It is true that many people with social anxiety lack social experience and may not have had the opportunities to hone their social skills, but there are also many people with social anxiety who have perfectly acceptable social skills. This gives us our first reason to doubt that social inadequacy is the problem for people with social anxiety. A second reason is the fact that there are many people in the world who are very confident in themselves, but yet have atrocious social skills. Surely, if social anxiety was caused by a lack of social skills, then all people who lack social skills would experience social anxiety, and conversely, all people with social anxiety would lack social skills, but this is not what we find.

Instead, what is usually the case is most people with social anxiety believe they are socially inadequate, because of their struggles, but it is actually their anxiety that causes their struggles rather than a lack of skill. This means problems with socialising are a symptom of social anxiety rather than a cause of it. What people with social anxiety experience is usually more like hindered social ability, rather than social inadequacy. It is the way anxiety causes symptoms such as poor concentration, and also how we react to anxious feelings (i.e. avoidance) that stop us interacting with people effectively, not poor social skills. Once the anxiety is absent most people find that their natural ability to socialise shines through, or at the very least, improves greatly.

People can easily get caught up in trying to read social skills books to learn the ‘correct’ social rules that it seems everyone else seems to know, but this can mean people with social anxiety end up trying to achieve social perfection before they have had much social experience.  This is a recipe for feelings of failure and anxiety. Really, social skills need to be learnt through a trial and error process where mistakes are made and sense of what works is developed.  A well written social skills book may help to some degree, but nothing beats experience and books on social skills will not remove the anxiety.

Confidence is developed through learning that we can cope with our mistakes rather than through being socially perfect. This is a key point as many people with social anxiety are trying to achieve social perfection to gain confidence, but that is fairly unattainable as well as unstable. It only takes one mistake for it all to come crashing down, so better to be confident about your mistakes rather than your abilities.

As already mentioned, people with social anxiety really can lack social skills due to a lack of experience, and improving them can help in some ways, but doing this should not be seen as a solution to social anxiety. In fact, putting lots of effort into improving social skills with the aim to overcome social anxiety can do more harm than good. This is because however hard they try to improve socially, they still experience anxiety, which then carries on affecting their ability to socialise. Since they do not make much progress, feelings of frustration and hopelessness can set in which only feeds their sense of inadequacy further. This can then increase anxiety in social situations and make socialising even harder. It is a paradox where the thing that seems it should help, only makes the situation worse.

Make sure you are not feeding your sense of social inadequacy with social skills books and tips. A series of videos I have made on this subject can be viewed here.