Latest news with #Quiet:ThePowerofIntrovertsinaWorldThatCan'tStopTalking
The Guardian
27-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
In my family, introvert-extrovert pairings are common. But I had to get to 36 to learn which one applied to me
I never identified as shy as a child because my younger brother was the type of kid who wouldn't speak in the company of strangers, and I – apparently – never stopped talking. Shyness was comparative, and, in my family of origin, there was always someone shyer than me. I didn't notice my shyness until I split with my first long-term partner when I was 26. He'd been my boyfriend from the age of 14, so – by the time we parted – almost half my life. This first boyfriend was gregarious, always ready for a chat. He had a way of walking into a room and cracking a joke, so by the time I entered on his tailwind, everyone was already laughing. He'd warmed the room and I'd felt welcome. I'd never been an adult without him, so didn't have any awareness of how he'd held me under his wing. In the aftermath of our split, I became conscious of how difficult I found certain aspects of socialising. Simple things like how to enter and exit a room. Beginnings and endings: how to start a chat and how to finish one. How to mingle in a crowd of people. Parties or gatherings of any sort suddenly became fraught. I'd always assumed my ex-partner was simply friendly but, in 2013, a decade after our split, I read Susan Cain's, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking and realised he was an extrovert and I was an introvert. According to Cain, shyness and introversion often crossover but they aren't the same thing. Extroversion and introversion exist along a spectrum but they are mostly viewed as traits we're born with rather than develop. It seemed odd that I had to get to 36 to learn this about myself. My chattiness one-on-one had worked as a distraction. In fact, I found bigger groups overwhelming and needed lots of alone time to recharge. Like the shyness, my obvious introversion took some time to become obvious to me. My granddaughter came in to this world so vivacious that her extroversion was impossible to miss. Even from before she was mobile, she was throwing her arms up in welcome and squealing with delight at the sight of a visitor. Everything displayed, everything shared. She's so friendly out in public that I often come up against my own shyness when I carry her around. When she started talking, she'd motion to someone in the queue ahead and say – 'I shy' – but what she meant was, I would like to connect with that person and I'm not sure how. Striking up conversations with strangers is not my forte but she seemed to want my help. She was not yet two but she was already pushing me out of my comfort zone. One day, while I was wheeling her along the main street of my country town, an unknown woman called out, 'Hey, party girl!' This was clearly not aimed at me and I had to laugh. My granddaughter's social networks were already larger than mine and she was still in nappies. What is a shy person to do with such gregariousness? My eldest son, her father, had been the same. Throughout his life I'd watched him making enthusiastic small talk with strangers. As a teen he'd start up chats with elderly people at the checkout, spying dogfood in their trolleys and asking what type of dog they had. Often, they'd brace at first – the dissonance of this friendliness with his teenage attire – but a few minutes in and they'd be smiling. When he was young, before I'd read Cain's book, I'd tried to force rest days on him to catch up from the kind of socialising that left me drained. He never seemed to need it but I did. On these home days all his games involved imaginary 'parties'. I found his outgoingness baffling; he wondered why I was always so tired. When my second born came on the scene, dreamy and internal, he made perfect sense. He cried when I took him out in the world, all that overwhelming sound and colour. He nestled into me, staying close. As a toddler, his favourite game was snuggling on the couch. Our needs in perfect sync. In my family, introvert-extrovert pairings are common. Both my sons have paired up with their opposites. Now I understand the terminology, it all seems so clear! My introvert son's partner once declared, 'I hate having a shower, it's so boring!' and I realised it was the only time she ever spent alone. I watch them all navigate their differing needs: the introverts enjoying recharging in quiet, the extroverts wanting chats in the shower. My granddaughter is now just past two but she can talk up a storm. I was out with her a few weeks back and we bumped into a friend I hadn't seen for years. I was immediately awkward but my granddaughter came to my aid. 'You have a blue dress!' she said to my friend, 'and mine is pink!' The ice was broken. It was a beginning. I was holding my granddaughter on my hip but she had me under her wing. My younger son and his partner have a fifteen-week-old baby. A new granddaughter! Thus far, she's expressive and smiley. My older son's partner gave birth last week. A grandson! In this genetic lottery, I wonder what we'll get. Introverts who'll snuggle on the couch, or extroverts who'll help us make new friends. I cannot wait to see! Jessie Cole is the author of four books, including the memoirs Staying and Desire, A Reckoning
New York Times
08-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
Worn Out by an Extrovert? You Can Go ‘Gray.'
The Introvert's Dilemma Draining? I can certainly imagine. Irritating? No doubt. But first I want to say I'm impressed by your acknowledgment that part of being a manager is encouraging the growth of not just your direct reports but yourself. It's admirable, this impulse to pay attention to what employees need for success while also taking steps to improve yourself as a professional and as a human being. I get the feeling that your employee's problem may be not her extroversion but her lack of boundaries. Many of us joke around and say revealing things about ourselves to our co-workers — sometimes even our managers. (As a manager of editorial teams in multiple jobs, I've been guilty of doing the same thing.) We all need to feel connected, and human, and understood. Even (or especially!) in work environments. My feeling is that you should not feed the beast. As in: You should not respond to the contents of her emails, chat messages and phone calls that have nothing to do with work. You might also, when you are confronted by these messages, issue direct responses to her along the lines of 'I have a lot on my plate and need to keep us focused on work today.' A friend recently told me about the concept of 'gray rocking,' in which someone who is being subjected to another person's unwanted behavior reacts to the offending individual's attempts to provoke by simply going silent or responding in the most tepid, 'boring' — that is, 'gray' — way possible. The idea is that the offending individual will eventually give up his or her search for validation and go elsewhere. This might be too extreme a measure to take, but I do think that remaining relatively quiet in response to her provocations might make your employee more conscious of them, and help her delineate what is work-related or -appropriate and what isn't. Perhaps she just needs a little nudge to understand the meaning of professionally pertinent. I ran your question by Susan Cain, author of the best-selling 2012 book 'Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.' She told me that over the years she had heard from many, many extroverts who felt sensitive to the idea that their enthusiasm for lots of interaction suggested a certain superficiality. Her point, she continued, is that she doesn't necessarily associate your colleague's behavior with extroversion, and that it could be due to bad boundaries. Navigating how personality styles mesh — or don't — is a common challenge in the workplace, Ms. Cain said. 'An introvert might rather be interested in putting their head down and focusing and getting in a state of deep flow,' she said. 'An extrovert, on the other hand, might feel like they really want to be interacting through the day and feel that they're not like at their most productive if they're not getting feedback and interaction.' In that case, Ms. Cain suggested, a manager and her team can sit down and talk through what their temperamental preferences are: how much interaction is appropriate, how frequent it should be and how everyone can respect one another's needs. This depersonalizes the issue and doesn't pin it on one person. For what it's worth, I think this approach would work, but it would be out of the ordinary, and thus potentially uncomfortable for everyone involved. And if you aren't comfortable having these conversations in a group setting? Ms. Cain gave me the example of a former chief executive of Campbell's, Doug Conant, himself an introvert, who undertook an exercise called 'Declare Yourself.' Whenever he brought new members onto his team, he would schedule a meeting with them and, among other things, discuss his introversion and what that meant in terms of his preferred modes of interaction. 'The theme of both these exercises is basically giving people permission to talk about something that's otherwise socially awkward to discuss,' Ms. Cain said. As for the gray rock method, Ms. Cain said that it might be effective in the case of someone — co-worker or otherwise — with difficult personality traits, but that you might also want to consider that your employee's, ahem, enthusiasm is coming from a place of anxiety. 'So I would go with either of those two exercises,' she said, 'or just have an open conversation in terms of open and curious questions to ask how the person is feeling in general and to establish where she's coming from.' The Fallout From a Racist Remark This is one of the tougher questions I've received during my tenure as Work Friend, and the charged political environment we're in right now, particularly with regard to race and the workplace, makes this extra challenging for me (and, no doubt, you). My first impulse is to advise you to report Ed to H.R. and ask it to keep your involvement quiet. (In other words, have the H.R. manager talk to Ed directly without identifying you as the source of the information about his behavior.) But that didn't sit quite right with me. Neither did the idea of having one of the Hispanic co-workers go to H.R. My concern is that an appeal to the human resources department could redound negatively on him or her. And you. I reached out to Roman Palomares, President of LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens), a longtime advocacy group and civil rights organization. Mr. Palomares thinks you have a couple of options, and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. Option 1 is that you tell your Hispanic colleagues that you're aware of what Ed said and that you don't agree with it. By doing so, you are making it clear to your colleagues that you're sensitive to and aware of the idea that everyone should feel safe at work, regardless of nationality or ethnic background. Option 2 is that you go to H.R. and, without naming names, relay information about the incident and ask the people there to address the situation in a way that doesn't assign specific blame — or refer to the specific incident — but communicates what the company will and will not tolerate. Those company reps 'could just say we understand that this is happening' — in various environments — 'and we don't want it to happen here,' Mr. Palomares said. 'That way, the other gentleman is not going to know anybody's pointing a finger at him, but the company is saying: 'Here's what's going on in the marketplace. We will not tolerate it.'' Are there other options? I'm not sure that there are, at least not others that keep Ed's identity under wraps so that tensions in the workplace aren't further inflamed. (I hate that Ed gets to be protected from the repercussions of his own words, but here we are.) I mean, it's not as if you need go up to the two Hispanic women who overheard Ed's outburst and apologize on his behalf. You didn't do anything wrong. But you've been put in the unenviable position of having to clean up his mess.
