Improve Your Social Skills, page 14
Got writer’s block? This is a great list of flash fiction prompts, and you can easily Google for more.
As you write, don’t worry too much about good writing – worry about good storytelling. (You may even want to give yourself a time limit for each story so you practice telling the story, not editing it.) There’s no need to try for symbolism or fancy wordplay – instead, just write a story that people would want to read.
Building Connections
Tell Personal Stories, but Cautiously
There’s nothing wrong with telling a story about crazy Uncle Jim or the kind old lady who lives down the street.
But when you tell stories about other people, the potential for connection is limited. It’s only when you tell a personal story about your own life that you create the greatest opportunity to connect with others.
So tell stories about your own life! They don’t have to be dramatic or monumental. Your audience might enjoy hearing about the games you played with your childhood friends, or the drama team you were on in college, or the new ballet classes you just started taking. If your story is about something that is important to YOU, there’s a decent chance it will be interesting to your audience. Plus, stories from your life allow your audience to learn something new about you, which builds connection.
Also, you have many more memories to draw on when you tell a story from your life. If you’re telling a secondhand story you heard from someone else, you probably don’t remember many details, and it will be much harder to make the story interesting. But if your story is about something that happened to you, then you can draw from your memory banks to fill the story with richness and interesting detail.
That being said, you need to be careful about how much you share. Connection needs to build over time. If you jump right to a very intimate story before connection has had the time to build, it can make your audience uncomfortable.
For instance, let’s say you recently had a family member pass away from cancer and you went through a period of depression. If you share the story of their illness and your depression with a casual acquaintance, they might feel uncomfortable because you’ve shared something very personal with someone you didn’t know very well. Conversely, it would be fine to share that story with a group of close friends because they do know you well.
Of course, you don’t have to wait until someone is your best friend before sharing personal stories with them. But be extra careful with people you don’t know as well.
Start by sharing a semi-personal story and see how they react. If they react positively, then down the road you could share stories that are more personal. If they become uncomfortable, then you can avoid sharing personal stories with that person (at least until you get to know them better.)
Share Firsthand Thoughts and Feelings
When you tell a story about something that happened to you, don’t just say what happened. Talk about how you felt and what you were thinking.
In other words, don’t limit your story to facts that an outside observer would have noticed. Instead, give your audience a window inside your head by sharing your thoughts and feelings. This will help your audience to experience the story as you did, building connection.
Here’s an example.
Bad:
“I stood up in front of the class to give a presentation on the War of 1812. I hadn’t prepared at all for the presentation, and I didn’t know anything about the War of 1812. Just then, the school prankster pulled the fire alarm and we all left class.”
Good:
“I stood up in front of the class to give a presentation on the War of 1812. I was incredibly nervous because I hadn’t prepared at all for the presentation. I remember feeling so queasy I wondered if I would throw up – and then I remember thinking, “It would be better to throw up then to fail this presentation!” I racked my brain for anything I knew about the War of 1812, when I heard the fire alarm ring. This feeling of absolute bliss welled up inside me as I left the class, and I remember having the biggest smile on my face for the rest of the day.”
Both stories are about the same events, but one story is rather bland, whereas the other story lets you get to know the narrator a little bit. When you tell your stories, give your audience a window inside your head, and they’ll feel more connected to you.
A Satisfying Conclusion
Stop When you Reach the End
The easiest way to tell a bad story is to tell a good story, and then keep going after you should have stopped.
Once your story reaches the climax – the punchline of a funny story, the creative solution in a story about solving a problem, the moment of greatest emotional impact in a touching story – you should try to bring it to an ending as quickly as possible. In other words, when you reach the end, stop!
Obviously, you don’t need to end the story abruptly as soon as you say the climax – it’s okay to have a little resolution. But your natural temptation if you’ve told a good story is to keep talking, because everyone will be paying attention to you and attention feels good. Resist that temptation.
When the story is done, stop talking. Don’t give minor details, or summarize the story. And for goodness sake, don’t launch immediately into another story – give someone else the floor.
Good:
“…And when he got back from the hospital, he found that the entire office had come together to raise money to pay for his treatment.”
Bad:
“…And when he got back from the hospital, he found that the entire office had come together to raise money to pay for his treatment. It was such a touching and heartwarming moment. The office really supported him in that moment, and he felt like everything was going to be okay. I mean, can you believe how generous the office was to pay for his treatment?”
Really Bad:
“…And when he got back from the hospital, he found that the entire office had come together to raise money to pay for his treatment. It was such a touching and heartwarming moment. The office really supported him in that moment, and he felt like everything was going to be okay. I mean, can you believe how generous the office was to pay for his treatment? And by the way, that reminds me of another story…”
In some cases, your story might not have a climax. Perhaps you’re telling a story about what you did on your vacation to Europe, and while you have many interesting memories to share, there’s not a single memory that works as the “climax.”
In that case, just wrap up your story in a deliberate way. That will signal to everyone that you are done speaking. For instance, you might conclude a story about your European vacation by saying. “Gosh, it’s overwhelming how many memories we have from that trip. Even though we enjoyed it, I’m definitely happy to be home and sleeping in my own bed again.”
Your audience is not expecting your wrap-up to be brilliant or compelling. As long as your story finishes in a deliberate way instead of just trailing off, you should be fine.
Pass the Spotlight
Okay, you’ve just told your story, and it went great. Your audience was interested the whole time, and you gave them a great conclusion. Time to tell another story, right?
Wrong.
Storytelling works best when everyone gets a turn. Groups get a particular kind of energy when great storytelling is happening – each person builds off the person before them, and the story I told inspires the story you are about to tell. It’s a great experience that is much harder to achieve when just one person is telling the stories.
So be gracious. Pass the attention to someone else. This might be subtle – just pausing for a few seconds to let someone else jump in. Or this might be more direct – perhaps you ask the group, “Does anyone else have any childhood stories to share?”
You might even invite someone directly to share a story. For instance: “Jose, didn’t you go to Disneyland last week? Want to share some stories from that trip?”
Inviting someone directly is especially useful for making others feel included, and for helping shyer members of the group get a chance to share.
Of course, you’re not limited to one story per conversation. Just let one or two others share before you tell another story. The rest of the group will appreciate the opportunity to share, and the group conversation will be more satisfying for everyone.
Application and Practice
If you want to be a good storyteller in conversation, you need to hold your audience’s interest, provide your audience with a satisfying conclusion, and look for opportunities to connect with your audience.
You also need to practice. The best place to start practicing is by writing stories down. That way, you can practice in private, and you can also read through your stories afterwards to critique yourself. (You can also record yourself speaking and listen to the recordings.)
When practicing a story, don’t worry about getting it perfect. Each story should only take you 1-3 minutes to tell, so avoid spending a ton of time on each story. And since you’re practicing your storytelling technique, not your writing technique, don’t worry about things like spelling or word choice.
These are some ideas to get you started. Do your best to write a story for each of these experiences. Once you’ve written about each one of these ideas, try to come up with your own ideas for stories you can tell!
Tell a story about…
A childhood memory
Learning a new skill
A time you felt really happy
A funny mistake you made
Your first day at a new job
Discovering a new hobby
A time when you were really proud of yourself
Once you’ve practiced writing stories down and you feel confident, it’s time to practice telling stories in conversation. When in conversation, look for an opportunity to share a relevant story. To start with, try to share short (30 seconds or less) stories. As you have success with shorter stories, try longer stories.
Of course, this requires consistency. If you practice storytelling once a month, you’re unlikely to get better. So be deliberate to build in several opportunities to practice each week.
Over time, you’ll find your storytelling skill gets better and better. Keep practicing, and you’ll be a storytelling expert before you know it!
Chapter 11: Best Blog Posts
Better Every Day
So my work just unveiled a new slogan: “Better Every Day.”
Normally, company slogans are pretty bland. But there’s a powerful idea here.
Greatness doesn’t happen overnight. Most things worth doing take persistence and hard work.
But often, we look for a quick fix and fast results. When we put in some effort and don’t see immediate improvement, it’s easy to give up or say, “I’ll take a break and come back later.”
Or, we look at the end goal compared to where we are now, and the distance between them just seems unmanageable. We think, “I’ll never be able to get there from here,” so we never even try.
But here’s the thing.
If you’re 1% better every day, you are 38 times better every year.
And 1% better every day is doable. It means having one conversation that you might have shied away from, or accepting one social invitation you might have declined. It means spending ten minutes reading through a social skills guide instead of a humor site. It means deciding to ask a friend or family member for help, or pick up the phone and schedule that counseling appointment.
Commit to being better every day.
You won’t see improvement immediately, but it will come. And when it does, it will be exceptional.
How can you be better today?
Give it 100
Social skills are like any other skill — if you practice, you get better.
But in order to practice, you have to start, and you have to keep going. And both of those things are very hard. It’s really easy to wait to start until you’re totally “ready” (which will be never), or burn yourself out by pursuing a new goal in an unsustainable way.
So instead, I want to show you a better way.
There’s a website called Give it 100. The basic idea is that you practice something for 100 days in a row, and you film a 10 second clip of you doing it every day so you can see how you improve. You can also see what other users are doing, which is sometimes incredible and sometimes adorable.
Unfortunately, social skills don’t really lend themselves well to 10 second clips (in fact, a great social skills tip: don’t randomly start filming the people you’re talking to.) So instead I want to give you a different “Give it 100″ challenge. Are you ready? Here it is:
Do something that practices your social skills for ten minutes, ten days in a row.
For instance, you could
Spend ten minutes reading a guide to social skills
Spend ten minutes watching TV with the volume off to analyze body language
Spend ten minutes researching therapists — and then booking an appointment when you find one!
Spend ten minutes talking to someone you otherwise wouldn’t have.
At the end of ten days, you’ll have spent 100 minutes improving your social skills. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s about momentum.
I guarantee that if you “give it 100″ you will see an improvement in your social skills and your confidence – even if it’s very small (which is ok, because every good thing starts small.)
Once you see that improvement, it will be much easier for you to keep improving, and do another 100, and then another 100 — until you look back and you find that your first 100 minutes of improvement has become 100 hours.
So to summarize:
Commit to spending 10 minutes over the next 10 days to practice your social skills. If possible, start today — or at the latest, tomorrow.
Once you’ve “given it 100″, notice the improvement (even if it’s small!) in your social skills and confidence
Then, keep going! Give it another 100, or maybe another 1000!
And come back and post your story on the website to encourage others.
Fight Back
Life is really hard sometimes.
There are times when all of the encouragement in the world doesn’t seem to help, times when it feels like the only emotions available are rage or grief or numbness, times when starting another day feels like getting in the ring with Mohammed Ali.
Maybe that’s your story today.
Maybe that’s been your story for a long time.
If that’s you, I want you to know that it will get better. You will not always suffer. You will find healing and you will find people who will love you very much and you will have moments when life will be so good that your heart will feel like dancing right out of your chest. You are not a mistake. You are not a lost cause. It is good that you are alive and one day you will believe that.
But I also want to recognize that things might not get better right away. And I know that when people tell me, “This will be better someday, but you just need to wait,” I don’t find their words very helpful.
So I want to give you more than just waiting.
I want to give you the chance to fight back.
In the olden days, people wrote legends of battles with monsters – dragons and hydras and sphinxes. Today we still have monsters; they just have names like depression and loneliness and addiction. Maybe you are locked in your own hard fight with one of these monsters, and maybe that fight is going to take some time to win.
But your own fight will help you fight for others.
Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, said, “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” He found that people who fixated on escaping the camps tended to fall ill and die more easily.
But the people who created a meaning for themselves in the camp – through tending to other prisoners, creating art, or simply maintaining their dignity in the face of incredible suffering – were more likely to survive and even find moments of joy. Frankl said, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’”
If you’ve forgotten your ‘why’, I want you to find it. I want you to remember that you matter very much, and it is very good that you are alive and that your life has meaning.
And I want you to know that your suffering can have meaning, if you let it.
For me, my suffering taught me how to love other people better. My childhood of social rejection taught me to reach out to others on the outskirts – and eventually to write a social skills guide that helps readers find community. For one of my friends, surviving abuse led her into a career where she could help protect others. Another friend fills her writing with the healing wisdom that she learned from her pain.
For you, maybe your suffering will equip you to reach out to others who are suffering in a similar way. Maybe you will create art or music or writing that is beautiful and life-giving, because your suffering has taught you how to touch the deep places in a person’s soul. Maybe someone will stay alive because you can sit with them and say, “I know what you’re going through.”
Henri Nouwen once wrote, “The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”
Maybe today you are in a desert, and it feels like the sand will never end. You don’t deserve that, and I don’t know why sometimes it takes so long for things to get better.
But I do know that even if you can’t leave your desert yet, you can be an oasis to someone in their own desert. I know that your words and your love and your presence have the potential to heal and to bring joy to others. And I hope that when you see your power to bring light into the life of others, some light will enter your life too.
