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It's also why exhortations to imagine the audience in the nude don't help nervous speakers; naked lions are just as dangerous as elegantly dressed ones.
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Susan Cain |
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If you're a manager, remember that one third to one half of your workforce is probably introverted, whether they appear that way or not. Think twice about how you design your organization's office space. Don't expect introverts to get jazzed up about open office plans or, for that matter, lunchtime birthday parties or team-building retreats. Make the most of introverts' strengths--these are the people who can help you think deeply, strategi..
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Susan Cain |
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These findings suggest something very important: introverts like people they meet in friendly contexts; extroverts prefer those they compete with.
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Susan Cain |
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when introverts assume the observer role, as when they write novels, or contemplate unified field theory--or fall quiet at dinner parties--they're not demonstrating a failure of will or a lack of energy. They're simply doing what they're constitutionally suited for.
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Susan Cain |
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d682f2e
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Emily lowers her voice and flattens her affect during fights with Greg, she thinks she's being respectful by taking the trouble not to let her negative emotions show. But Greg thinks she's checking
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Susan Cain |
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Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything. --ROBERT RUBIN, In an Uncertain World
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Susan Cain |
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Functional, moderate guilt," writes Kochanska, "may promote future altruism, personal responsibility, adaptive behavior in school, and harmonious, competent, and prosocial relationships with parents, teachers, and friends." This is an especially important set of attributes at a time when a 2010 University of Michigan study shows that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, with much of the drop..
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Susan Cain |
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Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're 'in your head too much,' a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Of course, there's another word for such people: thinkers.
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Susan Cain |
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0cb9a48
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But buzz also has considerable downsides. "Everyone assumes that it's good to accentuate positive emotions, but that isn't correct," the psychology professor Richard Howard told me, pointing to the example of soccer victories that end in violence and property damage. "A lot of antisocial and self-defeating behavior results from people who amplify positive emotions."
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Susan Cain |
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was only once they accepted these two realities that Greg and Emily found a way to break their stalemate. Instead of focusing on the number of dinner parties they'd give, they started talking about the format of the parties. Instead of seating everyone around a big table, which would require the kind of all-hands conversational multitasking Emily dislikes so much, why not serve dinner buffet style, with people eating in small, casual conver..
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Susan Cain |
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The parents of high-reactive children are exceedingly lucky, Belsky told me. "The time and effort they invest will actually make a difference. Instead of seeing these kids as vulnerable to adversity, parents should see them as malleable--for worse, but also for better."
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Susan Cain |
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Orison Swett Marden, who wrote Character: The Grandest Thing in the World in 1899, produced another popular title in 1921. It was called Masterful Personality. Many of these guides were written for businessmen, but women were also urged to work on a mysterious quality called "fascination." Coming of age in the 1920s was such a competitive business compared to what their grandmothers had experienced, warned one beauty guide, that they had to..
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Susan Cain |
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7f07f5a
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The upsides of the high-reactive temperament have been documented in exciting research that scientists are only now beginning to pull together. One of the most interesting findings, also reported in Dobbs's Atlantic article, comes from the world of rhesus monkeys, a species that shares about 95 percent of its DNA with humans and has elaborate social structures that resemble our own.
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Susan Cain |
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Of course, there's another word for such people: thinkers.
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Susan Cain |
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ea013f5
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Still, there's a limit to how much we can control our self-presentation. This is partly because of a phenomenon called behavioral leakage, in which our true selves seep out via unconscious body language:
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Susan Cain |
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982e0d0
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We failed to realize that what makes sense for the asynchronous, relatively anonymous interactions of the Internet might not work as well inside the face-to-face, politically charged, acoustically noisy confines of an open-plan office. Instead of distinguishing between online and in-person interaction, we used the lessons of one to inform our thinking about the other.
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Susan Cain |
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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.
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Susan Cain |
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Schwartz, the director of the Developmental Neuroimaging and Psychopathology Research Lab. Schwartz has bright, inquisitive eyes, graying brown hair, and a quietly enthusiastic manner. Despite our unprepossessing surroundings,
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Susan Cain |
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expression on his face. He's in his early thirties, tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in jeans, a black polo shirt, and black flip-flops. With his short brown hair, reddish goatee, and sideburns, McHugh looks like a typical Gen Xer, but he speaks in the soothing, considered tones of a college professor. McHugh doesn't preach or worship at Saddleback, but we've chosen to meet here because it's such an important symbol of evangelical culture..
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Susan Cain |
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So the next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.
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Susan Cain |
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Greg and Emily are an example of an introvert-extrovert couple who love and madden each other in equal measure. Greg, who just turned thirty, has a bounding gait, a mop of dark hair continually falling over his eyes, and an easy laugh. Most people would describe him as gregarious. Emily, a mature twenty-seven, is as self-contained as Greg is expansive. Graceful and soft-spoken, she keeps her auburn hair tied in a chignon, and often gazes at..
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Susan Cain |
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People who pass us on the street can't know that we're clever and charming unless we look it.
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Susan Cain |
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Fried asked hundreds of people (mostly designers, programmers, and writers) where they liked to work when they needed to get something done. He found that they went anywhere but their offices, which were too noisy and full of interruptions.
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Susan Cain |
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It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn't worked together. That's because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption.
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Susan Cain |
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Osborn's theory had great impact, and company leaders took up brainstorming with enthusiasm. To this day, it's common for anyone who spends time in corporate America to find himself occasionally cooped up with colleagues in a room full of whiteboards, markers, and a preternaturally peppy facilitator encouraging everyone to free-associate. There's only one problem with Osborn's breakthrough idea: group brainstorming doesn't actually work.
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Susan Cain |
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What is the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren't very pleased about it?
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Susan Cain |
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So? You don't have to be an extrovert to feel alive!" True enough. But it seems, according to Tony, that you'd better act like one if you don't want to flub the sales call and watch your family die like pigs in hell."
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Susan Cain |
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The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. 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."
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Susan Cain |
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At IBM, a corporation that embodied the ideal of the company man, the sales force gathered each morning to belt out the company anthem, "Ever Onward," and to harmonize on the "Selling IBM" song, set to the tune of "Singin' in the Rain."
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Susan Cain |
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That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.
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Susan Cain |
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This style of teaching reflects the business community," one fifth-grade teacher in a Manhattan public school told me, "where people's respect for others is based on their verbal abilities, not their originality or insight. You have to be someone who speaks well and calls attention to yourself. It's an elitism based on something other than merit."
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Susan Cain |
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The New Groupthink did not arise at one precise moment. Cooperative learning, corporate teamwork, and open office plans emerged at different times and for different reasons. But the mighty force that pulled these trends together was the rise of the World Wide Web, which lent both cool and gravitas to the idea of collaboration.
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Susan Cain |
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Shakespeare's oft-quoted advice, "To thine own self be true," runs deep in our philosophical DNA. Many of us are uncomfortable with the idea of taking on a "false" persona for any length of time. And if we act out of 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 ext..
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Susan Cain |
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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.
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Susan Cain |
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Alex also took advantage of his natural strengths. "I learned that boys basically do only one thing: they chase girls. They get them, they lose them, they talk about them. I was like, 'That's completely circuitous. I really like girls.' That's where intimacy comes from. So rather than sitting around and talking about girls, I got to know them. I used having relationships with girls, plus being good at sports, to have the guys in my pocket. ..
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Susan Cain |
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You may be quicker than others to feel sickened by violence and ugliness, and you likely have a very strong conscience.
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Susan Cain |
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Speak with conviction. Even if you believe something only fifty-five percent, say it as if you believe it a hundred percent." "If you're preparing alone for class, then you're doing it wrong. Nothing at HBS is intended to be done alone." "Don't think about the perfect answer. It's better to get out there and say something than to never get your voice in."
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Susan Cain |
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Big Five traits: Introversion-Extroversion; Agreeableness; Openness to Experience; Conscientiousness; and Emotional Stability.
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Susan Cain |
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818b0ce
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From outside the evangelical community, this seems an astonishing confession. Since when is solitude one of the Seven Deadly Sins? But to a fellow evangelical, McHugh's sense of spiritual failure would make perfect sense. Contemporary evangelicalism says that every person you fail to meet and proselytize is another soul you might have saved.
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Susan Cain |
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The Subarctic Survival Situation may sound like a harmless game played inside the ivory tower, but if you think of meetings you've attended, you can probably recall a time--plenty of times--when the opinion of the most dynamic or talkative person prevailed to the detriment of all.
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Susan Cain |
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many introverts are shy, partly as a result of receiving the message that there's something wrong with their preference for reflection, and partly because their physiologies, as we'll see, compel them to withdraw from high-stimulation environments.
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Susan Cain |
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Social anxiety disorder"--which essentially means pathological shyness--is now thought to afflict nearly one in five of us. The most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the psychiatrist's bible of mental disorders, considers the fear of public speaking to be a pathology--not an annoyance, not a disadvantage, but a disease--if it interferes with the sufferer's job performance."
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Susan Cain |
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Because conflict-avoidant Emily would never "bite" or even hiss unless Greg had done something truly horrible, on some level she processes his bite to mean that she's terribly guilty-- of something, anything, who knows what? Emily's guilt feels so intolerable that she tends to deny the validity of all of Greg's claims-- the legitimate ones along with those exaggerated by anger. This, of course, leads to a vicious cycle in which she shuts do..
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Susan Cain |
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Buffett is known for thinking carefully when those around him lose their heads. "Success in investing doesn't correlate with IQ," he has said. "Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing."
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Susan Cain |