Medium-long read. Intended for the kind of guy who is truly starting from scratch or close to it as a step-by-step guide.

I had a user asking me what specific steps one would take if they wanted to learn how to socialize from scratch. I am on the autism spectrum myself and at one point in my life I actually couldn't converse with anyone.

If you haven't already, the article below are complementary to this one and explain conversational techniques in depth:

Vermillion's Conversation Skills Guide

THIS current guide entails:

• Meeting people
• Social norms
• Developing social skills

Meeting People

This goes without saying, but you can't socialize or use any social skills if you don't meet anyone. Whether it's an online gaming community or people at sports or other in-person hobbies, you need to be around people.

Do not isolate or keep yourself in a bubble. You can and should have alone time to refresh and recharge, but being around people anywhere people are having some kind of mutual shared fun — or at least some kind of shared mission or purpose — is step zero. Even if you are just volunteering or taking a cooking class, you can do at least something.

So essentially you have two paths to meeting and talking to people:

Skill- or Mission-Based Activities

• Church
• Volunteer
• Projects
• Video game sessions
• Sports
• Etc.

For skill- or mission-based environments, you arguably have the easiest form of learning communication skills. The reason being is that everything in these situations is knowledge, mission, and/or skill-based and usually someone else is delegating the bigger directives.

This form of socialization is by far the easiest, though depending on how competitive or skill-necessary they are you may have to adapt to the demands of how intense it is. Either way, this is a good way to develop social skills in general if you have largely been alone most of your life or you are incredibly rusty.

Recreation

• Sports
• Hobbies
• Night Clubs (hard mode)
• Social Dance
• House parties/friends
• Etc.

In these situations, you need more personality and the ability to read people and what people are going to do and how they are going to respond to various circumstances.

If you want to understand better how to effectively employ these as fast as possible, look to the highest status male(s) you have access to in any of these groups and observe how they communicate and how they react to various social interactions.

I list sports in both skill and recreation because sports can be casual or competitive and may be with friends or with set teammates that you do not personally know well. You will need more personality and a different social energy to succeed in these recreational environments as they are more personal.

Social Norms

Social norms are a fundamental backbone of any process to developing social skills so they need to be followed, or you will be outcasted in social groups. These include:

• First impressions and social fit
• Social contract and reciprocity
• Room reading and body language
• Value offer and value differential

First Impressions and Social Fit

Your first impression is remarkably important, as well as your perceived fit for belonging in a group. You should strive to at the very least fit in with any group you wish to interact with.

For example, if you show up to a gothic punk event wearing black and torn clothes and jeans you will probably fit in. If you show up to a co-ed volleyball game with torn gothic black clothing like a hoodie and black jeans in sweltering heat and sand, you will look like a fool with poor social awareness. If you are notably quite different from everyone around you, it will be an uphill battle to be accepted.

You also should be amicable and polite; you should aim to offend people to the minimum unless you are good at obvious banter and have strong frame and know when to act like that in a light-hearted way. There is no reason to come in like a wrecking ball or an opinionated jerk.

Your later impressions can always recover from neutral or better – they cannot easily recover from a bad impression without a monumental uphill climb.

“Character is much easier kept than recovered” – Thomas Paine

Social Contract and Reciprocity

A social contract in the social psychology sense is an unwritten social agreement in which people follow unspoken expectations on how to interact with the general public or in deeper relationships. They are typically centered around the Golden Rule which is treating others how you would want others to treat you.

Social contract revolves heavily around reciprocity, which is exchanging mutual benefit with others - both people (or a group at large) will exchange knowledge, privileges, service, help, and time to others at similar values to what they receive themselves. The nature of reciprocal exchange will depend on the scenario and level of rapport and connection you have with a person or a group.

While you should strive to be amicable and helpful and not be selfish and take more than you give in general, you likewise shouldn't be a doormat and give your friends or acquaintances all of your effort when they don't give you anything back themselves.

Room Reading

If you are genuinely new to fitting into groups you need to learn to read the room, which often includes tonality and body language (which makes up 80-90% of social communication). When you are in a room full of people or interacting with one person, it is your responsibility to pay attention to visually or audible social cues and even unspoken expectations based on available cues.

If you are talking to someone or in a room with good positive energy and people are standing closer together, displaying no urgency, have open body language, and positive warm tones, it is an open atmosphere with open-ended longer responses and exchanges, and people are intending to stay or continue advancing the activity or energy. If you or others end up apologizing for something and someone says "no, you're all good" then that is a green light to continue the current behaviors and energy of the vibe and the current social dynamic.

Likewise, if the energy is low, people are distant, there appears to be an urgency to go somewhere else or be somewhere else away from the social situation, responses and conversation is short and blunt, body language is turned away from you or the group and closed off, people are not laughing or having a good time and appear serious, and they are indicating they need to leave, it is time to leave or end the social exchange.

Sometimes it's just a matter of changing a topic or a minor pivot to recover, but just read the room.

Value Offering and Value Differential

Not all friendships or group associations are equal - sometimes members within groups have very different levels of value to offer. Sometimes there is a clear group leader - it may be someone who has more access to more things, or they are the most charismatic and likeable person in a group or a pair of friends to a notable degree.

So, understand you may not always be a social equal to someone else and where you are not equals, you may be the one who has more or less social value, and that's fine - just understand your role in these social associations at any given time. Have some grace if you are the more valuable of the two or within a group.

Generally speaking, you should strive to offer as much social value as possible, and again, without being a used doormat yourself. You should not provide unearned value to people who haven't earned it nor try to take things of value unfairly or greedily from those who have time and value to offer. Generally, people will be in social groups and friendships where they have similar value. You can always improve your standing with enough effort unless you've already blown rapport.

Developing Social Skills

This often comes down to three specific pathways:

• Observation
• Personal style
• Experience

Observation

Similarly to how there may be social value differentials between people, one of the most effective way to develop social skills is to look at the most charismatic two people in the room or any given social environment and watch what they say and do. Pay close attention to how they behave and what they say and what other people's social energy and reception to their actions are.

You can very quickly learn what works and what doesn't by observation even if you are just a quiet observer. Likewise, you can look at the most awkward and socially incompetent people in a group and learn from observation what easily does not work. If you're new to this that is fine, and you actually don't need to speak much to belong to a group so long as what value you do provide when you do is appreciated by others and follows social contracts.

The 'introverts being adopted by extroverts' is a popular internet meme, but it is not wrong and has much truth to it. Extroverts often love social energy and associations and often love to include introverts in their adventures and get people out of their shells. So long as you have something to offer you can just get selected by extroverts and learn by example by what they ask, what they say, and how they behave.

Personal Style

As much as it is critically helpful to learn from charismatic people, one of the fundamental reasons they are so charismatic is that they are confident in their own skin and interact with others flawlessly in their own personal style. Now, one's personal style might vary from situation to situation - someone might be the life of the party at house parties or social events but merely confident and directive with some minor humor in professional settings. Regardless, their style works for them.

While it is valuable to learn from others, if you do not interact with the social world in a way that aligns with your own personality, preferences, and virtues, you will struggle to feel comfortable in your own skin and social interactions. It's good to draw inspiration from others for what works well socially, but ultimately you have to be your best version of a self you are actually okay with and feels natural to you.

It's more than fine enough to emulate what others do to experiment and see what and why it works for them and if it even works for you, but at the end of the day if you try something and it doesn't feel right then you might need to get out of your comfort zone more or abandon a social style that genuinely will never work for you.

Just experiment and come to your own conclusions about what works for you and abandon whatever doesn't. Everyone can be socially effective and charismatic in their own way, but it has to come from a naturally comfortable place that aligns with your personality and preferences and everyone's personality and preferences are different.

Experience

Lastly - but probably most importantly - you have to actually get experience; you can't just learn social skills and never employ them. You have to actually use them with a lot of different people: strangers, teammates, co-workers, acquaintances, friends, flirty game sets that never go anywhere, flings, relationships, family, etc.

It's okay if you fail here and there - after all, that is how you will learn what works and what doesn't. Besides, no one bats 1,000 all the time - sometimes people are just tired or don't give a shit some days. Don't take it personally if you or someone is normally upbeat, low energy or uninterested from time to time. Everyone is human and has off days. Just shrug it off and resume another day unless you can tell that you made a serious mistake and have a good reason to think you offended someone or betrayed a social contract.

You have to keep trying what works and filter out what doesn't work. Sometimes some things work in some groups some of the time and that's fine. You have to keep trying and learning what works in different or similar social situations because not all group or situational dynamics are the same. It's normal and expected for every situation to be different a lot of the time.

There will be things that generally work in most social situations and things that only work in some social situations and sometimes only some of the time. Just get that experience, read the room, and learn by example in your own personal style for given situations and you'll end up climbing the social hierarchy like it's second nature.

~Vermillion

Succinct and useful post.

One more thing guys need to have in mind is how to manage situations in which you have low status in some groups, and high status in others.

You want to have contexts in which you are relatively low-status, because it means you get to learn and improve in there. However, because people, and especially women, tend to rely a bit too much on your status to judge you (as opposed, for example, on your technical skills or even your character), merging these groups tends to be problematic. Seeing you in low status can break down a perception of high status you may have been diligently working towards for a long time. For women, impression is everything.

In these cases, compartmentalize. Keep your groups separate. Don't feel bad or phoney, don't feel dissonance about it. It's a normal thing to do.

That way, you reap the benefits of both high-status (attention and opportunities) and low-status (growth).

You can always mix the two groups together later, when you are comfortable in both.