Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

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I think if someone is already not taken by any of their inner things entirely, then they are already doing this regulation thing. The social skills that are described in the article (and soft skills in general) are just a next step on the same path, focusing on getting along, rather than completely internal regulation.

I too have wildly different area of interest, level of interest, and approach to things than most people around me do. Soft skills helped me to connect anyways, for at least two reasons:

1. With them I can approach, and connect to the interest of others.

2. I can explain to people my interest, and make it more interesting to them as well.

Also, these are not for all time, all the time. The healthy thing is to vary the guardedness in different contexts. The flexibility in this is a skill in itself, and again, something that connects to, and can raise, emotional intelligence.

There is a true asymmetry that's avoided by the anodyne "everyone needs to think about these things" talk. If you take a group of 20 people from your country chosen completely at random, some people are likely to find things being similar with themselves and several people in this group, no matter which group was picked, and other people are likely to find little in similar between themselves and the group for most of the groups.

Social skills instruction is often about how to get along with averaged random groups like this. The first sort of person might find it as useful know-how for a thing they already find agreeable. The second sort of person might not find the initial situation agreeable at all, so the instruction gets the implicit added bit of "first of all, you need to not be yourself".

>"first of all, you need to not be yourself"

Yes, that seems part of it, as long as all you know is "yourself without social skills". With social skills, and leaving some of that "yourself" behind, you will discover that don't just change, or reduce yourself, in a social setting, but become more yourself as a whole. The very definition of "yourself" changes, broadens because of this added experience.

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