Which, as a matter of fact, I have been doing. But when I started learning guitar, I did not already know to ask "what exercises can I do to strengthen my hand so I can play barre chords better". I started with "where do I begin", and went from there. As I played more and more, I begun to see the things I needed to know in order to improve. The same follows here.
I wouldn't even know where to start in looking for a mentor. Any suggestions?
The reason I was not so specific is because my two overarching problems are themselves very wide: (1) having less than optimal impulse control resulting in sometimes making poor social decisions without prior thought and control, and (2) not possessing sufficient data on social knowledge/skills to know what to do in a variety of situations.
I am not yet at a stage where I could say exactly what it is that I need to learn, so I am looking for a wide variety of avenues to start down. Once I've made a solid start, I will be able to actually see the specific questions.
I'm definitely willing to sift through things in the PUA community to give myself some grounding in what to go ahead and do, can you give me any suggestions of where to start looking?
When I say I can't stimulate visual thinking, I more mean the problem solving element - I can construct visual thoughts in my mind with some effort, but I couldn't then work through those visualisations as a primary tool to solve problems. I'm curious as to how that works - do people who do this have a better ability to retain a visualisation in their short term memory, whether innate or practiced? Is there more to it than that?
So I find I can force myself to visualise that but it would be consistently born of the concept thought first, like "oh that's a line perpendicular to the line between X and y" and then I can paint the graph in my mind. But I don't need to - I can think the concept and then apply it to paper without visualisation and I tend to find that easier.
What intrigues me precisely is visual thinking for problem solving - ie a student who can easily perform arithmetic between graphs by visualising the transformations in their mind rather than doing calculations on paper.
As a uni student just finishing the second of what may be six years, I think I'm a ways away from having a manager or boss to go to for this (and most of my work/income is not in any kind of office/workplace).