Talking is Exhausting!

I had lunch with a pastor the other day, and we had some great conversation and discussion about leadership, life, and love (well we didn't really talk about love, but I was just rolling with the alliteration).

We ended up talking about personalities and introversion and extroversion (I promise I wasn't fishing for a blog post...in fact he brought it up!). He reminded me that a way to look at both personality types are that the Introvert is drained by interactions with people, and the Extrovert is energized by interactions with people. He said that he has extroverted qualities (which in church leadership is fairly common, and the subject of another post at another time) but his wife has introverted qualities. Even though I know better, immediately my mind jumped to the conclusion that she's probably really quiet, hermit-ish, and not as well-liked, while he's probably the life of the party. While it's probably true that he's the life of the party, He snapped me back to reality by saying that his wife is as well. She's very social, engaging, and loquacious (SAT word alert!). The difference is that when they leave the party, he's ready to talk some more, go to another party, or call his college roommate and talk until dawn...while she is ready to hibernate. Of course I already knew this, but being the proprietor of this blog, it embarrassed me that my initial reaction was that his wife was a social outcast! That's one of the things from which we're trying to liberate the Introvert.

The Introvert loves people, cares about people, and wants to interact with people. The thing is it's unnatural for the Introvert to do that, and it requires a lot of extra energy...so even though the interaction is worth it, it is still very draining for the Introvert. Every Sunday afternoon I feel like I've just run a marathon because of all the energy I've had to spend as a worship leader, doing what comes unnaturally to the Introvert. Even though I think there's huge benefits to being the Introverted worship leader and operating out of reliance on the strength of God, it makes me envious of all the extroverted souls leading worship on Sundays!