Why do we not succeed in social situations? Why does failure in social situations harm our life’s success and stop us from getting the results we desire? Why fake it till you make it not work in the long run? What is congruence, and why is this such a core to social success? How to calibrate to different social situations? How to get over social anxiety by using calibration skills with congruence?
Table of Contents
Why does a lack of Social Skills hurt your success possibilities?
- 1100=1, 22=4. So irrespective of your skill, your growth will always be limited as you can only achieve to a degree alone. The key to growth is people’s skills.
- People hire people they trust and do business with people they trust. Trust is a continuous exercise by two individuals in the social context.
- We all are part of society. Eventually, we all serve society through our work(job or business). Therefore if we can not handle social situations, society doesn’t find our part of it, and our results are limited.
- Eventually, all the solutions and products are designed to benefit people. If you do not interact with people, you do not get to know the deep inner psychology of people. Therefore, you fail to bring that knowledge to your work and business.
- A tire of a car is valuable independently and is sold independently. Part of the machine(like pistons) are not replaced independently but are part of the engines. Engines are hard to replace, and tires are easily and frequently replaced.
So your goal is to become part of a socially coherent unit, not an isolated unit, however valuable or worthy you are. Your social and professional value is your ability to be part of a unit and function well within the unit, and contribute towards making the unit more productive. We must all aspire to become high-value if we don’t want to be replaced.
How do the fakers and actors in society easily manipulate us?
Many today learn body language and train for good communication and personality. People appear charismatic; they hypnotize you and mesmerize you. They train to look confident and appear genuine. Often such people take you for a ride by their acting. You only see the persona of a person, but not the real person.
The problem is even though the persona attracts your attention, and you interact with the persona, the psychology is beneath that mask, and you have no idea of what is going on there. In a place where most of the shepherds are gaming you simply by acting and appearing more confident despite their lack of competence, you often get swayed away.
Therefore, most often or not, a professional environment, personal life, or social setting often becomes simply a stage, a dais where good actors woo the audience with their makeup and good acting. Audiences clap and shower them with money. Even in the drama, there is a green room where actors put up makeup; there is a script; there is a director, there are musicians, there is an audience, there are lights, and there are props.
“be yourself” is a bad advice by the seasoned actors to you, so that you remain a dumb audience who shower praise, and pay the actors by your attention, time, emotions and money.
What is Calibration?
CALIBRATION is the ability to change the personality, body language, and behavior of different social groups and scenarios.
With kids, you don’t behave like a confident leader; with waiters, you don’t behave like a boss. With men and women, in one-to-one business meetings and social gatherings, you adjust to that group/person and situation. In a mourning gathering, you don’t pull out jokes. In a hangout of friends where everyone is seeking pleasure, you don’t show a depressed face and discuss your life’s depression. In the office, you don’t act childish. You don’t act like a boss or employee during physical intimacy with your partner.
While walking in the streets, you don’t show your sexual desires. You don’t study while walking. You don’t walk while sleeping. You don’t sleep while romancing your partner. You don’t romance when someone is sick. You don’t act sick while romancing. You don’t go to a job and romance. You don’t consider the romance as your job.
You don’t consider your partner as your friend and behave friendly. You don’t consider your friend your partner and behave like a partner. You don’t consider another girl as your sister and your sister as just another girl.
You don’t treat your clients and customers as God. You don’t treat God as your customer. You have to forget while you are helping someone. Do not forget the ones who help you. You need to wear a swimming dress while in the swimming pool, and you can’t reach there in a suit. You must attend the business meetings in a suit and can’t reach there in a swimsuit.
Following are some of the key ways you improve your calibration
- Study about a social situation that you want to go to.
- List the type of people you will meet in a social situation.
- Make a list of demographic profiles of the people who would be there in that social situation.
- Search for ideal social etiquettes (do’s and don’ts).
- Study the lifestyle of the people present in that social situation. Get an understanding of their disliking.
- Always write down what is your benefit from a social situation. What real things do you want to invest for that benefit, and how much?
- Always go to the social venue earlier than the main event to get familiar with the place and people.
- Internalize this knowledge.
- Find a movie scene relevant to the social situation.
- Closely observe the dress, body language, facial expression, voice tonality, hand movement, feet movement, shoulder, face tilt, and hair.
- Observe a few of such movie scenes, and then try to enact those scenes. Try to act, talk, walk, and appear according to that situation.
- Practice this over and over again till you start liking your acting.
The above is called the preparatory stages for the calibration. Irrespective of the social situation you are going to be in, you have to redo this exercise over and over again. Because any social situation, including dating, business meetings, pitching, and friends hangout, is essentially a social drama where people act to the best of their abilities according to the moment and the situation, you have to become both a good student of that situation, as well as a good actor.
The more you study, practice, and participate in those situations, the behavior will become a natural and integral part of your personality. It is like learning to cycle. Initially, you fall, find it hard to balance, and try to balance with your legs on the ground many times, but as you keep practicing, you get perfect, learn to balance, and after that riding a bicycle appears a natural skill that you are born with.
Those who advise you to “be yourself” advise you never to learn a bicycle. The problem with not learning how to ride a cycle is that you can only walk so much with your feet, but you can travel a longer distance on a cycle. Hence calibrate.
What is Congruence?
CONGRUENCE is how one’s body and mind are in sync. They will always be if the situation is under control. Under pressure and sudden changes, the congruence falls apart. Eyes give up, nose shrinks, shoulders drop.
Congruence is the actual test of whether a person is faking or not. For example, you meet a girl and appreciate her beauty and intelligence. She will appear very nice to you. She will smile, walk with you, talk to you, would want to spend time with you. However, whenever you disagree with her and hold her accountable for anything wrong, you will see definite anger and immediate defense with justification, clarification, and nervousness. Even though she prepared well for the social situation and calibrated well, she had no congruence. It means her internal world, emotions, belief, and thinking are not aligned with her acting.
Cycling in the gym is easy because it is fixed and supported, and there are no dangers but tiredness. However, cycling on a difficult mountain road is not easy.
How to test people’s congruence?
Take the person through different social situations; if he/she acts the same, it’s a trained fake. When all appears normal, throw a few comments to irk the person and observe the change. Disagree with a person, refuse to accept the person’s opinion, judge the person, hold the person accountable, put elements of doubt into the person’s belief, and then see how that person is acting in the given social situation. Observe the difference in the personality before and after you have put the person under a stressor. If there is a significant difference, the person only acts and doesn’t believe in himself/herself.
Why to test people and why can’t we simply trust them?
Trust for a person is the measurement of the predictability of the person under different situations. It means they are trustworthy if a person remains the same in different situations. Because trust is the indifferent behavior of a person in different situations, you must put them in different situations in the first place before trusting anyone.
We always claim that we are suffering because someone broke our trust. After reading this, you may have already understood that trust is not given. It has to be earned. If anyone got your trust without earning, you were lazy or insecure not to test the person before trusting. So, you did not trust them; in reality, you just hoped that they remain the same in different situations.
Only you and no one else are responsible for your hopes. People did not betray you; you did not dare to test their loyalty. Hence you must always put people under stress and test their congruence before giving them anything as valuable as trust.
How to become congruent yourself?
- Write down the complete autobiography of your life. This is called autobiographical memory.
- Different events in life are stitched with a single story called an experience.
- Experience can be positive or negative, which is our emotion. Each of the small events has its own feelings. Often we confuse emotions with feelings and change our feelings with the events based on the final experience.
- If you had a good time with your lover, but your lover is no longer in your life, then when you think back about the dates, you will feel angry and aggressive because your final experience is negative. Experiences are experiences, neither positive nor negative. They exist to teach us something. When you think that you learned something from each of the experiences, you will not feel negative about the experiences, as learning is a positive experience.
- So live the feelings of the events, and cherish the learning of the experiences. This change of feeling negative about each of the experiences that don’t give you a good feeling will make you accept every actor and person in your life, as everyone has taught you something.
- Therefore by seeing everyone as your teacher and every event in life as a chapter of the book called life, you start accepting life more.
- As you learn to accept your past, everyone in life, and every experience, anyone disagreeing with you or putting you to the test won’t harm you.
- So, your inner core will remain fixed irrespective of your social situation and calibration.
Most people suffer from incongruence because their socially calibrated persona changes their perception of themselves. By fixing your perception of who you are, you prevent yourself from being affected by the stressors of your persona.
Conclusion
Become socially more successful by calibrating to different social situations through preparation, practice, and participation, and win people’s trust and hearts by being congruent through self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-reflection. Then incorporate the results(good or bad) of the social situations back into your memory to improve your calibration and self-learning. Repeat this process repeatedly in any social situation, with anyone and everyone from now till the last day of your life. In that way, you will cherish life and social situations, and people will cherish your presence.
Additional Resources
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