Finished uni, full-time job, living with an old friend... besides work and bars/clubs I don't have no places to meet people - thus I want to train myself to build good rapport with people I meet the first time (for friendships, girlfriends, anything) which is something I'm terrible in.
Problems I identified
1. I'm quite talkative when I'm with friends, but I have problems talking to people I don't usually talk to or meet for the first time. I don't know what to talk about, I'm afraid of saying something stupid, I loose focus during the interaction, and people become bored with me.
2. When I'm in a group of people interacting with a group of people, I can't draw attention to myself over people I'm with, I feel I'm "somewhere in the background", I also often loose focus and am afraid to draw this attention to myself because I'm afraid of not knowing what to say, just like the first point.
3. Speech problems - I'm having big problems with talking too fast and having troubles pronouncing words correctly sometimes, so I have to sometimes repeat myself and people tell me I talk too fast and not clearly.
Traits I am trying to work on
1. Being outgoing - I can modulate my voice to sound confident, I know something about body language, but I want to be talkative with random people, and come off as and intelligent guy leading an interesting conversation, not someone who's boring, doesn't know what to say and looses it.
2. Being charismatic - I want to draw attention to myself when I'm interacting in a group of people.
3. Training to be better at speech - I want to work on speeking slower and more clearly.
Solutions I've found and use to work on these
1. Going to bars/clubs twice a week to interact with people - I do interact with people, but these interaction doesn't seem to get any better - I know what I do wrong, I do draw conclusions, but I don't know how to change how I behave so this practice seems to be for nothing.
2. I've been trying to speak slower a couple of times but it usually didn't do nothing. I don't know how to work on my pronounciation.
I have a good, well-paid job, I have my own apartment, and a couple of close friends - and yet I'd want to have a bit more friends, likely women (I'm a computer programmer so my friends are mostly men - well, that's my environment), not get a red face when I say something I didn't want to, not envy others their personality and social skills. I'm 22, I have planned moving to another country by myself as an adventure (to work), I also want to become a manager, or a leader, in my future career, so I want to develop these skills.
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Ok, tons of books about self-improvement, practicing interactions - can it really be learnt? How can I learn it? What books should I read? How should I practice? Any advice or insight would be appreciated, thanks!