The introspective extrovert

I love people.  I really do.  I love having a conversation with a stranger.  I make friends in the grocery store.  Being with people charges my batteries and makes me happy.

I am also highly introspective.  I spend an enormous amount of time inside my head.  I think and rethink just about everything.

This means that if I don't spend enough time with people, getting out of the inside of my head, I start to lose my ability to show the people on the outside that I really do love people.

I start to overthink every conversation starter, and then panic if the conversation opening is not met with acceptance.

This gives me a lot of empathy for my introverted friends.

But it also makes me think more about why I have this tendency to overthink and over analyze, and why the voice in my head doing the analysis is so darn mean.  And it also makes me wonder how many people I interact with just need my conversation to keep going, to let them know that I think they are OK, even if they have nothing to say.

I think that for those of us that are born analytical, the need to analyze everything is impossible to overcome.   What is necessary to overcome is the mean voice in our head.  Analyzing everything should not mean that every analysis ends with me being less than I should be.  Some analysis will statistically end with me being more than I should be.  (That analytical thing can work for you).

If I think of all my interactions as points in statistical analysis, given the sample set will be huge, I can expect a Gaussian distribution of my results.  So, 99.7% of my interactions with people fall within 3 standard deviations of my mean.  What is my mean?  Well in statistics, mean is the arithmetic average of the set of values in my distribution.

So, if I assign a value to my social interactions, with 1 being totally in my head and not social, and 5 being so social I make the recipient of my attention uncomfortable, I'll be looking for a mean of 3, with a standard deviation of .5.  (I just made up the standard deviation - but it feels right).  So, this means that I have now proved with data that 99.7% of the time, my social interactions are between mildly social, and friendly but not scary.  Take that you mean voice in my head! I have data to shut you up with!

I am a firm believer that you can't change who you are - but you can find a way to make the mean voice in your head be quiet and let you be the wonderful self that you are.

My weapon of choice to quiet the mean voice is data - find your weapon.  Quiet the mean voice.  The world needs you and your wonderfulness.