 Today I'm going to be talking about methods that I've tried and tested that have had a significant effect on my ability to interact with people. These techniques are great, but they're mainly geared towards people on the autistic spectrum. But they will also help guys and girls who are finding it hard to get to grips with talking to people, making friends and dating. It may or not be known to you, but people on the spectrum don't have that kind of innate ability that people without aspergis and autism have in terms of communicating and also in terms of picking up social cues. Thus, people with autism and aspergis need some way of learning to do social interaction. So this can come from sources of information and also from observing other people. So without further ado, here are my 5 tips for improving your social game. So to start off with, this is one of the most powerful techniques that I've found that works, especially when you have quite a low self-esteem and you don't really know how to get a conversation started. Basically, all you're going to do is just throw little comments out there to people. Now it might sound quite silly when I say it, but you realise why it's so important to do that in a second. The beauty of doing this is that you don't have to have that much thought and anxiety about a conversation. You'll be able to test whether the person wants to speak to you and you'll also be able to get a bit of confidence if they start a conversation with you as well. By putting no investment into this, you'll be less likely to come away from an interaction that maybe didn't go as well as you wanted it to without feeling any of those kind of negative emotions that might turn you off trying to start a conversation with someone else again. Once you realise that talking really isn't a big deal and you don't need to go into social interactions with like a big script of things that you need to talk about and ask, you'll find it a lot easier to be comfortable and that will in turn make people more likely to talk to you and you'll be more likeable. So usually the way that you can see whether someone wants to talk to you is if you throw out a little comment about the situation and they throw a comment back to you or they ask you a question. And these are really good indicators that the person wants to initiate a conversation with you. If they say something like, yeah, or kind of giggle and look away, they probably don't want to talk to you and you shouldn't take that in a bad way, it might just not be confident enough to start a conversation with a stranger. So I find the easiest way to use this technique is to wait for any of the following scenarios. So if you're waiting for something and something happens that you think another person might agree on, for example, I like to use the analogy of you standing in like a queue at a supermarket or something and in front of you there's maybe a girl or a guy that you want to talk to, a further down the line or further back, there's some people arguing. So maybe there's like a couple arguing or a staff member getting in trouble or something like that. So you can throw out comments like, you can laugh a little bit at it and say, I wonder what's going on there. And if the person that's near you wants to speak to you, then they'll make a comment about it as well. It's also good to use a lot of humor in these situations as humor can diffuse a lot of tension that you might have talking to strangers. You can say something like, in regard to that analogy, you can say something like, makes me glad I'm not in a relationship, which if you make someone laugh, they're more likely to like you as a person, which is psychologically proven. So if you find the first one a bit too daunting, though, there are some other ways that you can go about using this technique in order to prove your confidence. And for example, you're walking back from a train station or you're walking through your home town to go home, and there's a homeless person at the side. Now so you can get like a little bit of change out, give them a change, maybe UP or something, maybe a quid if you're that generous, but you can ask, you can say, oh, how's your day going? And they can give a little comment back. And if they want to talk to you, then you can have a little bit of an exchange and then say, all right, I need to get off. I hope you have a good day. And there you go, you've had a conversation with someone. And once you get the confidence to start a conversation with random people, maybe move up to the first one and you can maybe approach people in different situations like parties and such. So seriously, using this technique is really powerful because it doesn't put much investment in. And it also gives you the opportunity to test the water and see if the person wants to speak to you. Using this quite a few times instead of going in with all scripts and managed to get a few numbers from people. And it's a lot easier to come across as more kind of a laid back person. So number two might be quite obvious to some people, but working on your confidence and your self-esteem is a big part in both being comfortable with talking to people and also being attractive to people as well. Do you feel like you're kind of a prize or a catch or something? You're more likely to be more lax in situations. And you can treat the guys that you know, mates that you know, and you can treat strangers that you know. You can meet strangers that you meet as like mates that you've known for a long time and that'll make them feel a lot more at ease with you. And you can treat girls like bratty little sisters and you can tease anything like that. And you'll generally give a good aura off to people that you are confident and you're open to having a conversation with people as well. With the confidence, you'll feel like people want to talk to you and you'll feel wanted. And that kind of confidence and self-esteem that you put out there will actually become a reality. So if you feel like you wanted and people want you and want to talk to you, then it'll usually happen because you'll put off that confident and friendly aura that will draw people to you naturally. So the next technique is maybe quite controversial to most people, but it comes from saying fake it till you make it. Now, this is mostly for people on the spectrum as I said before, the innate social abilities that people, neurotypicals, people not on the spectrum have. They already know how to do this and it's inbuilt naturally into them. So first thing I would have you do is search up some YouTube celebrities, for example, relating to media around the time I made this video. David Hay. Just any kind of person that gives off a good vibe of confidence, but also friendliness and maybe attractive and mysterious. Anyone that you admire as a person and you want to have a conversation with. So once you get that person and you watch them and you see how they interact, you see the facial features, you see the body language, like hands and stuff. And how slow they speak and how deep they speak, what they say. You generally get an idea of how being confident and speaking and how the person who is confident speaks and that will help you. Now, as I said, you might feel a bit wrong with doing this because it might, it might not really gel with your personality. But I really reckon that you deal with this because it's based on a scientific fact called cognitive dissonance, which is when how you act and how you feel or think are different. Now this will cause some discomfort for you because you'll be like, why am I acting like this? Am I doing this? But after a while, the dissonance will affect, because you're acting the same way all the time. The dissonance will affect how your brain thinks. So naturally over time, by making this kind of persona, it'll be integrated into you. You won't become David Hay just by trying to act like him. I don't know why you'd want to, but that's personal opinions. But it will be integrated into you and you will, you'll develop some of the positive traits that the celebrity has, which is the confidence and the ability to talk to people will benefit you greatly in your social situations. The next one is quick and simple. The best way to feel comfortable is to join a sports club that you like. Now, if you have some social anxiety issues, that might be a problem. And talking to people might be a problem in general. I reckon you go for something that's easy, but also something that's going to raise your heart rate as well. So chess club's probably not a good idea. It doesn't really stimulate conversation and it doesn't really get your body moving. Now, the main reason why you want to raise your heart rate once you get your body moving is to stimulate release of adrenaline. So releasing this adrenaline gets you very concentrated. Exercise also releases a hormone called serotonin, which on a vague basis of science, it'll make you feel better and make you feel more ease. And these are very good things to have because when you're focusing on your sport, you're less likely to focus on other people. And having that kind of passive conversation during your sport like badminton, something like that, you'll be able to connect with people, but you won't feel that kind of pressure to answer questions and give questions and generally have what you perceive to be a normal social situation. As well as these hormones that will make it easier for you to interact with people, you'll also be meeting with people and being around people regularly. So you'll get used to being around people. There might be quite a lot of people doing badminton. You might be rotating. This doesn't mean that you're not, you're getting yourself out there and people can see you and they can see you multiple times. And the more times they see you, the more higher the likelihood is that they're going to come over and say hi. And especially if they find you attractive. And if you're particularly skilled at the sport that you're doing, you'll give off a lot of confident vibes doing that sport. And you'll also be, might be able to impress people with it as well. So it might go, wow, you're so good at this. And you know what it's like talking about your special interests. So that might be a good thing for you. Maybe, maybe tone it down a little bit. Just keep it lax. Use that adrenaline. Use that sort of tone and just relax into it and just have a good time. The last point that I have is really important in my books. It's really easy for people on the spectrum to get what I call socially saturated. So basically this is where you can't get any more pleasure if you get any pleasure from being around other people. Just can be anybody. There's been a lot of cases where people I really like being in a relationship with, I just kind of didn't want to speak at all because you just, it's hard to explain. But anyway, you must know and identify when you start to get these feelings. This will save you from losing your will to talk to people. And if you lose your will to talk to someone, you kind of space out and you don't really seem very interested that can harm chances of developing a good friendship. So it's good to know when to leave a conversation or when to leave a situation in order to maintain that positive kind of high energy vibe that people have with you. When you reach this point of saturation, step out, take a breather, and maybe later you might feel need to socialize again. With this, you also be less likely to experience any bad situations. Example, as I said, people can get the idea that you may be a bit bored of them or something, and that might be quite daunting to someone, especially if you're not very confident with your social skills. Make out, oh, God, this person hates me now and panic and say something stupid and one thing leads to another, et cetera. Put an example to this. I might go out to one of my taekwondo competitions abroad. So this might be three or four days of constant being around people all the time. Talking to people on the plane, in the car, in rooms and apartments, because we have to share apartments, competition venues, and also during fighting when there's loads of crowds and it's just completely just an allergy system. And after this, after this, getting, getting home, after all of this, it can be really, really all of it can be really, really taxing on your system, your physically and mentally. And I might go for maybe one or two days, just completely alone, just to kind of recover from all that social interaction that I've had. This is a bit of extreme example of being socially saturated, but it just shows that how you need to, you need to identify that you have autism, you have aspergers and it is gonna happen. And you need to take measures to make sure that it doesn't impact you negatively as much as you can help it. So this has been five Thomas's top tips for helping with boosting your social interaction abilities and also improving your confidence in situations. And all of this will help you feel more happy and feel more like a inclusive member of society. So thank you very much for watching. If you like the video, leave a like. If you want to see more content by me, subscribe. And if there's any content that you could suggest, anything that you'd like to talk about, or maybe just give your own ideas, stick it in the comment section and I'll be sure to reply to it as soon as I can on YouTube.