Reflections on Being an Extrovert Working With an Introvert

Please welcome my guest blogger today, Jeannette Paladino. How do you welcome her? You can say, Welcome. You can comment on her blog post. You can SHARE her blog post. I’ll let Jeannette tell you the rest of the story.

Pat and her recent guests have discussed how introverts see the world and how they can work collaboratively with extroverts. I’m an extrovert. In fact, my good friend Shoya Zichy, creator of the

Color Q

personality profiling system, calls me a “raging” extrovert.

By that she means that I need to be involved with community – people at work and in my personal life. I’m very outwardly focused. But I personally think the differences between introverts and extroverts in the business world are exaggerated. My recent collaboration with Pat on our ebook “Repairing the Elevator Speech to Burnish Your Brand” is evidence that introverts (Pat) and extroverts (me) can have stress-free collaborations that work.

Pat and I met on LinkedIn and neither one of us can remember who reached out first. We both belong to the Bloggers Helping Bloggers Group on LinkedIn and our relationship first started by our commenting on each other’s blogs. You know, one blogger helping another.

Discovering a Shared Interest

Soon we discovered that we shared a common distaste for most of the “elevator speeches” we are victim to at networking events. We started talking about how elevator speeches could be so much better. Eventually we interviewed each other in a series of blog posts that appeared on each of our sites. Then we decided to take all this good advice on what makes for a good elevator speech and turned it into ebook, “Repairing the Elevator Speech to Burnish Your Personal Brand.” We’re using it as an incentive to build our subscriber base and to promote our companies.

We also appeared as guests on Free Webinar Wednesdays about how we leveraged our relationship on LinkedIn. Now we’re cooking up ways to repurpose the book and get it more exposure – and more PR for ourselves.

So how did Pat and I get along? Splendidly. We agreed on a common goal – turning our blog posts into an ebook and we each pulled our own weight in dividing up the tasks. The fact that we are different personality types didn’t even register on the radar screen.

You know, introverts and extroverts have more in common than you think. We like alone time, too, but we usually don’t plan for it. We just fall down dead tired. Small talk annoys us too. I’m an ENTJ and I’m always ready to move in for the kill. “Let’s get this thing going!” I have to be careful that I respect introverts who need more time to think things through before acting. Just because they don’t speak up right away doesn’t mean they don’t have anything meaningful to say.

And if Pat hadn’t told me, I don’t think I would have guessed that she’s an introvert. She’s full of energy, outgoing and talkative. Just like an extrovert.

Jeannette Paladino is Writer-in-Chief for Write Speak Sell. She helps clients leverage social media to make more money.