How about explicit instruction in successful social behaviors? An acting class, basically. Would that help?
Or, alternatively, changing the game. Success is spending an hour at the party, not anything that happens during the party.
"You ever read that romance novel where the protagonist girl falls for a mid guy with no obvious virtues or flaws?" >> So I feel like this really does happen! Attraction can be very idiosyncratic and can depend a lot on people being good but not showy. Anybody else?
I think "social skills training" is probably a real thing, but I also strongly suspect it's on a totally different axis than "social confidence"; I've known many people both with "high social confidence/low social skills" *and* with "low social confidence/high social skills".
That said I think there's a really useful thing about improv classes especially where they *require* you to suppress the part of yourself that wants to plan out interactions. If you do that in improv you fail and this is true of real life conversations as well; they cannot be flowcharted.
I do agree with you that defining "success" in a way that it's literally only about things you personally are doing is very important; if you define it by other peoples' unobservable brainstates you'll just be anxious.
How about explicit instruction in successful social behaviors? An acting class, basically. Would that help?
Or, alternatively, changing the game. Success is spending an hour at the party, not anything that happens during the party.
"You ever read that romance novel where the protagonist girl falls for a mid guy with no obvious virtues or flaws?" >> So I feel like this really does happen! Attraction can be very idiosyncratic and can depend a lot on people being good but not showy. Anybody else?
I think "social skills training" is probably a real thing, but I also strongly suspect it's on a totally different axis than "social confidence"; I've known many people both with "high social confidence/low social skills" *and* with "low social confidence/high social skills".
That said I think there's a really useful thing about improv classes especially where they *require* you to suppress the part of yourself that wants to plan out interactions. If you do that in improv you fail and this is true of real life conversations as well; they cannot be flowcharted.
I do agree with you that defining "success" in a way that it's literally only about things you personally are doing is very important; if you define it by other peoples' unobservable brainstates you'll just be anxious.