As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I have been enrolled in a communications class for the last two months to improve my communication and marketing skills so that I can better market my books. As part of my classwork, I have had to conduct several interviews with people to complete my assignments for the class. If I am being completely honest, the act of interviewing someone was quite daunting to me as I struggle with social anxiety. I didn’t know it would be something I had to worry about when I first enrolled in the class, and if given the option, I would have avoided doing this aspect of the assignments to keep myself from feeling anxious.

However, I knew that part of taking the class was to get me out of my comfort zone, as writing for communication careers was a skill very different from the ones I learned as a fiction writer. I realized going in that conducting interviews might be required of me, given the nature of news and feature writing, so I had to be prepared to do whatever I was asked if I wanted to receive a passing grade. 

So far, I have conducted three interviews for two different class assignments, each one with a different person that I either knew or had only met for the first time when class first began. Now that they are completed, I can look back on them and say that they weren’t as bad as I had thought they would be. In fact, they were actually quite fun. Not only did I get to know a couple of people from my church a little bit better than before the interviews, but I also got to know the life story of a young woman from Mexico who, like me, has the desire to use her talents as a writer to make the world a better place. The things I learned from each interview wound up changing me, expanding my worldview so that I became more empathetic toward them and others who may have had similar experiences.

Overall, interviewing has helped me to grow as a person, giving me greater insight into the world and the people who live within it. More importantly, it has helped me gain experience that has bolstered my confidence, making me less anxious about meeting new people as I work to overcome my social anxiety. While I have been working for a long time to overcome such a debilitating condition, I can say that this exercise has brought me one step closer to ridding myself of the inhibitions that have kept me from building new relationships and developing a network that will further my career as a writer. Who knows, maybe I will be ready to take the "Introduction to Sales" course by the time next semester has come around.