How to Improve Your Social Skills
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Most advice I’ve heard for improving social skills falls into one of a few categories. First, there are trite suggestions like, “be yourself”, which are at best feel-good platitudes and at worst, gross simplifications. Although this advice may be correct, it isn’t practical.
Next, there is the advice to improving your character. Be honest, loyal and trustworthy. Show respect and be friendly. This is the type of advice in books such as Steve Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Finally there is the area of self-improvement from the dating community. Although this is the first time social mechanics are often broken down in a useful way, it has a pretty narrow focus. Social skills are important for more than just sex.
What are Social Skills?
I’m a pretty ordinary guy. I don’t have magic powers of persuasion and charisma. But I have a great social life, and this hasn’t always been the case. I believe I started at a point of below average social skills, and I’ve made a lot of progress in the last few years.
I believe part of the problem when it comes to improving social skills is that the term is a blanket statement for many different areas of self-improvement. I’ve seen so few comprehensive guides to improving social skills because the term includes everything from:
- Being extroverted.
- Persuasiveness and selling.
- Maintaining relationships.
- Friendships and having a social circle.
- Meeting new people.
- Dating.
- etc.
With such a diverse range of different attributes, it’s hard to pin down exactly what “social skills” are, never mind create a complete guide to improving them. Despite this giant list of ideas, I’m going to focus on just two. Aside from dating (which already has a lot of coverage), these are the two I feel people identify with most when they use the term “social skills”.
Becoming Outgoing and Shedding Social Awkwardness
When I read an email from someone trying to improve general social skills, it usually takes the form of:
- Becoming more outgoing and being more comfortable around other people.
- Shedding the awkwardness they feel in some social situations.
There is certainly a large range with this. Some people might be hopelessly introverted and fumble basic interactions. Other people might just have difficulty being as completely comfortable as they would like in certain situations. You don’t need to be a social moron to want to improve this aspect of life, just like you don’t need to be grossly overweight to want to go to the gym.
How to Become More Outgoing
Get over the label “introvert”. I’m not here to discuss the scientific merit of using these labels. They might be accurate, they might not. But, if you want to become more outgoing you have to stop thinking of yourself as an “introvert” and more like an athlete who is out of shape. You can build the muscles, it just takes some practice.
The first step to become more outgoing is to systematically destroy all your social fears. This isn’t an easy feat, but if you break it down into manageable steps, it can be done. You may be to terrified to walk up to complete strangers and introduce yourself. But, you might be able to if you had friends accompany you.
I remember a story about construction workers that built skyscrapers. They said that when you work on the job, you get used to the heights. Dangling hundreds of feet in the air didn’t bother them, because their bodies became conditioned to it. However, if they stopped working construction for a few years, the natural fear of heights would return.
Being outgoing requires constantly exposing yourself to things that make you uncomfortable. You wont fall to your death if you slip, but the fear can still hold you back.
The next step to becoming outgoing is to find social activities you actually enjoy. This sounds obvious, but it’s a difficult step. If you don’t like spending time with the people in your surroundings, it’s easy to become withdrawn. Becoming outgoing means you need to travel further and experiment more with different social groups.
Join Toastmasters, take classes, drop in on obscure organizations. It might take a little work, but eventually you’ll find social activities that combine something you enjoy with other people. This steps works with breaking down your fears as a means of becoming more outgoing.
Shedding Social Awkwardness
Social awkwardness results from not understanding social norms. These are the little steps in the intricate dance of social life. They vary between cultures and even within different groups of people. If you want to shed any social awkwardness, you need to understand this dance and see why people judge you on it.
For those of you who read my article on social independence, this may seem like a complete betrayal of those principles. Doesn’t following the crowd violate the spirit of independence?
Independence is important for the things that matter to you. Violating social norms that don’t have any meaning to you, just makes you insensitive, not independent. Where you draw the line between following norms and being yourself depends on what your values are. I couldn’t care less about fashion, so I’m happy to follow the prevailing fads on this one. But I care a lot about my health, so I don’t eat meat even if hamburgers are in vogue.
Most social norms are insignificant, so understanding and following them shouldn’t violate your independence. Break the norms that have a deeper meaning to you. Don’t just do it to be a rebel.
Decoding Social Norms
Nobody can teach you the social norms of your group. Norms are hidden assumptions in the background that people rarely talk about in the open. Everyone understands the norms, but they don’t make their way into conversation.
In my experience, becoming more socially aware is a process of trial and error. This involves two things: paying attention to other people and occasionally violating minor social norms.
The first step is to pay more attention to how people behave. Look for patterns and observe what happens when people violate the understood norms. If you commit faux-pas, don’t beat yourself up, just make a note of it and move on. Spend more time with other people so that you have an intuitive understanding of what makes people tick.
The second step is to occasionally violate social norms. Sometimes awkwardness can be the result of believing social norms exist when they don’t. If you have a bad experience saying hello to a stranger, you might believe this is an unwritten rule. That person might have been grumpy, instead of revealing a great social truth.
Decoding social norms can only be done through practice. You can’t sit at home and read about what the rules are, you can only go out and practice.
Practice is the Cure-All
When you boil down any self-improvement effort it usually becomes a matter of experience. If you can force yourself to digest a lot of experiences, you’ll usually become better. Social skills are no different. It might not be fun initially, but it’s a lot better than sitting at home alone. You may even find out that you were an extrovert all along, and just needed the right push.
Trevor said,
June 16, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I find that sports leagues are a great way to get out and meet people. My favorites are ultimate frisbee and kickball, but there’s also softball, golf, and tennis.
They’re a lot of fun to play and people usually go there ready to meet people and be friendly. It’s easy and fun… and healthy!
Preston said,
June 16, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Thanks for writing this article Scott. I consider myself an introvert and developing myself in this area has been a priority of mine lately.
If I may, I’d like to recommend the site www.succeedsocially.com for anyone who would like some advice in this area. It’s written by someone who struggled with social skills themselves, and contains a lot of down to earth, practical information. It’s the most complete resource I’ve been able to find on this topic and it mostly avoids the three types of unhelpful advice you mentioned.
Gary said,
June 16, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I’m wondering if there is a forum specifically designed for people who want to improve their social skills, which allows them to post what practical steps they are taking, where the community can give and receive encouragement in the process. One of the problems I see with being nonsocial is that you can be under the mistaken impression that you are one of the few who are like this. And quite often it’s the last minute urge to not go out that kills me. Such a community just might be of benefit to anyone who, like myself, finds the process of being more outgoing to be like climbing Mt Everest.
Stu | Improved Lives said,
June 17, 2008 at 12:53 am
Hey Gary, it might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but I know the PUA (pick up artist) community does a lot of work on improving social skills and I’ve been told there are some popular PUA forums out there. I’m not sure where they are but some googling should point you in the right direction.
Gary said,
June 17, 2008 at 3:10 am
Ha, I know the PUA community well. It has been a disappointing experience, with a lot of inauthentic needy guys acting as ‘performing monkeys’ as one leading figure put it. There’s only one part of that community that I find to be good, that is Pickup Podcast and its associated forum (http://pickuppodcast.com). I’m slowly trying to get something going locally.
Chris | succeedsocially said,
June 17, 2008 at 6:24 am
Another broad source of social skills information are books and manuals published for use by professionals. They’ll be things like curriculums to teach kids social skills in the class room, or how to teach communication skills to a client with Asperger’s in individual counseling.
These can be good and detailed, but also harder to find (try a university library maybe) and sometimes a little too basic (as they’re often geared towards kids or people with large deficits).
I think the seduction community is best thought of as an advanced supplemental class on a specific type of social skills. If you’ve got a more basic foundation, then it can help you in the particular area of dating.
But if you have no basic people skills, and you rely on the community to teach you everything, you can not ‘get it’ and go a bit funny in some regards. In The Game by Neil Strauss he talks about how some guys can become ‘Social Robots’ and how he feels sorry for
younger guys whose whole personalities are formed based on what the seduction community teaches.
The community has some good things to say about group dynamics, being entertaining, and getting your act together mentally. It’s also probably the single best source of advice on how to get over social fears. It’s good about providing a structure guys can follow to systematically improve themselves.
It doesn’t teach everything though. As Scott says, there’s more to social skills then picking up women. I’ve seen guys go wrong trying to extend the relatively restricted amount of community advice onto all their social encounters. It doesn’t all translate over.
Where I’ve seen guys go wrong following the community’s social advice is in relating to other guys (they put too much emphasis on being the ‘alpha male’), relating to groups sometimes (they feel they always have to be the center of attention), humor (they try too hard to be cocky and funny or bust balls), and seeing everything women do as a test and power play.
Scott Young said,
June 17, 2008 at 6:27 am
Chris,
I completely forgot to link to your site! Hopefully Preston’s promotion can make up for it.
Great comments, everyone, as always.
-Scott
Chris said,
June 17, 2008 at 6:36 am
No worries.
Hey, keep up the good work yourself. Ever since I read some of your older articles on people skills, I’ve thought you had a lot of insightful things to say about this area. I’m glad you’re writing about it more these days.
Dhruv said,
June 18, 2008 at 12:06 am
Hey Scott!!
Really nice article. It’s remarkable that you come up with so many good one’s at such a fast pace.
david said,
June 18, 2008 at 4:05 am
Hey, great article!
I like your analogy to construction workers and fear of heights, and how facing social fears will weaken their power.
However - and I’m sure you are aware of this - there is a difference between those fears, that I find helpful to think of when trying to overcome social fears: When you fear heights, you fear something that is actually physically dangerous - falling down a building will hurt you, regardless of what you think. Social fear, on the other hand, comes more from conditioning and is not directly physically dangerous - getting turned down by someone actually won’t hurt you at all. Of course, it might embarrass you, but only if that is what you think it will do. So; fear of heights is in that sense a real fear, while social fear is somehow constructed.
The tricky part is that those fears feel exactly the same - in fact, they are the same, physically speaking. They both feel equally real, and this makes them quite hard to distinguish, if you’re not used to it.
Anyway. I find it helpful to try to be aware of this difference - if I find myself in a socially fearful situation, I try to be aware of that the fear I feel is something I am creating, and that it doesn’t have the power to actually hurt me.
Scott Young said,
June 18, 2008 at 5:30 am
David,
If you go back further in time, social fears probably made sense. Humans lived as tribes. If you made a bad social faux pas, that could mean eating last or being exiled from the group. That could mean a virtual death sentence for a cave man. Today, those fears have less of a basis.
-Scott
david said,
June 18, 2008 at 10:42 pm
That’s a good point, Scott! Didn’t really think about that.
Still. Being aware of the difference helps me and, as you say, those fears makes less sense today!
Laurie said,
July 5, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Good post, Scott - thanks. I really like that you suggest to conquer social fears by breaking them down into manageable steps. This is so important. It’s intimidating and overwhelming trying to face all social fears at once and that can result in going backwards because going forwards is too hard. You’re right with taking manageable steps - each success builds on the one before and with a bit of time and practice, social fears can be eliminated. Thanks for the post!