Chris MacLeod MSW - The Social Skills Guidebook: Manage Shyness, Improve Your Conversations, and Make Friends, Without Giving Up Who You Are

This book is for anyone who feels they need to brush up on their social skills. Maybe you feel shy, anxious, and insecure around people. You struggle to make conversation and leave a good impression on others. Youre lonely and isolated and dont go out nearly as often as youd like, or you only have a few casual acquaintances and want some closer relationships. Maybe all of the above. Maybe you feel like you somehow missed out on learning the unwritten social rules that everyone else seemed to have gotten the hang of by the time they were thirteen.

If you have these social difficulties, youre not alone. You may feel like a uniquely broken outcast, but theyre all common issues. Millions of people feel the same way you do.

The good news is that these social problems can be fixed. The concept of a late bloomer exists for a reason. Lots of people were shy or lonely for a period in their lives before they developed their interpersonal skills and put the shyness or loneliness behind them. You can increase your self-confidence. You can learn to manage shyness and anxiety and the counterproductive thinking and behaviors that feed them. You can practice and hone your conversation skills. You can learn a reliable process to meet friends and build a social life. Even if aspects of socializing dont come that naturally to you and youll have to work a little harder at it than most, nothing about your situation makes you a lost cause.

You dont need to completely change who you are to become more socially successful either; you can leave your interests, values, and personality traits intact. You just need to fill in the skills or confidence gaps that are currently holding you back. Then youll be a more socially polished version of yourself. The goal of this book is to give you the tools you need to become socially happy in whatever way works for you, whether that involves partying all the time with a dozen casual acquaintances or mostly keeping to yourself except to occasionally meet with a few really close friends. It doesnt want to turn you into someone who acts fake so they can appeal to as many people as possible.

This book is a comprehensive guide to catching up socially. There are titles that cover shyness or conversation skills separately, but this one tells you everything you need to know in one place. The author struggled with all of these issues himself when he was younger and wrote this as the guide he wished hed had at the time.

This book teaches the fundamentals you somehow missed learning as you were growing up. It addresses barriers that only come up for people who have been struggling socially for most of their lives.

If social skills could be rated on a ten-point scale, its about helping you get from an unhappy 3 to a content, functional 7 (or higher). Its not a collection of little-known tricks that will let you move from average to advanced. It wont reveal five secret tricks that CEOs use to make their handshakes extra memorable and influential. That said, charismatic people are that way not because they have access to a bunch of techniques most of us dont, but because they execute many of their social fundamentals a little better than normal. In that sense, this book may help you someday have lots of charisma by making you aware of the core skills you could develop beyond a typical level.

This title focuses on day-to-day socializing. It doesnt cover workplace-specific issues like how to manage difficult colleagues, influence your boss, or nail that product demonstration. It also doesnt go into dating and flirting. However, if youre struggling socially, most of the topics covered here should help your career or love life. You can hardly woo someone or get along with your coworkers if you have trouble with conversation or cant manage your anxiety around people.

Whats ahead

After a few opening chapters about the process of working on social issues, the book covers three core areas of social skills:

1. Dealing with shyness, anxiety, and insecurities, and feeling more comfortable and confident with yourself and others
2. Making conversation and interacting with people
3. Meeting people and making friends

The sections build on each otheryoure going to struggle to make conversation if youre anxious and insecure, and youre going to have a hard time making friends if you cant keep an interaction goingbut you dont have to read them in order. If you feel your confidence and conversation skills are already okay, then using the suggestions in the Forming and Growing Friendships section may have the biggest and quickest impact on your social life.

The Overall Process of Improving Your Social Skills

As you work to improve your social skills, you must approach the process in the right way. Many people struggle to improve their social skills not because theyre up against impossible challenges, but because they approach the task from the wrong angle and get unnecessarily discouraged. With the right mind-set, expectations, and approach to improving, youll make more progress. This chapter covers some things you should know before working on your issues. Chapter 2 troubleshoots some common questions and concerns people have about improving their social skills.

Figuring out which skills and traits to work on and which to leave alone

As the Introduction said, you dont need to change everything about yourself to do better socially. Of course, youll want to address clear-cut problems that most people would be happy to be rid ofshyness and anxiety, low self-confidence, unpolished conversation skills, and lack of knowledge about how to make friends.

The traits listed below can also cause social problems. Theyre all perfectly valid variations from the norm that you shouldnt have to change. However, they can lead to practical social inconveniences when either people misunderstand and look down on the traits, or the traits cause you to have competing needs.

Acceptable, though sometimes impractical, social differences

• Having an introverted personality
• Liking to spend a lot of time alone
• Not needing or wanting a ton of friends
• Being selective when choosing who you want to be friends with
• Preferring to socialize for shorter periods of time, and then head home to relax and recharge your batteries; having a tendency to get drained by socializing
• Being into low-key types of socializing and choosing to avoid rowdy parties or getting drunk
• Preferring to hang back and listen more in conversations, rather than talking a lot and trying to hold the spotlight
• Not having a bubbly, expressive, excitable personality
• Being able to take or leave aspects of socializing, like making chitchat with strangers waiting in a line with you
• Preferring your conversations to have lots of substance
• Being into uncool, non-mainstream hobbies
• Not caring about seemingly popular interests like team sports or reality TV
• Living an alternative lifestyle or being part of a non-mainstream scene or subculture