Social Skills + Social Capital Challenge & Resource Collection Thread

[shelob]

This is a challenge & resource collection thread, with new focus topics every 1. and 15. of the month, starting January 2023.

Every second week, there'll be a topic related to the wide area of social skills, potentially with reading material, ideas for practice, etc. Everyone is invited to comment, practice, and so on. There is no requirement to commit to being a regular participant.

My goal for this is
1)to have a framework to practice social&interpersonal skills and develop social capital in a focused and efficient manner, and
2)for this thread to be a resource collection, for book, article and podcast recommendations etc. Collections to relevant links of other threads on this forum are also welcome.

I'll try to insert links to the individual topics in this post later on.

Potential topics:
-conversational skills
-storytelling
-boundaries
-nonviolent communication
-body language/facial expressions
-status/power literacy
-telling jokes/humor in general
-models of adult development, e.g. Kegan
-things related to group settings & communal living


Later readers: This was the original first post. I'm leaving it up so the initial conversation remains legible.
I've read the suggestion for a Social Capital MMG in the "Suggestions for MMGs" thread. How much interest is there?

Related possible topics, more in the "social skills" direction:
-conversational skills
-storytelling
-boundaries
-nonviolent communication
-body language/facial expressions
-status/power literacy
-telling jokes/humor in general
-...


I've got a few books about body language that I'm currently working through (Emotions revealed, What every body is saying,...). A potential video activity could be something like the "Spot the lie" game (inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire).

Caveat: I'm terrible at this stuff irl (of the "would probably have gotten diagnosed with Asperger's or similar if my parents had sent me to a therapist " variety) and don't always have an internet connection, so I'm not the best person to run this.

[ertyu]

I think this might work better as a "challenge" thread on the forum rather than an MMG. Because with social skills everyone is likely to have very different starting points, it might be better to have everyone decide what they would like to work on and then focus on non-zero weeks: one person does a reminder post, "what is your social skills challenge for the week", then everyone responds with what it is that they would like to do this week to advance their social skills (read and summarize a book? write reflections on a book? set themselves a practical challenge -- e.g. start small talk w strangers in line 3x this week? journal on some related topic // journal open-ended exploring one's general challenges and successes in the area for X time, Y days a week?? -- etc). Then when you complete your challenge, you report. If you do not complete the challenge or it went badly, you report why/how.

Everyone can be free to comment and offer advice, not just "challenge" participants.

[shelob]

Thank you, ertyu. I can see how this would indeed work better as a challenge. Where do you think that challenge thread would be appropriate, in the Friends&Family section perhaps?

PS Sorry for responding so late, I'm working on that "getting organised " thing.

[ertyu]

Can you rename the thread? If yes, it can just stay here @shelob

[shelob]

Done.

First job might be to get a working definition of social capital. Google provided this definition:

"Social capital is a set of shared values or resources that allows individuals to work together in a group to effectively achieve a common purpose. Social capital can also be thought of as the potential ability to obtain resources, favors, or information from one's personal connections." source

Relevant links on this forum:
Methods and examples of highly developed social capital
Ways of improving your social capital?
Financial vs. social capital

I may be misunderstanding this completely, but it seems like if one wants to obtain resources, favors, or information from one's personal connections, it would be beneficial to be able to provide resources, favors, or information, hence giving rise to the network that is in the first part of the definition. There would accordingly be two ways to improve social capital: 1) to increase one's stock in these things, and 2) develop the ability to initiate or facilitate the flows in the network (which increases the part of your own stock you can barter, or the part of other people's stocks you can gain access to). Both will increase your total social capital.

The first would be stuff like "bringing tasty food to a gathering", the second is what that which is traditionally referred to as social skills would help with. What I like about this is that it gets rid of the "egocentric mindset" issue mentioned in some of the threads linked above. You aren't seeking your own benefit as much as trying to strengthen the network.

[AnalyticalEngine]

I'd like to join this. I'm increasingly finding my limiting factor is less my social skills and more my environment/learned apathy. I've found I need to:
1. Unlearn the negative mindset about people (aka the "I hate everyone" belief).
2. Be diligent about filtering out people who aren't going to be a good fit.
3. Also be diligent about the numbers game of finding people who are a good fit.
4. Actively demonstrate interest in other people through physical or social shows of it (some people want hugs, some people want you to bring nachos to the party, some people want you to tell them they're cool, whatever).
5. Try to encourage other people to meet your needs in a healthy way instead of assuming that will never happen and shutting off.

[sky]

what types of communication to use
how to plan "events"
how often to communicate
how to create a group of interested persons
how to attract people to a group

[ertyu]

When it comes to my social skills, I think my biggest gap is in "how to live in society." What I mean by this is that I have switched locations every 1-3 years since I was 15 and won a scholarship to a boarding school. My character has very much evolved in response. I see meatspace relationships as essentially transient and have little patience for the performance one needs to put up when one plans to live at the same place for a long time.

For example, I do not care about how my reputation would suffer because I haven't optimized my appearance (to the endless consternation of my family of origin who felt like I was causing them social shame by wearing knock-off crocs where people can see, etcetera). I do not, for instance, iron my shirts. I come across as a but unkempt. I am in addition unfit.(*) This causes people to project a certain set of social insecurities on me and to look down on me. I am perfectly aware I will never see these people again in my life, so I appreciate the relief of having my appearance be a low cognitive load task. My parents, who have lived all their lives in a small city, working alongside people they've known since grade school, are much more conscious and deliberate when it comes to appearances - both clothes-wise and socially. I see both as a burden -- but if one does decide to live in a society long-term, one has to accept that appearance/appearances are a tool. I do not engage with any conscious manipulation of my social image - don't want to, don't know how to - and I assume this hurts me.

(*) I don't mean to imply that the only benefit to fitness is appearance; I am aware fitness should be pursued for its own sake, but it has a bearing on appearance and how one is perceived socially.

Also, because relationships are never longterm, I am not very motivated to try and form them or to nurture them. Also, because I never spend a lot of time at a place, I don't really engage in any of the social dances - I'm open and honest about myself from the get-go, and to some, this might come across as premature disclosure / intimacy.

My third major shortcoming is that I can't simply let people suck and not let it get to me. For instance, among the group of classmates who stayed in my home town, I observe a much higher incidence of "he is just like that" - people tolerate each other because they know they're stuck with each other. They develop various skills for not rocking the boat. Whereas I am quick to wholly dismiss people because they're "not how they should be" - in some way behave against my values, for instance, or offend me in some way, etc. It might be good to be better at, "ah, you suck, ok, let's be civilly polite to each other and carry out conversations on neutral topics in social settings"

On the whole, though, I sincerely can't be fucked and it shows. I find not engaging with people a relief. As a result, situations which would've been made easier by social networks are hard. even so, though, I still can't be fucked. I don't see relationships as something stable and lasting where I can get my needs met, and so I don't care about them. I got enculturated like that in my family of origin (the lightest that can be said about that is emotional neglect), and it only got worse as I started to travel.

[ertyu]

I'd like to join this. I'm increasingly finding my limiting factor is less my social skills and more my environment/learned apathy. I've found I need to:
1. Unlearn the negative mindset about people (aka the "I hate everyone" belief).
2. Be diligent about filtering out people who aren't going to be a good fit.
3. Also be diligent about the numbers game of finding people who are a good fit.
4. Actively demonstrate interest in other people through physical or social shows of it (some people want hugs, some people want you to bring nachos to the party, some people want you to tell them they're cool, whatever).
5. Try to encourage other people to meet your needs in a healthy way instead of assuming that will never happen and shutting off.

+1, I relate to all 5

[ertyu]

So should we each come up with an assignment for ourselves for the week of Dec 19-25? Can be as large or as small as we want

[AnalyticalEngine]

My challenge for that week is to do metta (loving kindness) meditation everyday that week and invite 1 person in my existing social network over for dinner. I'm hoping that doing the metta meditation enough will make it easier to actually feel closer to people instead of merely intellectually considering them a member of my social network, and inviting someone I already know over is good practice for eventually hosting parties with people I don't know as well.

[shelob]

My assignment for the week:
1. Finish reading "Nonviolent communication: A language for life" (I'm about 1/2 through)
2. Look up the translations into my native language for all the emotions-related vocabulary, and practice them
3. Practice the NVC framework, especially with the ample opportunities I'm likely to have over the holidays.

@AnalyticalEngine, @sky
Great suggestions, I too would definitely benefit from all of those!

@ertyu
I can relate to having deficits in the "how to live in society" thing, and in being reluctant to invest into doing something about it, because it often seems like a bizarre set of made-up and often illogical rules. My specific circumstances are of course different from yours, but I think there are commonalities. (I hope I don't completely misread your post, though!) My family of origin was a bad match with my secondary school (*) are both a bad match with my current military job (**) are all three going to be a bad match with the tertiary education I'm currently working toward. What's useful and adaptive in one context is unhelpful and maladaptive in the next, and if you already know you're going to move soon, why expend the effort into acculturation?

What's helped me to make some sense of this is reading discussion of things in that category of thing from 10,000 feet altitude POV. Here are a few examples: 1,2,3,4.

I'm not sure what to do about this. Some ideas:
- Not living in one's country of origin perhaps? IIRC, when I lived in France for student exchange, whenever I came across as somewhat 'off' it got attributed to me being a foreigner, probably often somewhat incorrectly. I'll see if I can pull off something similar when I move to the UK for uni as per my current plan.
-Settle down eventually, and then acculturise.
- I've taken steps for taking a table manners class before going to the UK for uni Sadly it's necessary. I probably wouldn't be motivated for that sort of investment if I didn't have the hope it's more than transient, though. So far, when my lack of table etiquette or similar threatened to get me into trouble, I'd make some sort of comment like "This is not the sort of thing that was taught in my family of origin", which forbade everyone from criticising me for the thing in question as per the rules of polite society. See also the 2nd link above for countersignalling. I can't keep doing this forever.

I hope this wasn't completely off track.

(*) I once showed a picture of a part of the house I grew up in that was in less-than-ideal repair to a school counselor and she reacted by being completely horrified and asking me whether I wanted her to call Social Services.
(**) Many terms like "retard" are common parlance in my Navy job's environment but I'd be an instant social pariah if I used them at home. That sort of thing makes switching between contexts difficult and annoying and I wonder what specific social skill you'd have to develop in order to get better at it, as it seems very valuable, especially if you want to make at least some use of social capital.

[shelob]

My assignment for the week:
1. Finish reading "Nonviolent communication: A language for life" (I'm about 1/2 through)
2. Look up the translations into my native language for all the emotions-related vocabulary, and practice them
3. Practice the NVC framework, especially with the ample opportunities I'm likely to have over the holidays.

1.: Almost done
2. Ongoing
3. Not going well
Extending the assignment to the next week

[C40]

I am interested in this. I need to read the posts and give it some thought but I'm posting this now to declare I will participate

[ertyu]

3. Not going well

To help with this, you might want to consider defining how precisely you are going to act in certain situations. I read that Starbucks trains their employees this way -- "if a client says A, you respond B," and they cover most of the situations one is likely to engage on the job.

You might consider doing a similar exercise. Open up a spreadsheet and choose an aspect of your life: work, dating, aunt Betsy at grandma's birthday, etc. You know aunt Betsy. You know all the bullshit aunt Betsy is going to say. So on one side of your spreadsheet, write common aunt Betsy situations. In the second column, write what a NVC response would look like. What would you like to say when aunt Betsy does in fact come up with her bs? Pre-planning the response often helps with being able to react more like you want at the right time because it's a sort of practice.

you might leave columns 3 and on as space to do post-mortem analysis. What worked? What didn't? Why didn't it? etc.

You can use this method with common job interview questions, other common situations you encounter, etc.

[AnalyticalEngine]

A friend invited me to a Christmas party with his friends, and I went to that with the hope of extending my social network. However, the party was not a great experience because I got the very distinct feeling the couple hosting the party were utterly neglecting their three year old child and their two dogs in favor of their gaming addiction due to concerning behaviors the dogs and child kept expressing. I was supposed to go skiing with these people later this week, but I am canceling that and going skiing with a relative instead.

Skiing might possibly be a good place to meet people because I'm still very new to the sport. Maybe I can find ski friends who could give me pointers on how to ski better instead of paying for lessons.

I think I'm going to try and make friends by going to events in lower middle class and working class areas rather than continuing to hang out in the rich part of town, which is where I live. I'm finding that rich people just want to hire out every aspect of their lives and are very deep into consumption as a hobby. Other economic demographics seem to have more people willing to trade favors or who are less into self-absorbed consumption.

I have not been doing metta meditation but I am still committed to the idea this will help me learn to feel love toward others more. After some self-reflection, I do think my current attitude is hindering closeness in my relationships, so I am still committed to this habit. I'm learning when to forgive people for simply being human and not being perfect and when to recognize behaviors as red flags and immediately stop dedicating time to that relationship.

[Jin+Guice]

I've been working on raising my social skills for the past 3 years.

I realized that low social intelligence was holding me back in all areas of my life. A few months later I realized that social and emotional intelligence were different things and that low emotional intelligence was holding me back to a much greater degree than social intelligence.

Since then I have vastly improved my social skills which has vastly improved my life.

I continue to try to improve my skills and make up challenges for myself.

I wouldn't have been able to improve my social skills very much without first improving my emotional intelligence and making an ongoing effort to improve emotional intelligence. I think something like non-violent communication, or at least using it well, is the intersection between social and emotional intelligence.

I'd like to participate in this group if we are just doing challenges? I also need to participate only intermittently as I'm working on several other projects and MMG consistency is not my strong suit. Is this alright?





I know this is weird based on what I just said, but I have a certain unique set of social skills that I have always been very good at. I've always had a lot of friends both close and not so close. I can't name exactly what my set of social skills are, but it is some odd combination of being very very good at a few things and horrifyingly bad at what people mean when they are like "that guy has high social skills." Whatever my skills are, I am super good at using social capital and have been for my entire adult life.

[ertyu]

I'd like to participate in this group if we are just doing challenges? I also need to participate only intermittently as I'm working on several other projects and MMG consistency is not my strong suit. Is this alright?

Sure -- there isn't a set thing the entire group is doing, everyone decides for themselves what they're doing and when, the mmg is on the thread and everyone is free to participate regardless of whether they're formally a member or not. the once-a-week thing is more to give structure so people make consistent progress, it's not a hard and fast rule.

As someone who has already worked on this, you could also give advice and suggest ideas for useful challenges that people could adopt if they want to.

[Jin+Guice]

Fantastic!

What I've learned doing this for a few years:

1) My golden rule for social stuff is "always have fun." If I'm not having fun, I'm not charming. If you're really high on social and other energy that day, you can try to be the one who makes the fun, but if you're not having fun, you eventually need to leave.... usually pretty quickly. Everyone hates networking. Everyone loves hanging out with friends. Make networking hanging out with friends and try to only engage with people you enjoy.

1a) I really really encourage you to have fun with this process and in social situations, but everyone has to talk to people they don't like for social reasons. If I'm talking to someone I don't like that I need something out of (this "need" can be just a cold but cordial relationship at social events), my strategy is to try to make a good impression and disengage as quickly as possible. If you end up having a bunch of these relationships that are taking up most of your social energy and strategy, you are, imo, doing something wrong and should re-evaluate.

2) It's important to be aware of your own social and emotional energy. I'm not charming when I'm tired. Worse, I'm much grumpier and prone to anger and depression, especially if I'm drinking and the social situation isn't going how I want it to. One of my best social skills is going to bed.

3) The goal of all social skills is integration. People with great social skills don't think more, they think less. Humans socialize without thinking. I love an analytic model, but my brain can't think fast enough in social situations. I'm also receiving all of this social and emotional stimulus which is possibly making me react a certain way/ become dumber in the moment. You haven't added a social skill until it happens reflexively*. It's really hard to remember all of your "do this and don't do that" when you are having an engaging conversation with someone that is just flowing.

*I *think* this is impossible if you have actual autism. Like your mind doesn't understand the social context of what is happening bc it is incapable of that sort of pattern recognition or something? So in that case I believe it is helpful to analytically plan everything. But this is for sure the hard route. Sorry to anyone with Autism if I just totally don't understand or this is an offensive misunderstanding.

4) Hang out with, observe and copy someone's social skills you admire. You can copy people to a surprising degree without them noticing. Copy more than just one person as well and try to integrate what you think works for them together. Observe what they do that's similar to each other.

5) Get outside your comfort zone. I find social growth really uncomfortable. You are going to be uncomfortable. I'm sorry, I wish it was easier.

6) Be genuine in your interactions. People can usually tell if you are lying or trying to get something from them. You're going to be trying new things socially, but it shouldn't involve changing your core personality instantaneously.

7) Observe and be aware of social and emotional context and social and emotional economies. People ultimately hang out with people who make them feel good. People like focused positive attention from people they like. Imo, we live in a world of material wealth and social and emotional poverty. If you can learn how to contribute to those economies your social skills will rise immensely.

8) Socialize. I read a bunch of books and made a bunch of lists bc I am a fucking nerd. It's much more efficient to pick out one skill, integrate it and then pick out another skill and integrate it. You can read books while you are doing this. But you aren't going to get better without practice and practice is for sure not happening while you are reading/ watching something/ gathering information.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Thanks, @J+G, this is great stuff. Have you found certain environments more conducive to building relationships or meeting compatible people? If so, what are their features?