FEARLESS SOCIAL CONFIDENCE by Patrick King

• You are not going to achieve great things, feel connected, or be happy without other people in your life.
• small, incremental victories and the spike of adrenaline that accompanies each one are the key to overcoming social awkwardness and lack of confidence.
• Developing and building social confidence is definitely a process.
• Developing fearless social confidence is essentially developing the ability to create the life you want and not shying away from social interaction and the opportunities that come with it.
• Relationships are the most important facet of our lives, and viewing each one as a potential judgmental rejection is crippling and paralyzing.
• The aftereffects of our actions are often hidden, unintended, or flat-out ignored.
• The first step to social confidence is to realize how it affects your entire outlook on life, not just when you’re at a networking event or a birthday party.
• Socially confident people expect to be accepted.
• Socially confident people evaluate themselves positively.
• Socially confident people can deal with criticism.
• Confident people learn to compartmentalize and separate criticism and recognize its actual purpose; they do not take it personally in an emotional way.
• Socially confident people feel comfortable around superiors.
• People without social confidence expect rejection.
• People without social confidence evaluate themselves negatively.
• People without social confidence despise criticism.
• People without social confidence are highly uncomfortable around superiors.
• There are no evil ogres keeping you down. Just you.
• We use negative self-talk to explain situations that we can’t assess objectively.
• The first step to making progress in addressing a lack of social confidence is to pay attention to how we talk to ourselves.
• If you have low social confidence, it's because you unknowingly use negative self-talk to make judgments and assumptions about yourself and others.
• Your perception becomes reality when you keep repeating negative self-talk. The more you repeat it, the greater this downward spiral of negative mental states and negative external social responses will be.
• When you think you can't do something, or you feel you're making an excuse for something, the most important step you need to take is to ask yourself why.
• One of the most underrated aspects of self-improvement is initial self-assessment.
• For you to make progress toward your desired destination, you have to have a clear idea of where you are now. It's really important to get a very clear survey of what you're dealing with.
• If you are confident in a work setting but not the others, it means that you feel confident in your objective abilities.
• Regardless of whatever strengths and qualities you bring to the table, you will become miserable when you compare yourself to others.
• Comparisons are toxic, and worse, unnecessary – especially when you are comparing apples to bananas, which is almost always the case.
• We have a tendency to compare ourselves to other people around us or to some kind of imagined ideal – neither of these situations is good.
• Comparing is a learned habit that destroys your confidence because it tries to put all your value and worth into one tiny aspect. You have to understand that you are a compilation of many different traits and talents.
• Unfortunately, when we compare ourselves to others, we ignore or throw out all the things we are good at and only focus on the one thing we’re not good at or that we imagine others excel at.
• you compare your worst moments to other people’s best moments.
• Confidence, if you truly think about it, is just the knowledge that no matter what happens, you can handle what is thrown at you.
• Social confidence is not an exercise in having all the answers all the time. Instead, as you can see, social confidence is about being flexible and versatile.
• Instead of aiming for some sort of grand theory of social interaction success, look to pick up small skills that you can then tweak to serve you well in a variety of social situations. When you cultivate your small skills, they will incrementally carry you toward greater success.
• The lesson of this chapter is that confidence comes from knowing that you can do things. The more you can do without worry, the more confident you will become.
• It’s important to keep practicing these special social gifts that you already have. Eventually, you’ll become known as the “go-to” person for certain types of questions, analysis, opinions, or just simple assurance.
• When you become skilled enough, or are simply the person who can provide help to others, that is a massive social advantage.
• Take the time to educate yourself and become an expert in the things that you are already good at or for which you get praised – your calling cards.
• Start in an area you know you can succeed in and slowly branch out.
• Set small goals, exceed them, and build confidence in knowing that you are growing better and better.
• The not-so-secret secret to social confidence is preparation.
• Social Warm-Up Exercise #1: Read 300 words out loud.
• Social Warm-Up Exercise #2: Visualize the social situation you’ll be getting into.
• Social Warm-Up Exercise #4: Create index cards with confidence anchors.
• Most people have a relatively clear idea about the sources of their insecurity.
• If you stay in your head and continually analyze your insecurities and shortcomings in lieu of action, you might just be stuck forever.
• The longer you choose not to resolve or work on your insecurities, the longer your insecurities will continue to drag you down.
• Don’t get stuck in self-pity thinking about your lack of social confidence, be proactive and solution oriented.
• People do judge books by their covers. You can complain and whine all you want about how this should not be the case—but hey, living in reality is all about focusing on how things actually are and not obsessing about how things should be.
• The best approach is simple preparation.
• All social conversations, especially among total strangers, tend to follow certain predictable patterns. It’s very, very rare that you will have a really deep, profound, existential, and philosophically-rich conversation with somebody you don’t know from Adam.
• For the most part, our social conversations tend to be fairly shallow. Use this to your advantage.
• Predictability is the foundation to social comfort. If you want to be comfortable in any kind of social setting, even if you are dealing with complete and total strangers, look for predictable patterns.
• By simply choosing to improve these areas of insecurity by making small changes, you will eventually end up realizing dramatic improvements.
• Human beings are social animals.
• One of the most common treatments for true social anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
• Change almost never occurs without some level of discomfort.
• When you properly expose yourself to your social fears, you’ll learn that you don’t have much to fear.
• Exposure therapy is where you take small, incremental, and gradual steps to expose yourself to your social fears in varying ways related to your main fear.
• Experiencing failure after failure because you’ve aimed too high will work against you.
• Each step you take builds on the last. What's important is to start with gradual exposure and take baby steps forward.
• One of the core issues with lack of social confidence is that people don’t accept themselves as they are.
• The key to social self-acceptance is to define a realistic and objective expectation of success. No more, no less. Objective means it’s good enough for others, and realistic means that it’s not about perfection, but the impact you make.
• Another key component of self-acceptance is being able to forgive yourself. This is in contrast to beating yourself up over every little mistake you make.
• One of the best ways to fully accept yourself is to celebrate your strengths.
• Actively practice gratitude for what you have in your life and what you’re capable of.
• Perhaps the most important aspect of self-acceptance is to stop being a slave to your ideals.
• Once you’re done with mourning, get back to being the best you can possibly be. That’s all you can do. There's really no other way.
• Live more for the present by focusing on what exists now, instead of getting all worked up about how things should be or could have been.
• The world only rewards results.