6 Steps To Take To Improve Your Social Skills and Defeat Your Anxiety

Are you tired of being held back by your social anxiety? Do you always feel like you totally embarrass yourself after every social occasion even though the only “embarrassing” action you took was holding eye contact for more than 2 seconds? If all that relates to you, then read on and I will show you practical steps you can take to improve your social skills.

“But why should I take time and effort to improve my social skills?”, you might ask yourself, so before we get on to the 6 steps you can take to develop your social skills, let me first tell you why having excellent social skills is beneficial.

Why I should Improve my Social Skills

1. For business and the Job Market: 

Social skills are not only important in dating and parties, as a matter of fact, the most important part of having good social skills is to influence people in the business world. You might have excellent technical skills on the job you do, but if you can’t communicate with customers, ultimately and most probably, the person with better social skills will have your job. There are exceptions, but why take the chance? Right.

2. For Relationships 

Here, I am talking about both romantic and friendly relationships. In case of the romantic relationships, no matter how “hot” you think you are, nobody wants a partner who only has looks but you can’t relate to. This applies for both men and women. For friendly relationships, I think it is obvious for why you need social skills. The more relatable you are (which requires social skills), the more friends you will have.

3. For Developing Confidence

Many people on the internet claim there are shortcuts to having magnetic confidence, but the only practical way to develop confidence is to master skills. Confidence is a mindset where you are certain that you won’t fail on what you plan to do. Do you think regular public speakers (comedians, actors, motivational speakers…) have low confidence? No, you know why, because they have been in the situation for years, so it doesn’t faze them anymore. The same way when you apply the steps, I am about to give, below consistently you will be unfazed with social situations eventually.

Note: This is not a shortcut or overnight method to improving social skills. It requires consistent action and effort by your part, but eventually, the effort will pay off like it did for me, and you will be happy with the time you took.

6 Practical and Proven Steps To Take To Master Your Social Skills

1. Understand why your fear social situations and try to identify specific parts of interactions where you feel embarrassed and out of your comfort zone. The next time you are in a social situation where you aren’t comfortable, I want you to forget about the interaction and instead take notes in your mind for why you fear socializing. The more diverse your interactions; the better, so try interacting with men, women, elders, managers… and write why you fear the interaction

• Are you constantly thinking about what to say next and how to say it so that you don’t get embarrassed?
• Are you constantly re-positioning yourself so that you don’t look awkward, even though the only thing you are doing that is awkward is not sitting still.
• Take note of everything that is bothering your mind and making you unsociable. After that…

2. Write all the reasons you came up with and jot down under each why you have this irrational or exaggerated fear. For example, you might be afraid of being judged and laughed at if you say something wrong. Write for every single reason you came up with explanations for why you are afraid. You will find that for some of the reasons, you won’t have explanations 🙂 After jotting down everything that came through your mind…

3. Make a plan to confront that fear: I am pretty sure some of the excuses for your fear you came up with are just irrational and exaggerated, and in order for you to see that you are just irrational, you have to confront it and see how harmless the fear you have is. The plan is to go out and confront your fear; I know, it is scary, but I promise it is worth it. I suffered for the majority of my life thinking I could find an easier solution, but truthfully, there isn’t one. 

4. Improve your Physical Appearance: One of the reasons you came up with in Step 1 is probably that you are insecure about your looks and there is a solution for that. Take effort and time to improve your physical appearance. Many think that they are stuck with their looks but in reality there is a 1000 steps you could take to improve your appearance. You could improve your fashion and style sense; you could improve your facial appearance; you could lose weight and gain muscle mass by following Brandon Carters Channel; You could improve your body language and more.

Note: This step doesn’t have to be completed before going on to the next step, keep working on it while following the next steps.

5. Get a Job That Requires You to Utilize Your Social Skills: This is the step that completely eradicated my social anxiety and made me more sociable and you know why it works? Because you fear being fired more than interacting with strangers. It is like a therapy for your mind but you don’t pay 300$ per hour. The jobs I am talking about are waiting, hosting, retail service… Anything that requires constant interaction with strangers. If you take this action, I assure you social skills will skyrocket and your anxiety will start fading. If you want to take it a step further…

6. Embarrass yourself in Public: I am not saying you should make a complete utter fool out of yourself, but try to do something that grabs attention and try to cope with the attention by being unfazed and welcoming it. For example, go into a cafe and order something and eat by yourself. If you don’t fear this, try something more daring. But I know people who would rather not eat lunch rather than go out and eat lunch by themselves. Come up with things that embarrass you and do those things in public and eventually it will feel like a feather landing on your skin. NOTHING.

These are all the steps you need to take to improve your social skills; it requires constant effort and will not solve your problem in one day so keep at it and you will eradicate your anxiety and master your social skills.

————-

Yohan Michael is the owner and founder of Dynamiteblogging. Over the last 5 years, he has transformed his life by defeating his social anxiety and improving his appearance and attitude. To get more of his articles, be sure to subscribe to his newsletter and receive as a bonus his 6 free ebooks.