Social Skills are the foundation for getting along with others. A lack of Social Skills can lead to behavioral difficulties in school, delinquency, inattentiveness, peer rejection, emotional difficulties, bullying, difficulty in making friends, aggressiveness, problems in interpersonal relationships, poor self-concept, academic failures, concentration difficulties, isolation from peers, and depression.
I think the best advice I can give for improving social skills is simply: Practice. You can study techniques like matching and mirroring to build rapport, and you can memorize cutesy acronyms like SOFTEN (Smile, Open posture, Forward lean, Touch, Eye contact, Nod). But I don’t think those are all that helpful. I think they’re likely to make you even more self-conscious. If you’re in the right frame of mind to begin with, you’ll naturally perform the correct actions like smiling and mirroring — if you have to think about them, you’re in the wrong mindset.
With practice you’ll develop more comfort in a variety of social situations, and when you become comfortable, you’ll naturally be yourself. And that’s the basis of effective interpersonal communication — just be yourself and feel perfectly at ease with who you are and what you bring to a conversation.
If a child has a learning problem, such as a language or auditory processing disorder, he may have difficulty understanding what another person says or means. He might also have trouble expressing his ideas in speech. Either of these problems can interfere with interpersonal communication.
When you feel totally comfortable with who you are, your ego dissolves. You aren’t thinking at all about yourself, how you look, how you sound, etc. You’re thinking about the topics you’re discussing and about the other people. This is true whether you’re having a conversation with an old friend or giving a speech in front of hundreds of people. When you feel comfortable with yourself, your focus is on the content of the communication and on the other people, not on yourself.
As you practice and gain more “stage time” in a variety of social situations, the unknown will become the known. You’ll be able to feel comfortable in new types of interactions.
Think about the social situations in which you do feel perfectly comfortable, such as talking with long-term friends or family members or even playing a character in an online role-playing game. When you do communicate effectively, are you thinking about low-level techniques like remembering to smile, or do you simply do what feels most natural to you? What would happen if you could bring that level of comfort to every other social situation?
The child with a processing skill deficit may not notice that his inability to discriminate and interprete speech, especially in noisy places, may make it difficult to interact socially in those situations. Therefore any attempt at humor ends up in heartache. His attempt to “be part of a group” or to entertain his peers are often met with blank stares or laughter directed at him instead of with him. Children with right hemisphere based processing deficits may often compound that with difficulties in social judgment and inappropriate behavior as a response to their peers. Simply put, some attempts at socially connecting with another human being may become devastating to their self esteem and emotional well being. This makes trying to communicate into a chore instead of a pleasure.