Overcoming Laziness, Inertia, And Fear As You Improve Your People Skills

For a lot of people, it's not that they don't know what to do to do better socially, it's just that it's hard to get out of their comfortable rut of staying in and playing computer games every weekend. If you search around you'll easily find lots of other information on this area. I wanted to throw my own take on it out there.

Accept that you're going to be lazy some of the time

Anything that is both a) uncomfortable, and b) optional is inevitably going to lead to bouts of procrastination. Improving your social skills often falls into this category. It can suck to go to a party where you don't know many people, or try to make friends, or invite someone out. But there's no law that says you have to do it. On the other hand, it'll probably be pretty fun if you rent a cool new game and play it for three days straight.

So just realize up front that you're going to slack off some of the time, and that this will make the process of improving yourself take longer than it has to. Accept that some of your natural tendencies (e.g., liking to be alone) will slow you down. If you read enough self-help material, you'll come across the same archetype over and over again: It's the person who was in a low, low place in their life, and through years of consistent, determined effort they turned themselves into a huge success. Awesome if you can be one of those people, but most of us aren't cyborgs with a bottomless reservoir of willpower and discipline. We're going to get there eventually, but we'll occasionally plod along, detour off the path, or take a break. Sometimes you'll throw a week away reading a new book. Whatever, no one's going to die. Get it out of your system. Sometimes you'll be happy with life the way it is, your problems won't be weighing on your mind too heavily, and you won't feel any need to get to work on yourself at that moment.

It's cool though. You have more time than you think. Social skills don't really atrophy from disuse either. Once you've got yourself up to a certain level, you tend to stay that way. I guess you could say that the preceding sentiment encourages mediocrity. I just think I'm being realistic about how most people approach their self improvement. And while it's great if you can get into the top 1%, getting to an average level is sufficient for many people, and doesn't require as much hardcore dedication.

Do whatever you can to make the process of improvement as easy and painless as possible

Going back to that archetype of the self-improving cyborg, an implicit message I read into a lot of self-help material is that changing yourself has to be a painful, drawn out process that requires a ton of willpower and a high tolerance for hardship. Forget that. While there are most certainly times where you'll unavoidably have to overcome anxiety and discomfort, the idea is not to be masochistic. Use your intelligence to find any cheats and short cuts that you can. If you have a choice between a comparatively easy way to achieve a goal, and a protracted, laborious one, why not go the simple route?

A main point of this site is that you can do a lot to get better with people through slow, easy, indirect methods. If you can't talk to other people, you don't necessarily have to put hours into having discouraging, unsuccessful practice conversations with them. You may just need to read more and get some things to talk about. If you can't have fun with your friends then learn to take part in the things they do, instead of lingering on the sidelines wishing you could go home now. If you can't make friends, it may be that you're doing something wrong in the actual 'friend making' process, but it could be that you need to buff up your personality a bit.


If there's an easy option, then go for it, but you'll still have to deal with your fair share of hard times. Here's some general advice for forcing yourself out of your comfort zone in these situations. I basically adapted many of these ideas from Behavior Modification, a practical application of Behavioral Psychology principles:

Don't waste too much time trying to think your way out of your anxiety

If you don't want to do something it's because it's uncomfortable. In social situations, usually the source of this discomfort is anxiety. Anxiety is tricky because although it can be at the core of your reluctance to do something, on the surface it can manifest in other ways. You may feel lazy and unmotivated in general. Or at the last second you'll 'realize' you don't want to do something ("I don't want to go to this party. It's too cold out and it'll be boring.") Or you may feel a strong aversion to something ("I don't want to make friends. People suck.") But it's all rationalizations and self-sabotage. Your mind's throwing up hoops so you can avoid the situation that makes you experience that anxiety.

Anxiety's not rational. The way to get rid of it is to face the anxiety-provoking scenario enough that you experience firsthand that it's nothing to be nervous about. You can't just have a realization that your fear is ungrounded, or be told that the situation is nothing to be worried about. Irrationality doesn't care about logical arguments. At best you'll get a brief jolt of confidence that won't translate into any lasting real world results. You gotta force yourself through the barrier and face your fears. Only then will you truly know that going to a party, or getting rejected, or dancing in front of your friends isn't that bad.

Come up with a plan for what you want to accomplish ahead of time

It's much easier to procrastinate when you vaguely realize you have to 'get better with people', or 'get a life'. Those problems are too amorphous and overwhelming. Where do you start? What are you supposed to do if you're sitting around on a Friday at 8:00pm and know you 'need to get something social going on'? Assuming you don't do nothing, you're going to be haphazardly bumbling around more than you should.

You can start making progress when you sit down and figure out what exactly you need to do. Once you know what you're dealing with you can systematically go about changing it. You don't have to solve your entire life in one sitting, but disassemble your problems and come up with short term and longer term plans for what exactly you need to do to fix them. It's fine if they're rough sketches, or if the plans change later, but take apart your issues so they're more than, "I can't get along with people very well."

Like say your social life kind of sucks. You could look at yourself and conclude:

So now you have a rough idea of what you need to work on:

For each point, you may need to come up with a more specific plan of action. For example, you may not have many friends and realize the main problem isn't that you're unlikeable, it's that you're not meeting any new people. "I need to meet new people" is too vague and won't get you out the door. So break down the issue and figure out what specific actions you need to take, as well as some time lines for each sub-goal. For example, you may need to:

That's something you can follow. You may still have to overcome some inertia to look up a club and then join one, but it's much more concrete and manageable than, "I need to make friends."

Gradually work your way up to the hard stuff

If there's something relatively specific that you're afraid to do, you can probably work your way up to it over time. Figure out your current goal, and then work backwards to its easiest variation. If you're too nervous to talk to certain people at your school who you want to get to know, you could start with briefly saying hi to people you're not intimidated by, then you could have quick chats with them, but with an excuse to leave after a minute, then you could try talking to the non-intimidating people for longer periods. Maybe after two or three weeks of this, you could try briefly talking to the people you really want to get to know.

When gradually working your way up to more difficult goals, let your momentum carry you through

Gradual progression towards more difficult tasks partially works because you're acquiring the basic skills that will let you tackle the harder stuff. But you also have momentum going for you. When you do something you fear, you get a little jolt of confidence and courage that makes subsequent obstacles a little easier to manage, and which you can use to jump up to the next tier. It wears off though, so you've got to keep your foot on the gas pedal. Otherwise you can get a start-stop-start-stop thing going. It's a little painful to start up again each time. You've lost some of your progress/fearlessness and have to get it back again. It comes back quicker than learning it the first time, but it still takes some time. So make your climb up the ladder consistent. Do something everyday. Keep that psyched up feeling going.

Use your environment and your natural preferences as leverage against yourself

This is the last big point. When you're trying to make yourself do something that's uncomfortable, you have to do what you can to force yourself through your anxiety. Like I said, you can't think away the fear, so you have to push yourself do it by whatever means you can come up with. Having a concrete plan to follow instead of a vague notion helps. Working up to the worst stuff over time helps. Momentum helps. All these helpful concepts can be aided by using your environment and your default tendencies to force yourself to take action.

Environment

Alter your environment so that it pushes you away from unproductive activities. This could mean making changes such as:

If you make the right changes, you won't have any say over whether you can waste your time or not (you can hardly play newer games without a newer system). With others it's more a matter of willpower (e.g., not visiting disposable, fluffy sites), but if you do things like get rid of your bookmarks to them you'll be that much less likely to go to visit.

You can also make your whole life more conducive to change. I talk about this more in Lifestyle Factors That Can Affect Your Social Success

Your natural preferences

Actually, while I think cutting down on the obsessiveness and time drain of your pastimes is good, I don't think cutting them out entirely accomplishes all that much. You like doing them, why deny yourself something you enjoy? Instead, you can make them work for you. Make indulging your innate desires contingent on trying to progress socially. Make it a reward, but one based on trying, not on results that are largely out of your control:

Putting this kind of leverage over yourself is under your control so it does take some willpower to use (you can always play video games without doing anything productive first). However, if you use it correctly it will have a very strong influence over your behavior.

Usually the hardest part is getting started

Acquiring a new routine and pulling yourself out of your rut is often the most difficult aspect of changing. It's easy to put off. Once you take that first step, it's often rewarding and natural to keep going (e.g., once you've got some people to hang around with it becomes easy to spend more time being social, and the idea of sitting around alone becomes less appealing). You can use all of the advice above to get started: make your current environment less attractive. Come up with a concrete plan to follow, one that incorporates clear goals, gradual progression, momentum, and rewards for meeting daily objectives.