The trap of "I am not an extrovert"

In my immediate circle alone - my sister is a strong extrovert and always has been. She thrives on large groups. If she's stressed and wants to relax she'll go to a party or downtown dance club or hang out with a dozen acquaintances. She's been that way since tween. I bring her up because she's very upfront, and I trust and believe her, that social engagements alone are NOT, and never have been, hard work or effort. They're natural to her, she gains energy from them, she enjoys them tremendously, and gets recharged through them. This is not my external observation but her convincing expression. I know others like that.

Then there's me :-). Lot of that, such as parties and dance clubs and even large groups of friends, sounds awful to me. Easy on assumptions though : As per my parallel comment, I've been a client-facing consultant for 20 years. I practice and teach soft skills and emotional intelligence at fairly high level at work. Having started as a hands-on techie for the first decade of my career, I haven't written a line of code since 2018 - ALL I do now is talk to and manage and coach and mentor people, meet with clients, etc. I spend about 7 hrs a day actively engaging people professionally.

And it's still as draining as it is rewarding and enjoyable. 20 years of active practice and daily high level socialization has not meaningfully moved the needle on whether I gain energy from people, like my sister always has, or drain energy even with people I enjoy doing activity I like.

Absolutely there's detail and granularity to this - I love teaching and have been a visiting professor for 3 years at local college. I love mentoring and coaching and do it daily. But at the end do the day I strongly crave alone time to recharge after social activities (which is what I call "being an introvert"), whereas I know people (I call them extrovert) who simply don't need that, at all. The notion that simply practice can change that, hasn't been the case for anybody I know.

You can gain skills and that's indeed worthwhile! But that does not automatically alter the energy management situation.

So my apologies, but your post is the most literal proof that some extroverts don't understand this, at all, and like Freud, make wild assumptions based on limited internal experience :-/. It's less of a capacity thing, which I'll agree may get expanded, and more of what does activity do and how does it draw on that capacity.

I have two phrases I use often:

"Should is not in my vocabulary"

"Should is a lazy word"

People use words like "should" and "must" to get around explaining their perspectives.

I remember early in my career, I made a request for a feature to an employee in another team. Their SW was allowing users to specify parameters that made the whole model unphysical, and it was a burden on us users to always double check that parameter "X" was not negative. The SW wouldn't fail. It would simply not give correct results (and they wouldn't be wildly wrong that you'll quickly realize it).

I requested that they simply not allow a negative value. We didn't always put one there - sometimes it was the output of another process, and I didn't want to continually check that our automation wasn't putting in unphysical values.

The response? "The engineer should be diligent in making sure the value is not negative".

Should is a lazy word. He didn't explain at all why he's rejecting the feature request. I would have preferred "Low priority - we simply don't have the time."

Start counting how often someone uses the word as a way to avoid explaining him/herself.