Another useful reframe involves how you see the other people at the gathering. Are they sources of potential embarrassment? That’s an unproductive way to think of it. I recommend reframing the participants as each having a problem you are uniquely qualified to solve. Their problem is that they feel socially awkward.
Most people are uncomfortable meeting strangers. If you have social anxiety, you’re closer to the norm than the exception. With a little practice, you can learn to see a room full of strangers as a bunch of problems you can solve just by engaging with them. Their social anxiety will go away as soon as they are talking to a nice person who shows interest.
Usual Frame: Each person at the gathering is a source of potential embarrassment for me.
Reframe: Each person has a problem (social awkwardness) that I can solve right now.
How to Pick the Right Target for Conversation
If you enter a room and the people already there are mostly paired off or in small groups to converse, you have the extra pressure of trying to break into an ongoing conversation. Here are some tips:
Men who are having a high-energy conversation often won’t open their body language and let you in when you sidle up to them with the clear intent of becoming part of the action. Men who act that way have poor social skills or are asserting rank. If you try to enter a male conversation and get frozen out, pull out your phone, pretend you just got a message, and walk away to handle it. Find an easier target.
Women are more likely to open their conversation circle if you make your intentions clear. If you see an alpha woman doing most of the talking in a small group of women, that’s ideal. A strong woman will invite you in and initiate introductions.
Look for the strongest social players and approach them first, male or female. You can usually spot them. They are moving effortlessly across small groups and dominating conversations. Strong personalities like meeting new people and enjoy connecting people with others. If you see one of the strong players leave a small group and head for the bar for a refill, consider intercepting. When meeting a strong social player—someone with the skills you are acquiring right now—the awkwardness disappears. Strong players know the rules. You’re a strong player now. If you want to make sure the other person knows you have skills, introduce yourself. That alone would flag you as a strong player in social situations.
Look for the awkward loners in the same predicament as you. They would LOVE someone to come up and say hi. The degree of difficulty there is near zero.
How to Introduce Yourself
This is all you must do:
Make eye contact and smile.
Extend a hand to shake.
Say, “Hi, I’m Scott.” (Use your name, not mine.)
Most people will tell you their names as they shake hands. The most socially awkward people will not. If needed, follow up with, “What’s your name?” Speak their name out loud at least once to help you remember. Use it in a sentence if you can, and right away. People love to hear their own names. It’s an easy and instant bonding technique. Be a name-user. This one tip puts you in the top half of talented social talkers. Make it your superpower to remember names. All it takes is focus and effort. Now that you know how important it is to remember and use a person’s name, maybe that will increase your attention to every name you hear in the future.
How to Be Interesting
Are you worried you’re not that interesting? You might be right. Most people are not great conversationalists. It’s a rare skill. But that’s no problem because the worst thing you could do when meeting a stranger is talk about yourself for too long while attempting to be interesting. Instead, you want to ask questions and show interest. You might need to fake your interest for a few questions until you find a topic you both like. Start your question stack roughly in this order:
What brings you here? (Or, What is your role today?—Use words to that effect.)
Where do you live?
Do you have kids?
What do you do for a living?
The reason these questions come first is that the answers are easy. No thinking or cleverness is required. And your follow-up questions will be obvious. For example, if someone has kids, you ask the ages or where they go to school.
If those questions strike you as too personal for someone you just met, that’s an illusion. People love answering easy questions about themselves in awkward social situations because they know exactly how. That’s how you solve their problem. If you ask me where I live, I know exactly how to answer, and I’m darned glad I’m not standing alone pretending to look at text messages on my phone.
When you introduce yourself and ask questions of a stranger, you are solving the stranger’s biggest current problem: What do I do right now? You can accurately assume most people at social gatherings are struggling to appear socially capable. You can make their part easy. And if you do, they will want to talk to you all night.
Usual Frame: No one wants to talk to me. I’m boring.
Reframe: Everyone enjoys talking to people who show interest in them.
You’re only a few minutes into this chapter, and already your social skills are in the top 10 percent of any human gathering. Literally. No kidding. And you are about to get even better.
Being a Huge Fake, But in a Good Way
As much as we like to think of ourselves as “keeping it real,” we also know we change our personalities based on who we’re with. You wouldn’t talk to a toddler the way you talk to a cop, for example. You wouldn’t even talk to your boss the way you talk to your coworkers. And you probably don’t talk to anyone else the way you talk to your lover or spouse.
The people with the worst social skills can’t get past the illusion that “being yourself” and “keeping it real” are good strategies. Instead, I say go with what works. And what works best is modifying your communication style to optimize it for each situation.
Usual Frame: Be yourself and keep it real.
Reframe: Adjust your communication style for the situation.
Once you accept the fact that we are all “acting” to some degree when we communicate, you can go all-in and turn it into a technique. I learned this trick from a college peer who was taking acting classes. When he talked to older adults in the college administration, he literally acted like he was one of them. The act was so transparent to his peers that it was hilarious. But how did the college administrators receive it? They loved this polite fellow who made eye contact and generally acted like a capable young man. It didn’t look comically exaggerated to them at all. His act only looked hilarious to his friends. The “trick” he used—literally acting—was perfectly acceptable to his target audience of older adults. My guess is that the adults knew he was “acting,” but since they were acting too, it probably seemed normal. I was the one who was uncomfortable when he went into his act because I was only beginning to understand “the show” that adults put on for each other. Don’t deny the show. If you can, call on your acting skills and create an interesting version of yourself that isn’t a lie.
How to End a Conversation
If you go to an event to network or to meet new people, you don’t want to get bogged down talking to one person all night. You need some tricks for ending a conversation gracefully. Here are three classics that work every time:
My drink evaporated. Can I get you anything at the bar?
Excuse me, I need to use the men’s (or women’s) room.
I need to do some more mingling. It was great meeting you (or catching up with you).
Physicality
As you know, humans are deeply influenced by appearance. One way to reduce your social anxiety is to work on your diet and fitness until you feel confident in any public setting. If you know you look good, you’ll feel less awkward.