say: social skills practice

You think of something to say. Then the moment passes. It happens in line at the store. In elevators. At the edge of a room where everyone else seems to have started already. You work out what to say, and by the time you have it, it is too late to say it. So it stays in. And another one joins it. You are not short of things to say. You say them constantly — on the walk home, in the shower, at two in the morning. The reply you thought of an hour late. The thing you almost said to the person at the counter. Most of what you say in a day, you say to yourself. WHAT YOU ACTUALLY WANT You are not trying to become a different person. You do not want to work a room, or be the loudest one in it, or have a personality transplant on the way to the store. You want to say something to the person next to you without rehearsing it first. You want to leave a place having spoken to someone in it. You want the thing other people appear to do without thinking about it to cost you a little less than it does. And somewhere you have already worked out that the person who talks to everyone is not braver than you. They started earlier, and they have had a few thousand more conversations since. Nobody handed them that. It is a skill, and skills are learned. The problem is that nobody gives you the reps. There is no obvious place to practice this, and "just put yourself out there" is not a practice, it is a dare. say is the reps. HOW IT WORKS say is a deck of small social challenges. You draw one card, you go and do it in real life, and then you write down what happened. Say where you are — waiting somewhere, buying something, out and about, or somewhere social. Turn over a card. It hands you one small thing to do: say one thing out loud, ask one question, or ask a second question after they answer. Then go and do it. Come back and write a couple of lines about how it went. BUILT TO BE UNPUNISHING No scores. No badges. Nothing in this app turns red, including failure. - Two cards a day at most. After the first is written up, a second is offered and never pushed. - "It went badly" is a proper entry. It looks exactly the same as "it went well", because you went either way. - Miss a day and nothing is lost. The gaps stay gaps. - Put a card down whenever you want. The day closes and nothing is owed. A card locks the moment you turn it over. There is no reshuffling until an easier one comes up, and that is the part that works. WHAT IS IN IT - 252 challenge cards across four situations - Three rungs — observe, ask, follow up — so you can see how far a card will ask you to go before you commit to it - Three opening lines on every card, for when your mind goes blank - A help sheet for each situation: what to expect, how to start, and what to do if it goes wrong - Cards that know the time of day. A "say good morning" card is never handed to you at nine at night, and a weekend card is never handed to you on a Tuesday - A notebook of everything you have written, and a calendar of the days you showed up - A card on your Lock Screen while you are carrying one WHO IT IS FOR You, if you find it hard to start a conversation with someone you do not know, and would rather practice it in small, survivable pieces than be told to put yourself out there. You are not going to feel different tomorrow. You will just have done one thing, and written down that you did it. Then another. The whole method is that the pieces are small enough that you actually go. Two hundred small conversations from now, you will not remember starting. You will just be someone who talks to people. It is deliberately quiet about all this. There is nothing here to keep up with.