Your Introversion Is a Big Part of Who You Are, but It’s Not All of It

Yes, your introversion is key to who you are. But while it’s a major part of you, it’s not all of you.

If you see yourself as an introvert and refer to yourself as an introvert and manage your day-to-day life through an introvert lens, are you empowering yourself?

Or are you limiting yourself?

The answer, potentially, is yes.

It can too easily be both—even though the “empowering” part is the only one you’re going for.

Harnessing the Good

I remember so vividly the day in graduate school, more than 25 years ago now, when I first took the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality assessment.

When I received my results and my graduate assistantship supervisor began describing this thing called introversion—and emphasizing that it wasn’t a bad thing but just a thing—one thought took over my brain:

“This explains so much!”

There was a name—introvert—for someone like me.

Someone who actually liked being alone, who shied away from parties and dances in high school and college, who had just a few really close friends and not a hundred sort-of friends, who needed time to think instead of being put on the spot, who loved quiet conversations one on one but hated trying to “converse” with dozens of shouting people in a noisy bar.

Like so many other introverts, I had always thought something was wrong with me.

In my mind, I didn’t enjoy what everyone else seemed to enjoy, and the things I did enjoy seemed to be things everyone else avoided.

Now, thanks to the MBTI, I had a billboard in front of me at all times flashing the words:

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Pete. You’re just an introvert.”

Before long, and continuing to this day, I figured out that knowing I’m an introvert can help me manage my present and my future, too.

If I’m starting to get cranky with my wife or (and?) my kids, for example, it’s a good bet that I just need some time to myself to regroup.

So I make sure to go get it—or my lovely bride nudges me in that direction!

If I need to hunker down and write an article, without being interrupted and thus jarred out of my productive zone of deep concentration, I make sure to eliminate distractions and shut my door—or go somewhere else if necessary.

It works.

Acknowledging the Bad

But in a 2020 article (“The Confusion and Contradiction of MBTI”) on the Psychology Today website, organizational psychologist Benjamin Hardy—author of the book 
Personality Isn’t Permanent—criticizes the MBTI and the whole notion of personality type that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator promotes.

“Personality,” Hardy argues, “doesn’t work in types.”

Later in the piece, he continues:

One problem with the whole notion 
of “types” is that they make people think their personality is more extreme and black-and-white than it really is. Hence, a real danger of these kinds of tests is that they can give a person an extreme sense of identity, wherein the label or “type” becomes how they identify.

Guess what.

Hardy is right, times two.

Personality—who you are—does not “work in types.”

And, much more critically, it is “a real danger” (though perhaps “risk” would be a better term) to have an “extreme sense of identity” around your MBTI type—or around seeing yourself as an introvert.

In the same way that seeing yourself as an introvert and referring to yourself as an introvert and living your life as an introvert can be, and is, empowering, it can indeed be limiting, too.

You can easily overplay your introvert card.

I can’t count the number of times, for example, when I have gone to some sort of social event—sometimes willingly, more often grudgingly—and, against all expectations, thoroughly enjoyed myself.

This very blog post, to cite another example that’s close to home, came about only because I purposely—and again grudgingly!—went against my introvert instincts.

When I began writing the piece, its focus was much different than it is now.

Worse, the piece was going in circles.

And so was I.

Normally in such situations, I just keep fighting on, alone.

But this time I asked my wife to talk things through with me so that I could figure out what I was really trying to say and how best to say it.

And here we are.

Preventing the Ugly

So what am I really trying to say, and how can I best say it?

Yes, accept and embrace yourself as the introvert you are. Live your life acknowledging your many introverted strengths and needs. Cater to them when it makes sense.

But don’t take things to an unnecessary—and unhealthy—extreme.

Remember the words of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, the man who came up with the concepts of introversion and extroversion in the first place:

There’s no such thing as a pure extr[o]vert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum. Those are only terms to designate a certain penchant, a certain tendency [emphasis added].

In other words, the term introvert is merely convenient shorthand, used to identify a person who tends to behave in an introverted way much or even most of the time—but not all the time.

Jung gives us the key word, and the essential concept, to remember: Introversion is a tendency; it is not a type.

(The MBTI publishers should thus rename their tool the Myers-Briggs Tendency Indicator—they’d still be able to call it the MBTI!—but don’t get me started on that.)

Introversion Is Part of Who You Are

Technically speaking, you’re not “an introvert“; you’re a person who tends to behave in an introverted way much or even most of the time—but not all the time.

You have a tendency toward introversion, and that tendency is perfectly healthy and perfectly normal.

But it is not you in your entirety.

It’s not any of us in our entirety.