Intro to SucceedSocially.com

SucceedSocially.com is a free collection of articles related to improving social skills, dealing with shyness, and working around the problems that come from not fitting into the norm. Some people will only come here to read an article or two, but taken as a whole the site is a detailed guide on how to get past all-around social awkwardness.

The advice is geared towards helping unhappily shy, lonely, and socially inexperienced people catch up to everyone else, not so much on how to become a superstar salesman, schmoozer, corporate climber type. The content is geared towards adults and older teenagers, though some of the advice could be useful to younger children.

This site is a one man show. I used to be really shy, lonely, and socially clueless myself and everything written here is based on my own experiences and conclusions in overcoming these problems for myself.

As far as I know this is one of the most extensive sites on the topic out there, and I've put a lot of work into making it as useful as possible. Even then, there's a lot of information I could still cover. I don't think I have all the answers either, and am also always thinking about how I could improve or correct what I've already written, to make it more helpful.

This site has advice about the main social trouble areas:

• Meeting people, making friends, and getting over loneliness
• Dealing with shyness, fears, insecurities, and lack of confidence while socializing
• Learning to make better conversation, and deal with specific types of conversations
• Generally improving the social package you present, by developing appealing traits and eliminating bad habits (an admittedly broad category)
• Working with issues such as Social Anxiety and Asperger's Syndrome

The site also covers topics related to the process and idea of improving socially:

• Feeling ambivalent about changing socially, seeing it as selling out or having to compromise your personality, wanting to change on one level, but not on others, and not being sure where to find the balance
• Feeling that your main social 'problem' is that you're just different from other people, in terms of your interests or style of socializing, and that you get a hard time because of it
• Having trouble with the process of improving your social skills, like finding the motivation, looking for a magic bullet, or not knowing where to start
• Having a negative view of certain aspects of socializing, and how that can affect someone's progress

How to start using the site

Assuming you haven't already started poking around on your own, or noticed that what I'm about to cover below is also on the right hand side bar that appears on every page, here are some quick thoughts on how to get started with the site:

• How you'll approach the site will mostly depend on what type of reader you are. Some people are happy with their social skills overall, and are just looking to quickly shore up a few weak spots. Other readers may be quite awkward, and have a number of longstanding issues they want to work on. More one-off visitors just need to find the handful of stuff that's relevant for them. People who have more to tackle may want to settle in for a longer haul.
• One way to find what you're looking for is with the search feature. Which is coincidentally located to the right of this sentence.
• You can also browse the site's entire list of articles. At the top of that list I've included a number of ways to find the stuff you're most interested in.

Before I link to the articles list I'll mention that sometimes new readers say the amount of content on the site is overwhelming to them. People who are here for more one-off reasons probably won't have this problem, but when someone realizes they have a larger set of issues to tackle, they can see how much writing there is and think, "Oh man, I can't read all of that" or "There's so much. I don't know where to begin." At the start of the articles listing page I offer some quick suggestions on how to lessen that feeling.

To help ease people into the site I've written an introductory piece that summarizes some of its key concepts and points to some of its most important articles.

The Main Concepts On SucceedSocially.com

With the disclaimers and whatnot out of the way, here's a link to the entire articles list if you want to look at it now: