Improve Your People Skills

If you walk through the day and can’t find a single person to engage in friendly banter with, it’s not because everyone is “unfriendly” or “awkward”—it’s because you are

Human beings are motivated by self-interest, whether we want to admit it or not.

What do you care about? Yourself and things that benefit you. Now take a split second to think about their self-interests, and how they stand to benefit by an action, event, or statement. This is how you can immediately appear to understand people—by understanding what they are motivated by and generally want from any situation. You can think of this in the broadest of terms, and you can also drill down to tiny, specific interests.

Getting along better with people doesn’t necessarily mean that you are making a new best friend every day. Getting along better with people on a realistic level mostly means that you appear to understand them on a deeper level; that you “get” them and their motivations—even if you don’t. If you aren’t able to achieve this level of understanding, you’ll probably get more cold reactions than warm ones.

bottom line is you have to take control over the whole process. Nobody’s going to do it for you. Pretend that there is an invisible gas tank that represents each social interaction you have. You are responsible for filling 100% of it.

Don’t just expect the other side to pick up the slack. You can’t expect the world to open the door for you. You have to open it yourself, and you have to proactively step through it.

Socially, you’ll think What if they say this, what if they do that, what if I sneeze and spill my drink all over them?

You have to make your own luck in the social realm; you cannot just sit back and hope you’ll get lucky. One of your first steps might have been picking up this book. You may have realized that you can’t rely on luck as a factor in your interpersonal success, so you are proactively looking for methods to increase the likelihood of social success.

because you are.

If you walk through the day and can’t find a single person to engage in friendly banter with, it’s not because everyone is “unfriendly” or “awkward”—it’s be