Ever since I was introduced into the social scene as a kid, I’ve always been rather shy and introverted.  Throughout high school and then in college, I only ever met people through my friends and on rare occasions through class or extra-curricular activities.  I had the same group of friends through high school and struggled maintaining a social circle through the first half of college.  Through no real effort of my own, I was absorbed into a social circle beginning my junior year because of my roommate.  Now that social circle makes up a majority of who I spend my time with outside of work.

I’ve always known that I was not very good at making friends, at times painfully so.  I always tended to get rather anxious when meeting new people and I never warmed up to people very fast.  Like many computer nerds like myself, I took refuge in my room on the internet, which only served to make things worse.

After graduating, I was hit with a rather acute case of 20-something angst.  I took a long look at my life, and realized if I wanted to enjoy things from then on, I would have to make some changes to my social habits.  Since then, progress has been rather slow.

One practice that I’ve found quite useful has been Social Skydiving. The name makes it sound like more than it is.  Simply, social skydiving is the practice of merely saying “hi” to strangers.  This may seem like no big deal, but for me it’s been quite a big step.  Having gone from avoiding eye contact with other students in the dorms, to greeting strangers as I’m walking around town has been quite the eye-opening experience.

I didn’t start straight into talking to strangers though.  At first I took things slow and only made a conscious effort to simply make eye contact with people and smile.  This was the hardest part.  Eye contact can be a pretty powerful thing and can make you feel fabulous or insignificant based on what happens.  Actually saying “hey” to people was a relatively simple transition from the smile.  I’m not incredibly consistent with this yet though.  More often than not, I stick with the smile, though it’s probably somewhere close to 50%.

It’s surprising how effective such a simple thing can be at changing your mindset about things.  I no longer get anxious when talking to new people and I’ll warm up to people over the course of a single night instead of months.

The next hurdle I have is actually making conversation and keeping it going with strangers.  I’m not sure how that fits into the skydiving analogy though.

As a side note: the 30sleeps.com blog is a great resource for this kind of stuff.  I highly recommend it.