This time the other blog is 30 sleeps, written by Brad Bollenbach.  Here are some of his posts, but his site as he has other pieces on socializing as well:

Social Skydiving:  The Art of Talking to Strangers

Social Polarity

How to Avoid Being a Wallflower

How to Get a Life

Overcoming Loneliness

Social skills-wise, he has some really good things to say.  When I read his advice on socializing, I sometimes have to laugh because he’s independently come to some of the same conclusions I did (e.g., that advice like, “Just be confident and be yourself”, is easier said than done, or that socially capable people often say things like this because they can’t really articulate why they’re good).

He likely knows what he’s talking about because he had to get his own people skills into shape.  As he says:

“I became a lot more social when I moved from my smaller town to the larger city of Winnipeg.  Before my move, I hadn’t built many strong relationships in my hometown.  This was partially due to my personal development efforts, as I distanced myself from the crowd to work on myself.  It was only after I moved that I realized I was missing a huge chunk of life, and I needed to take steps to fix it.

…nearly three years later, those steps have been very successful.  I have several groups of friends, and any evening I spend by myself is a matter of choice, not a lack of options.”

Here are some of his articles:

How To Be More Social

How To Improve Your Social Skills

Social Skills And Dancing For Dummies

I also wrote an earlier post listing some links to good articles on making conversation.  I mention three of his articles on that sub-topic there too.

As far as I know, there aren’t many sites out there devoted totally to interpersonal skills. However, there are quite a few blogs that occasionally write about socializing, but mostly focus on a range of other personal development topics. Compared to other categories like productivity or finding your life’s purpose, social skills don’t get a ton of attention. One of these sites may only have a handful of articles on getting along with people in two years worth of archives.

What they do write though can be quite good. Each one of these posts will gather together the people skills articles from one of these sites.

The first site I’ll do is The Simple Dollar. It’s mainly about finances and paying off debt and whatnot, but when using StumbleUpon one day I came across a helpful article on it about creating a social network. I was impressed and went through the archives and found several more. Here they are:

Building a Powerful Social Network in Your Immediate Area
Investing in Yourself: Socializing and Networking
Seven Ways To Overcome Social Awkwardness That You Can Practice Anytime
Nine Social Skills To Practice – Even For The Socially Unskilled Like Myself

I didn’t list them here, but it also has a few entries relating to relationships and finances (i.e., what to do if your friends are more loose with their money than you).

But that’s just me. If you’re interested, here are some links to articles on conversation. My main criteria was to look for articles that cover new ideas besides the usual listen, smile, be interested, follow current events, offer compliments, ask open-ended questions, repeat what they said back at them-type advice. Not that that stuff is bad, just that you’ve probably heard it already.

My three conversations articles to start things off, in case you haven’t seen them:

Some ‘bigger picture’ thoughts on making conversation

Examples: Starting conversations, inviting people out, and more

How to do better in loud, crazy group conversations

By Scott H. Young – this guy mostly writes about productivity and changing your habits and stuff, but the handful of articles he’s written on social topics are pretty insightful:

Better conversations: Collecting life stories

Improve your conversations with stories

Mastering Conversation

Two recent ones from lifehack.org:

How to initiate conversation

How to exit a conversation

Positivity Blog – another one of those eclectic personal development blogs that occasionally discusses socializing:

Do you make these 10 mistakes in a conversation?

5 conversational mistakes that can make you look dumb

Five awesome and five awful conversation topics

Best Tool For The Job – found this one pretty randomly:

How to have better conversations

And that’s it. It’s weird. I had some of these articles in mind going in, but the rest I pretty much found through Google. I intended to link to anything good that I found, but the only stuff I really liked was on blogs. All the non-blog stuff I found was either too short, basic/unoriginal, or obviously a teaser for some commercial program. Go figure.