Ah, Valentine's Day. If you're single or not in a serious relationship (and sometimes even if you are), the big V-Day can cause you lots of undue stress.
If you're single, you may dread it because you don't have a date or aren't in a relationship with someone.
If you're in a casual relationship (or one that's just starting out), you're worried about what to do that's "appropriate".
Men feel pressure to spend lots of money to impress their dates. Women stress out trying to "read the signals" of the guys.
All-in-all, it's just a messy situation.
Never fear, however, Social Charm is here to help with our "Valentine's Day Survival Guide". So take a few deep breaths, sit back, and pay attention. You'll make it - we promise.
Here are some quick tips, no matter what your dating situation:
We recently did a Q&A seminar called Take Back Your Social Life for the New Jersey Young Professionals, where young professionals submitted questions about improving their social lives - both personally and professionally - we answered those questions using our basic framework of understanding human social interaction.
You can download a copy of the presentation here for free .
However, we're still not satisfied.
There were so many good questions that we didn't have time to cover, and - since we know that there were some people who really wanted to make the call but couldn't, here's what we're going to do:
Posted by: khowie in Untagged on
Feb 5, 2009
This week we are committed to accomplishing one thing and one thing only - we want to get YOU started telling interesting and engaging stories. Here's how we're going to do it:
Method Behind the Madness
By now you've probably noticed that we at SocialCharm are obsessed with storytelling. And hopefully you've read some of our articles explaining why we think storytelling is so darn important - the article titled "A Story to Save Our Planet" should give you a good idea.
If you're still not convinced that storytelling is one of the most important social skills you can, and SHOULD start developing immediately, well... keep reading. All we ask is that you get out there and TRY IT. Later on in this article we will give you a couple of stories that you can start telling immediately, and we hope you will at least give it a shot. You may be surprised at how much fun storytelling can be!
Now, before we go any further let us briefly explain exactly what we mean when we use the term "storytelling."
We're not talking about storytelling in the traditional sense - we're not exactly trying to make you better at telling ghost stories around the campfire, or at writing short stories like Edgar Allen Poe.
What we're talking about is storytelling in an everyday social context. Take two examples of our recent students who used storytelling as an everyday means for achieving their social goals...
- The Date - One of our students was out on a first date with a woman who was particularly shy. He found himself struggling to keep the conversation going, so he decided to tell her one of the same stories we are about to show you. From that point on the entire mood of the date changed. The story got the woman engaged in conversation, and the two wound up talking for hours, sharing stories and forming a strong social bond.
- The Promotion - Another student won a chance to have lunch with the CEO of his company (a firm with over 1000 employees) through a company raffle. The CEO took the student to a Japanese sushi house that had literally hundreds of choices on the menu. Without communicating to each other, both men wound up picking out the same exact soup, appetizer, and sushi-roll combination to order. The CEO chuckled at the coincidence, and the student capitalized on the opportunity to make himself stand out through storytelling. So he told one of his personal favorite stories about coincidences. A conversation ensued and the CEO left the lunch with a newfound respect for the student's intelligence and insight. While we can't claim that the story directly lead to a promotion, that student did get promoted faster than most of his peers within the company.
So, in essence "storytelling" means weaving the traditional art of crafting and telling stories into an everyday setting.
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