What to do when your communication sucks

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If you're like me, your social skills may have atrophied since your youth. Being surrounded by a captive audience of young people with alot going on made socializing easy, but it's harder when we get older. As a middle aged man, my social skills sucked, and I needed to improve them. Improve them I did.

As we get older, the organizations and captive audience we once socialized with vanishes. It's up to us to make socialzing a priority or not. I got lazy, and started to become a hermit because the required forced socializations took work. After a hard day of work, sometimes 10-12 hours, we need to leave our comfortable nest and go to events. These events seemed forced and like networking to me, which made it worse. I needed to motivate myself and put in the leg work.

When we stop exercising a muscle, it weakens. Why would socialization be different? It had been awhile since I actively sought friendship and I was rusty. Inertia was a bitch. I had to seek friends in activities I enjoyed including the gym and rock climbing. I visited the local church and suddenly had some contacts. How do you leverage this into friendships?

Once I had contacts, I had to make a communication channel and regularly engage with them. Group texts and social media connections helped with this. I had to be international and interested in these new contacts as people.

The takeaway here is that as we age it's harder to make friends, but it's worth it. Isolation sucks and it's easy to become a hermit. Hope this helps!