we all eat food
Senior Don Juan
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The following 2 posts were not written by the person posting them. They're from the following link:
http://www.fastseduction.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?action=retrieve&grp=6&mn=1113987124219872
-diablo
In the future, give credit where it is due. In other words, feel free to post an article you found somewhere but don't make it look like it's your own original work when it isn't. Thanks.
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In the spirit of being cool and keeping it real, here is a guide to getting a social life. It's sort of 'big insight' focused and is geared towards people who are a bit hard up socially at the moment. Ever been lonely and frustrated that everyone just assumes you know this stuff and that there's no information on it? Yeah, me too. Getting this handled will improve the quality of your life bigtime and improve your game via the kind of subtle slow-burn effect that happens whenever you work on your overall personality.
Basics and Prerequisites:
You don’t need to be a super cool person to get a social life. In fact this is a myth that lonely people tend to subconsciously subscribe to. As long as you’re reasonably friendly and cool you can get a group of friends to hang with. They may not be your 100% ideal friends but that’s fine to start. That said, you should have the following handled:
-Basic conversation skills. Can hang around with someone one-on-one and keep the convo going fairly well. Can hang around a group of people and contribute your fair share. Know how to make the conversation enjoyable for the other person (ie. funny, interesting, etc) and not bore them to death by being negative or only talking about what you want to talk about. Ideally you want to have everything you say be interesting and be able to do 95% of the talking if need be.
-Basic good attitude. We’ll get into this in detail a bit later. For now I’ll just say you need to be fairly friendly, sociable, and think well of other people.
-Basic social skills. By this I mean being able to relate to other people and make a good impression and not come across as a total idiot. You don’t need super or even good social skills. Lots of dorks have friends but if you can’t even talk to people without coming across as rude or bitter or unpleasantly nerdy or totally down on yourself then work on that first.
-Basic level of looks. Who wants to hang around a total greasy slob? Groom, dress half-decently, be clean etc.
-Some level of balls. Being able to phone people or ask them to do things with you without wimping out. Being able to chat to strangers at a party. Being able to speak up in a group, etc, etc, etc. Trying to make friends can be a bit scary. You might get rejected. You might have awkward moments. They might not like you. You have to be able to get past all these feelings. Luckily they’re much more minor than when you deal with women.
The ability to be a fun 'date'. So when you hang with people you're fun to be around. You do interesting things. Cool situations develop when people hang around with you.
Some level of persausive ability. So when you call up joe to do something and he's not sure you can go 'ah, come on man!' and convince him to come. You gotta twist people's arms a bit sometimes
Get the idea? You don’t need to reach a very high standard to make friends in this world. However if you’re super shy or insecure you may recognize that you have trouble in these areas.
Of course the better your social skills are to begin with the easier this will all be. More people will like you and they’ll be much more likely to want to hang out with you.
Where lonely people make mistakes:
This is the portion where I talk about what NOT to do. Lonely people tend to do the following things wrong:
-They tend to be ashamed of the fact that they’re lonely and hide from other people even more, obviously making the problem worse.
-They tend to be negative and have a bad attitude about other people. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of loneliness or a root cause. If it’s a symptom I imagine the thinking is along the lines of ‘I’m a loser, these people don’t like me, so I’m going to reject them before they reject me’.
-They tend to be insecure and down on themselves. They also tend to think that no one likes them. If they interact with people they assume the other person came away with a bad impression of them.
-They tend to have poor social skills. In particular they tend to be so preoccupied with their own insecurities and how they’re coming across to the other people that they don’t focus on the other person.
-They tend to lack initiative and expect other people to do all the work and go out of their way to include them. They falsely believe that if no one invites them to do anything it means no one likes them.
-If they do get invited somewhere, there’s a decent chance that they’ll turn it down. Perhaps to confirm their self-image that no one likes them and they won’t have fun anyways. In other words they pass up opportunities to increase their social skills.
-They may be so socially inexperienced that they just don’t know how friendships work or what to expect of them. Therefore they may overreact to normal things like an argument or having plans cancelled on them.
You can see how this overall mindset could prevent you from making friends.
Attitudes to have:
Now let’s start talking about what to DO.
The following is the number one attitude to have. It is:
Always assume that all your friends and acquaintances think you’re awesome and love hanging out with you but that they are benignly thoughtless about you and have no initiative whatsoever.
Besides being plain true with some people, this gets at a lot of things but mainly it’s saying that if you want to have a social life YOU have to do the work and take the initiative. Sure lots of times your friends will call you up to do something but oftentimes they won’t (but they don’t hate you, their minds are just somewhere else). So if you want plans every weekend then don’t just sit around on your ass waiting for people to call you. You gotta put in the work. You have to do things like:
-Keep in touch with your friends. Don’t assume they’ll drop you a line. Like it says above, assume they’ll be happy to hear from you and eager to hang out but that they are busy, or thoughtless, or be a bit nervous and will never get in touch with you on their own. This is often the way it is with some people. If you want to keep the relationship alive assume you have to keep it going.
-Find out what everyone’s up to each weekend. Don’t hope they’ll call you up and just let you know when they’re free. Give them a quick call or email and find out what they’re up to. They may be busy or they may be free some days. Once you know everyone’s schedules you can plan things out much better.
-Actually invite people to do something with you (this also means you have to be interesting enough to come up with things to do.) Yes, it takes a minor amount of balls but if you want to go out on x day you have to invite someone to go with you. Again, sitting on your ass and waiting for the phone to ring is not good.
-Asking if you can come. No you’re not showing what a loser you are by tagging along. If someone is doing something that sounds cool then you might as well ask if you can come too. You can phrase it all cool like “Mind if I join you?” or “Sounds cool, maybe I’ll show up”.
-Being able to coordinate between several people to organize some sort of bigger outing. At a simple level I’m talking about something like phoning three people and asking if they all want to go to a certain bar on a certain day.
This is the biggest lesson in the post as far as I’m concerned. If you want a social life forget any dumb ideas you have about being a loser if you have to work for it and put some effort into getting together with people. Invite people to hang with you like a mother****er. But ****! I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s get into getting some people to potentially hang with in the first place.
BIG LESSON # 2 is:
At first don’t be picky about who you hang around with or what you do with them.
This is true whether you’re trying to get some semblance of a social life together for the first time in your life or if you’re starting over from scratch because of some life circumstances. At first your goal is to just get something going, some alternative to watching TV alone every night. Only once you’ve got more options can you afford to be choosy. A related lesson is:
Never turn down an invitation.
Probably heard that one before right? Baring exceptional circumstances if someone invites you to do something and you have no other plans, you should go. It’ll be more fun than you think and you’ll get some socializing under your belt. Sure, once you’re ultra popular and are inundated by requests for your time then you can ignore this rule, but not until then.
This also gets at the idea that you’re going to have to make little sacrifices for the sake of your social life. Like if someone calls you up and invites you to meet them at a bar and it’s 11pm on a Friday and you’re tired, well you should get ready and head out. Never turn down an invitation.
So anyways, if at first you have to hang around with some guys who are a little dorky or sporty for your taste, well just suck it up until you have more going on. Of course if they *totally* suck and make fun of you don’t put up with that, but if all you have is a vague feeling that you could do better or these folks aren’t totally your type keep with it.
http://www.fastseduction.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?action=retrieve&grp=6&mn=1113987124219872
-diablo
In the future, give credit where it is due. In other words, feel free to post an article you found somewhere but don't make it look like it's your own original work when it isn't. Thanks.
------------------------
In the spirit of being cool and keeping it real, here is a guide to getting a social life. It's sort of 'big insight' focused and is geared towards people who are a bit hard up socially at the moment. Ever been lonely and frustrated that everyone just assumes you know this stuff and that there's no information on it? Yeah, me too. Getting this handled will improve the quality of your life bigtime and improve your game via the kind of subtle slow-burn effect that happens whenever you work on your overall personality.
Basics and Prerequisites:
You don’t need to be a super cool person to get a social life. In fact this is a myth that lonely people tend to subconsciously subscribe to. As long as you’re reasonably friendly and cool you can get a group of friends to hang with. They may not be your 100% ideal friends but that’s fine to start. That said, you should have the following handled:
-Basic conversation skills. Can hang around with someone one-on-one and keep the convo going fairly well. Can hang around a group of people and contribute your fair share. Know how to make the conversation enjoyable for the other person (ie. funny, interesting, etc) and not bore them to death by being negative or only talking about what you want to talk about. Ideally you want to have everything you say be interesting and be able to do 95% of the talking if need be.
-Basic good attitude. We’ll get into this in detail a bit later. For now I’ll just say you need to be fairly friendly, sociable, and think well of other people.
-Basic social skills. By this I mean being able to relate to other people and make a good impression and not come across as a total idiot. You don’t need super or even good social skills. Lots of dorks have friends but if you can’t even talk to people without coming across as rude or bitter or unpleasantly nerdy or totally down on yourself then work on that first.
-Basic level of looks. Who wants to hang around a total greasy slob? Groom, dress half-decently, be clean etc.
-Some level of balls. Being able to phone people or ask them to do things with you without wimping out. Being able to chat to strangers at a party. Being able to speak up in a group, etc, etc, etc. Trying to make friends can be a bit scary. You might get rejected. You might have awkward moments. They might not like you. You have to be able to get past all these feelings. Luckily they’re much more minor than when you deal with women.
The ability to be a fun 'date'. So when you hang with people you're fun to be around. You do interesting things. Cool situations develop when people hang around with you.
Some level of persausive ability. So when you call up joe to do something and he's not sure you can go 'ah, come on man!' and convince him to come. You gotta twist people's arms a bit sometimes
Get the idea? You don’t need to reach a very high standard to make friends in this world. However if you’re super shy or insecure you may recognize that you have trouble in these areas.
Of course the better your social skills are to begin with the easier this will all be. More people will like you and they’ll be much more likely to want to hang out with you.
Where lonely people make mistakes:
This is the portion where I talk about what NOT to do. Lonely people tend to do the following things wrong:
-They tend to be ashamed of the fact that they’re lonely and hide from other people even more, obviously making the problem worse.
-They tend to be negative and have a bad attitude about other people. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of loneliness or a root cause. If it’s a symptom I imagine the thinking is along the lines of ‘I’m a loser, these people don’t like me, so I’m going to reject them before they reject me’.
-They tend to be insecure and down on themselves. They also tend to think that no one likes them. If they interact with people they assume the other person came away with a bad impression of them.
-They tend to have poor social skills. In particular they tend to be so preoccupied with their own insecurities and how they’re coming across to the other people that they don’t focus on the other person.
-They tend to lack initiative and expect other people to do all the work and go out of their way to include them. They falsely believe that if no one invites them to do anything it means no one likes them.
-If they do get invited somewhere, there’s a decent chance that they’ll turn it down. Perhaps to confirm their self-image that no one likes them and they won’t have fun anyways. In other words they pass up opportunities to increase their social skills.
-They may be so socially inexperienced that they just don’t know how friendships work or what to expect of them. Therefore they may overreact to normal things like an argument or having plans cancelled on them.
You can see how this overall mindset could prevent you from making friends.
Attitudes to have:
Now let’s start talking about what to DO.
The following is the number one attitude to have. It is:
Always assume that all your friends and acquaintances think you’re awesome and love hanging out with you but that they are benignly thoughtless about you and have no initiative whatsoever.
Besides being plain true with some people, this gets at a lot of things but mainly it’s saying that if you want to have a social life YOU have to do the work and take the initiative. Sure lots of times your friends will call you up to do something but oftentimes they won’t (but they don’t hate you, their minds are just somewhere else). So if you want plans every weekend then don’t just sit around on your ass waiting for people to call you. You gotta put in the work. You have to do things like:
-Keep in touch with your friends. Don’t assume they’ll drop you a line. Like it says above, assume they’ll be happy to hear from you and eager to hang out but that they are busy, or thoughtless, or be a bit nervous and will never get in touch with you on their own. This is often the way it is with some people. If you want to keep the relationship alive assume you have to keep it going.
-Find out what everyone’s up to each weekend. Don’t hope they’ll call you up and just let you know when they’re free. Give them a quick call or email and find out what they’re up to. They may be busy or they may be free some days. Once you know everyone’s schedules you can plan things out much better.
-Actually invite people to do something with you (this also means you have to be interesting enough to come up with things to do.) Yes, it takes a minor amount of balls but if you want to go out on x day you have to invite someone to go with you. Again, sitting on your ass and waiting for the phone to ring is not good.
-Asking if you can come. No you’re not showing what a loser you are by tagging along. If someone is doing something that sounds cool then you might as well ask if you can come too. You can phrase it all cool like “Mind if I join you?” or “Sounds cool, maybe I’ll show up”.
-Being able to coordinate between several people to organize some sort of bigger outing. At a simple level I’m talking about something like phoning three people and asking if they all want to go to a certain bar on a certain day.
This is the biggest lesson in the post as far as I’m concerned. If you want a social life forget any dumb ideas you have about being a loser if you have to work for it and put some effort into getting together with people. Invite people to hang with you like a mother****er. But ****! I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s get into getting some people to potentially hang with in the first place.
BIG LESSON # 2 is:
At first don’t be picky about who you hang around with or what you do with them.
This is true whether you’re trying to get some semblance of a social life together for the first time in your life or if you’re starting over from scratch because of some life circumstances. At first your goal is to just get something going, some alternative to watching TV alone every night. Only once you’ve got more options can you afford to be choosy. A related lesson is:
Never turn down an invitation.
Probably heard that one before right? Baring exceptional circumstances if someone invites you to do something and you have no other plans, you should go. It’ll be more fun than you think and you’ll get some socializing under your belt. Sure, once you’re ultra popular and are inundated by requests for your time then you can ignore this rule, but not until then.
This also gets at the idea that you’re going to have to make little sacrifices for the sake of your social life. Like if someone calls you up and invites you to meet them at a bar and it’s 11pm on a Friday and you’re tired, well you should get ready and head out. Never turn down an invitation.
So anyways, if at first you have to hang around with some guys who are a little dorky or sporty for your taste, well just suck it up until you have more going on. Of course if they *totally* suck and make fun of you don’t put up with that, but if all you have is a vague feeling that you could do better or these folks aren’t totally your type keep with it.
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