How To Improve Your Social Skill: As elucidated by the ancient Philosopher Aristotle, Man by Nature is a Social Animal. That is to say that so long as we are humans, we must interact and depend on one another. It therefore flows that so far as we are humans whether introvert or Extrovert, we must have a Social life. But what is a good Social Life?
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A Good Social Life
A social life is the aspect of one’s life spent with other people, interacting with others, doing something you enjoy or having pleasurable activities with people with whom you share a bond with. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a social life is the part of one’s life spent in enjoyment with others.
From the above definition, a Social Life can be said to mean the act of interacting and spending time with other people. We can therefore agree with my earlier assertion that everyone has a Social Life, because you cannot exist without human interaction. Thus, every human being either interacts or spends time with other people, but the question is how much amount of time do you spend? This is where the measurement of Social Life comes in; as a person could either have an Active or a Passive social life.
Having an Active Social life involves spending quality time with friends, meeting new people, networking with people, and participating in social activities such as partying, playing games, going out, et cetera. On the other hand, having a Passive Social Life means that you’re not actively involved in Social activities. Someone with a passive social life may prefer to watch rather than indulge in social activities, and such a person will love being alone, having a few good friends, attending social activities once in a while, staying indoors or conversing in private rather in group. These may be exemplified in the life of most introverts. However, it is instructive to note that as much as having a passive social life and maintaining personal space is nice, it is equally important to have a stable social life as it is beneficial in a whole lot of ways.
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Benefits of a Stable Social Life
The benefits of having a stable and fairly active Social life are as follows:
a. Building good connections: This is a major and very important benefit of having an active social life. It is said that your network is your net worth and that there are some things you can’t contact except you have a person’s contact (number). This is why building good connections is very important as it may come in handy to rescue you tomorrow or provide lucrative opportunities for you today. An active social life helps you to easily build connections through interactions with people particularly strangers, communication with friends, meeting new friends at social events, networking with influential people, and et cetera.
b. Gaining Support: Support is like an engine which drives a car. Hence, it is very important in our drive for success, and it can be acquired through an active social life as having good social relations with others provides reliable people in your life whom you can fall back on when something goes wrong or count on their support in turbulent times.
c. Curbs boredom: Having an active social life curbs boredom and idleness. This because you are actively engaged in enjoyable activities. Having an active social life also reduces mental and physical stress through laughter, games, and discussions.
d. Improves health: Finally, having a good social life is beneficial medically, as it has been proven that having an active social life strengthens one’s immune system, Increases one’s life span, improves mental life, betters one’s mental health, Reduces anxiety as well as tendency of depression, high blood pressure, and Increases self-esteem.
Having considered a few benefits of having a Stable Social life, we can all agree that it is very important to have a fairly active Social life. But how then do people with a passive Social life improve their Social life so as to enjoy these benefits of an active social life?
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11 Effective Tips to Improve Your Social Skill
The ways to improve your social life is that answer to how we can improve our social life. These ways are:
1. Communication: Communication is the first step to developing an active social life. You therefore need to be able to communicate with whoever you wish. Speak out, introduce a topic of good interest, and express yourself. If you are not able to communicate, you will not be able to develop a relationship and likewise if you are able to improve your communication skills you will improve your social life.
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2. Reading: Reading about how social skill development is taught in the classroom may pique your interest in developing social skills. Additionally, seek inspirational books by looking for titles that are related to your objectives.
Pay close attention to the political concerns of the day, the speeches, and everything else that offers you fodder for discussion. Decide where you stand on the big issues, including both political and non-political ones. Take time to continuously absorb the qualities of the books and articles you read and study, and then start reading things that will be useful to you.
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3. Increasing Confidence: Self-esteem is a measure of one’s level of acceptance, love, and understanding of oneself as well as one’s level of self-knowledge and compassion. Although having a stronger sense of self-worth makes life pleasant, it also improves social skills significantly.
Growing your sense of self-worth also means you’ll find it easier to find and form relationships with other individuals who share your values. You will thus end up attracting better mates, friends, business relationships, and everything else if you increase your sense of self-worth.
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4. Expand Your Vocabulary: The greater your vocabulary, the more effectively you can communicate valuable thoughts and find words to utilize that you couldn’t previously. There is unquestionably a link between language and conduct, as they discovered: “The more restricted the language, the greater the proclivity for negative behavior.”
If you have a restricted ability to grasp, it is because you have a tiny vocabulary that makes everything someone says incomprehensible. Sometimes this is due to a restricted vocabulary that is unable to register the scene on the screen of your brain.
5. Helping out: Offering help to someone can go a long way in initiating a social bond with such person. That is to say that by simply lending a helping hand, you have displayed yourself as a reliable person and this could draw whomsoever towards you and initiate a friendship.
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6. Volunteering: Asides helping out, another way to improve your social life is through volunteering. Volunteering simply means the act of freely offering to do a work or indulging in community service. Volunteering works will expose you to the community, help you meet new people, and have meaningful social interactions with others, so therefore improving your Social life.
7. Keeping a good expression: First impression matters, and likewise our facial expression and body language says alot about us. This is because it can make you look approachable or not. So therefore, it is important to have a good facial expression by having a smile on your face or always looking happy as this will encourage people especially strangers to approach you and freely ignite a social interaction with you.
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8. Participating in group activities: Actively participating in group activities introduces you to a large number of people who you are expected to interact and work with. This can go a long way in improving your social skills, work ethics, and social life.
9. Accepting invitations: Participating, attending on your volition, and accepting invitations to social activities or events will help improve your social life. This is so because you will meet a lot of people in the process, interact with them, as well as have fun.
It’s no news that most people who are introverted turn down invitations to events most of the time, perhaps due to their shy nature or quiet personality. However, accepting invitations to events will really help to pull you out of your shell so therefore improving their social life.
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10. Being well mannered: A tricky way to improve your social skills is by being well mannered. That is to say behaving properly, acting right, and being nice to people be it friends or strangers. Portraying a kind and well-mannered behavior attracts people to you and likewise portraying a bad behavior or character keeps people away from you.
11. Networking: While majority of the ways to improve your social life discussed in this article has centered on physical activities or interactions, a non-physical yet very potent and important way to improve your social life is through networking via the social media or other technological means.
Networking is simply connecting with new people and keeping in touch with these people via social media, email, Skype, zoom and other technological platforms which connects two or more individuals. So doing greatly improves our social life.
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In conclusion, I must reiterate that Man is a social animal, so therefore we cannot do without social interactions and a social life. Thus, it is important that we have a stable social life and if that is not the case for you at the moment, heed to the various ways to improve your social life as enumerated in this article so that you will enjoy the benefits of having an active social life.
Edeh Samuel Chukwuemeka, ACMC, is a lawyer and a certified mediator/conciliator in Nigeria. He is also a developer with knowledge in various programming languages. Samuel is determined to leverage his skills in technology, SEO, and legal practice to revolutionize the legal profession worldwide by creating web and mobile applications that simplify legal research. Sam is also passionate about educating and providing valuable information to people.