A Year in Review
December 30th, 2008 by AndyIt seems that yet another Thanksgiving and Christmas has passed. With the new year looming only a few days away, its time I take a few minutes to think back on this passed year and speculate about what may come in the next year. I can only hope that next year will be half as exciting as this year has been.
At the beginning of this year, I had just started a new job. While it was a bit frightening it was exciting none the less. I spent quite a bit of time continuing my research into the anxieties that I faced and how to conquer them.
At some point, I discovered that the anxiety I suffered from was known as Social Anxiety Disorder. It was at this point that I realized that there wasn’t nearly enough information openly available to sufferers online, and decided to create this blog in order to help others. From that point forward, I continued working on myself, and writing about every technique that I found that worked for me.
Finally October rolled around, and my posts screeched to a halt. Suddenly I found myself without new techniques to contribute, and decided that rather than clutter the site meaningless summaries of what I’d already covered, I’d hold off until I had something new. That time hasn’t come yet, but some amazing things have happened with me.
Right around this same time, I suddenly found that my anxiety had drastically decreased. From then thru today, I’ve been continuing with systematic desensitization and self-hypnosis. If I take a moment to think back to where I started, or even just 6 months ago, I hardly recognize the person I was. I have more fun now. I’m a better father. I’m much more assertive. Most importantly I’m much happier than I was then.
So what does all of this mean for SociallyDistressed.com in the year to come? Relax, despite my lack of new content recently, I’m not abandoning you guys. Personally I’m at a point where I’m probably going to stay for a few months. So I probably won’t be writing about any new techniques for a while. On the other hand, I’m always willing to help you out. Just comment if you have questions, and I’ll answer maybe even write an entire post if your question spawns enough thought. Once I have taken care of the things I have to do, I’m sure you’ll start to see new techniques and ideas appear again.
With that said, I wish you all a great and prosperous 2009! Happy New Years!
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Loading ...The Basics of Reality and Rapport
November 4th, 2008 by AndyIn my last article, A Look in the Mirror – Evaluating Your Own Confidence, I discussed a technique that you can use to not only evaluate your confidence, but also begin to learn to observe non-verbal communication. One reader asked in a comment if the someone who is being “unreasonable or hostile” might be reflecting her non-verbal communication. Personally, I don’t think that “reflecting” is the right word. It is more likely that they are “reacting to” her non-verbal communication.
Before I even begin to explain how our verbal and non-verbal actions affect others, I have to introduce you to reality. You must understand that each of us lives in our own reality which is created around the things we have learned and have observed. No two peoples realities are identical because no two people could possibly have seen, heard, read, and learned the exact same things.
Another very important thing to understand is that our actions and reactions are based completely out of our reality. In other words we will respond in the way we have learned to respond to something. In NLP the things that cause our responses are referred to as triggers. When we hear a word, it is attached to some representation within our mind. So the word is a trigger to retrieve its meaning within our reality.
If you look at two separate cultures, it is much easier to see how our realities differ. For instance one culture may eat bugs while another finds the idea repulsive. It may be the case that eating the bugs is perfectly healthy, yet for some reason or another, the other culture developed a belief that it is repulsive. From generation to generation, this belief is taught the offspring.
In a less obvious example, one person might interpret a smile as being a very positive gesture while another, even though she knows the gesture is meant to be positive, might have a negative reaction to it. This negative reaction is because somehow a smile became a trigger for negative feelings. Perhaps the smile stirs up a reminder of a previous bad experience where someone had a smile on their face.
Both of these concepts are extremely important to understand because without them we can’t even begin to understand how to gain good rapport with people. If we understand these concepts we can begin to observe peoples reactions to things, and adjust our own actions to get the reactions we would like to see.
So the answer to her question more completely, those reactions are not a reflection of her non-verbal communications. They are instead a glimpse at the reality of the other person triggered by her non-verbal communication.
If this is the case, you may wonder why having very confident non-verbal communication is so important. To answer that, look back the at example I gave above about two separate cultures. Culture creates the basis for our reality, and in most, if not all cultures around the world, confidence is considered a positive attribute. In addition, our signs of nervousness are similar – sweaty hands, fast breathing, shakiness, etc… So it makes sense that being confident and radiating confidence through both our verbal and non-verbal communication will make it easier to build rapport with people. At the same time it is possible that some people will have associated certain aspects of our confident actions with negative representations, so it is also important that we be able to recognize this and adapt.
I think I’ve done about the best I can to explain this. This is just a very topical explaination however, so if you really want to understand how all of this works, I recommend reading the works of John Grinder and Richard Bandler. I believe that “Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.” volumes I and II and “Frogs into Princes” do a very good job of explaining these concepts.
A Look in the Mirror – Evaluating Your Own Confidence
November 4th, 2008 by AndyIf you’ve been reading my articles, you’ve probably been recognizing an overall theme which is that self-confidence is the key to many things. Across your professional life and your personal life, your self-confidence has many opportunities to affect the results you get. What you may not realize is how easy it can be to evaluate your level of confidence.
What I would like to propose is that you look in a mirror. Take a few minutes to study that person you see as if you are looking at a different person. Notice the feelings you get from this person, and attempt to figure out what it is that gives you these feelings. In this exercise you are looking at yourself through the eyes of another person, reacting to your own non-verbal communication, and attempting to determine the source of it.
Now you can try imagine other situations and look at yourself as if you were watching another person in that situation. Take a few minutes, close your eyes if you need to, and really imagine yourself being in that situation. Now look at that “other” person in the mirror as if that person is in that situation. Notice the feelings you have now, and try to notice the non-verbal communication. Is the person smiling or frowning? How is he/she standing? Now try to figure out why once again.
You should repeat this many times with different situations and circumstances both positive and negative. This is also an exercise you will want to repeat occasionally, and perhaps get in the habit of doing regularly. Not only can it help you to identify your confidence issues, but it will also help you to become more conscious of the non-verbal communication of other people.
Personally, I use this technique discreetly many times a day. When I notice I’m feeling a particular way, I simply look at my reflection somewhere. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mirror or a window as long as I can see my reflection just long enough to notice how those feelings are being reflected non-verbally.
Bridging Your Abilities
October 30th, 2008 by AndyFor years I have had a very strange confidence issue. At work I was completely confident, resourceful, and able to face nearly any situation head on. I felt almost like I was James Bond. As soon as I walked out the office door though, I felt more like Napoleon Dynamite. In my non-professional world I lacked most of the knowledge and communication skills that I had in my professional life.
Before I really got to work on myself, I had no awareness of this. To me things were just the way they were, and I didn’t see any relation. Once I started learning about myself I discovered that I had two different sets of skills. At work I had a ton of relevant knowledge, skill, and resources to pull from. At home I had a little bit of skill and few resources. Seeing this, I decided to figure out if I could bridge some of my skills from my professional life into my personal life.
One problem I had in my personal life was my speaking abilities. When I spoke, I mumbled rather than projecting. In the office, however, I was almost to loud and outspoken. In reality I could do this in my personal life, I just had never realized it because I was in the habit of being quiet. A couple days later, in the middle of a conversation with some friends, this thought crossed my mind once again. I realized I was mumbling, and started projecting. Not only were my friends surprised, but after having this happen a few times, I started to notice that I was projecting my voice all of the time. And so I managed to bridge my speaking capabilities from my professional life to my personal life.
The next thing I decided to attempt to tackle was my confidence. This one hasn’t been so easy because there are many factors that contribute to confidence. In reality many factors have contributed to my improved confidence, I did bridge some of my confidence building skills from my professional life. I discovered that when I’m not confident about something at work, I learn more about it. In my personal life when I didn’t know something, I’d just be quiet. Once again once I realized I already had the tools to use to build my confidence, it was just the matter of getting into the habit of using those tools in my personal life. Before I would just sit around and listen to other people talk about sports and movies or whatever. I was interested, but never bothered to commit any of it to memory because I previously saw no use for it. Now though I use my learning skills to commit some of this to memory and I now have more to talk about, which in turn gives me a bit of a confidence boost.
Now you may or many not have the same problems I had. The examples I have laid out are only examples of how I applied this technique to myself in my unique circumstances. You may find that you have no skills that need to be bridged between different parts of your life, or that those that should be bridged are different than mine. My whole point is that it is worth analyzing your talents in different situations, and attempting to find ways to apply them to different parts of your life.
A Trip To The Coffee Shop
October 30th, 2008 by AndyThis morning I woke up with the worst craving for a mocha. Unfortunately between getting my daughter to school, and myself back home to work I didn’t have time to stop and get one in the morning. By the time 11:00 rolled around, I was starving and still craving that wonderful caffeine and chocolate mixture so I decided to go to lunch early. I hopped in the car, and off I went.
Before I continue my little store it is important to note that over the past few months, I’ve been working very hard at learning to pay attention to the non-verbal communication of other people. The theory is that the words we say is only a small amount of our actual communication. Our non-verbal communication is much more important and telling. This may seem strange because you normally this communication is completely subconscious. If you’ve ever been asked why you didn’t like someone and relied with something like “I don’t know, he just gave me a bad feeling” you’ve actually come close to realizing this. That is your subconscious using that non-verbal communication to communicate a message to you kinesthetically (through feelings).
So anyway, while I was out getting my lunch, I stopped at the coffee shop. Ordinarily I’d just go though the drive thru and head home, but my subconscious though it would be better if I went in today and gave me a feeling. So I got out of the car, and confidently walked to the door with my back straight, shoulders back and head up. I walked to the register slowly and deliberately. The girl was off to the side making someone cleaning something when I reached the counter.
Months ago, I would have stood there patiently, as I was willing to today, while she finished cleaning whatever it was, but not today. As soon as she saw me, she looked up, smiled, fumbled with what she was cleaning, put it down, and practically ran over the register to greet me. Her non-verbal communication was crystal clear. She was excited, nervous, and perhaps a bit intimidated. I ordered and paid, while she was smiling, and giving off very positive body language the whole time. I told her to have a good day and walked over to where I had to pick up my drink. Another girl was out changing the garbage bag. I tell he “Hi” and get the same body language from her.
The third girl, the one who made my coffee, was the best. She’s rushing to make it, paying more attention to me than the coffee. She goes to put the whipped cream on top, and ends up putting on too much and making a mess. I almost laughed, but managed to just smile instead. She brought it over nervous and apologizing. I just thanked her and told her to have a great day and left just as confidently as I had first entered.
As I returned to my car, I wanted to jump up and down with excitement. While I didn’t carry on a spectacular verbal conversation with these girls, what I had accomplished was much more important. I had managed a HUGE non-verbal talk with them. I had also managed, for the first time, to pay attention to every detail of their non-verbal communication. In fact, had I tried to carry on a lot of verbal communication, I probably would have messed something up just because I had to dedicate so much of my focus the non-verbal communication. With more practice I’ll be able to dedicate more of my attention to my verbal communication as well, but right now, this was a huge win!
New Forums
October 28th, 2008 by AndyIn order to better foster better communication between you and myself, SociallyDistressed.com now includes forums. You will find the link to the forums on the menu at the top of the page. You will also notice that you can now register and log in. Unfortunately, in order to post to the forums you will need to create an account. I really must require this in order to keep spam to a minimum. I will never sell the information you provide or provide it to third parties.
I hope you will all create accounts and join me in the forums. Feel free to post your questions, and discuss things between yourselves. This is your way to tell me what you want to read.
Thanks,
Andy
What Women Want in a Man
October 14th, 2008 by AndyThe other day, I was hanging out on Plurk and I saw a question that literally made me laugh. The question he asked wasn’t stupid nor was the person who asked it, but both the question and its answers demonstrated very well how little most people understand themselves and others. The question that was asked was "How come most women are attracted to assholes?"
I can pretty much guess what most of you are probably thinking right now. Male readers are thinking "Yeah, I’ve noticed that." while the females are thinking "We are not." Realistically both thoughts are totally wrong. It isn’t the asshole that attracts the woman, but certain qualities he appears to possess.
The most important quality that women gravitate toward confidence. While most assholes aren’t confident, they put a lot of into appearing to be strong and confident in order to hide their insecurities. They are so good at hiding their lack of confidence in their non-verbal communication that women find themselves drawn to them. Women really have little control over this because the feelings they get are generated internally by their subconscious.
Now there’s good news for all of us who are "sweet guys" and those women who don’t want to get stuck with assholes. Most women aren’t really attracted to assholes. They are attracted to confident, un-needy, self respecting men. If you aren’t this person today, don’t fret because you can be.
I have something for the women reading this who might be attracted to assholes as well. Consider for a moment that you may not really be attracted to the "bad boys." Instead is it possible that you attracted to a feeling that you get from them? Is it possible that this feeling comes from something other than the badness? Perhaps from the confidence they appear to exude? Do you find yourself unhappy in these relationships later because you’re always having to take care of that person? Because in the end, he really isn’t self-sufficient and confident, but just putting on an act?
If you answered yes to any or all of those questions, you may now understand the point that I am trying to get across. The asshole is just an imposter faking the role of the person you are really looking for. Its not your fault, you are tricked by your own mind which acts upon instincts that have been evolved throughout the existence of the human race.
I hope this clears things up a little bit for some or all of you. As always I’m always willing to field questions, so ask away.
Breaking The Cycle of Repeated Mistakes
September 18th, 2008 by AndyI’m pretty sure that most of you conscious of at least one habit that you have developed that gets repeated over and over again in the same situations. Some of these may be positive habits, like brushing your teeth, yet others may be bad like smoking. On top of these habits that you are aware of, there are probably many others that you don’t consciously recognize as habits. These habits can also be good, but I am going to focus on the bad ones that might cause us to repeat the same useless behaviors over and over.
In order to tackle these unconscious bad habits, its important to understand how and why they are formed. A habit is formed when your subconscious deems something to be positive and useful to you. It generalizes the situation, and applies that generalization in the future. Once a habit has been formed, whatever action it requires is automatically performed outside of your consciousness. In other words, you don’t know it happens. When it comes to brushing your teeth, this is a good thing because it has to be done. When it comes to meeting new people, however, you probably don’t need to panic.
Habits can often extend into much larger parts of our lives without us realizing it. You may have known someone who has been finding jobs and getting fired repetitiously for years. This person has a pattern, or habit that he keeps repeating over and over again. He probably has no idea why he keeps getting fired, and may even blame others, but somehow he has developed a pattern that leads him to the same place every time. In the same way, these habits permeate all of our lives.
The good news is that there are ways to break these habits. First and foremost I’d recommend finding an NLP practitioner who can help give you new choices to use rather than repeating that same loop. If that’s not possible, you try to gain conscious control over the the habit. If you have ever been a smoker and attempted to quit, you probably know exactly what I mean. In this situation there will be times when you’ll notice you have a lit cigarette in your hand and not know how it got there. Other times you may notice that you’re lighting one and stop yourself. In that first case, the cigarette got there because your unconscious mind ran its program (your habit) for smoking outside of your consciousness. In the second case, you as soon as you realized you were lighting the cigarette, you had conscious control over it and could stop.
In order to change these unconscious habits, you have to interrupt the unconscious programs. If there is a specific situation where you have problems, make little changes. Try sitting or standing differently. Try talking in a different tone of voice. If you always watch what’s happening, try listening instead. You can try anything that’s different than what you would normally do in this situation. I offer so many suggestions because what will work for you depends on you at that specific point in time.
I know that whole practice seems too simple to be true. It really isn’t as simple as it may seem, yet this is extremely effective. It can be very difficult to consciously make even small changes in a stressful situation because our conscious minds are focused on the situation, while our unconscious takes care of everything else. With this in mind, if you do have trouble applying this in highly stressful situations, attempted it on smaller, less stressful bad habits.
Now I’m off to break my bad habit of not doing my laundry when I should. I wish you all the best!
How Would You Define a "Short-Term" or "Long-Term" Relationship?
September 16th, 2008 by AndyMost of you will read that and initially think you have an answer. To tell the truth for a long time, that’s what I believed I wanted. After a while though I started to notice that people’s definitions of "Long-Term" differed. That’s when I started thinking about how relative that term really is.
Most other terms have relatively universal meanings. For instance if I said I were looking for marriage, pretty much everyone would understand that I wanted to marry someone. On the opposite end of the spectrum if I were looking for a one night stand, I could assume that pretty much everyone would understand. Friends with benefits, might be a somewhat sketchy but still most people would understand. When we come to short-term and long-term relationships, things get a bit more vague and the universal understanding crumbles.
These phrases define a whole set of expectations that may be different from person to person. For instance one person may understand short-term to be a single date, while another may assume this means friends with benefits for 6 months. Even still, with short-term, there is always a reasonable assumption that there will be an end to the relationship rather quickly.
Long-term tends to get even more complicated. One may assume that by long term we imply that there will be no end. Another may assume that there will be a very distant end. Even two people who believe there may be an end may differ in the length of the term. Is it 6 months or 6 years?
In my opinion both of these terms are used as a way to avoid sharing your true feelings about a relationship. Are you dating with the expectation of eventually getting married to someone? If so, are you not in fact looking for marriage? Are you dating with no real intention of getting married? If so, are you not looking for friends with benefits?
While this may seem like a big rant to some of you, I’ve hidden a greater point within this post. Most people don’t know how to communicate. More specifically, most people don’t know that they don’t know how to communicate. This has recently started to become crystal clear to me as I have been continuing my quest to learn NLP. You have to assume that another person’s definition of a word doesn’t match your own because they’re definition is based on their experiences just as your definition is based on yours.
As an experiment to help me prove or disprove my point, I’m asking that you leave a comment and explain what you think Long-Term and Short-Term relationships are. Thank you.
When the Depression Rolls By – Recognition and Coping
September 4th, 2008 by AndyAs we go about our daily lives, it is inevitable that eventually something will bring us down. The more busy and stressful our lives become, the more we risk having depression sneak up on us. Even though the depression can be sneaky it there are some clues you can become accustomed to looking for that will help you to recognize when a little bit of depression is attempting to surprise you.
The key to recognizing when depression is sneaking up is to develop a habit of analyzing your own reasoning. In order to do this, you need to learn to listen to your inner dialog. Once you have become versed in paying attention to your thought, you will be able to notice patterns in the way you are thinking. If you start noticing a lot of thoughts prefixed with things like "I don’t want to", "I don’t feel like", "I’m too tired to", or anything like that, you are probably at least slightly depressed. Generally you are looking for those negative thoughts that cause you to be depressed. Using this method of introspection now gives you the ability to begin to cope with the depression.
There are many methods you can use to combat the depression. Maybe you’ll find that simply realizing the depressed thoughts you were having will change them and the depression may be gone. If not, you may want to try to determine what has been happening lately that has been causing it. If those factors can be removed from your life, that may be help. If they aren’t easily dealt with, the next best thing would be to work with your inner dialog to discover new possibilities that are better for you.
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