Help with Casual-Conversational Skills

[Mollocephalus]

Re: Help with Casual-Conversational Skills

If you think relying on drugs makes you more confident you are a pathetic shithole, it's obvious that once the effect wears out you have gained nothing, and you actually wasted an occasion to try and do it with your own strenghts. I expected better from you arch.

[Arch0wl]

Re: Help with Casual-Conversational Skills

No one is "relying on drugs"; I suggested that, like most of the adult population, you use alcohol as a social lubricant and learn how to replicate your confident attitude while sober. It becomes part of your own strengths. If you can't do this, that's fine; you're not being judged.

Though, I find your wording irritating because the weight of your reply relies on stigmatizing drug use categorically, as if 80% of the adult population didn't drink coffee and half of the U.S. didn't consist of regular coffee drinkers. Drugs themselves are a marvel of civilization. They are the triumph of executive functioning over the body. Humanity itself is just apehood 2.0, and you're expecting effectively a genetic accident to hold up for thousands of years after we've reshaped effectively every other aspect of the planet to suit our collective thinking styles and ideologies. It would be pathetic if we didn't eventually take control of our brains via some artificial means. Organic agency is a very temporary idea.

@reuben I think you're overestimating the extent of what I'm saying here. Waiters, actors and most people in the service industry learn to do what I'm talking about. You simply cannot walk to the back of a restaurant, have your manager yell at you for fucking something up and then expect to put on a smile for a table without learning how to bulldoze your default reaction to things in some capacity. If you are angry inside, your smile will come off as obviously fake because the muscles in your face will be tense, so to make it "real" (i.e. gesture corresponds to emotional state) you have to actually make yourself feel happy in a really short period of time. This is pretty basic stuff, you've probably just not heard it worded like this. It's not like waiters are walking around with their sense of self disemboweled from their identity or that actors are these Dittos of people who have no individuality.

But yes, everyone has overall personality traits, and emotional regulation is a minor aspect of personality. You can take a comprehensive big-five personality test here: http://www.personal.psu.edu/j5j/IPIP/

Although, (and this leads into what MracY mentioned about a "fake self") the question you might be raising is "do you have a central sense of self, once everything is reduced to a component?", in which case I refer you to the cognitivephilosophy.net entry on the idea of a "real self". My opinion on this is that the only thing you could really call a core "I" is the very limited sense of executive functioning you have, and even then that's a shaky foundation. But if we ever achieve the capacity to radically modify our genes/desires/emotions or radically change our evolutionary path to a kind of meta-evolution / artificial selection, the thing doing that is executive functioning. It's able to make decisions that reshape itself. But what you're really addressing is less of a forum question and more of the subject matter that makes up an entire discipline of thought, so it's a huge can of worms that could encompass a whole library, much less a thread.

[Spenner]

Re: Help with Casual-Conversational Skills

A lot of the times people learn to fear the person they become after they've had too much alcohol, like me!!!! A great social lubricant at first until I realize that my impulsivity is the only thing being initiated here. I can speak more impulsively/analyze less of what I'm saying sober too, and like Rubix said I'm more confident because there's a more rapidly concluded idea of what to say. It's not the same mechanism that drives my social interaction when drunk.

I think you have to learn to relax and not put any pressure on yourself when interacting-- your mind can calculate things immediately if you're relaxed enough to just be finely tuned to the conversation. It's getting into the peak frame of mind for it.

If anything, depressant drugs are the most useless for this, because in effect it just means you're not really caring as much about what you say, whereas with a stimulant you're at least analyzing things more intelligently. Not saying to go on stimulants, just saying that by comparison, the social effect it has is far more applicable to the way you interact after the fact.

All in all try to be mindful of the fact that you're probably filling your trains of thought when socializing with WAY too much that doesn't need to be there, and it's effectively cluttering and clouding your abilities to just be naturally social. If you have less anxiety around the fact that you might be interpreting something wrong, then you'll probably be doing much better with it, because rooted in you is a pretty defined ability to read people, as long as you don't spend most of your thought process second guessing things.

It's far better to make a mistake and have a bit of a laugh about it in front of the person and to never make the same mistake again, than to continue socializing in fear of it happening, when it never does actually happen (because you don't let yourself commit to speaking as well).

[Dynam0]

Re: Help with Casual-Conversational Skills

@Arch, your points -though valid- are delving into a much more specific focus than what the OP was requesting assistance for. It sounds interesting though, maybe start a thread in CT about what it means to have a core "I"?

I think people are still at odds with how you say consuming alcohol to release inhibitions is an effective strategy in this scenario. Especially considering the fact that alcohol affects certain people much differently; it just seems like more of a gamble than an apt solution imo.

[Arch0wl]

Re: Help with Casual-Conversational Skills

Yeah, it's kind of becoming a tangent. We started with advice, and I'm just responding to the responses to that advice. I'd rather not have to continually clarify that position if necessary.

But most people I know in college have been able to use alcohol to make themselves more confident. Some people I know turn into shitshows when completely drunk and start being self-destructive or extremely depressed, but that's when they've had way too much. There is a point of buzzing / drunk that tends to be ideal.

Then again, and I really don't mean this in a derisive way, but most people are extroverted and most of this forum isn't. So maybe the effect works differently if you're very introverted and have no desire to socialize with anyone from the get-go.

[Cavernio]

Re: Help with Casual-Conversational Skills

"If you have less anxiety around the fact that you might be interpreting something wrong, then you'll probably be doing much better with it"
That was part of the impetus for the initial suggestion.

"rooted in you is a pretty defined ability to read people"
This, however, is something that the OP claims to not have or has it very poorly. They have an ASD.

I wouldn't and didn't recommend stimulants simply because they are addictive. Coffee is devil's brew. Alcohol isn't, not in a strict biological sense anyways. (I'm aware, pretty much anything can be addictive.) The addiction is noticeable for me and caffeine.