Stages You Can Go Through As You Improve Your People Skills

I've observed that people seem to go through different stages as they work through their social issues. I'll lay them out so you'll have a better idea of some things that may come up for you in the future, and to possibly make you feel better if you currently feel stuck in a bad place.

The obvious disclaimer is that no one really goes through concrete, isolated stages in a concise, tidy order. They're more just a way of illustrating general ideas. The actual process varies between people and is much more disorderly and blurred together. Not everyone will go all the stages either (e.g., if your people skills are half-decent you may only experience later ones). Certain things may not apply to you. You may experience aspects of several stages at once. You may be be in different stages for different parts of yourself (e.g., with most people you're okay, but with certain types you're much more behind). Here they are. Also, after writing them I found they fit that classic progression from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence fairly well:

The blissfully ignorant stage

This describes a lot of awkward people in high school. This is when your social abilities are lacking but you're not all that aware of it yet. What I should note though is even at this stage, there may still be areas where you're doing okay. It's not like you're a total social failure in every way possible, or that you're a bad person just because you're a bit awkward. It's just that on the whole there are a lot of areas you could stand to tune up.

• Certain things may not be on your radar at all (e.g., the concepts of grooming and dressing half-decently).
• For other areas you may have a distorted sense of how you're doing (e.g., you fancy yourself a sophisticated, witty intellectual but most people would describe you as an abrasive, argumentative dork.)
• You may have a tendency to fool yourself about your problems and have defense mechanisms in place to protect your ego.
• You may realize you're lacking socially, but you're relatively optimistic about the future. Your thinking may be along the lines of, "Next semester will be different."
• Regarding your weak areas, you can have a tendency to not take any action and instead rely on the universe to bring you what you want.
• In this stage, and other ones, you can realize you're behind in some areas, but have a wrong idea of what you need to do to address the problem (e.g., you believe the solution is learning tricks to make people like you).
• This is not to say you never get insecure or depressed at this stage, but you're largely unaware of your issues.

After this phase you realize you need to improve but you can be in many different states of mind:

Insecure, down in the dumps phase

At some point you'll start to transition away from blissful ignorance as the magnitude of your weaknesses hits you. You now realize that your social skills aren't as good as some people's, and you're missing out on things because of that. This stage is characterized by depressed feelings, from mildly mopeyness to being really, really down. You may never really experience this stage, and instead jump into the later ones, or it could be relatively mild or short-lived.

• As the name implies, you're generally insecure and down on yourself.
• Your problems occupy your thoughts a great deal.
• You feel like you don't have the first clue about what to do to escape your condition, which naturally makes you feel worse.
• Or you could take some steps to improve your situation, but they don't amount to much and make you get further discouraged.
• Cognitive distortions and insecurities are common: One bad conversation means you're a loser for all time, one ambiguous look is interpreted as a sign of withering rejection, you just know all your coworkers hate you, etc.
• Your depressed mood colors your thinking negatively. A big part of getting over this stage is getting a handle on these destructive thought processes.
• You can feel so down on life and lacking in confidence that you don't want to try anything ("What's the point? I'll get rejected/make an idiot of myself/not have anything to say")
• You're likely to give up after small setbacks ("I smiled at them and they did nothing. I knew I was a loser. There's no point in trying to get to know people. I can't win. If I fail then I feel bad. If I have some success then I'll feel even worse when I just screw up down the road after I've gotten my hopes up.")
• Your poor mood can hinder your abilities to improve yourself because you can not feel like talking to anyone. You may get invited to a party, come up with several scenarios about how it'll be a disappointing waste of time, then decide it's not worth going.
• You can feel caught in a Catch-22 in that you need to be around people to not be a such a loser, but you can't be around people because you don't want them to see what a loser you are.
• At it's worst, your mind can almost have a caged animal quality to it - one minute you feel frantic and desperate, the next helpless and despondent.

Hitting bottom

This doesn't happen to everyone either, but many people who have recovered from their social ineptitude remember a specific time where they feel like they hit bottom.

• The difficult nature of your situation just hits you all at once and you crumble.
• It can be an ultimately positive experience because you finally start on a path to seriously improving yourself.
• You finally realize where you stand in life and that you need to do something about it.
• After it's over you start to work on eliminating your problems in a more dispassionate, systematic way.

Temporary over-confidence phase

This is another one that doesn't happen to everyone. It happens when you first start getting serious about improving and you come across some material that seems really helpful. For a while you can think that just because you've read the information and understand it intellectually, that you actually have the ability to apply it in the real world.

• The material psyches you up, fills you with hope, and makes you feel like you can conquer the world. That's one contributor.
• You're just learning about a new area and making frequent large leaps in your understanding of it compared to how you were before. You feel like the man for learning so much so quickly. Unfortunately you lack perspective about how good your are in the grand scheme of things (i.e., you're a beginner) and confuse feeling like the man, for actually being the man.
• Your confidence may cause you to take some action, but objectively you're probably just doing okay, not as well as your pumped up emotional state leads you to believe you are at the time.
• Eventually it sinks in that just because you've read some helpful information it doesn't mean you can 100% apply the skills in real life.
• If you hit bottom, you may do so before passing through this phase. Or you may start making progress, feel over-confident for a bit, then hit bottom after you later realize you weren't in nearly as good shape as you thought you were.

The rocky ascent, mood swings stage

This phase occurs when you start seeing some initial results, are committed to improving, but your actions and thoughts are still influenced a lot by your unproductive habits and weaknesses. You're on the road to improvement, and you're moving upwards to a place where you'll be over your problems, but the ascent has a lot of ups and downs. The biggest characteristic of this stage is swinging moods. One day you'll be doing fairly well and you'll feel super human. But then something bad will happen and you'll feel moody and discouraged. Then you'll feel fired up again and like everything is going to be a-okay from here on out. Then you'll feel like it's all hopeless again and that you're backsliding...

• This stage can happen at the steepest part of the learning curve for a particular area.
• You may have a background desperation to get over your problems as soon as you can, which contributes to the emotional ups and downs.
• In general, you can tend to read too much into little things and make exaggerated projections about what they mean for your future (e.g., if you have a good conversation with someone, you conclude you're going to have a busy social life by the end of the month. If someone doesn't talk to you that day, it means you're a loser who will always be a lonely reject.)
• Having a mindset where you're looking for a magic bullet can contribute to these mood swings as well. You'll read some inspirational passage or seemingly profound piece of advice and feel psyched up for a day or two. Then you'll be bummed when the feeling inevitably wears off and it turns out you weren't cured after all.
• People can also get thrown for a loop when they feel really 'on' in a social situation one day, but then can't seem to recreate that success again.

The problem with this stage is that when you're in the middle of it you lack perspective and are out of touch with the larger picture. That's why little things that are quite trivial in hindsight seem to carry so much importance. Whether someone says 'hi' back to you when you greet them isn't a big deal at all, but at the time you don't know how relatively important or unimportant it is compared to other things, so you blow it out of proportion.

What helps is having a realistic idea beforehand about the path ahead of you and the progress you can make. If you know you've still got a year or more of work ahead of you won't get so freaked out if you're not magically becoming cured overnight. It also helps to pull back from your day-to-day battles and focus on your overall growth. In the grand scheme of things you're slowly creeping upward, even though within one day or one week your fortunes swing wildly. Think of a stock that fluctuates a lot in price but still ends up being worth more at the end of every year.

The coasting to the finish line phase

You reach this stage when you feel like you've gotten over the hump and things are finally starting to click into place. You may still have a lot of work to do to get to the level you want, but it doesn't feel like such a struggle anymore. If you continue to put in the time you know you'll get there sooner or later.

• By this time you've likely hit on an effective way to improve. Before you may have traveled down a few dead ends, but now you think you've got it.
• You've probably met some of your initial goals by this point and can thus relax a little. Your strivings for improvement aren't accompanied by the urgency and desperation they were before. For example, if your overall goal is to get better with people, you may have met your initial goal of getting a regular group of friends to hang out with.
• Like I said, there may still be challenges and setbacks ahead of you before you get to the finish line, but the biggest problems are gone and socializing is much more enjoyable for you now. Working on your issues is more interesting and rewarding now, when before you had to struggle with the littlest things. If you sit down with some people, you may still want to work on your conversation skills, but you can have a fun chat as you do so. Before it would have been a frustrating ordeal to even have a five-minute exchange with someone. Now you're tweaking little details and enjoying the comfort that things are falling into place.

The end (sort of)

There's never really a clear end to this kind of thing, you can always improve further, but one day you'll get to the point where you've more or less got the kind of life you want and you don't need to think about how your social skills are doing every minute. You can hang out with your friends and have a good time without really thinking about how you do it.

• The thing is you don't really know the end for you until you get there. When you're first starting off your dreams may be quite ambitious, pie in the sky even. But when you get to a certain point you may realize that's where you're happy to be and you really don't need to go any further.
• You're comfortable and content where you are. If you had to stay at this stage forever you could live with it.
• You may occasionally backslide into your old ways, but overall life is good and you have the skills to recover quickly.
• Little things that you used to struggle with are easy. You may even eventually start to lose touch with how hard they used to be for you, because you take your competence with them for granted.
• You may still have future goals or extra heights you want to climb to, but you're going to tackle them from a solid, calm, happy base. And they're more optional enhancements, rather than essential components of your very happiness.

This progression was from Socially Below Average to Socially Average. In a way you're back at the beginning again. You could theoretically make the journey to Socially Above Average, but in your current average state you'd be unconsciously ignorant about many of the things very socially competent people take for granted. Average is just average after all. That's not to say you'd go through the same stages again, you'd probably go through different ones. It's just food for thought, that what's the end in one way is the beginning in another. And it shows how amorphous this whole idea of stages is. Can't take those too literally.