Can Introverts Succeed in Communications?

When I was nine years old, I started a cat club based in a blanket fort built from Scotch tape and push pins in the 4 by 6 foot space in my closet. I was the only member.

I wrote rules on a piece of paper torn from a journal, and I displayed it as a grand degree on one interior wall. With push pins. Rule number one: Do not talk about cat club. Rule number two: Cats only. I spent hours at a time lounged in my makeshift closet fort with Barbie pillows and my CD player, enjoying the stress-free privacy before I even fully understood what stress was. Looking back, I recognize this kind of behavior as true introversion. Only an introverted child would create a social organization designed for complete antisocial activities. Growing up, I considered my tendencies to crave solitude just part of who I was. It wasn't until I became an "adult" that I noticed how people use introversion in a derogative way.

In my experience, the average person responds one of two ways when I tell them I'm studying communications: complete misunderstanding (I once told a fellow student I was studying Mass Communication and he asked me how many languages I knew) or stigmatized surprise (“So you must be, like, really bubbly and stuff, huh?”). While I find the prior taxing, I've been most upset to discover the prevalence of this stereotype that communication majors are all cookie cutter copies of one extraverted personality. That idea doesn't seem to plague other industries, like business, health or technology. Why communications?

Forbes reporter Nick Morgan touched on this idea in his article about introverts and public speaking jobs. “We are so fixated in this tumultuous era on the differences among cultures” he writes, “that we have a hard time accepting the similarities.” Indeed, we do, as confirmed by tons of social psychological research; Humans are biologically programmed to categorize each other based on certain traits like gender, race, age or appearance. In ancestral times, this was essential to survival because it helped humans distinguish between friendly and hostile tribes, but today it seems to do more harm than good. Grouping people based on similar traits, though an innate behavior, leads us to such hot-button issues as sexism and racism.

The categorization of introverts and extraverts is rampant in the communications industry, probably due to the fact that it's been widely perpetuated as a quantitative measure of talkativeness ("On a scale of 1-10" kind of thing). However, introversion and extraversion are more so descriptions of how people absorb and expend energy, or how much value a person places on social time versus alone time. Come to find out, these traits are actually based in biology and extend into a larger multi-spectrum concept developed by British psychologist Hans Eysenck (see above) that even further dispels the idea that introversion-extraversion is a one way street. It uses quadrants to categorize people based on levels of stability and introversion/extraversion.

People who pursue the communications field do so for generally the same reasons: They love and are skilled at communicating with other people, whether it be orally, verbally or visually. It's this array of abilities that makes mass media possible. It takes all kinds of communicators to make the world go round, so don't allow anyone to make you feel inferior about your particular set of strengths and weaknesses.

Personally, I hate public speaking. I even hate talking to people over the phone. I know I'm not very good at it. But I know I'm a great writer, I have a pretty strong vocabulary and I'm a good at teaching others how to be good communicators. I choose to love myself for those skills I have and try to be the very best I can be in those areas. Plus, I work on my weak areas. I took a Speech Communication class last spring in which I had to give a presentation as part of my grade. It was hard, but I learned some really useful public speaking tips that help me feel more confident doing something I've never felt good at. I accept myself as a introvert. It makes me a better writer. It makes me the person I am, and the same goes for all you reading this. Whether you identify as an extrovert, introvert or neither, your place in the communications field is entirely dependent on your creative abilities, not whether you prefer a Netflix marathon to a night on the town.

If you need any more reason to embrace your skillset, check out this quote from Apple CEO Tim Cook that he gave during an interview with Charlie Rose in Sep 2014:

"I think each person, if you’re a CEO, the most important thing is to have, to me, is to pick people around you that aren’t like you, that complement you. Because you want to build a puzzle, you don’t want to stack chiclets up and have everyone be the same.believe in diversity with a capital D. And that’s diversity in thought and diversity any way you want to measure it. And so the people that surround me are not like me. They have skills that I don’t have. I may have some that they don’t have. What we do as a team collectively are able to do some incredible things."
Tim Cook, CEO, Apple