Best Books on Social Skills | Improve Communication with Bukuru

A GUIDE TO SELECTING THE

Best Books to Improve your Social Skills

Decoding the Patterns and Dynamics in various areas of Communication

There are different kinds of interactions, each with its own unwritten rules and patterns. Knowing these can make you more effective.

There are several topics in the realm of social skills that have specific patterns:

Making new friends and getting along
Public speaking and presentations
Sales and negotiations
Attraction and relationships
Conflicts and aggression

Effectiveness in obtaining desired outcomes is not all that matters for satisfactory interactions. Being authentic – integrity – is another important factor.

To become good or better at any area of communication, there is an inner and an outer aspect to work on.

Most people focus on the outer aspect but books and coaches often consider the inner aspect more important than the outer aspect.

The inner aspect is sometimes referred to as the “mental frame” you have during the interaction. For example, do you see the person you're talking to as an equal or do you see one of you as higher value than the other? This is reflected in whether or not you will try to prove your worth to the other. Or, is a certain outcome important to you or are you relaxed about outcome? It helps to be aware of your frames and to question them – perhaps even refine some.

Besides your own frame, other people also have frames and it helps to be able to read them in their behavior. This helps you in discerning compensatory behavior from their true intentions, like when a kind person is acting aggressively out of insecurity. Then, making them feel safe would give a more pleasant outcome than reacting with aggression.

Any type of communication would benefit from an increased ability to regulate emotions, because when we cross our emotional threshold our communication and behavior tends to become a repetition of scripts we have been running all our lives, regardless of what the circumstances demand.

When someone else is in a script, different rules than normal apply. The main goal then should be to break the script and get through to the person again.

Those who simply learn to bypass their feelings of discomfort by mastering techniques to control conversations can never be sure of their control and run the risk of building up tension to the point where it leads to psychosomatic issues such as ulcers.

Social skills are often related to one’s level of self-esteem and improvement usually involve stepping out of your comfort zone, which can be exciting if you learns first how to become comfortable with discomfort.

Types of Books on Social Skills

Here you find a list of archetypal books about social skills from which we captured the essence in a short summary. The books are listed in a random order. We don't earn any commission on your selection.

"The Social Skills Guidebook"

Chris McLeod offers practical strategies for navigating social situations, including sales conversations. He talks about common limiting thought patterns like jumping to conclusions and catastrophizing, which can hold back social growth. The main practical tips are: pausing briefly before responding, focusing on physical sensations when uncomfortable, wrapping points of disagreement with points of agreement, acknowledging feelings of others and ask questions about how people are feeling and what could improve their feelings.

"Games People Play"

Eric Berne proposes that many interactions are repetitions of unconscious patterns driven by unconscious emotional needs. Examples are: asking for advice and rejecting all suggestions to maintain composure, negative behavior for attention and behavior that reinforces a negative self-image. Berne then offers a framework – Transactional Analysis – with 9 different states someone can be in and how someone in one state can be moved to another. But the first step is to recognize the games in order to stop playing them. The book does not provide solutions to all social dynamics, but it will help many people get out of some repetitive games.

"I'm Okay, You're Okay"

The focus of this book by Thomas Harris is on our core mental frame: whether we consider ourself okay and how we feel about the other person. The healthy and most realistic position, he argues, is that both are considered okay, even if some behavior is not pleasant. If you would dive deeply into why anyone behaves like they do, you'd understand. Knowing this, returning to this knowing and focusing on positive aspects of both yourself and others, will rewire your beliefs and change the quality of your social life.

"Conflict Communication"

Rory Miller is an expert in self-defense and explains what to do in different types of situations. Key is that aggression coming from feeling threatened – either physically or the ego – can be dealt with through de-escalation and negotiation. Key is to snap them out of their state. However, aggression that is predatory, requires calm non-compliance and either getting out of the situation or surprise attack with a lot of noise.

"Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars"

This seminal book by John Gray explains some of the key issues between men and women. He argues that each side requires the opposite when there's a conflict. Most women need space to vent their feelings and be validated despite those feelings, while men tend to look for solutions because that's how they naturally respond to a conflict. In general, men like to feel competent and valued. Women rather need to be heard and empathized with. Understanding this basic difference could already solve many issues and even improve dating.

"Pitch Anything"

Oren Klaff provides tools for hacking the listener's primal brain as this is where decisions are being made based on emotions that are later self-justified by the logical brain. Information only activates the logical brain are does not create much result. Instead, by framing your message in an interesting way, teasing and truly believe in your value, you're more likely to get a sale or buy-in for your idea or proposal. However, because these techniques have been around for some time now, people can also become disengaged when they are used on them.

Bukuru's Zero-Books Approach

Our suggestion is to start developing your discomfort tolerance level. It's the key to presenting, dating, sales, conflicts as well as with overcoming hesitancy to meet new people. You can read here how to do it.

With specific regard to dating and relationships, it might be useful to become familiar with some modern theories about modern struggles in this area. For example, dating apps are considered by some to have had a net negative effect on the chances for men and women to find happy, long-lasting partnerships. The explanation given is that, typically, a small portion of men receive likes from women, which makes a large group of men feel rejected and a small group of men ego-inflated in how they develop their personality. Women, however, often receive a lot of likes, which creates a sense of having so many options that they can preserve themselves exclusively for men that are handsome and successful. Since these men have so many options, most women won't find one that's exclusively available to them nor one with well-rounded character traits. In short, the dynamic from dating apps affected men and women, making them less excited about each other. On top of that, the desire and opportunity of women to have an education and a career – partly due to the historical lack of appreciation from men to housewives – changed the role of men too. Instead of being a valued provider of income, safety and emotional stability, men now are also expected to have the same level of empathy as women, do an equal share of household chores and expect less room for the need to blow of steam after a long day at work. Ironically, women with careers have a similar challenge after a long day at work – they also lack the benefits of being the income earner in a traditional family (with reversed roles). There are several books too about dual-income challenges, but our main advice is to ask yourself first if this is the road you want to take, or that you perhaps want to play one of the two roles in a more traditional setup, now with equal appreciation for one role to the other.

About Bukuru

The core philosophy of Bukuru is that each person should test their own beliefs. The project started as a quest to categorize self-development books in such a way that it would become easier to find books that match your beliefs. However, along the way we concluded that the essence of most books can be captured in a few sentences – if the idea is original at all. Instead of helping people buy books, we now help people not buying books.