Hi! My name's Penny and as usual, I'm here to talk about some bookish things.
Specifically, today I wanted to take you through some of the books about
introversion that I've been reading lately. So over the last few months I've
read eight books about introversion and while I didn't find exactly what I was
looking for, I still found some books that I think would be worth recommending
if the topic is something that interests you. Just to give you the backstory, when
I started looking for books about introverts and introversion, what I was
really looking for is a book that would tell me some advice about how to
approach life or some strategies to work that would allow me to really benefit
from the strengths that I have as an introvert. Unfortunately, most of these
books instead focus on reassuring the reader that it is, in fact, okay to be an
introvert. I don't know if that's just because all these books are written from
an American perspective and American culture is much more extroverted than
New Zealand culture where I come from. New Zealand, I would say as much more
introverted than America as a whole. Obviously, that doesn't hold for
individuals. But growing up I never felt like being an introvert was a bad thing.
In fact, as a kid I was often complimented on my ability to be
independent and focus on things, take things away think about them and come
back with good insights. Like I never really felt like being an introvert was
a weakness. Ah but some of these books went to such
great lengths to reassure me that it isn't a weakness that it almost felt
like they really believed that it is. I did manage to find a few books with some
useful advice but for the most part I was kind of disappointed. So if you do
know about any other books about how to leverage your skills as an introvert
then I would love those recommendations. But anyway let's talk about the eight
books that I did read and you can see whether they might be useful for you. So
by far the most well-written book that I read about introversion was Quiet by
Susan Cain. This isn't a surprise because this is the book that most people talk
about when they talk about books about introversion. This book I think is the
best explanation of what an introvert actually is.
Basically, introverts tend to be a lot more sensitive to stimulus around them which
can be a weakness in terms of we often need to take ourselves away in order to
re-energize ourselves and we can get overwhelmed more easily. But from the other
side of things that can be a strength because we're more likely to notice
things and we don't need that constant stimulation that extroverts crave.
Actually while I'm describing this it's also worth noting that introversion and
extroversion are not completely separate distinct things. It's a scale and you can
be somewhere inbetween. Most of us are somewhere inbetween. So it's easy to
fall into the trap of thinking about extroversion and introversion is like
completely black and white, people are either one or the other, and all the
attributes of an introvert are going to apply to any introverted individual. But
in reality it's not really true. Everybody's different. Extroversion and
introversion are more just tendencies about how you prefer to behave. So
don't ever let anyone tell you that you're not going to be good at something
just because you are an introvert or an extrovert because that is bullshit. It's
more just that in some cases some things are going to be harder for you than
other people who have a different tendency towards introversion or
extroversion. Make sense? Probably not, but what did make sense was
Quiet by Susan Cain. I think it's definitely the best book to read if you
want to understand more about introversion. It does go into the history of
the study of personalities and how this idea of introversion and extroversion
came about and how extroversion being put forward is the ideal has really
affected American culture. And it did actually make me wonder how much
people's anxiety is exacerbated by the fact that they think they need to live
up to this extroverted ideal. I did also read Quiet Power by Susan Cain, which is
essentially a lot of the same material but targeted at teens or the parents of
teens. And I definitely think if you have an introverted teen, you should read it.
Unfortunately, the parents who would probably most benefit from reading this
book are the people who are the most likely not to read this book so I don't know
how that's gonna work out. But if you happen
to be watching this video and you are concerned about how quiet your child is
maybe you should read Quiet Power because while Quiet focuses more on like
understanding the concept of introversion, Quiet Power did provide a
lot more advice about how to be an introverted teen, how to cope with it at
school and all that stuff. And also how to parent an introverted teen. So it was
a much more advice focused book. As I'm not a teen and I don't have a teen, it
wasn't so useful to me but I could definitely see that it could be useful.
So then the next best introvert book that I've read was Introvert Power by
Laurie A Helgoe. Now I will admit that this was of the first introvert book
that I read and I do think that my ratings went down as I listened to more
and more just because so much of the material was repeated that the more I
had to listen to, it the less tolerant I was of this constant reassurance that
it's okay to be an introvert. And just, you can only listen to the same material
being repeated over and over before it gets rather tedious. So obviously this
one being the first one I was the most tolerant of any of that. But I will say, I
had a look at the Goodreads reviews for all of these books and for every single one,
the people who were rating all of these books the highest were people who had
just stumbled across this idea that it's okay to be an introvert. So if you think
there's any chance that you might be an introvert but you've always thought that
that wasn't an acceptable thing to be, that it wasn't acceptable to be quiet
and keep to yourself, then perhaps you would be one of these people for whom
any of these books could change your life. But I still would recommend
introvert power over some of the other ones. I thought it had some really good
advice. Another thing that this book did that I liked was that it challenged the
idea that most of the population is extroverted. So I think the stat most
commonly quoted is that it's about two-thirds of the world is extroverted.
But this book went a little bit into the history of where that statistic came
from and some other potential statistics that might
be more accurate. In truth, we can't know for sure, there's a lot of difficulties in
measuring this in a non-biased way. But it does seem quite likely that the number
is a lot closer to 50%. So most of the messages out there will try to tell you
that if you're an introvert you're in the minority but that might not be true.
And honestly, if it's not true then that adds even more strength to this idea
that it's okay to be an introvert. Again, I don't know why people need to be told
that but apparently they do since all these books wanted to keep saying it. So
I'll say it too, it's okay to be an introvert. So the next two books that I
read were both written by the same person and that is the Introverted
Leader and also Quiet Influence by Jennifer B Kahnweiler. Now my main
problem with these two books is that Jennifer Kannweiler, whatever name was, she
is an extrovert. And so even though in these books she tries to say that
introverts have strengths and it's okay to be an introvert - honestly someone go
through and count how many times I say that phrase in this video because it's
ridiculous - but despite repeating that, most of these two books are about how to
cope with being in an extroverted world and so the way it's framed really does
make out like being an introvert is actually a weakness and that she, the
extrovert, is going to come in and help fix you. I didn't really appreciate it.
I think I definitely prefer books about introversion written by introverts. I
guess just even in this case own voices are still valuable. It makes it feel a
little bit more authentic and like the person actually knows what they're
talking about, not just like oh well my husband is introverted so I know all
about introverts, let me tell you how you should act. I will say though that in
terms of giving advice that was well-structured, I think that these two
books did the best. The Introverted Leader focused everything around four
Ps. So that was Prepare, Presence, Push, and Practice, which I thought
was a good structure. I do think the Prensence and Push elements of her advice
were much more trying to make introverts act like extroverts
but there was still some good advice in there. I will also say in the Introverted
Leader I was expecting some leadership advice but for the most part it's just
general work advice. I don't think that this woman really has much leadership
experience or knows what it's like to be a leader so there really wasn't any
leadership advice in there which was disappointing given the name. Quiet
Influence was a lot more just general life advice.
It was also structured into different categories so I've actually written down
in my notes "listening, writing, social media, hmm there were others" so I guess
when I was writing my notes I kind of got bored and missed what the others
were. But I did think it had good categories. It was a little bit more
focused on strengths rather than just advice on how to fix you but overall I
didn't think the advice in Quiet Influence was as useful as the
Introverted Leader. That could possibly be just because I was more interested in
advice in a work setting than a personal setting. Then the worst one that I read I
think was the Irresistible Introvert by Mikayla Chung. So this one unfortunately
I felt like it was written by an introvert who thinks that introversion means being
insecure. Introverts certainly can be insecure but I would say that's more
because of the extroverted culture that they're being raised in rather than an
innate attribute of introversion. So right from the start I didn't really
agree with this book. It spent a lot of time I felt just kind of whining about
how awful it had been growing up in an extroverted culture, which like as I said,
I agree that being an introvert growing in a highly extroverted culture
probably can be pretty awful but like does crying about it in your book really
help anybody? I don't think so. And just in general the advice was very scattered
and unstructured and surface-level. It felt more like something that should
have just been a blog rather than a full-blown book and like it was just
padded out into a book. And I think it was still a pretty
short book! So I definitely wouldn't recommend that one. now I have kind of
been going from best to worst but I do have a couple of here that I actually
didn't take notes on, so again, great reviewing quality from me. So I'm not
sure exactly where these go in the ranking. I guess somewhere in the middle.
I probably could have talked about them somewhere in the middle but like I'm not
doing that, I'm doing it now. So basically I had a look at the reviews and I used
them to trigger some memories and I'll tell you something about what I think I
thought about them. So firstly the Introvert Advantage by Marti Olson
Laney. I think it's actually Dr. Marti Olson Laney. This book covered so many
topics but it was mainly about different aspects of life and the problems
introverts might have in those aspects of their life and how they might cope
with them. So it had some really good advice but again it was more focused on
introversion as a problem rather than introversion is a strength so it wasn't
what I was looking for. Again, if you're someone who really struggles with being
an introvert and how to live your life as an introvert some of this advice
might be relevant for you. A lot of the topics weren't relevant to me. There was
a section on dating, a section on like socializing, a section on parenting. I
don't care about any of those. But I do think there were some good tips
scattered throughout it that I did find useful, just it was a lot to get through
just for a few random tips. But you know, I listened to it on audiobook so it wasn't
too much of a burden. So I would recommend listening to this audio book
if you're looking for some tips about how to cope with introversion in your
life. You could potentially just read the chapters for the topics that you think
you need help in and that would probably give you what you need. Then I also read
Introvert Entrepreneur by Beth Buelow. So again, this one covered a lot of the
same topics about it being okay to be an introvert and so I think the main reason
I didn't write notes for this one as I was just getting quite bored of that by
now. And primarily this was just a coach giving her experiences about setting up
a coaching business. Nothing in it was particularly
mind-blowing, I don't think there is any particularly great entrepreneur advice.
Perhaps if you're an introvert and you're completely lost about how to start
working for yourself, this might be useful but I think it was still quite
surface-level and not very in-depth and a lot of it was
quite just common sense and not something you couldn't figure out by yourself.
So I am certain that they are much better entrepreneurship books -
entrepreneur... entrepreneur... ship - so I am certain that there are much better
entrepreneurship books out there that you could get a lot more from even if
they're primarily directed towards more extroverted people. So those are all
eight introvert books that I read. I think, to summarize, I would probably most
recommend Quiet, Introvert Power and the Introverted Leader although taking in
mind that introverted leader doesn't really have any leadership advice. And
then also potentially Quiet Power if you have a teenager. But the other ones I
probably wouldn't bother with. As I said I was looking for books that would tell
me strategies that I could use to really get the most out of my introversion and
the strengths that it gives me. I didn't really find that in any of these books
so if you have any recommendations of introvert books that you think would do
a better job of that please leave them down in the comments. Otherwise that's
all from me today. I hope you're having a wonderful day and I will see you next
time :)