Hidden Brilliance

by Katie Rasoul

  This is often the undiagnosed problem for high-achieving introverts; our work is always successful, so we are completely unaware of even bigger levels of greatness that we could be reaching. We just stop because it is excellent, or we keep doing what we are doing because it appears to be working. We don’t even realize on a conscious level that we could be doing bigger or better work, but deep down on a subconscious level we know because we feel busy yet unfulfilled.

  It is important as well that we make the distinction between more work and better work. Often, high-achievers get more responsibility added to their plates because they will make it happen, or it is “good for their career.” Doing more work that isn’t stretching you or expanding your repertoire in some way is simply more of the same, not bigger or better. We confuse this a lot in the corporate world with “development,” but in the case of a high-achieving introvert, it is simply choking the blank space and time needed for introverts to do their best work. I remember feeling at odds with my personal values of only doing work with excellence, because there was so much to be done. Eventually, “done is better than perfect” became an overused rationalization. I would get worn down enough to not even care about or celebrate completion, because I was just glad it was finally done. But what if it could be so much better?

  Regardless of your current work environment, having the awareness that you need time and space in solitude for your own thoughts to thrive, is the first part of what you need to start building your life to include those things regularly. Like anything, it is a habit-building process that takes some time and effort, but here are some methods you can try that will begin to hold the space that you need.

  Build the Time You Require into Your Schedule

  Are you someone who thrives on back-to-back meetings, or do you prefer space in between to gather your thoughts? I often had back-to-back meetings and celebrated my ninja-like efficiency, but in reality, I needed time in between to decompress from the last conversation and gather my thoughts for the next one. I also HATE being late, and so that buffer time in between meetings was critical for me to get to my destination early enough so as not to get stressed about time. I could also use my early extra minutes to look over my notes and get centered on the next topic. If building in time in-between meetings just simply isn’t possible (and I challenge you that if you want it bad enough, it is possible), then you can hold a large preparation time earlier where you organize all of your thoughts, put your topics in an organized fashion in your likely color-coded folders, and whisk on to your action-packed day.

  I know you know how to be organized. You probably have lots of fancy tabs and folders in your desk that bring you joy. It is likely you are not honoring the time you need to do your next level work, because you are rationalizing it away and giving it to something less important. Email is a great example of a time suck that does nothing to add to your good work or bring you joy. If you spend the only quiet, longer blocks of alone time that you have answering other peoples’ emails, then you are squandering your best potential moments.

  I know my brain has a lot of complex thoughts that are sometimes difficult to form into coherent and articulate sentences, particularly on the fly. Humans only have so much RAM in their brain for working on multiple things at the same time, and introverts with big ideas can use up maximum capacity. And then there is the utter annoyance I feel when my deep thought processes are interrupted. It often takes a minute for me to resurface from where I was, and by the time I finish with someone else’s question, I have lost my place in my internal think tank, or have lost a lot of time in transit to and from my heavy thinking.

  If you need 30 minutes between meetings, build it on your calendar. If you need gym or coffee shop time on the way home to relax, then plan it out as a recurring appointment. If you need time to center, meditate, or set intentions, make it a morning ritual before anyone else in the house is awake. The awareness and commitment to giving yourself time and space might be the missing link to unlocking even higher potential.

  When I left the corporate environment, I retooled my schedule to be exactly to my ideal. It balanced time with others and time alone. It included exercise, time out in nature, blank space for “curiosity hour” to Google topics I wanted to learn about, and uninterrupted blocks for actual work. If I could do a high-powered job, the actual work I had to do, in about 6 hours a week in between useless conference calls and soul-sucking meetings, then doing my actual work in 20 hours a week seemed like a total gift. The other 20 hours became dedicated to all of the other stuff that made my life worth living and informed my work, like reading. I recognize that not everyone has the opportunity to completely own their schedule, but deciding what your priorities are, scheduling them first, and holding onto that time like grim death is a surefire way to start. If you aren’t sure what your priorities are, go back to the top and read the Values section.

  Meditate

  I have struggled for years with keeping a consistent meditation practice, because I tended to view it in very black and white terms. I thought I needed to meditate a long time and be really focused or just not do it at all. In reality, I have found (and research confirms) that even a few minutes a day of mindfulness or meditation can have a lasting impact on your day. The whole point is to quiet your mind, not to have it quiet already when you begin! I come out the other side feeling calm and focused, which makes my scheduled thinking and creative time much more productive.

  Introverts often have a very rich inner dialogue going on in their heads at all times (you’ve already met the Board of Directors), and on top of that, many of us have big jobs, kids at home, parents to care for, and a thousand other things that we are trying to hold in our working memory at any given time. I generally have a very ambitious multi-tasker brain that I am sure if you photographed would look like about 1,200 monkeys swinging around in a small patch of jungle. In fact, I can feel myself being distant and distracted when I am trying to hold too many things in my head at the same time. Much like a computer, our brains can only hold and process so much.

  Meditating allows you to cut through that and be more focused on the few key important things. Much like scheduling time for your thoughts, this can be a good start to those longer blocks of scheduled time to stay focused rather than frittering your “introvert spa time” away on emails.

  Intentions

  During your meditation time or at the start of your quiet work hour, take time to think and to set an intention for the day. This may reflect the biggest and most important work you do that day, or it may reflect just being or living with joy. Taking a moment to set an intention will be a moment of consciously setting a path for the day. When things veer off course, you will be aware that you are not living your intention and you can redirect. If you didn’t set one to begin with, you will never take action to get back on a course you never set.

  If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. - Lewis Carroll

  Have you ever had one of those days where you leave work and you can’t remember a single important thing that you did that day? You just spent ten hours at work, bouncing from one thing to the next and you can’t think of one thing to talk about at the dinner table when asked how your day was. Those are the days I wish I could go back to. I would set an intention, be more focused throughout the day, and come out the other side feeling like it wasn’t a total waste. It was days like this that, particularly as a new parent, I would think, “I left my beautiful baby at daycare for a day full of this? I’d rather be at home cleaning shit and getting puked on than wasting the day for nothing.” Intentions might have helped.

  My intention that I set for the day tends to align with my top three priorities, and simply writing those down on paper suddenly takes power away from the menial junk that fills my day. I find myself doing less of anything that doesn’t honor my intention, or Top Three, for the day. If my day fills up with other “stuff,” then I reflect at the end of the day what went well a
nd what I could improve the next day. As a result, I have much fewer days that waste away, and the ones that do get a post-mortem for improvement tomorrow.

  Gratitude and Journaling

  I have incorporated a gratitude practice in my day in order to expand the good things in my life. Sometimes it has been focused on a specific topic, and other times it has been free-form. I write them down in a journal next to my bed at the start of the day, at the end of the day, or as part of my daily journal and to-do list at my desk. Find what method works for you. You will begin to see things that you didn’t previously notice.

  If you express gratitude once, you cover the obvious bases. Family, friends, health, and so on. But if you do it daily, you can’t use the same tired list every day, so instead of just saying “family,” you begin to note your gratitude for the time when you call your mom every Monday, or when your child comes home having learned a new song at school that is so cute to listen to. Instead of “friends,” you notice your gratitude for your friend who always texts to check in on you, or that you had the opportunity to send a meal over to new parents. You become grateful for the fact that you haven’t had a cold in three months or that your routine doctor appointment was, in fact, just routine. It gets more granular, and as a result, your gratitude expands.

  Just like your intentions, writing your gratitude down gives you the personal accountability to make sure you commit to it on paper, and it sends it out into the universe. It is easy to recite gratitude in your head without actually thinking of new topics, but when you write it down, it forces you to be much more committed and deliberate with the practice. And, it is fascinating to read back what you wrote months ago as a study on how you have changed in the meantime. To take it to even the next level, express your gratitude to others for the things that you write down. Maybe you tell that friend how much it means to you that they check in with you often, and why. They will feel honored by your gratitude and will probably keep up the good work.

  Thinking List & Curiosity Hour

  In order to clear out working memory in my brain for things that are really important, I like to make different lists to capture my thoughts and go back to them at a later time when I have my designated quiet time to reflect. I keep separate lists based on what the action might be, so that my most important “To Do” list doesn’t get muddied by things I wanted to look into, or people I wanted to reach out to when I got around to it. These are all separate lists. When I want to get shit done, I go to the To Do list. When I want to reach out to my network community, I go to that list and focus on connecting. When I want to research new ideas or topics that sparked my interest, I go to the Curiosity Hour list.

  Curiosity Hour is my favorite. A friend gave me this practice, and it has both cleaned up my To Do list and created this lovely running list of cool things I want to research. Sometimes I Google a topic, read up on one page, and that is sufficient before moving on to the next topic. Sometimes I research down a rabbit hole if it is something I really want to learn more about. It’s a great way to allow your mind to learn and wander with purpose.

  If you do not plan time on your calendar for this type of blank space, I guarantee you will never do it. That is not to say you don’t waste time “researching,” but you are probably just doing it more in an “hour lost on Instagram” sort of way (no judging, it happens to the best of us). Especially for people like myself who need time to decompress alone, we find ways to do it one way or the other because we need it to recharge. If you are intentional about your time, you can spend it in a more fulfilling way for your personal development than wasting it doing something you aren’t really even enjoying. I troll around Facebook when I have no chance of doing anything else productive, like at 9:00 p.m.

  Creative Time

  It has become increasingly clear to me as I spend my “blank space” time more effectively, that holding space for creative work is critical to my wellbeing. Growing up, I was most in flow when I was doing something creative. I spent a lot of time singing, dancing, and acting, and those were the moments when I was most perfectly myself and enjoying life. It felt easy and free. So why as an adult was I not spending any time in a creative space?

  Once I got over myself and realized what a good time that was, I decided to spend more of my time there and see what happened. I spent more time singing and dancing, listening to more music, and lo and behold, trying a new creative outlet that had always been dying to escape from my introvert body: writing. Imagine that! Spend time researching, thinking, reflecting, and writing ideas quietly in my office to create something uniquely my own? Sign me up. Perhaps your creative time is best spent on graphic design, or crafting, or coding. This is just another way to commit to the personal time that you need, and to use it in a way that makes you feel so alive that you keep doing it and refuse to give it up for anyone else.

  I have covered a lot of different ways to be still and commit to some time alone, but they all hinge on the idea that you give yourself the time you need. If you are skeptical, try it for a period of time (I suggest 30 days), and, in the grand scheme of things, it is easy to go back wasting your time on email and Facebook without much lost if you don’t like it after that time. But if you do like it, you will have unlocked additional time in your day and week, because you spent it with intention and purpose rather than fitting in some “skim milk” version of “you time” in between useless meetings.

  I could not successfully do all of the other work of living out my new action plan if I didn’t have these practices in place to allow myself time and space to be still and be alone. As an introvert, I needed that time to process all of the new information that I had taken in with the deliberate practice and growth that I was experiencing. Had I not allowed myself this space and protected it, I would have been a mess. It would have been as if I hadn’t slept and allowed my brain to dream and process memories overnight. And if you have ever been truly deprived of sleep, you know that is a dark place to avoid. So why wouldn’t you allow yourself the same courtesy during the day? It allows the high-achiever in us to accomplish big things without the weight and judgement of how we “should” be spending our time.

  

  Try It: Still and Alone Activity

  Commit to yourself an amount of time each day that you will spend being still and alone. Maybe it is an hour. Perhaps you think mustering up 10 minutes is going to be a challenge. Whatever it is, you decide. You have to be all in.

  Consider when exactly you will schedule this time so that it works with your day and no one will steal it from you. Put it on the schedule every day for seven days. This is an experiment, so you want to try it on work days and non-work days to see what works for you. Add it in your calendar with notifications.

  Start your time with a minimum of one minute of breathing and centering. You spend the rest of the time however you want. Perhaps you spend your full allotted 10 minutes on meditating, or maybe you breathe and center for two minutes before you spend the next 25 minutes reading or writing quietly. After one week, assess what worked, what adjustments to make, and block it in your calendar with no end date ever!

  Activity 11: Staying Friends with Your Inner Child

  “The most sophisticated people I know – inside they’re all children. We never really lose a certain sense we had when we were kids.” – Jim Henson

  I have often felt as an adult that I am really just an eight-year-old trapped in an adult’s body. I like music, jokes, board games, cartoons, and hiding tiny animal figurines in peoples’ purses. In my best state, I was someone who saw the world with wonderment and joy, much like a child. I swear to you, Santa might be real.

  An old friend showed me some photographs recently from our epic middle school sleepovers and birthday parties. Every photo showed me hanging upside down with a giant cheesy grin on my face or making weird faces at the camera. It was the perfect representation of me as a child before I changed anything to suit anyone else’s interests, particularly Brid
get’s. It occurred to me while I was on this journey that, somewhere along the way, I had forgotten about my inner child. I had stuffed her away and asked her to please grow up, and I took on my new role as the fun police. When I tried to identify the last time I really felt in the flow, I had to think back. Way back. The fact that I didn’t have a very recent example of sustained flow and enjoyment was a red flag.

  

  The times that I felt most in the flow of life were when I was doing the things I loved most as a child: swimming laps for the swim team, dancing at dance practice, singing in the choir, or joining a theater show. It was pure fun without expectation or pressure. As I grew older, the weight grew, too, but in their purest forms, my childhood activities were havens of joy and alignment.

  It struck me that I didn’t have any outlets like this in my life anymore as a thirty-something working mom, so I set out to revisit my old stomping grounds to see if they still had any magic left in them. I switched up my morning running workout and went to the outdoor pool. It was cold and reminiscent. I dusted off my tap shoes and went to a tap class. Although my feet forgot a few steps, the hour flew by. I took a midday break to go watch a musical at the local theater and sang the entire soundtrack of Wicked at the top of my lungs in the shower. I pulled out the piano sheet music. I listened to French music and felt nostalgia from my time studying abroad.