For a long time I thought social skills were about being funny, interesting, confident, or charismatic.
Honestly, that mindset made everything harder.

Recently I realized something simple:
most social skills start with lowering the pressure for yourself and the other person.

When a conversation doesn’t feel like a performance, it becomes 10x easier to:

  • listen without overthinking
  • ask natural questions
  • actually enjoy the interaction
  • let the other person talk
  • stop worrying about “saying the right thing”

I’ve been practicing these small things and they helped a lot:

  • Asking simple, open questions like “How’s your week going?” instead of forcing something clever
  • Not trying to fill every silence (silence isn’t danger it’s space)
  • Reacting naturally instead of planning my next sentence
  • Letting conversations be light instead of trying to impress people

It turns out that the moment you stop trying to be “good at social skills,” you actually become better at them.

People relax around you.
You relax around them.
And conversations start to flow on their own.

Anyone else experience this? Or have something similar that helped your social skills click?


7 comments

  1. This is insightful. Managed to realise a few on my own, but you sum it much better than i do internally.

    Indeed silence is not necessarily something you have to be eager to fill.

    Next if you react naturally but still rub people the wrong way without you being aware and the person just didn’t bother to give proper feedback even when asked, just move on.

    While it is always advisable to self reflect, it is not always possible to fill in all gaps. So just accept the other party isnt a good match and vice versa.

    In other words, chill. A peace of mind at any moment is more valuable than any relationship. Cos when the mind is undisturbed you don’t always need clarification from anyone.

    You just see the correlation, causation effortlessly. All this needs lifelong investment.

    There are those with superb mental clarity but their intentions are selfish or even malicious.

    So dont fret. No pressure. Even the feeling of pressure need not be suppressed. Just be aware.

  2. Just listen and be respectul and be listened to respectfully.

    r e e s p e e c t find out what it means to me.

  3. Yes, I grew up in an environment where I needed to perform to be noticed (or tolerated, depending on the moment). So I developed massive social anxiety and got really good at masking to fit in. But it wasn’t until I learned how to be comfortable just as I am that everything started feeling good. A bonus is that you’ll more easily find true belonging when you’re not trying to impress anyone.

  4. Yessss exactly love this!! Making conversations and connections just genuine and natural, letting it be what it is, not trying to force anything. That’s what makes it go well, that’s what makes it feel good, and that’s what makes it genuine and EVEN MORE PRECIOUS!

    Connections don’t come from performances, they come from, literally connecting, bringing the walls down and seeing each other!

  5. My problem is that I’m great at asking questions and listening. But people do in fact want to hear jokes and interesting stories. They don’t want to just be interrogated the whole time. And I don’t have any jokes or stories to share. If I relax and don’t worry about it, I end up saying literally nothing besides questions and its so boring.

  7. This all folds into one principle for me, that you need to attribute the appropriate importance to the conversation, which is very little. We get into bad habits, trip ourselves up and fill our heads with anxious noise when we think an interaction is very important. How can you enjoy an interaction when you think your entire future hangs on it?

    The trick is to go out and have lots of conversations to desensitise yourself to them. A friend of mine did this by accident by taking a door-to-door sales job. He hated the job and getting the door slammed in his face time and again, but it taught him that it didn’t matter. I met him some time after that and he was one of the most chilled guys I’ve talked to.

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