Stages You Can Go Through As You Improve Your People Skills

I've observed that people seem to go through different stages as they work through their social issues. I'll lay them out so you'll have a better idea of some things that may come up for you in the future, and to possibly make you feel better if you currently feel stuck in a bad place.

The obvious disclaimer is that no one really goes through concrete, isolated stages in a concise, tidy order. They're more just a way of illustrating general ideas. The actual process varies between people and is much more disorderly and blurred together. Not everyone will go all the stages either (e.g., if your people skills are half-decent you may only experience later ones). Certain things may not apply to you. You may experience aspects of several stages at once. You may be in different stages for different parts of yourself (e.g., with most people you're okay, but with certain types you're much more behind).

Here they are. (Also, after writing them I found they fit that classic progression from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence fairly well):

The Blissfully Ignorant stage

This describes a lot of awkward people in high school. This is when your social abilities are lacking but you're not all that aware of it yet. What I should note though is even at this stage, there may still be areas where you're doing okay. It's not like you're a total social failure in every way possible, or that you're a bad person just because you're a bit awkward. It's just that on the whole there are a lot of pieces you could stand to tune up.

Certain social skills may not be on your radar at all (e.g., the concepts of grooming and dressing half-decently).

For other areas you may have a distorted sense of how you're doing (e.g., you fancy yourself a sophisticated, witty intellectual but most people would describe you as an abrasive, argumentative dork.)

You may have a tendency to fool yourself about your problems and have defense mechanisms in place to protect your ego.

You may not see your social life as a priority and happily choose to put time into your hobbies instead.

You may realize your social life isn't exactly where you want it to be, but you're not really worried and assume everything will fall into place soon enough, e.g., "Next semester will be different."

Regarding your weak areas, you can have a tendency to not take any action and instead rely on the universe to bring you what you want, e.g., "Maybe some of the Christmas hires at my part-time job will make friends with me."

In this stage, and other ones, you can realize you're behind in some ways, but have a wrong idea of what you need to do to address the problem (e.g., you believe the solution is learning tricks to make people like you).

This is not to say you never get insecure or depressed at this stage, but for the most part your social deficits aren't a huge concern for you.

Insecure, Down In The Dumps phase

At some point you'll start to transition away from blissful ignorance as the magnitude of your weaknesses hits you. You now realize that your social skills aren't as good as some people's, and you're missing out because of that. This stage is characterized by depressed feelings, from mildly mopeyness to being really, really down. You may never really experience this stage, and instead jump into the later ones, or it could be relatively mild or short-lived.

As the name implies, you're generally unconfident and down on yourself.

Your problems occupy your thoughts a great deal.

You feel like you don't have the first clue about what to do to escape your condition, which naturally makes you feel worse.

Or you could take some steps to improve your situation, but they don't amount to much and make you even more discouraged.

Cognitive distortions and insecurities are common: One bad conversation means you're a loser for all time, one ambiguous look is interpreted as a sign of withering rejection, you just know all your co-workers hate you, etc.

Your depressed mood makes your thinking more negative and pessimistic. A big part of getting over this stage is getting a handle on these destructive thought processes.

You can feel so down on life and lacking in confidence that you don't want to try anything ("What's the point? I'll get rejected/make an idiot of myself/not have anything to say")

You're likely to give up after small setbacks ("I smiled at them and they did nothing. I knew I was a loser. There's no point in trying to get to know people. I can't win. If I fail, then I feel bad. If I have some success, then I'll feel even worse when I just screw up down the road after I've gotten my hopes up.")

Your sour mood can hinder your capacity to improve yourself, because you can not feel like talking to anyone. You may get invited to a party, come up with several scenarios about how it'll be a disappointing waste of time, then decide it's not worth going.

You can feel caught in a Catch-22 in that you need to be around people to not be so awkward, but you can't be around people because you don't want them to see what a dork you are.

At its worst, your mind can almost have a caged animal quality to it - one minute you feel frantic and desperate, the next helpless and despondent.

Hitting bottom

This doesn't happen to everyone either, but many people who have recovered from their social ineptitude remember a specific time where they feel like they hit bottom. What happens is the difficult nature of your situation just hits you all at once and you crumble. It may be triggered a particularly tough social failure, or just the realization that your up-until-now half-hearted attempts to change won't work.

As rough as it is to go through at the time, it's usually an ultimately positive experience, because you can finally start on a path to seriously improving yourself. You now fully realize where you stand in life and that you need to do something about it. You'll often start tackling your problems in a more dispassionate, systematic way.

Temporary Over-confidence phase

This is another one that doesn't happen to everyone. It comes up when you first start getting serious about improving and you find some advice that seems really helpful. For a while you can think that just because you've read the information and understand it intellectually, that you're actually skilled in real life.

The material psyches you up, fills you with hope, and makes you feel like you can conquer the world. That's one contributor to this stage.

You're also learning about a new area, and so are naturally making frequent large leaps in your understanding of it compared to how you were before. You feel like a rock star for learning so much so quickly. Unfortunately you lack perspective about how good you are in the grand scheme of things (i.e., you're a beginner) and confuse feeling like a super hero for actually being one.

Your increased confidence may cause you to take some real-world action, and then feel like you knocked it out of the park. Objectively you probably just did okay, not as well as your pumped up emotional state lead you to believe at the time.

Eventually it sinks in that just because you've read some helpful information, it doesn't mean you can 100% apply the skills in real life.

If you hit bottom, you may do so before passing through this phase. Or you may start making progress, feel over-confident for a bit, then hit bottom after you realize you weren't in nearly as good shape as you thought you were.

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The Rocky Ascent, Mood Swings stage

This phase occurs when you start seeing some initial results, and are committed to improving, but your actions and thoughts are still influenced a lot by your unproductive habits and weaknesses. You're moving towards to a place where you'll be over your problems, but the ascent has a lot of ups and downs. The biggest characteristic of this stage is swinging moods. One day you'll be doing fairly well and you'll feel super human... Then something bad will happen and you'll feel moody and discouraged... Then you'll feel fired up again and like everything is going to be A-okay from here on out... Then you'll feel like it's all hopeless again and that you're backsliding...

This stage can happen at the steepest part of the learning curve for a particular area.

You may have a background desperation to get over your problems as soon as you can, which contributes to the emotional ups and downs.

In general, you can tend to read too much into little incidents and make exaggerated projections about what they mean for your future (e.g., if you have a good conversation with someone, you conclude you're going to have a busy social life by the end of the month. If someone doesn't talk to you that day, it means you're a loser who will always be a lonely reject.)

Having a mindset where you're looking for a magic bullet can contribute to these mood swings as well. You'll read some inspirational passage or seemingly profound piece of advice and feel psyched up for a day or two. Then you'll be bummed when the feeling inevitably wears off and it turns out you weren't cured after all.

People can also get thrown for a loop when they feel really 'on' in a social situation one day, but then can't seem to recreate that success again.

What makes this stage so emotionally trying is that when you're in the middle of it you can't see the larger picture. That's why little things that are quite trivial in hindsight seem to carry so much importance. Whether someone says 'hi' back to you when you greet them isn't a big deal at all, but at the time you don't know how relatively important or unimportant it is compared to other things, so you blow it out of proportion.

What helps is having a realistic idea beforehand about the path ahead of you and the progress you can make. If you know you've still got a year or more of work ahead of you, you won't get so freaked out if you're not magically cured overnight. It also helps to pull back from your day-to-day battles and focus on your overall growth. In the grand scheme of things you're slowly creeping upward, even though within one day or one week your fortunes swing wildly. Think of a stock that fluctuates a lot in price but still ends up being worth more at the end of every year.

Related: Why Can Your Confidence And Social Skills Fluctuate So Much?

The Coasting To The Finish Line phase

You reach this stage when you feel like you've gotten over the hump and things are finally starting to click into place. You may still have a lot of work to do to get to the level you want, but it doesn't feel like such a struggle anymore. If you continue to put in the time you know you'll get there sooner or later.

By this time you've likely hit on an effective way to improve. Before you may have traveled down a few dead ends, but now you think you've got it.

You've probably met some of your initial goals by this point and can thus relax a little. Your strivings for improvement aren't accompanied by the urgency and desperation they were before. For example, if your overall goal is to get better with people, you may have met your initial goal of finding a regular group of friends to hang out with.

Like I said, there may still be challenges and setbacks ahead of you before you get to the finish line, but the biggest problems are gone and socializing is much more enjoyable for you. Working on your issues is more interesting and rewarding now, whereas before you had to fight for the smallest victories. For example, if you sit down with some people, you may still want to work on your conversation skills, but you can have a fun chat as you do so. Before it might have been a frustrating ordeal to even have a two-minute exchange with someone. Now you're tweaking little details and enjoying the knowledge that the worst is behind you.

Temporarily Swinging Far To The Other Side phase

When some people finally get the hang of previously unpolished skills like the ability to mingle and have fun at bars they'll spend a while really exploring that new side of the social world and their personality, before eventually settling back into a pattern that's more in line with their true temperament. A guy who's a cerebral homebody by nature may get better at partying, make a bunch of shallow night life friends, and go clubbing every weekend for a year or two, until he gets it out of his system, realizes his old tendencies are fine, and switches to going out only occasionally.

When people do this, they're partially just excited by the novel new opportunities they've opened up. There may also be an element of their wanting to prove to themselves that they can be that outgoing party person if they want to be. It's not the healthiest motivation, because not being a party animal doesn't make you a lesser person, but they have it regardless.

The end (sort of)

There's never really a clear end to working on your people issues - you can always improve further - but one day you'll get to the point where you've more or less got the kind of life you want and you don't need to dwell on how your social skills are doing every minute. You can hang out with your friends and have a good time without really thinking about how you do it.