How to Appear Socially Confident

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Tips to Build Social Confidence

Not sure how you can appear more socially confident? One way to do this is to practice your social skills. If you make the effort to practice your social skills, it will help you to appear socially confident no matter what situation you find yourself in.

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But, don’t get overly serious about this. You don’t want to be perfect—rather, you want to feel confident that you know social etiquette and have practiced it enough times that you know how to handle various situations.

It’s okay to make mistakes. You’re trying out new skills and seeing how they work. You’re bound to feel awkward and like you don’t know what you’re doing, but over time that feeling will go away.

Step 1: Address Your Social Anxiety

If you have overwhelming social anxiety, you’ll need to address this first before you start to put yourself into social situations to become more socially confident. There are a variety of ways you can do this.

You could read self-help books and apply the strategies that you find.
You could see a therapist in person or choose online therapy from a provider such as Online-Therapy.
You could tap into energy psychology methods and see if they work for you.

Regardless of what you choose, it’s important to make sure that your anxiety is at least manageable before you start to try to boost your social confidence.

Step 2: Choose a Skill to Work On

First, choose a social skill that you’d like to focus on, read a description of how you go about it, and then put it into practice. Below is a list of the types of social skills you may want to practice.

Assertiveness:

Expressing your opinion
Standing up for your own rights
Handling rejection

Non-verbal behavior:

Speaking with a loud enough voice
Maintaining eye contact
Not standing too far away from people
Pointing your body toward someone when you are talking

Conversation:

Listening and asking questions
Sharing things about yourself
Joining a group in conversation
Ending a conversation

Meeting new people:

Introducing yourself to a new person
Introducing someone to another person
Making small talk
Asking someone on a date

Being in the spotlight:

Speaking up in a meeting
Volunteering to give a toast

Making friends:

Sharing things about yourself
Smiling and being friendly toward others
Showing interest in others
Sharing funny stories or jokes
Asking someone how their day is going

Awareness and empathy:

Shift your focus away from yourself to becoming aware of how others are feeling

Step 3: Find or Create a Social Situation

However, you can’t practice social skills on your own. So, you’re going to need to seek out people to practice with.

Create a situation in which you have an opportunity to practice some social skills. The situation you create will depend on the social skill you want to practice. For example, you could sign up for a yoga or similar class if you want to practice meeting new people. If you’d like to practice being assertive, you could return an item to the store.

Once you’re in the situation, practice working on a social skill from one of the above categories.

Step 4: Do It Again

Quite literally, you’re just going to keep repeating this process for each of the different social skills. Over time, you should notice that you start to feel more socially confident as you begin to get more comfortable with various situations.

Step 5: Evaluate Your Progress

What you should notice over time is that your beliefs start to shift, such that you start to see yourself as a socially confident person rather than someone who is awkward and anxious.

Eventually, these new beliefs should start to feed your thoughts, so that you have fewer anxious thoughts overall. If you don’t notice this happening, it could be that you have underlying unresolved issues that are preventing you from making progress.

Do you ever feel like you are resisting becoming a socially confident person? Do you worry that people won’t like you if you become “that guy” or “that girl?” These are issues you will need to address in order to make progress.

That’s it! Go through the list above and start making progress toward becoming a more socially confident person. I believe that anyone can take positive steps in this regard, and you are no exception.

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