You’re reading 6 Steps To Take To Improve Your Social Skills and Defeat Your Anxiety, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Are you tired of being held back by your social anxiety? Do you always feel like you totally embarrass yourself after every social occasion even though the only “embarrassing” action you took was holding eye contact for more than 2 seconds? If all that relates to you, then read on and I will show you practical steps you can take to improve your social skills.
“But why should I take time and effort to improve my social skills?”, you might ask yourself, so before we get on to the 6 steps you can take to develop your social skills, let me first tell you why having excellent social skills is beneficial.
Why I should Improve my Social Skills
1. For business and the Job Market:
Social skills are not only important in dating and parties, as a matter of fact, the most important part of having good social skills is to influence people in the business world. You might have excellent technical skills on the job you do, but if you can’t communicate with customers, ultimately and most probably, the person with better social skills will have your job. There are exceptions, but why take the chance? Right.
2. For Relationships
Here, I am talking about both romantic and friendly relationships. In case of the romantic relationships, no matter how “hot” you think you are, nobody wants a partner who only has looks but you can’t relate to. This applies for both men and women. For friendly relationships, I think it is obvious for why you need social skills. The more relatable you are (which requires social skills), the more friends you will have.
3. For Developing Confidence
Many people on the internet claim there are shortcuts to having magnetic confidence, but the only practical way to develop confidence is to master skills. Confidence is a mindset where you are certain that you won’t fail on what you plan to do. Do you think regular public speakers (comedians, actors, motivational speakers…) have low confidence? No, you know why, because they have been in the situation for years, so it doesn’t faze them anymore. The same way when you apply the steps, I am about to give, below consistently you will be unfazed with social situations eventually.
Note: This is not a shortcut or overnight method to improving social skills. It requires consistent action and effort by your part, but eventually, the effort will pay off like it did for me, and you will be happy with the time you took.
15 Practical and Proven Steps To Take To Master Your Social Skills
1. Understand why your fear social situations and try to identify specific parts of interactions where you feel embarrassed and out of your comfort zone. The next time you are in a social situation where you aren’t comfortable, I want you to forget about the interaction and instead take notes in your mind for why you fear socializing. The more diverse your interactions; the better, so try interacting with men, women, elders, managers… and write why you fear the interaction
2. Write all the reasons you came up with and jot down under each why you have this irrational or exaggerated fear. For example, you might be afraid of being judged and laughed at if you say something wrong. Write for every single reason you came up with explanations for why you are afraid. You will find that for some of the reasons, you won’t have explanations 🙂 After jotting down everything that came through your mind…
3. Make a plan to confront that fear: I am pretty sure some of the excuses for your fear you came up with are just irrational and exaggerated, and in order for you to see that you are just irrational, you have to confront it and see how harmless the fear you have is. The plan is to go out and confront your fear; I know, it is scary, but I promise it is worth it. I suffered for the majority of my life thinking I could find an easier solution, but truthfully, there isn’t one.
4. Improve your Physical Appearance: One of the reasons you came up with in Step 1 is probably that you are insecure about your looks and there is a solution for that. Take effort and time to improve your physical appearance. Many think that they are stuck with their looks but in reality there is a 1000 steps you could take to improve your appearance. You could improve your fashion and style sense; you could improve your facial appearance; you could lose weight and gain muscle mass by following Brandon Carters Channel; You could improve your body language and more.
Note: This step doesn’t have to be completed before going on to the next step, keep working on it while following the next steps.
5. Get a Job That Requires You to Utilize Your Social Skills: This is the step that completely eradicated my social anxiety and made me more sociable and you know why it works? Because you fear being fired more than interacting with strangers. It is like a therapy for your mind but you don’t pay 300$ per hour. The jobs I am talking about are waiting, hosting, retail service… Anything that requires constant interaction with strangers. If you take this action, I assure you social skills will skyrocket and your anxiety will start fading. If you want to take it a step further…
6. Embarrass yourself in Public: I am not saying you should make a complete utter fool out of yourself, but try to do something that grabs attention and try to cope with the attention by being unfazed and welcoming it. For example, go into a cafe and order something and eat by yourself. If you don’t fear this, try something more daring. But I know people who would rather not eat lunch rather than go out and eat lunch by themselves. Come up with things that embarrass you and do those things in public and eventually it will feel like a feather landing on your skin. NOTHING.
These are all the steps you need to take to improve your social skills; it requires constant effort and will not solve your problem in one day so keep at it and you will eradicate your anxiety and master your social skills.
You’ve read 6 Steps To Take To Improve Your Social Skills and Defeat Your Anxiety, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
From the architect. A team of thirty architecture students from Studio Tom Emerson at ETH Zurich have designed and built a pavilion for Manifesta 11, the nomadic, European biennial of contemporary art. Floating in the lake against the backdrop of the city centre, the Pavillon of Reflections serves as the biennial’s public forum: as a meeting point, as a cinema for screening films produced as part of the biennial, reflected in the public swimming bath, open to the public during the day.
A timber island, arrange like a fragment of intimate urban space enclosed by five buildings: a tower, a tribune, a bar, a sun deck with changing cubicles below, a central pool with cinema screen above, and three generous sets of steps that lead into the lake. Together with the tower, the volumetric roofs over the bar are built up from a distinct profile of timber lattice roofs.
Under the guidance of Tom Emerson and project leaders Boris Gusic and Adrian Heusser the 32 architecture students at ETH Zurich collectively concieved and built the pavilion. The project began with an ideas competition between smaller groups of students, from which the most promising ideas were identified and developed. Organising themselves into smaller teams, they worked at different scales, from considering its position on the lake, right down to 1:1 scale prototypes. As well as the design process, the democratic construction techniques employed informed the design: the pavilion is made almost entirely of timber (European spruce), and all joints were designed to be simply screwed together. The students worked over ten months to bring the many design-related, technical and organisational dimensions of the project together to in a multi-layered and ultimately buildable work of architecture. As the project grew, experts and volunteers helped the 32 original students to realise this exceptional public space floating in lake Zurich.
London’s Design Museum closes the doors of its Shad Thames building for the final time tomorrow, ahead of its move across town. In a Dezeen exclusive, Deyan Sudjic reflects on his favourite memories from the 10 years since he took over as director (+ photos by Luke Hayes). (more…)
Madrid’s Museo del Prado has announced the finalists for the competition to redesign and transform the museum’s Hall of Realms. Among the list are acclaimed firms OMA; Souto Moura Arquitectos; a team of Foster + Partners – Rubio Arquitectos; B720 Arquitectos – David Chipperfield Architects; Cruz y Ortiz Arquitectos; Nieto Sobejano Architects; Stedebouw B.V.; Juan Miguel Hernández León – Carlos de Riaño Lozano; Garces de Seta Bonet Arquitectes – Pedro Feducci Canosa; and Gluckman Tang Architects – Estudio Alvarez Sala – Enguita and Lasso de la Vega.
Each finalist has previous experience in transforming older buildings into modern museums. They will now compete for the chance to reimagine the Hall of Realms of Madrid, providing the Prado with 2,500 square meters of new exhibition space and an additional 2,900 square meters for supporting spaces. The hall was once used by Spanish royalty and most recently served as the home of the Museum Del Ejercito, or Army Museum, before becoming a part of the Prado in October 2015.
The new hall could play host to a major exhibition on the relationship between Spain, the American Continent and the independence of Latin American countries. Four or five existing elements of the building will be preserved, and new space will be allocated to housing traveling exhibitions.
Final proposals for the competition are due on October 30, 2016, and the jury will select a winner before the end of the year.
News via EL PAÍS and Museo del Prado
Check out these adorable bobcat kittens! Rangers found these cute brothers denning in a woodrat nest at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in California. Rangers took samples and measurements and placed ear tags on the kittens before returning them to their den and setting up a camera to monitor for mom’s appearance. Video by National Park Service.
This article is part of our new “Material Focus” series, which asks architects to elaborate on the thought process behind their material choices and sheds light on the steps required to get buildings actually built.
The Great Wall of WA, designed by the Australian firm Luigi Rosselli Architects, and selected as one of Archdaily’s Best Building of the Year 2016, provides a unique example of rammed earth construction. At 230 meters in length, the Great Wall of WA is the longest structure of its kind in Australia and possibly the South Hemisphere, according to its architects. Built in remote North Western Australia, the building is made from locally available materials whose thermal properties help it to endure a variable climate. We spoke with the architect Luigi Rosselli to learn more about his compelling choice of material and the determining role it played in his concept design.
What were the principal materials used in the project?
Rammed earth mainly, with some Cor-Ten steel and concrete.
In terms of materials, what were your biggest sources of inspiration and influence when selecting what the project would ultimately be made of?
The landscape featured in North Western Australia, with its iron ore rich soil, sand dunes and harsh environmental and climatic constraints, served as a great foil for the imagination when developing this project. The remote and isolated location of the site also required a practical solution of sourcing materials locally. The rammed earth wall construction is composed of iron rich, sandy clay that is a dominant feature of the site, and pebbles and gravel were quarried from the nearby river bed and bonded with water from the local bore hole. The concrete slab contains gravel and aggregates from the local river, which lend a reddish color to its polished surface. In this hot and harsh climate using rammed earth made perfect sense, as the clay component of the wall has hygroscopic characteristics, and airflow along the wall draws moisture from it through evaporation. This evaporative cooling reduces the temperature of the wall in the same way sweat cools the body.
Describe how material decisions factored into concept design.
The 230-meter long rammed earth wall meanders along the edge of a sand dune, like a natural cut in the topography, reflecting the environment it inhabits. The wall is stepped to organically follow the natural curve of the landscape, while at the same time providing a level of privacy to each of the enclosed twelve residences buried into the sand dune. The use of the rammed earth, as well as the underground nature of the buildings, was chosen to maintain the residences’ cool and constant temperature. Designed according to these thermal mass principles, the accommodations represent a new approach to remote North Western Australia architecture: it moves away from the sun baked, thin corrugated metal shelters, and cools architectural earth formations naturally.
What were the advantages that this material offered in the construction of the project?
With the 450 millimeter thick rammed earth facade, and the sand dune to the rear and forming the roofs, the residences have the best thermal mass available, which makes them naturally cool in the subtropical climate. Rammed earth is a quarried mix of clay, sand, gravel and does not need any processing or energy intensive production like bricks and cement. Since the material was sourced in close proximity to the site, the material has relatively little embodied energy content. The awning roof is a Cor-Ten steel cyclonic shade frame, mirrored by a concrete slab on the ground. The deep awning roof is designed to keep the sun out during the hottest part of the day and invite the inhabitant to go outside and enjoy the cool evening breeze.
Were there any challenges you faced because of your material selection?
The energy efficiency provisions in the current Building Code of Australia are based uniquely on the thermal conductivity of a material. Thermal mass and hygroscopic characteristics are not factored. We had to employ Floyd Energy consultants to use a more sophisticated evaluation and simulation program that confirmed the superiority of a high thermal mass rammed earth construction.
Did you consider any other possible materials for the project, and if so how would that have changed the design?
Not really. In this part of the world we needed thermal mass, so any other alternative would be involving either brick or concrete, both of which would have to be imported. In the case of rammed earth, 90% was sourced locally.
How did you research and select providers or contractors for the materials used in your project?
We had already worked with rammed earth constructions in Sydney, so the knowledge has been evolved in house for some time with projects like Kirribilli House. Our providers and contractors were sourced locally from WA: the builder was Jaxon Construction, the rammed earth contractor was Murchison Stabilised Earth Pty Ltd, the structural consultant was Pritchard Francis, and the environmental consultant was Floyd Energy.
From the architect. Casa U is located in the suburbs of Mexico City in a very steep and hilly site overlooking the Valley of Mexico. The pronounced slope generated a sitting that emphasizes the intimate relationship between the spaces of the house with the site´s topography.
The parti questioned the typical sequence of a house, having its access in its roof to then descend into the private and social spaces of the house. A large number of trees served for tracing, framing the house and giving it more privacy.
The exterior facade is sober and simple, hiding the house beyond and making evident the relationship between slope and horizon. After an entry portal, a bridge extends the transition from the street and becomes an observatory. By stepping away from the slope, the house reduces its footing and frees up the most of green surface.
The stair becomes the core of the project, acting as the material axis and a threshold of light. It distributes to all levels and spaces making use of landings with framed views, bringing the landscape into the interior at different scales. The steps are strategically longer in some sections to slow down the person and allow for amore conscious act of transitioning between levels.
The top level holds the garage and access vestibule, being the next level down occupied by two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a master bedroom with private bathroom, a terrace and a studio, followed by the living room, dining and kitchen floor, and lastly a semi-buried level with a playroom and access to the lower garden.
The materiality responds to the function of the spaces. The highest volumes containing the bedrooms reach the clarity of the sky. The social level, the one with access to the gardens is expressed with a heavier nature using black stone rhythmically divided by small ridges that provide a continuous play of light and shadow mimicking the volcanic local stone. This two make the volume look embedded into the soil. Finally, an in between concrete is used for all of the volumes that contain service spaces.
Sig Nordal 