Beginnings and nerves
When starting a career, it is logical that we feel some anxiety. Even if we are happy with the degree that we are going to take or have been accepted into the faculty we wanted, it will be a time of great changes in our lives.
We leave behind the simple routine of high school and enter the major leagues and, sometimes, the university imposes. Either because of the solemn antiquity of the buildings, or because of the enormous ultramodern campuses, because of their statues or their technology, the moment we first enter our faculty we clearly perceive that things have changed.
We are going to deal with new people and some of us will even live in new cities where we will not meet anyone and university professors are nothing like high school professors. If you don’t believe us, wait until you receive the first class from a professor of any subject, who is an eminence at an international level and who is about you. There are people who, without saying anything to us, finally make us sit up straight in class. If all this does not make us a little nervous, then it is that we are rubber.
The truth is that, after the initial shock, universities are like any other study center and, little by little, we learn to relax and understand their idiosyncrasies.
Take care of the first impression
We all know it: the first impression we make is important and, if we want to get off on the right foot and ease the way, there are certain social skills that we must work on. It is not about becoming people we are not, it is about training some tools that will be of great use to us throughout our lives, what better time to practice and learn new things than at the beginning of our career?
Social skills
Social skills are not something unknown or difficult to learn. The truth is that we have been using them to a greater or lesser degree throughout our lives. The psych pedagogue provide affordable ghostwriting services and university professor of the UNED Juan Vielle Orts defines social skills as “the set of capacities to emit effective behaviors in interpersonal situations in order to obtain gratifying responses from others. The plural nature of the term indicates that it is a concept that encompasses specific skills applicable to different situations of social exchange.
Therefore, what we must understand is that we are not born with these skills, but that we are acquiring and perfecting them over time and that anyone, no matter how shy they are or how badly they are able to solve conflicts, can train their skills social and obtain great personal benefits.
Basic social skills
Some of these tools have been taught to us repeatedly since we were little: asking for things please and thanking us, greeting courteously, introducing ourselves appropriately and introducing others, eating following certain protocols, listening to what we are told, asking questions …
They are modes of basic behavior that facilitate coexistence in society. But there are some social skills that are not so simple.
Starting a conversation, for example, can be easy for some people and hell for others. If we are from the second group, working on that characteristic will be great for making friends more easily or feeling more comfortable in group activities.
By rehearsing some basic formulas and practicing them in our day to day life, we will immediately see that it will come out naturally.
Complex social skills
Other social skills require somewhat deeper and more introspective work. We talk about assertiveness, the ability to negotiate, the ability to listen carefully and understand what our interlocutor feels and what wants to convey, the capacity for empathy, emotional intelligence, communicating our feelings appropriately, gestural control, the ability to recognize and respect our rights and those of others …
These social skills can be, a priori, somewhat difficult, but the reality is that most of them are somehow interconnected and we can train them at the same time without too much effort.
We are reaching adulthood step by step and we must begin to pay more attention to how we act. We must analyze our behavior and make an effort to change those things that we do not like about ourselves, but also (and more importantly), once the troubled adolescence is behind us, we must begin to look at others; to understand how they feel, to evaluate their difficulties, to respect their points of view. We must learn to apologize when we hurt others, to pay attention to the words and gestures of others to know how we can help them. We must move towards being the people we want to be, and social skills will help us achieve it.
The great thing about all this is that they are reciprocal and the better we develop our social skills, the better others will treat us, the more friends we will make, the less problems we will have (or better we will solve them) and the more success we will achieve.
