AnalyticalEngine wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 9:27 am
I'd be interesting in hearing more about your story with developing social skills. How did you go about doing it? How long did it take you? Were there any roadblocks you had to overcome?
AnalyticalEngine wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 9:27 am
I'd be interesting in hearing more about your story with developing social skills. How did you go about doing it? How long did it take you? Were there any roadblocks you had to overcome?
Hopefully I can do this concisely (edit: ha!). Some context is relevant though first.
I was a gregarious and chatty kid. I was happy playing with my legos alone for hours, but I also loved spending lots of time with friends. Then my family moved to the ass end of nowhere and I had no friends from 13yo - ~16yo. (I was homeschooled as well, so no access to other kids). In retrospect, that was really hard for me. Then I got some friends through high school sports and did okay having friends. Then I went to college and went back to not really having friends. I was also borderline depressed, partly as a result of going through an extended crisis of faith and rejection of worldview, and had a bunch of unhealthy life practices (standard 18yo stuff like staying up all night reading about how f'ed society is), and I used not having friends and being lonely as an "excuse" for downward-spiraling dark moods and anger indulgence, which obviously didn't help me make any friends.
That context is intended to communicate that I don't think I was *naturally* socially deficient. I am, and was, emotionally and psychologically sensitive and aware enough to be able to basically read emotions. I'm not on the spectrum and didn't have any other biological/psychological challenges to overcome wrt social skills. My social deficiencies as a 18-22yo were a result of experiences: having few friends from 12.5 - 16yo, and then having moderate circumstantial mental health issues from 17-20 yo, and being homeschooled k-12, all of which contributed to their being some very large "gaps" in my social skills.
Honestly, wanting to have adequate enough social skills to get laid every once in a while on purpose was also a big source of motivation. So by about 21/22yo, I'm fed up with myself and decide to figure out how to make friends and talk to people. Not in any particular order, these are the things I did or that happened to me that helped increase my social skills:
1) I read a *lot* of books and blogs. Most of them in the beginning were about "how to talk to girls", ranging from garbage PUA stuff to solid stuff that I still recommend like Mark Manson's Models, but there were many general soft skills books in there as well. From this reading I realized that hygiene, grooming and fashion choices were a form of social conversation that by ignoring I was demonstrating brash ignorance, sort of like TYPING ONLY IN ALL CAPS ON THE INTERNET. I also developed a more nuanced understanding of what "confidence" is, why smiling is useful, started a list of things that make people uncomfortable, how to think from someone else's perspective, started to understand biological vs. socialized differences between men and women, learned about cognitive biases (the fundamental attribution error, etc), and methods of persuasion that e.g. salespeople use (Cialdini). I read books that had actual exercises for me ("Say hi to ten women today without being a creep about it") and ones that were heavy on theory. I still read books on this, by the way, that's never stopped just slowed.
2) In my 4th (of 5) year at university, I reconnected with a highly social female friend from 1st year and
I basically did a ride-along with her to the bars and house parties 2-4 nights a week for six months. For whatever reason she enjoyed my company, and so I put in a lot of time just being in highly social environments with social adept people. This got me over a lot of social anxiety because I just got used to being out. I was extremely quiet but her friends just got used to me being around and not saying much.
3) I got a girlfriend at 22yo. It was a terrible relationship, more like a three year long disaster, but I treated it like an education. I ruminated over every fight, thought carefully about every shitty thing she said about me, thought hard if my words and actions were fair or unfair, trying to puzzle out why she did the things she did, trying to figure out why when she did/said X I felt Y (or nothing, and what that might mean...). I actually do this with all of my relationships, including friends and one-off interactions. My mind won't leave an interaction alone until I've convinced myself that I understand what happened, or have identified the general genre of knowledge I need to go research. This requires me to construct a mental model of the other's person's mind. On that note...
4.a) My dad is emotionally oblivious, but has trigger points himself (e.g. he accuses everyone else of being too sensitive, but if you say the wrong thing he'll blow up and not even realize he's yelling). One of my childhood survival mechanisms was learning where his trigger points were, and making sure to steer clear of them. Essentially, I developed a highly sensitive ability to perceive what was going on in his head. I then leveled up to being able to observe someone *else* having a conversation with him, seeing five steps ahead that they were headed for one of his trigger points, and developing the ability to enter the conversation and steer it around the danger zone without either other party knowing what I was doing. I could also talk him down from an outburst if he did get triggered, and I knew how to smooth and explain an outburst to other people who didn't understand as well what had just happened. When I was a kid I didn't realize I was doing this. As an adult, once I started developing the ability to construct mental models of people other than my dad, I became able to do the same thing with anyone I had an accurate enough mental map of.
4.b) As a result of this, I assume everyone I meet has trigger points. I don't give anyone the benefit of the doubt that they're a psychologically healthy person. An implicit goal of my interactions with them is to ascertain where those trigger points are without poking. As a result, I tend to be a very "safe" person to interact with. I rarely challenge people, and in fact I actively ask questions trying to elicit recollections of positive experiences. I used to be conflict avoidant to the point it was unhealthy. Now I'm... aware of my old conflict avoidant tendencies, and on a good day I do "active conflict management", meaning, if I think conflict is the healthy thing to let happen, I let it happen and lean in to it.
5) Several opportunities for public speaking. I actually started public speaking as an 8yo in 4H, took an "Oral performance of literature" class in college, and continued doing public speaking during my career. I highly recommend taking advantage of any opportunities to speak publicly. Read a few books - "The Naked Presenter" and "Resonate" are excellent to read even if you don't have a presentation coming up, the first in particular.
I feel like I was basically socially adept by my mid 20's. So it took 3 or so years to go from deficient to acceptable. My experience of it was "bewildered and totally confused about other people" to "okay I understand the gist of why people act they way they do, and have a pretty good sense of how to act to get what I want".
I think a key is that I put a lot of effort into creating mental models of other people's minds. I'm intensely curious about why people say and do the things they do, and I find the ability to accurately predict or explain people's behavior deeply satisfying (from 4.a, it makes sense that I'm into this because it was how I avoided pain as a kid). As a partner, I find the ability extremely useful in cultivating a healthy relationship. On the flip side, I can find people who lack this ability to be deeply frustrating. There are few things in this world that infuriate me as much as an emotional solipsist, or rather someone oblivious to other people's perspectives (this also follows from 4.a...). Combine this ability with my tendency towards conflict avoidance, and I often feel like the Catcher in the Rye (or the Lone Cat Herder, or the adult day care proctor, or...). This is one reason why social engagement takes energy from me and I skew introvert: I'm on alert to make sure that No One Gets Hurt by That One Guy who Means Well but Is an Idiot and Doesn't Realize When he's Being a Bull in a China Shop.
As far as roadblocks, the biggest hurdle was that initially, I felt so deficient socially that I was just clueless. I didn't have any way "in", it was all just a black box of mystery to me. There was nothing for me to analyze because it was all too far over my head. I know some people still stuck there, it's sad. The books helped build up my theory to the point I could start drawing connections between observations and theory, but also that period of my friend dragging me to all the bars worked as a sort of exposure therapy and gave me a lot of grist to work with.
Also, an initial roadblock was my anxiety and low self-esteem. I was terrified of saying stupid or hurtful things (it was a legit fear). Again, my friend dragging me to the bars for six months helped just shove me through that - partly because I was able to look at my life and say "hey, I'm spending a TON of time with other people, and no one has kicked me out yet, I must be sort of okay as a human being". It helped boost my esteem enough that I could kind of take over from that point and self-direct.