Okay, you want to get over your social awkwardness and be more at ease around people. You've come across this site. The advice seems pretty good from what you've seen so far. What a lot of people want to know is, how long does it all take? How long until the awkwardness and all the pain that comes with that goes away? One answer would be, "Just don't worry about it, it'll take as long as it takes", but I find people still do want a sense of what the timeline will be like. I think that's totally understandable.
It's not the easiest question to answer because it obviously depends on a few things:
- How shy and socially awkward are you at the moment?
- What are your goals?
- What's your exact situation?
- How long have you been that way?
Where are you starting, and where do you want to end up? The farther the distance between the two, the longer it will take. A deeply awkward guy with dreams of becoming incredibly magnetic and popular will take a lot more time to get there than a girl who's a little reserved, but pretty likable, and who just wants to get the hang of making friends.
One to three years
If I had to make a super rough guess though, I'd say improving your social skills takes about one to three years. That may be longer than you'd like to hear, but based on my experiences, I think that's a realistic estimation. It's just a matter of you needing to catch up to everyone else. If you're two years behind your peers in your social development, then you've somehow got to get two years of catch up practice in. Social skills are built up of all these little sub-abilities and you have to get them all into shape.
However long it will take for you, that hardly means things will be tough going the entire time and then only get better right at the end. Someone may improve their quality of life and their social relationships quite a bit even when they've only moved partway towards their goal. They only be at 30% of where they eventually see themselves, and recognize they still have a lot of work to do, but still be way happier than they were when they first started. Imagine what you could do if your issues were even a third less severe?
There's no way a time frame like this can't be really crude and imprecise though. For one, it's really hard to nail down exactly when you start, and when you finish. If you've been awkward for years, does that count towards the total, or does the clock only start when you really get serious about improving? And your social skills will continue to grow over your whole life, so when do you say you're done?
What will happen in the future, when you have improved your social skills, is that you'll be able to look back and have a rough, intuitive sense of how long it was from when you got serious about improving to when you felt like the worst was over. You probably won't be able to pinpoint the exact date you stopped taking more halfhearted pot shots at your issues, and got more focused and serious. You also won't be able to tell someone specifically when you felt like the bulk of your work was behind you. You'll have a vague idea of how long the process took though.
There's no shortcut
It's not uncommon at all for people to turn over a lot of rocks looking for a magic pill to solve their social problems instantly. There isn't one. More details in this article:
There's No Quick, Effortless Way To Improve Your Social Skills
Overall, it's probably better to know improving can take a while
Being told you won't be cured in two weeks can be discouraging. It can also be a relief in a way to have a reasonable idea of how long the process can take. If you know ahead of time improving is going to take a while, you won't get too demoralized if you're not making huge jumps in progress from one week to the next. On the other hand, if you expect that you're going to get over your problems nearly instantly, then you can grow more and more unmotivated when that doesn't happen. You may give up entirely.
This site will hopefully help you improve more quickly
It all still takes time, but ideally what this site can do is take some of the trial and error and guesswork out of the process. I figure that's got to save you at least a couple of months of work. Rather than have to figure things out from scratch and reinvent the wheel, you can draw on its information for concepts that have been helpful for other people, or mistakes that have held them back. You can go into situations thinking more along the lines of, "Here's what I know I need to do and practice" rather than, "Okay, I know my vague goal, but how do I even start moving towards it?..."
The more you work at it, the quicker you'll improve. That's not always possible though
The biggest determinant of how quickly you improve is how much you practice and catch up in your social development. If you make a deliberate effort to get as much social experience as you can, as quickly as you can, than you'll save a lot of time.
I am realistic though. I realize not everyone is a self-improvement cyborg who can tirelessly pursue their goals and improve themselves with maximum efficiency. You're human and at times you may not be putting every last ounce of effort into your social skills. One weekend you may goof off and watch an entire T.V. series on DVD. Your may put your social development on the back burner for a few months while you give more attention to other priorities. This factor is one reason I give that 1-3 years time frame.
You just have more time than it seems
I know the feeling of being lonely and insecure and feeling really impatient and desperate to get some relief. When you're in the thick of your own problems, you can feel like it's the end of the world, and that you have to get over your issues soon or your life will be over. But really, even if you think you're awkward at age 21 and never become more socially adjusted until, say, your late 20's, you still have lots of time to catch up to everyone else and enjoy a regular life. At any age you still have a lot of time ahead of you once you get better with people. I often get emails from readers in their 40's and 50's, who tell me they've just now started trying to get a handle on their social issues.
I realize a lot of the site's readers are in their late teens or early twenties, and feeling they have to fix their problems now, now, now, so here are some thoughts for them: I've found when you're younger you tend to see life in 4-year chunks. High-school is four years and you end up thinking that if you don't accomplish certain things by the end of that time then you've failed. Then, if you go to college, that's about four years. So if you don't achieve those accomplishments by the end of college then think you're really a failure. Even after college, you can mark being 25 or 26 as another milestone, and then 30. But really, saying you should have done x by the end of college or your 'loser rating' goes up further is somewhat arbitrary. Is there really that much difference between being a 21-year old student and a 22-year old graduate?
Another thing is that when you're younger you only have a hazy idea of the future, so you feel this vague urgency to do certain things right away before you run out of time. But say you never start really hanging out with people and having fun until you're 22. You still have eight more years of being young to have fun and play catch up before you turn 30. Eight years is double the length of high-school or college. And that's assuming all the fun suddenly dries up at 30, which isn't the slightest bit true.
You can catch up too because people's social development starts to level off at a certain point. So while they're slowly improving at a higher level, refining the groundwork they've already laid, you're quickly moving up the more basic and intermediate ranks. Eventually you'll be at a fairly equal level to them.
As long as you don't give up, you have to get there eventually
Right now you might be neck deep in your problems and can't see a way out. But if you start working on yourself and making steady progress, then one day you're going to be a regular person just like everyone else. You'll have a bunch of people in your social network who you see frequently. Relationships won't be any better or worse for you than they are for anyone else. Your mind will be preoccupied with all the run-of-the-mill thoughts that come with having a normal social life. I can say this fairly confidently because there are a lot of factors pushing you towards changing, and hardly any pushing you to stay unhappy. It may take a while, there may be dead ends, detours, and frustrations, but you'll still keep at it in one way or another, and with enough time you'll finally get it.
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