The Calm in the Storm: An Introvert's Guide to Success

[Music] hello and welcome to the calm in the storm an introvert's guide to success i am joshua huber brigging specialist at vicarious visions i've been in the industry for about 13 years with my last five at vicarious visions and i started my career back in 2008 as a rigging intern and at the time the studio i was with about a month into the internship notified me that they were also opening a full-time rigging role and that i was doing a great job and they were interested in having me fill that role and about a month later we had a one-on-one to update my progress and it was brought to my attention then at that time after evaluating me for the past month they were also going to explore external options and to kind of paraphrase what i was told you know my lead said we love your work the team's getting along with you you're doing everything right but you just

don't seem energetic and enthusiastic about what you're doing and this absolutely shocked me you know fresh out of school in los angeles kind of living the life and on top of that doing what i dreamed of doing my entire life you know making video games and here's someone telling me that i'm not enjoying what i'm doing and this really took me back um and i kind of had to step out of my comfort zone and over emphasize you know my emotions and i remember pointing at my face and i said this is my happy face this is my sad face this is my angry face it's just the way i am my family you know still doesn't understand this and they've known me my whole life so i don't expect you to understand it but you need to know that i'm really enjoying this job and i would love for it to be a full-time thing and for the remainder of my internship i made an effort to try and externalize those emotions

and that's a feat that doesn't come easily when it's not in your nature and i liken this to the idea of something like the lakers and lebron james you know if they kind of told him uh you know listen lebron you're scoring 40 points a game you won the mvp last year we won the championship because of you but you just don't seem like you're having fun playing basketball so we're gonna have to let you go and these stories are important because what i was basically being told was you just aren't outgoing enough so we can't invest in you and this is scary because our society is comprised of one third to one half of introverts and we can assume that numbers even higher in our industry given that creatives tend to be more introverted yet because of the traits our culture has deemed as successful and rewarding we've essentially internalized the bias against being introverted as you can see from my myers-briggs score i'm a decidedly introverted person

and i've wrestled with being an introvert throughout my entire career in the games industry from hoping my work would speak for itself because i'm awful at self-promotion but then at times feeling like i never got the proper credit to leaving meetings with things that went unsaid because i couldn't interject among the more outspoken to focus issues when casual conversations break out near my desk to struggling with understanding why i was being perceived in certain ways or why my success felt hindered i've always just accepted it as a fact that i was different and that i would need to change my ways in response it wasn't until reading this book quiet by susan kane that i started to realize that as an introvert i'm not in the small minority that i'm not wrong for being an introvert and that there's far more to the solution than me needing to be a completely different person

so in this talk we'll discuss what is an introvert why our culture is set up to put introverts at a disadvantage what the consequences of this bias against introverts are and how we can learn to be more inclusive of introverts but before we start to share the learnings from quiet i'd like to make a few disclaimers first i'm obviously a game developer who wrote a book i'm in no way a behavioral or social scientist this is not my area of expertise this is simply me sharing the information that i found useful from the book quiet interspersed with my experiences of being an introvert in the games industry secondly and this should obviously go without saying but i love my job and i love vicarious visions when i wrote the proposal for this talk i ran it past one of the writers in our studio and he sent it back with some edits and then he followed up with a few questions he asked me are you okay

do you like it here and are we treating you fairly and while i'm fairly certain he was joking it's not uncommon for introverts to be misinterpreted due to their lack of emotion and straightforwardness it should also go without saying that this talk is in no way meant as a slight to extroverts i will be pointing out many advantages to being introverted and even pointing out some flaws of being extroverted but that's not to say we should all become introverted both personalities bring their own unique advantages and disadvantages and it's how we use them in tandem that's the key takeaway the most common and agreed upon way to distinguish an introvert is that it's someone who prefers and operates better in environments that are lower stimulation and while we most often associate associate stimulation with social

situations it's important to note that anything can be a stimulus from background noise to caffeine intake to light levels studies have even shown that introverts salivate more when lemon juice is placed on their tongue because they're responding more to that stimulus if we were to visualize this in a graph we'd see our introverts represented by the green line and our extroverts represented by the red line where the y-axis represents our level of response and our x-axis represents our level of stimulation introverts and extroverts both reach the same optimal level of response but it happens at a far lower level of stimulation for introverts and i found a great analogy for introverts and extroverts it likened introverts to a cell phone there's an external initiation that's required you know you think your cell phone it's generally in kind of a sleep mode and it

doesn't turn on unless you press a button to activate it or someone texts or calls you introverts are much the same way both introverts and cell phones have their energy from within and the more interaction you use with that cell phone or with that introvert the more it uses up that internal energy and when the battery is low it requires a recharge and if you think about the places where you recharge your phone you know generally you plug it in uh put it on the charger and just kind of set it off and let it be by itself while it charges back up that's how introverts prefer to recharge too with that same amount of seclusion extroverts on the other hand are solar panels they get their energy from an external source solar panels getting it from the sun extroverts getting it from other people or from the other external stimuli and they can't make their own energy

and once they get their energy they always give it right back solar panels give it back to the house or to the power grid extroverts give it back to other people immediately running through some other traits of introverts and extroverts introverts like to reflect before making decisions when forced to make quick decisions multi-task or handle information overload extroverts actually perform better because introverts spend too much time thinking and being overwhelmed by that stimulus introverts also like to listen more and they enjoy one-on-one conversation it's very important to note that introverts have been proven to not necessarily talk less they just prefer deeper more intimate conversations and can become bored easily by small talk when discussing introversion it's also important to note that shyness and introversion are not the same thing

the shy person is not talking because of a fear of social disapproval while the introvert is not talking because of a preference for that quiet environment introverts also tend to be more introspective more self-aware they think before they act and they learn through observation which is a trait that's known as paying alert attention and this is when you observe a social situation and you learn all the rules before you're comfortable joining in and you know just before quarantine an example of this my son my five-year-old son who i also think is act introverted like i am i took him to a classmate's birthday party at a karate dojo and immediately almost all the kids you know jumped right on the mats started kicking and jumping and chopping and doing all the activities and my son was content was sitting next to me just watching for the majority of the party but once he felt comfortable he learned all those rules uh you know and

understood what he was going to be doing he jumped right in and he had a great time einstein was a well-known introvert and he once said it's not that i'm so smart it's just that i stay with problems longer and persistence is a trait that's been proven to be stronger in introverts it's also been proven that introverts perform better on critical thinking tests and a study asking japanese and american students to solve puzzles resulted in the japanese students spending more than five minutes more on the puzzle before quitting than their american counterparts and the study attributed this to the strong introverted tendencies of the far east cultures introverts also exude less emotion and energy this is because they prefer to be in those lower stimulation environments and it's also their way to communicate their preferences to other people

this is a dangerous trait of introverts though because it generally results in them seeming aloof uninterested unfriendly and oblivious of others however if used properly this can be a huge strength of introverts in regulating their feelings it results in a very even keeled personality and if we go back to my internship story at the beginning of the talk as we move to the end of the internship we entered a really heavy crunch period for the project we were finishing and you know i was right there in the trenches putting in 70 80 hours a week with all the industry veterans and what started as you know a negativity my introverted lack of emotion um it turned into a huge positive because of my ability to remain calm and collected under that extreme stress level and this is the trait i think that helps secure the job for me and turn it into a full-time role and it's also something that has since positively shown on me throughout my

career it's also important to remember that the introvert extrovert type is a spectrum rarely is anyone 100 of either type as i've grown older i've felt my type shift more introverted and you can also adjust your type for given situations however it's believed that you cannot ultimately change from one type to the other and numerous studies have proven that being introverted or extroverted is inherent to who we are when we are born according to some scientists the traits are in our dna a study that followed babies through childhood successfully protected the introverts based on their reaction to stimuli at the age of just four months the introverted babies were labeled as high reactive due to their extreme reactions to stimuli while the extroverted babies showed little to no reaction this happens due to how our bodies process dopamine

dopamine is a neurotransmitter known for causing pleasure and motivation in the brain extroverts have a low sensitivity to dopamine so they require much larger quantities of it to reach the same level of pleasure that an introvert does studies have also shown that western cultures have evolved to be more extroverted this is believed to be because they descended from migrants who were required to be more social in their explorations in addition around the turn of the 20th century america specifically began to view introversion as a problem it was at this time that we saw the rise of the businessman and we shifted our focus into sales and marketing and in the process we began to push the traits perceived for success in those positions in her book quiet susan kane refers to this as the extrovert ideal which is the widespread belief that the ideal self is gregarious alpha and

comfortable in the spotlight and you can see from this ad in the 1950s we're not only advertising it is a problem if you're introverted but we're also starting to prescribe drugs to try to help you change and this extrovert ideal is even corroborated by science numerous studies have found that people who speak more often more loudly and faster are rated as smarter better looking more interesting and more desirable as friends and a well-known study from uc berkeley found that television pundits whose job it is to make predictions often make worse predictions than they would by random choice and the ones who were wrong the most often were not only the loudest but also the most successful so for more than 100 years now our country has been cultivating this idea

that to be successful you need to be extroverted and this has now become an accepted norm in our society being an introvert is viewed negatively and we are taught that introverts need to correct their ways uh for the any of you who are introverted this report card likely causes flashbacks uh nearly all a's except for that dreaded class participation grade and a comment that always references being too quiet or too shy the fact that class participation even merits its own grade is a reinforcement of this extrovert ideal and this ideal follows us all the way from this early age in the classroom through to adulthood in the workplace where extrovert ideals like open office floor plans and large group meetings can inhibit an introvert franz kafka a well-known introvert and famous writer once said

you once said that you would like to sit beside me while i write listen in that case i could not write at all and you know his statement here you know a famous writer saying i won't be able to write if you're next to me is a reinforcement that while open office floor plans have merit for both cost savings and visual appeal countless studies have found them to be far less productive than the collaborative environment that they sell themselves as in one famous experiment introverts and extroverts were asked to solve a puzzle while wearing headphones that played random noise they were asked to adjust the volume to their comfort level introverts chose a level that was approximately 20 decibels lower than the extroverts and at the chosen levels both types performed equally but when the levels were swapped both underperformed by about 32 percent the extroverts because they were under stimulated and the introverts because

they were overstimulated and in another study known as the coding war games the goal was to find the best computer programmers and what the study revealed was that salary job level and even years of experience did not influence the results the best performers all came from within the same companies and it was at these companies that the employees were given the most privacy freedom and least interruptions and the important thing to remember here with both of these studies is that you know extroverts obviously require more stimulation and introverts require less it's always easier to add more stimulation than it is to take away stimulation uh you know if you're in a noisy workplace you can't take that noise away easily but if you're in a quiet workplace you can always add that to your own suitability

so if we go to our ultra hip and collaborative open workspace here and we keep in mind our earlier look at optimal stimulation levels we have a few groups to the left who may be working or just chatting they're likely introverts and they're in their optimal stimulation level over in the corner though we have our introverts trying to focus unable to operate efficiently possibly even operate at all because of the over stimulation of the workplace and even if the open office plan was successful in its quest to promote collaboration there can be the added danger of collaboration through group activities a study at the university of minnesota proved that more ideas and higher quality ideas were produced when everyone worked alone versus in a group and numerous other studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases the first reason for this is known as

social loafing which says in a group some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work and this is where most of our introverts will fall in this case it's not that they're purposefully sitting back and letting others do the work but it's that they're overstimulated by the large group and it's prohibiting them from participating and another blocker for introverts here and this is something that happens quite often for me is that as introverts we tend to think far more deeply about ideas which makes coming up with ideas or answers on the fly very prohibitive and it's not uncommon for me in a meeting to latch on to one concept or question or idea and i drill so deeply into that one that i miss a large part of the rest of the meeting because of that production blocking is another failure of group meetings and this says only one person can talk or produce an idea at once while the other group members are

forced to sit and listen passively and the abilene paradox is an anecdote which reaffirms a failure of group meetings and it paradox goes like this there's a family they're sitting on their porch in a town called coleman texas and they're playing dominoes and the father-in-law thinks everyone is bored so he suggests that they take a 50-mile drive to abilene texas which is the next town over to have dinner and no one wants to go they're all having a nice time doing what they're doing but the first person agrees because they think the father-in-law wants to go and then sequentially each other person agrees because the previous person agreed and upon returning each family member says how much they hated the trip and the father-in-law says he only brought it up because he thought everyone else was being was bored and this is just kind of a reaffirmation of you know the tendency of us to follow

anyone who initiates an action regardless if we agree or not and if y'all think to any brainstormings or meetings that you've probably had you can probably come up with at least one instance where somebody makes a suggestion and your immediate thought is whoa this is way out of scope or this doesn't make sense for the game that we're making or you know that's just not going to work but the rest of the group immediately agrees with it and it's because of this abilene paradox that that can happen another pitfall to group brainstorms is what's coined by scientist gregory burns as the pain of independence and a study by burns revealed that participants playing a game gave a wrong answer only 14 percent of the time but when they played that same game in a group setting and were asked the same questions they agreed with unanimously incorrect answers over 40 of the time

an evaluation of the study revealed that those who were conforming to the incorrect answers showed less activity in the region of the brain that makes decisions and more activity in the region associated with perception so all this to say that you can actually perceive problems and therefore give answers differently if you're presented with falsities in a group so peer pressure is actually changing how your brain views problems to enable you to agree with an incorrect answer so as we can see group activities are inefficient in several ways but most notably they present several hurdles for introvert participation and inclusion this can also have an unintended deeper consequence though since introverts tend to be less vocal in group settings it can affect how or even if they are perceived by others in relation to career growth

mark twain once told the story about a man who scoured the planet looking for the greatest general who ever lived when the man was informed that the person he sought had already died and gone to heaven he made a trip to the pearly gates to look for him and saint peter pointed at a regular looking joe that isn't the greatest of all generals protested the man i knew that person when he lived on earth and he was just a measly cobbler i know that said saint peter but if he had been a general he would have been the greatest general of them all and i can relate to this because for the first 10 years of my career i was steadfast in my belief that i did not want to be a lead and to add to that was never approached by others to become one when i arrived at vv the rigging department was under the tech art group which at the time made sense and was working well

but when the studio moved to working on destiny the tech art group shifted under the engineering umbrella which made sense for most of the tech art group and how we interacted with bungie but it left rigging in an awkward position of being under a group that didn't make the most sense for us it was at this point that i saw the rigging group was being limited in its potential and i wanted to push the team in its own independent direction my desire to push the boundaries of what the rigging team could do and lead the team as i best saw fit became something i really cared about and it enabled me to step outside of my comfort zone as an introvert free trait theory developed by psychologist brian little says that we are all born with certain personality traits but we can and do act out of character in the pursuit of what he calls core personal projects using free trait theory introverts can

push themselves to be more extroverted in certain situations and while my use of free trait theory to develop the rigging department and become the rigging lead has worked out great for not only my career but also my team and vv as a whole we need to be mindful of our cobbler friends those introverts who aren't able to push themselves outside of their comfort zone on their own because they could be lost opportunities for other great leaders one of my biggest misconceptions about being in a leadership role was the idea of managing as an introvert i dreaded the thought of taking on less work telling people what to do dealing with conflict and the other bureaucracies that i thought being a lead entailed what came naturally to me though was exactly what propelled me into the lead role the desire to lead my department in a direction that would be better for us our games and our studio

and thankfully i set a path that my team wanted to follow i've learned that a great lead uses their passion to evoke empower and mentor others in his book good to great jim collins identifies five levels of leadership at the highest level possible the level 5 leader practices great humility strong will a ferocious resolve and the tendency to give credit to others all of these are traits that are inherent to introverts so it should only seem natural that introverts can be the most successful leaders in one study measuring the success of introverts as leaders they analyze data on the success of pizza chains managed by the differing personality types they found 16 percent higher profits when the teams were led by extroverts but only when the employees were passive

types on the other hand there were 30 percent higher profits when teams were led by introverts if the employees were actively engaged in improving work procedures and in another study that simulated leading teams of shirt folders for retail stores it was found that introverted leaders were perceived as more open and receptive to ideas and this resulted in higher motivation and better performance and this is one area where i think i've really excelled as an introverted lead in reviews from my team reports it's often cited how they appreciate my ability to point them in certain directions whether it's solving problems coming up with studio initiatives generating or accomplishing goals yet i don't explicitly tell them what to do or how to do it i make suggestions based on my experiences and then i allow them the space to

explore and find the answers for themselves which helps them to learn and grow in their careers and these are all important studies and anecdotes because currently 95 of leaders identify themselves as extroverts and more importantly in another informal study 65 of senior management actually said they identify introversion as a liability so we can see here it's neither uncommon for potential leaders to be overlooked because of their quiet and humble demeanors nor for introverts to assume themselves not fit for leadership despite the fact that introverts are inherently set up to be great leaders over the past nearly a year and a half now we've been all navigating this unique landscape that is covid and working from home so it's also worth discussing how that impacts introverts

if you google introvert and quarantine or introvert from working from home you get this whole slew of hilarious memes that kind of you know depict that this is the moment introverts have been waiting for their whole life uh we're all at home alone having these you know great parties by ourselves and while that might be true for some people it's important to remember that introverts still need balance and not all of us are getting that proper balance take myself for example you know working from home lots of zoom meetings all day and then you know as soon as i'm done working my family gets home i have two rambunctious young boys who i love but it's a lot of high energy so you know all the stimulation of zoom meetings followed quickly by the stimulation of uh you know rambunctious loud children and that goes pretty much from the moment i wake up till the moment i go to bed so not all of us introverts are getting that balance that alone time that we

need that you know make the quarantine as successful as people think another thing to remember is that introverts think a lot there was a test of 1 000 american adults recently and it tested how much covid has negatively impacted their mental health and they found that those who tested higher as extroverts also tested better on mental health during quarantine and they believe this is because introverts are thinking so much about the ramifications of kovid you know what happens if i get this what happens if my family gets this am i doing a good job working from home and balancing homeschooling with my kids all these things are constantly running through an introvert's mind while extroverts can more easily shrug these things off and keep plowing ahead something else that came up that really stuck out to me we have an art leads meeting about once a month where the leads of each art department get together we discuss you know studio happenings

team health how we're doing things like that and it was the first meeting we had uh after working from home started and we kind of went around and did a you know how is everyone doing checking in how are your teams doing and someone said don't forget your extrovert friends they're really hurting right now and this really stuck out to me because i liken extroverts working from home to introverts in the workplace in both cases we're in more unnatural environments for us extroverts at home because they're under-stimulated introverts in the workplace because they're over stimulated and you know we want to think the same way we're thinking about extroverts now and saying you know don't forget your extrovert friends we want to be mindful that when we get back to our studios we also want to be thinking about our introvert friends and the last thing to remember is that we all still need to recharge introverts you know if you're over stimulated by family and working from

home you need to find that alone time somehow uh extroverts if you need to get that extra social stimulation you need to find a way to do that too when working from home it's also important to discuss zoom and its impact on introverts first zoom magnifies the meeting failures that we identified earlier it can make it even harder for introverts to interject their thoughts it's also been proven that zoom fatigue is real there's a lot of energy that's spent interpreting the unnatural socialization of zoom all the excessive up close eye contact is unnatural there's more energy spent interpreting because there's a lack of body language and the reduced mobility of trying to keep your body still to stay on camera to help combat this you should work to limit your daily meeting quantity and if that's not possible you should work to

make some of your meetings audio only so that you're not getting the fatigue of all these visual cues it's also unnatural to see yourself as you speak and when you see yourself you tend to be more critical of yourself so you're spending a lot of energy criticizing yourself which is further taxing you so you should work to hide yourself view during meetings and you should always question if this really needs to be a zoom meeting or not and if it doesn't explore alternate feedback avenues our studio has recently used started to use a program called miro and this is kind of a real-time whiteboard editing program that everyone can edit a page at the same time and the advantage of this is we'll have zoom in the background audio only and someone will kind of be a moderator of the meeting but we're all able to give our opinions and our feedback at the same time on this nero page and we don't have a lot of the meeting failures and the fatigue associated with

zoom it's also important to keep in mind that while virtual social functions can help to maintain your overall team bonding and studio dynamics these can be very difficult on introverts and we should start to think quality over quantity with our social function meetings smaller meetups that rotate around shared interests or creative ideas can be a great way to get introverts to nourish their deeper connections and be more involved with our virtual social functions and this is something that as an introverted lead i've really struggled with since working from home finding ways to keep my team's social bonding going but also do it in an environment that's suitable for my introverted tendencies and one thing i came up with was something we did which was called a rigging jam and we basically put pencils down on production for a week we got approval for this

and we we took that week to work on personal projects uh in the friday before we each pitched an idea to the group and you know we talked about the idea we worked out kind of a rough outline of what we were going to do and then for the week we would have a morning check in with each other how the our progress is happening we would answer any questions or things that were stuck on and then we would spend the day working on that project and at the end of the week we each presented our project and you know this just became a fun way for the team it encouraged the team bonding but it also was that uh you know unique deeper connection that appeals to introverts and appealed to me and throughout my career i've also learned to do many things to help my introverted tendencies the first thing i do is to take advantage of my environment i've made myself an early bird at the studio and even working from home i like to start early and it's not unheard of

for me to have days where i'm more productive in the one to two hours that i'm alone in the studio in the morning than i am for the rest of the day because i'm filled with meetings and other distractions so find the time that your environment is most conducive to your preferences and you know adjust your hours accordingly to make best suit of those needs and an interesting fact here in relation to working early is that introverts have actually been proven to work better with lower levels of sleep and this is because uh lacking sleep makes us less alert less active and less energetic so a sleep-deprived person is less aroused which works better for the introvert another thing i like to do is prepare for my meetings ahead of time gather your key points of the meeting or your brainstorm session in advance and think them over so you have your questions and thoughts ready this allows you to absorb your materials

generate your questions and explore deeply and it prevents you from making those connections during the meeting and missing other key points of the meeting and because you feel more prepared it will also make you it'll make it easier for you to share your ideas and i liken this to how we approach job candidate interviews you know i hope we never really go into an interview with a job candidate and we haven't at least reviewed their resume or their demo reel or a test that they prepared for us you know and generated questions that are specific to that candidate and their work and how they'll fit into the studio so much the same way i like to prepare for my job interviews i also like to prepare for all my meetings you should also always follow up after the fact and make sure your thoughts are getting across even if it's not in the moment we discuss the different ways that group meetings can cause introverts to be less

successful in terms of sharing all their ideas so don't feel just because the meeting is over that the topic is closed it's not uncommon for me to marinate on ideas that are presented in meetings and bring them up with the person who is hosting the meeting later on and when it comes to this use any format that's comfortable and relays your thoughts the best you know don't feel like you need to wait for another meeting when you may have the same issues interjecting your thoughts feel free to use anything like slack or email whatever is most comfortable for you you should also ask thoughtful questions this one's really important because it serves multiple purposes by verbalizing the thoughtful questions that are running through your mind as an introvert it can help to get extroverts thinking more about their ideas it can also extend your period of thinking out an idea during a meeting because others are now discussing that question you asked rather than

continuing to a new idea thoughtful questions can also redirect a group when we're getting sidetracked and it can help to maintain focus and asking questions also deflects energy in asking a question you're getting others to do the thought the thinking and the talking on your behalf but in essence you're getting the credit for the conversation because you asked that question and initiated the conversation even if others are discussing the question and you're not doing a lot of the talking it's giving you the credit and in her book quiet susan kane tells a story about an introverted man who loves to host parties and you know this seems counterintuitive but it kind of makes sense the reason he loves to host the parties rather than attending parties is because when he's hosting a party um you know he can kind of be his introverted self and get caught up in doing things that hosts do cooking food you know putting food out getting drinks for people

and he doesn't necessarily have to be a social butterfly but if his party is viewed as a big success even if he's not a social butterfly he's viewed as a big success and this is something that really hit home to me uh i realized that i love to do the same thing uh and you know this reminded me of an instance we had a party a while back and friends of friends came and it was the first time we had ever met them and you know they got to the party and we introduced each other but other than that i don't really remember talking to them at all throughout the night and we met up with our friends a few weeks later and you know they said oh our friends loved you guys so much uh they really want to hang out with you again they thought you were so much fun and you know i thought this was really funny because i remember not talking to them at all during the party so like you know i kind of questioned how would they know how much fun we are we didn't even really talk to them

but it's this same idea um you know they they saw us hosting a great party and that that gave us the spotlight even though we were more introverted and weren't necessarily social butterflies at the party another thing to do is just say no we've learned that introverts can become overstimulated easier so as such we shouldn't participate in every activity so don't feel guilty if you don't participate this is something that's really hard though because you want to be present in every group activity uh you know you feel like otherwise you're missing out on opportunities to bond with your team uh you know represent your work or push ideas so you have to find balance and be wise about which activities you're partaking in so you can make the best out of the ones you do attend another thing to do is always suggest more fruitful and less draining alternatives so you know if you decline a full team

social lunch outing because you might not gain much from that outing maybe in response offer a one-on-one lunch to a member of that group who's a more important member where you can have more fruitful conversations you should also try to find a champion for your work this is one that i've learned to lean on a lot recently as i mentioned earlier one of my reluctancies to becoming a lead was the perceived need to make myself more extroverted and thankfully my lead complements my personality by being more extroverted so i'm able to talk to him in a one-on-one basis and share my ideas and my goals and my accomplishments and then he does the external sales and promoting for me so i'm relying on his personality to complement mine [Music] this helps to limit my exposure to large group environments which are harder for introverts and since introverts also

prefer more in-depth intimate conversations having a strong relationship with him allows me to stay in my comfort zone and it allows me to rely less on self-promotion because now he's doing all the promoting to others for me you want to make sure you trust your champion and you're paired with someone who you're comfortable talking to and who you also know will go to bat for you and it's important to note here that you know in not every circumstance this might be your lead and you know if you think that your lead is not the champion for your work make sure you find someone else in the studio who can be i have several other people in our studio too who i rely on for this much the same way that i rely on my lead for it and since introverts thrive on less stimulation you always want to find ways to keep that stimulation balanced and take notes of the things that you do that you notice are putting you in your

comfort zone headphones are an obvious one as an introvert i even find sometimes i'll put the headphones on to cancel out external noise and i don't even play anything in the headphones but also be on the lookout for other unsuspecting filters i'm known around the studio for always having my hood up and it's not uncommon if my hood is down and i'm walking down the hallway someone will jokingly say that they don't recognize me and it was upon analyzing introverts and myself that i realized i was putting that hood up to filter out noise and distraction and limit the amount of input i was taking and just remember if you've put yourself into those extroverted situations you always want to remember to recharge when you need it on the studio level while not intended well not directly intended to benefit introverts we've done several things that can help you learn more about

introverts and extroverts within about your first year at vv everyone goes through disk training and if you're not familiar with disk it's essentially a personality test that charts out your demeanor and your working style and once you have those results the training teaches you about your personality and how to effectively work and communicate with other personalities and while the disc training doesn't explicitly categorize people as introverted or extroverted if you have some awareness of introverts and extroverts you can use the disc tools to help extract those results to the introvert extrovert relationship we also did a course known as active listening training and the course revolved around how to be a better listener when people are talking to you and an aim to teach us how to be more present in a conversation and this is of special importance to introverts because introverts tend to be

more out of tune with a conversation because they're constantly thinking constantly asking questions and constantly trying to solve the problems of the person who is talking rather than listening to what they're saying recently the art team at vv has also made an active effort to promote professional development time this program allows artists about two hours a week to focus on core personal projects research and development tutorials or other areas of interest we even block this timeout in outlook so that people aren't interrupted during that time and so they can't be booked with other meetings google is notorious for the idea of something called 20 time which in theory allows their employees 20 of their time dedicated to new idea development and the thinking is b is that the best ideas come when creative people aren't explicitly being managed or forced to

work and we're hoping to capture that same idea by allowing artists the creative free time once a week to do this there are also many ways that extroverts can help the first thing you can do is pre-warm your meetings by providing more context questions and insight in advance of a meeting this can help introverts to better prepare for those meetings ahead of time and you know recently i got a meeting a request that was just called boss rigging questions and there was no context within the meeting to it that was it and i had no idea what this meeting was about and i spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure this out you know which bosses does this apply to we're working on several bosses right now what are the rigging questions so you know just by providing some of that context you're not only helping introverts prepare more and be better prepared to share ideas in the meeting but you're also reducing the amount of

energy that they're spending overthinking things in advance another idea is the five-second rule and this idea says that if there's that awkward silence when one person finishes their thought to give it five seconds and let it breathe and make sure that no one else has anything to say and make sure that you're saying the proper thing after that uh there's a tendency of extroverts to fill in silences immediately even if they're not saying something that will advance the conversation properly so the idea here is to just give it that moment to breathe so introverts have time to think and to speak their mind if they're ready another thing you can do is call on the quiet this is one you want to be careful of because people don't necessarily always love to be put on the spot this is also another one where body language can be a big cue people often you know give body language

cues when they're ready to speak and if you notice someone looks like they're ready to speak but they're not able to interject their thoughts because others are speaking feel free to call on them just make sure you're doing it in a manner that doesn't make them feel pressured to give an answer uh and you know give them the space that it's okay if they if they don't have an answer ready that they don't need to give one uh activision on the whole has also instituted a new thing called no meeting fridays this just gives us a full day to not have the burden of meetings to focus on our work and to not have those distractions i have heard of people taking it even further with no talk days it seems pretty optimistic and utopian in my idea but that could be another thing you strive for we should also work to minimize multitasking you know keep introverts deep and focus on their one task since we know that

introverts are not great at multitasking so if you're aware of someone who's working on a particular task and your need isn't urgent just give them that extra alone time to wrap up their current train of thought as we've seen introverts and extroverts both bring their own unique qualities and flaws so we should work to mix our personalities to make better use of our differences our best success is going to be leveraging the powers of both introverts and extroverts and as we work to shine a spotlight on promoting equity and inclusion in our industry we should be mindful that inclusion is not only relevant to the visually apparent categories like race gender and sexuality our society has been conditioned to believe that we should all be extroverted and as such we have created a subconscious bias against introverts even though upwards of one half of our

society is introverted and in our industry it's especially important to be mindful of this bias as the number of introverts is likely even higher introverts carry many positive traits from which we can benefit and we should work to utilize them to help balance our teams and our processes if we continue to not be fully mindful of them we stand not to use our teams to their full potential i'd like to thank you for taking the time to listen to this talk for any of you who are here in the live chat if you have any questions or comments i'd love to answer them especially if you've done anything yourself as an introvert to benefit your tendencies or if your studio has done any initiatives to benefit introverts i'd love to hear about that and if you're not here in the live chat please feel free to email me i'd love to hear from you too jhuber blizzard.com [Music] also we are hiring both at vicarious

visions and blizzard please visit careers.blizzard.com if you are interested and thank you again for attending [Music]