Why We Need to Improve Our Social Skills and Build Trust
Many people today have forgotten that social skills existed long before social book marking sites and other Internet social communities existed online. The dictionary (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1964) has nearly a page listed dealing with the word “social” and derivatives of, but the meaning we are most concerned with in this article is the definition given to the word social:
“social:a.& n. Living in companies, gregarious, not fitted for or not practising solitary life, interdependent, co-operative, practising division of labour, existing only as member of compound organism, (man is a social animal; social bees, wasps, kinds having common nests etc. ~birds, building near each other in communities; ~plants, kinds that grow thickly together & monopolize ground they grow on)”
People have been social creatures since they first learnt the benefits of not clubbing each other to death. People soon learnt the benefits of communal living and sharing daily jobs and food and the safety and joy that companionship can bring.
Family groups grew into communities, communities into tribes and tribes into Nations. If there weren’t ever any socially acceptable behaviours in this grouping that everyone included found nice or acceptable, then they would very soon have been thrown out of the family, community, tribe, and today we would like to throw those with socially unacceptable practices out of our nations; instead each Country has evolved different ways of dealing with what we now call miscreants.
A miscreant for the purpose of this article is someone considered “really bad, beyond redemption and beyond salvage” In the United States, they still kill them either by hanging, electric chair or injection. In the Arab world they are more likely to behead a miscreant or to stone the person to death. In Asia they still hang people for unsociable behaviour like drug running and murder while in Australia and some other Commonwealth countrys, we incarcerate them for life (supposedly) but they seem to be released again after 20 or so years. Hopefully they will have gained some socially acceptable manners and have found redemption and so not be any further threat to law-abiding citizens.
Socially acceptable manners is the key phrase we are concerned with here. So what is a socially acceptable manner?
We need to get away from the unacceptable behaviours of killing each other, murder, rape, and a number of other heinous crimes.
A socially acceptable manner is quite a complex behaviour. It includes words, body language, physical behaviour, diplomacy, consideration for those around you or in your group, social skill as in a sort of political aptitude but that’s as deep as we will go in these articles.
Socially acceptable words are probably ‘up there’ in importance simply because they are our introduction to each other and our needs/intentions. Words alone need body language to reinforce the message and if the body language doesn’t meet the meaning of the words, distrust is the outcome of the meeting. Once distrust is evident between people or groups of people, it is very hard to overcome this barrier to communication.
Building trust is probably the most important socially acceptable behaviour people can learn and the easiest to implement but the hardest to maintain.