by Katie Rasoul
Don’t get me wrong, extroverts. We appreciate you, and we need you as both personalities are important. Many of you thrive under pressure and can talk through, brainstorm, and find solutions in the moment. You have gifts that work well in the world, and that we aim to emulate. I also implore leaders in organizations to listen for the less vocal members of their teams so as to not overlook the quiet strength and value that introverts may bring. For my fellow quiet leaders, find ways to share with others more about how you operate and what works for you. The more we can help others understand how we tick, the better we can work together.
The internal conflict between less and more presents another challenge for some introverts. The inner workings of a high-achieving introvert live at the intersection of the drive to achieve more and the need for solitude. The tension between ambition to be out conquering the world fighting and the need to be alone with our thoughts, means that high-achieving introverts are no strangers to big dreams that can feel overwhelming. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” We want to shake the world in a big way but without trumpets or fanfare or small talk, which means that we’re not very good at including others in our feeling of accomplishment. The result: shame and fear of being “found out” as a fraud.
High-achievers often feel shame for not meeting their high expectations of themselves or for feeling like a fraud. We can feel the rising pressure to keep up with ourselves, assuming we can and should “do it on our own.” We can be so focused on the future that we forget to enjoy the present. Combining drive and inner reflection can either serve as a superpower or a recipe for implosion.
The world today is filled with endless options and social media facades. As a result, we are conditioned to assume that “more is better” and that everyone is out living their best life, documented by glittery Facebook feeds. However, this “you can do anything, and more is better” narrative is not helping. Looking back, I know where I went wrong. When I heard “you can do anything,” I replaced “anything” with “everything” and “can” with the almighty “should.” Operating with the mindset of “I should do everything” inevitably leads to disappointment, shame, and a blow to the self-esteem. And I have found through my work and research on generational differences that this cultural shift does not only affect high-achieving introverts. Millennials report having the highest rates of depression and anxiety of any generation, and the next generation is following suit. We are in a unique moment to examine this idea now, and apply it to the rest of our lives and how we raise the next generation.
On a broader scale, we are part of a larger subculture of “outliers.” Banded together by the mutual experience of feeling like “the other,” we begin to question what is true for us, because what is true for us seems to go against the grain of what is true for everyone else. But just as we have perhaps often felt like outsiders, I encourage you to search for commonality and comfort in the fact that there is still a whole lot that makes us the same. While we all have our individual and unique take on life, we are all sharing one common human experience. Every emotion that we experience has been felt by someone else before, and we are not alone.
We all have inner critic voices telling us we aren’t enough of something. They tell us to sit down or play small. For those addicted to achievement, this is the place where perfectionism breeds and where nothing is ever enough. I always thought that I needed this weight and that I was successful because of it, not in spite of it. But what would it be like to be a high-achiever without the weight? It would feel easy, free, present, and without fear of what might happen. But could I be successful without it? I had lived my whole life thinking that was the only path to success, when in reality, perhaps it was the one thing holding me back from my true greatness.
But it’s probably best to start at the beginning.
Chapter 3: Growing Up
“Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.”
– Max Frisch
I was born in 1983, unknowingly plunked into what we now know to be a pretty bitchin’ decade. Here are some notable features about 1983: Ronald Reagan was President, the Apple Lisa personal computer was released, the final episode of MASH aired, Michael Jackson showed us the Moonwalk, the cold war was ongoing, and Return of the Jedi was the highest grossing film of the year.

And this is me – making my big entrance into the world! Here is a picture of me, my sister, and my mom from that year. Please note that my sister just opened up an E.T. doll, and my mom is holding me on an orange velour chair. (I will also mention that those chairs spruced up the living room of my college apartment for several years.) Apparently, I was a good eater judging by my voluptuous baby rolls and that hungry look in my eyes warning my older sister that I may eat her at any moment.
I grew up in the suburbs (almost the country) in a small city in Wisconsin. My mom was a special education teacher turned school psychologist, and my dad worked as a civil engineer. It was a decidedly middle-class upbringing where we didn’t eat very fancy food, but we also weren’t lacking anything in our lives. I was given every opportunity to succeed (both by my parents and systemic privilege) and I made the most of those prospects. I competed on the swim team, dabbled in local theater, danced a lot, and had a nice group of friends. It all sounds very plain vanilla, and it was pretty low on the scale of strife and struggle. This upbringing provided me with an incredibly solid foundation for feeling comfortable in my own skin and instilled confidence that I was doing good things.
Right around my birthday in the fourth grade, my parents told my sister and me that they were divorcing. Adults and counselors kept reminding me that it “wasn’t my fault” that my parents were getting a divorce. In my mind, it had never occurred to me that it would be my fault; that sounded silly to me. I remember crying at the time, because I felt sad for them and for our family, but never because I harbored emotional responsibility for the loss. After several years, the final result was two sets of very supportive parents, some additional step-siblings to boss me around, and the good fortune of twice the Christmas presents. That is about the extent of my personal trauma.
As a child, I remember teachers and coaches describing me with words like conscientious, committed, and responsible. Of my own accord, I filled all of my time with something: school, work, advanced placement classes. The best day for my parents in 1999 must have been the day I earned my driver’s license so they could stop chauffeuring me around the city from activity to activity. I drove from theater practice to swim team and came home in time to eat a lukewarm plate of spaghetti my mom had saved for me at 8:30 p.m. I was tired enough at that point that I never bothered to heat up my food (and to this day I still tend to eat food at the same temperature). I would do homework on the couch until I fell asleep, would wake up in the middle of the night to keep working, and would somehow magically finish my homework before I hauled my ass to early morning swim practice or National Honors Society meetings again the next day.
Looking back, I have two vivid memories of feeling a certain weight on my shoulders in high school. They are the two moments in my youth when I can pinpoint instances when my carefully-curated exterior as a high-achiever cracked open and my true inner pressures and expectations showed up to the world around me. I am not bold enough to assume that I was so good at hiding it that no one could have possibly noticed, but no one had taken the opportunity to mirror those feelings back to me before these two incidents.
In my younger years around the age of nine, I was a very avid singer in my school choirs. In high school, I had the good fortune of being part of a very high quality and long-standing choral program with a choral director who was well-liked and slightly feared. It was a place where I found many of my friends in the other nerdy and interesting weirdos who saw the value and felt the love in making music. I can think back to my days in music and recognize that, although I wasn’t the best singer, choir was one of the few places where I truly felt in
my flow and operated in my highest possible form without care of what others were thinking or doing. At least, this was true when the music was being made.
Our teacher had some pretty strong student relationships, but not necessarily with me (I didn’t often open up easily), which makes what happened next even more surprising. One day, we were at an off-site location for rehearsal leading up to a concert. I recall a specific moment when my choral teacher looked at me (as in, REALLY looked at me and saw me) and asked me how I was doing. In that moment, it was the first time that I had ever really felt found out and truly seen. It was simultaneously overwhelming, scary, and relieving. I burst into tears as the weight I had always been carrying suddenly crushed me, as if somebody else seeing the weight suddenly made it real. No one had ever really looked closely enough to notice it before. I was surprised by the uncontrolled tears that were pouring down my face, but he looked as if he already knew (which, of course, he did). My teacher gave me a hug and let me cry for a minute before I pulled it back to my usual “I’m great!” self, and then I moved on by stuffing it all down into the box where I kept my feelings of being overwhelmed. It was a rare slip-up.
This is the first memory I have where my outsides ever so briefly matched my insides. It never manifested in the form of clinical depression or anxiety or something else big enough to warrant a diagnosis and action from others, but it was always there. It stayed and grew, taking up more and more space, getting heavier. It felt like the equivalent of slowly gaining weight, like putting on five pounds a year until you realize ten years down the road, that you gained 50 pounds before you noticed the “problem.”
Along with music, dance played a key role as a place of passion and personal expression. I had taken dance classes since around the age of three, and the only time I tired of them was when I felt like I was no longer learning or growing enough, which I rectified by finding more challenging dance groups. One new dance studio that I moved to gave me the opportunity to take my first true contemporary style dance class. It was new, exciting, and slightly outside my comfort zone. The instructor for the class was sort of a hippie-ish alternative lady whom I loved. I always looked forward to her classes, and I think it was in part because, for the first time, someone paid pretty close attention to me.
One day at the start of class, the instructor handed each of us a blank piece of paper and a pencil. She asked each of us dancers to journal whatever was on our minds and gave us several minutes. We each found our little corner of space on the floor, sprawled out on our stomachs to write on the hardwood dance floor while she played instrumental music in the background. I recall having a particularly tough day that day, juggling lots of balls in the air. I took the opportunity to scrawl on about feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, as if there was some invisible monster forcing me to do all of this “stuff.” After intensely writing for five minutes straight with a pencil on the hardwood, my hand started to cramp up. Writing my frustrations down had made me feel better, as if I had released some of the stress. At the end of our time, we handed our journaling in to the instructor and went on with class as usual, learning technique and dance combinations. She took them home to read.
The very next week in class, she shared with us what our dance presentation would be for the spring recital. It was a piece where each dancer would dance their own mini-solo to some recorded spoken words. She had selected a personal quality that best fit our thoughts from J. Ruth Gendler’s Book of Qualities, where the author personifies different emotions and personality qualities, and vividly describes them as if they are people. After explaining the construct of the piece, she handed out pages to everyone that listed the personal quality she had selected for us based on what she knew about us already and our journaling from the previous week. As she handed pages to my peers, I heard the names of the qualities they would be representing: Patience, Stillness, Discipline. Then I looked at my piece of paper and read the word “Panic.”
Here is an excerpt from the page on Panic:
Panic has thick curly hair and large frightened eyes. She has worked on too many projects meeting other people’s deadlines. She wakes up in the middle of the night pulling her hair out. She is crying for help, but only when she is sure no one is around to hear her.
Panic is sure no one can help her. She must sweat out these demons on her own. Although people care about her, she refuses to see them. She is ignoring the evidence of her own senses.
– J. Ruth Gendler
Other people personified calm or pleasant things. I had the anxious, thrashy part of the dance piece. I supposed having a variety of qualities made for a good work of art. At the time, I remember being a little annoyed for about a millisecond about my assignment but then just shrugged it off, thinking it made sense considering what I had written on my paper the week before. Truth be told, I really enjoyed dancing my part of the piece personifying Panic. It felt uniquely mine and accurate, and I appreciated the opportunity to dance out my frustration weekly.
It was not until more than fifteen years later that I looked back at that passage and had the willingness and openness to observe that not only was Panic the exact right match at that point in my life, but the words are also poignantly representative of my adult life. I realized I have always preferred angry, more expressive and honest dances. Ballet was never really my thing, because it was always a façade, like kabuki theater, rather than a true expression of emotion. I much preferred contemporary dance, or styles like krumping, which is a high-energy, high-expression variation of hip-hop dancing that was created on the streets of L.A. as a way to express anger and aggression in a positive way. Frustrated people, you should try it.
In college, the weight continued to grow. I was an Honors scholar and worked three jobs, not because I needed the money but because it was important to me to get the experience and apply myself as quickly as possible. Looking back, I can see that I was the poster child of collecting clubs, activities, projects, and responsibilities to make my own ridiculous collection of “stuff” that constantly kept me busy. I was often strategic in where I spent my time, like the Honors Club, the civic choir, and coveted application-only business school classes. Inevitably, I did things that looked good on the resume, even though I hated them. Finance Club? It was the worst, but I paid my dues and showed up, because I imagined it would be one of those key differentiators for my future employer. (Note: As someone who spent a lot of time in Human Resources looking at applications, I am certain nobody ever gave a shit about my participation in Finance Club, for the official record).
This makes it seem okay, right? When it is all good and important stuff that you spend your time on, you fail to see that perhaps you and all those around you would be better served by doing less and focusing more in-depth time on a few important areas. I did a lot, and with my personal insistence to be “all in” on everything that I did, it perpetuated the problems I had started early on of overcommitting my energy. This would continue to expand in my career.
At this point in college, I found myself starting to take everything personally, because I was so hard on myself. The standards that I had set for myself had grown from what were above average in high school, to truly suppressive by the end of college. Every move seemed to matter, as if it was the most important chess game of my life in order to secure the best career path. Apparently, I still hadn’t learned the lesson from high school that nearly none of these things – grades, activities, classes – mattered as much as I thought they would in the end.
During college circa 2003, I happened to flip the channel to a reality television show called Starting Over where a group of women lived in a house and participated in coaching to overcome their own personal obstacles. I watched from my college apartment and the first time I heard there was such a profession as a “Life Coach,” I was blown away. This was actually a thing? I studied Finance and French and was busy planning my future life as a jet-setting, suit-wearing international finance executive. But if I wasn’t doi
ng THAT (or independently wealthy), then I would most definitely be a life coach.
If I really wanted to play the “if I knew then” game, I would have maybe been a Psychology major instead, would have become a professional coach much earlier, and today Brené Brown and I would be best friends! My mom became a school psychologist after a mid-career change from teaching, so I should have known. But no, I was off chasing some definition of success and achievement that I hadn’t fully thought through at that age, and that definitely wasn’t true to my heart.
Instead, I graduated with a Finance degree, began working as a Human Resources Manager and continued to find new ways to expect more of myself and fear the day when the whole scheme of my success would unravel.
Chapter 4: The “Right” Career
“The question should be, is it worth trying to do, not can it be done.” – Allard Lowenstein
Having spent most of my college time curating the right experience for the perfect career, I kept up the practice once I actually joined the workforce. I had already made one critical decision based on my gut when I decided to take a summer internship in retail management instead of a year-long internship in treasury finance, forgoing a career in finance for something more fun and aligned with my values and strengths as a leader. I had listened to my intuition, and it was the best decision I had ever made at that phase of my life. As a result, I felt very much in the “right place” – an environment where people understood me – and I felt a sense of belonging (an experience that eludes us high-achieving introverts sometimes as a side-effect of never quite feeling understood).
In my career, I continued the perpetual cycle of beating my expectations and then raising them, assuming that was the recipe for success. I worked long and hard hours, because like with everything, I was “all in.” It only took a matter of months for me to start to burn out. A coworker and good friend stepped in to intervene and challenge the hours I was working. I needed that gut-check from the outside world to know when to stop, that I was doing enough, and that it was okay to go home. I only celebrated accomplishments when I impressed myself, and rarely did external recognition mean as much to me. The drive that had always been the cornerstone of my work kicked into high gear in a high-performing organization and went wild in a new adult world with fewer guardrails to define my time.
