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 Be More Social
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.
January 8, 2009
This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts. I’ll add new ones when I have a spare moment.
As far as I know, there aren’t many sites out there devoted totally to interpersonal skills. However, there are quite a few blogs that occasionally write about socializing, but mostly focus on a range of other personal development topics. Compared to other categories like productivity or finding your life’s purpose, social skills don’t get a ton of attention. One of these sites may only have a handful of articles on getting along with people in two years worth of archives.
What they do write though can be quite good. Each one of these posts will gather together the people skills articles from one of these sites.
The first site I’ll do is The Simple Dollar. It’s mainly about finances and paying off debt and whatnot, but when using StumbleUpon one day I came across a helpful article on it about creating a social network. I was impressed and went through the archives and found several more. Here they are:
Building a Powerful Social Network in Your Immediate Area
Investing in Yourself: Socializing and Networking
Seven Ways To Overcome Social Awkwardness That You Can Practice Anytime
Nine Social Skills To Practice – Even For The Socially Unskilled Like Myself
I didn’t list them here, but it also has a few entries relating to relationships and finances (i.e., what to do if your friends are more loose with their money than you).
August 1, 2008
There aren’t a ton of articles on my main site on making conversation. One reason for this is that I think you can do a lot to improve your conversational skills indirectly, and not by focusing too much on the little details. The larger reason though is that the topic has already been written about quite a bit. I like to give more attention to what I feel are less explored ideas.
But that’s just me. If you’re interested, here are some links to articles on conversation. My main criteria was to look for articles that cover new ideas besides the usual listen, smile, be interested, follow current events, offer compliments, ask open-ended questions, repeat what they said back at them-type advice. Not that that stuff is bad, just that you’ve probably heard it already.
My three conversations articles to start things off, in case you haven’t seen them:
Some ‘bigger picture’ thoughts on making conversation
Examples: Starting conversations, inviting people out, and more
How to do better in loud, crazy group conversations
By Scott H. Young – this guy mostly writes about productivity and changing your habits and stuff, but the handful of articles he’s written on social topics are pretty insightful:
Better conversations: Collecting life stories
Improve your conversations with stories
Mastering Conversation
Two recent ones from lifehack.org:
How to initiate conversation
How to exit a conversation
Positivity Blog – another one of those eclectic personal development blogs that occasionally discusses socializing:
Do you make these 10 mistakes in a conversation?
5 conversational mistakes that can make you look dumb
Five awesome and five awful conversation topics
Best Tool For The Job – found this one pretty randomly:
How to have better conversations
And that’s it. It’s weird. I had some of these articles in mind going in, but the rest I pretty much found through Google. I intended to link to anything good that I found, but the only stuff I really liked was on blogs. All the non-blog stuff I found was either too short, basic/unoriginal, or obviously a teaser for some commercial program. Go figure.
July 25, 2007
