I posted these two articles already, but couldn’t announce it here.  The second one is pretty quick.

Inviting yourself to social events

Is it okay to hang out with another guy one on one?

How to practice your social skills

When People Say “How’s It Going?”, “What’s Up?” or “What’s New?”

And a semi-new one on small talk, that organizes what a few previous articles said about it:

Thoughts On The Point Of Small Talk

There was something else I wanted to include in this update but I think I’ll just get to it later. That’s it for the site tune up updates. There are lots of little clean ups I’m still going to make, but they’re not really worth announcing, just more minor organizing.

If you’re thinking about going on your first trip, check it out.

Loosen Up To Be More Socially Successful

Is Thinking You’re Better Than Other People Holding You Back Socially?

Reasons People Mistakenly Think They Don’t Like Something

(I’m not sure about the title for this one. If you read the article you’ll get what it’s about, but I can’t quite figure out a good wording for the concept without sounding accusatory. False, mistaken, faulty, they all sound bad and don’t totally capture everything… If you have any idea, feel free to drop me a line).

I also edited What To Do If You Can’t Relate To All The Shallow People Out There to be not be about six different concepts at once, and to focus just on ways people can seem more shallow than they are, and why “shallow” things aren’t all bad.

Some Ways People Are Mentally Lazy About Judging Others

And a sort of new article, to put my ideas about indirect improvement in one spot:

Indirectly Become More Socially Successful By Improving Yourself As A Person

I split up and revised my older article on the tricky issue of changing yourself. One thing I wanted to emphasize was how you don’t have totally overhaul your whole personality just to get better with people:

You Don’t Have To Totally Change And Sell Out To Have Social Success

Sometimes Changing Yourself Can Increase Your Social Success

And since the ideas in the articles above previously may have been scattered all through the site, often redundantly, I’ve gone through the site as a whole to help tidy it up. I’m not totally done on that count, but I should be once all the tune ups are done.

I’ve been writing www.succeedsocially.com for about two and a half years.  I’ve put up around 75 articles. At the time I wrote each article, I was focused mainly on whatever points I wanted to get across for that topic.

If you take the site as a whole though, it’s gotten a little messy as the articles have accumulated.  Themes that should be more prominent are scattered all over the place.  Some ideas get repeated too often. Some articles discuss too many things at once and would be better off split up.

I felt it was time to go through the entire site and give it a clean up to try to make it more organized and cohesive.  This will take me a while, but I’ve grouped the changes I need to make into rough batches.  I’ll update the site when I get a ‘batch’ done.

A new article, based on a question I get asked fairly often:

How Long Does It Take To Improve Your Social Skills?

Some of the material at the end is moved over from an older article called Overall Attitudes That Will Help You Improve Your People Skills.  That one has had some new concepts added to it.

The importance of practicing gets its own article:

Directly Practice Your Social Skills To Improve Them

The idea of there being no magic shortcut gets it’s own article too:

There’s No Quick, Effortless Way To Improve Your Social Skills

The article My Take On Social Skills And How To Improve Them was really three things at once.  The original is gone now.  First, it was about why I created the site.  That’s in its own article now:

Why I Made This Site

Next it talks about what social skills are.  Maybe I’ll write about that one day.   Lastly, it gave some general principles for how to improve.  That should be coming fairly soon.

I’m working on this site-wide overhaul straight through until it’s done.  I’ll post the next batch of updates as soon as I can.

Some Things I’ve Noticed Now That I Have Better Social Skills

Dealing With Regrets Caused By Your Poor People Skills

How to be more fun

The biggest change is there are now two main sections. One talking about being more fun, and another on how to avoid being less fun.