Comment by DesaiAshu
8 hours ago
You still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards
How, though, If you never developed social skills?
How to start riding a bicycle in your 40s, if you never developed bike skills? How to snowboard, if you never developed snowboard skills?
… Do it; suck. Do it more; suck less.
“How to Make Friends and Influence People” is a great & classic book about giving people social room, focus, support, and attention with genuineness and humour (“influence” isn’t meant in a manipulative sense). Effort and attention are required, and practice, but that’s the cost of change and improvement.
I mean.... Riding a bike is nothing like making friends.
“How to Make Friends and Influence People” is a salesman's guide, Dale Carnegie was an traveling salesman and the book techniques he learned making sales. The techniques you need to be a salesperson is probably not the same techniques to build lasting relationships. These tips are great for brief interactions; they are not for building relationships.
There's a couple of things that need serious caveats -
The "using the person's name" is so well known it's now clocked as exclusively a sleezy sales behavior. Don't do this - you sound like a sleezy salesman.
Asking people endless questions about themselves can really come off as a really weird integration and can be extremely off-putting if not done carefully/correctly and with grace. My mom does this, she asks hundreds of the dumbest most inane questions and she doesn't even listen to the answers to. It's so insufferable that people actively avoid her. I'm sure she read this book and thinks she's a social genius.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/17943742-how-to-...
"And also, if you think about these tips of smile and try to avoid arguments and greet somebody enthusiastically a lot of these are tips for making somebody like you immediately... They're not tips for ongoing relationships. They're like, when you show up at somebody's door, how can you make a good impression in the first five minutes and establish trust very quickly?"
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Find ways to lower the stakes.
Make new friends with others that have underdeveloped social skills and figure it out together.
Do things in a group in some activity that won't put the spotlight directly on you and where you can observe others.
Explore therapy where odds of rejection are pretty low since you're paying them for coaching.
I think noticing how children play is very instructive, but if you don't have good social awareness that could get you in trouble. Kids haven't internalized all the baggage you and I might have about social rejection and awkwardness yet. They just confidently say "hey I like your bracelets will you tell me what they mean to you?" and if it doesn't pan out this time they play with someone else. It's the social anxiety / awkwardness that usually makes people the most uncomfortable, not the atypical interactions. Kids don't have that at all.
I help my neighbors out a few days a week, and walk their kids down to the bus stop and make sure that they get off to school okay. There's a bunch of kids at the bus stop, and I know them all pretty well by this point.
The one little girl is black and has very tightly curled hair. Every few weeks she has it done up differently, with different colored beads, etc. I make sure to pay attention to when it changes so that I can tell her that it looks amazing, and she gets a huge smile on her face every time. It's often the highlight of my morning, and I truly hope that she heads off to school with more spring in her step.
Adults aren't much different -- they also like to receive compliments. Give out compliments as you see fit and soon you'll have something in common to talk about.
I like classes for meeting new people for a few reasons. First, there's a structure around the activity which doesn't force you interact all the time. Second, you're not entering an established group as the one new person. And third, you're all going through a shared experience which naturally helps form bonds.
If you're really hard up for social skills, and you like being around silly fun people and are okay acting silly yourself, I recommend taking an improv class. Any introductory improv class is basically kindergarten games to help you realize how low stakes socializing can be.
But I also realize improv isn't for everyone. In that case I recommend finding an activity you might be interested in and taking a class in it. If you aren't sure what you're interested in, good news! That means you get to take all the classes until you find one you like.
Even if there's no classes for your activity, anything that can be done out of the house and with other people probably has a community built around it. Use your interest in the activity as leverage to expose yourself to that community.
https://www.empathiceurope.com/ has free courses/trainings on empathic listening skills.
Spend some time on that website, see what you can dig up on specific skills, and then test using them in real life.
That site skews heavily towards therapists, and has a lot of woo-woo. It is clearly not THE answer.
But it is A answer. Enough to give you a framework to get started.
It's one of those things: the world doesn't care (unless you are really attractive of course), so you'll have to choose: Do I want to put even more effort into this and/or fake it 'til you make it - or do I want to be alone?
Doing it late(r) only adds to the pain of missing out before.
Just because you enjoy a thing at a certain time in your life, doesn't mean necessarily that you would or could have enjoyed a similar thing earlier.
Besides, social interactions are one of those things that don't depend exclusively on you but also on the environment and on luck. I had better and worse periods, I doubt I could have had only "great periods". Going through periods is how you also learn and get to put some effort to change (the environment and yourself).
In the grand scheme, it's very difficult to miss out on anything.
Taking phrases like "when you're ready" as a condescending insult or ego challenge is a stronger guarantee of pain than simply doing nothing. Your own expectations and misguided impressions are most of the pain.
There are plenty of bitter and unhappy people who got that way by being delusional. Misjudging one's own experiences and accomplishments is what it really means to "miss out".