4 ms·
Ultimately all the advice in the world leads to one simple starting point: You have to act, practice, and rehearse new skills to get their benefit and those fir
by spodek 9y ago
Ultimately all the advice in the world leads to one simple starting point: You have to act, practice, and rehearse new skills to get their benefit and those first acts, as with any new skill, will be clumsy, embarrassing, and full of other challenges that will lead the novice to feel bad.
If you try, you will fail and feel bad, worse than if you never tried, but if you stick with it, you can overcome the failures. You'll never lose access to the skills you now have it you don't want to feel or act social, but you can when you want.
The reward for overcoming those failures, in my experience at least, is so much greater than the struggle to reach that reward, that I only wish I had started learning social and emotional skills earlier.
- havetocharge 9y agoThere is a lot of good advice in the actual article, but this is also a good point. Failure in a social setting can feel especially bad, but there is hardly a way to improvement without experiencing it. With perseverance, one can establish tolerance to such pain, and eventually develop the skills that help avoid it altogether.
- maxxxxx 9y ago"If you try, you will fail and feel bad, worse than if you never tried, but if you stick with it, you can overcome the failures" This is probably good advice for a lot of people but it can also make things worse. I have made several attempts to "go out there and learn" and the result was always that I didn't improve but instead got more insecure. I think there needs too be some underlying strategy and not just banging your head into the same wall. A lot of people understand social skills intuitively but some don't.
- ljf 9y agoThe thing is - with most nice people - even if you 'fail' they aren't going to hold it against you or make fun of you. In fact, most people won't even notice your 'failures'. And if someone does make fun or hold it against you, it's a great time to consider cutting them out. I remember years ago reading a comment about someone who was terrified of failure, until they learnt to skateboard - and realised that aside from the occasionally pulled off success, everyone was failing all the time, and that they reveled in the trying.
- germinalphrase 9y agoI felt the same way after recently starting a grappling based martial art. My entire training goal has been "learn to lose less quickly" - which is humbling.
- watwut 9y agoIt depends a bit on what exactly the failure was through. If you come across as clumsy and awkward, sure there should be no problem. If you unintentionally came across as rude, cruel, high maintenance to be around or something like that, people may make assumptions about you and act accordingly.
- maxxxxx 9y agoAnd I bet a lot of people who came across as rude don't really mean it.
- maxxxxx 9y agoLet's say you make an effort to talk to people and after doing that a lot people still don't talk to you or you invite people but they never invite you back and so on. It's clear you are doing something wrong but how do you figure out what's wrong and how to do it right? Skateboarding is much easier. The skateboard will be there tomorrow and you can try again. With people it's different. After a few awkward encounters they don't want to deal with you anymore.
- ljf 9y agoFair enough, I should have added that it's good to find places where failing is cheap - meet ups, public social events, mixers etc. I do understand that people can form opinions quickly that can stick.