How to Make New Friends and Improve Your Social Skills
Today’s question is one of the two most popular ones I get, and it’s about how to make new friends and improve your social skills after you quit gaming. Here’s how you do it:
When you first quit most of your friends are gamers, so you need to put an effort into finding new ones that have other interests and hobbies. Not only that but feeling insecure about your social skills is likely one of the factors that led to you gaming in the first place.
I totally relate to this because when I was younger I experienced a lot of bullying which caused me to isolate myself away and avoid social interactions.
So when I quit playing games learning how to improve my social skills was one of my top motivations, and just to be honest, quitting video games was one of the best decisions I ever made to improve this area of my life.
Now in order to make new friends there are a few different factors to consider, and today I want to talk about you, and how you show up in every interaction you have, and how that leads to you making friends or not.
The key to making new friends is having a mindset shift that social skills is a skill, it’s something you, personally, can get better at, if you decide to put some focus and intention into it.
To do this you want to start approaching every interaction you have as an opportunity to practice connecting more meaningfully with others. Every single day we are talking to people, our friends, family, the cashier at the grocery store, the barista at Starbucks, and even just people we’re randomly standing next to.
Over time all of this practice compounds and you can start seeing some major improvements. Growth happens through focus and intention so focus on every interaction you have with the intention to have a more meaningful conversation.
The way I do this is by genuinely wanting to get to know them, even in a small way by actually wanting to know how their day is going, instead of just going through the typical autopilot conversation.
As your conversations improve you’ll become more confident in yourself and if you focused on meeting one new person every day, that’s over 365 people a year! And some you’ll just naturally connect with.
If you want to improve your social skills and make new friends is something you choose to do. It’s something you can do by just interacting with the people around you on a daily basis. It’s something I used to struggle with a lot and now I feel much more confident in, but it happened every single day by my decision to engage the people around me.
And I know the same can happen for you too.
If social skills is an area you’re serious about working on, I want you to take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.
It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.