Violet

There is a word for the quiet ones who win

We’re still in the garden. Last week was the Tiger Lily, the loud one, the one that guards its ground. This week it’s the one everyone underestimates. The one we named for shrinking.

The violet earned that reputation honestly, from how it sits. It grows low, right down against the ground, and it keeps its flowers tucked near the soil, half hidden under its own heart-shaped leaves. It likes shade and the quiet edges of things. With the sweet violet you often catch the scent before you ever spot the bloom, because the bloom is down there hiding. About two hundred years ago an English poet named Leigh Hunt looked at one sitting in the underbrush and called it a shrinking violet, and the picture stuck. Fifty years later people on this side of the Atlantic had borrowed it for the shy one in the corner, and we have been handing it to quiet people ever since. The Victorians even made the violet their symbol for modesty. But all of that came from the flower’s posture, not its nature. Low is not the same as timid.

Because here is what the violet actually does. It does not wait to be planted. It fires its own seed out of the pod when it splits open, throwing itself into ground. It grows a second kind of flower that never even opens, one that pollinates itself. It sends its roots sideways under the surface and comes up exactly where it decides to. And ask anyone with a tidy lawn what it takes to get rid of one. You can pull it, mow it, poison it. It comes back. It is one of the hardest things in the whole garden to kill.

I know that flower. I have been that flower.

I always believed I was an introvert. I labeled myself that way because of the immense shyness, the fear of big groups, of public speaking, of being the center of attention. No one believed me, because of the job I had, the way I presented on a stage, the way I carry myself. What they did not see was the obsessive practicing before every presentation. The feeling that I might throw up, right up until about two minutes in, when I finally settle. The way I rehearse every conversation in advance, then replay it after, snagging on the one wrong word, critiquing my own answer, wishing I had said it another way. How on a Friday I would want to crawl into a dark room and talk to no one.

Turns out there is a word for what I am. Not the introvert they did not believe, and not the extrovert they wanted. An ambivert. The one who sits in the middle and picks her setting, pulling energy from people and from quiet both, and flexing to whatever the room actually needs. And it truly was not until I learned that word, and started studying how to actually operate as one, that my life changed.

So let me tell you what operating as an ambivert actually looks like, because none of it came naturally and none of it is soft. It is a handful of rules I now run my life by.

The first one. My prep is not a flaw, it is the weapon. All those years of rehearsing a talk until I felt sick, running a conversation in my head before I walked in, I used to think that was the anxiety I needed to fix. It is not. It is the engine. The preparation is the exact thing that lets me walk into a room and meet it however it comes. I stopped fighting it. Now I feed it.

The second. I treat my energy like money, because it is. A high-stimulation day comes with a bill, so I pay it on both ends. I put quiet on either side of the big rooms, on purpose. That Friday where I want to disappear into a dark room is not weakness leaking out. It is the recovery my system was always going to need, so I schedule it now instead of apologizing for it.

The third. I win by reading the room, not filling it. The old story says you own a room by being the loudest thing in it. The truth is you own it by reading it. I ask, then I actually listen, and I let the quiet do work the noise never could.

The fourth. I pick my setting on purpose. I can turn it all the way up for the stage, however big, and all the way down to listen and close. I stopped asking which one is the real me. Both are. The whole skill is choosing.

And there is data underneath all of it that I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago. The myth in my world is that sales belongs to the loud extrovert. In 2013 a Wharton professor named Adam Grant actually measured it and found the opposite. The ambiverts, the ones who can talk and also listen and read a room, brought in the most revenue. They outsold the strong extroverts and the strong introverts both. The quiet strategic one was never the long shot. The power was never in the volume. It was in knowing exactly when to bloom.

The hardest place I ever had to learn all of this was the boys club. School through most of my career. The golf courses, the bar nights, showing up hungover and trying to keep up. To keep up I gave away the things I fought hardest to hold onto at home. Eating well. Working out. Not drinking. Trip after trip I traded them away, and it wreaked havoc on my body and my energy.

And it was more than a pace. To keep up I made decisions I would never make on my own ground, choices that brought my guard down in rooms where I could not afford to have it down. And still, I was never the loud one. Never the drunk one. Never the one who fumbled. I was too afraid of the mistake for that. So instead of fumbling I fought. I fought my own body and my own energy to stay sharp while everyone around me loosened, and I held that line all night, in every one of those rooms. It was exhausting. Part of what kept me fighting was what I could see. I watched people I care about make terrible decisions in those rooms, the kind you do not get to walk back, and I was determined, all the way down, to never become that.

Here is the thing though. Those rooms were never the villain. People have a wonderful time in them, and so have I. The room was never the problem. The problem was that I did not yet know how to be in it as myself, so I kept someone else’s pace instead of my own. It took me until recently to say the honest thing out loud. I cannot keep up anymore. And more than that, I do not want to. That is not defeat. That is finally operating the way I was built to.

And the person who taught me how to actually live all of this was my daughter. I always thought I was the one teaching her, and some of it I was. Protect your energy, the Tiger Lily lesson from last week. But the how, so much of it came from watching her. She is a violet. She tends her boundaries, she says no when no is the honest answer, and she grows where she decides to, on her own terms. Learning from her is what made my struggles and stumbles feel less like guilt and more like I had finally found the power button. These days, I am the one taking notes.

She will not do a social thing unless it also brings her peace. So she builds her own, the kind of gathering that is connection and comfort in the same room, the self care and the friendship folded into one. She decides her ground, every time.

She is my Violet. And some days, I am hers.

The Weekly Practice

Find the one room this week that costs you the most energy. Before you walk in, do the ambivert thing. Prepare like it is the weapon it is, put a little quiet on both sides of it, and decide in advance that your job is to read the room, not fill it. Then notice how different it feels to be in there on your own terms instead of at someone else’s pace.

The Community Question

Where in your life are you spending energy to keep up with a room, when you could be spending it on becoming more you?

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The next flowers in the garden are the ones that open. We will get to those. But first we had to meet the ones with thorns.

Source: Adam M. Grant, “Rethinking the Extraverted Sales Ideal: The Ambivert Advantage,” Psychological Science, 2013.