Susan Cain | |
---|---|
Born | Susan Horowitz Cain 1968 [1] March 20, 1968[ better source needed ] |
Occupation | Writer, former lawyer and negotiations consultant [2] |
Language | English |
Nationality | American |
Education | Princeton University (BA) Harvard University (JD) |
Genre | Success, Management, Education, Psychology, Self-Help, Interpersonal Relations |
Notable works | Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (January 24, 2012); Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts (2016); Quiet Journal: Discover Your Secret Strengths and Unleash Your Inner Power (2020); Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole (2022) |
Website | |
susancain |
Susan Horowitz Cain [3] (born 1968) is an American writer and lecturer.
She is the author of the 2012 non-fiction book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking , which argues that modern Western culture misunderstands and undervalues the traits and capabilities of introverted people. In 2015, she co-founded Quiet Revolution, a mission-based company with initiatives in the areas of children (parenting and education), lifestyle, and the workplace. Her 2016 follow-on book, Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts , focused on introverted children and teens, the book also being directed to their educators and parents.
Her book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole (2022) focused on accepting feelings of sorrow and longing as inspiration to experience sublime emotions—such as beauty and wonder and transcendence—to counterbalance the "normative sunshine" of society's pressure to constantly be positive. [4]
Cain is the youngest of three children, and was raised in Lawrence, Nassau County, New York. [5] She graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1989 [6] after completing a 91-page-long senior thesis titled "A Study of Thomas Stearns Eliot and Wyndham Lewis." [7] She earned a J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 1993. [8]
Cain worked for seven years as an attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, [9] and then as a negotiations consultant [2] as owner and principal of The Negotiation Company. [10] She has been a fellow and a faculty/staff member of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an educational non-profit organization. [10]
She left her careers in corporate law and consulting for a quieter life of writing at home with her family, [11] likening her years as a Wall Street lawyer to "time spent in a foreign country". [12]
Cain explained that if she were not a writer she would want to be a research psychologist. [13] Her interest in writing about introversion reportedly stemmed from her own difficulties with public speaking, which made Harvard Law School "a trial". [11]
While still an attorney, Cain noticed that others at her firm were putting personality traits like hers to good use in the profession, and that gender per se did not explain those traits. [14] She eventually realized that the concepts of introversion and extroversion provided the "language for talking about questions of identity" that had been lacking. [14]
She explained that in writing Quiet she was fueled by the passion and indignation that she imagined fueled the 1963 feminist book, The Feminine Mystique . [13] She likened introverts today to women at that time—second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent. [13] Saying that most introverts aren't aware of how they are constantly spending their time in ways that they would prefer not to be and have been doing so all their lives, Cain explained that she was trying to give people entitlement in their own minds to be who they are. [15]
She said she was interested in working with parents and teachers of introverted children and to re-shape workplace culture and design, and in particular replace what she terms "The New Groupthink" with an environment more conducive to deep thought and solo reflection. [13]
Cain, a self-described [19] introvert, had grappled with her own introversion as a Wall Street attorney before writing Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking . [12] In contrast, she described the time of creating Quiet—seven years of reading, researching, and thinking—as "total bliss". [16] [17] Initially concerned that the book would be merely a "highly idiosyncratic project", she found instead that New York book publishers engaged in a bidding war. [9] Quiet was published January 24, 2012. [20]
Cain wrote that her year of preparation before her February 2012 TED talk had unfolded in "three stages of accelerating dread", [21] so she joined Toastmasters and scheduled a two-hour crash course with TED's speaking coach. [21] But saying her butterflies had turned into "gut-wrenching knots", she worked for six full days with an acting coach immediately before the talk. [21] Three months after the talk, Cain confirmed her April 2011 prediction that the ensuing year would be her Year of Speaking Dangerously, [22] writing that she had metamorphosed into what she termed an "impossibly oxymoronic creature: the Public Introvert". [21] The Atlantic's Megan Garber remarked that the ideas spread by TED are becoming defined by the persona of the speaker who presents them, citing Cain in particular as representing the idea of the power of introversion in an extrovert-optimized world. [23] Chris Weller quipped in Business Insider that Cain had become "the patron saint of introverts". [24]
Within one week of its publication, Forbes' Jenna Goudreau noted that Quiet was featured by several major media outlets and was shared extensively across the Web, Goudreau observing that readers said they felt validated and seen for the first time. [25] Cain spoke at leadership, management, training and education conferences throughout the U.S. and internationally. [26] By 2015 she had delivered more than 100 speeches, sometimes receiving five figures per appearance, in addition to her pro bono work. [5] InformationWeek's Debra Donston-Miller had noted that the idea of introversion and extroversion was being widely discussed due in large part to media coverage of Quiet. [27]
There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas—I mean zero.
Within a year of her first TED talk, Cain had formed an online public speaking and communication class for introverts, said to emphasize authenticity over showmanship. [28]
She collaborates with Steelcase to design office spaces to include quiet areas where workers can have privacy for a time, in contrast to open plan offices. [24] [29]
In 2016, Cain co-authored Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts , which focused on introverted children and teens, the book also directed to their educators and parents. [30]
In 2018, she began co-curating the Next Big Idea Club with Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Daniel H. Pink, focusing on books about psychology, business, happiness, and productivity. [31]
On March 31, 2020, Cain published Quiet Journal: Discover Your Secret Strengths and Unleash Your Inner Power, a journal with a first section directed to self-assessment, and a second section for applying that self-knowledge and prompting action. [32]
Cain's second TED talk (2014) formally announced the Quiet Revolution—a "venture backed, mission-based" organization for transforming office architecture to combat the erosion of focus and privacy in modern offices, forming a Quiet Leadership Institute to help organizations train introverted leaders, and empowering quiet children. [24] [33] The organization focuses on areas including children, life, and the workplace, while providing training programs and learning tools for client organizations to use in managing employees. [34] More specifically, the organization formed an online education course for parents, a co-branded lifestyle section in HuffPost , a podcast, a website to support a community including writers and advocates, and young-adult books and shows whose heroines are quiet leaders. [5] Quiet Revolution implemented a Quiet Ambassador initiative, for which it trained volunteers to be embedded in schools, businesses and other participating organizations. [9]
I've concluded that bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It's also a quiet force, a way of being, a storied tradition—as dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential. It's an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.
— Bittersweet at pp. xxii-xxiv [35]
Cain's third TED talk (2019), "The hidden power of sad songs and rainy days", preceded her April 5, 2022 book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole . [4] The book's theme is to accept feelings of sorrow and longing as inspiration to experience sublime emotions—such as beauty and wonder and transcendence—to counterbalance the "normative sunshine" of society's pressure to constantly be positive. [4]
The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a pseudoscientific self-report questionnaire that claims to indicate differing "psychological types". The test assigns a binary value to each of four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result representing one of sixteen possible types, such as "INFP" or "ESTJ".
Shyness is the feeling of apprehension, lack of comfort, or awkwardness especially when a person is around other people. This commonly occurs in new situations or with unfamiliar people; a shy person may simply opt to avoid these situations. Although shyness can be a characteristic of people who have low self-esteem, the primary defining characteristic of shyness is a fear of what other people will think of a person's behavior. This fear of negative reactions such as being mocked, humiliated or patronized, criticized or rejected can cause a shy person to retreat. Stronger forms of shyness can be referred to as social anxiety or social phobia.
Psychological functions, as described by Carl Jung in his book Psychological Types, are particular mental processes within a person's psyche that are present regardless of common circumstances. This is a concept that serves as one of the foundations for his theory on personality type. In his book, he noted four main psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. He introduced them with having either an internally focused (introverted) or externally focused (extraverted) tendency which he called "attitude". He also categorizes the functions as either rational or irrational.
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
TED Conferences, LLC is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". It was founded by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in February 1984 as a technology conference, in which Mickey Schulhof gave a demo of the compact disc that was invented in October 1982. Its main conference has been held annually since 1990. It covers almost all topics—from science to business to global issues—in more than 100 languages.
Quiet may refer to:
Sheryl WuDunn is an American business executive, writer, lecturer, and Pulitzer Prize winner.
In psychology, personality type refers to the psychological classification of individuals. In contrast to personality traits, the existence of personality types remains extremely controversial. Types are sometimes said to involve qualitative differences between people, whereas traits might be construed as quantitative differences. According to type theories, for example, introverts and extraverts are two fundamentally different categories of people. According to trait theories, introversion and extraversion are part of a continuous dimension, with many people in the middle.
Psychological Types is a book by Carl Jung that was originally published in German by Rascher Verlag in 1921, and translated into English in 1923, becoming volume 6 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.
Laurie Anne Helgoe is an American clinical psychologist, educator, and author interested in the relationship between personality development and culture. In 2008, her research revealed a flaw in scholarly and popular accounts regarding people displaying traits of introversion and extraversion.
Susan P. Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She served as President Barack Obama's Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (2009) and is a columnist for WIRED. She is a former board member of ICANN, the founder of OneWebDay, and a legal scholar. Her research focuses on telecommunications and information law.
Extraversion and introversion are a central trait dimension in human personality theory. The terms were introduced into psychology by Carl Jung, though both the popular understanding and current psychological usage are not the same as Jung's original concept. Extraversion tends to be manifested in outgoing, talkative, energetic behavior, whereas introversion is manifested in more reflective and reserved behavior. Jung defined introversion as an "attitude-type characterised by orientation in life through subjective psychic contents", and extraversion as "an attitude-type characterised by concentration of interest on the external object".
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking is a 2012 nonfiction book written by American author and speaker Susan Cain. Cain argues that modern Western culture misunderstands and undervalues the traits and capabilities of introverted people, leading to "a colossal waste of talent, energy, and happiness."
Amy Joy Casselberry Cuddy is an American social psychologist, author and speaker. She is a proponent of "power posing", a self-improvement technique whose scientific validity has been questioned. She has served as a faculty member at Rutgers University, Kellogg School of Management and Harvard Business School. Cuddy's most cited academic work involves using the stereotype content model that she helped develop to better understand the way people think about stereotyped people and groups. Though Cuddy left her tenure-track position at Harvard Business School in the spring of 2017, she continues to contribute to its executive education programs.
Quiet Revolution LLC is a privately owned, mission-based, for-profit, American company formed with a stated mission "to unlock the power of introverts for the benefit of us all." The company has initiatives for business, government, office space planning, education, lifestyle and parenting. Quiet Revolution was formally launched in 2015 based on principles in Susan Cain's 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.
Temperament Isolation Theory, also known as personality bias or personality discrimination, is a recent social science theory that attempts to explain how cultures favor a specific temperament and how they view and interact with those of other or opposite temperaments. The first concepts of the theory were explored by Susan Cain in her book Quiet where she looked at how western cultures, particularly the United States, value extroversion over introversion and how that could possibly make it difficult for introverts to thrive in society. Northern Arizona University professor Jorge Rodriguez III took the idea a step further and viewed how the opposite could be viewed in eastern cultures where introversion is valued over extroversion. These observations and further research led to the concept of "personality bias" which suggests certain personalities are favored over others and that these opposing personalities are "intentionally or unintentionally oppressed or muted." The concept of personality bias was later formally formulated into Temperament Isolation Theory. The theory is currently not widely accepted among social scientists, but it is gaining ground thanks to the research of Rodriguez and others.
Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts is a 2016 non-fiction book written by Susan Cain with Gregory Mone and Erica Moroz, and illustrated by Grant Snider.
Carol Fishman Cohen is the CEO and co-founder of iRelaunch, an author, a speaker and a consultant to employers, universities, non-profits and individuals on the subject of career re-entry.
Susan A. David is a South African psychologist, speaker and author.
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole is a 2022 nonfiction book written by American author Susan Cain.