Not-So-Quiet | The Power of One Ambivert

The sign currently on the back of my computer.

When I was a kid, I did all my homework on the coffee table with the tv on. My parents let me because they were old and beaten down by my three much older siblings and because I made good grades.

When I was in college, I studied in the living room of my dorm. Not my dorm room where nobody was around. Not the study room in the basement filled with the wrong kind of people - sober, serious, studious people. In the living room where I could be interrupted. When I really needed to buckle down, I’d stay right there in the middle of everything, put my head phones on, and turn the radio just in between stations. Yes…I invented white noise.

During my college summers, I cleaned and painted oil well tanks in the middle of nowhere. My peeps were all on AM radio because I was too far from any FM stations and they sang and yammered at me all day long.

As an adult, in offices and at home, I’ve worked to the tv, the radio, music app, and endless podcasts - sometimes multiple media at once.

And now, today, I’m working and writing this almost inside a co-working space - or more precisely in the hallway of a co-working space between the two main rooms where people are quiet…too quiet. But out here, people walk by, I have my music on, I can be interrupted, and I’m finding my groove.

I’m an ambivert - not an extravert, not an introvert but part of the vast swath of people in-between. The personality instrument I use most frequently in my work describes ambiversion and my particular expression of it thusly:

It’s from the Workplace Big Five Profile® which is based on the Five Factor model, the most widely accepted framework for understanding personality among researchers and academicians. Extraversion is just one of the five supertraits - with Introvert, Ambivert, and Extravert as three parts of the trait continuum - and each supertrait has a handful of subtraits to it.

I don’t have to be the life of the party, but I do need stimulation of some kind to fire my brain which is why I’m sitting where I am and why I’ve affixed the sign you see at the top of this article to the back of my laptop.

So…now that I’ve got my million-dollar book title. I guess it’s time for me to work on my Ted Talk. Can I deliver it in your living room or hallway?