Going Solo, Part I

Years and years ago I found myself in charge of a small community service organization at BYU. One of the perks of my position was that I got to attend a leadership retreat in a mountain lodge up Hobble Creek Canyon with other leaders of other BYU service organizations. In retrospect, I think the leadership retreat was less about teaching valuable leadership skills to help us in our positions than about giving the next-level-up leaders a chance to practice their own leadership and organizational skills. As a consequence, the retreat consisted mostly of playing EFY style get-to-know-you activities with people I was never going to see again, taking personality tests, and eating hamburger dinners and ice cream sundaes and pancake breakfasts.

The first personality test we took, of course, was the Color Code test. Then someone from the business school did a presentation on the different personality colors, and then we were given a new sheet of paper with a series of questions designed to tell us if we were introverts or extroverts. "Most of you," the presenter said as we finished our tests and added up our scores, "maybe all of you, are probably extroverts. People in leadership positions tend to be extroverts. Did anyone at all score as an introvert?"

I had scored as an introvert. And now that the presenter had told me that extroverted was what people in this crowd were supposed to be, I felt very out of place. I also felt rather disinclined to raise my hand and out myself. But I wasn’t alone, and a few furtive glances and tentative hands later it became apparent that that, in fact, all of us were not extroverts. We introverts were a minority, but a solid one. To everyone’s surprise, our numbers even included Chris, the next-level-up leader of the cluster of service groups that included my own. Chris was almost overwhelmingly likeable and friendly and outgoing and enthusiastic and social and, it turned out, unashamedly introverted. Almost the whole room laughed when he raised his hand, like he was just trying to be funny as usual, but he didn’t even crack a smile. Okay, he did crack a smile, because he was always smiling, but he was dead serious when he replied, “No, I’m definitely an introvert. I like people, but I need lots of time to myself or I’ll go crazy.”

The presenter seemed a bit taken aback by all of this, like he had been expecting to use the test to instruct a group of extroverts on how to understand the introverts among the volunteers we would work with in our respective organizations. But, like the good public speaker he was, he jumped on the opportunity. “Introverts,” he told us, “are not always who you expect them to be.”

And this, actually, is the one useful thing I learned at the retreat. Before then, I felt like there was something wrong with me that I didn’t like to spend all my time with other people, that the more time I spent in large crowds, the more time I needed to recharge by myself. I would never have wanted to call myself “introverted” because the word has negative connotations. To be introverted suggests that you’re shy, awkward, withdrawn, misanthropic.

But those labels are not necessarily true. I prefer to call myself independent or reflective, even a little solitary, but I'm not sure that describes it either. The real difference between introversion and extroversion (and just like any label, there’s not a strict dividing line between the two) is that extroverts are energized most by being with people and introverts are energized most by being alone. There was a much-passed-along piece in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch several years ago in which he attempted to set the record straight on introversion. He described the distinction better than I can. Extroverts, he says,

are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge…This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating.

[Incidentally, I’m curious where my readers fall so I set up a completely unscientific poll in the sidebar. If you read this in a reader, click over and clock on where you think you fall.]

What this means for me is that there are a lot of things I could do with people that I’m just as comfortable, if not more so, doing on my own. Shopping for clothes, cooking, running, or going to the grocery store with another person are rare treats for me, and I enjoy the company most if I normally get to do these things by myself. I also don’t mind solo travel, as long as it’s just for a day or two, and when I take trips with people (which is most of the time) I almost always need a healthy chunk of alone time afterwards before I go back to work and my normal routine.

It’s not that I don’t like people. In fact, I really like people, and I like spending time with people. There are plenty of things that I much prefer to do with people. If I had my choice, I would watch most of my television with one or two other people, and while I might like cooking alone, I enjoy it most when I’m cooking for someone, and it’s not much fun to play Boggle by yourself. But people are a bit like running (a very little bit). I love running. It’s one of my favorite things to do. But running also makes me tired. I will willingly and happily tire myself out, and then I’ll rest and spend a lot of time not running so that I can go run again the next day.

And this is where I’ve decided that this blog post needs to be serialized. Because, believe it or not, this was just the introduction to a story I want to tell. And I think people are more likely to read a short blog post than a long one, and since I’m incapable of writing a long blog post, I’m banking on the theory that people are more likely to read a long blog post than a novel. So stay tuned for tomorrow(ish).