Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Cant Stop Talking
Susan Cain
Description
At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society.
In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts--from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.
Key words: Introversion, Extroversion
To read reviews of this book visit Goodreads
My Notes
Introduction: The North and South of Temperament
They said she was “timid and shy” but had the courage of a lion.
The extrovert ideal – the belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight.
We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual – the kind who’s comfortable “putting himself out there.”
Introversion – along with its cousin’s sensitivity, seriousness and shyness – is now a second class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.
The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather that rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement.
Of course, there’s another word for such people: thinkers.
Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves. Introverts recharge their batteries by being alone; extroverts need to recharge when they don’t socialize enough.
Introverts feel “just right” with less stimulation, as when they sip wine with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle, or read a book. Extroverts enjoy the extra bang that comes from activities like meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes and cranking up the stereo.
Many psychologists would agree that introverts and extroverts work differently. Extroverts tend to tackle assignments quickly. They make fast (sometimes rash) decisions, and are uncomfortable multi-tasking and risk taking. They enjoy “the thrill of the chase” for rewards like money and status.
Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration. They’re relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame.
Our personalities also shape our social styles. Extroverts are the people who will add life to your dinner party and laugh generously at your jokes. They tend to be assertive, dominant and in great need of company. Extroverts thing out loud and on their feet; they prefer talking to listening, rarely find themselves at a loss for words, and occasionally blurt out things they never meant to say. They’re comfortable with conflict, but not with solitude.
Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were at home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.
Many introverts are also “highly sensitive”, which sounds poetic, but which is actually a technical term in psychology.
Part 1: The Extrovert Ideal
The rise of the mighty likeable fellow – How extroverts became the cultural ideal
Myth of charismatic leadership
When he analyzed what the highest performing companies had in common, the nature of their CEO’s jumped out at them. Every single one of them was led by an unassuming man. Those who worked with these leaders tended to describe them with the following words: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild mannered, self-effacing, and understated. The lesson is clear. We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own ego’s but the institutions they run.
…This man lost focus when he interacted too much with people, so he carved out time for thinking and recharging. He spoke quietly, without much variation in his vocal inflections or facial expressions. He was more interested in listening and gathering information than in asserting his opinion or dominating conversation.
…People respected not just his formal authority, but also the way he led: by supporting his employee’s efforts to take the initiative. He gave subordinates input into key decisions, implementing the ideas that made sense, while making it clear that he had the final authority. He wasn’t concerned with getting credit or even with being in charge; he simply assigned work to those who could perform it best. This meant delegating the most interesting, meaningful, and important tasks – work that other leaders would have kept for themselves.
…In the t-shirt folding study, the team members reported perceiving the introverted leaders as more open and receptive to their ideas, which motivated them to work harder and to fold more t-shirts.
Extroverted leaders, on the other hand, “may wish to adopt a more reserved quiet style”. They might want to sit down so that others may stand up.
When collaboration kills creativity – The rise of the new groupthink and the power of working alone
There’s a less obvious yet surprisingly powerful explanation for introverts’ creative advantage – introverts prefer to work independently, and solitude can be a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck once observed, introversion “concentrates the mind on the tasks in hand, and prevents the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.
The best violinist’s rates “practice alone” as the most important of all their music related activities. Elite musicians – even those who perform in groups – describe practice sessions with their chamber group as ‘leisure’ compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done.
What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in deliberate practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly.
If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move.
…That’s because the top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments and freedom from interruption.
Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same startling conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group sizes increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four.
If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.
Participants in brainstorming sessions usually believe that their group performed much better than it actually did, which points to a valuable reason of their continued popularity – group brainstorming makes people feel attached. A worthy goal, so long as we understand that social glue, as opposed to creativity, is the principle benefit.
What they didn’t tell us was why we were so prone to conform. What was going on in the minds of the kowtowers? Had their perception of the lines lengths been altered by peer pressure.
…That was exactly what happened – the conformists showed less brain activity in the frontal, decision making regions and more in the areas of the brain associated with perception. Peer pressure, in other words, is not only unpleasant, but can actually change your view of a problem.
…Most of the volunteers reported having gone along with the group because “they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer.” They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them.
The way forward, I’m suggesting, is not to stop collaborating face-to-face, but to refine the way we do it. For one thing, we should actively see out symbiotic introvert-extrovert relationships, in which the leadership and other tasks are divided according to people’s natural strengths and temperaments. The most effective teams are composed of a healthy mix of introverts and extroverts, studies show, and so are many leadership structures.
We also need to create settings in which people are free to circulate in a shifting kaleidoscope of interactions, and to disappear into their private workplaces when they want to focus or simply be alone.
Some companies are starting to understand the value of silence and solitude, and are creating “flexible” open plans that offer a mix of solo workplaces, quiet zones, casual meeting areas, cafes and reading rooms.
These kinds of diverse workplaces benefit introverts as well as extroverts, the system design researcher Matt Davis told me, because they offer more spaces to retreat to than traditional open-plan offices.
Part 2: Your Biology, Your Self?
Is Temperament Destiny? Nature & Nurture
Psychologists often discuss the difference between “temperament” and “personality.” Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix. Some say that temperament is the foundation, and personality is the building. Kagans work helped link certain infant temperaments with adolescent personality styles like those of Tom and Ralph.
Kagan hypothesized that infants born with an especially excitable amygdala would wiggle and howl when shown unfamiliar objects – and grow up to be children who were more likely to feel vigilant when meeting new people. And this is just that he found. In other words, the four-month-olds who thrashed their arms like punk rockers did so not because they were extroverts in the making, but because their little bodies reacted strongly – they were “highly reactive” – t new sights, sounds, and smalls. The quiet infants were silent not because they were future introverts – just the opposite – but because they had nervous systems that were unmoved by novelty.
The more reactive a child’s amygdala, the higher his heart rate is likely to be the more widely dilated his eyes, the tighter his void cords, the more cortisol (a stress hormone) in his saliva – the more ganged he’s likely to feel when he confronts something new and stimulating. As high-reactive infants grow up, they continue to confront the unknown in many different contexts, for visiting an amusement park for the first time to meeting new classmates on the first day of kindergarten. We tend to notice most a child’s reaction to unfamiliar people – how does he behave on the first day of school? Does she seem uncertain at birthday parties full of kids she doesn’t know? But what we’re really observing is a child’s sensitivity to novelty in general, not just to people.
High and low reactivity are probably not the only biological routes to introversion and extroversion. There are plenty of introverts who do not have the sensitivity of a class high-reactive, and a small percentage of high-reactive go up to be extroverts. Still, Kegan’s decades-long series of discoveries mark a dramatic breakthrough in our understanding go these personality types – including the value judgements we make. Extroverts are somethings credited with being “pro-social” – meaning caring about others – and introverts disparages as people who don’t like people. But the reactions of the infants in Kagan’s tests had nothing to do with people. These babies were shouting (or not shouting) over Q-tips. They were pumping their limbs (or staying calm) in response to the popping balloons. The high-reactive babies were not misanthropes in the making; they were simply sensitive to their environments.
Indeed, the sensitivity of these children’s nervous systems seems to be linked not only to noticing scary things, but to noticing in general. High-reactive children pay what one psychologist calls “alert attention” to people and things. They literally use more eye movements than others to compare choices before making a decision. It’s as if they process more deeply – somethings consciously, sometimes not – the information they take in about the world. In one early series of studies, Kagan asked a group of first-graders to play a visual matching game. Each child was shown a picture of a teddy bear sitting on a chair, alongside six other similar pictures, only one of which was an exact match. The high-reactive children spent more time than others consideration the alternatives, and were more likely to make the right choice. When Kagan asked these same kids to play word games, he found they also read more actually than impulsive children did.
High-reactive kids also tend to think and feel deeply about what they’ve noticed, and to bring an extra degree of nuance to everyday experiences. This can be expressed in many different ways. If the child is socially oriented, she may spend a lot of time pondering her observations of others – why Jaron didn’t want to share his toys today, why Mary got so made at Nicholas when he bumped into her accidentally. If he has a particular interest – in solving puzzles, making art, building sand castles – he’ll often concentrate with unusual intensity. FI a high-reactive toddler breaks another child’s toy by mistake, studies show, she often experiences more intense mix of guilt or sorrow than a lower-reactive child would. All kids notice their environments and feel emotions, of course, but high-reactive kids seem to see and feel things more. If you ask a high-reactive 7 year old how a group of kids should share a converted toy, writes the science journalist Winifred Gallagher, he’ll tent to come up with sophisticated strategies like “Alphabetize their last names, and let the person closest to A go first.”
Many high reactive become writers or pick other intellectual vocations where “you’re in charge: you close the door, pull down the shades and do you’re work. You’re protected from encountering unexpected things.
…these high reactive monkeys owed their success to the enormous amounts of time they spent watching rather than participating in the group, absorbing on a deep level the laws of social dynamics.
Beyond Temperament – The role of free will (and the secret of public speaking for introverts)
…the footprint of a high or low reactive temperament never disappeared in adulthood.
…We can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizeable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that was found in the high reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.
These seem like contractor principles, but they are not. Free will can take us far, suggests the research, but it cannot carry us infinitely beyond our genetic limits. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends with a computer.
We might call this the “rubber band theory” of personality. We are like rubber bands at rest. We are elastic and can stretch ourselves, but only so much.
…I realize it’s not true that I’m no longer shy; I’ve just learned to talk myself down the ledge (thank you, prefrontal cortex!).
…Human beings seek “just right” levels of stimulation – not too much and not too little. Stimulation is the amount of input we have coming in from the outside world. It can take any number of forms, from noise to social life to flashing lights. Extroverts prefer more stimulation than introverts do, and that this explained many of their differences; introverts enjoy shutting the doors to their offices and plunging into their work, because for them this sort of quiet intellectual activity is optimally stimulating, while extroverts function best when engaged in high wattage activities like organizing team-building workshops or chairing meetings.
Once you understand introversion and extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favorable to your personality. You can organize your life in terms of your “optimal levels of arousal” and what I call “sweet spots,” and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before. You’re sweet spot is the place where you’re optimally stimulated.
Imagine how much better you’ll be at this sweet-spot game once you’re aware of playing it. You can set-up your work, your hobbies and your social life so that you spend as much time inside your sweet spot as possible. People who are aware of their sweet spots have the power to leave jobs that exhaust them and start new and satisfying businesses.
Franklin was a politician, but Eleanor spoke out of conscience – Why cool is overrated
Highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap. They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises. They’re often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee. They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing a music recital) or judged for general worthiness (dating, job interviews).
But there are also new insights. The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive. They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions – sometimes acute bouts of job, but also sorrow, melancholy and fear.
Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments – both physical and emotional – usually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss – another person’s shift in mood, say or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
…sensitive types think is an unusual complex fashion. It may also help to explain why they’re so bored with small talk. “If you thinking in more complicated way,” she told me “then talking about the weather or where you went for your holidays is not quite as interesting as talking about values or morality.”
….sensitive people are highly empathetic. It’s as if they have inner boundaries separating them from other people’s motions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world. They tend to have unusually strong consciences. They avoid violent movies and TV shows; they’re acutely aware of the consequences of a lapse in their own behavior. In social settings they often focus on subjects like personal problems, which others consider “too heavy.”
…It’s as if they can’t help but feel what others feel.
It most settings people use small talk as a way of relaxing into a new relationship, and only once they’re comfortable do they connect more seriously. Sensitive people seem to do the reserve. They “enjoy small talk only after they’ve gone deep.” “When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.
Why did Wall Street crash and Warren Buffett prosper? – How introverts and extroverts think (and process Dopamine) differently
….Extroverted clients are more likely to be highly reward sensitive, while the introverts are more likely to pay attention to warning signals. They’re more successful at regulating their feelings of desire or excitement. They protect themselves better from the downside. “My introverted traders are much more able to say OK, Janice, I do feel these excited emotions coming up in me, but I understand that I can’t act on them.” The introverts are much better at making a plan, staying with a plan, being very disciplined.”
…The old brain is constantly telling us “YES, YES, YES. Eat more, drink more, have lots of sex, take lots of risk, go for all the gusto you can get, and above all, do not think!” The reward-seeking, pleasure-loving part of the old brain is what spurred Alan to treat his life savings like chips at a casino.
We also have a “new brain” called the neocortex, which evolved many thousand years after the limbic system. The new brain is responsible for thinking, planning, language, and decision making – some of the very faculties that make us human. Although the new brain also plays a significant role in our emotional lives, it’s the seat or rationality. Its job includes saying NO, NO, NO! Don’t do that, because it’s dangerous, makes no sense, and is not in your best interests, or those of your family or society.
The old brain and the new brain do work together, but not always efficiently. Sometimes they’re actually in conflict, and then our decisions are a function of which one is sending our stronger signals. This is sometimes a tug-of-war.
We all have old brains, of course. But just as the amygdala of a high reactive person is more sensitive than average to novelty, so do extroverts seem to be more susceptible than introverts to the reward seeking cravings of the old brain. In fact, some scientists are starting to explore the idea that reward sensitivity is not only an interesting feature of extroversion; it is what makes an extrovert an extrovert. Extroverts, in other words, are characterized by their tendency to seek rewards, from top dog status to sexual highs to cold cash. They’ve been found to have greater economic, political and hedonistic ambitions than introverts; even their sociability is a function of reward sensitivity, according to this view – extroverts socialize because human connection is inherently gratifying.
What underlies all this reward seeking? The key seems to be positive emotion. Extroverts tend to experience more pleasure and excitement that introverts do – emotions that are activated “in response to the pursuit or capture of some resource that is valued. Excitement builds toward the anticipated capture of that resource. Joy follows its capture.”
Extroverts, in other words, often find themselves in an emotional state we might call “buzz” – a rush of energized, enthusiastic feelings. This is a sensation we all know and like, but not necessarily to the same degree or with the same frequency: extroverts seem to get an extra buzz from the pursuit and attainment of goals.
Extroverts’ dopamine pathways appear to be more active that those of introverts.
In short, introverts just don’t buzz as easily.
Another disadvantage of buzz may be its connection to risk – sometimes outsized risk. Buzz can cause us to ignore warning signs we should be heeding.
The blindness to danger may explain why extroverts are more likely than introverts to be killed while driving, be hospitalized as a result of accident or injury, smoke, have risky sex, participate in high risk sports, have affairs, and remarry. It also helps why extroverts are more prone than introverts to overconfidence – defined as a greater confidence unmatched by greater ability.
Introverts also seem to be better than extroverts at delaying gratification.
…The problem is that on one side, you have a rainmaker who is making lots of money for the company and is treated like a superstar and on the other side you have an introverted nerd. So who do you think wins?
….who have shown that extroverts think less and act faster on such tasks: introverts are “geared to inspect” and extroverts “geared to respond.”
But the more interesting aspect of this puzzling behavior is not what the extroverts do before they’ve hit the wrong button, but what they do after. When introverts hit the number nine button and find they’ve lost a point, they slow down before moving onto the next number, as if to reflect on what went wrong. But extroverts not only fail to slow down, they actually speed up.
This seems strange; why would anyone do this?...If you focus on achieving your goals, as reward sensitive extroverts do, you don’t want anything to get in your way – neither naysayers, nor the number nine. You speed up in an attempt to knock these road blocks down.
Yet this is a crucially important misstep, because the longer you pause to process surprising or negative feedback, the more likely you are to learn from it. If you force extroverts to pause, they’ll do just as well as introverts at the numbers game. But, left to their own devices, they don’t stop. And so they don’t learn to avoid the trouble staring them in the face. That’s exactly what might happen when bidding on a company at auction. When a person bids too high, that’s because they didn’t inhibit a response they should have inhibited. They didn’t consider information that should have been weighing on their decision.
Introverts, in contrast, are programmed to down play reward – to kill their buzz, you might say – and scan for problems. As soon as they get excited, they’ll put the brakes on and think about peripheral issues that may be more important. Introverts seem to be specifically wired or trained so when they catch themselves getting excited and focused on a goal their vigilance increases.
Introverts also tend to compare new information with their expectations. They ask themselves, “Is this what I thought would happen? Is this how it should be? And when the situation falls short of expectations, they form associations between the moment of disappointment (losing points) and whatever was going on in their environment at the time of the disappointment. These associations let them make accurate predictions about how to react to warning signals in the future.
Extroverts appear to allocate most of their cognitive capacity to the goal at hand, while introverts use up capacity by monitoring how the task is going.
Extroverts are more likely to take a “quick and dirty” approach to problem solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating. Introverts think, before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately.
Introverts and extroverts also direct their attention differently; if you leave them to their own devices, the introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from their past, and making plans for the future. The extroverts are more likely to focus on what’s happening around them. It’s as if extroverts are seeing “what is” while the introverted peers are asking “what if.”
“It’s not, that I’m so smart” said Einstein, “it’s that I stay with problems longer.”
If you’re a buzz prone extrovert, then you’re lucky to enjoy lots of invigorating emotions. Make the most of them: build things, inspire others, and think big. Start a company, launch a website, and build an elaborate tree house for your kids. But also know that you’re operating with an
Achilles heel that you must learn to protect. Train yourself to spend energy on what’s meaningful to you instead of activities that look like they’ll deliver a quick buzz of money or status or excitement. Teach yourself to pause and reflect when warning signs appear that things aren’t working out as you’d hoped. Learn from your mistakes. Seek out counterparts (from spouses, friends or business partners) who can help rein you in and compensate for your blind spots.
Extroverts are reward seeking.
Introverts enjoy “Flow.” “Flow” is an optimal state in which you feel total engaged in an activity. In a state of flow, you’re neither bored, nor anxious, and you don’t question your own adequacy. Hours pass without you noticing.
The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings. Although flow does not depend on being an introvert or an extrovert, many of the flow experiences that Csikszentmihalyi writes about are solitary pursuits that have nothing to do with reward-seeking: reading, tending an orchard, solo ocean cruising. Flow often occurs, he writes, in conditions in which people “become independent of the social environment to the dree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself.
In a sense, Csikszentmihalyi transcends Aristotle; he is telling us that there are some activities that are not about approach or avoidance, but about something deeper: the fulfilment that comes from absorption in an activity outside yourself. Psychological theories usually assume that we are motivated wither by the need to eliminate an unpleasant condition like hunger or fear, Csikszentmihalyi writes, or by the expectation of some future reward such as money, status, or prestige. But in flow, a person could work around the clock for days on end, for no better reason than to keep on working.
Buffest takes pride not only in his track records, but also in following his own “inner scorecard”. He divides the world into people who focus on their own instincts and those who follow the herd. “I feel like I’m on my back” says Buffett about his life as an investor, “and there’s the Sistine Chapel, and I’m painting away”.
Part 3: Do All Cultures Have An Extrovert Ideal?
In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly.
An if we act out character by convincing ourselves that our pseudo-self is real, we can eventually burn out without even knowing why. The genius of Little’s theory is how neatly it resolves this discomfort. Yes, we are only pretending to be extroverts, and yes, such inauthenticity can be morally ambiguous (not to mention exhausting), but if it’s in the service of love or professional calling, then we’re doing just as Shakespeare advised.
How was it that some of Lippa’s pseudo-extroverts came so close to the score of true extroverts? It turned out that the introverts who were especially good at acting like extroverts tended to score high for a trait that psychologists call ‘self-monitoring’. Self-monitors are highly skilled at modifying their behavior to the social demands of a situation. They look for cues to tell them how to act.
When Professor Little makes a great speech, its partly because he’s self-monitoring every moment, continually checking his audience for the subtle signs of pleasure or boredom and adjusting his presentation to meet its needs.
And I was pretty good at asking the “but” and “what if” questions that are central to the thought processes of most lawyers.
Those hideouts sessions tell us that, paradoxically, the best way to act out of character is to stay as ture to yourself as you possibly can – starting by creating as many ‘restorative niches’ as possible I your daily life.
‘Restorative Niche’s is Professor Littles term for the place you go when you want to return to your true self. If can be a physical place, like the path beside the Richelieu River, or a temporal one, like the quiet breaks you plan between sales calls. It can mean cancelling your social plans on the weekend before a beg meeting at work, practicing yoga or meditation, or choosing e-mail over an in-person meeting.
You choose a restorative niche when you chlose the door to your private office (if you’re lucky enough to have one) in between meetings. Youc an even create a restorative niche during a meeting, by carefully selecting where you site, and when and how you participate.
All three of these people have taken decidedly extroverted fields and reinvented them in their own image, so that they’re acting in character most of the time, effectively turning their workdays into one giant restorative niche.
This is the final piece of Free Trait Theory. A Free Trait Agreement acknowledges that we’ll each act out of character some of the time – in exchange for being ourselves the rest of the time. It’s a Free Trait Agreement when a wife who wants to go out every Saturday night and a husband who wants to relax by the fire work out a schedule: ½ we’ll go out, ½ we’ll stay in.
Double pneumonia and an overschedule life can happen to anyone, of course, but for Little, it was the result of acting out of character for too long and without enough restorative niches.
“Emotional labor”, which is the effort we make to control and change our own emotions, is associated with stress, burnout, and even physical symptoms like an increase in cardiovascular disease. Professor Little believes that prolonged acting out of character may also increase autonomic nervous system activity, which can, in turn, compromise immune function.
They focused on the so-called Big Five Traits: Introversion-Extroversion; Agreeableness; Openness to Experience; Conscientiousness; and Emotional Stability. (Many personally psychologist believe that human personality can be boiled down to these 5 characteristics).
These findings suggest something very important; introverts like people they meet in friendly contexts; extroverts prefer those they compare with.
Scores of studies have shown that venting doesn’t soothe anger; it fuels it.
But these studies measured who well introverts observe social dynamics, not how well they participate in them. Participation places a very different set of demands on the brain than observing does. It requires a kind of mental multitasking; the ability to process a lot of short-term information at once without becoming distracted or overly stressed. This is just the sort of brain functioning that extroverts tend to be well suited for. In other words, extroverts are social because their brains are good at handling competing demands on their attention – which is just what dinner-party conversation involves. In contrast, introverts often feel repelled by social events that force them to attend to many people at once.
Consider that the simplest social interaction between two people requires performing an astonishing array of takes: interpreting what the other person in saying; reading body language and facial expressions; smoothly taking turns talking and listening; responding to what the other person said; assessing whether you’re being understood; determining whether you’re well received, and, if not, figuring out how to improve or remove yourself from the situation. This of what it takes to juggle all this at once! And that’s just a one-on-one conversation. Now image that multitasking required in a group setting like a dinner party.
So when introverts assume the observer role, as then they write novels, or contemplate unified field theory – or fall quiet at a dinner parties – they’re not demonstrating a failure of will or lake of entry. They’re simple doing what they’re constitutionally suited for.
“I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling”, explains Jon. “They buy because they feel understood”.
Jon also benefits from his natural tendency to ask a lot of questions and to listen closely ot the answers. “I got to the point where I could walk into someone’s house and instead of trying to sell them some knives, I’d ask a hundred questions in a row. I could manage the entire conversation by asking the right questions”. Today in his coaching business, Jon does the same thing “I try to tune in to the radio station of the person I’m working with. I pay attending to the energy they exude. It’s easy for me to do that because I’m in my head a lot, anyways”.
“A lot of people believe that selling requires being a fast talker, or knowing how to use charisma to persuade.
“I believe that’s what makes someone really good at selling or consulting – the number-one thing is they’ve got to really listen well”.
The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself.
If David Weiss’s tale of transformation resonates for you, there’s a good reason. It’s a perfect example of what the psychologist Dan McAdams calls a redemptive life story – and a sign of mental health and well-being.
At the Foley Center for the study of Lives at Northwestern University, McAdams studies the stories that people tell about themselves. We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing (“I was never the same again after my wife left me”), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise (“The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I’m so much happier with my new wife”). Those who live the most fully realized lives – fiving back to their families, societies, and ultimately themselves – tend to find meaning in their obstacles. In a sense, McAdam’s has breathed new life into one of the great insights of Western mythologpy: that where we stumple is where our treasure lies.
Carve out restorative niches.
If its creativity you’re after, ask your employees to solve problems alone before sharing their ideas. If you want the wisdom of the crowd, gather it electronically, or in writing, and make sure people can’t see each other’s ideas until everyone has had a chance to contribute. Face-to-face contact is important because it builds trust, but group dynamics contain unavoidable impediments to creative thinking.
If you have a proactive work force, remember that they may perform better under an introverted leader than an extroverted or charismatic one.
