How do I get over my fear of social gatherings where I know nearly no one?

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I'm a 17 year old girl, pretty, medium normal figure, about 5'9, and told that I have a great personality and am an amazing funny person-but, by people who have known me my entire life.

It's hard for me to start a conversation with someone I haven't know for a really long time. I don't know what to say, what should I ask, what should I do? In the beginning the reason for listing some of my characteristics was so that you, the answerer, can assume that my insecurities have nothing to do with any extrinsic quality.

However, when I was in middle school, I didn't have any friends and was coined to be "annoying, weird". I'm sure tons of people go through this and get over it, and I don't know if I have or not, because I always have a fear of not being good enough for certain people. There's always this little voice in the back of my mind saying "how will you ever be friends with those people." I'm going to a party in a few days where I know only 3 people, out of 60. These are also 17-23 year olds.

How do I start a conversation with some of them and leave them wanting to be my friend? I'm not that great at making friends, however, I really want to make tons of friends. I know I have to act confident, nice, strong, and try to be who I am, but its terribly hard for me to get out of my comfort zone with someone I am just meeting. How do I break all barriers and just show others who I am?

I know this is a huge and long question, and I really appreciate anyone who answers it.

social skills

loneliness

psychology

advice

tynamite

Finding a common ground is always a good to start a conversation with someone you know, or even someone you don't know if you can be psychic enough to be able to do that.

When entering a room, one should identify the three groups of people. The people you can be friends with, the people you could be friends with, and the people you can't be friends with. The definates, maybe's, and the nevers.

Coincidentally I was going to give this answer yesterday to this girl I'm mentoring on social skills. What I did to her once is call her stupid, to gauge her reaction, and she didn't do anything as in her words "It was because it was you that I didn't mind. If anyone else had said it I would have been angry".

The point is, is that, what you say to your friends is not really important, in regards of maintaining a relationship, even when you insult them, as they still wouldn't mind (to a certain extent). And most importantly, they'll stick by you anyway. However if someone who is not well acquainted with the person (let's not use the word friend here), it won't be the case. To anyone who is autistic or socially inept, this can be strangely confusing. Look at Exhibit A, B, and C

Xhttp://imageshack.us/a/img211/42...
Xhttp://imageshack.us/a/img688/41...
Xhttp://imageshack.us/a/img716/39...

Do you notice anything peculiar about the images?

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The answer is, Som did not write the comments. I did.
I basically photoshopped the images to get my comments, and put his face on them, to make it look like he wrote them instead of me.
Now why would I do this?
To fool the woman I'm mentoring, that's why.
I know that she speaks to Som, and when I showed her the comments, she wasn't suspicious at all, and she truly thought that Som wrote them, replying what she thought about what Som said.

I then asked "You've been speaking to the same person twice? What does it feel to know that Som and me are the same person?"

And she thought that that she just liked speaking to the same person twice, she supposed.

I then went on to mention that the ONLY difference between me and Som, is that I'm from the UK so I can talk about social skills from a Western aspect, and Som is from India so he can talk about social skills from an Eastern aspect.

She thought it was interesting how we both knew different things shaped by our environment, and was less interested by the topics we knew or were interested about as anyone in a library can learn those things. She then paused to listen to what else I had to say.

I then said, that because she got tricked, that me and Som are linguistically the same. Plain talking, nothing fancy going on.

But earlier, I said that in the beginning, when you're befriending someone, or when you're trying to get to know someone after first becoming your friend (not secured yet), that you have to turn on your manipulation on, to pull out all the fancy verbal gymnastics in order to become their friend. It's not enough when becoming someone's friend to merely state information, but you also have to get to know them, and make them feel good about themselves and feel like nothing else matters.

Going back up to earlier, autistic people or socially inept people might find problems with our neurotypical concept of the beginning of a relationship being more important in determining future outcomes than what is said later on once things are secure. Looking at Exhibit A, it is clear to see that Ellie only made the response she did, because I said it, and not because a stranger said it.

Xhttp://imageshack.us/a/img211/42...

And she was the one who inboxed me out of the blue, for a chat, wanting to be my friend. In this case, I didn't have to do any initiation.

Autistic people have trouble starting conversations with people, as they can only start conversations by asking people questions, so making a conversation flow and doing all the stuff that we do, is tiring and difficult. This also includes people who have Aspergers. Also they don't do small talk among their Aspie selves, they just ask the question and be out of it. "Hello" "Hi" "Do you want sex?" "No" "Okay" **walks off** So from that aspect, they find our rituals of small talk, to have unnecessary complexity.

And remember that Ellie only replied to me the way she did, because she's my friend.
Now think about the ramifications of this for a second.

It's not what you say in the relationship that's important, it's what you say in the beginning of it as you befriend the person.

Have a think about how crazy this is, and how linguistically likewise me and Som are, and you'll get to see things my way, enough to know that all the skill comes in how one makes friends.

Some people in this world are extroverts, who can boldly walk over to someone to approach them and shake their hand in such a grand manner, but I'm an introvert, so I can't. So I have to think of ways to reverse it, to make people approach me instead. I also noticed that when people approach me to become my friend and they make conversation with me, they are not purely looking for the answers to my questions, so they would be disappointed as a young child if I did was answer their questions. I had a long think about what they wanted off me.

What they wanted, was me to understand them, and for them to understand me; in equal measure. (This is why talking about yourself for a long time is considered as selfish.)

People use the beginning of a relationship to look determine whether they should trust you and what the relationship is based on.

(I used to always write short 1 paragraph answers, but people would downvote me and comment that they don't understand me. So that's why I write long answers. I literally thought this whole answer out in a split second.)

||||| === So this is where my answer begins === |||||

So people want to understand you, and for you to understand them, right?

But to understand, is much more than listening or merely responding. It's on a deeper level, right?

So for every person I spoke to, I decided to ask myself 2 things.

What can I do so that this person feels secure?
What can I do to reveal something about myself when I speak?

Every time I spoke to someone, I would constantly think those 2 questions in my head. It took me a long time to get this. Two months, six months until I fully got it.

And then one day, something just clicked.

One thing I do is reduce my vocabulary to the smallest possible amount of words as possible so I can say as little words as possible, and I also use lots of phrases, so I keep using the same phrases and sentence starters again and again. So for me, it would be easy enough for me to implement what just clicked, in how I already speak.

What can I do so that this person feels secure?

There are certain things you can say to be empathetic or show that you understand someone's line of thinking, such as

That's bad that is. // Are you............? // What do you think?

Remember to also use affirmative (below) as well as assuring (that's listed above) comments such as

"Do you see the X over there?" or agreeing with someone when they tell you something and adding a few words so it don't sound like a simple yes, or I dunno, use your imagination.

What can I do to reveal something about myself when I speak?

You would have to use ONE sentence as a comment to show what you think about something going on or a situation you've foreseen, in a way that lets others learn about you and how you see things. Alternatively you could use ONE comment about how you think introspectively, which might sound histronic.

I'm sure that you being you, you would know how to do this.

I phrase I use for this is "I would laugh if....."

==== Does it work?
I got to a conference late, and I saw some guy who was late too, and we both walked in at the same time. I asked him if he was late, then he said he was, then he started to ask me questions. We then walked in together and sat next to each other. It was that simple.

Another time I went to visit Bloomberg London with the Investment Society and I said affirmative comments to the guy that seemed for some reason to want to stand next to me, as not many people had friends there, and I would make observations about the stuff around me or how long it would take to get to the next place. Five hours later, he gave me some of his food on the coach back. He asked me if I had any food, I said that I ate it, then he offered. Then he told me where he was from.

PART TWO OF MY ANSWER

Have you now got rapport with that person? Good.

Now you're in that awkward I seem like his or her friend but I could not be his or her friend as we've only just started talking and I don't know how long we will be talking for, or if I can still talk to them once they are in another room and I approach them again.

Triple P system
Pager - People like it when they know that they are a part of your life, so maybe say what you're doing or planning on doing.
Prompt - Making a statement for someone to reply to. (I hardly ever ask questions. And now you know why. I ask questions in a different way. My advantage over this, is that the participant has more freedom over the words they choose to answer my statement/prompt with.)
Pathway - I can't fit what this means here because that would make the answer too long. In short, this means to make someone believe that they can do the little things that they are insecure about, to make them more confident, which applies to a wide array of things that they can do everyday, but more importantly, the little things they avoid doing each day. I haven't properly explained this in the slightest, so ignore the previous sentence.

MISCELLAENOUS

And that's about all I know about befriending people.
What are some effective ways for introverts to start conversations?

And the trick for the above answer that I didn't want to add, is to keep mentioning different topics in your sentences as you speak, rotating round, and eventually, the other person will latch onto one of those topics, and then talk about that. And they thought that they moved onto that because they thought of it, but actually you suggested it to them.

http://www.quora.com/Autism/What-scores-do-various-Quora-members-get-on-the-50-item-Autism-Spectrum-Quotient-Index-test/answer/Elizabeth-L-Mead/comment/1107866#comment1176283

To anyone thinking that I do verbal gymnastics when I befriend people, I will ask you whether people hide their bad traits and only show their good when they are around people who are new. (Yes they do, do that. So for that reason, we are all alike. We all have tricks for befriending people. We all put in lots of effort when befriending people And then once we are their friend, the manipulation and trying stops. It's tiring to do it always, so we only do it when befriending people. )

And this is why I don't read self help books. Because in my opinion, books like How To Make Friends And Influence People, teach people to be someone they're not. Someone not true to themselves, someone who knows how to lie and not be genuine to get what you want, teaching them how to be the Fonz (Fonzie from Happy Days) instead of a better version than themselves. They want you to manipulate to deceive people, whereas my manipulation is only to be scheming. The only thing personally, I would teach people to do social wise, is to be a better version of themselves,