I’ve been coaching others in improving their social skills and social confidence for over 6 years now. One thing that became vividly clear to me over the years is that conversation and social skills are just like most other skills, in the sense that they can be developed deliberately.
I often think of developing social skills kind of like learning a new language. It takes some time, it can feel unfamiliar at first, but nevertheless, if you do the work and you take an effective approach, you can become an advanced speaker of any language, in a reasonable amount of time.
The trickiest part in improving your social skills is very often taking an effective approach. In time, I’ve discovered that there are 4 fundamental strategies (or pillars) for developing social skills that constitute such an approach.
Use these 4 pillars, and you can make your conversation and social skills soar, in the shortest length of time possible. Disregard any one of them, and the whole process will be slower and considerably less fruitful. Here are the 4 pillars, one by one.
Pillar 1: Learning the Theory
Getting a good conceptual understanding of how social dynamics work is like a shortcut to better social skills.
It can take months and years of interacting with an array of people and trying out various social behaviors to uncover various principles of social interaction on your own. But select individuals who’ve already gone through this process plus have strong analytical thinking and tutoring skills can teach you such principles in just a few hours.
And then if you go out and chat with others and you apply these principles, your conversations will go a lot better than the day before, when you weren’t even aware of these principles. Good theory is the distilled experience and wisdom of others, and it can assist a lot in boosting your social skills.
The key though is for the theory you learn to actually be of high-quality. And regrettably, there is a lot of generic, cheesy and ineffective advice out there on how to interact with other people. You’ll need to get your hands on the really good stuff in order to improve your social skills, and fast.
Speaking of which, I recommend you join my free social confidence newsletter, where I share lots of practical, tested advice for improving your social skills. The opt-in is on the sidebar to the right.
2. Having Social Interactions and Practicing
Quality theory regarding social dynamics can be very useful, but it has its limits. First of all because, even if you get very pertinent conversation and social advice, when you first put it into practice it will probably not go ideally. Just like if I give you a bunch of sentences in a new language and you use them the first time, you might not pronounce all the words correctly or you may omit some of them.
You need to practice any social advice for a while in order for your mind to internalize it. And then applying that advice will feel natural and it will go much smoother. But this only happens through practice.
Second of all, keep in mind that social interactions have lots of subtleties and complex dynamics that no book, article or course can teach you. These are things that you can only learn on your own, through your own social experience.
You can save a lot of time by learning some aspects from the experience of others, but if you wanna have advanced social skills, doing lots of social interacting yourself is unavoidable. Sooner or later, you’ll need to go out there, meet new people, talk to them and have lots of social interactions.
Your mind will integrate all the social experiences you accumulate, and with each new social experience, your social intelligence will grow, and you’ll be able to reach an advanced level of social skills.
3. Conscious Refection
The great thing about your mind is that it does it integrates the social experiences you acquire and learns from them subconsciously. As long as you interact with people and you wanna get better at it, your mind will work for you in the background and leverage your social experiences to sharpen your social skills. Which is pretty cool.
However, you can greatly accelerate and optimize this learning process by consciously reflecting on your social experiences. For example, if one evening you go to a party and you have a few conversations you deem interesting, when you get back home contemplate them just a bit and willfully try to draw some valuable lessons from them.
By doing this you’re combining subconscious learning with conscious learning. These two working together form a very potent mix for boosting your social skills.
Many of the persons around you that you may consider to be good with people got that way mostly through subconscious learning. They had lots of social interactions, but they rarely reflected on them consciously. Think of what you can achieve if you have lots of social interactions and you also reflect consciously on them. Your social skills can reach a very awesome place.
4. Improving Your Social Confidence
I find that many times, people who struggle with social interactions misdiagnose the cause. They believe they have a hard time interacting with others because they lack social skills. But in reality, although their social skills could use some enhancement, the core issue is their lack of social confidence.
When they’re in a social situation, they often feel anxious and tense. As a result they can’t think straight, they act awkwardly and they’re not their best self. So they assume that by getting better social skills, they will solve this.
But that’s rarely true. What they really need and will help them the most is gaining social confidence. This will make them more relaxed and self-assured in social interactions. Their thinking will be more agile, they’ll instinctively know what to talk about, they’ll find it much easier to keep a conversation going, they’ll be funnier and wittier and more charismatic. This is the power of confidence.
So if your social interactions don’t go as well as you’d like them to, the first aspect to look at is your social confidence, not your social skills.
If you lack social confidence, I recommend you start by working on this area and only later consider improving your social skills. And anyway, you’d be surprised how sharp your social skills truly are when you feel confident and at ease!
I have a program called Conversation Confidence, which is designed specifically to give you a step-by-step, effective blueprint for improving your social confidence. I suggest you check it out.
I’ve created this program based on scientific research as well as my experience of coaching shy and socially anxious people from over 20 countries, on 5 continents. It’s a top-notch program designed to help you boost your social confidence as efficiently as possible, without wasting time. And the current testimonials speak for themselves.
Go here to learn more about the Conversation Confidence guide and grab your copy today.
