How Long Does It Take To Improve Your Social Skills?

Okay, you want to get over your social awkwardness and be more at ease around people. You've come across this site. It looks pretty good from what you've seen so far. What a lot of people want to know is, how long does it all take? How long until the awkwardness and all the pain that comes with that goes away?

It's not the easiest question to answer because it obviously depends on a few things:

Where are you starting, and where do you want to end up? The farther the distance between the two, the longer it will take. A deeply awkward guy with dreams of becoming incredibly cool and popular will take a lot more time to get there than a girl who's a little reserved, but pretty likable, and who just wants to get the hang of making friends.

One to three years

If I had to make a rough guess though, I'd say improving your social skills takes about one to three years. That may be longer than you'd like to hear, but based on my experiences, I think that's a realistic estimation. It's just a matter of you needing to catch up to everyone else. If you're two years behind your peers in your social development, then you've somehow got to get two years of catch up practice in. Social skills are built up of all these little sub-abilities and you have to get them all into shape.

There's no way a time frame like this can't be imprecise though. For one, it's really hard to nail down exactly when you start, and when you finish. If you've been awkward for years, does that count towards the total, or does the clock only start when you really get serious about improving? And your social skills will continue to grow over your whole life, so when do you say you're done?

Personally, I'd guess it took me three years from when I got serious about improving, to when I felt like the worst is over. I couldn't tell you the exact month I stopped taking halfhearted pot shots at my issues, and got a lot more focused and serious. I also couldn't tell you the day I felt the worst was behind me. When I think back though, I just have this intuitive feeling for when the rough start and finishing points were.

There's no shortcut

I turned over a lot of rocks looking for a magic pill to solve my social problems instantly. There isn't one. More details in this article:

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

Overall, it's probably better to know improving can take a while

Being told you won't be cured in two weeks can be discouraging. It can also be a relief in a way to have a reasonable idea of how long the process can take. If you know ahead of time improving is going to take a while, you won't get too demoralized if you're not making huge jumps in progress from one week to the next. On the other hand, if you expect that you're going to get over your problems nearly instantly, then you can grow more and more unmotivated when that doesn't happen. You may give up entirely.

You can probably improve quicker than I did

When I improved my social skills I had to figure out everything on my own. It took me a surprisingly long time for some pretty obvious things to dawn on me. If I could go back, knowing everything I know now, I could get better in maybe as little as a year.

Obviously I hope the advice on this site can shave some time off your improvement process.

The more you work at it, the quicker you'll improve. That's not always possible though

The biggest determinant of how quickly you improve is how much you practice and catch up in your social development. If you make a deliberate effort to get as much social experience as you can, as quickly as you can, than you'll save a lot of time.

I am realistic though. I realize not everyone is a self-improvement cyborg who can tirelessly pursue their goals and improve themselves with maximum efficiency. You're human and at times you may not be putting every last ounce of effort into your social skills. One weekend you may goof off and watch an entire T.V. series on DVD. Your may put your social development on the back burner for a few months while you give more attention to other priorities. This factor is one reason I give that 1-3 years time frame.

You just have more time than it seems

I know the feeling of being lonely and insecure and feeling really impatient and desperate to get some relief. When you're in the thick of your own problems, you can feel like it's the end of the world, and that you have to get over your issues soon or your life will be over. But really, even if you never become more socially adjusted until, say, your late 20's, you still have lots of time to catch up to everyone else and enjoy a regular life.

It's weird, when you're younger you tend to see life in 4-year chunks. High-school is four years and you end up thinking that if you don't accomplish certain things by the end of that time then you've failed. Then college is usually four years. So if you don't make those accomplishments by the end of college then you're really a failure. Even after college, you can mark being 25 or 26 as another milestone, and then 30. But really, saying you should have done x by the end of college or your loser rating goes up further is somewhat arbitrary. Is there really that much difference between being a 21-year old student and a 22-year old graduate?

Another thing is that when you're younger you only have a hazy idea of the future, so you feel this vague urgency to do certain things right away before you run out of time. But say you never start really hanging out with people and having fun until you're 22. You still have eight more years of being young to have fun and play catch up before you turn 30. Eight years is double the length of high-school or college. And that's assuming all the fun suddenly dries up at 30, which isn't true at all.

You can catch up too because people's social development starts to level off at a certain point. So while they're slowly improving at a higher level, refining the groundwork they've already laid, you're quickly moving up the more basic and intermediate ranks. Eventually you'll be at a fairly equal level to them.

As long as you don't give up, you have to get there eventually

Right now you might be neck deep in your problems and can't see a way out. But if you start working on yourself and making steady progress, then one day you're going to be a regular person just like everyone else. You'll have a bunch of people in your social network who you see frequently. Relationships won't be any better or worse for you than they are for anyone else. Your mind will be preoccupied with all the run-of-the-mill thoughts that come with having a normal social life. I can say this fairly confidently because there are a lot of factors pushing you towards changing, and hardly any pushing you to stay unhappy. It may take a while, there may be dead ends, detours, and frustrations, but you'll still keep at it in one way or another, and with enough time you'll finally get it.