Here’s The 3 Important Lessons That Helped Me Become ‘Good’ At Being An Introvert

When I was in my twenties, I discovered the word “introvert” and I soon enough discovered that I was introverted. I also discovered that there was nothing wrong with that and that I could succeed while being an introvert, and that I could even take advantage of this trait to succeed even more than I would if I wasn’t.

Although I believed that there was nothing wrong with being an introvert, and although I did not believe that this was the case for every introvert, I knew there were harsh reasons behind my introversion.

One of the main reasons why I thought my childhood lead to me being an introvert is because I wasn’t liked. And because I wasn’t liked, I didn’t have too many people to talk to, which lead to me spending most of my childhood alone. Sure I had brothers but they were guys, which lead me to become more of a tom boy which did not enable me to fit in with much people at school.

So here are some of the lessons I learned from being an introvert:

1. You can use it to your advantage

If you understand and are able to use your introversion effectively, it can give you a big advantage and enable you to reach your life goals. Along with other personality traits, introversion can be used to help you determine what kind of job you are more likely to succeed at, how to handle doing things that you are not comfortable doing, how to manage your introversion, if you will.

I’ve always hated making phone calls. As soon as I got a boyfriend and started getting more and more close to him, I figured: Why not ask him to make phone calls that I’m not comfortable doing? It was perfect, I text him my requests and he makes the phone call for me when needed.

2. Learn when to use your energy and when to save it

For me, I’ve always needed my energy in social contexts, mainly because I wasn’t ever super popular, and so socializing with people was one of the few ways that enabled me to be liked. After years of suffering in sales and corporates job positions, I finally learned that my introversion and personality traits enabled me to better succeed at a different kind of job; the kind of job that did not require me to have physical conversations and discussions with people a lot.

Once I started working from home, all alone, I realized that I had more energy to spend on social activities, I felt less exhausted when I went out with people and socialized, which worked in my favor because I was more productive working from home and at the same time, I saved more energy for social interactions.

3. You will need to pretend sometimes

Since most of the population is made up of extroverts, you will find yourself in positions where you will need to force yourself to socialize, laugh at silly jokes, and ask about people’s lives, even though you might not be interested at all to hear about these things. This is where you pretend to be an extrovert in order to get what you want. Most people are extroverts and most people like extroverts more, and since so many things in life will require people to like you, you will have to play an extrovert’s role every now and again.

To put it in a nutshell, nobody can tell for sure if being introverted is a trait that you are born with as a baby or if it comes with age, but if you follow the aforementioned steps, you can use introversion to your advantage or as a tool to accomplish your goals in life.