Social or Communication skills?

[Dougie_D]

How are you in one-on-one interactions?

 

I get uncomfortable speaking to and among large groups .... and that nervousness translates to inability to articulate my thoughts coherently, or as coherently as I would among a smaller group of people or one-on-one.

 

It's sort of social anxiety I suppose, but limited to only large groups. I am an introvert mostly, although I can be somewhat extroverted too at times (I enjoy meeting and talking to new people for example) but large groups unnerve me.

 

Can you relate to this at all?

 

Do you consider yourself introverted or extroverted?

 

That may be part of it too.

 

I think I do better 1 on 1 in general. But after thinking about it, I had a meeting with a manager about something and I think I confused him. So it might be more about the topic I'm trying to describe or explain. Or it could be that I always lose my train of thought. So in a group, there is a lot going inside my head rather than when it's just 1 person I'm talking too.

[jonny15]

It's both part of the same thing.

 

My speaking skills are horrible. I mumble when I speak, and often talk low and not loud enough. I hate raising my voice. My speech in general is pretty bad.

 

I will have a brain fart and can't find the word and or words I'm looking for. Then blurt out the wrong thing. Then do it again. Sometimes several times.

 

My IQ appears to drop by the sentence.

[Moontiger]

Is there any chance you have some kind of cognitive issue going on? I ask because I have known many people with ADHD, dyslexia etc who experience similar things you are describing in this thread (mixing up words, rambling etc).

[RainyCoast]

ooooh, you summoned a long-winded sister, brace yourself for the wall of text buddy LMAO!!

 

for what's it's worth dougie, reading this thread i kept wanting to exclaim that you seem to be expressing yourself a lot better than in the last threads of yours i've read like a year ago! have you tried reading something you wrote, on here, in a planner, wherever and comparing it to how you're verbalising now? perhaps you've become more articulated and seeing the progress for yourself might help do away with some of the stress or the sense of urgency that you need to be the perfect communicator yesterday?

 

i can relate to what you're saying in a way. i've always been VERY well articulated (and actually was world champion in a field where this was a pivotal skill), until my mental and physical health hit an all time low. i struggled with c-ptsd and a chronic inflammatory response that messed with my central nervous system, and one of the difficulties i noticed was suddenly becoming a clumsy communicator. i obviously had difficulty being concise, but that wasn't all of it. it was most irritating that despite always having had an impressive vocabulary, it was like 90 % of it had been erased. it felt embarrassing, i knew i knew those words, where did they all just go?! another, still often evident, is a tendency to misspell. and i am a former grammar-nazi. i know how words are spelled. i know punctuation. i know grammar. my brain misfires in a way, and i'm not using my full faculty when it does that. moments -sometimes hours- later, i am. when writing, it helps to proof-read and slow myself down-- but you don't always have the luxury.

 

as far as the rambling and long-winded stories go, i think it has to do with what you describe as having so much going on in your head. that was how i experienced it exactly. there was waaaay too much material in my mind so that i couldn't ever get to having talked it all over coherently with myself. so when i was presenting the information to someone else, it was inevitably in some half-digested form they couldn't do much with. because i haven't been able to plough through the mountain of info in my head with myself, i didn't have a STRUCTURED way of presenting it to others, it was long-winded vomit, really, and you can tell i'm not entirely done with that LOL!

 

what helped noticeably (although i see much room for improvement still) was finding a therapist and a therapeutic modality that was the perfct fit for my anxiety, my tendency to feel overwhelmed at ease, to experience a mountain of anything- words and thoughts and feelings included- as an overload. so when my anxiety was manageable, "mountains of whatever" weren't so scary any more and i could attempt to deal with things or communicate things less chaotically.

 

before that, i coped by slowing myself down. i'm a fast talker and i noticed how many people talk really slowly or make pauses between sentences and even pull it off as "class". so i figured if i talked at a slower pace, in simpler, shorter sentences, with longer pauses in between, it would buy me time to process what i wanted to say in small, manageable units before i could present it. and noone would suspect that i was struggling with basics. i'd just be one of those people who talk like that. noone DID suspect anything!!

 

when with a good therapeutic approach i was empowered to deal with things that felt overwhelming, larger than me, i noticed a huge change in my communication, and if i do try, i CAN keep things succint these days. when i'm rambling these days, it's by choice. usually because i feel like it or trust that the listener is willing to enterntain me. i don't do it with people i don't know well, or with those who give subtle clues they want to hear the mini version.

 

i really like the headline tip. i'd say first give people the beginning and the end of a story, even if there doesn't seem to be a logical connection between one and the other. they will likely ask subquestions, that's where you can go into the details. like "wow, i had the weirdest weekend (beginning)! my car is at the repair shop (end)." they'll go how did that happen? YOU: "i was driving home from a party and some idiot crashed into me" THEM: "whose party? when? where? what did you do about the crash? were you injured? did the idiot flee the scene? was he DUI or just reckless?" etc. you're not annoying anyone with your long story if it's THEM into ASKING YOU for more details.

 

also, often in order to have a structured way of communicating something, you'll need to have discussed it and digested it and burped it up ( yeah, sorry for any potential visuals) and digested it again and again and again so that by the time you're presenting the material to people, it's already in a form they can deal with. to me, this is where therapy was so helpful, everything's been discussed in sessions, at home with myself, then with a friend who also enjoyed this mutual "digesting". so there's not THAT much there left that i don't have a processed and thus user-friendly version of to offer to listeners. when there is such data, i'm comfortable with it because it's no longer my default and i can live with myslef if i ocassionally stray of the main subject.

 

another thing that might help to become comfortable with is some peculiarities in your way of expressing yourself. mine is a tendency you can see here in the use of somewhat excentric metaphores and illustrative language. i hated it. until i learned what purpose it served. turns out, with my mental condition, people often have trouble symbolizing. i noticed a decline in my artistic ability too when i was at my lowest point, which was weird, i used to write and paint and compose and suddenly the abstract plane was out of my reach. so when i expressed myself unusually, this was a subconscious attempt at abstract, symbolic communication. apparently, it's highly important that one can do that, because the failure to symbolize can prevent one from unfu*king a psychological problem. i'm not making this up, i swear, ask a therapist. so if there's some "weird" qualities to your communication, it's worth examining whether they're just weird, benign, potentially therapeutic even-- or whether they're inappropriate.

 

at the end of the day, you can always just appologize when people impatiently interrupt you. you could just say "sorry, i have trouble organizing my thoughs so my speech tends to be disorganized too". and then shut up. they'll either think "okay dougie has a hard time expressing himself. a little patience and polite reminders that we can't follow might be better than rude interruptions."--- or, they're the callous kind who couldn't care less that you're having a problem, and then you won't really be dying to tell them stories anyway. "hello" and "goodbye" and "nice weather" is usually the most you feel like sharing with the type.