Why is my statement any different to what a person on the street would say when a random stranger tries to interact with them? People on the street always WANT something from you. It is rarely ever for the benefit of the recipient.
Thats why 99% of people have their guard up and are not interested in random chit chat let alone making friends. Reading Dale Carnegie wont change that.
These suggestions are being thrown around as preferred alternatives to meeting people at work.
> People on the street always WANT something from you.
One can learn to spot the difference. This is not always the case. Also, this mentality doesn't help. I see where you're coming from, but when you do what I do, this mentality doesn't help.
> Thats why 99% of people have their guard up and are not interested in random chit chat let alone making friends.
Only true for the first 2 minutes, in my experience. And yea, you can't make friends with everyone. The first 2 minutes people live on autopilot. Approaching them is tricky and needs to be done precisely because you're not talking to the real person (IMO). You're talking to the person who has a whole program in their head that they need to execute and the chance they see you as something that once to sell something is high. It takes a bit of time for most people to understand that you're really just there as another human being. For some people it takes 0 seconds though, for others it takes longer. I personally have noticed it takes less long for guys (being a guy myself), because they're not afraid I'm secretly trying to hit on them.
> Reading Dale Carnegie wont change that.
I mentioned in my comment that I didn't read him either.
> These suggestions are being thrown around as preferred alternatives to meeting people at work.
That's because for me they are. Like I tried to mention: this is my preferred alternative. I'm living this. It's a different perspective that I'm offering.
It's a hard perspective to offer as it's a "show don't tell" type of thing. I've showed many friends, they were all amazed and all bestowed magical abilities upon me of how amazing I was socially. They couldn't explain it away as training. I'm not a naturally social person. I consciously trained it.
They didn't believe it. So I trained a few of my friends to do the same. They see it. They're surprised. It takes a while to train, depending on the person. Though, as far as meeting people and making friends is concerned, 20 hours per week for max 3 months ought to definitely do the trick. So that's 240 hours of training to fix one of the biggest issues in people their lives: making sure they can consciously always build a social life.
It's not natural to me but trained :) Trained a long time ago, so maybe natural now? Trained nonetheless.
The biggest thing I've learned in this regard are a few things:
1. Be positive / optimistic (read Seligman's stuff on learned optimism)
2. Be playful with people (aka not too serious, see creative interpretations in things, roleplay. Doing improv workshops helps a lot)
3. When starting to talk to people, you can:
A. Comment on the situation "This train is going so slow"
B. Give them a compliment "Excuse me, (they look up at you now you have their attention) I just wanted to mention that I like your whole vibe. The guitar, the clothing style reminds me a bit of a hippie actually, haha (they nod in agreement). Yea, just wanted to say it's cool is all."
In most cases the conversations don't go anywhere for me. That's fine. I'm just there to chill and have fun, no need to prolong what can't be prolonged. In one out of 10 cases it goes somewhere interesting.
