If you need to improve social skills there are probably some key areas that you have concluded you must work on. Here are some useful techniques that can help you in situations where you meet new people.

1) Learn to listen. This will improve social skills to a surprising degree. If you get engaged in a conversation with someone there are simple ways you can tell them you are listening that will make them feel engaged and understood - and therefore warm to you. These are "giving some feedback", for example where you chip in to let the other person know you have been paying attention. If they are telling an anecdote, ask at some point "so he picked up the fork and..", or jut make some comment to prove you are listening.

2) Building a rapport - this is largely an unconscious thing but you can work on it as part of a plan to improve social skills. It is true you more feel this than do it knowingly, but things that will help are adopting a similar stance to the person you are with, using similar language to them and the giving feedback idea that we talked about earlier in this article.

3) Eye contact - to establish some level of communication, a big part of that drive to improve social skills, then you do need to make eye contact with people. Avoiding eye contact naturally looks shifty and suspicious, but on the other hand excessive eye contact can be disconcerting for whoever you are looking at. The simple rule is, if it feels uncomfortable, you are at one end of the spectrum, rather than in the middle.

4) Getting over shyness - this is a topic in itself but to communicate with people and have that rapport, you must lose some of the self consciousness that shy people can have.