Gaining social skills
So how does one go about learning social skills? Well, experience would be my best guess. But that just leads back to the old “chicken and the egg” dilemma. In order to get experience one must get out there and do things, however, without social skills, I couldn’t function properly to get that experience. Somehow, I needed a little boost. I needed an alternate route.
After weighing all my options, I concluded that I would have to make do with whatever resources I already had. I decided that I would start by asking my family for advice.
Now there were people in my immediate family that had perfected certain talents when it came to social skills. My brother was an expert in one-to-one and group conversations. His wife’s sister and her husband were impeccable dancers. My mother knew all the intricacies of table manners and what fork was used with what dish. When I really thought about it, I had a big resource at my disposal; it’s just too bad that I ignored most of it in the past.
Of course, I still had to approach them and ask if they would consider helping me. It would be embarrassing because I’d have to basically admit that I was a social loser and I needed their help. I knew I could ask my brother for a few tips without much trouble, so I started there.
He knew about my social anxiety, but I doubt that he realized how severe and debilitating it was for me. In the end, his advice didn’t really help me as much as I thought it would.
To make a long story short, I was able to eventually approach everyone and have a down to earth talk about what I needed. It turned out ok and I did learn a few things, but not as much as I expected. For example, my brother’s advice was ok for someone that was already a non-shy type, but I doubt that I could have used any of his techniques in real life. I just wasn’t me.
My mother’s advice was great if I wanted to impress the Queen, but in everyday life, it was a tad too much. However, I was able to extract what I needed and that proved to be useful later on when I started dating a little.
The most useful info I was able to gather was from my brother’s sister-in-law. I always thought she disliked me (and maybe she did), but she was able to show me several basic dance steps that would give me a tremendous confidence boost in the years to come.
One thing I learned was that it didn’t take much to dance better than the average guy. And because most women love to dance, it was a huge advantage once I created the opportunity to use it.
So, after I adding a few more items to my arsenal, was I better off? No, not really because this was not going to help create confidence and build self-esteem. It would help down the road, but for now, it wasn’t quite what I needed.
What I needed now was a way to get in the game and get some real-life experience. That was the only way I could re-program my negative belief system. In order to do that, I needed something to take the place of real self-confidence and self-esteem until I was able to develop these desirable traits.
That’s when I came up with a way to manually deal with social situations. This method was purely artificial and was far from the desirable auto-responses I wished for, but it was effective none the less.
Using this particular coping technique required a tremendous amount of effort because it forced me to be “on” all the time. I had to manually process all the information during social encounters – and, oh, by the way, I had to make it look as though I wasn’t.
This was a real turning point for me. With the help of this technique, I was finally able to see the world as it really was and to re-program my belief system at the same time. There is no way I could have made any progress without implementing this.
I’ll start talking about it next time.
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