The Cost of Faking Extroversion

This past week, I began reading Susan Cain's Quiet.  It is an exploration of the ways that introverts can succeed in an extroverted world by embracing their introversion.  As a life-long introvert that has spent most of his life trying to approximate extroversion, I have found her writing to be a cool drink of life giving water, and when I finish the book, I will likely review it.

In an early chapter, she talks about Tony Robbins, the self-help guru who as Jack Black famously quipped while shaking his hand, "it's like shaking a bunch of bananas" and she writes that "[Tony] told us at the start of the seminar, 'You don't have to be an extrovert to feel alive...' But it seems, according to Tony, that you'd better act like one if you don't want to flub the sales call and watch your family die like pigs in hell" (39).

Since reading this, I have been reflecting on my own struggle with faking extroversion and I would like to share with you some of my thoughts.

Thought 1: Faking extroversion made dating incredibly painful

The other night, I was talking with Cindy and I shared with her that one of the reasons I love her and wanted to marry her was that she was the first non-family member that I could embrace introversion in front of without the fear that she wouldn't like me anymore.  The reality is that few things suck more for (most) introverts than dating.  Consider the expectations given to us by Hollywood for what dating should look like: A charming, flirtatious hunk uses his best line on a beautiful, clever woman who knows how to deflect the first line in such a way that he comes back with a new one.  Eventually, (some times in as short as 5 minutes) the magnetic, outgoing man and the clever, confident woman are overwhelmed with their interpersonal energy and bada bing, bada boom=love.  If you don't believe me, I challenge you to find a romanticish movie where the male protagonist is an introvert (hint: I can only name two).

So for those of us who find playful, flirtatious banter exhausting, these expectations are overwhelming.  And often-times result in awkward exchanges as we try to pretend to be Don Juan, when our natural response is the exact opposite.

Thought 2: Faking extroversion leads us to say stupid stuff

I think the best way to explain introversion is to say that we are energized by internal stimuli (we gain far more satisfaction from the debates that rage within our own mind than any debate we may have with another person) and that we process internally rather than externally (you will rarely hear an introvert say the words, "I am thinking out loud")

Therefore, when we try to 'think out loud' in the attempt to approximate extroversion we are probably going to say something really foolish, because we don't practice thinking out loud and the on the fly filters developed by extroverts are underdeveloped for us.  Think about it this way, when most extroverts become inebriated, their ability to filter is greatly diminished and they say things that 99 times out of 100 are filtered and left unsaid.  For introverts, everytime we try to think out loud, we run the risk of saying the things that extroverts only say when drunk.

Thought 3: Faking extroversion is expected in American culture

Going back to the thinking about the protagonists of love stories, now broaden the scope of the study, how often is the protagonist of a given story a larger than life, life of the party, alpha who wins the hearts of everyone around them with charisma and cunning?  Go ahead, try to think of one, my guess is that for every 1 protagonist that doesn't fit that description, you will be able to come up with 10 who do.  The heroes of American pop-culture, business culture, church culture, political culture, etc. are predominantly extroverted, and our children learn from a young age that to be a hero, one must fill a room, be glad to be in that room, shake every hand, kiss every baby, and want to do it all over again when we are done.

The reality is that for introverts, parties are exhausting.  Which doesn't necessarily mean we dislike being there, but we have to budget our emotional energy.  For example, I love being in church on Sunday mornings, I love hearing the stories of how God's grace is being extended in the lives of people who I love; but, by noon, I am emotionally spent and need to get home, sit in the recliner and recharge.

A few months back, I began tracking how many hours in a given week I did activities that required people skills more often found in extroverts, and I found that after 12 hours of meetings, church, meeting new people, being in public, working in a team, and other energy sapping activities, my productivity, enthusiasm, and overall performance plummets.  I encourage you to look at your schedule and see how long it would take for you to reach 12 emotional energy sapping hours, my guess is that you would be surprised how quickly you get there, I know I was.  In large part this is because in the US, most places of work operate on the assumption that working in a space that is abuzz with the activity of coworkers will increase your own productivity and that multiple weekly meetings are not only helpful but necessary.  My boss, Tom, describes his own introversion like this, "I am an introvert, which means I don't need someone watching me to get my work done."

Thought 4: Most employers want an introvert, but we interview so poorly they don't realize it

If given the choice of an interview or a standardized test, I would take the standardized test every single time.  Interviews are terrible.  They begin by entering a room with one to five people you don't know (strike one), who will be asking questions some of which you aren't prepared to answer (strike two), all with the underlying assumption that you must produce magnetism in the first 10 seconds to make a good first impression (strike three, and we're out).

What if employers were to send out a packet with case studies that required applicants to consider a problem prevalent in a given work environment, and then write out their response?  Would this not be a far more helpful strategy in finding employees that would add value to your company, church, school, or municipality?  In the church, we produce pages and pages of written work for ordination, which can all be undone with a bad interview... what sense does that make? To give privilege to a 40 minute interview over a two pound stack of documents, recommendations, and performance reviews, that doesn't make any sense.


Now this list is far from exhaustive, but hopefully it will start the conversation.  What do you think?

A Foolish Tweet from an Intelligent Man

This morning, as I was making my wife breakfast, I read this tweet from astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, "If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people." As a modern hero of humanism, this sort of rhetoric is often used by Tyson and other non-theists to claim intellectual high ground against theists of every stripe. However, as is the case in every claim that can be made in less than 140 characters, this line of thinking has some serious problems. For starters, there is not a person living on the planet today, who experiences "objective reality." Each of us are bound by our situatedness and our intuition. To deny that human existence is inherently subjective either shows an incredible lack of self-awareness or unbridled arrogance. Now, it would be one thing to say that those who make decisions that affect others should be capable of making well-reasoned decisions based on the evidence that is available to them, but I don't think this is what Tyson is saying. That being said, he hints that their may be a plurality of objective realities. Which means that best case scenario, Tyson is saying that 'if your belief system is not founded in well-reasoned claims about the nature of reality given the evidence that you have available to you, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.' But, I don't think that is what he is trying to say.

Finding the real in the midst of what my TV shows me of Israel

My friend Craig Miller posted his thoughts earlier today on the current news coming out of Israel, and as I was reading I thought back to my own experience of Israel this past January.  And I should start by saying that life in the strip of land between the Mediterranean Ocean and the Jordan River is far more complex than American news sources are capable of reporting.  The narrative that you and I hear coming from every major news source is that there are two essentially two sides that are separated by culture and religion and cannot come to terms for sustained peace because of these differences... this narrative is incomplete and if we try to make value judgments with this as our baseline understanding of the conflict, we will almost surely be in error.

When Cindy and I were there, we were instructed by Rabbi Brad Hirschfield to do what we could to suspend judgment as we heard the stories of the people.  He encouraged us to assume that every person we talked to was being honest and that each of them were describing their interpretation of the reality of their lives.  He said that if we went into our experience looking for what is true we would leave frustrated, but rather if we listened for the real, we would have a robust, enlightening experience.  I listened to his advice and these are the realities that I remember from my trip to Israel.

The Main-line Ben Gurion reality:
In the early 20th Century, Mayor Meir rode his mare, Mayer, into Tel Aviv and started a colony for displaced, discouraged, disenfranchised Jews from across Europe.  One of the early founders of this city was a man named David Greene.  Greene would later be known as Ben Gurion and when the British left the land in 1948, Ben Gurion, along with the first Israeli paliament declared that Israel would be a Jewish state in the Holy Land.  Within 24 hours, all the surrounding nations attacked, but by God's grace Israel survived.  In the year's following the Israeli government has acted in the best interest of Jews around the world providing a safe place to live to a people group who have been persecuted continuously for 3,000 years.  While Israel isn't perfect (for instance, Sephardic Jews were discriminated against in the 80s and 90s), it offers greater freedom, safety, and prosperity than the other states in the region and has the only functional, quality centralized health care system in the world.

The Palestinian refugee camp reality:
In 1948, the Jews removed the locals from their homes, gave them a tent, and put them in open air prisons promising that in two weeks they would take them back to their homes.  It has been 65 years, and they are still waiting to go back to their home.  In the last 65 years the refugees endure daily dehumanization from IDF guards and have developed a strong disdain for their jailers.  The camps are overcrowded, but if someone tries to build on empty land beyond the boundaries of the camp, their home is demolished by bulldozers in the night.

The National Religious Party Reality:
Forget the last century, three millenia ago, God gave them the land and by God they are going to live in it.  Settlements are not illegal, but rather the will of God who promised the land to the children of Abraham.  With each settlement, God's will is coming to pass.  (Some of the more hardliners would call for the expulsion of all non-Jews from any land that was Israel/Judah during the time of the unified kingdom)

The Bedouin reality:
In the last 40 years, the Israeli government has bulldozed 80% of their communities, and even now the communities that are still intact have rules which forbid putting permanent roofs on homes, installing sewage systems, and other essentials for thriving.

The Eritrean and Sudanese refugee reality:
As many as 100,000 African refugees have come to Israel looking for a safe place to work and live, while their country is embattled in bloody civil wars.  They, in union with human rights groups are asking for work visas so that they can enjoy the privileges of being documented workers.

The Conscientious Objector reality:
At 18 Israeli citizens (with some exceptions) are expected to join the Israeli Defense Force.  Some of these soldiers after seeing the inequity and oppression of the Palestinians conscientiously object to the way in which their own government has governed its neighbors in the Holy Land.

The bartender at our hotel's reality:
Palestinians (he was one) are stupid.  The only way they can live in prosperity is to come to grips with the reality that the Jews are here to stay.  Learn the rules and play by them, quit dreaming of the way things were 70 years ago, because the world is a different place.  Educate yourself and learn how to live in the Jewish world.

These are just thumbnail sketches of the realities that I can remember.  What I learned is that I need to be really slow in judging who is right and wrong, understanding that such value judgments run the risk of dehumanizing both sides.  

Focusing on Virtue

One of my prayers for my son, Ben, is that he would grow up to live a virtuous life.  Virtue is not a particularly popular topic in today's world, as a word it smacks of an antiquated bygone era, but virtue was once the goal of which all great people aspired.  Virtue is a process not a result.  Virtue is a way of being, not a bottom line.

In the modern world, we measure success by how many figures are in our salaries, how many people attend our events, our winning percentage, batting average, and state test scores.  However, the problem with measuring success in this way is that it is incredibly difficult to replicate results.  How often have we seen a person with promise be promoted beyond their capacity?  How often have we seen a one-hit-wonder?  How often do we see fast-starters burn out in the long run?

John Wooden says that when he was younger, he wanted to be in better shape than anyone else he played against, but as he matured he saw the foolishness of this thinking.  His goal should never be rooted in being better than another, but rather in being the best he possibly can be.  Wooden says, "Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing that you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable."  This is virtue.  Virtue is the intentional, internal choices to become the best of which you are capable.

David Watson explains, "When we are listening, giving fair consideration to arguments, representing the positions of others accurately, thinking rigorously, and speaking in ways that are logical and coherent, we exhibit intellectual virtue. When we do otherwise, we exhibit intellectual vice."  Notice, that intellectual virtue is not a measurement of truthfulness or falsehood of one's stated position, but rather a measurement of the process that leads one to believe, and virtuously express those beliefs.

Someday, in the relatively near future, Ben will begin to develop the ability to communicate.  And I pray that as he begins to compete on courts, diamonds, rinks, and fields and as he begins to bring home schoolwork and as we talk about what he learned in Sunday School after church, that his mother and I can effectively nurture virtue within him. so that the only person he ever judges himself against is his best possible self, and the way we score each performance is focused on his process rather than the outcome.  

A New Place to Belong

Child development experts say that for the first 18 months of our life, the fundamental question of our existence is, "To whom do I belong?"  As we get older, we ask different sets of questions, but the first question we ask is always, to whom do I belong, or as the children's book phrased it, "Are you my mother?"

When we go through transitions, we often find ourselves asking this same question.  When I married Cindy, I instantaneously belonged to a new person.  This past week, with the birth of Ben, I have found myself belonging to yet another person.  And not all my belongings are familial.  I belong to friends, the community of faith, and God.

There are people in our community who find themselves without a place to belong, sometimes because of previous sin, sometimes because of disabilities, always because the world's economy has said that they are not valuable, are not worthy, are not loved.  We have an awesome opportunity to subvert the message of the world, with the message of Jesus.  This is why Gentle Worship is so exciting.  For the first time, in the history of Dayton, a church is saying that families affected by disability are valuable, are worthy, are loved--and God has called us to be that church.  There are two other churches in the Dayton Metro area that have monthly gentle worship gatherings, but we will be the first to offer a weekly place to belong for families affected by disabilities for worship, fellowship, and service.

This Saturday, Greg, Andy, Cindy, and I will be going to Hillside Chapel in Beavercreek to worship with their Gentle Worship community, and network with partners in serving the disability community in Dayton.  Pray for us as we continue to plot and scheme ways to infect the world with the subversive message of Jesus.  If you would like more information about Gentle Worship at the Y, please let me know.

Gloria a Dios!

When I was in high school, my youth group went on a mission trip to Juarez, Mexico with Youth Works.  And during this trip, I learned two gospel truths.  1) Mexican coca cola is infinitely more delicious than American coca cola, and 2) The best way to end a day is to name the experiences of the holy from the past day.

Before bed each night, the group would get together and share how God made his presence known throughout the days activity, and when a person was finished sharing, as a group we would exclaim, "Gloria a dios" which if I remember correctly is roughly translated, "Hooray God."  As Christians, this type of spiritual discipline should not be ignored.  Whether it is practiced personally or corporately, we are wise to incorporate the intentional remembrance of God's presence in our lives into our disciplined devotional life.

For Cindy and I this is part of our devotional life together.  This morning, when we were studying together on our back patio, we asked each other the question, "How have you experienced the grace of God this past week?" And I know for me (and I assume for her), it is a profound experience to say that my experience of God was the result of her kindness towards me or someone else.

So today, I encourage you to be on the lookout for God's presence breaking into your daily activity and tonight before you go to bed, sit down and write out at least one time in the past day, where you experienced the grace of God.  If you really want to over achieve, post your God sighting to facebook or twitter with the hashtag #gloriaadios and together we can share in the experience of the Holy.

Reflections on Parenting: Stop Complaining about your Church

As we get ever closer to the day our son will enter the world, well meaning people continue to give us the advice, "Do [activity x] now, because when the baby comes you won't get to do it anymore."  Now, I know that the folks who give us this advice are well meaning, and that they love their own children and wouldn't give them back for 10 million dollars; however, the way parenthood is often presented as martyrdom to not-yet-parents.

"When the kid comes, you won't get to golf anymore."

"When the kid comes, you won't get to go to movies anymore."

"When the kid comes, you won't get to sleep through the night anymore."

"When the kid comes, you won't have any time to take care of you anymore."

Just think about the video that went viral this past mother's day:

They made motherhood out to be slavery to your children.

And make me wonder if Captain Hook had it right.

But let's be honest, parenthood is not slavery to children.

And neither is being a pastor slavery to the church.

This next week, West Ohio clergy will gather at Lakeside for Annual Conference, and while I enjoy getting to go up and see friends and colleagues, my least favorite part of Annual Conference is the constant whining of pastors who complain about their churches.  "Those people are needy," "Those people are lazy," "Those people are stuck in 1971"... And the never-ending lamenting goes on and on.  If I didn't know better, I just might think that you hate your church.  And if you hate your church, then why would I ever want to be a part of it?

A few months back I was going through a frustrating situation at church, and while at the gym, I was complaining to my workout partner, and he said, "Man, sounds like the folks in your church really suck."  And a wave of conviction hit me,  because the folks in my church don't suck, in fact, I find myself on a weekly basis overwhelmed by the grace of God to put Cindy and I in a church that is so committed to discipleship, so committed to living out and sharing God's love.  My folks are awesome, and doing awesome ministry.  The only thing that sucked was my attitude, and my attitude gave my friend the impression that our church is not the sort of place he would be welcome.

If our default attitude leads us to complain about shortcomings, we will never be happy.  If we spend more time complaining about our spouse than we do praising them, we will have a miserable marriage.  If we spend more time complaining about our kids than we do enjoying them, we will be miserable parents.  If we spend more time complaining about our church than we do telling the story of God's faithfulness, then we will be miserable pastors.