Your communication skills are a series of overlapping habits. You have habits that influence when and how you make eye contact with people, how you speak, your voice inflections, what kinds of questions you ask, whether you lead the conversation or follow, whether you’re curious about others or self-centered, how often you smile, look away or laugh. The list goes on and on.
If you have trouble relating to people, particularly women, then chances are you’ve developed communication habits that are attractive and are not serving you well.
Some of these habits are simple to learn and fix, such as making more eye contact. Others are more difficult to notice and harder to fix, for instance deferring to the opinion of others when making an observation.
A lot of men get the wrong idea. They’ll read some dating advice saying something like, “touch her on the arm when you smile at her.” Then they’ll go out and do it and it’ll feel very awkward and stilted, so they’ll never do it again.
The reason it feels awkward and stilted is because they’ve never done it before. It’s not a habit for them yet. In fact, not touching a woman when their smile is a habit, and they’re trying to break it. Habits are hard to break. They take time. And you have to do them repeatedly.
The trick is to identify the good/bad habits you want to build or break and the focus on them consciously until they’re second nature. This actually doesn’t take a long time. For simple things such as eye contact or posture, it may only take a few weeks. For things such as touching, or making statements instead of questions, it may be even shortter.
Either way, the more you implement the habits, the better your reactions from women will be, thereby increasing your motivation to implement the habits further.
And just as with desensitizing yourself to your anixieties, you want to focus on one at a time, two at the most.
Another problem many men run into is that they learn that they need to make strong eye contact, lean back on their back foot, touch on the approach, make observations about her features, qualify her on her passions, smile when she smiles and touch her when she laughs all at the same time.
So they go out, and get completely jumbled up and don’t know what to focus on and are unable to focus on all of the behaviors at the same time.
It often actually makes their interactions much worse.
We won’t be doing that. In fact, I think a lot of the tiny habits listed above are overated. I’ll be presenting attractive social habits in more general terms so that 1) you have fewer things to clogging your brain, and 2) there will still be room to express your personality and unique ticks.
You’ll also notice that many of these habits are directly correlated with overcoming fears and anxieties as discussed before. For instance, developing the habit of touching a woman when you make a joke relates directly to an anxiety many men feel about showing sexual interest. The habit of smiling when you introduce yoruself to somebody ties into the anxiety of meeting new people.
Many of these behaviors are linked to your anxieties. And the interesting thing is that you can resolve them from both sides: fixing your outer behaviors will help alleviate your internal anxiety, and alleviating your internal anxiety will help fix up your outer behaviors.
As always, attractive social behaviors are rooted in a comfort with making yourself vulnerable, an honest expression of your desires, and ultimately, embodying non-neediness and investing in yourself.
Comment