In my opinion, based on over a decade of social skills coaching, these are the top #3 most important social skills.
Managing your emotions
High confidence. High enthusiasm. This is optimum for social situations where your life is not in danger, which is very rare.
Fast thinking
Ever considered it a funny paradox, that those with the highest intelligence, are often the most socially awkward? In our globally connected world, scrutiny is everywhere, and with it perfectionism. However in social situations, fast and ok is usually more impactful than slow and perfect.
Risk taking
A great rule to follow in social situations is:
“if not sure take the risky option”
Why is this a great rule to follow?
- Immediately reduce chances you’re boring down close to zero.
- Mostly can’t generate positive emotions from your communication except calmness without being outside of normal.
- The risky option is usually the better one both for the reason above plus even people with the worst social skills still have better than 50% accuracy on predicting if a risk is gonna be good or bad. Plus variance intrinsically has positive features..
- Improves ability to manage emotions over time because risky option often requires pushing through nervousness, doubt etc.
- Increases confidence over time.
- Causes more interesting stuff to happen which gives you more to talk about over time.
- Most important reason – if you take the risky option & it turns out that was the bad choice in that one situation this is actually the best outcome in the medium to long term because your the accuracy of your perception of boundaries of various kinds will almost definitely improve quite a bit.