In this article, we will explain to you how to become more social with 7 tips:
1. Make your social life a priority:
The first step towards change is to make your social life a top priority. This means that you must dedicate time to meet new people, spend time with new friends, and open up to others. This may be difficult for you if you are not social by nature for two reasons:
- The first reason is that you may not give much importance to social activities. We don’t mean that you have to spend most of your time at parties to make friends. It is enough to set aside some time to be in the places where people are in order to become more social.
- The second reason is your lack of the necessary energy to be social. If you live a life of isolation for a long period of time, you may have lost what we call your social fitness. This appears clearly when you attend a social event, and find that the people around you are enjoying their time effortlessly, while you make a lot of effort to keep up.
- The solution to the first problem is re-evaluating your priorities. If building strong friendships is important to you, you should allocate the necessary time to it.
- The solution to the second problem is not worrying about it. It is like going to the gym. You will regain your fitness through practice, and what exhausts you at first will become enjoyable and useful later.
This is only true if other aspects of your life are going well. However, if your life is chaotic, you should not prioritize social skills at the expense of yourself. If you have not taken care of building your personality properly, you will not be able to build meaningful and useful social relationships.
If other areas of your life are fine, we suggest that you give social skills a top priority because acquiring social skills has benefits that will be reflected on your career, wealth, health, and productivity. It is an important investment.
2. Be fun to have fun:
Life is like a mirror, as it reflects our qualities on the people and experiences we live. Fun experiences follow those who love fun, and success follows the successful.
This is the most important rule for success in any area of life, especially in social life. You have to imitate the thing you are trying to get. If you want to get to know fun and interesting people, you must be fun and interesting, and if you want people to get close to you, you must get close to them first and get to know them.
This is not an easy step. Do not stress yourself if you cannot achieve it immediately. When you are in an unfamiliar environment, it is natural to be reticent and feel nervous. However, remember that in 95% of the cases, you will not get the result you want because you are not making the effort you expect from others.
3. Be friendly, not cool:
There are many tips on the internet on how to be cool, and many of them are related to emotional relationships. We will not judge this content. Although some of it may be really useful, we will suffice with saying that most people who try to be cool, get the opposite result.
What happens is that antisocial individuals find cool people to be aloof or arrogant. Therefore, antisocial people try to have these characteristics, only to find themselves in uncomfortable environments which reflect these characteristics of them.
Social skills are mostly an unconscious process. Surely, you can remember that you met someone who was very friendly, but at the same time not very social.
The only way you can get rid of the feelings of embarrassment is by getting used to the social norms of the people you meet, and the only way to achieve that is through practice. Any attempt to feign confidence or a false attitude will be easily exposed to others. The best way to win over others is to treat people the way you wish to be treated.
If you want the people you interact with to be kind, friendly, and fun with you, then be friendly, kind, and fun. With this attitude, you will soon realize that cool people are not aloof nor arrogant. They are open and kind people who smile all the time, with polite and tactful behavior. Be friendly towards others, as this will improve your social skills more than anything else. This means being willing to strike up conversations with people and to take the initiative to say hello. If you are not used to this, it may take some effort at first, but by starting gradually, it will become a part of your daily life.
4. Start gradually:
You don't need to start taking actions that are too bold and completely out of your comfort zone. Although that boldness can help, we think most people think like this:
- They want to meet new people, so they think of the biggest and most stressful step.
- They try to get excited about doing it, but they fail.
- They start lecturing themselves for failing, call themselves weak-willed, and then go back to the first step.
There are many ways to meet other people, and some of these methods require more than just confidence and charisma. Some of these methods are easy, while others are very difficult. We recommend you to start with easy situations, and not to try to build your self-confidence with difficult situations. Start with easy situations that allow you to meet people, and gradually build your confidence up until you can deal with difficult situations.
5. Let go of false beliefs about personality:
One of the biggest mistakes that prevent people from living a fulfilling social life is that they believe that introverts cannot be sociable. The truth is that most introverts enjoy their time alone and prefer conversations with one person over conversations with a large group of people.
However, the characteristic of introversion has nothing to do with the individual’s ability to be social. You may meet someone on an occasion who introduces themselves in a wonderful way to strangers, but is in reality an introverted person.
It is true that innate differences in personality traits are important, but remember that your desire to form a certain social life is also due to an innate difference in personality. The fact that you want to live a certain experience is more important than any previous experience of success or failure. Therefore, do not pursue a social life that you do not really desire only because you feel like you have to.
Also, if you want something and have a real desire for it, be careful not to let the beliefs and opinions of others determine whether you are able to succeed in your pursuit or not.
6. Be socially independent:
If you want to improve a certain area of your life, you will often have to make some sacrifices. The improvement journey will initially involve some loss and pain before you start reaping gains. You have to sacrifice what you have in order to start over, and this applies to social life of course.
If your social life is full of friends, but you do not communicate with them genuinely, you should either work to rebuild these friendships and be more truthful, or abandon them. Sometimes, abandoning untruthful relationships is the right thing to do. This allows you to form new relationships with people you get along with in a better way.
If you spend a lot of time developing your personality, you will probably be able to outperform the group of people you have relationships with. Most people don’t change much, so if you are developing rapidly in your life, the people you have relationships with may be the biggest obstacles in the way of your progress.
We do not advise you to completely cut off your relationships unless these relationships are really destructive. You can invest your time in building new relationships because when you create a new circle of relationships that are more suitable for you, it will be natural for you to spend more time with those new people.
7. Work on developing the relationships you start with:
One of the mistakes that should be avoided is confusing social skills with the ability to meet others. The reason is that meeting people is only the beginning, and if you are good at this stage, your social life won’t necessarily be thriving unless you are able to build sustainable friendships.
So, after you meet the people you communicate with, don’t stop at this stage. Follow up and try to pique their interest by inviting them to participate with you in the activities you practice. This can be done very easily thanks to the facilities provided by social media platforms, which enable you to build relationships faster.
We also advise you to devote at least half of your time to improving your social skills in order to develop the relationships you have already built. The fun in building a group of strong friendships lies in the fact that it facilitates getting to know new people.
In conclusion:
The ultimate goal of acquiring social skills should not be limited to emotional relationships. The goal is to enrich your life with people who inspire you, motivate you, and give you satisfaction and happiness every time you achieve success, which is certainly a goal worth pursuing.
Add comment