If you’ve ever struggled for acceptance in your peer group or even found it hard to get into any form of consistency in your social interactions at all, then don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many people are in the same situation. And fortunately, social skills are just that- they’re skills that can be learned and refined over time – as we make our way through life. Just because you feel like you’re on the outside looking in right now, doesn’t mean it has to be that way forever.
Here are 3 techniques that will help you improve your skills.
- The Deserve It Factor
And this one isn’t so much of a skill as it is a change of perspective, but it’s a really important one to integrate if you’ve ever found yourself being needy or entitled to someone’s friendship. If you’ve ever had been on the receiving end of this, you’ll know how much of a massive turn-off it is. When someone is needy and not able to be fully independent, it acts as a repellent. So, if you’re coming to your interactions with the same kind of entitlement and expectancy of people’s time and energy, you’re going to get nowhere fast. The ‘deserve it factor’ is a question you ask yourself to determine how much you deserve something based on the effort you’re putting in. For example, if you’ve got designs on being a track and field athlete, but you never put the time in, it’s never going to happen. Because you won’t deserve it. Now, apply the logic to your inter-personal relationships, if you’re someone who’s always in a mode of expectancy and wanting what other people can do for you, it doesn’t set the right tone. You are deserving of the people around you based on how willing you are to be giving of yourself and how much time you invest in becoming a better communicator, listening to people, helping them meet their emotional needs and showing up when it counts.
You build trust and rapport, which leads to the natural organic growth of a relationship.
- The Inverse Rule
Now, we can take this one step further and put it into practice. Again, this is a bit of a perspective-shifting tool. Or, if you’re familiar with NLP, you could think of it as a frameshifting exercise. This is ideal for those times where you know what you want, but you don’t know how to get it.
So, you want to follow these four steps:
- Set your main goal
- Invert the goal (Basically, find its opposite)
- Find the Subgoals (smaller goals within that opposite)
- Invert those goals back to your main goal
Ok, so now that might be a bit confusing, so let’s run through a breakdown of how it works, and we’ll use social skills as an example. Your main goal is to be more accepted by others and increase your network of friends. So, if you inverse that, your goal is now to drive them away. And if you want to accomplish that you might be:
- Criticise people
- Always talk about yourself
- Cut people off in the middle of what they’re saying
- Gossip about other people
Now, you’ve got what doesn’t work, you simply flip these sub-goals, it back to your original main goal. And now you’re left with something like this:
- Give people compliments
- Make the conversation about others
- Listen intently to what’s being shared
- Never speak badly of others when they’re not around
This is a pretty basic example. And you can actually go quite deep and expand on this to create your own core set of values for how you approach not just your relationships, but any goal you’re struggling to create a method of success.
- The FORD Method
This final hack is a real get of jail free card.
If you’ve ever been left alone with a friend of a friend you’ve just met for 5 minutes and there is literally nothing either of you can think to talk about remember this acronym. The ford method stands for:
- Family
- Occupation
- Recreation
- Dreams
These are a set of universal topics that everyone can relate to in some way, and so you’re always likely to get an answer. Let’s take the example we just laid out. You probably wouldn’t want to start asking about someone’s family immediately. It can come off as a little jarring and a bit invasive. The best place is occupation. What do you do? Or what do you do for work? Yes, it’s cliche and a bit on the nose, but you have to start somewhere and this is a last resort set of questions if you have absolutely nothing else to say, don’t forget. After work, recreation is your next safest bet. Then dreams, although you’ll probably want to avoid framing the question as directly as ‘what are your dreams?’ You could maybe ask in relation to their job is that what you always wanted to do, or even ‘is there something else that you’re moving towards.’ You could also tie in travel. Have they been anywhere this year, are they going to, what would be their dream destination? See how the dream was subtlety slipped in there? Then, if you’ve got the person to loosen up and you need somewhere else to go, you’re probably in safe enough territory by now to ask some casual questions about their family. Hopefully, by that point, your friend should have returned and you can breathe a sigh of relief about not having to carry the conversation by yourself anymore.
