Rung 5 · Graded exposure
Open on the room, not the person
Start one conversation today with something you can both see — the book they are holding, the broken machine, the queue you are both standing in.
Your attempts
Nothing is recorded against this rung. The dread you feel next time will be a guess, and you will have nothing to check it against.
Why this one
An opener about them is a verdict waiting to happen, so your attention swings inward to check how you are doing. An opener about the room gives you both something to look at that is not you.
What it buys — Every rung above this needs your attention pointed outward. This is the rung that teaches you where to put it.
In the dominant cognitive model of social anxiety, self-focused attention is a maintaining factor: monitoring how you are coming across degrades performance and inflates the sense of being judged.
What it cannot show — A theoretical model rather than an experiment. It organises what clinicians observed and has shaped the treatment of social anxiety ever since, but the individual mechanisms in it are not each tested by this paper — and it was written about diagnosed social phobia, while this academy applies it to ordinary shyness.
When to climb
Three logged attempts running at 2 or under, each opening on something in the room rather than on the person.
Those two numbers are ours, not a finding. Graded exposure is clinical; where the line sits is our judgement.
Rung 6 — A genuine compliment, no follow-upSource
Clark & Wells (1995). A Cognitive Model of Social Phobia. In Heimberg et al. (eds), Social Phobia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Treatment.
The full version of this rung, with the rest of its topic, is exercise 03 of that lesson.