will support you. Tools are so essential. I'll link one of the tools that I use down in the show notes. And three is stop labeling your fear as a reason that you're less than. You may feel uncomfortable, but that has nothing to do with your ability or your worth. That just means that you're ready for the next step of courage. Next week, we'll be talking about how overthinking paralyzes growth and learning to trust yourself. Until then, I see you, I believe in you, and I'm cheering you on every step of the way. Thank you for joining me on today's episode of Quiet Courage. Remember, courage is the first step to confidence, and together we practice showing up, taking brave steps, and building that confidence every day. If this episode encouraged you, I'd be so thankful if you'd share with a friend. Keep taking those small steps, and I'll see you in the next episode.