Social skills are considered a competency that can help you communicate easily with others and it can take you places. Social skills are beneficial not only for your personal life but for your professional life as well. These skills can help you become a valuable member of a workforce, who knows how to interact, plan, and collaborate. If you want to improve and sharpen your social skills, then try out these practical tips that we have mentioned below.
- Engage With Others
The most obvious and effective way to improve and sharpen your social skills is by engaging with others. It doesn’t matter whether you are engaging with people in person or on an internet platform like https://www.omegle.com/. The bottom line is that you should engage with others and practice your conversation and socializing skills so that you can get better at it. Find ways by which you can keep your conversation going with your friends, family, and colleagues.
- Start Small
Remember that you can expect to become a full-time extrovert and socializer overnight. You need to start small and slowly move your way up. You can do this by engaging with people on a daily basis and even socializing with people that you usually used to avoid. For example, if you usually smile at the cashier at the grocery store, then the next time try engaging in small talk with her. These are small things but they can help you get better at socializing.
- Ask Open-Ended Questions
If you really want to improve your social skills, then you need to ask open-ended questions. Asking open-ended questions can be an effective way to lengthen a conversation and get others to do the talking. Open-ended questions can also help you to get to know more about your friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances.
When you include open-ended questions in your conversation, you get the other person a chance to express themselves and it can have a positive impact on building relationships. In case you are wondering how to ask open-ended questions, you can practice first on https://ome.tv/ and then try in-person conversations.
- Maintain Eye Contact
Maintaining eye contact is very important to improve and sharpen your social skills. Maintaining eye contact during conversations is considered to be an important part of socializing and you should at least make and hold eye contact with the other person for at least 3-5 seconds each time you engage with them.
If you have never made eye contact before for this long or are anxious about it, then you can start by doing so with a friend, family member, or colleague with whom you are comfortable. Practice holding eye contact during the start of the conversation while listening to the other person, and while closing the conversation.
- Be an Active Listener
Listening is an important part of socializing. It is equally important as being able to share your own thoughts. Everyone wants to be heard and listened to and by being a good listener, you make the other person feel comfortable in sharing their thoughts and what’s going through their mind. People who are considered to have good social skills are the ones who have appropriate listening skills too.
You can develop your listening skills by maintaining proper eye contact, nodding your head, asking for clarification when you hear something that you don’t understand properly, and using nonverbal cues like positive body language.
- Focus on Others
To keep the conversation going and lengthen your social interaction with someone, focus on others and what they have to say. If you start to get self-conscious and think about what to say next, then you might end up making a huge blunder. Instead of getting conscious, switch things around and focus on the other person to keep the conversation going.
Shifting the interest toward the other person will not only keep the conversation going but also make the other person more interested in the conversation. Focusing on others during a conversation is an effective hack by which you can keep a conversation going.
