Is Social Awkwardness Holding You Back?
I was always a shy kid. I was embarrassed easily, and I always wanted to avoid those situations where I was put at the center of attention.
(But secretly I wanted to be that attention without all the feelings of people "seeing" me wrong, if you know what I mean...)
So I'd be very quiet when I went to gatherings or social events like my friends' birthday parties. Eventually, I'd come "out of my shell" when I found out the other kids were cool and wouldn't make fun of me.
But every time I was in front of someone new - BOOM! The shyness would come back.
And as I got older, that shyness started to get in the way of me meeting girls.
I started noticing the girls very early, too. I was attracted to a girl in my 1st grade class, believe it or not. Her name was Julie, a raven-haired beauty.
I mean, there were dozens of cute girls around, but I couldn't seem to get anything started - even in high school - because I just didn't understand WHAT the heck I was supposed to be doing.
I knew a lot of girls at the time that I really didn't want to date, but these girls also told me they felt that sense of "I'm so confused... what am I supposed to DO?"
Stay with me here, because I want to give you some information that will clear some of this up for you...
Do you think of yourself as "shy"?
Do you consider yourself "introverted"? (By the way, shy and introverted are not the same thing...)
Do you still find yourself having a tough time handling social situations with people?
Or maybe it's handling interpersonal conflicts...
Or maybe it's just handling all the people that seem to want to help you, but you know they really just want to GET something from you...
I want to share something with you that I didn't really come to appreciate until just the last few years, and it has made ALL the difference in my social life.
It's going to sound pretty harsh when I first say this, but if you think about it for a second, and open up your mind to the possibility, you're going to know what what I'm saying is true.
It's this:
People play games with you.
Every day, and in very subtle ways.
Now, we all think of "playing games" as being a BAD thing. After all, guys feel like girls play games with them when it comes to romance. Women feel like guys are playing games with them.
And it all feels like some kind of mysterious conspiracy to keep us from being successful with the opposite sex, doesn't it?
The fact is that playing social games is NORMAL.
Not only is this normal...
It's absolutely NECESSARY.
If I were to just walk up to you on the street and say: "Hi, I'm Carlos. I'm a man of my word, and I'm very trustable. I'd like to be a very close friend of yours, starting right now."
After you stopped looking at me like I'd just escaped from the local insane asylum, you'd probably say, "Yeah, whatever." And then you'd walk away.
Well, if that's not the way that we become good friends with another person, how DO we do it?
Well, we usually go through a process. This is called the "friendship" model of how we allow ourselves to get closer to someone. And it has 4 important steps.
THE 4 STEPS OF CONNECTION & FRIENDSHIP:
STEP #1: Attention
This is where we get a person's attention. For a guy, it might be going up and introducing himself to a girl. For a girl, it might be getting her friend to introduce her to a guy.
Whatever the means, we know that the first start has to start with an introduction or approach of some kind.
That's gaining attention.
And since we use a variety of methods to get over our fears of rejection and our shyness, you might have to call these methods 'games.'
After all, when was the last time you walked up and told someone exactly what you were thinking and why you wanted to meet them?
Mmm hmmm. Thought so.
Some people call this being "indirect," but it's still a kind of game.
STEP #2: Connection
After you meet a new person, whether it's for friendship or more, the next thing we need to do to create a friend is to find something in common. This is part of building a "connection."
You may think of it as "building rapport," or something similar.
And since we are - again - indirectly searching for these things, we might consider that a bit of a "game," too.
I was just talking to one of my female friends today about this, and she used to subscribe to a "service" where you would actually be given coaching before you go on a date. They would give you relevant news stories to talk about, and each one of those stories was chosen so that you could find out the important things about your date, like if they wanted kids, like pets, etc.
Hmmm.
Sounds like a bit of a 'game' if you ask me.
But a good one, because if she were to ASK those same questions, she might have gotten any number of answers.
STEP #3: Commitment
This is the step where you get to take your connection to the next level. If you're a guy trying to get a date with a woman, you'll probably need to get some level of commitment from the woman, usually by getting her phone number so you can reconnect and move up to a date.
"We should do something ... sometime. What's your number?"
If you were a woman, you might point out convenient parts of your connection and gently 'suggest' that you two could "do something..."
... "Sometime."
We put these things out there lightly like this to minimize our risk of getting hurt (i.e., getting rejected or turned down).
This is a kind of a game. But again, it's a GOOD game in that it gives us the freedom to explore possibilities and still feel safe at the same time.
STEP #4: Action
Now that you've gotten them to commit to doing something with you, it's time to make them take ACTION. Whether that's to follow your plan - maybe a date, or just to show up, they have to DO something to make the connection real.
They have to act on it.
This is the 'moment of glory,' as they say. The small games we had to play to get here are now acknowledged as being okay, because they got us to the goal of finally getting together with someone so that we can now - hopefully - drop the games and get REAL with the other person.
But unfortunately, many of those games don't necessarily go away here - or in other parts of our life.
The truly unfortunate part of this is that people very often play negative games with us, too.
I used to feel really "played" by other people. It got so bad that I started to get very negative about interacting with others, because it felt like they were just out to get something from me.
And then I started learning some very important techniques for handling people in social situations.
Now I've been talking about this concept in terms of creating a new girlfriend or boyfriend, but this is really applicable to ANY area of your life where you're trying to create a "relationship" of some kind.
It could be a business relationship, between you and your boss...
It could be a romantic relationship between you and a lover...
It could be a sales relationship between you and possible client or customer...
Whatever the motive, we need to go through these steps to create something REAL between people.
But when the games start to become negative, and we feel like we're in over our heads, the only thing you can do sometimes is to grab on and hope that you can avoid getting "played" by these people.
But very often, they are not people we can escape from. Sometimes we can't get away from our boss, or we don't want to throw our relationship with someone out the window just because we haven't been able to figure out the game they're playing and put an end to it.
I'm also here to tell you that these situations can be AVOIDED.
All it takes is some special understanding of what it takes to get power social skills and awareness that you can bring to ANY situation.
Because when you know how to handle the games that people play, you will finally start to feel more in-control of your own life.
I was out at lunch with a friend of mine, and her daughter was having problems handling some kids in her high school that were giving her a hard time. She asked me what her daughter could do when they were being mean. When my friend heard my solution, she told her daughter: "See! That's why it's good to ask Carlos... He always has a good solution to these problems."
I'm not telling you this to brag or pat myself on the back. It's to let you know that just a few years back I was CLUELESS with what to do in these situations. And THAT is what inspired me to learn these social skills. I was sick and tired of feeling manipulated by other people.
If you'd like to stop being "played" by the games people play - and learn how to take POSITIVE control so that you can start winning - without deception or manipulation, or sinking to their level - then you owe it to yourself to take a look at my
Power Social Skills program.
It's taken me 5 years to learn all the best ways to handle difficult social situations, and I put everything I knew into this program.
When we start socially interacting with another person, our instincts will tell us everything we need to know about them in just a few seconds - IF you know what to look for.
And your gut never lies...
After all, this is what most of your brain evolved to do - to figure other people out!
The way we do this is through intricate and subtle social GAMES.
Go have a look at the new rule book that can give you back your feeling of power and social ability again...
Power Social Skills
Talk to you soon...
Your friend,
Carlos Xuma
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