Technique #4: Enhancing Social Skills to Ease Social Anxiety

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Part of the Series “10 Powerful Techniques To Overcome Social Anxiety”

Social anxiety can significantly impact your daily life, making social interactions and public situations feel fearful and overwhelming. Fortunately, there are practical strategies to help ease social anxiety and build your confidence.

In this multi-part blog series, I am covering ten powerful and effective techniques for overcoming social anxiety.

Today’s technique is improving your social skills.

If you are catching up on this blog series, so far we’ve covered:

Each of these ten strategies includes actionable steps to implement that technique in your daily life. Following these steps can help you to improve your social interactions and ease social anxiety.

Whether you’re facing anxiety at social gatherings, work meetings, or casual conversations, these techniques can provide the tools you need to navigate social situations with less anxiety and more self-assurance.

Why Improving Your Social Skills Can Help Ease Social Anxiety

If you suffer from social anxiety, you likely fear being judged and/or making a fool of yourself in front of others. After a social encounter, you may relive interactions in your head and criticize yourself for what you said or did.

This is where working on your social skills can really come in handy. Armed with practical techniques and guidelines, you will start to feel more assured that you will know how to act and what to say. In turn, this assurance decreases your anxiety, and gives you more opportunities to practice these skills. Cue the positive spiral!

When you can express yourself clearly, you generally feel more in control and less anxious in social situations.
If you enter an anxiety-provoking social situation with tools and conversation starters, you’re more likely to feel prepared and confident, which can reduce your anxiety and improve your overall experience.

The bonus: feeling more equipped in social situations will help you build stronger relationships, both personally and professionally, in addition to feeling less anxious.

Social Skills Help Improve Your Mental Health

We are social creatures. Feeling equipped to navigate various social situations will help you build stronger connections, which is associated with improved mental health across the lifespan.

In particular:

Emotional Expression:
Being able to communicate emotions effectively helps prevent the buildup of stress and anxiety. It allows you to seek help and support when needed. There is substantial research indicating that the ability to seek social support is closely linked to better mental health outcomes.
Reducing Isolation:
Strong social skills reduce feelings of isolation and loneliness. Loneliness is associated with a wide variety of negative emotional and physical outcomes, including anxiety, depression, suppressed immune function, and cardiovascular disease. Having meaningful social interactions is linked to better mental health and overall well-being. So let’s do this!

Practical Tips for Improving Social Skills

Social skills are not innate traits; they are learnable. Do they come more naturally to some people than others? Definitely. But regardless of where you fall on the social skills continuum, you can get better at navigating social situations with more confidence and less anxiety.

And guess what, you don’t need to become a raging extrovert, if that’s not who you are. These tips will simply help you feel more comfortable and authentic in various social settings, and less stuck in a dreaded “deer-in-the-headlights” situation during a social interaction.

1. Practice Active Listening:

Pay close attention to what others are saying, without interrupting them. Show that you are listening through nodding, eye contact, and verbal acknowledgments. Avoid distractions like checking your phone or scanning the room.

2. Focus on the Other Person:

Show curiosity, ask questions, and notice how you probably become less self-conscious when you are more focused on learning about other people. Demonstrate interest in the other person by asking about their interests, opinions, and experiences.

Try to convey understanding about what other people say to you. Empathizing in this way fosters stronger connections. With respect to managing social anxiety, focusing on others is a great way to reduce your own self-consciousness.

3. Eye Contact: How much?

Make natural eye contact with the person you’re speaking with to convey interest and attentiveness. Avoid staring because it can make others feel uncomfortable or self-conscious. Also, try not to look away too frequently, because it can signal disinterest.

4. Your Body Language Checklist:

Keep your body language open and welcoming. Avoid crossing your arms in front of you, which can seem closed off or defensive.
Stand or sit up straight to convey confidence and attentiveness.
Take Deep Breaths: Practice deep breathing to calm nerves, reduce physical tension in the body, and ease social anxiety.
Give Space: Respect others’ personal space and avoid standing too close, especially if it makes you or them uncomfortable.
Smiling does wonders. Usually.

5. Limit Fidgeting:

To the extent possible, try to minimize fidgeting or nervous gestures like tapping your foot or tearing a napkin into a thousand pieces.

Trying not to fidget is a tough one for many people, and I feel you. “Fidgety” might be a way that you show up as authentically yourself, although sometimes it can distract from conversation.

Don’t be too hard on yourself about this one. If you’re fidgeting, try to make it incidental instead of something that draws focus away from the conversation. For example, tear up that napkin, but do it underneath the table.

Figuring out ways to fidget that are more subtle can help you ease social anxiety and still show up as yourself.

6. Volume of speech:

Anxiety can make us talk either too loud or too soft (thanks a lot, anxiety!). Try to pay attention to how soft or loud you are speaking.

Ideally, you want to talk loud enough to be heard, but not so loud to cause discomfort or overwhelm the listener.

7. “Pack” Some Conversational Topics:

Before an anxiety-provoking social encounter, generate a few appropriate conversational tidbits that you can break out if you feel stuck.

For example, if it’s springtime you might “pack” the question, “Do you have any fun vacation plans this summer?”

8. Rehearse a Few Personal Details

Anxiety tends to put us into fight-or-flight mode, which hijacks our brain and makes it hard to think straight and articulate ourselves clearly.

If you are meeting new people, there is some information that you are very likely to be asked. Why not rehearse these things ahead of time, so that you feel prepared when someone asks, “So what do you do?”

Practicing can help override your nerves in the moment. It can mean the difference between “Uh, I wrote a screenplay…” versus “I’m an aspiring screenwriter, and right now I pay my bills working as a virtual assistant while I shop my screenplay around.”

Preparing ahead of time can give you a real confidence boost and help ease social anxiety. You can do this!

9. Try to do Something Thoughtful

People with social anxiety are often so worried about embarrassing themselves or offending someone that they interact as little as possible in social situations. Ironically, they may end up appearing aloof or uncaring.

Anxiety can create a cruel cycle, where those affected are so preoccupied with discomfort and worry that they struggle to connect with others in a way that could ease their anxiety.

Try this: when you’re feeling anxious in a social situation, look for something thoughtful to do for someone. You’ll find these opportunities if you look for them.

Here are three ridiculously random examples that I witnessed at a party last week:

Someone offered assistance to another guest who was carrying multiple plates.
Someone quietly handed an extra napkin to a nearby person who had dropped theirs.
Someone offered to take a picture of a group, so that everyone in that group could be in the photo.

These little gestures don’t require sophisticated conversational skills, but they help you connect in a positive way with others. You’ll help put someone else at ease, and by focusing on helping them, you’ll take your attention off of your own feelings of anxiety.

Use These Social Skills Tips to Ease Social Anxiety

Think of these tips as tools in your socializing toolbox. Implementing them will help improve your social skills, which in turns helps you to ease social anxiety. Invest time in learning and practicing these skills, so that you feel more prepared and less fearful about meeting new people and socializing in general.

In subsequent parts of this series, I will continue to cover ten techniques to ease social anxiety.

How I Can Help

If you are reading this and thinking, “This makes sense, but I want more help with my social anxiety and social skills,” you might consider working with a therapist.

In fact, therapy is one of the ten techniques I’ll cover in this series on social anxiety!

I invite you to reach out to me to discuss working with me in therapy to help you overcome social anxiety. I am authorized to see clients in online therapy in 40 states, and I have helped people with anxiety for over 20 years.

Your first step is to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation with me. If I’m not available to be your therapist, I can provide you with appropriate resources so that you can find the help you are looking for.