Tips for Becoming Socially Confident

Interact with people. It's a learnable skill just like playing baseball or reading. Talk to the people you see when you're going about your business and learn to thrive outside of your comfort zone. Pretty soon you begin to understand the akwardness you feel when you interact with people is coming from your own head. You become more comfortable sociallizing and you begin to enjoy it which makes you want to socialize even more. When you get better and more comfortable socializing, people will enjoy socializing with you even more.

 

At the moment this is an area in your life that is beyond your current skills, confidence, experience level, and comfort zone.

The uncertainty of what might happen (pain / problems / negative experiences) worries you. Your mind tries to fill in the gaps of that uncertainty via overthinking (which makes the anxiety even worst). That overthinking is basically you being overly concerned / excessively worried about doing the right thing to avoid pain / problems / negative experiences. Trying to attain guarantees before taking action.

That uncertainty / possible set of circumstances are made not to matter as much by experiencing them (both pain and pleasure / problems and solutions / positive and negative experiences). That experience leads to competency. Repeated competency leads to confidence... but you have to be willing to face those uncertain experiences with your current incompetence / insecurity / lack of experience / lack of certainty. So step 1 is courage. The courage to do something that might not work. To look like a fool doing something you're not good at. The courage to fail and make mistakes. The courage to take more uncertain risks which leads to more failures, but also to more success. Eventually that repeated courage gains you both positive and negative experiences which circles back to what I said above.

Repeated courage leads to competence. Repeated competence leads to confidence. Repeated confidence leads to more courage to do things that might not work / that's outside your current level of competence confidence and experience level. That ability to go through this process allows you to be more courageous in any other aspect of your life that you want to get better and more confident with.

Confidence is earned.

Where most people go wrong is that they want to magically have confidence without earning it. So they use alcohol, drugs, research some kind of bulletproof never get rejected 10 super secret techniques, or they don't take any action at all.

Do something that might not work. Do it even if you're incompetent, insecure, inexperienced, and scared.

Trust the process.

Invest in your long term outcomes rather than fearing short term emotions.

The more risks you take, the more you'll fail, but also the more you'll succeed.

The less risks you take, the less you'll fail, but also the less you'll succeed.

You become socially confident by first being socially insecure, but being social anyways.

 

There’s a book called ‘the noble art of seducing women’ that covers things like confident body language and techniques to keep conversation going. I got a lot out of it and the majority of it can be used in the majority of social encounters, just leave out the seduction parts if talking to your barber etc. (unless you’re into him then go for it, I don’t know!)

When talking to people the biggest worry is that you’re going to screw it up or say the wrong thing, you can’t go into interactions with this mind set! Just be happy and non-attached to the outcome of the interaction, if it doesn’t work out as planned, the most important thing is that you learn and grow from it! It’s better than avoiding it all together.

I think it’s awesome that at 20 you’re looking at improving this aspect of your life, with that attitude you’ll be a changed person in no time!

 

Nice one elevate, well said!

 

Having been very socially anxious and awkward myself as a 20 year old back in the day (11 years ago), my best tip is to first disconnect yourself as much as possible from the digital world and then go out and practice practice and practice by meeting people and interacting with them as you go through your daily business and routines.
It feels very awkward, uncomfortable and frightening at first but I can promise it will give you much more confidence (and improved social skills) by actually facing these fears rather than trying to ignore them or push them aside. In my case, as I was moving overseas (from Europe to North America) for six years as a 20 year old, it really forced me to interact with people all the time or otherwise I would have been in a much tougher spot.
Believe it or not, having social skills these days is going to be worth its weight in gold in the future as more people become addicted to their phones and don't want to learn, improve or maintain that skill as much.

 

Yes.

Social skills, delayed gratification, attention, facing adversity / uncertainty / tension / conflict, placing importance on long term outcomes rather than short term emotional gratifications, and just developing yourself along with your reality in general.

With every year as technology / comforts / convenience evolve, there are less and less people that are able to thrive within reality.

The basic skill of seeing beyond instant gratification / what immediately feels good / short term emotions / what's comfortable now (which becomes uncomfortable later on)... is fading among most people.

 

I don't know if this works for social confidence, but I feel unconfident at work and I have found that the way to overcome it is to pretend. It turns out there is no difference between a confident person and someone pretending to be confident. If someone at work does something amazing and it feels like they put my work in the shade I ask myself how a confident person would react and I do that instead.

 

An easy place to start is try chatting with cashiers every time you buy something.

Captive audience that’s low risk.

Every time you buy something try it.

 

I don't know if someone mentioned this: Look into people's eyes. Your sustainable look tells you how self-confident you are.
Practice looking at people's one eye.

 

Social anxiety is probably my biggest motivator for partaking in nofap. Do you any of you guys feel there is a physiological/hormonal component to the social anxiety we experience? Whenever i am on a long streak my anxiety symptoms definitely reduce... and then when i relapse bam.. my anxiety worsens, i struggle to make eye contact and i just feel like a general awkward sissy...

 

Same here.

Humans are naturally social animals, communicating and connecting with other people is supposed to be rewarding and make us feel good (dopamine and whatever). The idea goes that if we're depriving ourselves of the dopamine rush from porn and so on, then we're more motivated to and feel less anxious about seeking out other forms of getting our dopamine fix, ideally communication and connecting with other people.

Testosterone likely plays a part too, less porn and fap and in general you'll have more testosterone. The more testosterone, the more likely you'll seek out risk and go for things that might have scared you before.

 

This might sound a little dumb but ive just started doing voice recordings of myself, just random little voice journals if you like.. and i find it hard to talk, my voice sounds quite trembly and i generally just feel quite similiar to how i do in social situation. i mean for me anyway, it may not be the presence of others that brings about the anxiety, it could be the fact due to the withdrawals my body cannot react the way i would like in social situations and as a result is inducing me with the anxiety as opposed to a direct fear of others...

 

I think recording yourself and listening back is a great idea and you should be giving yourself feedback on how to improve. It's easy to only see the negative about how bad you sound and let it mean too much. Instead you could try imagining you're actually listening to a friend and that they want you to give them some honest feedback on how they could sound better. Hopefully this approach will make it easier to focus on what you can fix and improve rather than judging yourself for not sounding the way you want to.

I haven't listened to myself recorded for a long time but I remember hating the way I sounded, your post has made me realise that I need to face this too, thanks for sharing.

 

How far along on your reboot are you bud?

 

Yes! Keep going with the practice, make steady and continuous progress. You'll begin noticing other peoples shyness and social awkwardness, see if that applies to you and where you can improve that in yourself. Also keep your eye out for people who seem like natural stand up confident people and model some of their behaviour.