My professional association is having their international conference in my home city next month. I've volunteered to help out because volunteering is a wonderful way to give back to the community and, oh, who am I kidding? I get to see some sessions for free and add to my resume.

One of my assignments is to introduce the speakers for a session on online marketing. Now that I've researched and written the intro, I'm beginning to remember that I will need to actually say it in front of a room full of hundreds of people, all looking at and listening to me. So all I can focus on now is what the HELL was I thinking?!

But then that's exactly what I was thinking. I'm doing it because the thought of doing it terrifies me, but not as much as it would have years ago, since I keep doing things that terrify me. It's part of my homeopathic treatment against shyness, where doses of what ails me are used to cure me.

I was a timid kid and I moved a lot, so I have a lot of memories of painfully acute shyness. Adults who were shy as children tend to think of themselves that way long past any outward indications of it. (Then there are the ones who call themselves shy because they don't feel entirely comfortable in every social situation; that's called being human.) Though I'd still insist I'm not only very shy, but come across that way to others, enough people have told me I don't, that I suppose I have to admit I'm possibly, finally, one of those adults.

My impression of my own shyness gets muddled by the fact that I am undeniably an introvert, which isn't the same thing, but has some of the same social limitations. We did a Myers Briggs exercise at work and the facilitator divided us into the introverts versus the extroverts. He then got us to ask questions of each other. Mine was this: "Do extroverts feel pressure to be less extroverted, the way introverts feel pressure to be more extroverted?" My extroverted colleagues said no, but these are people who have chosen a career that has elements of public and media relations, so it's not exactly a random sample. Still, I think it's undeniable that extroversion is valued far more than introversion in our culture.

I do value introversion; I like a lot of alone time. But I don't value shyness. At all. It was a conscious choice in my late teens to beat it out of myself. Since actual beatings seemed painful and counterproductive, I decided to put myself in situations where I simply couldn't be shy or I couldn't function.