A Conversation with Susan Cain & Kimberly Goff-Crews: Vulnerability & Leadership

good afternoon everyone and welcome today's talk will feature a conversation between secretary golf Cruise and Susan Cain followed by a question-and-answer session when you came in you should have received a note card and pencil if you haven't and are interested in submitting a question please raise your hand and let an usher know feel free to write down questions in the first half of this event and pass them to the aisles so the ushers can grab them so that we can answer some of those questions later on in the event it is now my pleasure to introduce secretary and vice president for student life Kimberly Gulf Cruise Secretary Gulf Cruise is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School after several years in private law practice Misgav Cruz returned to Yale as assistant dean in Yale College and director of the afro-american cultural center she then went on to serve in various roles at Wellesley University Wellesley College and the University of Chicago in 2012 she returned to Yale as secretary and vice president for student life as she supports institutional governance oversees official university functions and provides strategic direction to improve the student experience her goal is to help keep Yale at the forefront of education it is my pleasure to introduce secretary goth Cruz so it's great to see all of you in the audience today and welcome our guest Susan Cain who just drove in from the Hudson River Valley so we're really grateful for your your travel here this event just so you know is part of the vulnerability and leadership series where we invite leaders from all sectors of society to talk about leadership aspect of leadership self development resiliency and obviously vulnerability the series is co-sponsored by the Yale well initiative which was formerly called the wellness project and that initiative was created in response to your request students requests to have resources training and conversations about what it means to be a whole human being not just the person who's studying but someone who's doing all the other things that you do and how to do that well today's conversation is going to focus on the ways in which introverts can thrive in communities like Yale and Beyond it and how introverts can participate in the classroom in the lab and the studio how they can run student organizations how they can have successful jobs and lives our conversation is for those of you who are introverts both of us are introverts it's for extroverts and all of people who work with them so it's for students faculty and staff and we're honored to have Susan Cain who was dubbed the fairy godmother of introvert she is the New York Times bestselling author of quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking and she has a record smashing TED talk that has been viewed 17 million times so she I think you're in the top 20 at this point her second book is called quiet power the secret strength of introverts and it's adapted from our first book but it does focus on kids and teenagers and how they can thrive as introverts in school and extracurricular activities family life and friendships she is the leader of a revolution the co-founder of the quiet revolution in facts the quiet schools Network and the quiet Leadership Institute she has been writing and her writings can be seen in the New York Times the Atlantic The Wall Street Journal and she has numerous awards she graduate from Princeton that's the only downside Harvard Law School but she does live as I said in the Hudson River Valley with her husband and her two sons so we are delighted that she made the trip to join us to talk about introverts and how best is thrive welcome so I thought we would start with a conversation about what exactly is an introvert and I've been reading your Twitter feet which you have phenomenal things coming out almost every day and a couple days ago you had an ad from the risk whiskey River River soap company that makes soap and has irreverent labels and they make soap for foodies for you know cool kids and they happen to make a soap for introverts and here's what they said people suck that's why you prefer you introverts prefer to stay inside with your stuffed animal collection but even enjoying your own company requires some ambience and some basic hygiene so wash up with soap for introverts a handcrafted bar dyed with a blend of non-confrontational ocean blues and we didn't bother sending it because seriously it's not like you're gonna go anywhere so that's the so that's some people's view of what it means to be an introvert but is that actually true what is your definition of an introvert yeah you know and it's funny that we're starting with that but wait first of all I just want to say hi to all of you it's so nice to be here and notwithstanding your quip about Princeton I really love Yale as everyone who knows me knows my sister went here and was in Saybrook college and I've just always loved this place so thank you for having me so I actually had great mixed feelings about posting that so bad especially because of what you began with the idea that people suck which i think is actually the great myth of what introverts are you know people who think that other people suck and I don't think that's true at all we actually know you know if you look at personality psychology there's no correlation between introversion extroversion versus how warm and loving or agreeable you are that those two things are distinct so it's more that introverts like to socialize in a very different way preferring to focus their energies on one or two people at a time and to really go deep socially but like really the definition is more about what's happening neurobiologically because introverts have nervous systems that just react more to stimulation Alki it could be social stimulation but it could also be lights and noise and just stuff going on in your lives and if you're someone who reacts more to stimulation that means that you feel at your most alive and calm when you're in quieter settings and you feel a little bit jangled when when things ramp up a lot but I do think that what happens is we all from such an early age are taught to adapt to a more extroverted culture that we lose sight of how we actually prefer to spend our own time so I think if you wanted to figure out in two seconds where you fit on this introvert extrovert spectrum the real question to ask yourself is imagine that you have a weekend or maybe even a week to spend exactly as you please with zero social or academic or whatever obligations how would you spend that time and how many people would you spend it with if you're really giving yourself that permission and I think that gives you your true north and you talked a little bit about the fact that the the culture around the u.s. culture I think about how people think about introversion has shifted over time can you say a little bit more about that oh yeah yes I was really curious when I first started researching this book whether this cultural bias that I had you know knew we were all living with and whether it whether it was something that was intrinsic and innate to any culture so I thought okay well the first thing to do is look at has u.s. culture always been this way and our cultures across the world this way or we you know is this kind of the way it has to be so when I looked at the US what I found is that cultural historians we used to live in a culture of character this was back in the 19th century and this was a time when people were living in smaller towns alongside people they had known all their lives so the qualities that mattered were kind of more inward and deep qualities like do you have character and do you take care of the people around you you know because you get to know over time which neighbors do and which ones don't but then in the 20th century with the rise of cities and industrialization we all started moving into these great population centers where you're living now alongside strangers and you're working in corporations often and what started to matter was these qualities of do you have magnetism and you know can you dazzle somebody the minute you meet them as opposed to what unfolds over the course of your life together and so that's when we moved into this culture of personality and do you see a difference in terms of how introversion plays out for women and men and how people value introversion and women and men that's an interesting question because the the the number of female and male introverts is the same I mean according to recent studies it's about 50% for each for each how about you actually do you think exist I mean is there is it half the population where interprets or how many times what the most recent studies show and then older study is found about a third were introverts so I figure either way you know we're talking one out of every two or three people okay so you're saying a third to a half for introverts yes and then of that it's mostly it's half and half of that there's no difference really for male or female but I think what is different is just the way it plays out he's done social expectations right because for women you know it's both easier and harder at the same time for women I think there is more cultural license to be just quiet and hanging back and I get you know that that derives from all kinds of problematic right constraints that women have been operating under but in this one case it gives you a little more latitude on the other hand women have historically been expected to play the role of the vivacious host person right and then for men you know male introverts do automatically have the authority that is accorded to males in agriculture but at the same time the pressure for male introverts is the the pressure to be kind of the dominant and take-charge person and like these are obviously stereotypes that may play out in all different ways but these are some of the kind of trends that I hear about from people and do there are there other cultures across the world that value introversion differently we found that were more positive in terms of how they thought about introverts yeah yeah so I mean the ones that spring to mind the quickest it kind of varies from culture to culture Finland is is known to be a much quieter society and then I actually spent a whole chapter of the book looking at Confucian based societies which I mean it's really interesting there because you know there's there's much more of sorry I've got like here and my coming out of my microphone you have in Confucian based societies much more of the idea of group orientation and that no one person should stand out too much from the group and so it's better to be quieter and there's a sense of strength being found in silence so like I always think of this one I did a ton of interviews for this chapter and there's one I always think of from a woman I met who have come to this country from Shanghai and she was biologically I would say one of the more extroverted people I've ever met you know she was just like this very jolly outgoing person by nature but she talked about how when she first came here and she was in school I think it may have been grad school at the time she was absolutely shocked to find these cultural norms where you know the way she put it was like the students are expected to talk nonsense raise your hand and talk nonsense and then the teachers nod respectfully at you and encourage you to speak more nonsense and you know and from her point of view that's like wasting everybody's time why would you ever do that right so yeah so let's move to the classroom why don't we and talk about introverts in the classroom and what what how they might thrive in mushroom I remember in your book I think it was in the secret the second book there was a cartoon of a student who has a bubble saying don't call him me don't call me don't call him me I don't know about if you have had those that kind of experience like please don't call me could you talk a little bit about the the kind of things you think worked for for for an interpreted student yeah well I'll give you one tip and and you'll you'll get this as a fellow law person I discovered this kind of accidentally when I was in law school and you know you in law school classes are conducted in these giant amphitheaters with a Socratic method and the professor just calls on you in front of hundreds of people and I really wanted when I first got there I really wanted to avoid just being called on and in that kind of a way so I forced myself like on the first or second day of class she raised my hand and just say something anything because I reasons that then the professor would be less likely to cold-call me and and not only did it work in terms of avoiding the cold calling but I found it had this other incredible unexpected by-product which was that after that the professor started directing comments to me and would refer back to things I had said early on and I feel about that I actually really liked it you know I felt like oh I contributed something to this class and and that felt really good you know and other students after class would we'd be talking about class and they would refer to to that kind of thing so I discovered through this and now I work with a lot of people in workplaces and I often advise them in meetings to do the same thing of thinking in advance something you might want to contribute or a question you want to raise and giving yourself a push to ask it early because what happens then is that you emotionally when you do that become a center in the room and other people are directing energy towards you and if you wait too long to speak you feel emotionally ever further to the margins and it becomes harder and harder to feel like you actually have a place there so those kinds of subtle shifts make a really big difference now if you're a back team member or you're running a meeting perhaps and you recognize that something might be interpreted what would you say we should do in that situation well I mean a few things what one is especially if there's an area where you know that that person might have a lot to contribute you might want to let them know in advance you know we're gonna be talking about XYZ today and I would love to hear your thoughts on this because I know you've got a lot to say or you could use other techniques like going around the room and having everybody contribute because a lot of what we're talking about whether it's biological introversion or cultural introversion or gender you know all these different things are at play some people feel like they have a lot more permission to speak than others do just on some deep down level and so you want to create structures where the people who feel they have less permission or handed the permission and invited to speak and and so another thing you could do is say okay we've got everybody seems to be going in the direction of opinion X can we have somebody take the devil's advocate position of opinion Y and I just want you to argue that position and then you're giving someone that the permission to go against the grain without necessarily having to own it at that moment but they're just invited to take that rule so it sounds like you're talking about a difference between or you see a difference between class participation in class engagement is that what I'm hearing well I don't know I mean all those things I think have more to do with participation in a way class engagement I think is it's an important thing to think about because I think we do tend to think too much that class participation means you know going like this or speaking out and in fact for a lot of people they're engaging deeply with a material by reading and taking notes about it or you know by talking with a classmate after class and for them that engagement is just as profound even though it's harder to track from the professor's point of view you use this interesting phrase called passing as an extrovert yeah just a barrier you know I don't know if anybody's felt that but can you talk about that phenomena and give us some examples of what that might look like yeah I mean I heard about this for people all the time I okay so I first became a well no I guess I've always known this but I became aware of the extent of this phenomenon of basically introverts pretending to be more extroverted than they really were my book came out and then I gave a TED talk about it just a few weeks later and the audience at Ted you know it's I don't know how many people fifteen hundred or something and and it's this audience of these huge movers and shakers and I came off the stage and and I was one of the first speakers and then I was there all week and for the whole rest of that week I literally I I could barely even walk an inch across the room because everybody was coming up to me and telling me that's my story too and don't tell as some would literally say don't tell anyone but that's who I really am or someone say you know I've never told anyone before but now I'm going to and and this has kept happening to me so I I did I sat once on a panel and the other panelists were it was Arianna Huffington George Stephanopoulos Candice Bergen and I'm forgetting some of the others but they were anchor people on TV and one by one they all said yeah I'm an introvert I'm an introvert I'm an introvert and it's just like the extent to which people don't talk about how they really feel and what their true social preferences are it's it's it's so enormous that I can't even put it into words is this why you created the Lacroix revolution found eight or your Institute rather yeah in Harlem it's can you talk a little bit more about that what you hope to accomplish and why did you start on just work and school I mean really it's as you said you have to narrow it anyone's work in those two areas yeah I mean well focus is on work in school because I think those are the places where people spend the most of their time right you know kids are there all day grown-ups or at work all day and and these are the social structures that I think have the most profound impact on our lives sure we have a number of students here who are student leaders so switch a little bit so how how you think of a quiet leader and in a way that might be supportive for student organizations here can you talk about what you see is effective quiet leadership yeah I mean it looks it it looks like so many different things but I'm gonna start actually by giving you a statistic I think and there's a lot of these statistics now but I I do believe that when most people think of what a good leader is or a natural leader is they're assuming whether consciously or not they're assuming that it's somebody very charismatic and outspoken and type a you know all that and in fact there was this one study where a guy named Jim Collins went out and and looked at the the 11 best performing companies in the country and he wanted to figure out what set these companies apart from the rest of the more mediocre pack and he found that every single one of these companies was led by a CEO who had two characteristics the first one was having a fierce sense of will and dedication like they really cared about the company and then the second characteristic was that these each of these CEOs was described by their peers as being quiet unassuming low-key soft-spoken and even shy and you know that not what we would normally think it's not what you would normally think and it might at first seem so counterintuitive you'd be like how can what can explain this but if you study introverts the way I do it's not that surprising because what happens is and for those of you who are introverts you know this we tend to get really passionate about one or two areas in our lives and to like really go deep into those passions and so in the service of your passions you will end up acquiring all kinds of expertise and building your networks as you get to know other people who have the same passion and you start inspiring trust in people so you start seeing all these leaders who ascend to these roles not because they were the kinds of kids who just like had a will to leave because some children are like that you know and they're like that all their lives so they're not those people they just like really care about this thing and in the name of this thing they become a great leader and and all of these CEOs were like that and and there's so many I mean so Gandhi there's another great example who Gandhi was so shy when he was a kid at school he used to run home from school as soon as the bell rang because he didn't want to have to socialize with his classmates and if you look at his autobiography he talks about for all his life being really uncomfortable in group settings and not liking to be the one running meetings or holding forth and those qualities of effortlessly you know bringing together a group it is an amazing asset to leadership I don't want to pretend that it's not what I do want to say is that there are so many different pathways to fulfilling these roles and somebody like a Gandhi who just cared so deeply and everybody knew it ends up attracting the other people who care about that same thing with the same authentic depth and you end up building a movement that way mm-hmm so so that's what leader quiet leadership often looks like you know it looks like like a really deep commitment and you talk also about the fact that quiet leaders often have a partner who offsets yeah or complements part of what can you talk a little about that and give us some examples yeah absolutely I mean so i think this is true for all areas of life that you know no one human being is good at everything and so the more honest you can be with yourself about what your strengths are and what your gaps are the more you can surround yourself with people who you love who also offset those gaps so for example at Facebook share a Mark Zuckerberg CEO he's a very introverted guy everybody says and he brought Sheryl Sandberg in as his CEO Oh partly cuz you know she's super talented and also because she's a very strong extrovert and so for her it's very natural and she likes to spend time building relationships with advertisers and that kind of thing and he likes to spend time poring over analysis and that kind of thing not to say each one can't do the other and it's not to say each one doesn't sometimes have to stretch outside their comfort zone to do the other but you're so much more effective if you can just have someone else doing that so it like to me yin and yang is the answer to everything in all ways you know let me go back to the question of definitions because I'm not sure I really understand the difference between being an introvert being quiet and being shy yeah I think there's a range but I'm not coach can you talk about that's a really good question because introversion is much more about how you react to stimulation so you know you just kind of prefer settings where there's less stuff coming at you and shyness is more about the fear of social judgment so if you're a shy person and let's say you're looking at someone's face and they have a neutral expression on their face you will tend to read disapproval into the neutral expression and that disapproval will wound you more than it would for a less shy person and this tends to come out in especially in settings where social judgment is woven into the experience like a job interview or going on a date or public speaking or something like that so in terms of the work that we've been doing it quite revolution and in my book and so on we're really looking at both it's about introversion and about shyness but important to know that it's not a complete overlap so you could be an introvert who's not shy at all and I believe President Obama is probably an example of this I think he's quite introverted and really not anxious in any way socially or otherwise and then you can be a shy extrovert like the singer Barbara Streisand who everyone says has a very larger-than-life personality but she stopped performing for decades because her stage fright was so intense so these things are pretty complicated let's go back to now talking about students and I'm thinking about social environment and social things like parties and networking and all those kind of things and that can be really difficult for some whose introverted can you talk a little bit about how we might navigate that successfully and so one on the one hand and then how if you're if you're hosting a party or in social networking event how you might organize that so that it makes it easier for people to function yeah well I mean the first thing I would go back to is the idea of constantly asking yourself like if I truly were spending my time the way I prefer to spend it what would I be doing right now because you know you you all are living at a stage of your life lives where there's tremendous pressure to be going to parties all the time and maybe you enjoy that and maybe you don't and if you don't it's okay I mean especially on a campus like this there's a thousand ways of connecting with people and getting to know your classmates that don't involve going to a big keg party or whatever it is so like do it some of the time but you probably don't have to go as much as you're thinking that you do number one and I would look for the alternative ways like maybe you'd rather get together in a small group with other people who share the same interest and and connect that way but when you are going to parties and especially if you're having those moments of discomfort what can really there's two mental tricks that help one is to think of yourself as the host and make it your role to make the people around you feel comfortable so that you start taking your mental energy away from your own discomfort and towards everyone else's and you can assume that at least half the people there have way more discomfort than they're trying to express and then the other thing is to make it a kind of intellectual puzzle of just knowing I mean you know this everybody has something absolutely fascinating about them and so if you're a job when you're meeting somebody is to figure out like to tap into your curiosity and figure out what is the thing that's really fascinating here that can make it really interesting and you might develop real connections that way right I want to go a little bit back to leadership because you now are running this organization and you're still writing I wonder if you could talk about vulnerability and leadership which is the theme of our of our series in what ways have you seen yourself be vulnerable as a leader and how have you adapted to that oh yeah I mean I think it's at the core of everything really and I you know I think you would ask me the question of like is it easier to be vulnerable on the page or in real life and it's much easier to be vulnerable on the page I believe I think you don't have to look at the people who are reading about your vulnerable thing as you're talking about it but it's really complicated we were living in this world where although it's now become fashionable to talk about words like vulnerability let me say it differently I think there is a balance that we're all constantly striking between having to think about self presentation which is a fact of life and having to think about being really or not think about it but wanting to be really sincere with the people around you and you can't be sincere without being vulnerable it's impossible because every single one of you has some kind of deep ache at the center of your being because you're human I mean there's whether you're religious or not every single religious tradition is premised on this idea you know Adam and Eve thrown out of the Garden of Eden the gardens gone you know Buddha leaves his father's Palace and discovers that actually life is dissatisfaction and suffering and and then figures out what to do about it this is a human truth and it's it's so weird to me that we live with us human truth and yet we're usually not allowed to talk about it most of the time and so like all this talk about you know going on Facebook and and people will say well it it can be very fake and overly curated and I think that what people are really reacting to is not so much the status anxiety that Facebook and juices and people but it's just really grating that people that no one's telling the truth I think we all want the truth so in this example when you've been vulnerable on how that has how you dealt with it yeah okay yeah show me but I I think one of there are a few reasons but one of the reasons it took me a while to become a writer even though that was what I had always wanted to do is that I liked writing about the vulnerable stuff I liked writing about like telling the truth about what it's like to be alive and the hard things and so it was really uncomfortable for me and embarrassing at the beginning to write a book about being an introvert you know and during the like now okay now everybody is talking about it a little bit more so it's okay but during the years that I was writing the book and it hadn't come in - yes at what seven years I think you said yeah yeah I was I was working on it for seven years and I remember going to dinner parties and saying yeah I'm writing this book about introversion and people would be like what you know like it seems like a weird topic at the time and it felt like a stigmatized topic so I just had to finally decide okay I'm just gonna deal with that and that's the price that I'm gonna pay in order to tell the truth about what I think so that your writing was your act of vulnerability and okay yeah so first the writing was then once I had the book contract and I was working on the book I was like okay I'm okay with that but now I have to go up on stage and talk about it you know and that was a whole other thing that was way harder at the beginning now I'm really used to it but I walked around for the first few months after the book was published and doing all the publicity stuff that you have to do you know I I just felt incredibly raw and exposed and but I will say the good news is you get over those feelings like the more you get over them well it's just the more you're exposed to things that are uncomfortable the more you become desensitized to them like people have studied this phenomenon so and the key for anything that you're feeling uncomfortable about whether it's sort of generic public speaking or about being specifically vulnerable the key is to expose yourself to the thing that's making you so uncomfortable in very small and bite-sized ways so like for me I actually went to a class for people who were uncomfortable with public speaking and the very first session of the class but all we had to do was stand up say our names and sit back down again and declare victory you know and then you'd go back the next week and and all you'd have to do is stand up and answer a few questions about yourself like where you'd been to school and where you grew up to clear victory sit back down and you kind of ratcheted it up a little by little from there and the miracle of it is that that process just somehow works and it it can really all melt away you know there was a New York Times op-ed that you did I think it was in March of this year and it's it's the corollaries different conversation about leaders were talking about followers and I wanted to read to you what a little bit about what you wrote just ask you about it because it's in a way you argued that college campuses need to really create more followers not leaders that was sort of a theme I believe of the op-eds aid if college admissions offices show us whom and what we value then we seem to think that the ideal Society is composed of type A's this is perhaps so unsurprising even if these examples come from highly competitive institutions it's part of the American DNA to celebrate those who rise above the crowd and in recent decades the meteoric path to leadership of youthful of youthful garage and dorm dwellers from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg has made king of the hill status seem possible for every 19-year old so now we have high school students buying to be presidents of as many clubs as they can it's no longer enough to be a member of the student council now you have to run the school get a well-functioning student body not to mention polity also needs followers it needs team players and it needs those who go their own way it needs it needs leaders who are called to service rather than to status that's a pretty powerful statement so could you talk a little bit more about that and yeah I mean ok so I was horrified by this even back when I was applying to schools and even more horrified now by the pressure that all of you are under from a very young age you had to have felt it to get here the the pressure to be the leader of this and to be the leader of that and I'm as you can tell from what I said before I'm all for being the leader of something that you truly care about like you should do that but it just it seems to me that in the culture now there's this there's a kind of emptiness in the pressure to just be the leader of something for its own sake and and I believe that you can have a life full of great contribution to the people around you and full of great personal happiness and fulfilling without being the leader of a damn thing you know you could go and do great science or a great art or be a great parent or you know in any number of things that have nothing to do with conventional notions of leadership so yeah what's been the response to that statement an enormous amount of interest actually yeah I mean I I heard from a lot of universities who were interested in this topic yeah in fairness to university admissions I think that most admissions offices know that this is a problem and at the same time they're inundated with all these applications and how on earth do you distinguish one from another but I just wish we could expand the way we think about what it means to be human yeah one of the things you talk about is the importance of space I think it call them nurturing niche nice I think it's definitely to call but you know we're sort of thinking we sort of niches and we are we are building we've just built two new colleges two new residential colleges we've we are building a new Campus Center where we are always looking for space on campus and yeah you talked about the need for introverts to be in not just large spaces like this but small spaces and and also what it's like to be in a dorm space and how to function if you're in those small spaces yeah you talked a little bit and gives people advice about how they might navigate that and how we might actually want think about building our buildings oh yeah yeah I mean so what I'm about to say it's true for everyone it's kind of more true for introverts but really all he need to be in physical spaces where you have spaces to come together and you also have spaces that you can come right where you can be by yourself so you know I don't know how much you guys have been exposed to it but in corporate America now are really globally the trend in office design it's these gigantic open plan offices where people don't really get that much personal space and when I was first researching my book and I started talking to people in these offices they were all coming up to me and kind of whispering and saying you know I I'm really unhappy in this office but I can't I can't say this to my boss because I'll be perceived as not being a team player and they would say is there any research out there that I could show my boss to just prove to them why they shouldn't be designing the next space that we're moving to you like that and I started looking and I found that there's this mountain of data that's out there and again this data is not even about introverts it's just about humans that like if you're in a space where you have no privacy and you feel like you're subject to people's gaze and people's evaluation all the time it it increases pressure it increases cognitive load you get interrupted more so it takes you more time to do things and you get sick more often and then the weird real paradox is you actually don't form as many social bonds or close ones because if you think about it the the currency of forming a true friendship is often that you're sharing information with your friends that you wouldn't be sharing to everybody in your dorm or office and if you can never be alone in order to do that that's just not going to be happening as often so in terms of how to build university spaces my suggestion is to design them so that you've got the open spaces here but you've got plenty of nooks and crannies where people can go to be by themselves or to be little dyads you know and I'll tell you I remember this even from when I was an undergrad at Princeton and the dining hall that I went to you in my residential college it was a modern one and it was designed so that it had all the big tables were in the center and then you had a few tables that were meant for just two or three or two or three people at a time and the they were off on the sides but in kind of in the cobwebby sides you felt like those were the dusty undesirable tables at which to sit and I remember even then feeling this conflict and feeling like gosh I'd really rather be sitting at one of those tables with one or two friends having a real conversation but there was so much social pressure that was built right into the design to be sitting at the big tables where people were recounting their drinking games from the weekend before and and and yeah so the physical space really makes a difference business yeah well you've given us a lot to think about so we have questions from the audience I'm going to turn our attention to those and our first question is what advice can you give to introverts who want to stand out and take leadership positions but sometimes feel overshadowed by the extroverted peers yeah I mean the best thing that you can do really well it's a couple things one is to develop mastery and expertise in whatever the area is where you want to be a leader because first of all the more mastery you have the more confidence you're gonna have and you're gonna be expressing that confidence in all kinds of ways you're not even aware of and other people will be reacting to it too so it will all just kind of happen more naturally and and then the other thing is to come back to what we said before of just give yourself pushes if it's something that really matters to you give yourself a push to speak at the moments that you might be kind of afraid to do it or do in the beginning or end do it beginning yeah yeah one rule of thumb that I often give to people is to ask yourself am I not speaking or am I not doing X Y Z out of fear or just out of true preference and if it's out of fear don't don't let the fear be your master you know blow past the fear but if it's out of a true preference if this is actually what I'd rather be doing then honor that our next question is how does introversion change introversion change over the course of a lifetime or through different stages of life yes so this is complicated because the data shows that for all of us over time we get more introverted really yeah yeah I mean haven't you noticed that I feel like I have with my friends that I'm selective I'm sorry I'm more selective okay but oh yeah okay so so people mellow out I think it's probably because their nervous systems all of them become more reactive to stimulation as you get older so people see quiet more but on the other hand what happens is we all develop so many skills as we grow older that things that would have for introverts let's say things that would have bothered us when we were younger may become less of a big deal as we get older you know such as public speaking like if you have a fear of that for example you might really overcome it and so you're gonna start seaming and acting like more of an extrovert as you grow older and get those skills but your underlying being probably won't change and might even get quieter okay we talked a little bit about spaces and I'm going to come back to in a second but the question now is how do you make time to be alone or recharge when you live in a university environment yeah I'm all dorm rooms I think is what the yeah so if you're living in this kind of an environment you have to really prioritize it and that is the only way it's gonna happen you have to make it a commitment that you honor as fiercely as the commitment to study for your midterms what does that look like what is that what does it look like I don't know I mean and for you it might be taking a walk like just taking a walk around this campus there's people all around you but you can walk quite undisturbed I think I'm sure there are some pathways where you can for some people it's gonna be exercise you have to kind of figure out what your thing is but in my experience the hurdle is not so much figuring out the space as it is feeling emotionally entitled to actually do it because what you're gonna be feeling is like I shouldn't be doing this there's something wrong with my need to do it I'm too busy to do it but you just have to tell yourself you're gonna be so much more socially present and academically on your game if you give yourself those moments then if you don't how can we help as administrators and faculty in getting that message out what would you suggest that we do I would well first of all I would talk about it I mean I a lot of the issue here is just kind of normalizing this discourse and making it part of everyday a conversation I would asked for people who you think are influential role models on campus whether they're professors or students or whatever who are introverts to have discussions like this one where they talk about what their strengths are as introverts what their challenges have been so it just becomes part of the everyday language and when you're when you're creating programs like an orientation program let's say you make sure to build in quiet space and breaks for people and have the people who are leaving the programs honor not just honored it like oh we we know you can traverse need it but just like you know more like everybody needs this kind of way so now it's time now we're gonna have our quiet space because we all need that you know call it meditation if you need to cuz that's a fashion for you to learn it yeah okay should we categorize introverts and extroverts or think of introversion as a spectrum oh thank you for asking that whoever that came from we should think of it as a spectrum for sure so Carl Jung the psychologist who first popularized these terms in the 1920s even he said no such thing as pure introvert or pure extrovert he said such a man would be an Aluna tick asylum that was his quote and so we all have a tendency to be one part of the spectrum or another but we're also all much more complex than that and I'm sure you've had the experience if you're extroverts of feeling like oh now I'm really seeking quiet time or if you're introverts feeling like oh my gosh you know when I'm around these people I'm talking about this subject I feel like really out there so that's that's all part of it so I know that you you some people have said that you are so focused on introverts that you must be anti extrovert but I don't think that that's true yeah I know you're having you married to an introvert yeah and I'd like to actually ask you to talk to the extroverts in the room about what you know you know what they can do to support the introverts in their myths yeah like if I asked your husband what he does for you what would he say oh gosh well it's also what I do for him because it's both like we actually both need to make all kinds of adjustments so I think for my husband it would be it's probably things like you know the advice that I just gave to all of you I very often will say to him at around 7 p.m. like I really want to go for a walk right now you know and I'll go and take a quiet walk and he's not saying you know I really wish he'd make dinner or can I come with you on the walk he knows I just need the walk and and we build those kinds of things in and then there's things that adjustments that I always have to remember to make for him and I'll give you an example of one he has a really lovely delightful way of getting excited and enthusiastic about stuff he gets very very exuberant and it's really nice to be around and so when my book first hit the bestseller list he was like jumping up and down and you loo lating and you know planning a party within the first 5 minutes and it was my book so I was just as excited but my way of expressing it is much more muted you know I'm more like this is really great [Laughter] so that's fine and I'm really benefitting from his wonderful exuberance when I'm around him but what I always have to remember is and something great happens for him or for our family in general I have to give myself a push to express it in outward way so that he feels like he's getting that affirmation back from me and of course he at the same time needs to remember that it's never gonna look the way look to him the way he would express it but but giving myself that push can really go a long way so that's kind of why I was saying before about why it's so important to make this part of everyday discourse because there's so many misunderstandings that can happen between friends and couples and colleagues of the kind that I was just describing like you might think that someone doesn't care when they really do care but they just are more muted about it and and talking about that and making those tweaks for each other can go such a long way well I think we might be almost the end of our time if I'm looking at it so I want to give some time for for her to leave on time and for you to come up and ask questions individual if you'd like to since we trying to be supportive of our introverts so I think what we'll do is we'll have Stephen come up and close out the session and give you some sense of how we're going to move forward but as he's doing this I'd love to again thank you very much for making time to come talk to us we love the scene the fairy godmother for for introverts and then we'd love to have you back on campus as soon as possible possible so thank you so much for all your advice oh my gosh [Applause] [Music] okay thank you so much so I want to say a big thank you to all of you for being such an incredibly warmly spirited audience and and if you want to stay in touch with these questions and these issues I actually have a website it's quiet Rev comm for quiet revolution it's an amazing website there's a lot of information there's a ton of articles and ways to connect and so on so I would invite you there and yeah thank you so much and thanks to Stephen and to Kim for doing this right Steve well thank you so much for joining us today Susan and taking the time out of your very busy schedule to be here also Thank You secretary Gough Cruz for hosting this conversation and really working with Yale well to make sure wellness is an important part of the programming on campus and also thank you to Yale well and life lab for sponsoring today's event the audience thank you so much for being here and for your engagement and the insightful questions that you submitted if you have a lunch ticket if you could please exit to the left when you're leaving and go out through old campus otherwise if you could exit through the Elm Street door to the right thank you so much again for Jannetty wants to just come on up for small conversations thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 6,421

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

Keywords: Yale, Susan Cain, Kimberly Goff-Crews, Vulnerability, Leadership, Introverts, Yale Well

Id: TDj8nYKqZE4

Length: 50min 41sec (3041 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2017