Any LWers with recommendations for ways to improve social skills? Right now, I can more-or-less hold a conversation, but I tend to overthink what to say and end up not saying anything, and I just generally lack confidence. How much benefit would I get from, say, joining an improv class or doing (more) rejection therapy?
I think the most important realization re typical conversation is that its purpose is not for information exchange, it’s for bonding (like apes picking nits off each other). A good conversationalist has a lot of anecdotes (and continually generates more), listens and mentally models others well, and makes no overt attempts at lowering the status of others within the conversation (this could be something as seemingly innocuous as pointing out that someone is wrong about something).
Yeah, nerds are atypical in many ways. Also, you could form information into compelling anecdotes/stories like the best science journalists do (Carl Zimmer comes to mind).
Practice conversation and you will get better at it. That’s it. More helpfully, if there is a random stranger near you, you can open them and talk for a bit about any random smalltalk bull you like. This will improve general conversation skills. If you live in a large anonymous city you don’t need to care if people think that’s weird because people will not be getting together to share these impressions. Advice I picked up from reading PUAshit; jump between topics without feeling the need to link them or segue at all. Advice that sounds good that I haven’t tried out; record yourself in conversation to pick out flaws. Oh, and pause, don’t um. Improv will help, and remember, keep calm and carry on.
Also, choose topics where inferential distance for a random person is small. This is what allows talking instead of explaining, and easy jumping between the topics. Avoid controversial topics, such as money, politics, religion.
A good topic is easy to understand, and does not divide people into opposing groups.
What topics aren’t controversial and within a short inferential distance from most people? My intuition is that this is close to the definition of “boring”.
Listen to actual conversation sometime, most of it is excruciatingly boring if you think about it in terms of information. But as other posters have pointed out, most conversation is about social bonding, not exchanging information.
This all looks like good advice; thanks. I think my main problem is that I have trouble mustering up the guts to actually do these things. I just don’t talk to strangers.
Maybe I could get around that by precommitting to social interaction? Like signing up for improv like you say, or with stickk, or by going on some sort of working holiday?
If you’re not really good at reading feedback, practice won’t help in the least. People will be polite to you, which you won’t distinguish from pleased, and quietly hate you.
Really good is helpful, very helpful, but not necessary.If what you’re saying is that practicing on randomers you won’t meet again is low EV given poor is people reading skills, sureis. But iwhat’s higher? And for people with over sensitive rejection detectors or general anxiety practice is good even if all you get out of it is calmer.
Getting in group conversations, then mostly shutting up and watching. Most people will be decent conversationalists to learn from, you’ll be able to watch reactions more closely than if you were concentrating on talking at the same time, and they’ll gossip about the absent which will tell you what to avoid.
What worked for me better than anything was standing on a busy sidewalk holding a sign that said “Free Hugs” for a few hours. I came away feeling very high status and had a friendly, open orientation towards everyone I saw.
Another idea is to play the eye contact game lukeprog mentions in one of his skill-building posts: stare in to a friend’s eyes for 15 minutes straight. Seems to have permanently made me way more comfortable maintaining eye contact (this is more than a year after doing the exercise).
Thanks for the advice. The second one in particular is surprising because most of the once-off life-changes I’ve tried have had no effect on me a week or two later. I’ve added both to my list of “things I’ll wish I’d done sooner”, from where I’ll hopefully make concrete plans to actually execute them.
I’m also interested in this. I want to know what specific social situations I can put myself in to build social skills. Raw exposure doesn’t seem to work well for and in any case isn’t time effective.
If you feel you lack confidence you could try exposure as others have suggested. If you want put yourself in an awkward situation you could maybe Skype with me or someone ells willing. That way you can pick out the flaws afterwards as Barry pointed out .
Thanks for the skype offer. Maybe as a stepping-stone to real social interaction I could try talking to lots of random people online via chatroulette or something similar?
I notice that you’ve listed things you do that are not working. Can you think of people you interact with who seem to have achieved victory? What do they do? How do other people respond? It may be easier to decide if improv or rejection therapy is helping if you have more metrics to check to see if people are comfortable and/or enjoying conversations with you.
Feelings of confidence are an internal signal, and not a very trustworthy one, since you will feel unconfident when you’re experimenting. Look for some external signals like the body language of people you’re talking to (arms uncrossed, duchenne smiles, etc). Combine rejection therapy and data gathering and ask some friends outright what you could improve. (Tell them to be specific).
One thing that I did was to notice some people who seemed good at socializing and then just try to impersonate some aspects of what they did. Don’t mimic to the point of parody, but pick out a few specific things they do (relaxed, splayed leg body language, asks questions to draw out others, etc) and then just try them out for a week.
Other people seem to be able to sit down and assimilate themselves into a group conversation, when I do this I rarely end up saying anything.
Yeah, I think that feeling unconfident is largely the cause, so it’s something that I should try to avoid even though it is an especially poor internal signal. I should try to make myself update on some more reliable signals like those.
Yeah, I should try that more. My main issues with mimicing successful people is that I have trouble mustering the emotion to do it effectively.
Social abilities are useful when you are prepared to say awful things like agreeing, when disagree. People would reward if they feel you are part of they social/groupthinking. For this infere that there is habilities you could train in terms of general competence, but is is better to have some specific groups in mind.
Any LWers with recommendations for ways to improve social skills? Right now, I can more-or-less hold a conversation, but I tend to overthink what to say and end up not saying anything, and I just generally lack confidence. How much benefit would I get from, say, joining an improv class or doing (more) rejection therapy?
I think the most important realization re typical conversation is that its purpose is not for information exchange, it’s for bonding (like apes picking nits off each other). A good conversationalist has a lot of anecdotes (and continually generates more), listens and mentally models others well, and makes no overt attempts at lowering the status of others within the conversation (this could be something as seemingly innocuous as pointing out that someone is wrong about something).
Nerds bond by exchanging information.
Yeah, nerds are atypical in many ways. Also, you could form information into compelling anecdotes/stories like the best science journalists do (Carl Zimmer comes to mind).
Practice conversation and you will get better at it. That’s it. More helpfully, if there is a random stranger near you, you can open them and talk for a bit about any random smalltalk bull you like. This will improve general conversation skills. If you live in a large anonymous city you don’t need to care if people think that’s weird because people will not be getting together to share these impressions. Advice I picked up from reading PUAshit; jump between topics without feeling the need to link them or segue at all. Advice that sounds good that I haven’t tried out; record yourself in conversation to pick out flaws. Oh, and pause, don’t um. Improv will help, and remember, keep calm and carry on.
Also, choose topics where inferential distance for a random person is small. This is what allows talking instead of explaining, and easy jumping between the topics. Avoid controversial topics, such as money, politics, religion.
A good topic is easy to understand, and does not divide people into opposing groups.
What topics aren’t controversial and within a short inferential distance from most people? My intuition is that this is close to the definition of “boring”.
Listen to actual conversation sometime, most of it is excruciatingly boring if you think about it in terms of information. But as other posters have pointed out, most conversation is about social bonding, not exchanging information.
This all looks like good advice; thanks. I think my main problem is that I have trouble mustering up the guts to actually do these things. I just don’t talk to strangers.
Maybe I could get around that by precommitting to social interaction? Like signing up for improv like you say, or with stickk, or by going on some sort of working holiday?
If you’re not really good at reading feedback, practice won’t help in the least. People will be polite to you, which you won’t distinguish from pleased, and quietly hate you.
Really good is helpful, very helpful, but not necessary.If what you’re saying is that practicing on randomers you won’t meet again is low EV given poor is people reading skills, sureis. But iwhat’s higher? And for people with over sensitive rejection detectors or general anxiety practice is good even if all you get out of it is calmer.
Getting in group conversations, then mostly shutting up and watching. Most people will be decent conversationalists to learn from, you’ll be able to watch reactions more closely than if you were concentrating on talking at the same time, and they’ll gossip about the absent which will tell you what to avoid.
What worked for me better than anything was standing on a busy sidewalk holding a sign that said “Free Hugs” for a few hours. I came away feeling very high status and had a friendly, open orientation towards everyone I saw.
Another idea is to play the eye contact game lukeprog mentions in one of his skill-building posts: stare in to a friend’s eyes for 15 minutes straight. Seems to have permanently made me way more comfortable maintaining eye contact (this is more than a year after doing the exercise).
Thanks for the advice. The second one in particular is surprising because most of the once-off life-changes I’ve tried have had no effect on me a week or two later. I’ve added both to my list of “things I’ll wish I’d done sooner”, from where I’ll hopefully make concrete plans to actually execute them.
I’m also interested in this. I want to know what specific social situations I can put myself in to build social skills. Raw exposure doesn’t seem to work well for and in any case isn’t time effective.
If you feel you lack confidence you could try exposure as others have suggested. If you want put yourself in an awkward situation you could maybe Skype with me or someone ells willing. That way you can pick out the flaws afterwards as Barry pointed out .
Thanks for the skype offer. Maybe as a stepping-stone to real social interaction I could try talking to lots of random people online via chatroulette or something similar?
I notice that you’ve listed things you do that are not working. Can you think of people you interact with who seem to have achieved victory? What do they do? How do other people respond? It may be easier to decide if improv or rejection therapy is helping if you have more metrics to check to see if people are comfortable and/or enjoying conversations with you.
Feelings of confidence are an internal signal, and not a very trustworthy one, since you will feel unconfident when you’re experimenting. Look for some external signals like the body language of people you’re talking to (arms uncrossed, duchenne smiles, etc). Combine rejection therapy and data gathering and ask some friends outright what you could improve. (Tell them to be specific).
One thing that I did was to notice some people who seemed good at socializing and then just try to impersonate some aspects of what they did. Don’t mimic to the point of parody, but pick out a few specific things they do (relaxed, splayed leg body language, asks questions to draw out others, etc) and then just try them out for a week.
Other people seem to be able to sit down and assimilate themselves into a group conversation, when I do this I rarely end up saying anything.
Yeah, I think that feeling unconfident is largely the cause, so it’s something that I should try to avoid even though it is an especially poor internal signal. I should try to make myself update on some more reliable signals like those.
Yeah, I should try that more. My main issues with mimicing successful people is that I have trouble mustering the emotion to do it effectively.
Social abilities are useful when you are prepared to say awful things like agreeing, when disagree. People would reward if they feel you are part of they social/groupthinking. For this infere that there is habilities you could train in terms of general competence, but is is better to have some specific groups in mind.