Improve Your Social Skills

Book excerpt: Improve Your Social Skills is a comprehensive, practical guide to social skills.It contains 200+ pages of step-by-step, easy-to-understand explanations of social interaction, written by a professional social skills coach whose TEDx talk on overcoming the social challenges of Asperger's Syndrome has been viewed over 180,000 times.You'll learn how to: Make Conversation (and keep conversation flowing smoothly!) Read Body Language (and send positive signals with your own body language!) Meet New People (and make friends with them!) Tell Stories In Conversation (that don't bore your audience!) Combat Shyness And Social Anxiety (a little courage every day adds up!) Date Successfully (without manipulation or sneaky tricks!) And More! (lots more!)Ok, enough with the bullet points.I'm Dan Wendler, and I wrote the book. I wrote it because I believe everyone deserves a place to belong and I didn't want poor social skills to hold anyone back from friendship and community. even if they struggle with social skills. I know firsthand how hard it is to struggle socially. Growing up, I was bullied, harassed, and excluded -- no matter how hard I tried to fit in. It wasn't until I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome that I put the puzzle pieces together. I realized I struggled socially because I didn't have any social skills -- and just like any other skill, social skills can be learned. So I started to learn them. It took hard work, but I soon started to see improvement in my ability to interact with others. Eventually I was able to start making wonderful friends and today I feel comfortable and confident in all sorts of social interactions.On January 1st, 2012, I launched ImproveYourSocialSkills.com to share what I'd learned with the world. Hundreds of thousands of people visit the site every year, and I'm excited to help even more with the Improve Your Social Skills Kindle guide.The guide you're about to read is a compilation of the social principles I've learned during my lifetime of personal social skills study, as well as the techniques I developed while offering hundreds of hours of social skills coaching. These principles led me to a life full of close friendship, satisfying connection, and tender romance.I believe that with these principles, you can live a life full to the brim with friendship, connection, and love. I hope that after reading Improve Your Social Skills, you'll believe that too.