Mask every day. Life goal: Be 100% artificial person. All openings and responses must be calculated and faked. Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation. Once you train and work hard enough to suppress it at all times forever, you may be accepted and allowed to participate.
Fake it till you make it.
"Be yourself" is not wrong, but it's not specific enough.
You can be perfectly authentic, but that doesn't mean being socially uncalibrated.
Get good at being sociable, then blend that with your personal tastes and preferences.
I thought "be yourself" was fine until I grew up and learned I was just being rude to most people and called myself introverted when I didn't make friends.
"Be yourself" works when you're awesome already (and keep performing).
So it's not useful advice for most that need to build yourself up to something that performs decently, nicely or awesomely (the most you can).
And Fake it till you make it is an awful expression (encourages posing and faking is legitimate when is not by definition) to communicate that you just need practice to obtain a level of performance.
> Fake it till you make it.
What are you trying to make though? You're pretending to want the same things the people you think you need to fit in with want, but if you don't actually want those things, what point is there to be in a competition to get them?
Social skills is moslty compromises. It’s kind of a protocol that signals that you’re not unfriendly, and if you’re part of a community, that you’re ready to pitch in, when someone or the entire community needs help.
Surely it would be simpler to identify who in the community actually needs help, help them, and gain a reputation thereby? Honest signalling works well among humans, in my experience.
it may be. But how are you going to identify who needs help? And if that someone is willing to accept help (pride and/or shame can be powerful blocker)?
Humans are social creatures. If you truly don't have the same desires as most - friendship, companionship, even career gain - then sure, it's purposeless. But why are you even in this thread then? If you clearly are actively dis- interested in this topic. Otherwise, skydhash is correct - it's about compromise.
Part of being truly social (and being emotionally mature) is to understand and apply the difference between manipulation and being mindful about behavior and speech. Same as honesty - honesty doesn't need to be brutal honesty. One can be authentic without being hurtful.
>Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation
Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.
The actual meta-skill that is being developed by maturing emotionally and using soft skills appropriately (for the benefit of the situation and the participants, not for manipulation) is tact. Same as how people learn to apply just a little pressure when handling glassware, and a lot of pressure when lifting a heavy weight.
This is addressed by the author here:
https://www.improveyoursocialskills.com/foundations/social-m...
> Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.
The inner self isn't just an id, it's your goals, interests, values and ways of thinking too. And the social fitness script is that you should only have acceptable goals and interests and acceptable ways of talking about them. Talking about wanting to buy a nice house and a sports car, good. Talking about wanting to beat the speedrun record for Mario 64 and how you've figured out a CPU glitch to use for it, keep it to yourself. "Let's agree to disagree", good, "let's sketch a causal model graph of this and plug in our guesses for priors to see where we get different intuitions", no.
I think if someone is already not taken by any of their inner things entirely, then they are already doing this regulation thing. The social skills that are described in the article (and soft skills in general) are just a next step on the same path, focusing on getting along, rather than completely internal regulation.
I too have wildly different area of interest, level of interest, and approach to things than most people around me do. Soft skills helped me to connect anyways, for at least two reasons:
1. With them I can approach, and connect to the interest of others.
2. I can explain to people my interest, and make it more interesting to them as well.
Also, these are not for all time, all the time. The healthy thing is to vary the guardedness in different contexts. The flexibility in this is a skill in itself, and again, something that connects to, and can raise, emotional intelligence.
There is a true asymmetry that's avoided by the anodyne "everyone needs to think about these things" talk. If you take a group of 20 people from your country chosen completely at random, some people are likely to find things being similar with themselves and several people in this group, no matter which group was picked, and other people are likely to find little in similar between themselves and the group for most of the groups.
Social skills instruction is often about how to get along with averaged random groups like this. The first sort of person might find it as useful know-how for a thing they already find agreeable. The second sort of person might not find the initial situation agreeable at all, so the instruction gets the implicit added bit of "first of all, you need to not be yourself".
>"first of all, you need to not be yourself"
Yes, that seems part of it, as long as all you know is "yourself without social skills". With social skills, and leaving some of that "yourself" behind, you will discover that don't just change, or reduce yourself, in a social setting, but become more yourself as a whole. The very definition of "yourself" changes, broadens because of this added experience.
Right. You don't need to be fake; but you need to be in control of yourself. Aware, mindful, and civilized.
> All openings and responses must be calculated and faked
Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.
If you just blurt out anything with no filter, that doesn't make you authentic, it usually makes you an asshole.
Not all thoughts are productive, many are bad and many are stupid. You should delete those or revise them. Not only when talking to other people, but even to yourself.
I can tell myself that I'm dumb or I'm fat or whatever, but that isn't true and just because I thought it doesn't mean I have to internalize it. No, I filter those thoughts, I tell myself "that's not true". Over time, I think them less.
Your own brain is not reliable. It does not operate on truth, or what is or is not productive. So tune it. Not for the sake of others, but for yourself too.
Being an asshole to others is bad, but being an asshole to yourself is arguably worse. The goal is to, overtime, build better thought procedses and mental models. Not to fake it.
> Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.
I guess what gets me with this stuff is that there are multiple things going on that are getting conflated. Considering your words is pretty straightforwardly good, it's learning to not say things you yourself wouldn't have wanted to say.
But then this stuff tends to show up in the context of work, or business, and it starts turning into selling. You are the seller, the other people are buyers. Buyers have no expectations on them, they react as they react and they want what they want. The seller must contort themselves to please the buyer and then close a sale to get one over the buyer. And this is where it gets corrosive for me. It feels like there's no common ground being built, the relationship is adversarial in both directions, and both sides are a bad model for a person to be. People are being split into feckless buyers who express immediate wants and judgments with no thought or development, and conniving sellers whose main order of business is to get themselves in front of the buyer and get noticed, no matter what the real value of what they are offering is. People might make money if they internalize this system and get good at it, but are they going to make lasting friends?
You can solve this by reapplying attribution elsewhere.
Instead of blaming the methods / soft skills / whatever, which can be used for good and bad, blame the people who misuse these tools for personal gain: politicians, salespeople, conmen, pua, what have you.
You are what you are because of circumstances.
Which is fun and great if you came out as a happy cool human.
If you made it through the weird unadjusted side without any gimmick you just loose.
No one has to force you to stay what your surroundings made you. It's not your personality it's just a reflection and you can change it and make it better for you by adjusting and reflecting.
Sometimes people already are like something and don't want to change it or feel like they could change it, but also don't get along being like they are. This is more awkward to think about than just treating them as damaged or incomplete people who would get around to becoming people who can fit in fine once the damage is fixed or the incomplete development is completed, because it's harder to see good solutions.
You severely underestimate the biological side of things regarding social interaction. Neurodivergent people are what we are not just bc "surroundings made us so"
That includes people like me who are neurodivergent
And I'm also not shaming anyone not wanting or unable to chain themselves.
It was a statement about the uniqueness of ones character and the agency of controlling it/changing or adjusting it by yourself
Then I don't understand what you are arguing about. If you're neurodivergent, you would always require self awareness and masking, faked as op rightfully stated. You could never natural, no matter what circumstances were.
I changed very slowly and steady over the last 20 years.
This has very little to do with masking.
Changing is possible even if you're neurodivergent, but you'll always have some barriers that neurotypicals don't. To interact with them, you will generally need some degree of masking.
This hits home.
After COVID, I stopped caring and trying to fake being a normal person, and choose just to be me, alone.
I wasn't good at trying to be normal, and it's so much nicer to be free to not bother to make the effort and not be me. But I have no friends or good relationships with family (who don't understand or tolerate who I am).
The problem is, that's the best strategy to gather resources and reproduce, aka "win at life".