Ask HN: If you used to be socially awkward and shy, how did you improve?

I also used to have this attitude, until I realized it was handicapping me. The point is to get a conversation going, and sometimes the way people are comfortable doing this is through the banal ritual of asking each other questions they don't really care about the answers for, and faking that they do care. It's illogical, but then again, so apparently is one's desire to just have a connection with somebody rather than nobody. Putting the pressure on yourself to only ask deep and genuine questions of people you don't even know is just going to result in you deciding you have nothing important enough to ask yet, and sitting in awkward silence, or never approaching someone at all. It's the conversational version of "the perfect is the enemy of the good."

Programmers tend to be quite rational people, and I've found CBT gave me a set of rational tools to interrogate my irrational feelings around social anxiety. It can feel like a dark cloud is hanging over you, and when you externalize the feeling and identify "fallacies" with those feelings then they become less nebulous and more manageable.

An example: a decade ago I remember sitting on a mostly empty BART train and feeling very low as I watched people get on and off at each stop. When I externalized the feeling it was simply "No one wants to sit near me", and once I'd written it down it became easier to interrogate -- I don't want to sit immediately next to anyone on an empty BART car either, why should I expect that others' decisions about where to sit are because of me and not because there's just plenty of space to spread out? Suddenly that feeling evaporated.

Once you've worked with a therapist and built up some habits, it becomes easier to identify those feelings on the fly and mitigate them. I rarely do written CBT journaling these days, it's mostly something I can react to in-the-moment through lots of practice.

Again: it's recommended to talk to a trained therapist and see if CBT is right for you (or whether you may need/want to try medication as well) but it's been one of the best self-care things I've ever done.

1. Exposure, simply spend more time in public and around other people, the only way to develop comfort and social skills is time and practice.

2. Get good at making small talk, there are plenty of resources for this online but it's really quite simple, a good rule of thumb is to start with asking people inoffensive questions and giving them occasional small compliments. The goal is not to have meaningful conversations (yet) it's just to establish mutual comfort ("ok, this person doesn't seem like a serial killer").

3. Mindset, if you're worried about your voice and posture you're making the common mistake of believing that other people give a fuck, when really they don't. Most of them are never going to notice stuff like this about you or if they do they'll forget it the next day. Heck, they'll probably forget their entire interaction with you, no matter how it goes. You're just not that important unless you're famous or something. Their world is centered around them, not you, so don't overthink things.

Once you get the hang of everything above (spend more time with people, get good at inoffensive small talk, don't overthink) then you'll find you can leave a decent impression on just about anyone. From there you naturally start to notice that you have more in common with some people than others and if you keep in touch with those people it becomes easy to build deeper friendships.