Ask HN: How do you practice social soft skills in real life?

I currently read "how to make friends and influence people", this and many other soft-skills books/trainings offer concepts and ideas of how one should act in a business/social conversations.

I always struggle with applying those concepts in real life, I cannot stop and think about what is the most appropriate reaction for a situation and I quickly forget and get overwhelmed with concepts and ideas from the book.

How did you apply similar concepts in real-life scenarios, and what ideas worked best for you?

Just jump in, meet new people. Try something, fail, let it go, try again. Granted, it’s much harder in covid cause it’s all virtual, but the world is big with lots of ppl to meet, and if you make a bad impression with one person, then learn from it and make a new first impression with someone else. Like with most things, it’s just practice. Failure and struggles are just part of the process like most skills.

Be genuine and kind instead of engineering situations.

The biggest thing for me is to gently check if I’m drifting in a conversation and to make sure that I’m actually listening to what the other person is saying.

Since almost everyone mentioned some form of listening, I will add this: dare to laugh. A lot. It's so relaxing and nice to spend time with people that realize that when you're socializing it's one of the rare and almost sacred times when we can just goof around and have fun. Having a laugh ready to fire off will spread like wildfire in a circle of people you're interacting with. You might feel that it's contrived at first, but then after 30 minutes you'll laugh genuinely along with everyone else and people in that circle will loosen up immensely. I don't know why we're so conditioned to have small talk at hand whenever, but a laugh at hand at whenever is almost unheard of. I dunno, I might live in a boring country.