Ramit recommends three ways to practice social skills: rehearse in a mirror, record yourself on camera, and do recorded role-plays with someone else. He suggests one-week challenges like smiling more, speaking slower, and asking more questions.
All right, we have a question about social skills. This one is from Richard. Richard writes, what are some of the best ways to practice the social skills you suggest? And with that, how do you deal with the initial bumps? So many of the things you tell us to do are easy to practice, but social skills require someone else. If it's not working, how do I keep the motivation to try again? Okay, there are three basic ways you can practice your social skills. Alright? The first is in a mirror. Now this seems weird, but I think it's weird to not practice your social skills and spend the next 30 years making critical social errors that you have no idea about. So in a mirror is the first one. Two is recording yourself with a camera. And many of you will remember that I asked my parents to record me. When I kept losing scholarship interview after scholarship interview. I quickly discovered that I was presenting myself like this. I wasn't fun or friendly at all. I just looked really mean because I didn't smile that much. And so when I realized that I started smiling more, I became more animated and I started getting scholarship after scholarship to go to college. The third way after you do the mirror, after you record yourself, is to actually bring someone else in. And this is to get a close friend, have them come in, interview you, ask you some questions, something you might talk about at a bar, or something you might encounter at a job interview, and actually record that interaction. You're going to discover a ton of interesting insights. A little while ago, I brought in 12 elite students into a program called Dream Job Elite. I brought them to New York and we did Hot Seats. We did this for days. And they would come in and they would try to negotiate against me or interview against me, or we would even just have a social conversation. And it was amazing because all of us have a few critical weaknesses that you can instantly discover when you're talking to someone. So for example, one of them was a great guy. He reminded me of me a lot. Cause he was an Indian guy, he just didn't have a lot of affect to him. So I asked him to tell me a story and he told me this pretty emotional story, but he told it like this. And it was so unemotional, I was so bored and, and I said, dude, that is an amazing story. Let's pump it up a little bit. And I pulled it out of him. I said, instead of saying it like this, say it like this. And it sounded very artificial to him. But when I asked the audience what do you think they were like, that was way better. So in a period of five to 10 minutes in the hot seat, you could see them improve from like a 5 to a 7 in 10 minutes. Often to do that, you can't just internalize it on your own. You have to see yourself and that makes all the difference in the world. I went through the exact same thing when I went through media training before going on TV and all kinds of other places. And it helped dramatically. So I'm going to give you three different challenges that you can do and I want you to do them in the next week. Send me an email. Send it directly to me. I read every email I get and let me know how it goes. The first thing I want you to do is try to smile more. Can you actually smile more? For guys, this is actually really difficult, especially Asian and Indian guys where the cultural value doesn't suggest that you should smile a lot. So can you smile more? Number two, can you speak slower? Think about any high status person. Are they speaking as fast every time they talk every time? No, they're speaking slowly. Why? Because they know that the audience is going to wait to listen to them. And number three, can you ask more questions? I love listening in on first dates. There are people where I work, there's a lot of people that have dates right there. And so of course I push mute on my headphones and I eavesdrop for an hour at a time. And one of the things you discover is that a lot of people don't ask any questions at all. They love to talk about themselves. So how can you test your way to success with these three challenges? Smile more, speak slowly and ask more questions. Try that. Send me an email, let me know what happens. Thanks for watching.
