The Dangers of learning Social Skills
April 30th, 2007
Social skills When people look for the “right thing to say†or if they “don’t know what to say†in any situation it usually boils down to a lack of clarity in what outcome they want or a lack of confidence in their ability to achieve that (self assurance).
While I think there’s nothing wrong with learning social skills, and in fact I commend anyone who wants to improve their social impact, there are, however, caveats and drawbacks which I feel should be addressed.
Social skills are only a probablistic science, like psychology or anthropology. They deal in what is likely to happen, what is statistically probable. If you say/do this, you should get this reaction. Deterministic sciences are those that are heavily based on maths, or deal with things in the purely physical world. If you do this, this will happen. Essentially the point needs to made that learning a social skill(technique) is no guarantee of the results, only a probability of success at best, a promise at worst.
The problem with internalising social skills or any skills training is the fact that you’re always playing with live ammo. There is no encounter that’s safe. If you were learning a new sport, you wouldn’t go straight into a championship game to get to grips with the rules and strategies. If you were learning how to use a new system, you wouldn’t be given the live version but another, or some less important task. Two things arise from this. If you are devloping social skills, doing it only in important situations is probably the most counter productive thing you can do. For one thing, you’re heavily emotional invested in the interaction. If you really want to make a good impresssion on somebody and get a date; win that contract; make the sale; ace the interview, changing and testing your new behaviours in that situation, and that situation only, will mean you’ll come across as very unpolished. Any new behaviour or skill is always rough around the edges. Think of the first time you drove or rode a bicycle, it was no where near as smooth as it is now. If you want to improve yoru social impact, you’ve got to be consistent, which entails changing how you interact in every situation, not just the vital interactions.
Secondly, you can’t break down social skill development into constituent parts and drill them like you can almost any other skill. If you want to be better at volleying in badminton, you can have your partner hit the shuttle to you over and over, with them putting increasing pressure on you as you improve.
This isn’t applicable to developing social skills. Say, for example you want to be better and deflating angry situations. I can’t see a way where you could contrive a situation with someone indignantly shouting at you and attempt to difuse it, afterwards reviewing your highlights and lowlights and then repeating with increased tension or a new strategy. Every situation is different, and you’re always playing life at ‘match pace’. This is a difficulty which is often overlooked in social skills courses.
Also, you can’t control conditions 100%. What makes the perfect date? You can control only to a very limited point. If the other person isn’t in the same headspace as you how can you categorically state you did anything right/wrong. Plus looking at only one encounter or example is unreliable from any statistical or scientific point of view. Would you honestly rely on medicine that had only been tried out by one person with no laboratory conditions? I wouldn’t!
Why I disagree with the term social skill: You cannot teach a social skill, only a technique. A technique used in the right context with the right effect is considered skill. Teachers of social skills make a lot of assumptions, the most important is that you (the student) will know when to employ a certain technique. Depending on your level of experience (social situations beyond what you are truly comfortable with) you’ll either know when to employ a certain technique, use it out of context or be completely baffled as to when to use it.
How social skills are learnt? Social skills are learnt by reading situations, seeing what works – has a desired effect – and then attempting to find the underlying reason or coming up with an explanation.
(Note the term, “has the desired effectâ€, if you don’t know what the desired effect/ideal outcome is, learning how to direct and manipulate conversations is pointless to an extent. The what is always more important than the how.)
How social skills are taught, however, is different. A situation is presented along with an ideal response. A technique is taught over a concept. Why is this? Well a technique is easier taught that a concept. A technique is something solid, with a clearly deliniated start and end point. Concepts are harder to get across because they require an understanding of context. One first needs to understand the situation, the history, and the desired outcome. It requires a more ‘advanced’ reading of a situation.
Sebastian, a social skills instructor who I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his workshops, has another take on concepts/tactics versus techniques. My BJJ instructor believes that when you’re a beginner, you want to learn all the new cool techniques. But what you really need is to immerse yourself ìn the sport, and start with learning the concepts. Once you have a grasp of the sport, you can learn and implement techniques with ease. If you’re chasing techniques without a solid understanding of the fundamentals, your growth is always stunted. I believe the same is true of social skills.
A lot of social skill teachers, particularly those in the seduction community, have a particularly strong belief system that allows what they say to work for them in any context. Tyler Durden uses this analogy in one of his speeches. If you were to hang out with rapper 50 Cent for a week you’d become convinced it was necessary to wear a bulletproof vest, put up a tough front and never let anyone away with disrespecting you in front of others. If you then visited the Dali Lama for a week you’d belief it important to live a life of harmony with others. So who’s right? Who has the valid handle on reality?
Vin DiCarlo states that the only reason the social skills taught in the community work are because people have a weak sense of reality and if you’re belief is stronger you’ll be accepted as the leader.
If these guys – who make a living from teaching social skills - claim that belief is of paramount importance, it’s surely proof that inner game work has far further reaching consequences than learning techniques, and that everything comes from within.
If you have poor social skills, a lack of social success and confidence, I definitely agree with improving yourself. Definitely. However going from zero to hero overnight seems unlikely. This is my main gripe with the “Seduction Communityâ€, the selling point of saying a few lines and all your dreams will come through. You need to be able to survive, be comfortable, and interact in social settings before you can influence them, let alone control them completely.
Social skills are a means to an end, and as such, not vitally important. They are a how, and not a what. So you’re better off working into the what. What do you want out of this interaction? Obviously if you know what your ideal life is this will help immensely, but the clearer you are on the ideal outcome the easier it is to take action.
When people get caught up in the hows of any situation, the hows become whats in themselves. This can be seen in all types of endeavours. In more traditional martial arts there’s an obvious example, bowing. In martial arts they wanted to show respect, and bowing was considered a means of showing respect. Respect being the important thing, and bowing a means to an end. But I know of an Aikido teacher who was furious when a Muslim student of his wouldn’t bow. “Why won’t you bow?†“I only bow to God†“But bowing shows respect!!!†“Okay I respect you.†“But you have to bow!!!†It’s a clear case of the how in the situation becoming a what in itself.
Your presence, which ultimately controls your inner value, is the determinant of how you’re perceived. A lot of the social skills teachers out there (seduction community or otherwise) will provide a student routines of phrases that will convey x, y and z about your personality. However the main problem is that if you don’t posess these qualities, any superficial action or words will be incongruent with your personality. It’s far better (in the sense of it will come across better to other people) to actually develop the traits, rather than working on a mannerism that will display an admirable trait that you’re lacking. It’s also more rewarding in a broader sense.
Also by following this path you need to watch everything you say. While there may not be a problem with controlling and deliberating on the words you use the effort required is enormous. It also means the effort is required with each and every interaction. While there is an enormous amount of effort in changing one’s belief system, deciding want they want or raising their self confidence, the payoff to effort ratio is much higher. Working on a deeper level permeates to all your actions, which is more efficient than working on action by action, or each part of your life as separate components. Secondly, once the momentum is developed inside you, transfering that inner ability (combined with faith in yourself) to different skills and tasks is relatively simple.
I’ve also never met someone who wanted to focus on learning social skills that didn’t have a deeper issue that was unresovled or a goal that was fuzzy or ill defined. If you’re learning social skills in order to be more confident, work on being more confident. If you’re working on social skills in order to be more comfortable or happy, work on those instead. Without resolving inner conflicts and developing yourself as a whole, social skills are of little use.
Have you ever noticed those people who truly have their social skills (which should read “have their social impact handledâ€) never have a clue what they’re going to say in most of their social interctions? They’re usually the ones who say something along the lines of “I dunno, just say something†and can’t really give specific advice. This is a result largely of their confidence in themselves to perform in any situation.
So why are learning social skills popular then? Well, it seems easier. Inner work on yourself requires a lot of effort. And people tend to take the easiest route wherever possible. When you’re learning techniques, you begin to get a different reaction from people. Even if it’s a harsh one, it’s a reaction, an immediate emotional payoff. We are pleasure seeking animals, and any emotional payoff is a reward for our actions. It’s far more effective and efficient to delay the instant gratification of the new killer line in favour of working on yourself as a whole.
In a marketing course I once took, the lecturer said that the common perception about marketing was that it’s all about advertising. Marketing was about finding out the customers needs, figuring out your strengths and weaknesses, developing a fantastic product that met the market and finally advertising it. Your social success can be viewed in the same way. You need to develop yourself completely, figure out who you want to have in your life (target market), as well as advertise yourself (work on your social skills). You cannot just advertise alone if you don’t have the product to back it up!
Am I saying that learning social skills is a worthless pursuit? Absolutely not. I read up on how to deal with irate customers, how to present yourself better in an interview, small talk techniques and a host of other outer social skills courses. I think they do have their place. But they need to be tempered with personal development and inner relfection. Without working on your foundations, painting the front of your house isn’t going to substantially increase it’s value.
Teaching, Coaching, Wisdom & Power
April 10th, 2007
The difference between Teaching and Coaching
Teaching comes from where the teacher is at or wherever he feels is important for the students. Teaching can be considered like a broadcast. The message may be fully applicable to your situations and wants/needs; it may only be partially applicable; or it may be completely irrelevant to your life at present.
Coaching, on the other hand, is by it’s very nature specific to your needs and wants at that time. It can be driven by the coach if they’ve worked with you for a while and know your ultimate outcome, because then they’ll understand the steps necessary to achieve your aim and what stage you’re at. Mainly, however, it’s driven by you the client, by your particular area of interest in any one given time.
Teaching is a means of imparting information, coaching is the process of developing that raw information into useful skills and abilities.
Teaching imparts techniques or concepts. A technique is any single action or phrase that can be broken down into either constituent movements/sections and has a relatively clear start and end point. A handshake or an answer to a question would be a technique. Skill, on the other hand, is being able to read a situation, select the appropriate technique, and then execute the technique appropriately. To put it in terms of social skills, a cheeky answer to the question “what do you do?†might be appropriate at the start of a conversation with a new acquaintance to add humour and ease the tension, but in a more intimate or rapport building situation, it wouldn’t be.
Any written article would be considered teaching, since I (in this context a teacher) can only write about what I feel is important right now and what I can explore. I usually try and answer questions that could be raised from previous entries in this blog, but more often than not I’ll have some thought which I feel compelled to get out to you so that takes precedence.
(The fact that I’ve usually 10 plus half written articles at any one time serves more to illustrate my disorganized thinking/working style more than anything else though!)
In any article or broadcast piece of information, you may find some parts particularly relevant and important to you, while others are little more than fluff or unnecessary detail/background. For another reader, these might be the most important sections.
That would be the main limitation of teaching, in that the teacher doesn’t know what’s important to the listener and attempts to cover all bases and answer any possible questions. It’s interesting that the message, or at least the core of it, can be identical between the two processes: teaching and coaching, only the coach’s message will be tailored and explored to suit the client.
Both a coach and a teacher need to have an analytical mind in order to see “behind the scenesâ€. With a coach it’s not necessary that they’ve experienced the exact situation you are dealing with, but rather they’ve an understanding of the end goal and the general principles behind the broader activity. A good teacher should be in part a coach and a good coach part teacher.
Understanding versus Applying
You can understand all the concepts I write down, you could even be able to explain them to someone more aptly than I can and fully pass on the message. But if you don’t apply and internalise them then the real value is lost on you.
Think about this physical analogy: Imagine reading up on the benefits of a regular exercise program. You know that reducing your unhealthy dietary intake and increasing your exercise schedule is a good thing. You know all the reasons and understand at a deep level the improvements to your health it can bring. But if you don’t actually go out and run, swim, lift weights or do pilates you’re not getting any healthier, are you? (Thanks Shane ☺ )
In terms of personal development, while there is some benefit in reading self help sites or listening to audios, the true profit is in applying the actions. Instead of saying “Yeah, I see how writing out the answer to ‘who am I?’ would be good,†actually write out the answer to ‘who am I?’ !!!
Wisdom and Power
It’s a spin on the old adage: those who can, do, those who can’t, teach. Is there any truth to this? In order to do, you must be able to apply the concepts, whether or not you understand them. To teach or coach, you need to be able to analyse the skill or activity, find out the key components, and then explain them on to someone. To coach those skills, you need to create situations/exercises that will reenforce that knowledge and takes a technique and turns it into a skill.
What’s the difference between great doers and great teachers? Great teachers/coaches deeply understand the underlying principles behind any tasks or skill and can develop those abilities in others. This is what I’d equate to having wisdom of a particular skill set.
There are people in any field that can just do it, whatever it is. Yet they can’t explain this to anyone. This is what I’d term power.
Wisdom is the ability to understand and relate concepts, power is the ability to perform, regardless of whether you understand the concepts.
In between the two extremes is where most people lie. They understand the concepts and can apply them to a degree. A good instructor (coach or teacher) helps those who have some ability maximise it.
Of course, a good student (and a great doer) is someone who listens to their coach and instructor, whatever form they take!
Is it possible to be overconfident?
March 5th, 2007
[Words: 1320, Reading Time: 5-6mins]Â
If you view confidene as a baramter of mental health, then no it’s not possible to be over confident. After all, how can you be too healthy? That just doesn’t make sense.
Your confidence is a measure of internal strength, mental strength. Just with physical strength, you’ve an ability to build it from the base level you have, no matter how weak it is when you begin. Everyone has muscles, everyone has thoughts. With that you can start building confidence.
Similar to physical fitness, you can develop mental health regardless of how weak you are to begin with. If you do four or five push ups a day, even if that’s all you can do, that’s something and you’re beginning to build strength. In a smiliar manner, if you work on improving your self talk or self image for just one minute each day, you can build you internal confidence and inner fortitude.
An interestering thing is that with physical fitness can be divided into exercise and eating habits, your mental is primarily built by your thoughts. There is only so far we can stretch this analogy, so please don’t take it as a perfect one-to-one relationship!
The external determinants of confidence
My focus is to help you build confidence from the inside out, independent of any external factors. But there is a role external factors can play in your internal confidence.
Building Self Esteem Today has an article on the external factors that can damage your self esteem and therefore should be avoided. While I don’t entirely agree with the premise it is nonetheless a useful article.
In NLP they believe that between that between an action and a reaction there’s a choice. I call this your filter. You’re mental barriers and how you decide to interpret things will determine the impact on your self esteem and confidence far more potently than just the event itself.
Say, for example, someone is rude to you, or a lot of people are rude to you. You could interpret this as:
- People are really mean (no reflection on you, just the world is mean)
- I must be a terrible person
- I’m weak, that’s why people bully me
- People are jealous of me, I don’t need them
- Wow! They’re really shy and insecure; I wish they didn’t have to feel the need to try to put people down.
How you react will depend on how you view yourself and how you decide to interpret events. And this will reinforce your inner beliefs. This to me is the true reflection of how external events affect your internal confidence.
It’s important to note that just like your outer strength, your inner fortitude has limits. To carry this analogy further, if you are strong enough to easily bench press 50Kg, there’s going to come a time when you can’t lift it anymore, no matter how much you’d like to.
Another analogy I like to use is a bank account. Every day you can deposit into this account with positive thoughts, actions, and self images. If a tragedy hits, or something less severe but nevertheless demanding on your fortitude, you need to make a withdrawal. You need to spend mental energy on combatting the stress. However, after a time you’re account will be depleted.
Then you need rest to rebuild yourself. This can come in removing yourself from the stressful/demanding situation, coupled with investing more in your account – i.e. doing more self improvement work.
So what do people mean by over confidence? Over confidence is commonly meant as believing you are more proficient at a particular task/skill than you are (if measured objectively).
Concerning confidence related to skill: Why you’re nervous when you start a new task is the image you have does not reconcile with the outward performance. You feel nervous when first starting a new task because you have an image of how well you should perform and obviously if the task is highly skill dependent, you can’t perform.
Part of the problem is that if your ignorant of the level of commitment and dedication required, or the skill involved you can’t form an accurate image of how well you should do. The second component would be your ego not wanting you to look foolish while you stumble over the first few tries.
Acceptance plays an important part in overcoming this confidence challenge. If you accept yourself fully you’re okay with how you perform because, well, you’re a beginner, you’ll reduce/eliminate the anxiety when performing the task for the first time. Furthermore, accepting the skill level you’re at makes it easier for you to learn as you can actively seek out the skills you need to ahcieve and progress. So acceptance will aid your development.
It’s looking at things through this light which allow you to figure out your confidence in those areas of life in which you’re weak or underdeveloped. You can accept that you’re at this particular level, and despite having a “shortcoming†in this area, still feel proud of who you are. Again I want to emphasise that something is only a shortcoming of yours if you chose to view it that way. The only true measure of your value is you.
To go back to our exercise analogy, if you aren’t that strong to begin with and your goal is a 100Kg squat it will take you longer to get there than if you’re “naturally†strong or have been exercising for a long time. Similarly, if you’re used to beating yoruself up, or haven’t invested in developing your self confidence, it will take you longer to develop proper mental fortitude. Longer is the wrong word, it will take more effort and resources initially. But the great thing is that it multiplies and has a cumulative effect. Brian Tracy talks frequently about building momentum, stating that while it might take a lot of effort to get yourself moving, it takes less effort to keep yourself going once you are.
Building your internal strength or confidence requires workouts. You can do ‘external’ workouts by taking moments of courage. Also, setting aside five, ten or fifteen minutes to meditate, affirm, visualise is what I’d consider to be performing mental workouts.
You need to take breaks in personal development, or confidence building. Why is this? Primarily because it’s always a good thing not to get overly committed (or worse, overly attached) to anything, as it will unbalance your life.
A second reason is that you also need time to ‘recover’ after mental workout just like a physical workout. Undercurrents of a lack of confidence can emmerge from building up your confidence. While you may be focusing on becoming more confidence you mightn’t notice all those thoughts of feeling inferior or low self esteem arising. It’s possible you might be asking yourself why you aren’t feeling confident and answering ‘I don’t feel confident because…’ It’s all those repetitions of ‘I don’t feel confident’ that can sabotage your efforts to build unshakable internal confidence. Consider them like minor injuries everyone picks up during the course of regular exercise.
It’s important that you don’t sabotage your efforts during the rest period. If you were trying to get a six pack all the cardio in the world wouldn’t help if you were eating McDonald’s and curries every day. Similarly, make sure you’re refraining from mental junk food by keeping your thoughts and actions in line with your intentions.
A curious thing I’ve noted that a lot of times I’ve set an intention or done some inner game work and then forgotten about it for a bit. After a while it’s manifested and I remember that I was thinking about it intensely a while ago. I guess if you’re always working you can never reap the rewards. So although work is important you need to take a break to gain the benefit of your efforts.
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