How to Master Your Social Life, Raise Your Status, and Win More Negotiations

Want to connect with those who can help you get ahead? Discover how to make yourself known and leverage your way into opportunity.

Are you tired of always fighting for attention? Plagued by unfair treatment in the workplace? Lacking anybody cool to confide in? Sociologist and entrepreneur Lucio Buffalmano’s resource-filled website has led thousands of students down a path of flourishing power and riches. Bestselling author Ali Scarlett has helped countless readers position themselves to mingle with the international elite. And now they’ve come together to share their advanced science-backed methodology for achieving highly gratifying personal empowerment.

The Social Strategist: How to Master Your Social Life, Raise Your Status, and Win More Negotiations is an eye-opening analysis into how high-achievers attain excellence. And by unpacking the highs and lows of personal and professional relationships and interactions, Buffalmano and Scarlett’s powerful insights will help you pave the road to consistently stellar results. With real-world-tested training, you’ll soon be taking control of power plays, making others take notice, and becoming an influential social charmer.

In The Social Strategist, you’ll discover:

  • The importance of building a strong social circle for enhanced support and to open new doors
  • How to influence others so your rate of success increases with each negotiation
  • Why raising your social standing is imperative to stepping up the ladder of achievement
  • Ways to achieve the best possible outcomes of successful communication and negotiations through science-backed training
  • A list of real-life, everyday power moves, practical and actionable scripts, and much, much more!

The Social Strategist: How to Master Your Social Life, Raise Your Status, and Win More Negotiations is your handbook for cementing a public perception that gains allies, attracts top mentors, and creates new openings. If you like research-reliant advice, purpose-built approaches, and in-depth revelations, then you’ll love Lucio Buffalmano and Ali Scarlett’s invaluable manual.

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Excerpt From The Social Strategist © Copyright 2022 Lucio Buffalmano and Ali Scarlett

CHAPTER 1

HOW TO GAIN POSITIVE INFLUENCE AND LEVERAGE OVER ANYONE YOU WANT

“Charismatic people are that way not because they have access to a bunch of techniques most of us don’t. But, because they execute many of their social fundamentals a little better than normal… Social skills are skills like any other…in the end, you have to practice to really get things down.”
—Chris MacLeod, The Social Skills Guidebook

Lucio agrees. The most charismatic people are not using any special tech- niques, they’re simply executing the fundamentals better than most.
If at any point in time throughout this book you feel like things are getting “too advanced” for you or that there has to be an easier way, be patient with yourself before you throw in the towel. Social skills are a skill set. There is no magic technique, insider tip, or quick hack to get good at them—especially not if you want to reach the advanced level. Social skills are a skill like any other that take time and practice before you can gain any understanding or mastery in them.

With that said, feel free to go back over any points that you feel you don’t quite understand yet as many times as you need. The information you’ll dis- cover in this book (including this chapter) is unlike anything the common self-help literature is teaching, and it’s certainly not taught in school. So, it’s completely OK to take your time learning and understanding the concepts, strategies, and techniques you are going to get from this point forward.
Now, finally, let’s start with the very first thing you need to know to develop advanced social skills. The social exchange.
The social exchange is foundational to how the most successful high-achievers of this world navigate their relationships. With this chapter, you’ll learn how to navigate your relationships like a high-achiever too.
First, let’s start with a definition:

“The social exchange theory is a framework model that looks at social relationships as exchanges among individuals who seek to maximize their selfish interests.”

The social exchange theory starts from the proven premise that people prefer relationships that add value to their lives. These are the relationships that advance their interests, make them feel good, and generally make them better off.

HOW THE SOCIAL EXCHANGE HELPS YOU

When you understand the transactional nature of human relationships—the parts of us that are always checking whether or not a relationship helps us or hurts us—it will help you to:

  1. Assess people’s
  2. Recognize and choose givers and collaborators who make your life better.
  3. Recognize and cut out the “takers” who hamper your progress.
  4. Be a better friend or partner.
  5. Be a better leader.

To clarify what we mean when we say “value,” here is a quick definition:

“In social exchanges, value is an umbrella term for everything that makes or has the potential to make people better off (when the value is positive).”

“Value” includes both material and emotional benefits.

Emotional benefits include things such as attention, gratitude, appreciation, or a positive energy that uplifts people. It can also be as simple as an honest compliment.

What people want and appreciate is “value-positive” (meaning it adds value to your life), and what they dislike and avoid is “value-taking” (meaning it takes value from your life). People naturally prefer dealing and engaging with value-giving individuals (people who give value or make us generally better off ), and we often avoid the value-taking ones (people who take away value or make us worse off ).

High-value people are people with an abundance of positive value to give us. Generally speaking, these high-value people are people who provide (or could provide) what others want. For that simple fact, high-value people are highly sought after.

Now, your efforts to develop a relationship with someone is a negotiation. And, you negotiate your relationships both verbally and non-verbally. Therefore, if you want to have the best chances of building solid relationships with others, you need to care for more than what you say. You also need to make sure you present yourself to others as a high-value individual.

Why? Simple—because people want to be around people who make their lives better.

We’ll dive deeper into this in later chapters, but this is the not-so-secret secret to how to master your social life. You can build a social circle of cool friends, allies, and mentors at will when they know you can add value to their lives (make their life better). So, since high-value individuals are people who make (or can make) the lives of others a lot better, who are the low-value people? They’re the opposite. They are people who rarely make others better off and who often make others worse off. It’s the low-value people who are far more likely to become value-takers, and for this simple reason, they are shunned, avoided, and disliked.

So, your takeaway is this: by providing value and/or becoming a higher-value individual, you become the person everyone wants to be around—so long as you’re also smooth and warm toward others (more on that later).

Now, to keep tabs on how much value you’re giving, people do something called value accounting. Think of value accounting as a sort of social book- keeping where people naturally keep track of who is giving and who is taking, including who could give and who could take.

There is sound evidence that almost everyone keeps a “social accounting tab.” People do this to make sure they are surrounded by the type of person who makes their life better and not someone who makes their life worse.

When we expect a value-negative transaction from someone (when we expect someone to be value-taking), we avoid them. And when we see the potential for a value-positive transaction (which is where someone could be value-giv- ing), we welcome them—and sometimes even chase them. Generally speak- ing, we are also much more likely to follow the value-givers and be influenced by them.

You might notice that the main takeaway here is to become and act like a val- ue-giver and avoid being (or coming across as) a value-taker. And, that’s right. The more you can get others to view you as helpful to their life rather than harmful, the more you can get relationships with those people—including high-value people who could make your life a lot better.

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