When a Loud person asks you a question it is best to give a quick, snappy, truthful answer.
Directly stonewalling or displaying reluctance to answer personal questions from someone you don’t trust yet is sure to get very negative reactions in the workplace and other social environments.
Ironically, the ‘friendly’ questions that many extroverts ask are only friendly if you answer them to their satisfaction and do it quickly.
When someone asks a series of questions, what you learn from one question leads to the next question. So be truthful, but brief; snappy, yet vague. Just neglect to give them anything that would allow them to continue inquiring.
I needn’t be the whole truth. The answers only need be something that can be construed as true.
The key is that short, vague, honest answers are boring answers. Most extroverts assume that someone who gives a boring first impression is in fact boring. 90% of them will leave you alone if you can convince them you are socially acceptable but boring.
The main thing is to stop the questioning quickly. Once they start asking detailed questions about the latest pop stars, tv shows, fashion trends, sports cars, and athletes, the game’s up.
Once they start giving you stories about their favorite experiences at night clubs and other social venues, they will start to notice that you aren’t responding with your own equally thrilling anecdotes.
At some point they pause in between their sentences and say “Wow, you’re really quiet.”
Unfortunately, there’s the 10% of truly Loud people who don’t go away no matter how uniform you can make yourself. Worst of all, there’s authority figures and important people to whom you can’t afford to give any kind of bad impression.
When a Loud person with power over your life or your job starts asking ‘friendly’ questions, the unmitigated truth could be devastating. Boring answers could cost you their good graces. There’s no easy way out of this one, which is just one reason why introverts aren’t usually going to rise to the top in an organization. It takes the touch of a social expert to figure out what the lead extrovert wants to hear and how he or she wants to hear it.
11 Comments
Hi Gluon,
Your point about bosses is interesting – I have struggled for 4 years with this situation with my boss who is a terribly ‘nice’ person who asks all sorts of friendly questions and I know I’ve got into all sorts of trouble with the wrong responses. I’ve kind of dealt with it by turning the tables and getting in a question first and of course she loves talking about herself and likes being listened to so it works pretty well and she is much more relaxed around me now.
hey are you ok?
‘hey are you ok?’
Wow!
A classic loaded question by which the asker strongly implies that I am mentally disturbed or unstable. I love it!
Also comes across as rather patronizing but if someone calls you on it you can say you were just expressing genuine concern.
It’s just that sort of social mastery that tends to elude me.
Snowqueen,
You’re definitely right that one of the best ways to defuse the situation is simply to get the extrovert to talk about themself. It doesn’t change the fact that you’re kind of a strange ‘quiet’ person in their eyes, but it’s better than most of the alternatives.
no ,fellow introvert! i just asked because your last post was on the 25th of July and i couldn’t recall you not posting for such a long time.
*June,obviously.
My apologies, then, blanket. I mistook your intent. I’ve been approached in that way a few too many times by extroverts.
There will be further breaks in the regularity of my posting in the near future. If I seem to have a regular pattern, it’s because I’ve been fortunate enough to have free time over the last couple months.
If I haven’t posted here in awhile, this isn’t my only internet project.
My central hub that links to everything is at:
http://www.gluontheferengi.com
Brilliant. What I want to be is socially accepted, yet left alone. This seems an excellent way of going about that.
I’ve had loud people ask me some pretty outrageous questions, and when I was younger I was afraid to snub those people OR bore them so I instead would answer with ridiculous joking answers. To “Did you get a raise?” I’d answer, “Oh yes, in fact they tripled my salary!” Nowadays I think the short, boring, honest answer that offers no leads to further questioning is a brilliant way to go.
With people in power, if they question about my weekend or something like that, I just say I did a lot of family things. Soon their eyes will glaze over and they think, “Dependable little employee. Pretty boring, but serviceable.”
Your typical extrovert is very like a kid tapping incesssantly on the glass in an aquarium or reptile house. He thinks: How stupid and boring the creature in the cage must be if it neglects to entertain me on cue!
The creature inside, already desensitized to glass tapping blithely ignores the noise. It stays completely motionless. Not even a twitch.
Something about this is torture to the impatient extrovert psyche. Their need to be acknowledged and have their sense of worth constantly validated will not allow them to accept such treatment, not even from an animal.
We introverts can’t stay motionless like that tropical lizard or snake because the extroverts are in the cage with us.
Every time an extrovert comes tapping we have to stir ourselves and put on just enough of a show to satisfy them and send them moving on to the next exhibit. We wouldn’t want to entertain them too much or else they’d not only stick around, they’d call in their buddies too, once again just like the kids at the zoo.
I love this post. Thanks!