[dauler]

Social skills are just that: a skill. No one started out knowing how to talk with other people, extroverts included. The only difference is that introverts tend to avoid putting themselves in social situations where they can learn how to communicate with other people more effectively, so they haven't had as much practice developing their skills. When they become self conscious about their poor social skills in relation to peers they avoid social interactions even more and it's a vicious cycle. The only "cure" to your anxiety and poor social skills is to ignore your instinct to avoid social encounters and get out there and practice practice practice.

A good beginner exercise is to go to a mall or other crowded public place and say hello to every person coming down the escalator, down the path, whatever. This will be very embarrassing for you, I'm sure, because you'll be overwhelmed with fears about what other people are going to think of you. If you have to balls to tell those self doubts in your head to shut up and you continue for an hour and a half, you'll have habituated to the situation and you'll realize that the world did not come crashing down, there wasn't a crowd of people who stood and pointed and laughed at you for being a freak. You'll be met by an amazing amount of indifference with some puzzled looks mixed in.

Perhaps they think you were hired by the mall to greet people, perhaps they think you're kind of strange, it doesn't really matter because none of them will remember you 15mins from the moment they saw you.

You've been fearing social situations your whole life, perhaps because of the way that your parents socialized you or a chromosome in your genes, and your mind is convinced that these situations are dangerous and that it must prepare your body to fight or run. But your mind is adaptive, and when you place yourself in these situations and allow yourself to habituate to them, your mind can begin to recognize that the life threatening response that it triggers isn't appropriate, that these situations are safe.

Make note that you MUST allow yourself to habituate to the situation(generally takes 60-90mins); if you leave before you feel comfortable in the situation you haven't helped to adapt your mind at all. Also note that this is a gradual process, one 90 minute session in a social situation won't cure you of all your anxiety, it just slowly helps your brain to adapt. The next time you go into a situation like that the maximum amount of anxiety you feel at the beginning will have decreased, and the amount of time that you take to habituate also decreases. After you do this a number of times(in the range of 12 or so) you'll have very little stress at the beginning and you'll feel completely comfortable within minutes, you won't be worrying at all about what people think of you because you'll know that it doesn't matter.

That takes care of that pesky anxiety that you may be feeling, but what does that do to help you build your social skills? Nothing, building social skills takes practice. Here's a starting point for that.

Introducing yourself

Think of situations that would be appropriate for introducing yourself to someone new. They pop up all over the place. Someone moves in next door. Bam, go over there and initiate a conversation with them. You have class with someone who sits near you. Talk to them about the class. You see someone in the elevator a few days in a row. Introduce yourself and remark about how you've seen them in the elevator before, do they live here/work here etc? You'd be surprised how flimsy your excuse for introducing yourself to someone can be without them batting an eye.

Initiating conversations

Initiating conversations is all about finding things that you have in common. If you're in a class with someone, talk about the teacher, the homework, whatever. If you're at a party and standing near someone, just introduce yourself and start talking.

Maintaining conversations

To keep a conversation going, it's important to use open ended questions. Compare "Do you like this music?" to "What kind of music do you like?". If you ask yes or no questions, people tend to respond with yes or no answers with very little elaboration. It's hard to think of enough questions to keep a conversation going if they only respond in yes or no answers, and it begins to feel like 20 questions after a short while and they'll get annoyed. Open ended questions get them revealing new topics of conversation that you can jump on to, I can't stress enough how important open ended questions are. Look at this:
You: Hi, I'm _____.
Her: I'm _____, nice to meet you.
You: So what do you think of the professor?
Her: I think he's pretty nice, but the homework is really tedious, I'm usually so busy that I struggle to keep up with all of it.
You: What keeps you so busy?
Her: Well I practice gymnastics 20 hours a week and I've got a part time job at Sephora.
You: Really, gymnastics, that sounds interesting, how long have you been involved in that?

Compare that to:
You: Hi, I'm _____.
Her: I'm _____, nice to meet you.
You: Do you like the professor?
Her: Yeah, I guess.
You: Do you have enough time to finish his tedious homework?
Her: Not really, I keep pretty busy.
You: Do you have a job?
Her: Yeah. *and looking uncomfortable at being barraged to a rapidfire series of questions with no transition between them*

Open ended conversations provide the nuggets that people use to keep conversations going. Most people LOVE to talk about themselves, you just have to go on a fishing expedition with open ended questions and then follow the trail of loaded topics that they'll leave for you to talk to them about. As an exercise, brainstorm a list of open ended questions that you could ask to people at a certain situation. For example, when you meet someone at a party you can do "get to know you" talk like "what are your hobbies?" and "what kind of music do you like?" After you practice open ended questions a bit it becomes second nature to develop them on the fly, but at the beginning you can go in with some cookie cutter topics. I can't stress open ended questions enough, but I'll move on.

Transitioning topics.

There's only so much that you can say about one topic of conversation before it runs dry, so it's important to know how to switch topics. The best way to do it is to somehow relate it to the conversation. Going off on unrelated tangents is a big no no. Your transition could jump to a similar topic by saying "That reminds me of the time I..." or "A similar thing happened to me", or it could jump to an earlier point in the conversation and go "You said something earlier about...?" The important thing is that you give a few words to explain how this is relevant to the conversation that you're having right now, people feel like you're not interested in what they're saying if you just jump from topic to topic without transition.

Making friends

Brainstorm a list of places that you could make friends. Generally these are places that you'll see someone over and over again, like at a school club, a sports team, a fitness class, the workplace, etc etc. Initiate and maintain conversations with people that you would like to be friends with, and invite them to join you in activities. There are 4 important parts to inviting them to join you:
-recognize social cues. If they're smiling at you and enjoying the conversation that's a green light that they'll want to continue talking to you in other environments. If they're yawning or disinterested, you can still invite them but don't push them if they decline.
-do a small activity. Don't invite a girl that you hardly know to go skiing with you for the weekend, that'll freak anyone out. Go out for coffee, grab some lunch, something that is a small time commitment and casual.
-make an open invitation. Say "We should grab some coffee SOMETIME" or "We should get talk outside of _____ SOMETIME". The key here is saying sometime, that way you can gauge their general interest before it gets confounded by other variables. If they decline, for example "I'm really busy, I really don't think I'd have time", don't push them, just say "I understand" with a smile and shake it off. Note: if you were reading their social cues, this should never happen, people will rarely say that they're not interested in ever seeing you outside of class/etc if they enjoy talking to you.
-set specifics. IMMEDIATELY. If they say "Yeah, that would be nice, I'd like to talk sometime", say "Are you free for lunch tomorrow?" or something comparable. If you don't do this immediately the chances are it will never happen.

I'm tired, there's more that I could write but I've got to wake up in 4 hours. This should get you started though. If there's one thing that you should take from this post though, it's this: you CAN develop excellent social skills and overcome your anxiety, it's all a matter of whether you have the balls to do what's necessary. It's not easy by any means, but that's the nature of the beast, so if you can't man up and do what's necessary then there's no room to complain about how introverted you are. If you start immersing yourself in social situations constantly you WILL develop results quickly.