Social skills are like any other skill -- if you practice, you get better.

But in order to practice, you have to start, and you have to keep going. And both of those things are very hard. It's really easy to wait to start until you're totally "ready" (which will be never), or burn yourself out by pursuing a new goal in an unsustainable way.

So instead, I want to show you a better way.

There's a website called Give it 100. The basic idea is that you practice something for 100 days in a row, and you film a 10 second clip of you doing it every day so you can see how you improve. You can also see what other users are doing, which is sometimes incredible and sometimes adorable.

Unfortunately, social skills don't really lend themselves well to 10 second clips (in fact, a great social skills tip: don't randomly start filming the people you're talking to.) So instead I want to give you a different "Give it 100" challenge. Are you ready? Here it is:

Do something that practices your social skills for ten minutes, ten days in a row.

For instance, you could

Spend ten minutes reading a guide to social skills

Spend ten minutes watching TV with the volume off to analyze body language

Spend ten minutes researching therapists -- and then booking an appointment when you find one!

Spend ten minutes talking to someone you otherwise wouldn't have.

At the end of ten days, you'll have spent 100 minutes improving your social skills. This doesn't sound like a lot, but it's about momentum.

I guarantee that if you "give it 100" you will see an improvement in your social skills and your confidence- - even if it's very small (which is ok, because every good thing starts small.)

Once you see that improvement, it will be much easier for you to keep improving, and do another 100, and then another 100 -- until you look back and you find that your first 100 minutes of improvement has become 100 hours.

So to summarize:

Commit to spending 10 minutes over the next 10 days practicing your social skills. If possible, start today -- or at the latest, tomorrow.

Once you've "given it 100", notice the improvement (even if it's small!) in your social skills and confidence

Then, keep going! Give it another 100, or maybe another 1000!

Give it another 100, or maybe another 1000! And come back and post your story in the comments, to encourage others 🙂