Ronaan said:
Excellent advice if I weren"t so shy (i.e. a huge pussy). Guess I"ll have tojust do it.
You"re not a pussy, you"re just shy. I"ve read a lot of things about helping get past the shyness. They are good ideas, and they"ve worked for me and other people, so I think it"s worth a shot. They suggest things like when you"re at the mall, just practice talking to people. Say "Hi, how are you?" randomly to strangers. You can just talk to them, ask a question or two then be on your way. Even if you"re not terribly shy it"s a great way to get in the talkative mood. A lot of people make a self-game about it, ie, to talk to 15 people in 1 hour in the mall. I still do these things to this day.
My best nights going out were the ones where I talked to almost ever person I saw along the way, shaking hands, being friendly. Complement other guys. It takes a hell of a man to talk to a mixed group of guys and girls and tell another guy that he has a great shirt on. It makes it so much easier to talk to people. And I also find when I"m in a talkative mood that if someone rejects my conversation it"s almost funny, because you can laugh at them for being so scared to talk to someone else (even if I/you are coming across as creepy, haha!) If you haven"t asked the girl out yet or openly started hitting on her (some would argue to never openly hit on a girl, and they"re probably right,... Dabamf!), and she rejects your conversation, then she is straight up just a bitch.
You can practice on all your customers too, just ask them how their day is going and maybe one or two more follow-up questions. It makes people feel comfortable when you"re friendly. I"m sure you"ve been places before and someone creates a mini-conversation with you and you walked away and thought "wow, what a nice guy/girl." If it"s a case where you"re only too shy to talk to the girl, but not others, then... I don"t know what to say Talk to her, kinda pick on her (I know we all hate Mystery here, but I love his line "wow, you can"t take this girl anywhere!" when a girl does something goofy.) All the pickup artist guys say if you start focusing too much on one girl the best thing is to just forget about it, because you"re probably going to fuck it up. But you won"t fuck it up because you"re an awesome guy and she"d be lucky to be with you.
But honestly, practice can really, really help with being shy or not liking talking to people. Most of us have been there and it"s something you can really master and get past. The really neat thing is learning about conversation and stuff. When I started reading about it, it helped me realize when things were occurring. I could tell if a girl was remotely interested, completely disinterested, or whatever else. It"s like you become wholly more aware of what"s going on. You can even manipulate the conversation, ie, let there be a little silence and she if she picks the conversation back up with you, or is quick to terminate it once it appears over. There"s a ton of books out there, and tons of shit for free on the internet.
I have a bad habit of getting excited when someone talks about something that"s familiar to me, and I tend to cut them off before they get to finish their thought. I recently read this thing about conversation fuck ups, and it happened to focus on precisely a problem I had, and it was pretty interesting. It made it clear how when I do things like that, it sucks for the person talking because that part of their conversation which peaked my interest might have had nothing to do with the point they were actually trying to make. Also, it made a suggestion of when someone finishes a statement about their opinion or whatever, kind of give them a 1 or 2 second wait before your respond. Because a majority of the time after they had a second to think about what they said they will want to elaborate more on it. It"s a pretty damn neat idea and it makes the person feel a lot closer to you when they feel like they can fully express their ideas around you.
I don"t know man. I guess if you can identify your weaknesses that means you can work on them. It really, really, really can"t do anything but help. Good luck and please give updates.