Before You Try Social Hacks, Read This!

If you want to improve your social skills, you should first build a solid foundation before learning any tactics or hacks.

Mindset and self-perception are foundations governing how you interact with others.

This article will teach you how to tune your mindset and self-perception to deal with others efficiently.

Mindset is how you think about yourself, others and social situations.

For example, you might think "People are scary" or "People are opportunities" for connection.

Self-perception is how you see and evaluate yourself in terms of confidence, worth, and abilities.

For example, you might think, "I'm someone worth knowing and I can bring good energy to the conversation", or "People don't find me interesting, I will need to prove myself."

Now that you understand mindset and self-perception, let's explore the mindset and self-perception one should have.

Growth over fixed identity

Believe that social skills are trainable and not something fixed.

If you think you can work on your social skills, you have a chance of becoming socially skilled. But if you think social skills can't be improved, you have already lost the game.

Curiosity over performance

Social situations are not for impressing or proving yourself, but to understand others.

You should think, "I want to learn about this person, " not "I want to impress this person."

When you try to impress others, you feel anxious about others' engagement level, which makes you uncomfortable.

If you drop this off your shoulders, you will feel more relaxed in conversations.

Additionally, if you stay curious about the other person, you will ask questions, understand and relate better, making the interaction engaging.

Self-worth First

Respect your thoughts, decisions, actions and yourself, regardless of external approval.

When your perceived self-worth does not depend on others, you will feel less pressured in social situations.

You will not be driven to fake or exaggerate yourself to impress others. People will sense your authenticity and trust you more.

When you respect yourself, you will not allow others to mistreat you and maintain healthy boundaries.

Your self-sufficiency will manifest in your body language, voice tone, decision-making and behaviour.

No Approval Seeking Mindset

In our early days as humans, being accepted into the group translated into higher chances of survival. So we are evolutionarily wired to seek approval from others.

Further, when we were growing up, everyone around us said, "Be good, " "Make a good impression." So we are socially conditioned to seek approval from others.

If you have an approval-seeking mindset, you will constantly think on the line, "Do they like me?", "Am I saying the right thing?"

You will often turn to people pleasing and change your opinions and thoughts to get others' approval.

Eventually, others will not respect, trust or like you genuinely.

So, you should consciously resist the approval-seeking mindset and honour yourself more.

With the above mindsets, you have a solid foundation to work on your social skills.

If you interact more and more with others, you might eventually develop social skills and use them to your advantage.

But, if you want to learn from my experiences and fast-track your progress, you should definitely check out my book, "Social Skills Mastery."

Click the button below to access it.

Remember, life is too short to learn by making all the mistakes yourself. It is always better to learn from others.