Our Featured Non-Fiction Book this Month

Our Featured Non-Fiction Book this Month is the brilliant You Don’t Have to Be Loud by Ben Brooks - a quiet kid's guide to thriving in your own way. 

Drawing on his own experiences growing up as a painfully shy child, Ben Brooks explores what it means to be "quiet" - how it feels and how we can embrace it, debunking some of the myths about what it means to be a shy person. 

We love the positive tone of the book, the graphic illustrations from Nigel Baines, and the personal anecdotes and stories about famously shy people from the past and present (including Beyonce, Greta Thunberg and David Bowie).

This book is for anyone who feels afraid of talking in front of people, making a mistake or saying the wrong thing and anyone who thinks they should be more confident.

You can read an extract of the book here.

And discover more about the book and why we all need it right now in author Ben Brooks' guest blog below.

You Are Not the World’s Worst Trombone Player - Ben Brooks 

If you haven’t ridden a bike in a while, you might find it slightly difficult at first. The same is true of playing the trombone, speaking French, doing handstands, and cooking lasagne. We know that if you don’t practise something, you start to forget how to do it. 

And recently, we all forgot a little about how to do something. 

After so much time spent in lockdown, it was strange to go back out into the world. Back to busy schools and offices. Back to crowds of people we didn’t know. A lot of us were nervous. A lot of us weren’t sure if we remembered how to hang out with other human beings. A lot of us didn’t feel as confident as we used to. 

For a long time, you probably only spoke to your family, your postman, and your dog. You might have messaged with friends and played games together online, but you may not have been able to see any of them in person. 

Once you got back to school or work, things might have been a little strange. After all, you hadn’t done this in a while. And it wasn’t a while as in a six-week summer holiday. It was a while as in an actual year. Imagine not doing anything else for that long and then suddenly being asked to do it for eight hours a day, five days a week. 

So it probably took some time to get back into the swing of things. And some people got back into it quicker than others. And some still haven’t gotten back into it. But we’ve all, hopefully, gotten a little better over the past months. 

This has proven one thing: it is possible to get better at being around other people, just like it’s possible to forget how to do it. Because knowing how to be around each other is a skill, like handstands or making lasagne or playing the trombone. You can forget it, lose it, train it, and improve it. It’s something we get better at over the course of our lives. And it’s something that we can’t really practise too well on our phones or computers. 

This is because words are only part of the way we communicate with each other. I could say ‘shut up’ to an old friend with a smile across my face, and he might laugh and tell me to ‘shut up’ right back. Or, I could say ‘shut up’ to a barking dog in a loud voice with my arms crossed. In real life, most of us can tell the difference in intention, thanks to the physical cues. When we’re pinging messages back and forth on our phones, however, we only have the words. And words don’t always mean the same things to different people. 

This is where the practice comes in. When spend time together, we learn to read each other. We learn to tell what other people are thinking and feeling, and we learn to show what we’re thinking and feeling in return. 

And the more we practise, the more confident we feel doing it. 

That doesn’t mean we all can or should become incredibly chatty and loud and supremely confident talking in front of others. 

Some people are just quiet. Or quiet compared to certain other people (not quiet compared to oak trees, for example, or blue whales.) Quiet is just one of the many ways there are to be. None of these ways are any better or any worse than any other ways. You might also be blonde or short or obsessed with comic books, trees, or jellyfish.

Some people, on the other hand, are ‘shy.’ This might mean that although you really wish you could be louder or more confident or more comfortable around others, there’s something stopping you. Most often, it’s fear of failing. Fear of looking silly. Fear of other people judging you. 

In this case, I think the lockdowns might be proof that we can all slip out of practice and get nervous around others, and we can all also grow in confidence. Like most other skills, it’s a matter of practice. It’s a muscle we have to train. 

Of course, that’s much easier to say than to do. Which is why I wanted to write a book about how shy I felt as a kid and all the things that eventually helped. I know how tough it can be.

After all, how much would you want to practise trombone if every time you tried, a voice started to say, ‘You are literally the worst trombone player in the world and no-one will ever want to hear you play trombone.’ It would make me want to give up. It would make me want to throw my trombone in a bin and never hear the word ‘trombone’ ever again. 

But this is the kind of voice shy people are often fighting against. A voice that tells them they can’t do the thing that everyone else is doing. That thing where you open your mouth and words come out. That thing that everyone else seems to find so easy.

It feels like if they do or say anything, everyone will laugh at them or think they’re weird. That they don’t have anything funny or useful or interesting to add to what’s going on. 

Which isn’t true, of course.

But it means we have to practise. Practise being around each other. Practise speaking up. And practise coming up with a new voice to drown out the old one. A voice that says you can talk to other people, you do have something to offer the world, and you are not, in fact, the worst trombone player in the world.