Shyness?

I have been going to Meetup.com meetings, 5 times each week for the past two weeks.

I used to go to a Shyness/Anxiety group, but I no-longer do.

The Shyness/Anxiety group enabled me to talk in front of the group, and learn to feel comfortable with the other people in the group.

Three weeks ago, I allowed myself to be, basically, forced into social situations with people I thought highly of, (basically, my brother and his friends).
At the end of that week,(two weeks ago), I was both ready and motivated to work on my social skills by attending a variety of “meet-ups” with people who either weren’t shy or I didn’t know they were shy.

These people were all strangers to me.
I’ve managed to get in the process of making one new friend. This has meant that we do stuff outside of the structure of a group.-very helpful and fun too.
Some of the people in these ‘non-shyness groups’, actually seem more shy, than people in the Shyness/Anxiety group.

Sometimes I have had to push myself to attend a meeting, remain at a meeting, and talk/listen to people.

And so my social skills and confidence have improved during the past three weeks, but I still have a long way to go before I’m as comfortable as I believe I need to be.
-for e.g. I still need to be the person who initiates receiving/giving contact information to a potential friend. (exchanging business cards with someone who is only a possible contact, doesn’t count, for me).

After a year of this socializing, I expect to feel at home in the ‘social world’ or at least have made a significant improvement in my skills.

Point: I neither want, nor expect, to make $12trillion and mostly always feel happy, by spending most of my life, by myself.

(Worth mentioning http://www.meetup.com was formed, I believe in NYC. Many people are starting groups under the ‘Meetup.com’ umbrella and making money by helping/allowing others who have same interests to get together. There are so many big cities in USA where entrepreneurs could make lots of cash. There’s a few large cities in Canada too. It seems like there’s tons of meetup.com groups here in Toronto, and I’m sure that at least a couple of the organizers of the groups are making a good bunch of cash from the the groups they administer. There are several meetup.coms in U.S.A., but I don’t have a record of where, exactly.) d