Social Skills: 7 Secrets To Succeed In Your Relationships

The social skills They are those behaviors that lead us to relate in a satisfactory way with others. Although having social skills is essential to live a full life full of great experiences. Even so, there are social skills that allow us to improve our relationships with others.

What are social abilities?

We understand the social skills or social competencies as the actions we take to communicate for others through various forms, including verbal, non-verbal, written and visual. When someone has a social skill, it not only involves spoken language, but also body language, facial expressions, and even eye contact. So much so that whenever you interact with another person, you use your social skills.

Why are social skills important?

The capabilities and social skills They are important as they help you communicate more effectively and efficiently, so much so that as a result having social skills ends up leading you to more experiences and collecting many more contacts. Mainly, the main characteristics of social life skills help you:

• Open the mind: Having more ideas and seeing more perspectives of reality is one of the advantages that having social skills Meeting more people helps you have a broader knowledge of reality thanks to being able to increase the perspective of different aspects.
• Achieve your goals: To have more social skills It is synonymous with getting more opportunities to reach each of your goals. So much so that through social skills it is much easier to reach the points that you consider your goals. The reason is that by meeting more people and having more affinity with them, it is very likely that they will be able to give you more advice or contacts that will allow you to go further.
• Support for difficult situations: Going through bad times is much better if it is done through these life skills People will have much more esteem for you if you have social skills and therefore it will be much easier to get through difficult times.
• Have more job opportunities: As we have already said, having any of the types of social skills It will make your contacts increase exponentially. So much so that you can get many more advantages not only in job interviews but also within the company itself.

These may be the benefits of social skills. Therefore, a social skill It can make your life improve both personally and professionally.

Types of social skills

There are some basic social skills that most people who have social skills share. So much so that almost all activities to work on social skills in adults or children are based on developing each of these aspects.

1. Efficient communication: The social skill The most effective is knowing how to communicate effectively with others. Through one of these social skills you can share thoughts and ideas clearly with others. When someone is an effective communicator it means that he has a lot of gains in the social skills to become a good leader.
2. Conflict resolution: A social aptitude which is highly valued today, is conflict resolution. When someone has one of these social skills he is able to get to the root of a problem and find a viable solution very easily.
3. Active listening: When someone develops social skills, one of the characteristics that should improve is the ability to have more active listening. In these cases, people know to pay close attention to a person who is communicating with them.
4. Empathy: Empathy is one of the social skills techniques that has the most value in today’s society. There are many occasions in which we find ourselves in a situation where most of us are not able to understand and identify with another person’s feelings. So much so that together with one of these life skills you may be able to make others trust you more and feel a much stronger bond with you.
5. Relationship management: One of the types of social skills What is most unknown is the ability to maintain healthy relationships. That is, the person who knows one of these social competencies allows mutual benefit to be extracted from each relationship.
6. I respect: A key aspect in social skills It is knowing when and how to initiate communication. So much so that one of the most valued personal and social skills when being in a group is precisely respect for others and their speaking turns.

These are the types of social skills to whom we tend to give more value in our daily lives. So much so that in many cases enjoying these social skills can make you gain many more benefits than not having them.

How to work on social skills?

There are a series of social skills activities with which you can improve in many aspects your way of relating to others. Acquiring these social skills is not only something that happens in childhood, but we can work with them through social skills techniques.

1. Establish eye contact: Being able to establish eye contact with your other interlocutor not only improves empathy and connection with others, but is also one of the social skills with which you can convey more confidence. In order to develop this aspect, it is vital to try to look into the eyes of others without transmitting submission or power to the other.
2. Control your body language: Inhibited people tend to be rigid when someone speaks or to cross their arms and legs as a sign of protection. On the contrary, there are those who pounce on the other or get too close, thus breaking personal space. I advise you to avoid crossing your arms and tilt your posture a little at an acute angle, this way it physically shows that you are interested in what the other person is saying. If you are standing, do not stand too far or too close and do not put your hands in your pockets, gesture a little with your hands and you will seem much more comfortable and relaxed when communicating. Control these social skills It will make you appear more confident and secure in front of others.
3. Be interested in what others say and listen: Show interest in what they tell you by nodding, asking about what they tell you, or repeating something they have told you as a sign of active listening. Looking away or not making gestures can denote disinterest on your part and above all, avoid looking at your cell phone or interrupting the conversation. Conversations have to be fluid to be pleasant. Therefore, a good social skills training It is trying to be interested in aspects that you don’t know about the other person.
4. Challenge yourself: This point is very important since it is what will make you improve your social skills ; experience is a degree. If you don’t try you won’t know if you are capable of doing it. So, if you find it uncomfortable to talk to strangers, ask for an address even if you know where it is, take the elevator and make small talk, talk to someone on the subway or go to a cafe, sit at the bar and talk to the waiter. They may be conversations of a few minutes but it will be enough for you to test yourself and get rid of that fear of what they will say. To work on social skills, it is best to not stop practicing them whenever you have the opportunity.
5. Ask yourself the question “What’s the worst that can happen?”: There are many times when the opinion of others matters to us so much that it does not even allow us to evolve in the direction we want. So much so that one of the basic social skills is to try not to give importance to what people think of you. Therefore, in order to improve your social skills It is very important to leave behind these limiting thoughts that hold you back from your goals.
6. Evaluate your changes and your evolution: Appreciate the changes you make and the efforts achieved instead of criticizing what you do wrong or don’t do out of fear. Every day of your life when night comes, look at yourself for five minutes in the mirror and evaluate the challenges you have faced regardless of their success, what you have achieved and the things you are proud of. Even though they are small things, it is very possible that thanks to these efforts you can improve your skills in many aspects. social skills
7. Dare to change and set goals: Think of someone who is not shy or aggressive when speaking and try to think as your interlocutor would. That does not mean that you stop being you, but that you imagine what it would be like to act without shyness or aggressiveness and put it to the test but obviously maintaining your personality. It’s not about you putting on a mask. Formulate the phrase: If you weren’t afraid, what would you do or what would you say? And do it.

With these social skills techniques You will be able to improve the way you relate to others. Despite this, there are other reasons why you may not be developing correct social skills. Among them we can find mental pathologies such as depression, social anxiety, among many more. If you think this is your case, it is vital to consult with a professional psychologist to be able to develop your social skills to perfection.

Social skills exercises

In case you want to reach the next level, there are some activities to work on social skills in adults that are taught through therapies or workshops.

• Psychotherapy: During psychotherapy, the person talks about the aspects that concern them during social interactions. In these cases the psychologist is able to detect those aspects that harm us during communication with others. Through these therapies the person will be able to understand what their deficiencies are to improve your social skills
• Role playing or interpretation sessions: This exercise involves a whole social skills training It is done through simulations of the interactions that really make you uncomfortable. So much so that one of these social skills activities will help you understand what’s holding you back in the real world.
• Books to improve social skills: There are many books with a program of social skills In them they will not only show you the most effective social skills techniques to achieve better interactions, but you will also be able to practice everything they suggest with your own methods.
• Group therapy: Group therapies allow experiment with social skills through the advice that real strangers tell you. So much so that they themselves will be able to help you point out what is really lacking in your social skills.

There are many tools that you can use to improve your social skills Despite this, what will make you really interact with others in the best possible way is by feeling comfortable with yourself. Therefore, a basis for having more than outstanding social skills will be to enjoy a good self-conception of yourself.