“I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people!” — Tom Smykowski

We analyticals and overthinkers often believe that if we do the right thing, people will respond the way we want them to. And then when they don’t, we blame ourselves for “doing it wrong.”

When you’ve been turned down or rejected, you probably ruminated about what you should or shouldn’t have said.

Whether it’s dating, dealing with conflict in a relationship, getting ahead at work, or simply being more social, we’ve all been there. I’m no exception myself.

We subconsciously believe that human interaction is relatively simple but based on some secret code we haven’t discovered yet. If only someone could give us the key to making all of our dating, relationship, business, and social conversations go EXACTLY as planned.

So because we’re logical problem solvers, we go about solving the problem of getting the interpersonal outcomes we want by assuming there’s a formula to solve for or an algorithm to discover. 

We want to be able to say the exact right thing every time to get people to like us, approve of us, and give us what we want.

After all, isn’t that what you do in your job every day? You’ve programed yourself to solve problems in a logical, sequential manner. So why wouldn’t relationships be any different?

So we focus on “strategies” and “tactics” instead of working on the main problem: Our willingness to embrace the unpredictability of relationships.

The reality is that humans are nowhere near that simple or predictable. We have to be willing to explore uncertainty and risk feeling emotions we don’t like in order to become better at people skills.

What is a conversation you’ve been avoiding because you’re afraid of how it might go?