Social Butterfly
Party Tricks for Social Suavity
And now, a Shelf Life that has absolutely nothing to do with writing.
Today I exhausted all my social muscles because I started a new job and I met a bunch of new people. Everyone was cool and welcoming but, still, meeting new people is hard. Starting a new job is hard. Being my best possible self for an entire day is hard. I need breaks to be my normal self for a while. My normal self is three possums under a trench coat trying to get into an R-rated movie.
My partner took me out to dinner to celebrate starting my new job and, while we were there, I said, “Today I’m going to write a Shelf Life about being socially suave,” and she said, “Where will you find someone to provide expertise on being socially suave?” It took way too long to arrive at the understanding that she was messing with me.
The best possible version of myself is socially graceful. A friend once referred to me as “the most socially capable person I know,” which I have arranged to be engraved on my tombstone one day. However, social grace is not something that comes naturally to me. I am an ambivert—that is, I draw energy or recharge my “battery” from being on my own and from being around others. I need a mix of both to function well.
But I am shy by nature and if I don’t make myself socialize then I won’t socialize and I will eventually run out of fuel in the energy tank and then my body starts draining life force from my mental health and it’s not great. I have to make myself socialize, so that my battery stays charged. I like to be at 70 percent or higher. I get anxious below 50 percent. I am a cell phone battery.
Like most life skills, social grace can be faked till it is made—if you know how to fake it. Like the noble possum—of which I am three, under a trench coat, trying to buy a ticket to Deadpool & Wolverine without an adult present—I collect life skill hacks like they are choice tidbits of garbage and I have accumulated variety of these to share (hacks not choice tidbits of garbage).
So today, in a Shelf Life that has literally nothing to do with writing, editing, or publishing, I’m sharing some tips and tricks that even the most introverted soul can use to impersonate a social butterfly, or at least a social luna moth, which we all know is just as good.
Remember One Fact
If you’re an introvert you might be kind of a nerd. Not all introverts are nerds but there’s a large overlapping area in the Venn diagram. Nerds are great at remembering facts. I’m a little too good at remembering facts and I start rattling them off when I’m nervous, to fill silence, which is super awkward. Don’t do that.
Okay: So I used to work with a guy, the head of the department I was in, who was not good at socializing with the staff. I picked this trick up from observing him: He seemed to know one fact about everyone in the department, and he could use that to make conversation with anyone in the department without having to actually get to know them. For instance, the one fact he knew about me was that I drove a Toyota Matrix. I had my Matrix for about 15 years, long after Toyota had stopped making them and they became less common on the road. I really did love that car. If Toyota put out a new Matrix today I’d buy one tomorrow. Anyway, every time this guy saw me he would ask if I was still driving the ol’ Matrix, and how was it holding up, and did I think Toyota might revive the model, and did I see the article in Car and Driver last month that referenced the Matrix as an iconic car of the aughties?
What I learned from watching him is that if you can remember one interesting or significant fact about someone you’ve met, you can easily make conversation in a pinch. Remembering the one interesting fact is also a great way to be the social glue that holds a gathering together. This is because you can use one fact about each of two people when introducing them to get them conversing with each other even if they’ve never met before.
This is a social butterfly pro trick: When introducing two people, don’t just give them each others’ names. Give them an interesting fact about each other. For instance,
Mark, this is Lindsey. Last year she rode her bicycle cross-country from Los Angeles to Portland, Maine! Lindsey, Mark maintains a herd of pygmy goats that he rents out to mow people’s lawns.
Mark and Lindsey now have plenty to talk about, even if I wander off to hide in the coat closet and breathe into a paper bag.
Take the Last Thing (and Fetch More If You Can)
I learned this trick from a CEO. To be a successful CEO, I think you have to be at least somewhat socially graceful (or fake it well) because that job involves a lot of meeting people. I was at a party with a whole bunch of people—including this CEO—and there was a tray of canapes by my conversation group. The canapes disappeared until there was only one left.
The CEO swooped in to join our conversation. He waited patiently for an opening and then introduced himself. He snagged the last canape and said: “I always take the last one. If there’s one thing left on a plate, it becomes a distraction to everyone nearby.” He was right. The sole surviving canape had a chokehold on the conversation group that no dumpling rightly deserved. We’d all been eyeing it, not taking it, but wondering who would. After a few more moments of conversation, he took off and said “I’m going to find the server and get her to bring you some more canapes, carry on.”
The lesson I took from this experience is that everyone in a social situation is doing their best not to be awkward. It’s not just me. We’re all trying not to be rude or weird. In the case of the last canape, everyone in the conversation group was distracted by the presence of the last dumpling—“Should I take it? Does someone else want it? Should I offer it to someone else? Dang, I’m hungry. Am I the only one who’s hungry?” and so on.
What the CEO did in this situation was step in, remove the distraction, defuse the tension by naming the awkward thing, refocus the conversation group, and then leave.
This is especially true if you are hosting. You need to be the person who opens another bottle of wine (or deputizes someone to do it) so your party guests don’t get distracted staring at the last half-glass in the bottle wondering if they should take it. Bring out and open another bottle to alleviate the distraction, deactivate everyone’s scarcity mentality, and restore the social equilibrium.
The next trick, too, is borrowed from my observation of this CEO.
Name the Awkward Thing
If you ever find yourself in a battle of wits with the fae, know that you can control a faerie by speaking its true name. Likewise, they can control you by speaking your true name so the real life pro tip here is to find out faeries’ names before they find out yours. Maybe you think you don’t need this advice because the fae aren’t real but one day you might thank me for this.
Awkwardness is like a faerie in that you can assert power over it by speaking it’s name. When something awkward happens, most everyone who witnesses it goes into this thought spiral—“oh my gosh, how embarrassing. I’m experiencing secondhand embarrassment. Did other people notice? Maybe no one else noticed? Should I pretend I didn’t notice? Are they pretending they didn’t notice?” You can be the person who interrupts the community thought spiral by simply naming the awkward thing and moving the social event back toward the tracks.
Someone breaks a glass or spills their drink?: “Party foul! Haha I’ll get a broom.” During an awkward silence, my grandmother used to say, in an ominous tone of voice, “Silence reigned . . . and we all got wet.” If someone makes a joke that doesn’t quite land, offer your favorite unfunny dad joke. All of these things probably seem a little bit hamfisted because they are. The idea is to take the attention from the person who is feeling awkward and put it on yourself, to relieve their feeling of awkwardness and also to name the awkward thing so that it dies and returns the social event to equilibrium.
Name the People
Finally: This is the party trick I could never get my ex spouse to master. It’s really simple. When you greet someone. If you know their name. Say their name. That’s it, that’s the whole trick. Instead of saying “Hey, long time no see!” say “Hey, Laura, long time no see!” Instead of “Hello, how are you?” say “Hello, Mike, how are you?”
First, psychologically speaking, people like to hear their name. This is scientifically sound information. When someone hears their name, something happens in their brain that is unlike the response to any other sound. Saying someone’s name when you greet them, when you say goodbye to them, or occasionally during a conversation, leaves a positive impression of yourself and the interaction.
Caution: Don’t repeat their name over and over with every sentence or at every opportunity. That’s creepy.
The second benefit of this technique is that anyone nearby who doesn’t know that person’s name—or, worse, has forgotten it!—now knows their name. My ex spouse came from a huge family and we routinely attended weddings with hundreds of guests, many of whom I might have met once, for ten minutes, several years before. Before every family event I coached him to please say peoples’ names when he greeted them so I could be reminded of their names, but this tactic just eluded him. Don’t be that guy. Be the guy who says peoples’ names.
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