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

and you have to proactively step through it.

Most people have the tendency to blame others for their failures and shortcomings, and doing so exempts you from responsibility and thus the ability to look at your own actions

You can’t expect the world to open the door for you. You have to open it yourself,

Whatever you turn your attention to will grow in your mind and improve

depending on external actions to occur to you, not taking action yourself.

a skill won’t grow on its own.

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.