Hey Reader,
Picture this:
Your manager catches you in the corridor after the meeting:
“I noticed you didn’t say much in there. Everything alright? I want to make sure you feel able to contribute.“
Good intentions. Terrible timing.
The honest answer needs you to explain how your brain handles information under real-time social pressure, and you’ve got about four seconds in a corridor to do it.
So you say you’re fine. Or that you were listening. Or you apologise.
Your manager walks off thinking that went well.
You leave the corridor having confirmed, one more time, that you can’t explain yourself when it counts.
What was actually happening in that room comes down to where your brain sends its resources:
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The Science
A 1999 PET imaging study by Johnson and colleagues found that introvert brains, at rest, direct more blood flow to the frontal lobes – the regions that handle planning, reflection and problem-solving.
Kumari and colleagues, using fMRI, added to the picture: as a task gets harder, extrovert brains have to work noticeably harder to meet it, while introvert brains stay closer to their optimal thinking state, because their resting activity is already high.
In plain terms: the thinking IS happening.
And you’re doing more of it than most of the people talking in the meeting.
It’s just that your thinking takes a longer path – and, usually, by the time you’ve finished processing everyone else has moved on.
Your manager is measuring contribution by what they can hear while the meeting is live; everything outside that window is invisible to them.
That’s a failing in workplace systems, not you. But it does impact introverts in the workplace.
Here’s one thing you can use this week:
When you’re put on the spot before you’re ready, you don’t have to fill the gap with a half-formed answer or an apology.
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Try, “I’d like to think about this properly before I respond – can we come back to me before the end?” It holds your ground without performing a certainty you don’t yet feel.
The Work section of my Introvert OSâ„¢ User Manual gives you language for the situations where this plays out – being put on the spot, being told you’re too quiet, being asked to be ‘more visible’ with no explanation of what that’s supposed to look like.
It’s what I wish I’d had myself 20 years ago.
In your corner always,
Sam 💛
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| | Sam SheppardIntrovert StrategistNeuroscience-backed insights for introverts who are tired of adapting to a world that wasn’t built for them. ​ |
