Introvert or Extrovert Which One Are You?

Have you been bamboozled by the terms introvert and extrovert?  Do you know which one you are?  The BBC are currently running their programme The Big Personality Test from the series Child of Our Time.

The show highlights the five personality traits we all share, one of which includes whether we are introvert or extrovert.

What does it all mean?  This article focuses on introversion and extroversion, what it means to you and how it affects your life.

The BBC programme highlights some very interesting facts about the relationship between introversion and extroversion and the controversy surrounding this.  However, more importantly, how might this change the way you think about yourself and who you are.

• So which are you?
• How would you rate yourself?
• Are you an Introvert?
• Do you prefer to stay at home?
• Are you shy?
• Do you prefer your own company?

Perhaps you think of yourself as an extrovert, gregarious in nature, outgoing, the life and soul of a party, loud boisterous and fun in nature or maybe somewhere in between?

• But what if you were wrong?
• What if after all this time the measurements you’re using to test whether you are an introvert or an extrovert are wrong.
• What if the labels of introvert and extrovert are wrong?
• Could and how does this affect you?
• What if after all this time you believed something about yourself that just wasn’t true?

Misconceived

The common misconception is that an introvert is shy and suffers from social anxiety with a preference for their own solitude; their own company. The extrovert on the other hand is domineering, loud, brash and likes to be centre of attention.

The terms introversion and extroversion come from the work of Carl Jung and later typified in the personality profiling work of Myers Briggs. Many organisations today use the Myers Briggs type indicators to determine your personality preferences as a means to help them with the job application and interview process.

As with many personality indicators rumours abound and misconceptions occur. The crass preference then becomes fact.  Introverts are shy and social outcasts, extroverts are loud, brash and the soul of the party.

What does this mean to you?

If you think of yourself as an introvert, do you think you are shy?

Do you prefer your own company?

Are you a social failure?

Do you only have a friend or two?

What do you think about yourself?

Are you different from the norm?

Do you wish you were more of an extrovert?

Or

do you think of yourself as an extrovert?

Do you love socialising and seek out and want to befriend?

Do you wish you were more of an introvert?

Or do you sit somewhere in the middle?

How does this affect the way you act, work and behave? And just as importantly what does this mean regarding your personal success?

We’ll cover these a little later.

The Test: Which one are you?

What you need. 1-4 sheets of A4 Paper. 1 Lemon cut in half

1) Take an A4 sheet of paper, hold it in front of you and lick along one edge and continue going until you run out of saliva, that is your tongue dries up on the paper. If you get to the end of the paper, turn it over and use the other side. Continue going on each side until you run out and your tongue feels dry on the paper.

2) Then make a mark or an indication of how far you licked.

3) Take the 1/2 lemon and squirt on your tongue. Now take some new A4 sheets and repeat 1)

Now measure the difference.

• Is there little or no difference?
• Is there a huge difference?
• How much extra saliva did the lemon produce?

The Answers

If the ‘Acid test’ produced little or no change and the lick tests are similar in length then this is a demonstration that your personality profile is that of an extrovert.

If the ‘lick lengths’ were different and you produced more saliva then this indicates that you have a personality profile of an introvert.

The degree of difference between the lick lengths will indicate the degree by which your personality traits are that of an introvert.

Imagine at one end of the scale is introvert, the other extrovert. The greater the difference the more introverted you are.

As an indication, if your initial lick length was 6 inches and your final lick length after the lemon was 1.5 metres, then your at the far end of introversion, if its about 18 inches then probably you sit somewhere in the middle.

Why & How?

The amount of saliva that you produce as a result of the lemon juice indicates the degree to which your senses are stimulated and therefore you either produce saliva as a result of the stimulation or not.  The amount of excess saliva also indicates how sensitive to stimuli you may be.

Therefore the acidity of the lemon stimulates our receptors and produces saliva; the more you salivate the less stimulation you require. The less saliva you create the greater stimulation your senses require.

How this works in relation to personality.

Think of it this way. If reading a nice novel stimulates you and you have a sense of satisfaction and comfort as a result then the ‘degree’ by which you need stimulating to achieve this is less than if you need to go skydiving or bungee jumping.

So an introverted person is someone who needs less stimulation to be happy compared to the extrovert who needs more stimulation.

Highly Recommended Further Reading

These two books are highly recommended if you wish to gain a further insight into personality profiles and why you do what you do. I’ll put the links again at the bottom of the post so you don’t have to click on them yet.

What this means to you

Introversion and extroversion have little or nothing to do with social ability and likeness and more to do with the amount of stimulation you require to achieve a state of ‘happiness’.

(Happiness: (used loosely) as the act of knowing you are happy only happens after the event of being/doing. Probably more accurately the desired state is one of being ‘yourself’ and of personal achievement – I am sure you’ll have your own word for this)

The more stimulation you need to get to this state the more you will attempt to find solutions that require you to seek ‘riskier, adventurous, and daring’ solutions.

The less stimulation you need, then you possibly have less need to have to bungee jump every day.

However, here’s the interesting thing…you like to bungee jump and you did the test and have discovered you are in fact more of an introvert.

That’s OK!

This just demonstrates the amount of stimulation you need to achieve your desired state. Introversion does not mean you won’t want to go skydiving anymore or that you may see or feel less of a need to do it as often. It simply means that you may wish to experience ‘high stimulating’ activities less often than an extrovert.

Similarly, if you discovered through the test that you are an extrovert, it doesn’t mean you will never want to read War and Peace, it simply means that you require less need to read more often.

So the question here is, being an extrovert or introvert is neither here nor there and has nothing to do with whether you’re a social outcast or miscreant, but to do with the amount of stimulation you require to feel satisfied. Therefore, you need not seek or wish to be other than what you are. If your preference is to read and paint or have light dinner parties or to go down the mountain blindfolded with no ropes while doing a conference call, then this is just what you need to feel good and get the stimulation you require.

What about the middle person?

This too is the degree by which you require the amount of stimulation. On one end of the scale the extrovert requires greater degrees of stimulation than the introvert and more often. Therefore it is about where you are on the continuum scale and how often.

What’s NLP’s take on this.

The important point here is not to say ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’. What you do and how you’ll behave and act will change according to context and motivation. Someday’s you may just be wanting to skydive and then halfway down be longing for a Pina Collada by the pool.

Behaviour happens and changes constantly from the continuous stimulation we receive throughout our lives. Introversion and extroversion are degrees, and the degree by which you require stimulation will depend as much upon the context you’re in to what you’ve been doing preceding this and where you are in your life.

Some people, possibly where the term ‘mid-life’ crisis comes from, may have had the personality type of introverts and now need to buy a motorbike and go travel the straights of Nevada for a year or base jump from the Eiffel Tower. While others have done this for the last 7 years and now wish a more sedentary life.

The point here is that it’s not who you are now but what you want to do now, and be happy doing it.  And, how can you take the upsides of whether you are extroversion or introversion to help you have a happier life?

If you’re the life and soul of the party, does it in fact mean you’re an extrovert or does it just mean that at this particular time you’re requirement is to be stimulated?

The take on this re NLP is that personality is a changing target, or perhaps, that some of the traits of personality will change over time through our core personality but who we are remains constant within a degree of flux.

Perhaps it’s closer to chaos theory, personality is chaotic within a structure and thus what we see and label are the fluctuating parts of the constant called ‘my personality’.

Your endeavour to success

If you require more stimulation to be satisfied this implies the threshold levels are higher than if you require less. This might also be why people that are extroverted require ‘big’ life changes to make the change; to travel around the world, to meet with Gandhi, a fire-walk. Whereas someone with lower thresholds for stimulation would probably require less significant encounters to achieve change. Their sensitivity to change is measured by granularity and not rocks.

So before you go for that new job or promotion think about how much stimulation you need and whether the position will be satisfactory or not.

If you want a change, will a firewalk do it for you, or do you want something more personal and subtle.

In summary

Just because you prefer silence doesn’t mean you don’t love a good ole’ rock concert.  Introverts and extroverts do however have certain preferences and are better at certain roles than their opposite. We are on an ever changing scale but we generally lean to one side more often than the other.  Environment, circumstances and motivation requirements can lead us to swap from our dominant side to the other and back again.

However from an NLP Perspective we know that change is about going through thresholds. How we go through these thresholds and whether we achieve our outcome depends on how much stimulation someone will need in order to achieve the change they want.

As someone who trains, I would guess that most of the people that have been on my courses and even my friends would say that I’m an extrovert or at least lean towards this side. I would suggest they see me as someone who is outgoing, plays to the crowd, is upbeat, socialises a lot, laughs loudly and in merriment and enjoys meeting new people.

And guess what… when I did the test I was off the scale as an introvert! My mouth would not stop watering and I mean really watering, well in fact pouring. Even thinking about it while writing this stimulates those senses.

However…. considering the type of role I have as a trainer, one of the other roles is that part of the training is taking people through life changing sessions as demonstrations. This requires a keenness of skill to pick up and modify my responses and strategies in response to their non-verbal changes. So it’s important given this context to have low thresholds to minute changes in skin colouration and muscle tone. Because it’s as much here that let you know something has happened and requires attention and a possible shift of attention.

After all this are you an introvert or an extrovert?

I think the case here is not whether you are one of the other or in the middle, rather when  is it most useful to have the strengths of each  given the presenting situation and how do you switch from one to the other in order to help you achieve what it is you most want.

If in doubt, just act as if…

And -

As John Grinder put it…

Change is rapport, congruence and any ritual that matches their belief system while waiting for the muse to strike.