Self-promotion can suck, but it’s a necessary task when you want to get a job or share something you created. While extroverts are generally believed to be the best at this task, psychologist Adam Grant discovered ambiverts — people who fall in between introverts and extroverts — do it best. When you have to self-promote, you want to emulate their behaviour.
Photo by Sunny studio-Igor Yaruta (Shutterstock)
Janet Choi, writing for productivity and ideas blog the 99u, explains:
Ambiverts strike a crucial balance between talking and listening, neither dominating nor dampening a conversation. Grant explains, they “draw from a wider repertoire of behavioural options to find the appropriate balance between selling and serving.” This responsive engagement style of balancing assertiveness with attention is what [author Dan] Pink calls attunement, or “the ability to bring one’s actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you’re in.” The best salespeople aren’t the most outgoing, they are the ones who can best “attune” to those around them.
Choi further explains that introverts and extroverts can, essentially, borrow this balance entirely through pretending. While few people on either side of the spectrum will get it right on the first try, trying to fake that balance makes for great practice. You don’t have to be an ambivert every day of your life, but when you need to self-promote it’s good to know how to borrow that skill to, essentially, perform for an hour or so.
You Were Born to Sell: Dismantling the Myths of Self-Promotion [The 99u]
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