You have to be ok with believing that you’re not annoying others when talking about yourself and asking about them. And you have to do it in a not-creepy way. I haven’t quite figured it out yet.
Redefine creepy as ‘surpressing emotions’.
When you surpress the awareness of surpressing emotions, then you surpress even more, so you appear to be more creepy.
Creepy has a lot to do with not picking up on signals from other people that your attention is not wanted (or in the case of genuine creeps not caring about and ignoring those signals). Unfortunately that works against the advice you just gave. I do realize this is problematic when that advice is kind of needed by someone who suffers from excessive self-consciousness.
And of course you mainly learn to pick up on those signals by practice. Which I guess points back to your advice.
You have to be ok with believing that you’re not annoying others when talking about yourself and asking about them. And you have to do it in a not-creepy way. I haven’t quite figured it out yet.
The creeper paradox: the harder you try not to be, the more you appear to be.
Redefine creepy as ‘surpressing emotions’. When you surpress the awareness of surpressing emotions, then you surpress even more, so you appear to be more creepy.
Creepy has a lot to do with not picking up on signals from other people that your attention is not wanted (or in the case of genuine creeps not caring about and ignoring those signals). Unfortunately that works against the advice you just gave. I do realize this is problematic when that advice is kind of needed by someone who suffers from excessive self-consciousness.
And of course you mainly learn to pick up on those signals by practice. Which I guess points back to your advice.
This is like the imposter syndrome but applied to every social interaction. This used to be my life, but it kinda shifted away eventually for me.
Anything in particular help you shift away from that?
For me, it was partly because I was growing older but the biggest impact was when I began training in martial arts, specifically kendo and iaido.