When you are too self-conscious of people looking at you.

Think of the  mundane task of washing the dishes. The carrying out of such a task may be called an unconscious act. I mean, if you are thinking of a million different things when you are doing it, you weren’t really attending to the act. It other words, it wasn’t really self conscious. Now there are different ways of viewing the term ‘self-conscious’ as applied to human beings. There is the notion of being mindful of an act fully attending to it, or, in the more pejorative meaning, self-conscious can be referred to as an interference of ego. In this pejorative sense of self-conscious ,we are conscious of other people looking at us, and careful to appear at our best so as to impress them; this may imply a lack of self-sufficiency or self-confidence. This is important for the performer, for the ‘self-conscious’ performer attends to herself too much so that she loses the vital ‘presence of mind’ required for the performance task.⁴

Peter Cheevers' short stories are published by Ether Books

http://catalog.etherbooks.com/Authors/1118  

Peter Cheevers' PhD can be found in UK Libraries at: