Rantings of an introvert !

I was labeled as an introvert, in front of my whole class. And as if that wasn’t enough to make me squirm, my Meyer Briggs personality report was held up high in the air to for everybody to see the rare occurrence, when the bar charts showed me highly introverted in all 5 aspects. *sigh*
And then to my horror, all of us introverts were herded into one corner of the class, while the extroverts gathered in the other corner.

I’m talking about my ‘Career Management’ class yesterday, in which we were given out our Meyer Briggs personality test results. I was branded as an ‘INFJ’ which was somewhat different from my previous test results. Anyway, after the class was divided into two groups, they were both asked to come up with things that they liked and disliked about the other groups.

A couple of interesting things that were noted about the two groups were:

• 80% of the people in the introverted group were wearing either blue or black. (For some reason I had decided to wear my favorite blue shirt that day)
• All the extroverts were standing really close to each other while the introverts kept their distance.
• The extroverts just couldn’t stop talking among themselves, while us introverts just finished the job at hand and then were trying to make uncomfortable small talk. (Did I mention that small talk sucks?)

Anyway … following are the things that my extrovert counterparts didn’t like about us:

• It’s really hard to get us (introverts) get excited about stuff. (Which is rubbish … I do get excited about things sometimes, but I just keep it to myself)
• We don’t talk! (duh .. if I start talking too … who is going to listen to you when you’re talking incessantly about anything and everything)
• We sometimes don’t understand what’s going on in meetings etc. (if we’re quiet, that doesn’t mean we’re stupid. I’d rather stay quiet and let you take control of things until you do/say something wrong, and then I’ll offer my expert opinion that will leave people dumbfounded. hehe)
• We write long emails instead of using the phone. (Oops … I think this blog post is getting quite long too. Oh and yeah, I do prefer emails over making actual phone calls)

So, next time when you see an introvert displaying some of these similar characteristics, try not to judge us based on what you see. We are just regular people with regular feelings. We are just a little stingy with words sometimes and like to keep things to ourselves if we dont know you that well.
And to set the record striaght I wore a green polo to work today (and I felt rebellious for some reason) ;)