Several years ago, when I was still teaching, I read the book Quiet by Susan Cain. Her simple argument is that introverts have a lot to contribute—seems obvious, right?—but American culture, with its bias toward extroverts, often overlooks those contributions. If you’ve been reading my posts for awhile, you may know that I am not an introvert. In fact, on the Myers-Briggs personality test, which I have taken several times, I am almost as far to the extrovert side of the scale as you can get. I’m happy to spend some time alone—to read, to garden (when a neighbor might wander by to talk anyway), to write—but give me more than, say, eight hours without people, and I start to feel a low-grade depression setting in. I don’t necessarily want to live in New York City again, surrounded by millions of people, many of them behaving badly. But neither would I choose a cabin in the woods for more than a weekend, especially not all by myself.
All of which is to say: Quiet was an important book for me. It helped me to understand my quiet students better, to recognize and accept the—again, somewhat obvious—fact that just because they weren’t participating overtly, I couldn’t draw the conclusion that they weren’t thinking about the class discussion. In fact, many times during my teaching career, I was astonished by how insightful the papers of some of my quiet students were. They’d given no outward signs of engagement, but often, they’d been processing more deeply than the extroverts who eagerly jumped into class discussion with the first thought that came to mind. I had underestimated the introverts over and over again. Worse, in Cain’s book I saw myself habitually steamrolling the introverts in my life.
One classroom technique for involving introverts more is simply to call upon students at random. Some introverted students don’t mind this at all. They do have something they’re happy to say; they just prefer to be invited. Others, however, find the constant possibility of “forced participation” painful, even terrifying. So I began to work with my students to help them help each other participate more, especially in small group settings—to become better listeners, to ask one another genuine questions, to invite one another into conversations.
It’s fascinating to observe this dynamic in the workplace as well. Leaders of meetings often miss opportunities by not asking those who have been quiet whether they have something to contribute. The result can, at times, be disastrous. For example, move forward on a “consensus” that isn’t really consensus at all and you’ll find it relitigated behind the scenes.
Which brings us to book club meetings. Even before I’d read Quiet, I was fascinated to see how the different book clubs I’d visited ran their meetings, often allowing the two or three most extroverted people to dominate the discussion. I even made a couple of videos for my YouTube channel on the issue, one for discussion leaders and one for introverts themselves. I was reminded of this issue recently when my sister-in-law shared with me an article from HuffPost on book clubs and introverts.
In it, self-proclaimed introvert Jay Krasnow writes about his longtime struggle to connect with others at meet-ups and networking events. He even studied how to do this, but with no real improvement to his social life. Then—I love this—he created a book club. More specifically, the professional advice he got was to stop with the fake networking meetings and join groups focused on what he actually enjoyed doing. One thing he really enjoyed doing was reading.
Krasnow created the book club himself because he was trying to avoid some of the problems of book clubs he knew about—for example, the very problem I’ve just described, in which there’s a discussion leader and a few people who tend to dominate, and everyone has to negotiate together which book they’re going to read. Like my Hardcover Book Club, which I wrote about earlier this summer, Krasnow’s book club was really a gathering of readers who would share with each other, “show-and-tell” style, the books they were already reading. His group grew, exponentially.
If you’re thinking about starting a book club, give this model some thought. My own book club isn’t growing exponentially because the friend and I who started it decided to keep it very small, each inviting (for now, at least) just one friend to join us. Maybe we’ll expand to two friends and six total. I doubt we’ll get any bigger than that (though if you check out my August post, you’ll see we invited our spouses to join us for our summer retreat, temporarily boosting our number to seven). Krasnow’s group in Virginia reportedly has 500 members “on paper,” though no more than three dozen tend to show up at one time. That’s still a lot of people giving little book talks. Obviously, his book club has evolved into a larger social group—which is pretty much what he was looking for all along.
If you belong to a book club, pay attention at your next meeting to who isn’t speaking, and help to make room for them to contribute more, because “quiet” doesn’t mean “has nothing to say.” Opening up the space for quieter members to talk is the simplest way to elicit broader, richer conversations about the books you’re reading together.
Kathy, I’m so glad that you brought up this topic and especially that you mention Susan Cain’s bestseller, Quiet, in which she points out persuasively and encouragingly how the world is organized so that the loudest mouths are too often considered the best leaders even though their ideas are not necessarily good. Her more recent book, Bittersweet, really spoke to me, too.
Both books continue to help me understand many things about myself and others. Cain has very important causes to which she is giving voice, and amazingly, decision-makers are actually listening. That her TED talks have had more than 30 million views speaks for itself. I find what you say about the introvert issue in book clubs and classrooms relevant to every group situation I’ve been in. Susan Cain is among the authors to whom I write in “Notes to Women of Note,” a chapter of my forthcoming Letters to Men and Women of Letters. I can think of many people who will like your post and am sending it their way right now. Thank you!