Some tidbits about introverts and extroverts, prompted by today’s MBTI discussion:
- When I got to lunch, about half the group from the tutorial session was in the lunch room, but it was almost completely quiet. I’m fairly sure that what happened was that none of the introverts wanted to stay around and chat after the official morning instructional part was over, so we all went down to lunch, and we all sat there not talking to each other. Once the extroverts showed up a few minutes later, there was a perfectly normal buzz of conversation.
- According to Esther Derby, if you are an introvert and want to say something while extroverts are chatting away and won’t let you get a word in edgewise, a useful technique is: 1) Lean forward; 2) Raise your hand; 3) Open your mouth. The former is a sign that you’re about to act, the second is a sign that they should stop, the third is a sign that you want to speak. If you do all of these together, it should serve as enough of a signal that the extroverts will be quiet for a second.
- Also according to Esther, if you’re an extrovert and, for some reason, you want to talk a bit less (e.g. to let the introverts speak), a technique that is sometime effective is to sit on your hands. (Presumably because it’s hard to speak without waving your hands around.)
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I just recently attended a MBTI session too. I thought the test was pretty accurate. I liked a few of the type breakdowns and solutions to common communication problems. I enjoyed a decent portion of the event and had an interesting experience during one of the exercises.
I’m not sure if your group was run in any way similar to mine, but about halfway through we physically separated ourselves into the four type quadrants (IN, IS, EN ES). Strangely, out of the group of 50 or so people, I was the only person in the IN group. I like to consider myself somewhat unique and I’m not totally convinced this is evidence, but it felt good. I guess that’s the introvert speaking.
11/3/2008 @ 6:13 am
Heh, funny. :-) I seem to recall hearing that, while the other splits are fairly even, there are a lot fewer N’s than S’s out there; I wonder if there’s some sort of self-selection process there, where the kind of people who come up with schemes like this are N’s, and hence call out their own characteristic feature even when demographic considerations don’t call for that…
11/3/2008 @ 5:16 pm
Interestingly, at the MBTI session at AYE, almost half of the participiants were IN’s….
11/13/2008 @ 1:50 am