I find it helpful to think of that physical barrier as your own emotions barring you from entering a state where the uncertainty as to whether you'll be safe grows too high to trust yourself to operate in real time.
The problem isn't really being liked or not being liked, the problem is the cognitive overload of trying to predict what will happen and respond to it in realtime, which is sure to set in when one's mental model of the potential interaction is very uncertain. Of course, if your brain quits in a conversation, the other person is not going to be very impressed with you, so this kind of failure carries social risk itself.
The way to fix this is to have as many interactions which are bearable as possible so as to build out the mind's mental model of itself and others in social situations. Gradually the danger just fades away. There's no substitute for firsthand experience; no amount of premeditating, ruminating, or brooding will fix this.
> The problem isn't really being liked or not being liked, the problem is the cognitive overload of trying to predict what will happen and respond to it in realtime, which is sure to set in when one's mental model of the potential interaction is very uncertain.
I think is a big piece. I have social anxiety and I have a tendency not to answer with what I'm thinking but what I think they want to hear because it's more predictable. This gets amplified tenfold in interviews. In an interview, I know that they're looking for a specific answer when they ask a question, but also that the answer differs from interviewer to interviewer. It's like there's this sub-process that is constantly running trying to figure out what to say, but in some situations it ends up locking up the system because it's using too many resources due to the constraints.
The problem isn't really being liked or not being liked, the problem is the cognitive overload of trying to predict what will happen and respond to it in realtime, which is sure to set in when one's mental model of the potential interaction is very uncertain. Of course, if your brain quits in a conversation, the other person is not going to be very impressed with you, so this kind of failure carries social risk itself.
The way to fix this is to have as many interactions which are bearable as possible so as to build out the mind's mental model of itself and others in social situations. Gradually the danger just fades away. There's no substitute for firsthand experience; no amount of premeditating, ruminating, or brooding will fix this.