I know that I'm very late to this thread, but I was hoping I could offer my experience with extroversion:
Attempting to be extroverted for public speaking seems completely unnatural for me. I had to speak in front of an audience and a school board once and it's difficult to describe how awful the experience felt. I had something prepared, but for whatever reason I decided to go off-script at the end and speak from the heart and I felt my voice crack and my pulse go through the roof. Although my supervisor/adminstrator told me that I did very well and that my speech was "right on the mark", I re-played the experience over and over in my mind every so often for the next few months. "Why on earth did I say
that?" I kept asking myself.
Fast-forward a few months and I find myself taking courses in educational administration. I sometimes question why I enrolled in the first place, but I feel like I have learned some valuable lessons already in just the first few weeks of my courses. First of all, having a little more college experience than many of my classmates, I feel like I have taken on almost a shepherd role, and I don't mean that to sound arrogant at all. I just see some of them struggling and I find myself doing whatever I can to help them.
In one of our classes, we have a professor who just recently received her PhD and she has been very hard on all of the students in the class; it almost feels like she wants to throw her weight around since she has a PhD and we don't. She has changed the syllabus multiple times and her expectations are unclear and demeanor is simply unkind. When she gave us a final project that everyone in the class felt was unreasonable, I found myself being the only person who tried to stand up to her and express the feelings that most of us had. The strange thing was, in this case, I didn't feel like I was "pretending" or trying to be something that I wasn't. I felt like I was assuming a role that had to be taken.
This leads me to a final comment (if you're still reading). I have taken the Meyers-Briggs test multiple times because I wanted to figure out if I was truly an INFJ - I guess I felt like I let my desk or my office become too messy most of the time to be a J and not a P. Anyway, the point is that according to Jung and Meyers-Briggs, I probably am an INFJ. That being said, just because I'm an INFJ doesn't mean that I should be scared to assume an "extroverted" role. For so long, it was easy for me to say, "I'm an INFJ so I wouldn't be good at doing that." I was letting my personality type set parameters for my life. I am at a point now where I want to say, "Yes, I'm an INFJ, but that doesn't mean I can't get better at speaking in public or something else that requires more extroversion." As an INFJ, I cringe at the thought of "faking" something. I want to be authentic in everything that I do. I want to get to the point where I can still be myself when I am speaking in front of crowd, and the only way to do that is to get over the fear and just practice it. If INFJ's are dolphins, I want to be the dolpin that gets out and lives life, not the one hiding underneath a rock (although I will still probably need to go there every once in a while just to recharge!).
Anyway, sorry for that rambling everybody
I am glad that I found this thread and want to the thank the original poster for thinking of it.
Sending all my happy thoughts,
AJ
You don't have to run around introducing yourself to people and initiating conversations. I find being pleasant and polite, caring but a bit aloof until I meet the people I'm actually very interested in getting to know better is just fine....though at times I don't carry conversations with them either... ;D I like one on one discussions over group interaction, but that too depends on the group... You know at times it's fun to just hang your complexities in the coat check and have some old fashioned fun too. then I can always go home, pull down the shades, hole in and read about self organizing systems, memes and musician's biographies or whatever interests me at the time. Draw a hundred toilet paper rolls doing the conga on the moon. The other good stuff.