Blog is having technical difficulties at the moment. Hopefully I’ll have time to fix them soon.
A few months ago I wrote a pretty short, basic article explaining why it’s important to directly practice your people skills. I just added a pretty big section to it on some ways you can get social experience. Check it out. The new section starts about a third of the way down:
How to practice your social skills
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First a new article:
When People Say “How’s It Going?”, “What’s Up?” or “What’s New?”
And a semi-new one on small talk, that organizes what a few previous articles said about it:
Thoughts On The Point Of Small Talk
There was something else I wanted to include in this update but I think I’ll just get to it later. That’s it for the site tune up updates. There are lots of little clean ups I’m still going to make, but they’re not really worth announcing, just more minor organizing.
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By request, I added a new section the article How Backpacking/Traveling Can Boost Your Social Skills on how to actually organize a trip. I tried to make it a quick, basic overview since this isn’t a travel site or anything, but it still went longer than I thought it would.
If you’re thinking about going on your first trip, check it out.
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Here’s the third batch of updates. The first three articles are new, but mainly gather together a bunch of ideas that were previously scattered all over the place:
Loosen Up To Be More Socially Successful
Is Thinking You’re Better Than Other People Holding You Back Socially?
Reasons People Mistakenly Think They Don’t Like Something
(I’m not sure about the title for this one. If you read the article you’ll get what it’s about, but I can’t quite figure out a good wording for the concept without sounding accusatory. False, mistaken, faulty, they all sound bad and don’t totally capture everything… If you have any idea, feel free to drop me a line).
I also edited What To Do If You Can’t Relate To All The Shallow People Out There to be not be about six different concepts at once, and to focus just on ways people can seem more shallow than they are, and why “shallow” things aren’t all bad.
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The second batch of updates is done. First a new article:
Some Ways People Are Mentally Lazy About Judging Others
And a sort of new article, to put my ideas about indirect improvement in one spot:
Indirectly Become More Socially Successful By Improving Yourself As A Person
I split up and revised my older article on the tricky issue of changing yourself. One thing I wanted to emphasize was how you don’t have totally overhaul your whole personality just to get better with people:
You Don’t Have To Totally Change And Sell Out To Have Social Success
Sometimes Changing Yourself Can Increase Your Social Success
And since the ideas in the articles above previously may have been scattered all through the site, often redundantly, I’ve gone through the site as a whole to help tidy it up. I’m not totally done on that count, but I should be once all the tune ups are done.
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This is one of those updates that may not wow you if you’ve been following the site for a while, but which I think will help make it more useful for new readers.
I’ve been writing www.succeedsocially.com for about two and a half years. I’ve put up around 75 articles. At the time I wrote each article, I was focused mainly on whatever points I wanted to get across for that topic.
If you take the site as a whole though, it’s gotten a little messy as the articles have accumulated. Themes that should be more prominent are scattered all over the place. Some ideas get repeated too often. Some articles discuss too many things at once and would be better off split up.
I felt it was time to go through the entire site and give it a clean up to try to make it more organized and cohesive. This will take me a while, but I’ve grouped the changes I need to make into rough batches. I’ll update the site when I get a ‘batch’ done.
A new article, based on a question I get asked fairly often:
How Long Does It Take To Improve Your Social Skills?
Some of the material at the end is moved over from an older article called Overall Attitudes That Will Help You Improve Your People Skills. That one has had some new concepts added to it.
The importance of practicing gets its own article:
Directly Practice Your Social Skills To Improve Them
The idea of there being no magic shortcut gets it’s own article too:
There’s No Quick, Effortless Way To Improve Your Social Skills
The article My Take On Social Skills And How To Improve Them was really three things at once. The original is gone now. First, it was about why I created the site. That’s in its own article now:
Next it talks about what social skills are. Maybe I’ll write about that one day. Lastly, it gave some general principles for how to improve. That should be coming fairly soon.
I’m working on this site-wide overhaul straight through until it’s done. I’ll post the next batch of updates as soon as I can.
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Scott H Young is a college student who blogs about a range of personal development topics, with a definite focus on productivity and habits.
Social skills-wise, he has some really good things to say. When I read his advice on socializing, I sometimes have to laugh because he’s independently come to some of the same conclusions I did (e.g., that advice like, “Just be confident and be yourself”, is easier said than done, or that socially capable people often say things like this because they can’t really articulate why they’re good).
He likely knows what he’s talking about because he had to get his own people skills into shape. As he says:
“I became a lot more social when I moved from my smaller town to the larger city of Winnipeg. Before my move, I hadn’t built many strong relationships in my hometown. This was partially due to my personal development efforts, as I distanced myself from the crowd to work on myself. It was only after I moved that I realized I was missing a huge chunk of life, and I needed to take steps to fix it.
…nearly three years later, those steps have been very successful. I have several groups of friends, and any evening I spend by myself is a matter of choice, not a lack of options.”
Here are some of his articles:
How To Improve Your Social Skills
Social Skills And Dancing For Dummies
I also wrote an earlier post listing some links to good articles on making conversation. I mention three of his articles on that sub-topic there too.
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New article:
Some Things I’ve Noticed Now That I Have Better Social Skills
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SucceedSocially.com has a more obscure, less-frequented sister site, www.datinggroundwork.com. It’s where I’ve written a handful of articles on remedial dating advice for inexperienced guys.
I haven’t updated it since August of 2007, but I’ve just finished adding a bunch of new articles, re-writing other ones, and re-arranging the overall organization.
Check it out if you want:
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Here’s the latest batch of posts for my blog carnival:
Project Hitchhiker presents Moving? Ten Steps You Can Take To Create A New Social Circle In Less Than 2 Weeks
Purpose Power Coaching presents The Power Of Silent Conversation
Alpha Student presents Feeling shy?
Potential 2 Success presents Meet Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere
Defining Someday< presents How to be Polite at a Party
Peter Murphy presents How To Get People To Respect You
The Wise Curve presents The way you dress does affect your life
Better Relationship Builder presents 6 Keys To A Great First Impression
The next carnival will be whenever. If you want, you can submit your articles here.
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