The Main Tasks For Polishing Your Overall Social Persona

This article will provide a concise list of main real-world tasks to work on from the ideas in the site's section on improving your overall social skills and persona. It won't cover the actual 'How To' information that the actual articles go into.

The site's section on making friends lends itself very easily to a list of tasks to complete. There's a clear objective and a set of actions someone needs to do to attain it. Generally improving how you come across socially is a lot vaguer. There's no 'Do this, then this, then this' sequence to go through. Instead you're doing one disconnected thing or another to polish the package you present to other people. You'll have to choose which facets of yourself you want to work on first, since you can't change everything overnight. you can't do it all at once, and putting them into effect can take a lot of time. This is an area where you've got to think really long term, and things you undertake may not pay off for months or years.

Here are the tasks, in no particular order:

If you haven't already, do what you can to improve your appearance

It's your call, but I do think this is something everyone should do sooner rather than later. This article goes into more detail about why having a half-decent appearance is important, and offers some quick tips for what you can work on.

Difficulty: Easy to Moderate

Some appearance changes are quick and easy to make once you know to do them (e.g., regularly plucking a unibrow, not wearing white socks with black shoes). Others take more education, time, effort, or money, getting in shape and dressing better being the two big examples.

Think of any lifestyle changes you could make, and then implement them where it's practical to do so

Lifestyle factors, like where you live or what transportation you have, is part of your overall social persona in a different way. They're not internal character traits, habits, or skills, but they're still part of 'you', and have a roughly similar influence on how smoothly the social world will be to move through. This article lists some issues that may make socializing for you more difficult than is has to be:

Lifestyle Factors That Can Affect Your Social Success

Difficulty: Moderate to Hard

Some lifestyle factors are very difficult to change. It's not that easy to just move to a more livable city or transfer to a university with more social opportunities. Even more realistic changes, like getting a better part-time job, aren't something you can do in an afternoon.

Learn some practical skills that will give you more social options

For example, you could:

This articles covers the thinking behind this point and the next in more detail:

At Times It's Practical To Know Things Other People Care About

Difficulty: Moderate to Hard

Though the process of learning them is often fun, you can't really say most skills are all that quick or effortless to acquire.

Catch up on common social or practical knowledge you may be missing

For example, you could:

Again, check out the link under the previous point for some explanation of this suggestion.

Difficulty: Moderate

Acquiring knowledge isn't as demanding as learning a new skill, but can take some time. It may also take some mental effort to wrap your head around topics that were previously foreign to you.

Do things to make yourself a more well-rounded, interesting person

This suggestion is something you'd probably want to do anyway. Pretty much any new thing you try or learn can help you socially, by giving you more to talk about, more ways to relate to people, and by imparting attractive personality traits. You shouldn't just mechanically amass new experiences with the expectation that for every additional thing you do you'll be 2.8% more likable. However, if you do things you'd naturally want to do,even if no one ever found out about them, the social benefits will come as a side effect.

There are a million things I could suggest. You could:

Difficulty: Moderate to Hard

Again, it should be intrinsically fulfilling to do these things, but they aren't quick fixes.

Identify some positive social traits you'd like to take on and work to acquire them

It's not realistic to think you can eventually acquire every positive trait known to man. No one can become perfect. However, we can all make ourselves more socially pleasant in little ways here and there. Like with negative traits, which I'll mention next, positive ones are a mix of behaviors and attitudes. For example, being more fun involves doing entertaining actions, but also having a worldview that's conducive to having a good time.

Some examples:

Difficulty: Moderate to Hard

Learning new attitudes and behaviors takes time. When it comes to more positive behaviors, the fact that they're inherently rewarding can make them easier to pick up. However, sometimes they have an easier said than done quality to them.

Identify and attempt to lessen any bad social habits you may have

Yeah, this is a broad suggestion that will break down into any number of sub-tasks. You'll never fully eliminate all your social imperfections, because no one does, and you don't need to be flawless to have friends. You're probably know about some of your bad habits. For others you may have blind spots in your self awareness. Reading through the articles on this site may bring some of them to your attention. Changing them involves a mix of adopting new attitudes and beliefs and consciously changing your behavior. For example, a guy who's too argumentative may need to adjust his belief that other people are stupid, and that he makes himself look good by debunking their opinions. Altering his behavior would obviously involve not starting arguments, and maybe also not unintentionally leading conversations down a path where contentious topics will come up.

This is another place where I could give a billion examples. Some bad social habits are:

Difficulty: Moderate to Hard

As I said, it's not always easy to find out what our bad habits are. Once we know about them it usually takes a fair amount of practice before we adopt new behaviors. This is also an area where you have to really want to change a habit. If you believe it's an acceptable to act a certain way deep down, it will be harder to make any changes stick.

Identify and try to adjust any negative social attitudes or unrealistic expectations you have

Bad social habits and bad attitudes blur together somewhat. However, there are plenty of negative attitudes or false expectations someone can have that don't feed into a specific behavior. They can still have a detrimental effect on your social success though. Reading the articles on this site may be a good way to spot some of your negative views. Some of those articles are in their own small section. Some of my favorite examples:

Difficulty: Easy to Moderate

As I said, changing your attitude can be easier said than done. I do find that some negative beliefs can go away quite quickly once the person knows about them and is offered an alternative perspective.