Vanessa Van Edwards explains why awkward people avoid social situations after one bad experience. She recommends rejection therapy: the "Say Hey" experiment, where you greet 100 strangers. About one in five say hello back, which builds resilience and breaks the fear of being first.
A lot of my recovering awkward people, they had one bad experience or bad moment in their life socially, which told them, I don't get along with people, so I better double down on my test scores, my book smarts. I better be really technical. I better be really good at my job, so I don't need anyone. Or we can say, all right, you had one bad experience and that taught you that you're not good with people. So then I'm like, let's do some rejection therapy. Let's go out and you're going to get rejected. So there's an experiment that I encourage everyone to do, which is the Say Hey experiment. And all you do all day long, and I want you to literally go out to malls and in your office especially and be like, hey, hey, because you are going to in 100 times in a row be the first liker, the first initiator, which is one of the hardest things. But once you do it, it's break that seal. Second, you're gonna get people who go to you and they're gonna make a bad face and they're gonna act like you're weird and you're gonna feel it. You're gonna be like, oh, that was awkward. But you know what? You survived it. It's all right. And then you're gonna get 1 person out of 5 that goes, hey, and now we're winning.
