What Comes Naturally to You, but Amazes Everyone Else?

What Comes Naturally to You—but Amazes Everyone Else?

About nine years ago, I was in an executive-level leadership course with roughly forty people.

It was a ten-week in-residence program, and for the first several weeks, I was one of the quietest people in the room.

There was one other person who was also extremely quiet, and at some point we discovered that we were both INTPs on the Myers-Briggs assessment. I remember thinking that was interesting. I am not suggesting that being an INTP automatically makes somebody quiet; it was just something I noticed about the two of us.

In my smaller group, I talked quite a bit more. I had gotten comfortable with those people. We were doing executive group coaching together, working through case studies, and talking about different leadership problems.

In the larger classroom, I participated a good amount. I did the work and I had plenty to say.

Still, forty people is a very different environment than a small group you get to know at a deeper level. There were people in class who were naturally much quicker to jump into a conversation, and sometimes it could be hard to get an idea in edgewise. So I definitely talked less than I normally would.

It was enough that people took notice.

Every once in a while, if I made a comment in the full class, somebody would jokingly say something like, “Tami actually talked!” and we would all laugh.

I knew I was quieter than normal a lot of the time, across those two months.

By that point in my career, I did have a strong idea of who I was and what I was capable of, so I wasn’t feeling anything negative at all. I felt confident, glad to learn, and worthy of being there, so none of that had anything to do with my less talkative nature in that class. I simply thought the whole class was full of amazing people, and I was just soaking it all in and learning from everyone, which is my favorite thing to do.

I appreciated the environment I was in. I was participating and generally engaged. I knew I might or might not work with some of these people again and possibly they’d understand who I was by the end of this class and it was also fine if they didn’t… But I wasn’t trying to be anything other than who I was.

Near the end of the program, we had a big capstone exercise that lasted several days.

Everybody was assigned a different role, and we were separated into our teams. We were also sequestered from other teams so we couldn't see what the other teams were doing.

The particular role I was given required people from my team to bring information to me. I had to capture what they were telling me, make sense of it, and eventually help synthesize what our team was doing so we could make decisions and report back to the facilitators what we decided to do.

Once the exercise started, people began coming to me with their pieces of information.

And pretty quickly I realized there were going to be a lot of tidbits of information coming in, so I grabbed a pad of sticky notes and a marker. As each person talked to me, I wrote down each piece of information they provided on a sticky note and started putting them on the whiteboard.

Then I started grouping them.

One related idea over here, something connected to that over there.

As more information came in, I continued to rearrange the sticky notes. I started seeing categories and relationships amongst the data. I could see which pieces belonged together and where a random piece of freshly provided information threw us some curveballs. It was fun and dynamic—just the type of situation I love.

This is something I have done in different ways throughout my career.

I often take in a lot of information that seems disconnected at first, and usually I’ll start seeing the relationships among the individual data points that come in. Then I can usually organize it in a way that makes the larger picture much easier to understand.

It is one of my superpowers. (I know that now after decades of experience.)

The interesting thing is that, in the capstone, people were able to watch me execute this superpower—in real time. In my regular life… I probably do it in my head, in my notebook, and very often on my own whiteboard in my office—which I often use to help me think.

One more point about our team’s success in that capstone: I did not suddenly start talking more than I had in the previous 9 weeks of class… If anything, a lot of the exercise involved other people talking to me while I listened, captured information, organized it, and synthesized it. I was just listening and thinking. Many introverts use those two tools (listening and thinking) as a basis for all types of superpowers.

But by the time we were done, the reaction from my team was almost comical—and kind of awesome.

They were excited.

They were energized when they told the larger class what had happened. They said, “Tami came alive in there.”

Our team did extremely well in the exercise, and suddenly people who had spent weeks primarily knowing me as one of the quiet people in the room had learned something completely different about me.

Even some of the senior mentors and instructors seemed excited by what they had seen. I remember looking at all of them thinking, essentially:

Well, yes… This is who I am.

Nothing new had happened to me during that capstone. I had not developed a new capability overnight.

What changed was that my team had finally been in a situation where they could see one of my strongest capabilities—that’s it.

When I remembered how everyone was complimenting me on how I helped our team in the capstone, I realized that I had seen versions of that superpower emerging multiple times across my career, but I never thought it was particularly special until that day, in class, when everyone else was so surprised.

People know that I am competent—even intelligent. They know I have a very strong work ethic and a lot of experience.

And maybe this happens for you… But when they see me in the middle of a complicated problem—gathering information, finding patterns, connecting things that looked completely disparate, helping a group make sense of what is happening… Sometimes people have a big aha moment when THEY finally realize what I am capable of.

So, back to you and your superpowers…

Sometimes the capability you have is already very familiar to you, because you have been living with it for years.

That doesn’t mean everybody else has had an opportunity to see it; it doesn’t mean they have already noticed it in your day-to-day work life.

And this is the type of visibility—making sure people see YOUR superpowers—that I want to focus on now.

Because when people tell ambitious introverted high achievers that they need to “be more visible,” that advice usually sounds like:

Talk more.

Go to more networking events.

Make sure everybody knows your name.

Speak up five times in every meeting.

Promote yourself.

Become louder.

And all you can think about is that if you do all of that, you’ll feel like a used car salesman. It just feels performative and inauthentic. And it kind of makes your skin crawl. Trust me, I get it!

You already know that sometimes speaking up really is the right thing to do if you are the one with the information. You don’t need a coach or a mentor telling you obvious things like this.

Still, I think many people who give advice like this distill “how to succeed as an introvert” down to “You need to talk more.” Whoever these people are—they are either not introverts or they can’t read people, or both.

We all know people who talk A LOT and say nothing important at all. They can talk constantly and reveal very little about their thought processes, executive judgment, or leadership.

On the other hand, you can be a person of few words… while doing powerful work that shows people exactly how you think and is also highly consequential to the customer or the overall organization.

So, if you are wondering:

Am I visible enough?

Consider this instead:

What do you want people to understand about YOU? How would they know what you are capable of? Where would they have an opportunity to see your superpowers in action?

For example, do you want to be considered for a strategic role or a position with a greater impact?

You know that you are good at seeing the big picture.

You understand how various functions affect each other, and…

You have an excellent ability to anticipate risk.

You might be able to take something technically complicated and understand what it means for the larger organization or industry…

But if all anyone sees is the work you are delivering in your current scope or role… how exactly are they supposed to know what you are truly capable of?

They know you are doing excellent work in the role you were hired to do… and you may be expecting them to infer everything you have processed and can see in your brain.

I do think that one reason visibility problems for you and other high-achieving introverted professionals develop is because you may be waiting for somebody to recognize a capability they have barely had a chance to observe. If you continue to do excellent work in exactly the same setting, week after week—how will they have a chance to see you lead in a different context?

Where is more strategic thinking needed in your organization? Where could you solve a problem that crosses organizational boundaries?

Where could you integrate multiple perspectives, or turn complicated information into something decision-makers can use?

Is there something you could lead that requires the kind of judgment and leadership you want to be known for?

This is where a lot of highly dependable people get into trouble. You may do an enormous amount of the thinking behind something and then hand the finished product to somebody else.

Maybe you wrote the analysis, found the pattern, figured out what was wrong, or developed the recommendation, and then maybe somebody more senior, or a project lead you support, is the one who briefs it.

The final product will move forward without much information about your personal deep thinking, analysis, and reasoning for the recommended solutions.

Your work may have been truly excellent, and the organization will benefit from it, for sure. But if you are trying to demonstrate readiness for greater responsibility, you need to notice whether the evidence of your capability is traveling with the work or not.

This does not mean attaching your name to everything or fighting for credit every five minutes. It simply means that your excellent work is not always obvious, and I just want you to notice if your knowledge work is getting watered down—especially if you feel stuck. This will help you see a potential career hurdle you can work to resolve in support of your future career growth.

If you want to move into greater responsibility and your full capability is invisible… it is worth examining what is happening.

You cannot expect people to make a well-informed decision about your readiness if they rarely receive the evidence they would need to make that decision.

None of this requires you to become somebody else. The most visible I became in my story during that entire leadership course was during an exercise where I barely talked. I was doing what I do, and other people finally had an opportunity to witness it.

Your contribution cannot realize its full value if nobody knows it exists. Finding different ways to demonstrate your superpowers will cause your visibility to bloom in ways that no one ever expected.

You don’t have to demand attention or try to convince everybody that you are important. As I always tell people… when you deliver high value that supports the organizational goals (if you’re a for-profit organization—if you can tie a line directly to increased revenue or cost savings; if you are in a charitable organization—if you can reduce costs while helping more people; if you are in a governmental organization—if you can more efficiently execute your required mission)… When you deliver this kind of value consistently, eventually people will notice. If you are delivering this value and not being noticed—that is something we can fix.

Here is your experiment for this week:

Choose one capability you want to be known for at the next level and get more specific than “good work ethic” or “good leadership.”

Maybe you synthesize complicated information, see risk early, make a difficult technical issue understandable, bring competing stakeholders together, develop new young leaders unusually well, support customers in wonderful ways, or maybe you are able to zoom out and see the whole system when everyone else is protecting their individual piece of the pie.

Write down the superpowers you have that will make a difference for the kind of impact you want to make in the world.

Then ask yourself: Who do you believe needs to see evidence of your superpowers?

I am not asking who needs to know your name. But who is involved in project assignments, organizational decisions, or providing people with new opportunities?

The next question is: Where in my current day-to-day work would that person ever get to see me actively using my superpowers?

If the honest answer is nowhere, that is good to know. Don’t put too much weight on it yet… you just need a hypothesis to start from, and we can test it out together and see how things change or evolve.

Look for one legitimate opportunity where that capability would be useful. It might be a difficult new assignment, a briefing, leading a cross-functional project, a recommendation you are willing to develop, or a piece of analysis that needs to be elevated to become a decision at the right level.

The point is not to create a stage for yourself. It is to find legitimate work your organization needs that will also allow you to demonstrate the full contribution that you are capable of making.

Then contribute. You do not need to force yourself to become Chatty Cathy. Just do the powerful, useful work, and afterward ask yourself what actually happened. Were you able to demonstrate what you are capable of? Do you have evidence that anyone else noticed it? If not, why?

That last question may tell you much more about your visibility problem than trying to speak five times in your next staff meeting.

I spent weeks in that leadership course being one of the quietest people in the room, and then one exercise allowed people to see me doing something that came naturally to me.

I did not become somebody different. My team simply had better information about who I already was and what I could contribute—and they shared what they saw with the class and the facilitators. It can spread just like that for you, too.

If you are an introverted high achiever, I want you to think about where that same gap exists for you. What do you know about yourself that the people around you have never had a chance to see?

If this episode helped you think differently about visibility, I have a free Visibility Blueprint Course that goes much deeper into how to help the right people understand the value you already create without turning yourself into somebody you can’t stand. You’ll find the link down in the show notes.

Next time, you’ll also learn my word of the year… It’s a good one and I bet it’s one you don’t hear very often.

Have a great week and I’ll see you then!