Charisma On Command YouTube channel

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A doctor prescribed/directed me to frequent the YouTube channel Charisma On Command.

I believe he did so because he thought I might benefit from the information presented therein.

Frankly, though, I’m not getting anything out of it. It seems like it should be helping me with social skills but I find the videos to be focused on presenting “hacks” and “tricks” as if they are rooted in deceiving others.

…and I don’t want to be guilty of tricking/deceiving others -ever.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with something you were prescribed/directed to yet it was actually not helpful?

Never let a YouTube video do your thinking for you.

I think the perception of deceit or trickery happens when you have to actively learn social skills.

You're not learning anything different from a person who picked up the skills naturally from watching others and trial and error and never even noticed they were learning anything.

You're learning the same thing, just differently.

Youtube is a perfectly good learning resource, you just have to be selective, much as you would be about choosing a book to learn from.

Personally I've been advised to do Cognitive Behavioural Therapy several times by mental health doctors. It's never worked for me because when I need help with my mental health, I'm not in a space where I'm going to engage with it. Its like telling someone who is starving to go out and chase down a deer. I don't have the energy because I haven't eaten anything for a week.

One of the first videos Charisma On Command offers me is called 'STOP LOOKING AWKWARD.'

The channel is not appropriate for me as an autistic person.

Most of these guys are hacks, selling the idea that you need to "appeal to everyone"
to "get a lot of chicks".

This is a terrible life philosophy and a terrible attitude for an autistic, due to the highly monotropic (one topic)
way we think. We should only learn to manage for those around us, not catering to everyone.
He might have a few decent tricks to be aware of - I think the reframing video was useful for me,
I used it to get a security guard to stop bothering me in the library.

Remember that people are exceptionally diverse, even NTs stuff up, and many NTs actually appreciate the way we are because they learn to see through BS tricks like those of these asshats, if you "learn" these social skills you will be different, and less likeable because you will come across as a poorly practiced pick-up artist, instead of an authentic, different person.

You just need to learn to filter for toxic attitudes well and find a small group that accept you and are kind, for whom you need to do
the least amount of masking possible, then use them for what advice you need in your local social environment.
Persistence helps. After a certain point people just accept you.
Google the "wizard of new zealand". This guy was a total nutter and yet he was eventually
appointed by the government as an official wizard and defended (but also attacked) by the local population.

"teaching me how NOT to be autistic" doesn't work. No matter how many times people tell me I fail at something, I don't automatically improve "now I know". I am fully aware of my failings in so many ways, but I can not necessarily improve my performance now that I know. I found out once I got diagnosis that I have 25th percentile visual processing and 35th percentile auditory processing. this means that I miss up to 75 percent of visual input and 65 percent of what I hear. No matter how hard I try, I am still attempting to understand almost everything I see or hear in "real time" while the conversation, presentation, lecture, meeting, class, movie, play, or other "real time" things are happening. No amount of telling me to look people in the eye, acknowledge what they say, recognize body language, or other "social training" skills can help the processing I was given at birth. Telling me how I fail and expecting me to miraculously change "now I know" is a load of BS and totally useless. Many others are the same. It is like trying to teach a fish to climb a tree or a whale to walk. Some of just don't have the same equipment for living as others do.

Like DuckHairback said, the advice is not being deceptive, it's what NTs already do.

Imagine everyone is robots. But NT robots downloaded the social program in their early years. A lot of Autistic robots did not download them or incompletely downloaded them. NTs think the social program is just part of who they are because they downloaded it so young. To many Autistics, because it was lacking or incomplete, we may view getting the program later in life as changing ourselves or deception. Yet it's not wrong to use these techniques if we want to. The NTs have been the whole time. They've been doing laps with an advantage.

^
Yes. Ive stumbled upon COC vids. Often quite interesting. Though you're right that its mostly the KIND of stuff that comes naturally to NTs....even your average NT doesnt have the world class thinking-on-your-feet abilities of the TV talk show hosts that they use as positive examples and cant actually duplicate the examples. But you can still learn.

And what they show isnt really "deceptive" that Ive seen ...except to the extent that any use of normal etiquette is "coloring the truth" a bit.

Mind that this is me, my own social skills and experience; I don't think I need them and I don't mask.

I have a social knack (it's one of my counter-aspie trait that I inherited. It's genetic and generational directly coming from my mother's maternal grandfather; so don't bother)
They're NTs with above average social skills and are extroverts. In addition that I seem to drawn particular types of NTs that are above average EQ; so I get to observe them closer.

So I have a particularly different mindset when it came to socializing.
But I don't know what to do with it because I'm autistic. So I went looking at it, see what I could do with it and...


So I looked plenty of it's videos...
.. Well, a lot of it are the stuff that I already knew in concept, in theory, and occasionally in application if and if I'm in a state of regulation, clear-headedness and high levels of boredom.

And I prefer more -- getting away with not masking. Getting away with being outside status quo, etc. I already know how to take over the room.


A lot of it I saw so far, nothing new or mind-blowing. Nothing insightful. Nothing that got me into different heights.


Except for romantic related topics.
As an apathetic asocial aroace, easy or not easy, the skill is pointless for me.


Otherwise; it's like most social skills related lessons I've seen countless times; stuff to do with emotions, expressions, overcoming social anxiety, how to 'behave', what and how to say things -- these things are practically obsolete (practically like lessons for kiddies) in my case and had to modify some of them relatively to my culture and my own preferences of how I want to express things, knowingly that it may not look like it to NTs.

It does not teach more subtle things; how to not be impulsive, how to multitask, how to read air and timing -- timing is huge. It's really just something that cannot be taught.

Or something impossible like how to not be monotropic (or which to go monotropic to), how to make do with APD, etc.

There's communicating these conditions and get others to accept that fact.
Then there's how to not let others exploit said conditions. And then there's how to not be annoying about it or not being guilty with it.

How to not have (all) emotions influence you too much, etc. Spotting 'red flags' are not enough.
And I do not want to learn scripting as a means to compensate with my verbal abilities

Countless prerequisites that NDs may struggle to gain or even not have to begin with -- like executive dysfunction issues most of all.

And more unspoken stuff -- like how to use your foreigner status, how to use your below average reputation, how to pre-establish things before you even start interacting for first impressions, the pitfalls of performative interaction and subsequent expectations as a consequence (the issues of masking basically)...

Nothing about how to use NTs assumptions against them, only convincing them of assuming things.



... I for one, want to hack them NT social skills.

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Ive seen this channel & others and they are quite good at helping people, although practice is a lot harder than just knowing, i wish these resources existed when i was younger.

Those who complain about being made less autistic miss the point.

The world doesn't care about our autism, try to help yourself or don't know one else outside your family zone will care either way, but your life will be harder as a result and again no one will care about that.

Society is a jungle you have to take what you can to self improve.

I watched a couple of the videos just now and I was surprised that I actually found them quite useful.

I love looking for “hacks” in the real world and treating people & psychology as if they were robots & programs. I have always operated like this: approaching social skills from a logical point of view because they don’t seem to happen naturally to me.

I understand the point that it can seem dishonest, but then again few people seem interested in engaging authentically with me, so I don’t really mind putting on an act in order to get some sort of social experience

I took a brief look at a couple of the videos on that channel. They go way too fast for me to take in, and the whizz-bangs and "bubbly" style also got in the way of my taking in the content, though one of the videos was more sober than the other. I didn't notice that they were recommending a lot of faking, but it might be there somewhere in that huge collection, and like I said, the pace was too fast for me to follow so I wasn't able to analyse the tips very well. Too much information, overload error.

And the actual tips would be very hard to empirically test. It would involve memorizing a lot of suggestions and being able to quickly recall the right one when the situation happens to come up in real life, which might be a long time after the lecture. But some of them did look like they might be good quality, so if the student happens to notice a tip for a situation they're often in, and feels it might be a good one, they might well remember it, try it out, and find that it does some good.

So much for the channel. Personal experience of being prescribed fixes that don't work, yes I've noticed that a few times. Doctor's recommendation for a path to smoking cessation wasn't even a path really, he just offered me some free nicotine gum in return for me signing a pledge to quit in a month or something. As I was already using nicotine gum in my own plan to cut down gradually, that wasn't much of an alternative path. I suppose the theory was that by promising him I'd quit by a certain date I'd be more motivated to quit, but I have little reverence for the doctor and I don't respond well to the threat of punishment ("you broke your promise"), so I think it would have just made me feel bad. His dogmatic advice that I needed to go cold turkey on the tobacco - I'd already tried that and failed. So I carried on in my own sweet way and eventually kicked the habit by my own intervention. It's a shame I couldn't do it quicker but that can't be helped.

I think it's a mistake to expect too much of doctors and of people who recommend this or that fix too enthusiastically. Hopefully most doctors would admit that their recommendations are mostly just a matter of "You might want to give this a try. It might fail but it's been known to work on the right person." A doctor won't impress me by telling me (s)he's going to "put me on" this or that medication. (S)he will impress me if (s)he shows me the full range of options, explains the pros and cons honestly, lets me decide what to do, and respects my right to choose for myself, even if I choose to do nothing. (S)he can recommend what (s)he thinks best but, especially if (s)he doesn't know me very well, it had better be done as a mild recommendation and not a "I'm going to be very disappointed in you if you don't take my advice" edict. It's my funeral if I make the wrong decision.