Quote from: Squirrel698 on June 05, 2011, 01:24:14 PM
I want to get more into the whole male friendship experience but I need to get over this hump first. Anyone have any advice on feeling more confident. I feel like I'm on a crash course learning about social cues and unwritten rules. Guys together can be surprisingly affectionate at times and in your face challenging at others. I'm just on the edge, not quite in there yet. They haven't given up hope for me yet, but I doubt that will last forever.
So any tips? Or advice on how to get myself better established? How to start believing in myself a bit more?
I am also... not the best at social things, there's always been all these unwritten rules, like you said, that everyone else seems to instinctively know, that take me longer to pick up on. I got a new job recently (been there a month or two now), in customer service, and a lot of the calls we get are the customers b*tching about this, that, and the other, and often they threaten things like going to the press about our company or filing a BBB complaint (and the company has already had a lot of bad press recently so we really have to take those threats seriously). Anyway, when I first started the job I was awful at it, the main reason being that I had practically zero confidence in what I was saying, so instead of calming the customers down and persuading them not to take further action, the call would get escalated and a supervisor would have to step in. After I while I got more confident, I didn't feel intimidated by them or their threats, and now I can deal with about 98% of all calls on my own without having to get a supervisor to step in.
My point is, new social situations are scary (for me anyway), but after you get used to it, and you figure out how to deal with certain people and/or certain circumstances, it gets a lot easier. Part of being confident is acting sure of yourself even when you're unsure or in unfamiliar territory. At first, when you're acting more confident, it feels like you're just faking it and like you're being an egotistical jerk, but eventually that wears off and one day you realize, oh, hey, I'm not faking it at all, I actually
am totally confident! It's a great feeling once you've mastered that. One thing a supervisor told me is that I should always be confident, even when I'm unsure of what I'm saying. Like if the customer asks about a certain policy, or if they can get a discount on whatever, instead of being like "uh... well... I don't know..." I say "that's a great question! Give me just a moment so I can find that out for you," so instead of emphasizing what I don't know, I'm emphasizing what I can do to find out. If that makes any sense.
So what I'm saying is, for whatever it is that you're not confident about because you're not sure how to act, or what to say, etc, be confident anyway and just go for it. If you're confident, even if you end up saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, or doing the wrong thing (socially, I mean, not morally), it won't matter much because the guys will see your confidence and be less likely to tease you about it or whatev because you're sure of yourself. It's like if a guy is giving a speech, and he's stuttering the whole time, if he isn't confident then everyone will be thinking about how much he's stuttering, but if he is confident and concentrates on what he's saying instead of the fact that he's stuttering, then most people won't even notice that he's stuttering, because of that confidence.
God that was a long post. Hope it helps.
