An extremely alleviating and conducive mental exercise for social anxiety is to ask yourself what your goals are. The stressed out escapist will say they don’t have any, and that’s fucking lying. Everyone has expectations, desires, social needs, hierarchical standards, and ego-related issues with social activities. Once you decide what your direction is, then you can start adjusting and exerting what works best for you. Do you want everyone to like you? Whom do you want to be seen as? Are you trying to get somebody’s approval? Remember that when all this is figured out and adjusted, your goal has an end outcome and people are often fickle. That means that even if you do not get the response you were aiming for, at least you put in reputation points, did what the Chinese culture calls facework. Most importantly is to that once these goals are illuminated, analyzed and organized they can only illicit responses from people which then fit your approval; you are never actually looking for other’s approval but you are looking for your own approval of yourself for getting the proper response. It is only ever your opinion of yourself that actually matters.
Authority pro’s and cons, can you have a leader you feel is helping and benefitting you? Leadership is present in most everything so you need to be able to comfortably relate, respect, and rely on them. There also must NOT be a feeling resentment, jealousy, being belittled, one-upping, mutinous, or fear toward the leader. Each of those emotions comes from a specific situation and is most often lingering from a past experience rather than actually happening in the now. Learning to confront each of these discomforts and antagonizing feelings is easy as soon as you admit, isolate, and analyze them. The step after that is to view your leader as a fairy god mother, a secret Wizard Uncle(like Sirius Black), or any other figure who is on your side and only trying to help you. Letting them be in charge is easy when you realize that if things fuck up, it is their ass before yours which gets chewed and blamed. They just want to help and sometimes they’re retarded, do not fight fire with fire! Fight fire with water, understand that they are in the biggest of trouble if you mess up and they’re just freaking out. Be chill, hold your color and hold steady; they’re on your side and freaking out. To allow them to benefit you, remind yourself that you are against the world and they’re on your side.
How do you express yourself? Most often offensive messages in group social situations are not insulting from the content but from the phrasing and delivery. For example when speaking to a boss if you do so with the starting limericks,” Well…you see… Maybe if you…why don’t you…” then you run a high chance of coming of condescending regardless of if it follows treasures and gifts and gifts of strippers and money. Attitude is key in all group situations and slight word usage greatly shifts this. Map out your sentences before say them and see if in their situation, you would find it irritating. When conversations flow towards being progressive and upbeat it is the word usage and formation of the statements so often instead of the words actually said. This can be accomplished quite simply by Throwing in hype-man mentality to the start, end, or as a short reply before you make a full sentence. The,”Oh, yeah we got this… we’re gunna kill it… now we’re cooking… can’t stop us now…takin’ this puppy to the moon…that’s my boy” sort of phrases said in genuine emotional excitement can change everything. It sounds stupid because it is stupid, communications is really really simple but it works.
In-group and out-group sentimentality is a natural human behavior to resent those in groups outside of themselves and defend those with them. There are numerous psychological experiments and historical examples of people doing horrible things to people outside their group and wonderful things for pieces of shit inside their own group. Learning to see the entire world as your in-group is how you get people on your side both through your own invitation, encouraging behavior and starting that relationship’s new conversation. If you start talking about something a person likes, they will start thinking about it and probably talking then surely, eventually, acting like that. It takes persistence, as does all great things. Be wary of idiocy that our evolutionary psychology has, it’ll take us for a stupid ride.
When some folks enter a situation they bring with them a ravenous tempest of hope and a confidence in a grand victory. Like Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog, there is assured, upbeat excitement. There are other folks who will shit talk under their breathe and attack everything going on, yet do nothing to change things and stay involved. Everyone has a degree of this spectrum in their involvement. Hope or despair are always measurable elements of a person’s presence. This comes from their thoughts of the future, the emotion related to them thoughts, and decision to believe it. You get to chose what you believe and you are free to create thoughts. So make it for hope and fire when ready.
What’s worthwhile, does this qualify as important? Do the people around you effect that? Is the task at hand really even related to their opinions and involvement? Well, socially speaking when you are involved and nobody else seems interested then, no, things do not qualify as important. And people naturally gravitate towards fitting in and there is a spiral of silence which forms around the minority opinion. If it qualifies as important to you, then the reasons behind that are absolute in esteem to social opinion. And the only opinion which really ever actually matters is your own.
Disengagement and respect are big topics of relating to people. The more involved in a moment you are, the more attractive and alive you are. To be aloof adds this sort of intellectual whispy, condescension boredom to a persona. It can be alluring the same way being a bully is attractive and even if it turns out there is something better elsewhere, being unengaged is a display of not being able to put one’s self in a place where they want to be in life. It explains the opposite of a directed and decisive life. Being fully involved in an activity shows truth in a person and purity of the spirit as it lays where it fits best. All the stories of escape and strife trying to find the best place to be are romantic but the final product is being engaged fully. To be disengaged is to show others involved that they are unimportant to you. Respect is a natural human thing that all people deserve a base level of. To treat the world otherwise is to assume people are undeserving and that you, are more important. The actions one would do exhibiting disrespect create a shitty atmosphere, a hypocritical and thus stupid conversational relationship, an unrealistic and offensive sense of immediate Karma and distrust in people. Being respectful of people shows one respects THEMSELVES because they exist in a world that they are fully engaged in such that they would treasure it. To be disrespectful demonstrates that a person is disengaged from their world, exhibiting a small dose of paradoxical escapism and a general disrespect to themselves. If a person cannot show respect to others then their care for the world they’re creating around them is low and that shows a disrespect to themselves. Creating your world full of people you have healthy and strong relationships with shows you like yourself just as being engaged with your world shows you can cultivate and make decisive action to find and or create that world.
How do others relate to you on the topic at hand? Without taking an interest in those around you there will be no success in express yourself. People show who they are in verbal, nonverbal, hierarchical, proximity, facially and micro-expressionally but they always show themselves somehow. Asking questions and showing yourself as interested or the grounds where a person would be interested and comfortable in expressing themselves is quite easy once you gives it a shot. Without realizing how others relate to you, there is no real communication only talking at or a lack of talking to each other. Seeing that some people are very vocal where others are reserve is important because those styles need a different environment to feel free. The over talkative ones want aggressive speech patterns from their friends and colleagues. Silent people enjoy space and moments to think about things just said and indulge the moment. Some folks want you to parade them around the party and meet everyone where as others want to stay in a select group, neither is wrong but both are specific. It’s hilarious how charming a person can be a matter of taking the particularly correct path one prefers while having no redeeming qualities or connecting values and interests. At the same time, perfect matches can be fucked to all shit if improper connection is made and awkwardness pervades. Take note on how you relate best to people and then how whom you want to relate to does their style.
The expectations you have of how other people will react to you is normally a subconscious reflection of how you would react. This can be changed by prepping yourself with the mental flick of a different scene occurring if you would it to do so. Look for that and look forward to the reaction you want. If you feel small talk will hinder you, then you are actually uncomfortable with being around people. If you are comfortable with anything beyond small talk then you are insecure about what you have to talk about in that others will attack you, misunderstand you, use you or some other way mistreat you. Learning to love yourself is a set of being able to chose what you like and admire about peoples, and becoming that kind of a peoples. When you like yourself, it shows that you CAN like people and simultaneously shows you to be likable. A demonstration of values and a function people want to continue and if it is one they do not want to continue, because you are uncomfortable with yourself, then you won’t attract many people. Learning to love yourself is actually an action of learning to be able to love others and let them approach and understand you by you understanding yourself.
The brilliance of humility is an opportunity of exponential growth once one opens up to it. Humans are naturally prideful and fearful so asking for help shows vulnerability and weakness, we are built to run, defend, pretend, and deny that. But having humility begets two of the biggest steps a person can in social situations. The first big step is to follow the rule of 33, from this cat named Tai Lopez, where you spend 1/3 of your time with people not as smart or adept or younger or w/e as you, 1/3 of your time with your peers, and then you spend the last third with people smarter than you AND YOU ASK THEM THINGS THEY KNOW THAT YOU DONT! The concept goes what if you had Aristotle, Ghandi, and Donald Trump as your mentors then where would you be right now? Incredibly successful right? Well there are people who know a bunch of things LIKE them who are older than you and would love to help you. People are naturally responsive to a person showing vulnerability and everyone wants to feel important like when someone helps somebody. Finding someone isn’t hard and folks are incredibly receptive to the question,”Im looking for a mentor and you have done some great things, could you give me some pointers?”. Like, folks you don’t know, call them up. It is ridiculous how easy it is. Doing this allows one to show vulnerability while growing. Showing vulnerability to people makes you human and we all love being able to see the humanity in each other. There is an experiment in communication studies where there are four groups of people and the survey asks who do you like the most. Them groups include successful people, unsuccessful people, and then those two groups split into one’s who just messed up and one’s who just did great. Everyone LOVES the successful fuck-ups. There is so much realness and encouragement there. Being cocky can be good in places but when you express yourself as someone who is humble and successful, you have the best of both worlds and people all want to relate to you. Displaying THAT you mess up and need help THEN going and succeeding is the plot of MOST great movies. Find a mentor and ask em for help, then use that vulnerability to be comfortable with yourself in front of the world with your failures so you can make them into successes. And grow from the fine aged wisdom others have.
