People Skills Decoded

Make no mistake about it: knowing how to meet people is a skill that will, depending on your case, either save or enrich your social life. Like most of us, you may live in a huge human settlement, but that doesn’t necessarily make meeting new people easy. The essential benefit of knowing how to meet [...]

Let’s face it: we’re all social animals and we want to be liked by others. That’s perfectly fine, as long as you don’t become desperate for people’s approval and feel shitty when someone doesn’t like you. It’s cool to want to know how to make people like you. One of the central benefits of having [...]

It has been a flourishing year on People Skills Decoded. I’ve let my mind run wild in 2010 and I’ve structured some of my best insights into over 70 articles published here this year. Now, at the end of the year, it’s a good moment to look back on this body of knowledge and point [...]

One variety of human beings we tend to have too many of in our lives (too many as in, more than zero) is controlling people. Considering the stress they can create, knowing how to deal with controlling people effectively is serious business and it requires a key set of people skills. Controlling People Explained Fundamentally, [...]

Reach a high enough level of success, skill or happiness, and you find out there are a lot of little green monsters around you, many of which you used to call friends, colleagues, partners or collaborators. Since envy is a common and tricky interpersonal occurrence, I believe that dealing with envious people effectively is one [...]

I remember many years ago, a woman told me how she is often bored because she doesn’t have a lot of friends. She was living in a city with over 3.000.000 people. I was shocked. I was wondering: “How can you live surrounded by so many people and not have enough friends to spend some [...]

We’ve all met them: they are the people who drain you of energy instead of enriching you, the people who pull you down instead of pushing you up, the people who require more then they can provide; the negative, wining, needy, manipulative people who can turn a happy day into a living hell. I call [...]

This article is written at the invitation of fellow blogger Abubakar Jamil, as part of the Life Lessons Series. You can find out more about this project and the people involved on his blog. It’s a very enjoyable activity for me to look back at my life so far, at the experiences I had, to [...]

I’m not generally a big fan of quick fixes and claims of fast improvement, for people skills or any other soft skill. I believe that most of them ignore the natural level of practice and repetition learning requires and they usually over-promise. However, I think there is one smart, effective way to get relatively quick [...]

I’m listening to the audio version of Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. So far, it’s a fascinating book and I have an intuition it only gets better. One thing I like about the characters in Ayn Rand’s novels is how they are constructed in epic proportions. Some of them are pure models of confidence, dedication [...]