Having Good Social Skills And Being Good At Social Situations Should Never Be Your Identity

That which you believe is your identity, or makes you special and different to others, will be what you automatically think about and work towards. If your identity is being popular, you will waste time on that. If your identity is a writer, you will spend your spare time automatically thinking of that and working towards it. If your identity is your hobby or what you do for work, you will become more invested in that and put more effort into it, thereby becoming more productive.

Having an identity of being Popular, goes against the Law Of Productivity, and is a bad idea. I will go into that later in this blog post.

If you are popular, you should not let it become your identity, or start to believe it’s what makes you special. Pick something else, like your work or hobby, and make that your identity.

We are meant to connect with people because of our identity. When I say identity, I don’t define it as how much money you have or how popular you are. You don’t want people liking you for those reasons. By identity I mean who you are, what your hobbies are, etc. For instance, your identity can be a writer, a dancer, a board game player, a volleyball player, a soccer fan, etc. What you spend a lot of your time doing is your identity.

You can have more than one identity. You may work as a computer programmer, and spend your spare time playing the guitar, doing yoga, and reading fiction books. In such a case, you may have four identities: computer programmer, guitar player, yoga enthusiast and fiction reader. And these identities will help you connect with others who have similar identities and interests, or people who want to spend time with someone who has one of those identities. If you want to meet people, you would go to meet-up groups for computer programmers, or yoga classes, or book clubs, or any such event where people who share your interests will be.

Some people who start learning social skills make the mistake of wanting social skills to be their identity. They want to believe they are special for their social skills. Social skills are not what makes a person special, and cannot be their identity. Someone can learn social skills in less than a few months. What then? What do you do after that? Your identity needs to be something you can keep doing, learning, and developing. Social skills do not fit this as social skills are limited.

If you make your identity as having ‘great social skills’, you actually make yourself do worse socially. You start to judge yourself by how well you do in social interactions, and every time someone doesn’t like you, you feel like a failure and experience an identity crisis. The proof that you have ‘great social skills’ is being able to get others to like you. If someone doesn’t like you, it’s evidence that you have failed in that identity, even though in reality it’s impossible to get everyone to like you. Rejection hurts a lot more, and this causes you to become more nervous in social situations. And what happens when you are nervous in social situations? You end up doing worse. You set yourself up for plenty of anxiety and depression by having this identity.

Whereas if your identity is a computer programmer, or writer, or volleyball player, etc; you are not dependent on strangers liking you. Your identity is proven by other factors, such as how much work you do, how often you write or play volleyball, etc. You are not dependent on everyone you talk to liking you to validate your identity. This makes you more relaxed and confident in social situations, and causes you to do better. This is just one way that not having ‘great at social skills’ as your identity causes you to do better socially.

A lot of people have noticed that when they are desperate or needy, other people avoid them. It is much harder to make friends or maintain relationships when you have too much time and need people to be around you. You need to do things with your time. Often what you do with your time will be dictated by your identity, as that will automatically become your priority. When your number one priority is meeting and spending time with people, you can give off a desperate vibe that causes people to avoid you as you need to meet people to validate your identity, and additionally you also have too much time. The best way to avoid this, is to have more important priorities.

Dedicate your time and energy to your work, hobbies, and passion. This keeps you busy, and gives you something better and more important to do than chase people. It will make you less needy and desperate for people to spend time with you, and you will ironically do better socially. What most people don’t seem to realize, is that the best way to do well socially is by having more important priorities, and not having an identity based on having good social skills or being popular.

In addition to all the above, there is also another big reason that you should never make your identity be about your social skills.

Wanting to be liked for your social skills, leads to you breaking the Law of Productivity. And this might be why the universe causes you to struggle more with social situations when you make this mistake, as the universe tries to redirect you to picking the right identity which will lead to you working hard on the right activities.

The universe wants you to follow the Law of Productivity. Basically, this is the law that we as humans are meant to be productive. We don’t have to be successful or rich, but we have to be productive with our time, and not waste too much time partying. We can party a little to rest and recover after doing work, but it should not be a big priority and not be something we spend too much time on. I have written an entire blog post on the Law of Productivity, where I explain the importance of this law.

We humans have this interesting psychological mechanism where that which we believe is our identity or that makes us special is what we automatically work on. Making social skills our identity, leads to wasting our time on socializing. Whereas if our identity is our career, or passion, we will work harder on this.

When we believe something is our identity, we automatically spend more time thinking about it and put more effort into it. Back in high school when my identity was getting good grades and working out at the gym, I studied harder and worked out at the gym a lot because of this. I took action that was consistent with my identity and supported the way I perceived myself. When after that in university my identity was a nerd, I studied harder. Now I see myself as a writer and I automatically spend more time writing and thinking of how to improve my writing.

This is the way our brain works, and it allows us to do more and better contribute to society. Whereas if we think good social skills is our identity, we end up becoming more motivated to keep working on our social skills, going out a lot to keep socializing and trying to become more popular. We waste a lot of time doing this. We break the Law Of Productivity and accomplish nothing. We do not contribute to society.

It’s interesting that anyone who makes having good social skills their identity, end up doing worse socially. It’s as if our sub-conscious mind or the universe is telling us not to do this. The cure is to pick something else as your identity.

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