Susan Cain's Blog

Yesterday I spoke at the HQ of a global bank, and during the Q and A following my talk, an HR leader raised her hand to ask an important question that I hear all time. So I thought I’d answer it here, and share with all of you.

Question:

I see many talented people who don’t get promoted, because they lack “executive presence.” How can I help them get to where they should be?

Answer:

You don’t have to be great at presence. (You’re great at other things.) You just have to be good enough. Think of it on a scale of 1 to 10. You don’t have to be a 10; 6 should do the trick. You can get from a 2 to a 6, right?

 

The best way to get rid of any discomfort or fear is to expose yourself to it, little by little, again and again, in a supportive setting. Join Toastmasters. Attend religiously.

 

Presence, as Amy Cuddy observes in her seminal book of that title, is about bestowing awareness and attention on others. Once you get rid of the emotional clutter of worrying how you’re coming across, or feeling unentitled to take the spotlight, this should come pretty naturally.

 

Presence is also about confidence. This does not require you to be one of those naturally confident people at whom you may marvel. Just get into the habit of speaking from a place of conviction. Practice deciding what you think about things. Exercise this skill as you would any other muscle, even if you’re simply arriving at an opinion of last night’s movie. You can speak softly. People will hear the conviction in your voice.

 

Presence is also about energy. But you don’t have to display an amped-up energy. Inner energy comes through just as powerfully. Energy comes from passion. It comes from finding and acting from the things that light you up. So try to find your passion source. If you can’t find it, try to change jobs. Seriously.

 

We all have physical tics we revert to when uncomfortable – running our hands through our hair, adjusting our ties. Body language experts call these “unconscious adapters.” Figure out and minimize your own unconscious adapters, just the way you strive to eliminate your ums and ahs from verbal conversation.

 

Of everything on this list, #6 is the least important, because it’s an outward adjustment. The inner adjustments matter so much more.

I hope this helps! Would love to hear your thoughts, and also your stories of developing your own presence.

The post “Executive Presence” for Introverts appeared first on Susan Cain.

Since launching the Quiet Revolution, I can’t tell you how many times people (introverts, extroverts and ambiverts alike) have asked me imploringly for new insights to help them work better with their introverted colleagues.

So I’m always happy to announce when new insights are at hand. Here are some today, courtesy of Dan Schawbel, a fellow introvert and author of the new book Back to Human! 

Recently, Dan shared exclusive data with me based on a global study he conducted with Virgin Pulse for his new book. The study, of over 2,000 managers and employees, found that introverts are much more likely to work remotely, feel lonely, and be disengaged at work. In addition, he found that 63 percent of introverts feel lonely at work, compared to 37 percent of extroverts.

Introverts can work effectively in isolation, but this data shows that they’re more likely to be lonely, and less likely to be engaged. As humans, we all need the love and belonging that come from deep relationships. While it’s often comfortable for introverts to use technology to connect, its overuse creates weaker relationships that can leave them unhappy and unfulfilled.

More than two-thirds of introverts say that they’d rather email than meet face to face; yet a study in the Harvard Business Review found that a single face-to-face conversation is thirty-four times more successful than email. Before I met my fellow introvert Dan in person, we had a digital connection; but we both agree that the relationship became stronger after meeting for lunch in New York City several years ago.

The trick, when it comes to introverts, is using tech in “just right” doses. Managers should make sure that this is happening for their teams; individuals should make sure that it’s happening for themselves.

Here are some more tips from Dan’s book, for leaders who want to create deeper, and more meaningful, relationships with their introverted teammates:

Encourage more social gatherings at work to build better team relationships. We spend so much time at work that it’s important we like and/or are friends with our colleagues. Dan’s study found that over 40 percent of introverted employees want to build relationships through team building activities and social events. Many introverts find these events hokey and unconvincing; to make it fun for all, try having everyone do a low-key activity, such as answering questions about each other, or holding a ping-pong tournament. Giving everyone something amusing to do can help the team get to know each other in a more human way. Give continuous feedback and recognition instead of annual performance reviews. No one wants to wait a year to know how they’ve performed. Tech has wired us (introverts and extroverts alike) for instant gratification. As a result, leaders need to regularly help their people feel appreciated, connected and loved. Create a safe work environment so introverts feel comfortable sharing. With Project Aristotle, Google set out to uncover the “secret sauce” to create a high performing team. They discovered that psychological safety was the answer: creating a safe place in which teammates feel they belong and can freely share ideas without repercussion. Promote a shared-learning culture. If there’s one thing introverts love to do, it’s learn. They also love to feel valuable, and to share their knowledge with others. In a climate where we all need to learn “at the speed of business,” this can be a huge advantage. We need to create work cultures that promote continuous education – and these are work cultures in which introverts can shine. Hold individual meetings either weekly or bi-weekly to check in. Introverts need individual attention. They’re typically more effective in one-on-one meetings than in big town halls. Give them individual attention, so you can hear the best of their hearts and minds, and so they know you genuinely care – and in return they’ll give you their commitment, their engagement, and their very best work.

The post How Leaders Can Create Deeper Relationships with Introverted Teammates appeared first on Susan Cain.

Dear everyone,

I just emailed these tips to a friend of mine who’s trying to help his fourth grade daughter speak up a bit more in class. After I wrote them up, I thought it would be worth sharing them with all of you, too!

So, here they are, hardly edited at all, except that I’ve changed my friend’s daughter’s name to “Sophie”:

1. The key to extinguishing any and all fears is to do it in small steps, with small victories along the way — sometimes VERY small steps. Maybe you can set small goals with Sophie: today I will raise my hand once…today I will ask one question…that kind of thing. And celebrate madly each time, when she pulls it off.

2. You can practice with Sophie, and role play what she might say and what it would sound like.

3. Can you partner with the teacher by letting her know what subjects Sophie is especially interested in? Then, the teacher could talk to her about those subjects privately and compliment on her knowledge or interest, and ask Sophie if she could call on her with one question about that topic during class.

4. If you’re comfortable with the teacher, you could suggest a think-pair-share method — this is a great teaching tool for ALL kids, and especially for kids like Sophie. The teacher asks a question; the students think about it to themselves; the teacher pairs the students up, and the pairs discuss the question together. Then, the teacher invites the pairs to share with the class, if they’re so inclined. This technique keeps all kids engaged, but especially helps the Sophies of the world to practice articulating their thoughts out loud.

5. If there’s a particular classmate Sophie would like to get to know, but hasn’t yet, you could let the teacher know and ask that Sophie be paired with that classmate for various activities, in order to foster the friendship.

I hope this helps!

Have a great week,

Susan

The post How to Help Your Child Speak Up in Class appeared first on Susan Cain.

This post is very personal, but it has a larger point too.

My father was a gastroenterologist and medical school professor in New York City. Every day he would take care of his patients, come home, and have dinner with the family, and then, after the rest of us had gone to bed, he would pore over medical journals late into the night.

As a young girl, I used to worry about him. I thought that surely he couldn’t be happy this way, night after night, alone with his work. It was only when I grew up and turned into someone who devours psychology journals that I understood how happy my father actually was. And, of course, all that studying made him one hell of a doctor.

I thought about this when I came across an article alleging that most doctors are too busy and overworked to read medical journals. They rely on what they learned in medical school and fail to stay current with developments in their fields. Here’s William Shankle, M.D. and professor at U.C. Irvine:

“Most doctors are practicing 10 to 20 years behind the available medical literature and continue to practice what they learned in medical school… There is a breakdown in the transfer of information from the research to the overwhelming majority of practicing physicians. Doctors do not seek to implement new treatments that are supported in the literature or change treatments that are not.”

Doctors do have “continuing medical education” requirements, which they often meet by attending conferences at beach or ski resorts.

My mother, who accompanied my father to these conferences, used to tease him about being the only participant to sit through every session, in the front row—no less. He taped them all, and then in his hour-long commute to work, he would listen to the tapes, over and over again, until he’d absorbed the information. Even now, when he no longer practices, he still attends gastroenterology conferences because he’s excited to find out “what will happen next” in his field.

This post is partly a paean to my father, but it has broader implications. Lately, medical schools have started screening applicants for people skills. This comes from an admirable impulse—we’ve all felt the sting of doctors who don’t listen or address us or their teams brusquely—but I wonder how effective these tests are. My father wouldn’t have shone in that kind of assessment—he doesn’t enjoy talking for its own sake—but his patients loved him because they knew how much he cared. Maybe instead of testing for social skills—which can favor a glib charm even if that’s not the medical schools’ intention—we should be screening for kindness, curiosity, and a thirst for quiet study.

*The above post previously appeared on Susan Cain’s former blog, The Power of Introverts.

The post Are Some of the Best Doctors Cerebral Introverts? appeared first on Susan Cain.

“How did your mother teach you to dream, and how do you hope to teach your children to dream?”

For Mother’s Day, Whitney Johnson, a venture capitalist and popular Harvard Business Review blogger, challenged me to answer these questions. With her new book, Dare, Dream, Do, she’s out to inspire women of all ages to dream big and make those dreams a reality—especially mothers.

So I started thinking about my own mom. And I realized: it was what she didn’t say that counted most.

When I was a kid, I spent countless sunny afternoons writing stories. I called the space under the family card table my workshop and curled up there producing “magazines”—looseleaf paper stapled together—subscriptions to which I sold to indulgent family members. My friend Michelle and I sat side by side at her bedroom table, writing plays and reading them aloud to each other. I went to the library every Friday and came home with teetering stacks of books.

Never once did my mother say: “You should be outside more. You should do more regular kid stuff. You should daydream less, socialize more.” Instead, she took me to my grandfather’s book-lined apartment and let me wander his library for hours. She understood that I had plenty of friends with whom I liked to play quietly—and that one of my very best friends was my very own self.

Today, I know how lucky I was. Every day, I hear from readers whose well-intentioned parents asked them to be more like their extroverted siblings or classmates, to spend less time with the riches inside their own head. Many of these parents were loving and well-meaning. They worried that too quiet a childhood might lead to a future of loneliness.

My mother is a famous worrier, but somehow she never worried about this.

Thank you, Mom.

Here is Whitney Johnson’s new book, Dare, Dream, Do. You can connect with her on Twitter @johnsonwhitney and on Facebook.  

*The above post previously appeared on Susan Cain’s former blog, The Power of Introverts.

The post How My Mother Helped Launch My Writing Career appeared first on Susan Cain.

Isn’t it strange how deeply we mistrust quiet these days even though silence and solitude are widely held values in most mythological and spiritual traditions?

Here’s one of my favorite examples: the biblical story of Elijah.

Elijah the Prophet is running for his life.

He’s just destroyed a cult run by the evil queen Jezebel, and he did it by staging a loud and spectacular piece of stagecraft designed to showcase the one true God. Now Jezebel seeks revenge.

Elijah flees for the wilderness, praying to die.

God answers his prayers, but not by killing him. Instead, he teaches Elijah the beauty of the soft-spoken approach.

He instructs Elijah to wait for him at Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments centuries earlier.

So Elijah goes to the mountain.

A loud wind roars, but God is not in the wind.

Then, an earthquake, but God is not in the earthquake.

After that, a fire, but still no God.

And after the fire, “a still, small voice.”

God is in the voice. Small. Still. Quiet.

I’d love to collect more of these stories, from across religions and mythologies. Can you help me? No need to write them all out, unless you have time and are so inclined. You could just tell me: check out the such-and-such myth. Thanks!

*The above post previously appeared on Susan Cain’s former blog, The Power of Introverts.

The post A Still, Small Voice appeared first on Susan Cain.

I met some really incredible people at TED conferences I attended, and Rabbi David Wolpe was one of them. Here he is on the power of solitude:

When he was a child, the Seer of Lublin (later a famous Hasidic master) used to go off into the woods by himself. When his father, worried, asked him why, he said ‘I go there to find God.’ His father said to him, ‘But my son, don’t you know that God is the same everywhere?’ ‘God is’ said the boy, ‘but I’m not.’

Solitude is the school of the soul. Why was it Pascal who said that all of our problems come from not being able to be in a room alone? Not solely because he was an introvert, but because he was a deeply faithful man and religion not only emphasizes community but helps cultivate solitude. ‘Moses received the Torah from Sinai,’ says a classic rabbinic text, and Abravanel, the 15th century commentator, asks—why Sinai? Why not ‘from God?’ His answer is not that Sinai is a synecdoche—that it stands for God—but rather that Moses needed the experience of aloneness on Sinai to be ready to receive the Torah. No mountain solitude, no revelation.

Introverts people their solitude—with books, with imagination, sometimes with God. Hitbodedut, aloneness, is a traditional Hasidic practice in which the worshipper goes off alone. Sometimes he will scream, or cry, or contemplate, but it is essential that the eyes of the world do not push or pull in that moment. Influence is important, but in aloneness is freedom. Those of us who stand on the side at the party, or prefer not to go, do not devalue others. We just find that we can be truest to them when we have stored up quiet moments in the private reservoir that nourishes our souls.

If you’d like to know more about Rabbi David Wolpe and his work, please go here:

https://www.sinaitemple.org

https://www.facebook.com/RabbiWolpe

*The above post previously appeared on Susan Cain’s former blog, The Power of Introverts.

The post No Solitude, No Revelation appeared first on Susan Cain.

The following is a guest post from Jessica Tom, author of the novel  FOOD WHORE: A Novel of Dining & Deceit . Here she writes about the challenge of creating an introverted protagonist. Jessica describes herself as a non-anxious introvert. Find her at www.jessicatom.c om and on Twitter @jessica_tom.

In so many books, we follow the adventurer, the warrior, the stranger who brings trouble to town. It is easy to write a page-turner about these action-oriented people. Writing a page-turner with an introverted main character is much more difficult.

A couple years ago, I started writing a novel titled FOOD WHORE: A Novel of Dining & Deceit, a culinary coming-of-age novel about an 18-year old girl named Tia who secretly writes The New York Times restaurant review because the real critic has lost his sense of taste.

The concept is easy to understand, but as with so many things, it’s all in the execution. Tia is an introvert. But like real-life introverts, Tia was prone to being misunderstood. When I shopped the manuscript to agents, I got these sorts of responses:

“We felt that Tia came across as whiny at times, especially with respect to Emerald, who seems to have done nothing wrong or that warrants Tia’s intense dislike of her.”

“She frequently gets angry out of nowhere, and we thought she was unnecessarily ruthless with Carey.”

“Why hasn’t she made any friends in her classes? Doesn’t she have friends from high school she might call for advice, even if they’re at different colleges?”

Take my word for it: I would never write a whiny, unlikable, navel-gazing main character—yuck!—yet, that’s how people are often primed to think of the quiet, slightly anxious people in the room, fictional or otherwise. Now, you can blame the reader for the misinterpretation, or perhaps make the main character all sunshine and giggles. Or you can do the more difficult thing: give a voice to the introvert and fight that bias.

Here’s the book’s premise: Tia lives in public as a college freshman. She is navigating her first love, coping with her sexy roommate, and trying to please her parents. But in her secret life, she is directing the NYC dining world. She gets access to a glamorous world and sees her words in the world’s most influential newspaper. She is afraid of success, of losing her love, of failing, of judgment. Writing The New York Times restaurant review under secrecy keeps her safe from criticism—until it doesn’t.

The emotional core of the book is how Tia reconciles her introversion with her ambition and personal relationships. This is a subtle and hard thing to articulate, especially given the uphill battle introverts must climb in the realm of public perception.

But for every Huck Finn, Odysseus, and Harry Potter, video game-like characters who thrust the book through action, there are many introverted characters. Hamlet, Holden Caulfield, Mrs. Dalloway. These are the characters you relate to most. I may never catch a killer, win a war, save a country. But I endure little humiliations each day. Everyday I am learning about my weaknesses. And everyday I am living my greatest drama—learning how to overcome what Trollope calls the “lacerations on the human spirit.”

The best way to turn an introverted character into someone you want to spend 300+ pages with is by baring his or her soul in a way that might feel uncomfortable at first. But do that you must. You must prove she is not whiny, but sensitive and pained. She isn’t angry, but scared. She isn’t pathetic and lonely…but happier and more productive alone.

If you put in the effort to really understand your introverted character, then the payoff can be enormous. The introverted mind can be a thrilling minefield. Her choices can be life or death. And her feelings can be so deeply felt that the reader gets chills just thinking about her story.

This is what I sought to achieve in my book, a 320-page novel starring an introverted main character, and I am looking forward to sharing Tia’s story with the world.

*The above post previously appeared on Susan Cain’s former blog, The Power of Introverts.

The post Why Writing an Introverted Character Is Hard, and Why You Must Do It Anyway appeared first on Susan Cain.

Hi everyone! Here’s a guest post from the insightful Ben Dattner, of Dattner Consulting, and author of The Blame Game—a book on how organizations can harness the strengths of their introverted employees.

Do you have other ideas to add? I would love to hear them.

In the meantime, here’s Ben:

The fantastic success of Susan Cain’s Quiet demonstrates that she has tapped into something very important in our culture and our society at this moment in history.

Inevitably, corporations and many other kinds of organizations will realize the implications of Susan Cain’s work for their practices and cultures. Here are some very preliminary suggestions of what organizations might do to better ‘hear’ introverts who may be ‘quiet’ but still have tremendous value that they bring to the workplace each day:

– Examine ‘competency models’ and performance appraisal systems criteria to ascertain whether there is a bias towards evaluating and rewarding extroverted behaviors over introverted behaviors.

– Write comprehensive job descriptions that inform people how much interaction, networking, collaboration, and advocacy is required in positions before candidates take the jobs. This will enable introverts to self-select out of jobs that they might not thrive in. ‘Realistic job previews’ in general are very useful.

– Utilize feedback mechanisms, such as online surveys or other kinds of anonymous ‘suggestion’ boxes, wherein introverts can feel comfortable sharing feedback and suggestions that they might not feel comfortable sharing in a public forum.

– Employ ‘polling’ or similar strategies to solicit, and consider the perspectives of all members of the team or organization so everyone has a voice, even if they are reluctant to fight for attention in a public setting.

– Ask members of a team if they would like time on a meeting agenda in advance of the meeting so that more introverted team members can influence the agenda in advance without feeling like they have to be ‘the squeaky wheel’ in a meeting or to compete for airtime.

– Structure debates so that members of a team have an opportunity to argue ‘pro’ or ‘con’ of any given issue or strategy in subteams. While an introvert may not feel comfortable soliciting support and loudly advocating a point of view, he or she might be comfortable participating in a discussion in a smaller team.

The above suggestions are meant to be a point of departure, and not a point of arrival. Corporations and other kinds of organizations, of any size and in the US and abroad, can benefit from thoughtful consideration of Susan’s excellent book and how much it is resonating with so many people.

If you’d like to hear more from Ben, you can find him here.

*The above post previously appeared on Susan Cain’s former blog, The Power of Introverts.

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Have you ever wished you could eradicate the ums and ahs right out of your conversation and especially your public presentations?

Turns out those verbal fillers may play an important role in establishing trust, according to this Slate magazine article by Michael Erard:

“…’uh’ and ‘um’ don’t deserve eradication; there’s no good reason to uproot them. People have been pausing and filling their pauses with a neutral vowel (or sometimes with an actual word) for as long as we’ve had language, which is about 100,000 years. If listeners are so naturally repelled by ‘uhs’ and ‘ums,’ you’d think those sounds would have been eliminated long before now. The opposite is true: Filled pauses appear in all of the world’s languages, and the anti-ummers have no way to explain, if they’re so ugly, what ‘euh’ in French, or ‘äh’ and ‘ähm’ in German, or ‘eto’ and ‘ano’ in Japanese are doing in human language at all.

In the history of oratory and public speaking, the notion that good speaking requires umlessness is actually a fairly recent, and very American, invention. It didn’t emerge as a cultural standard until the early 20th century, when the phonograph and radio suddenly held up to speakers’ ears all the quirks and warbles that, before then, had flitted by. Another development was the codification of public speaking as an academic subject. Counting ‘ums’ and noting perfect fluency gave teachers something to score.

What’s more, ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’ do not necessarily damage a speaker’s standing. Recently, a University of Michigan research team turned their attention to phone survey interviewers. They found that the most successful interviewers—the ones who convinced respondents to stay on the line and answer questions—spoke moderately fast and paused occasionally, either silently or with a filler ‘uh’ or ‘um.’ ‘If interviewers made no pauses at all,’ the lead researcher, Jose Benki, told Science Daily, ‘they had the lowest success rates getting people to agree to do the survey. We think that’s because they sound too scripted.’ Speaking with a certain number of ‘uhs’ and ‘ums,’ it seems, may actually enhance a speaker’s credibility.”

For those of you who have embarked on challenging yourselves to become the best and bravest speakers you can be, this is intriguing information. If you’ve been to a Toastmasters meeting, you know that at every session someone is appointed to count ahs and ums. This is an incredibly useful tool for making you conscious of how often you resort to these verbal fillers. And I must admit, I’m glad to be rid of them.

Still, it’s nice to know that verbal hesitation actually makes speakers more credible. This fits in with other research I’ve written about that suggests that expressing uncertainty makes people trust your opinions more.

What do you think: is there a place for ums and ahs at the podium? What do you think more generally about expressing uncertainty—is it a useful thing to do, or does it detract from a message?

I’ll report first: once I gave a seven minute talk (no notes at all) about my then forthcoming book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. The venue was a salon for women leaders. There were sixty-five people there, and the subject of the evening was power, confidence, and voice. I spoke about the powers of speaking softly but with deep conviction. It was a terrific experience.

I also appeared on the Diane Rehm show on NPR, which I enjoyed very much. You can hear a recording here.

How about you? Have any of you been going to Toastmasters or doing any other public speaking? Would love to hear your stories even if all you’ve done thus far is thought about attending. Also, please don’t be reluctant to share any lumps and bumps you may be enduring along the way—they are to be expected. Can’t have a Quiet Revolution without ’em.

On the other end of the spectrum, many readers of this blog are extremely experienced and gifted public speakers. We would love to hear your stories as well.

*The above post previously appeared on Susan Cain’s former blog, The Power of Introverts.

 

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