Dealing with Introversion

[madnak]

Introversion is great. There's nothing wrong with it or negative about it. There's a common perception in modern society that extroverts are "better" than introverts somehow, and there is really no basis for it.

Don't worry about what your girlfriend wants, worry about what you want.

Caring too much about what others think of you will probably go away with time. Especially as you get involved in more social situations and develop a more solid sense of self. If you and the people you are close to respect and appreciate you, then other people will cease to matter so much.

A lot of people may want you to "sell yourself" or force yourself to "get out there." If it feels uncomfortable, that doesn't always mean it's a bad thing. But if it doesn't feel like who you are, my advice is not to do it. As long as you feel good about yourself and feel good about being yourself, you should do fine.

Starting conversations is hard. But most people, the vast majority of extroverts, are very bad at it. Some of the best conversationalists I know are introverts. You probably don't consider the weather or the latest sports game to be particularly interesting topics. That doesn't make you boring, on the contrary. "Small talk" has a strong tendency to be light and superficial.

I don't know your personality, so I'm not sure exactly what you should say. But I would recommend finding something relevant. Rather than asking the same damn questions (what do you do, where do you live, interesting god-damned weather we're having huh?), try to find something interesting about the person or environment and ask about it. Comment on the clothes they're wearing, or the beer they're drinking, or listen to a conversation and wait for a pause to join in. If you can't think of anything, don't freak out. You can always be inane, too. "Pretty cold out, huh?" may not be the best option, but at least it gets things started.

Don't worry if you feel cheesy. Feeling cheesy can mean you're doing very well. Pay more attention to the people around you than to yourself. It may take some effort, but work on it. Look at what they do and how they do it. Don't worry about analyzing it too much, just try to be aware. Instead of worrying about whether you're saying the right thing, listen to what they're saying. If you really pay attention you'll notice that most of them aren't pulling off any amazing feats, they're just babbling.

The more comfortable you are, usually the more successful you'll be. Sometimes going into a bar and just sitting quietly and observing is the right idea. You don't have to always be "on," you'll just exhaust yourself. And observing people helps a lot. As an introvert you're probably a good listener, so get the other person talking. Let them tell you about what they're interested in. Offer insight and validation. And learn from them, that's a great benefit.

In conversation, when they say something don't just take it at face value. Try to keep in mind why they're saying it. How do they expect you to respond? Watch the body language. Tight and closed language means they're probably not very comfortable. If they're open and smiling and making lots of gestures and leaning in close, then you've established a rapport and are done with the hardest part. Don't be afraid to say what you think! Sometimes it's worth it to be careful with sensitive subjects, but even then the only way to learn tact is to [censored] up sometimes. Definitely express your opinions when they aren't offensive, chances are you have some very compelling things to say.

If you get rejected, shrug it off. It's much easier said than done, of course, and at first it may seem hard. But as time goes by you'll realize that every "success" is worth about 20 "failures." You will probably come across as a geek. Don't worry about it, it's great! Don't listen to these "PUA" snots. Just be a geek. You'll appeal more to the kinds of people who find you interesting. And there are probably more people interested the same things you are than you think. And in time you'll probably go through an "ugly duckling" experience without even realizing it.

And don't worry about "crutches." Use what's useful. Go out with friends if it makes you feel more comfortable. Going out alone to meet people is pretty hard no matter who you are. Drink a few beers if it loosens things up. If you're really nervous in social situations it can be a great tool. Go to classes and events. They give you something to talk about and provide a low-pressure environment compared to bars. And above all, if you don't want to socialize with them, don't socialize with them. If you're just afraid you can overcome that, but if you really don't want anything to do with them it's trouble getting involved. Stick with birds of your own feather if you prefer, there's nothing wrong with that.

[AAAA]

the other option may be that you have grown up and your 'buddies' haven't. like the guy said about growing into his type a personality. there are also lots of swans from ugly ducklings. you "introverted" guys might just be paying attention to what is around you and when the women start looking for husbands, you become much more interesting.

the "bad boys" aren't always so much fun when they use your rent money for a drug habit or throwing a party.

[RacersEdge]

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I think you are confusing shyness with introversion.

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Read the first paragraph of This , our problem sounds a lot like introversion to me.

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I interpret that as introverts being overwhelmed by too much information in large groups of people because they are internally wired. It's like information overload. But it should really be the case whether you know the people or not - it's just the big group thing period. If it's based on whether or not you already know them, then that sounds like a social thing - which is where the shyness comes in.

I guess the test would be how comfortable are you walking up to a stranger and starting a conversation?

[CheckRaise]

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I guess the test would be how comfortable are you walking up to a stranger and starting a conversation?

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Not comfortable at all.

[RacersEdge]

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I guess the test would be how comfortable are you walking up to a stranger and starting a conversation?

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Not comfortable at all.

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I would diagnose that as shyness then, although I only play a doctor on the internet.

[beenben]

I have a friend who says he used to have the same problem. He joined toastmasters. problem solved.

www.toastmasters.org

[itslog1]

i think the opinion of extroverts being "better" people than introverts stems from the inherent qualities found in extroverts. it follows logic that people will like people who get along with others well more than those that do not. doesn't mean any way is better or not. i myself am the epitome of the introvert. doesn't make me any worse/better than some of my closest friends who are extroverts. be yourself, i know it sounds cliche. YOU are a good person, the category people working in labs put you in can go take a hike.

[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.

[Boolean]

Damn good post.

When I go to the show, I'm going to do just what you recommended at the mall. Go up to pretty much everyone, see what they like about the show, hang out. I think it'll be a lot of fun and it should be interesting to see the results. I'll post a trip report to see how everything goes. I'm definitely good at asking questions, it's just the first question that's usually the hardest for me. At the show, "What do you think of this music?" should be a good starter.

Thanks for the advice.

[ScottyP431]

Boolean,

It's a question of do you want to put in the time to acquire the skillset of being an outgoing/talkative person. Gaining comfort and conversational skills will probably only come with practice. Just try striking up a 1 minute conversation with everyone you come into contact with. Cashiers, waiters, girls in line at the bank whatever.Seriously, you can easily do like at minimum 10 of these a day. 2 weeks later you will have no fear of social interactions because you just put 140 of these under your belt.

It's pretty hip on here right now to bash "The Game" and such tactics for getting women, but most of that stuff are things that nerds read in psychology books about general interaction and then backwards engineered (i say this since most of the original research was done on women, there is a good carol gilligan quote in the game about this) to apply exclusively to picking up women. I would specifically recomend you download like the Juggler post archives (its free). He talks about a lot of simple non trick/gimmick based ways to build conversational skills. Here is a quick outline of some that can help you:

-90/10 rule- when you begin a social interaction, most often the other person will be just as apprehensive as you are, so you need to supply most of the initial talking/conversation. Be willing to put in 90 percent. A real conversation is like a game of catch. You throw the ball back and forth. But you can't often jump right into normal conversation, you have to build to it. So be willing to do more of the work at first.
-Eye contact- this is huge, and a real problem i notice in many of my friends i would describe in the same way you (and others in this thread) have described yourselves. They tend to do this kind of weird shifty eye thing where they look at everything other than a new persons eyes. You don't have to stare down the other person, but make sure you employ active listening. Especially with women, if you just throw in some head nods and verbal agreements your results will dramatically improve.
-Dont ask a lot of questions at first. When you meet someone new, you aren't interrogating them. Everyone says the same [censored] "where do you live/go to school/work" etc and no one really cares to be asked or to hear the answers. Instead make statements about things that are interesting that would be a springboard for them to talk back to you.
-Emotional relevance- you want to talk about things that the girl (your GF's friends) can contribute to. You can't be like "oh god, last night i was 8 tabling 30-60 hi low stud when...." That gives them nothing to throw back at you. This doesnt mean you have to talk about Allie Mcbeal or oprah's book club though. Talk about travel, food, movies etc. Example

Girl: So where do you work?<lame question>
Boolean: Well right now i do XYZ<answer lame question>, but, I am probably gonna quit to go to spain and become a bullfighter. I really want to travel and pull a kind of hemingway drunken genius thing off for a few years.
Girl: I love to travel, i went to ABC and it was awesome
Boolean: Yea, i'd love to visit ABC, is it anything like DEF? I went there and this amsuing anecdote happend <insert anecdote>

If nothign else you can always fall back on talking about your GF because that is common ground you share. Make fun of her playfully
Boolean: So when you have a girls night out with my GF, does she make you carry all kinds of crap for her? Tongiht she tried to make me pocket enough makeup to do rupaul up for a week
Girl: Oh my god i know, she takes so long to get ready
Boolean: No crap, earlier today when she started to get ready, tehre was a stegosaurus outside our apt, thats how god damn long ago it was

Ok, enough meta level theoretical drivel. I know how you feel about meeting your GF's friends. My GF has a seemingly unending string of drunken hoes that shes friends with so anytime I am around here I have to meet 40 new people and it can be really annoying. Esp since girls make a big deal about meeting their friends BF's and what not. If I could break it down for you I guess I would say that a good short convo with meeting someone like this in a bar is like, actually, here is like a sample convo and then it can be broken down later, lets say you are at a bar and your GF Jen introduces you to her friend KT

Jen: hey, this is my BF boolean
KT: oh my god, I've heard so much about you (girls always say this for some reason, especially when they've heard nothing)
Boolean: Hi <eye contact> , nice to finally meet you, Jen has told me lots of stories about you and yalls debauchery together (most girls are now hooked, thinking "oh crap, what has jen told him)
KT: Oh no, i swear it isn't true, blah blah blah do you go to school with jen?<lame question>
Boolean: Yea i do, but i am considering dropping out to become a professional thumb wrestler/stamp picture photographer/astronaut, (whatever. Something fun and playfull that shows your sense of humor. )

As for starting conversations with strangers, use the 90-10 rule and just overload them with stuff. Dont worry about having the perfect opening line. Just say anything stupid. Today i was at the ATM and the girl in front of me was making a deposit and she reached for the left stack of envelopes and i said "no! not that one" and she kind of laughed and gave me the what look and i said "I had my eye on that one, take one from the back" , she giggled and took one from the back and we chatted a little. Just any kind of stupid thing can open as long as you are personable/playful and fun. A good one in bars is to critique the persons drink. Like if you are at a bar and a girl next to you orders a drink, comment on it.