Improving social skills

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Has anyone on here managed to improve their social skills significantly? What helped

Consider body language and any other non-verbal cues, both acting and responding to and also speaking to others, and making a meaningful reply
'small talk' and actively pursing friendships with others and being sociable

I feel I have improved dramatically through acting in a theatre - I trained up to Act at a high standard in a local theatre I attended.

Any replies welcome - including those from NT - Neurotypical people

Thank you

That's interesting. I would love to know if whats improved is your performance in a conversation or your actual interest/fluidity while engaging in one. Can you survive a 10 minute onslaught of small-talk?

Yup, what helped was practice, practice, practice.

Because Practice makes Perfect

I had therapy as a kid, and a lady following me around in school to teach me social skills, but I still don't get it quite right and my therapist is recommending me to read autism social skills books (though I don't have a dx)

In college, someone helped me a lot by saying that a convo is like a ping pong table, it should go back and forth in equal amounts, though I have not perfected it yet, lol.

I've made a few YouTube videos on this. Believe it or not, meditation really helped me. Also, reading books on body language and dating books and applying what the books say. You just can't read them. You also have to do what they say. Also, having the will to go out there and improve my social skills helped a lot. Sometimes, you just really need the will and determination to not let anything stand in your way.

Sometimes I can socialise, sometimes I can't I don't force myself to if I can't and don't get anxious. And that's probably why sometimes I can socialise a little bit better.

Trial-and-error helped.....mostly negative feedback from people, like at my 21st birthday outing when I talked so much that nobody else could get a word in edgeways - after the meal everybody seemed anxious to go home. At first I figured it was their fault for not taking enough interest in the interesting things I'd been saying But I worked it out in the end. These days I try to stick to a rule - never say more than a couple of sentences without leaving a decent pause for the other person to respond. Without that to-and-fro thing, it's not going to be as good as it can be. I'm still nowhere near 100% reciprocal dialogue, but it's better than it was before I realised it mattered.

Studying psychology did a lot of good too. If you know what makes people tick, you can work out how to keep them sweet. Also sociology - especially anything about how people behave when socialising.....apparently the first stage is to exchange "name, rank and serial number," which surprised me, because my usual opening move had always been to start talking about something deep. I still have trouble refraining from doing that, but at least I know that if I fail to keep it shallow, I'll probably scare them off.

To some extent I was trying too hard, and part of the solution was to relax...whenever I felt slightly out of it, I used to think that everybody else could see that and would label me a loser, but eventually I realised that most people hadn't really noticed me at all, or they just thought I was comfortable in my own company. I had to stop feeling that socialising was particularly urgent and to understand that I didn't have to make 50 lifelong buddies per night....friendship is a slow process. I often still felt desperate, but I learned to keep it in check and to hide it.

I learned not to wade too far out of my depth, and to assess the depth before jumping in - before diagnosis I guess I believed that I could become a "real socialite," so I'd throw myself into situations that were just too hard for me to deal with. These days, if I don't like the look of a social situation, I just opt out. I set myself mediocre social targets and I achieve them. Doesn't sound much, but over time it's surprising how that approach can build something worthwhile.

People usually take to people who are interested in them, in their loves and hates, their hopes and fears. So I try to find people who have these parameters in a way that naturally interests me, which usually boils down to mutual interests and experiences - I don't have the social imagination to empathise with people who are into stuff that's too far removed from my own experiences, so I tend to let those people be.

Luckily I don't have any adverse reactions to eye contact, so I've sometimes been able to look into people's eyes as they speak to me.....though I have to be in the mood, and I usually forget. Nonetheless, when I do remember, it seems to help people to warm to me.

I also spend a lot of time thinking about my friends, trying to work out what they might be feeling. I still find that quite difficult, and a lot of it is guesswork, but it's better than expecting myself to relate to them without all the "offline" pondering.

Strange, a look into my mind and M.O. here.^

The feedback once served as a shock to me. I would be thinking of one sort, and something later could be brought to my attention as: " I want to tell you something, and don't get offended by this, but you make people feel uncomfotable around you."

Or a lady once told me to my face, "I don't trust someone with shifty eyes." I'm losing my mind would be a common theme. This would cause profound displacement in my mental set.

Feelings of paranoia could set in. Ruminating on all this would cause blows to self esteem, and would reinforce the negative experiences at home and in school. Anxiety , already present, would get reinforced here.

O.P. what helped me was, when you're supporting youself, by facing the world on your own two feet -' It's sink or swim baby' - a self enforced cognitive behavorial training. With enough effort and time , your instinct won't let you fall, albeit with scars, though.

I think with an early diagnoses, this would prevent the stress disorders and lost time.

I guess you mean modus operandi?


Strangely enough, I hardly ever noticed any inferiority feelings after negative feedback. Initially I'd feel mauled and angry, and I'd tell myself that they were wrong, or I'd just blot it out of consciousness and pretend it had never happened. But my behaviour would change anyway, and eventually I'd be able to admit that I'd been at least partly to blame for any crap going down. The things that daunted me the most were my own ideas about my personality....I guess I've always been my own worst critic.

Yup.



That would be my knee jerk reaction. It eventually reaches a breaking point to where you start to look inwards. When, finally and eventually you catch a glimpse that you were wrong or erroneous; an enormous edifice of built up personality falls or crumbles, and everything that at one time made sense is now in question .

I know I'm not good at looking interested and if I can think of simple questions, I'm not going to be able to ask them well enough, so I tend to ask just random stuff, even if it's not technically small talk. I don't even know what small talk is for! But I'll ask stuff like "what do you think of Fleetwood Mac?" and then often they'll laugh a little and say "haven't ever heard of them...bit random isn't it?". Better than me going plush red and trying to think of quiet things to say. The problem is I'll say it straight after I've asked how are you and said hello and things. So it makes it seem like I'm talking to them just to find out this thing, I think. Oh gosh so many rules!!

I joined drama club in high school, and that seemed to help me a great deal because so many people were friendly to me there. This was after several years of special ed meetings, aides following me in school, etc.

Interesting......I guess I had similar things, but I never had to cope with a particularly large part of my personality needing reconstruction. It was more gradual renewal - I don't think I ever doubted that most of me was basically OK, except in irrational moments when I've been filled with self-loathing.....but that was different, there was never any detail behind that, just a kind of blanket "I suck bigtime, I deserve to be shot" thing, which I soon dismissed as an over-reaction. The only extensive reconstruction was in the light of the DX, which was more of an identity crisis thing.