I went from awkward to charismatic, so I can empathize.

* Warning: if you want to succeed at this you’ll have to experiment and fail. That’s not fun. But you will come out the other side a far more interesting and effective person.

* Several of the things mentioned here will benefit from practice. You can do this practice when you have otherwise unstructured time, such as driving, jogging, sitting on the bus, and so on.

This passage contains its own breakthrough:

> To be fair to myself, I am not awful in social situations in that depending on the context I can be seemingly confident and calm, especially when I am among people I know and the context is familiar.

When I thought about that I concluded that acting as confident and calm as I am around my friends was the key. I understood that if I could use that magnetism in otherwise uncomfortable situations I could level up like crazy. And I did. What I would do was act out how I would behave in meetings or sales situation in my head ahead of time, and I imagined the people I was dealing with to be my closest friends. This technique didn’t come naturally, which meant I had to mess it up several times before I got the hang of it.

This ability will also come in handy when your spouse or someone else close to you is angry at you, justifiably or not. I have been in many situations where I was accused of something I didn’t do, and I could not advocate for myself because I was too scared. Now that I work these things out before hand, I am more able to take control of the situation in a way that is as fair as possible to me.

* Being a genuine listener helps enormously. People like it when you try to understand and feel the message they are conveying. Don’t worry about trying to get your opinion across when you were trying to listen. Don’t try to give them advice unless they explicitly ask for it. Feel free to say absolutely nothing when someone is talking to you and just try to take it in.

* The black belt listening skill is being so good at it that you can make the other person in the conversation laugh. As with any advanced skill, don’t try this until you’ve completed the other skill levels. Otherwise it just sounds like you’re awkwardly inserting prefab jokes into the conversation. to hear this done right, listen to top podcast interviewers. Many of them are quite funny, but their humor almost always revolves around a perceptive and intelligent response to the guest.

* Truly confident people say “I don’t know“ all the time. Even if you’re not confident, being able to say it in public will make you a more confident person, and a better one to be around.

* It helped me very much to get good at things that others find difficult. Teaching myself to be a tech writer so I could not have to work for McDonald’s, then teaching myself to be a programmer so I could not have to work as a tech writer, and making more money than the losers I grew up with each helped me. I know I am supposed to tell you that we should be self-sufficient and not worry about what other people think. All I can say is that these things did help my confidence massively.

A more conventional method:

* I haven’t taken it but I have never heard anyone complain that the Dale Carnegie course was in effective.