Apologies for being lame with this.  Too many things came up in a row and I fell out of habit.  Fortunately, I have actual content this time.

So, throughout my endeavour to become more social and grow beyond the shyness that defined me through much of growing up I have only been able to measure my success through my own point of view.  I had to rely on comparing memories to tell if I was actually being more social or if it was just something i’d convinced myself of.  Over the last month though, I’ve found two different instances where my perception of progress was reinforced by other people.

First, a couple weeks ago I was at a concert with a friend.  We got there about an hour before the bands went on, so we had time to waste talking.  After a while, she mentioned reading my blog before and asked about my endeavours of self improvement.  Of course this led to a discussion of how I got on the road I am currently travelling, and she was really surprised as I told her how shy I really was growing up.  She always thought I was a really social person from the day I met her.  Granted, I met her after I was a few months into this experiment and she’s a cute girl, so that may have factored into why I came off as so social.  Either way, I’ve managed to keep up the ‘new me’ and supress the typical shyness I have with people.

Second, in late July I was up visiting family and having breakfast with my aunt and grandma.  After talking for a bit, my aunt made a comment to my grandma which hit me pretty hard.  “He never used to talk.”  It was so true.  Growing up, I always shied away from talking with anyone but my close friends unless pressed.  I never worked to keep conversations going and often just found it to hard to.  But now, I had been having a conversation with family that I’ve never talked to for more than 10 minutes at a time for more than an hour.  Talk about signs of progress.

Now that students are back around campus, it seems like a great time to ramp up the social skydiving.  Practice has been my greatest tool so far.  Might as well push a bit harder than usual while it’s easy to do.

It’s monday night and I’m sitting in a coffee shop enjoying an espresso. People are hunkered down studying with a few exceptions of groups doing work. Despite this hectic environment, I am feeling quite a bit calmer than I have been in the past weeks. The mental chaos seems to have subsided quite, and I have managed to calm my mind down to a much more tolerable state. At times it seems like a magic switch has been flipped, though it doesn’t stay where I want it.

Of course this has all been caused by a girl and being stuck in the same frame of reference I’ve been stewing in since Freshman year of college. That stereotypical socially awkward, shy, computer nerd. Being stuck in that frame caused (and sometimes still causes) me to withdraw into away from people into the comfort of my own world. When confronted with different situations, that frame dictated how I would act.

Frames in general shape how people interact with the world. The mindset that someone views the world through can completely dominate one’s actions. Where the socially awkward computer nerd sees a group of people about to judge him, a social badass sees a group of new friends. Most people are not even conscious of how our mind frames things and how much it plays into how we act.

Last week I was stuck seeing things from a place of desperation and had the urge to act accordingly. Right now though, I’m feeling like a much different person than even a week ago. At this moment, I’m the cool guy that could go up to any person in this coffee shop and start a conversation with them. I’m the intriguing one that people are drawn in by. Everyone here is someone I could approach.

Re-framing is a powerful thing, though not some magic pill. Consciously deciding to change how you interpret the world takes quite a lot of effort and failure is frequent and frustrating. More often than not I’m stuck in the same old position I’ve grown used to. Moments when I am able to successfully re-frame my outlook are becoming more and more frequent though. And that is something that puts a giant smile on my face.

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.

So, last night I ended up at a house party in EL. I expected to see the group of friends that had invited me, but not many other people I knew. About 10 minutes after arriving, I ran into an absurd amount of unexpected faces. Somehow I ended up knowing about half the people at the party.

One unexpected person was this one girl who was in an Intro to Feminist Philosophy course that I took the first semester of my senior year. I recognized her, but only to the extent that I knew that i’d seen her before. On MSU’s campus, even though there are 40,000+ students, recognizing people is incredibly too common. It’s odd how often I run into the same people around campus, outside of class, even though there are so many people on and around campus. I would think that the probability of running into a random person from a class at some party outside of school would be incredibly small, yet this small world syndrome seems to crop up all the time and show just how, even on a campus of 40,000, everyone knows everyone.

Anyways, back to the story. Her name was Erin. She was the one that remembered that we took a class together over a year ago. Every philosophy class tends to have at least one person who plays devil’s advocate, and in this class I was that person. Sure, it rubbed many of the women in the class the wrong way. How could this guy come in here and question this stuff? As a philosopher though, it was my duty. One sided philosophy is nothing more than useless ego stroking. I must have made an impression on her though, because even after a year and a half, she remembered my name in an instant. The entertaining part was that she didn’t remember my friend Tony’s name, and he was her partner for an in-class project.

Seeing that I left such an impression put me in a great mood the rest of the night. Sure it was a semester’s worth of hearing me talk that did it, but the end result is the same. Someone remembered me. That may seem like nothing, but having that impact without formally meeting someone gives quite the ego boost.

The events of last night made me realize that I want to have that ability, to leave a vivid enough impression on people that they remember me years later. The challenge is reducing the amount of time that is necessary to create such an impression from five months in the same class, to something within the first few hours of meeting someone. I need to think about this more to figure out what steps I can actually take to actually accomplish this task.

It’s odd how a feminist philosophy course taken on a whim my senior year of college could still be coming back into my life and teaching me things.