Good Morning DeGens!
This is the second episode of my new series “How to Stop Being Weird”.
A COMPLETLY FREE series aiming at helping those who lack the basic social skills to make it in a world that gets more social by the day and punishes harder the ones that don’t get it.
I highly recommend reading the introduction to the substack to know where I came from and where we’re going. (LINK)
I was 9 years old. We were at lunchtime in school and the meal of the day was some meatballs that I didn’t like. It didn’t matter. The school forced you to eat even if you refused. I hated those meatballs so I left one uneaten. The teachers in charge made everyone except my classmates leave the dining room, shut the lights off, and made them all stand in a circle watching me.
“No one leaves the room until Leviathan finishes the meatball!”
Remember that I was already a depressed kid at this point. I became paralyzed. I sat there looking at that damn meatball for 5 minutes until a kid grabbed it out of nowhere and ate it.
School went downhill from there. All the kids hated me, the teachers didn’t like me, the authorities never listened to me. Every interaction I had afterward was hell. If I was not being picked on, I was being called crazy. If I was not being called crazy, I was being scolded for whatever reason. Even asking someone for a pen or the time was terrifying. They always looked at me with those eyes of disgust. I was feeling like a monster. My parents only listened to the teachers and principals so I had no one to stand for myself. Every day was me shouting or crying at someone because they were mean to me. This continued until high school even.
Isolation and living in a bubble of everyone vs me was the only way I found at the time to cope with the living hell I was in. Being social was out of the question.
Let’s start with the following question:
Why are you Weird?
I hold the belief that being social is a natural state of being. Something had to go wrong along the way for a person to not be able to socialize at least to a basic extent. Reading simple body language, knowing how to catch a joke, etc. All of those should come naturally to a person raised properly and with early socializing.
You already know that I didn’t have any of that. Not knowing any kind of social rule spiraled out of control the more I grew up and the higher the expectations for someone my age was. Because I wasn’t social, my peers treated me like a stranger (a Weirdo!), because of that I was getting less and less social, which made the treatment worse and so on…
Just the thought of having to approach someone was terrifying to me.
I don’t know you. And I’m sure your circumstances were different. Maybe your parents were too strict. Maybe they were absent. Maybe you suffered abuse or another kind of trauma-inducing treatment. Maybe your school was full of incompetent teachers. Or you may have been socially isolated while really young.
The thing is that all of the above doesn’t magically make you a social outcast. Those circumstances affect your mental health. And your mental health is a big deciding factor in how you socialize with people. If you are anxious or depressed your behavior will accommodate to it and people’s reaction to said behaviors will change.
The way you see yourself makes a great difference in any kind of behavior. If you see yourself as a crazy outcast that is a burden to everyone like I felt at the time, yeah, your actions will reflect it.
I was pathetic. Always speaking with a pitiful tone, looking for acknowledgment. I was begging people to treat me like a human being.
If you ever wondered why bullied people get bullied. Why shy men don’t get attention from women. Why pitiful people are treated with disdain. That’s the answer. Your state of mind molds your behavior and people react to it accordingly.
This is the reason why social mastery when starting from scratch is hard.
Making a course or writing useless platitudes without context is, in my opinion, a very dangerous and irresponsible thing to teach to people that have deeper issues not addressed by that content.
This means that the first and most important thing to do is to solve the problem of your non-existent confidence first.
Why? Let’s say that I’m a loser dating guru and, without any context, tell you to go to a nightclub and approach 15 women and get sex.
Picture in your mind how that will go: Not very well.
Let’s say that I’m a useless self-improvement guru and I tell you to start chasing your dreams NOW when every mistake you make will spiral into a cloud of negativity in your mind.
Yeah, not very smart.
The best thing you can do now is to work on little things and make a bit of progress on specific areas so your preconceptions of being a failure go away little by little. That will start to give you confidence in yourself. Confidence is the basis of mental health. And confidence is not a mindset, is a state of being. You cannot fake it, you cannot make it magically appear in your head, you CREATE IT.
For this to be better understood let’s use the following example:
Picture Chad in your mind
How is Chad approaching people?
How is he talking to them?
What’s his body language?
And then think, is he confident because “he knows the social”? Or he knows the social because he’s confident? You get the idea.
There’s absolutely NO WAY to be good at this if you are not at peace with yourself, if you don’t feel good about yourself, if you lack confidence in your abilities.
It has to be out of the question that if you are not going to the gym already you should start training this instant. NOW. AHORA.
Lifting is the absolute best activity to give you a confidence boost. Why? Because is one of the few activities that will yield results exclusively because of you. If you gain muscle or lose weight is because YOU did something that influenced that outcome. You cannot get any help, if I lift a dumbbell for you nothing is gonna happen.
That’s why the gym is so good. It also has a shit ton of other benefits like looking amazing and being healthier.
Stop reading this and go follow @BowTiedOx (LINK) on Twitter and subscribe to his substack(LINK). This is non negociable. Come back after that.
You could also read a book and learn a skill, anything (nothing replaces the gym, don’t be stupid).
This and the following exercise I will give you will set you on the right track for everything else in the future.
I could tell you 100 tactics to use and leave you alone in a field that you don’t understand and where you will certainly crumble.
That’s why we have to start slow, for now.
First, you have to realize that being social should be something natural. This means that, in reality, is not that big of a deal. You now think is terrifying so you will have to learn that it’s not.
So we are gonna start with this:
Pick a time on the day and go for a walk, 30 minutes to an hour.
You will pick random people on the street, get close, and ask them for the time.
That’s it.
They give you the time (or not), you say thank you and then leave.
This will serve 2 purposes.
-It will teach you that having fear for the social makes no sense
-You will get more comfortable approaching people
-You are doing some good exercise, really good if overweight.
You will do this for as long as it takes for you to be confident doing it. You will notice that at first, you will shit your pants every time. With time, you will do it just naturally. Your body language will change, your tone will be different, you will be less scared.
You will feel better about yourself because you did something you thought impossible.
Disclaimer: this should be obvious but a little bird that you all know didn’t get it so it’s better to leave it out of the way.
Try to go to different places every time, and do not ask people for the time in the same places. At a minimum, you should be 2 or 3 streets away from your last approach. You don’t want to be that weird kid that always stays in a place asking people for the time when he already got the answer.
You can get a notebook and track your progress if you want. It helps when you have a feeling of stagnation, you can come back to your notes and see how far you’ve actually got.
This is it for this week. From now on I want you to leave a comment on what did you learned with the post’s exercise and how many approaches you made!
This will be a weekly series. However, I recommend not jumping to the next episode until you think you’re ready. If you skip steps you are NGMI. You cannot be a dating expert if you are scared of asking a random for the time.
I wish you the best of luck on this journey and I’ll see you again next week!