Matthew Pollard’s new book, The Introvert’s Edge: How the Quiet and Shy Can Outsell Anyone, offers myth-busting insights to help you excel at sales – without being that salesperson we all want to dodge. To play to their strengths, introverts sell differently from extroverts. I offered a whiff of that in my post, “Can an Introvert Sell Well?” In his book, Pollard goes much further, with compelling stories and techniques you can use right away. He’s here to share a taste of his collaborative and thoughtful – yet highly effective – approach to selling. (more…)

When fellow Psychology Today introvert blogger Sophia Dembling and I recently chatted by phone, we discovered that we both like communicating in sound bites—an efficient use of our introverts’ energy. So I interviewed Dembling, author most recently of The Introvert’s Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World, on Twitter. In case you missed it, I’ve excerpted our exchange below about fun, flâneurs, phones, and feeling good for introverts, even if life around you is, in Dembling’s words, “a Mountain Dew commercial.” (In case you don’t use Twitter, the @ symbol before our names is just the way our handles appear on that platform.) (more…)

“Do you ever worry that you’re too quiet or shy to succeed in the professional world?” asks Jennifer Berry in her Yahoo! Education story, “Best Careers for Quiet People.” Berry explores six occupations you can succeed at if you’re more of a “workhorse” than a “show horse.” She interviewed me for the article; as a business communication coach who thrives on quiet conversation and deep strategy sessions to help clients, I was happy to share my insights. Why not celebrate your quiet strengths and choose a career path that fits your personality—authentically and powerfully?

“The brains of shy or introverted individuals might actually process the world differently than their more extroverted counterparts, a new study suggests,” according to a recent article on the LiveScience Web site.

It is unclear whether the study, which was conducted by researchers at Stony Brook University in New York and Southwest University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, both in China, makes a distinction between shyness (social anxiety) and introversion (recharging your energy during your quiet time).

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