There is a significant correlation between your social skills and
your success in any area of life. With good social skills, it’s easier
to make friends, build strong relationships and get ahead in your
career.
If you lack social skills, it’s important to learn how to build
social skills. In this article, I’m going to reveal to you the 5 most
effective ways I know for building social skills, based on my experience
as a social confidence coach.
1. Practice
Developing any ability is largely a matter of practice. In order to
develop your social skills, you need to spend a lot of time interacting
with others.
By meeting new people, conversing with them and getting to know them,
you develop your intuition about people and you gradually become better
at attuning to them and building a connection with them.
You may be tempted to avoid social interactions because you think you
lack social skills, but unfortunately, this only keeps you lacking
social skills. The key to improving them is to interact with others no
matter how capable you are right now.
2. Take Risks
It’s not enough to just interact with others. It’s central to also
take risks when doing so. This means expressing your true thoughts and
feelings, and behaving in an authentic manner.
This is important because if you just stick to behaving during a
social interaction in ways that are very strict and safe, you don’t
really experiment and explore the possibilities. And this makes it
harder for your social skills to expand.
You really want to express your entire personality and notice how
others react, in order to wise up socially. If you have trouble in this
area, I advise you to learn how to be yourself and little by little to become more expressive.
3. Ask for Feedback
It’s hard to adjust your interpersonal skills when you don’t
understand exactly how people see you and what effect certain sides of
your personality have on them. This is where feedback comes in.
Ask people you know and you trust to give you feedback. To give you
their perspective on how you come across socially, on your strengths and
your weaknesses. They can do this casually while chatting, or fill in
some sort of feedback form you can devise.
Collect a number of feedbacks and look at the information you
acquired. It will help you understand yourself, others and social
interactions better. And this is how to build social skills.
4. Interact with Socially Skilled People
One of the best ways to gain social skills is through modeling
others. You interact with people who have good social skills, you study
their mannerisms and you learn from them.
So, seek to meet individuals who are people savvy and hang out with
them a lot. You’ll notice that just by doing this, your social skills
will go up.
And if on top of this, you’ll also study them intentionally and try
on for size pieces of their conduct, these skills will go up even
faster. Socially skilled individuals are an infinite source of wisdom.
5. Work on Specific Goals
There is quite a wide array of social skills and trying to develop
them all at once doesn’t yield results. You’re spreading yourself too
thin.
A much better approach is to pick one or two specific skills at a
time and work on improving them. Only when you’ve made enough progress
with them, you can advance to other interpersonal skills.
This means you don’t want to learn merely how to build social skills,
but also ways to build the specific social skills that interest you the
most. Setting specific goals and working on them is the best way to get
results.
As your social skills build, you’ll find yourself feeling more
confident in social settings and connecting easier with others. These
skills will open up a wide range of opportunities in your life. All you
have to do is take advantage of them.
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