Purpose

My Story is your story - we are the same

I am you! I feel what you feel every morning as you prepare to go to work. You steady your mind, maybe even do a few self affirmation chants; "I am worth it". But always, at the back of your mind, you feel uneasy. Then the questions start; "Why didn't I voice my opinion yesterday?"; "Why did Tom/Jane get the credit for my ideas?"; " Why didn't I see that coming?"; "Why can't they see how hard I'm working?". 

Again and agin, these questions come up. Whether it's looking in the mirror before you leave the house or that slight pause before you walk through the glass doors of the building or that momentary pause before your email application opens up... these questions come up and you start to doubt yourself. Think about it, you've started to doubt yourself before the day has even begun.

As the introvert inside steadies itself for the onslaught of the day, your brain is already trying to commit you to failure. Then throughout the day, your brain looks for evidence to prove its point. The look your CEO gave you when you made a comment, or the silence from the team when you made a joke, or someone didn't say thank you, or the disagreement with the customer. These tiny events, scattered throughout the day, your brain remembers and puts them forward to you as evidence of what you were thinking at the beginning of the the day. You are a failure, a fraud, and one day, they will find out.

You try to push these thoughts aside all day.... then at the end of the day, you are exhausted and you give in. The mental walls come crashing down as you make you way home. You replay those tiny events in your head and all you can think about is "what if I had said this or done this.". By the time you get home, you are so exhausted of inspiration and pride, you retreat into yourself. You don't feel like socialising and become short tempered with friends and family. You go to bed, knowing that tomorrow will be the same.

It doesn't take long before your self doubts at work start to impact your social and family life. Why should you socialise with friends? The more you look on social media, the more it seems everyone else is moving forward with success, getting promoted, and having a blast. Your normally happy demeanour and temperament degrades and family don't want to be with you anymore. If you have kids, you start to see them as liabilities and limiting your options. Your weekends are peppered with moments where you replay an event during the week and you feel deflated again. Before long, its Sunday evening and you know the week before and how you feel repeats.

Why am I doing this? 

I am not an academic, researcher, and I don't have a PHD. BUT I have enough common sense and experience to know that "work life balance" is just a phrase. As much as academic research warns you to separate work from the rest of your life and work shouldn't define you, the reality is, that's just no possible. Think about it... You spend 80% of your waking day at work (including travel) with a two day break in between, in which you probably spend a portion of time mentally preparing for Monday. For most of us introverts, work defines us and consumes us. 

After a series of horrible work days, I mentally snapped. I don't want to feel this way anymore! I want credit for my ideas and I want my opinions to be valued. I want to find a solution. There must be a solution. Then I took a lesson learnt from work. Test and learn. I am going to view my career and each working day, each meeting, and each workshop as an experiment. I am going to observe myself from the outside and I am going to test and learn specific actions from books, academic articles, podcasts, TED Talks and see which ones work. 

This is a big risk for me. As a Senior Executive in a Financial Institution, I am going to break what I perceive to be expectations of me and definitely put people off side. But I am an optimist and by putting my career on the line, I hope to identify which of the hundreds of thousands of publications and self help techniques can actually be applied and work for introverts. Because I deserve better. Because introverts deserve better in the office and in life. 

My Goal

There is no financial objective for me in this experiment. In fact, it's costing me money to host the website, buy the publications, and spend time going through them and applying them. I have to remain in my corporate life (12 hours a day on average) to test and learn the techniques. 

I want to arrive at a set of practical actions that all introverts can apply to shift things in their favour. It doesn't matter what seniority, experience, age, gender, all introverts (and some extroverts) can benefit from this. I am not writing a book. As useful as they are, nobody has time to read hundreds of pages and often by the time you get to the end, you had forgotten the actions and the theories behind them. No, this won't be a book. This will be a concise list. One that you can look at before the day starts, before that important meeting, or before that date, and put you in the most advantageous position possible.

And, I am not alone. Other introverts (male and female) have volunteered to be on this journey. You can be involved in this journey! I am going to interview successful introverts in leadership positions and extract from them their techniques that have worked.

Together, we can do this and build that list.