Who sucked in social skills?

[ShardMare]

Anyone who's been nerd all their life? How is your social life? What are your struggles? If you managed to get out of this how did you do it? What exercises you did? What books helped you? What are the best ways to improve?

[JonasVE12]

Many here have had it here including myself and there is no other solution than to build the courage to go out there and learn how to relate to people. Just start small. Smile at strangers, relax your body in the proces, ask directions, ask time and soon you'll find yourself couragous enough to give a compliment and this gets the ball roling. Watch some Owen cook video's on youtube for a week and then force yourself to take action and stop reading books till you have taken action. If you are paralised in your comfortzone and can't take action, you have to manipulate your environment in a way that you automatically have to be more expressive. I've done a sales job for example which had me go to strangers houses and try to convince them to buy products. I had severe social anxiety, but after 30 doors, man, I was a changed person. It just takes the initial courage to give yourself such a spike in confidence and boost in self image that it takes you on a upward spiral, giving you momentum and you have to build on it till it becomes your authentic self. You have to make it a priority though and stop distracting yourself with other stuff until you get it fixed. Social anxiety will hold you back in ALL areas of your life.

[WaveInTheOcean]

MDMA with some friends can be pretty pretty good

[7thLetter]

If you care about my life story read here:

Me, I sucked with social skills growing up. In Elementary & Highschool I was always the quiet kid in class, I had friends but I always somewhat chose to hang out alone during lunch. Lunch time was hell for me because I'd always try to find ways to stall time until the bell rang. Sometimes I'd sit in the bathroom for an hour, or just stand in the hallways. This is what it was like for me throughout Elementary AND Highschool. I'd only talk to the friends I had during class or outside of school, just never during lunch time. I'm an introvert (INTP) and I just naturally felt the need to hang out on my own. I'm not a nerd, but I sort of was in the sense that I played A LOT of video games and watched some anime in my early years. I'm talking maybe 8-12 hours a day of video games per day after school or on the weekends. This definitely contributed to the poor social skills I had.

But anyways, I don't want to make this too long. During highschool I had crushes on tons of chicks, never talked to them. After highschool, at my workplaces (I worked in a restaurant as a cook at around 16), liked some females but never talked to them. The thought of them would be so painful for me I would literally cry. I didn't even shoot my shot with any of them but for some reason I was upset. So this is when I started to seek help and improve myself. I started to look online and developed an interest in psychology. At first I thought I had social anxiety (and maybe I did to some degree) but turns out for the most part I'm just an introvert so I started to learn more about what an introvert is.

Although I was a loner throughout school, my social life got better over time. As an introvert I was always so good at creating friendships with that one extroverted person, that it lead to them bringing me into their world and introducing me to other people. It's just so fascinating that while introverts aren't good in group conversation, they have great strength in 1 on 1 conversation or connections. So I built a close connection with one or two extroverts then it lead to tons of social events and new connections.

Skip to this part if you want to know what I did to improve myself:

Best decision I ever made to improve myself was to work customer service related jobs. If you read above I was working as a cook for a while, but then I decided to move up front as a host. Less pay but all I wanted was to get out of my shell, and it helped. All my jobs after that were all customer service related in the hospitality industry. Interacting with hundreds of customers per day will definitely boost up your social skills, its all about getting the experience and its not really about reading books. I still read books though, did meditation, worked out at the gym, went to counselling, but I can say 95% of my results came from action taking. Not only did I work customer-service jobs, I got into MLM & pickup. I hate these two now, but they both honestly got me waaay out of my comfort zone. MLM if you don't know is the same thing as a pyramid scheme, and pickup is just cold approaching women. In MLM I've interacted with so many people, and this lead to me meeting a friend who got me into pickup, and when I did pickup I approached hundreds of women, got a ton of numbers. After all this I've just developed so much charisma, I became a completely different person compared to who I was. It became so easy for me to attract friends at work. At this point in time I can't even fathom how crazy my life used to be. This was when I was in my early 20s.

To be honest though, this social momentum will only last for as long as you are consistent with it. Now that I'm 25, being social is getting less and less important to me nowadays. I've naturally gravitated towards having less of a social life at this point in time because I feel that there's more important things we can put our energy and time into than having a social life, plus I'm completely fine with solitude. So since the momentum died out, at times I still might be quiet and awkward around people but it should be expected after not interacting with people after a long while. My social skills are still there though it just requires a bit of a warmup first just like anything else.

 

[ShardMare]

@JonasVE12 I've heard some people mention Owen cook and his older videos were good, how can i get them? But the reason why i dont want to go out because i feel like i couldnt hold a conversation, i would go blank, i have nothing to say... What now? Would it be good if i start with typing online then go out?

@WaveInTheOcean Why? It would show how i would behave if i had no social anxiety and all of these stuff? That stuff is easily addicting, how can i become so relaxed in other way?

@7thLetter Well that sucks. I dont know where are the parents when the kid plays hrs of video games and stay at home etc. and they can clearly see that the kid has no social life(ok u had few friends but still). Imo many adults shouldnt have children, they would have to go through a really hard exam to have children. Or they should create like a f*cking tax or idk xD. Seriously so many parents fk up their child. Anyways thx then i have to convince myself to work at a job where i have to interact with people a lot.

[7thLetter]

4 minutes ago, ShardMare said:

 

@7thLetter Well that sucks. I dont know where are the parents when the kid plays hrs of video games and stay at home etc. and they can clearly see that the kid has no social life(ok u had few friends but still). Imo many adults shouldnt have children, they would have to go through a really hard exam to have children. Or they should create like a f*cking tax or idk xD. Seriously so many parents fk up their child. Anyways thx then i have to convince myself to work at a job where i have to interact with people a lot.

Oh, that's a bit of a toxic comment there, wasn't expecting that

[ShardMare]

Im really sry i didnt necessarily wrote about u. I just wrote my experience and what generally happens to a lot of people when parents let the kids play a lot of hrs

[Hansu]

Had very, very poor social skills until 17 (also played games 12 hours a day until that), poor skills til 19, medium skills at 21, medium-good at 25. I first discovered self-help at 17 and have been practising social skills ever since.

I am still poor at some areas like game, but sufficient at almost all others. Listening and clear communication is something Im working atm.

Edited April 3, 2021 by Hansu

[King Merk]

I had such bad social anxiety that I used to pay my friends to go buy me food because I was too scared to talk to a cashier.

My story is that of the typical introverted video game nerd who rarely left his room growing up.

You simply need more exposure. Start to look people in the eyes. Once you’re comfortable there then start to smile at people. Next, ask strangers how they’re doing. Continue progressing until you develop your social skill to your desired level.

Today, I literally work with people for 8+ hours a day. I’m still an introvert and this can be a bit draining and even anxiety provoking at times but it’s about 1% of what it used to be. I’m quite confident approaching stranger and striking up a conversation with new people now.

It’s just putting the reps in bro. You got this. 

Side Note: some of my favorite books that helped with this field are...

• How to win friends & influence people (Dale Carnegie)
• The way of the superior man (David Dieda)
• Cant hurt me (David Goggins)
• Social (Matthew Lieberman)

That said, books won’t do shit for you if you don’t go out and talk to people on a regular basis.

Go figure.

Edited April 3, 2021 by King Merk

[Boethius]

It wasn't until I was 32 that I started to give a shit about socializing skillfully with other people. Until then I thought socializing (what I referred to as "schmoozing") was mainly about either subtly manipulating people or trying to win any number of different social games. With my exploration of spirituality, however, and the idea of everyone on this planet as a brother or sister, I started to think that I should probably start to learn how to be less awkward around people and more skillful at things like small talk, empathetic listening, sharing emotions, etc.

In that time I've done A LOT of work on myself, in reading books about exploring emotions, developing interpersonal relationships, handling conflict productively, practicing mindfulness, being at ease in the present moment, etc. And then in addition to reading/studying these issues I've also just put myself out there in interacting with people from all sorts of different walks of life and in all different sorts of social contexts. I would say that I've made interacting with other people skillfully into a large part of my daily "practice". Thankfully, I'm getting to a point where I feel like I can start easing up on the "seriousness" of this practice and start being a bit more playful and care-free. Which isn't half bad for an INTP math guy!

By the way, if anyone wanted a book recommendation on some of the things I've been looking into, I'll include the link below:

https://www.amazon.com/Relational-Mindfulness-Deepening-Connections-Ourselves/dp/1614294135/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=relational+mindfulness&qid=1617469994&sr=8-2

[JonasVE12]

11 hours ago, ShardMare said:

@JonasVE12 I've heard some people mention Owen cook and his older videos were good, how can i get them? But the reason why i dont want to go out because i feel like i couldnt hold a conversation, i would go blank, i have nothing to say... What now? Would it be good if i start with typing online then go out?

He still has good video's online on his channel, so that should do it. But if you search around, you'll see people have uploaded his old video's and you can download them.

And I hear you, but realise that you only feel that way because your social anxiety acts like a self reinforcing mental imprisonment that blocks your creativity, inspiration, and spontanity. It's perfectionism that comes out of the assumption that you are not interesting or fun enough as you are right now. The truth is that you just have to learn how to crawl before you can walk and run. Baby-steps. Dont go out there with the intention of getting good conversations. These will come naturally as you have build your momentum and have loosened up. You will have to develop a more positive self-image by building the courage to actually face your fears and talk to people. Just start by loosening up your body when you walk in public for a week, then progress by combining this with asking the time for a week, smiling to strangers, small things. 

Your subconscious will adapt to these experiences and things that seemed impossible will now flow more naturally and these blockages will go away. Your spontanity, emotions, body relaxation, freedom in expression will all come back gradually as you do these things. And I say come 'back'. You may feel you were like this your whole life. But do you think that as a little child you were this contracted? You were free, expressive, playful, spontanious and didn't hold yourself back. Life is hard and this is the result of it but don't think it's permanent. You have lost contrast. 

If you hold yourself back because you don't have anything to say, I understand, but understand that this is just because of lack of experience and self-limiting beliefs that put a limitation on your ability to just improvise on the spot. You have no idea how much bandwidth it takes for your brain to constantly be in this fearful mode.

Just do this tomorrow if you dare: Go outside for 4 hours and ask the time 50 times to 50 different people. First single people, then duo's, then groups of 3. Just be proactive with something that involves talking to other people. Also note the mind making excuses to do it another time, to start next week, next week, next year, or to first achieve a certain thing in order to be able to do it. Just do it soon or you'll regret it. The fact that you write this topic means that it matters to you and it is on your mind. To build deeper meaning and go to a higher frequency, you have to purify yourself and remove all your blockages. 

And if you really can't take action: you can even start with OMEGLE. You can talk with random strangers on webcams and you can build on it and then move to real life interactions. Practice self-love as well. This is important. If you fuck up, laugh in yourself and realise no one cares. If you feel awkward, only you care, no one else. If you would scream from the top of your lunghs in public, everyone would look for a couple of seconds, but after 5 seconds, everyone will go back to their own thinking and no one will care.  

[WaveInTheOcean]

15 hours ago, ShardMare said:

 

@WaveInTheOcean Why? It would show how i would behave if i had no social anxiety and all of these stuff? That stuff is easily addicting, how can i become so relaxed in other way?

 

MDMA removes all fear pretty much, yes. So it can show you how you would behave without fear. Which can be a profound experience.

Of course it requires that you reflect both on and after the MDMA: What does it mean to be good at socializing? What do I want? What do other humans want? Why do we socialize? What is socializing? What is love? What is empathy? What is emotions? What is communication? Etc.

Of course your ultimate goal is to be able to socialize like you're on MDMA, but sober. Using MDMA as a "hack" to show you how consciousness of mind feels with no fear can be a good learning experience. 

Yes, the "dangerous" thing about MDMA is that it feels so good that you might want to take it again.

But MDMA is much less addicting than cocaine, heroine etc. Don't worry, it's not like you'll become physical dependent on it.

Just use it wisely -- like other pyschedelics -- for growth. Research before using. Dose appropirately (125 mg with perhaps max 1 booster dose of 40 mg 1-2 hours in) and find 1-3 close friends who are open enough to try mind-manifesting substances.

MDMA is a psychedelic. Just a special one. A powerful tool like all psychedelics.

Edited April 4, 2021 by WaveInTheOcean

[Espaim]

@WaveInTheOcean I took MDMA one time and it made me smile more. I felt love for everyone in a much stronger intensity but it didn't change my behaviour too much. Does this mean I'm maxed out?

 

Edited April 4, 2021 by Espaim

[QandC]

It's all relative to the situation. Sometimes I can be a social retard and sometimes I can even impress myself

[CameronsExploring]

I used to game until very late at night and be tired all day during middle school. I would always regret it the next day. I wasn't in any clubs or sports either which made things worse. I didnt eat well or excersize and all this meant my energy would be drained. I made some friends but they weren't always the best. 

I remember i finally signed up for track at the end of 8th grade. I thought it sounded fun so I gave it a try. I felt quite uncomfortable and out of place being in a sport after all those years of not doing anything. I didn't know anyone on the team and felt lonely, but eventually I made a few friends at a track meet. I signed up for Cross Country and slowly started started to make a few friends there too.

The change was gradual as I worked on my sleep schedule and health. Looking back i just didn't have the energy to feel like going out to do something. Now I have a friend group and we go out places and I got a job that requires me to work with others. I felt out of place at my work at first, but eventually made friends. Signing up for the things im interested in helped me meet other people. I guess you shouldn't expect it to feel natural at first, but gaining social skills will come eventually.

I also learned to stop judging myself as much as I used to and stopped judging others as much. It really helped with my mental health. I learned to accept myself and still grow at the same time.