Benefits Of Improving Your Social Skills, Even If You Don't Care About Them

I figure most of the people who are visiting this site are here because they're motivated to improve their social skills. They want the pretty obvious benefits of learning interpersonal skills such as:

Better, more rewarding relationships with people.
The ability to make friends and create a social life.
Opportunities to have a more fun, varied, fulfilling life.
Relief from problems like shyness, insecurity, loneliness, and poor self-esteem.
Better career opportunities.
An overall better ability to function and succeed in the world, because pretty much everything you do involves social interactions in one way or another. As anyone will tell you, it's very hard to do well in life while totally having to avoid getting along with other people. In contrast,if you're a good communicator, it can make up for a lot of your other weaknesses.

I also know some people with poor social skills don't really care about improving them. That may be the reason their people skills are weak today, because it's just not appealing, or a priority to them. For the most part this site is made for that first group of people who want to improve. If you're not interested in this area, I don't feel like I need to spend all my time trying to convince you that you should be.

This is one of the articles where I'll make an exception though. I've been on both sides of the fence. I've gone though periods where I've been the unsocial guy who gets peeved when he's forced to interact with people. I've just wanted to be left alone to do my thing, even if other people thought I was being a recluse, and resented being told I should be "more social." But now I'm contentedly in that socially-average range, and I'm happy I put the work into getting there.

Here are my arguments for why it can be beneficial to develop your social skills, from one person with unsociable tendencies to another. I'm not going to reiterate the points from the top of the article. Instead I'm going to say some things that may speak more to the mentality and motivations of people who aren't intrinsically drawn towards the social world. If you're still unconvinced after reading everything, that's alright. If you really don't think it's in your nature to be social, then you should go with what will make you the happiest. Working on your people skills is admittedly a fair amount of work, and there's no point in doing if you think it will have no payoff:

You'll have a way easier time relating to potential romantic partners

No point in being coy and holding this one back until a little later. You may not care if you never have many friends, or if you aren't attending parties every weekend, but I bet you want to be able to have intimate relationships. I've written out this basic story before, but here I go again: I used to be hopeless with women. For several years I got sidetracked into thinking the solution to my problem lay in learning a bunch of tricks to get better 'game'.

Then it dawned on me that a more fundamental factor holding back my romantic success was that I was lacking basic social skills. I couldn't even get along with normal people very well, so why did I think I could get a girlfriend or hook up with someone? When I started working on my core people skills, I found relating to women became a lot easier as a natural side-effect. I mean, women are people too, and as much as relating to them requires some unique skills, a lot of it uses the same principles as it takes to connect with any person. And the people who tend to do well romantically are usually pretty likable on the whole. Get better with regular people and you get better with women. And working to do better with regular people isn't nearly as nerve racking.

I won't make the process seem easier than it is, there are other components to doing okay in the dating world than just basic social skills. Managing anxiety is the other main obstacle that holds a lot of people back. Having knowledge about how to be charming is also important. But if your core interpersonal skills are weak, and you're floundering romantically, this may be a productive area in which to focus your attention.

Socializing won't get on your nerves so much

When your social skills are weak, interacting with others can often be an irritating experience. It seems like everyone is a loudmouth idiot with nothing worthwhile to say. People are always trying to start time wasting conversations with you when you'd rather be left alone. They're always doing little things to get on your nerves.

When your social skills get better, you gain the tools to handle these situations better. When you manage them fairly easily, they're more tolerable, even enjoyable. The co-worker you would previously have had an strained, formulaic exchange with becomes your work buddy. You lighten up and start to see things from another perspective and realize all the little behaviors you previously wrote off as vacuous and bothersome really aren't so terrible.

You'll know you can do it, even if you choose not to

Even if you don't care about socializing, sometimes the fact that you're not proficient at it can still eat away at you. If you get your people skills into shape, that's one weight you lose off your back. It's good to know you don't totally suck at something, even if you're not going to use that ability all that often.

This point too is about increasing your freedom. Even if you choose not to use them most of the time, just knowing that you can pull out your social skills if you have to can open up a lot more options in your life. Like say as a career path you choose to be self-employed and do largely solitary work. If an opportunity comes up that involves working with another person or team, the choice is at least there for you to consider.

You get to drop a lot of your baggage towards socializing

I found it was hard to go through life with a clear mind when I had sub-standard social skills. I was annoyed at people for always saying I was an introvert. I was annoyed at myself when I did something particularly bumbling and clueless. Then I was annoyed at the person I was clueless towards by twisting things around in my mind so I thought it was actually their fault.

When I was playing video games alone, in the back of my mind I was annoyed people "out there" thought it was a poor way to spend my time. I was annoyed at society for decreeing communication skills were important, and punishing me in a million little ways for not caring about them. I was bitter about a lot of things. If you read through this site more, you'll find dozens of more examples of how my head space was messed up.

As I got better at relating to people, a lot of this thinking dissipated. I could let out some breath and relax a little. I become more easy going. I stopped having periods where I dwelt on how much socializing irked me. I stopped holding grudges against so many types of people.

You might really care deep down

I have no doubt some people truly are indifferent to socializing, but I think there are also lots of people who really do care about it, but have convinced themselves they feel otherwise. I've tried to do this in the past, but I couldn't keep it up over the long run.

I think some people's bad experiences with socializing have left them feeling bitter towards the whole concept. For others I think it's a case of, "I don't think I'll ever be good at it, so I don't want it anyways." It could be a kind of stubbornness as well: "I resent that everyone thinks I need to change myself and learn to be better with people. I'll show them. They can't tell me what to do. I won't give them the satisfaction of being right."

I think a lot of mental baggage also comes out of really caring, but not wanting to admit it. Rather than being in touch with what you want, but perhaps having to express vulnerability, inadequacy, weaknesses, or hurt feelings, you instead throw up a lot of rationalizations and faulty belief systems to make social skills out to be a bad thing.

You'll gain more freedom to be your true self

I discuss this point more in this article about why you don't need to sell out to do better socially. One of the sections is about how if you have good social skills, people give you a pass on any so-called 'dorky' traits you may have.