Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects.

First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now.

Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women's leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that's what I did.

Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn't aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who'd grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I'm pursuing my own version of both those roles.

But even if you're stretching yourself in the service of a core personal project, you don't want to act out of character too much, or for too long. Remember those trips Professor Little made to the restroom in between speeches? Those hideout sessions tell us that, paradoxically, the best way to act out of character is to stay as true to yourself as you possibly can—starting by creating as many "restorative niches" as possible in your daily life.

"Restorative niche" is Professor Little's term for the place you go when you want to return to your true self. It can be a physical place, like the path beside the Richelieu River, or a temporal one, like the quiet breaks you plan between sales calls. It can mean canceling your social plans on the weekend before a big meeting at work, practicing yoga or meditation, or choosing e-mail over an in-person meeting. (Even Victorian ladies, whose job effectively was to be available to friends and family, were expected to withdraw for a rest each afternoon.)

You choose a restorative niche when you close the door to your private office (if you're lucky enough to have one) in between meetings. You can even create a restorative niche during a meeting, by carefully selecting where you sit, and when and how you participate. In his memoir In an Uncertain World, Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary under President Clinton, describes how he "always liked to be away from the center, whether in the Oval Office or the chief of staff's office, where my regular seat became the foot of the table. That little bit of physical distance felt more comfortable to me, and let me read the room and comment from a perspective ever so slightly removed. I didn't worry about being overlooked. No matter how far away you were sitting or standing, you could always just say, 'Mr. President, I think this, that, or the other.' "

We would all be better off if, before accepting a new job, we evaluated the presence or absence of restorative niches as carefully as we consider the family leave policy or health insurance plans. Introverts should ask themselves: Will this job allow me to spend time on in-character activities like, for example, reading, strategizing, writing, and researching? Will I have a private workspace or be subject to the constant demands of an open office plan? If the job doesn't give me enough restorative niches, will I have enough free time on evenings and weekends to grant them to myself?

Extroverts will want to look for restorative niches, too. Does the job involve talking, traveling, and meeting new people? Is the office space stimulating enough? If the job isn't a perfect fit, are the hours flexible enough that I can blow off steam after work? Think through the job description carefully. One highly extroverted woman I interviewed was excited about a position as the "community organizer" for a parenting website, until she realized that she'd be sitting by herself behind a computer every day from nine to five.

Sometimes people find restorative niches in professions where you'd least expect them. One of my former colleagues is a trial lawyer who spends most of her time in splendid solitude, researching and writing legal briefs. Because most of her cases settle, she goes to court rarely enough that she doesn't mind exercising her pseudo-extroversion skills when she has to. An introverted administrative assistant I interviewed parlayed her office experience into a work-from-home Internet business that serves as a clearinghouse and coaching service for "virtual assistants." And in the next chapter we'll meet a superstar salesman who broke his company's sales records year after year by insisting on staying true to his introverted self. All three of these people have taken decidedly extroverted fields and reinvented them in their own image, so that they're acting in character most of the time, effectively turning their workdays into one giant restorative niche.

Finding restorative niches isn't always easy. You might want to read quietly by the fire on Saturday nights, but if your spouse wishes you'd spend those evenings out with her large circle of friends, then what? You might want to retreat to the oasis of your private office in between sales calls, but what if your company just switched over to an open office plan? If you plan to exercise free traits, you'll need the help of friends, family, and colleagues. Which is why Professor Little calls, with great passion, for each of us to enter into "a Free Trait Agreement."

This is the final piece of Free Trait Theory. A Free Trait Agreement acknowledges that we'll each act out of character some of the time—in exchange for being ourselves the rest of the time. It's a Free Trait Agreement when a wife who wants to go out every Saturday night and a husband who wants to relax by the fire work out a schedule: half the time we'll go out, and half the time we'll stay home. It's a Free Trait Agreement when you attend your extroverted best friend's wedding shower, engagement celebration, and bachelorette party, but she understands when you skip out on the three days' worth of group activities leading up to the wedding itself.

It's often possible to negotiate Free Trait Agreements with friends and lovers, whom you want to please and who love your true, in-character self. Your work life is a little trickier, since most businesses still don't think in these terms. For now, you may have to proceed indirectly. Career counselor Shoya Zichy told me the story of one of her clients, an introverted financial analyst who worked in an environment where she was either presenting to clients or talking to colleagues who continually cycled in and out of her office. She was so burned out that she planned to quit her job—until Zichy suggested that she negotiate for downtime.

Now, this woman worked for a Wall Street bank, not a culture conducive to a frank discussion about the needs of the highly introverted. So she carefully considered how to frame her request. She told her boss that the very nature of her work—strategic analysis—required quiet time in which to concentrate. Once she made her case empirically, it was easier to ask for what she needed psychologically: two days a week of working from home. Her boss said yes.

But the person with whom you can best strike a Free Trait Agreement—after overcoming his or her resistance—is yourself.

Let's say you're single. You dislike the bar scene, but you crave intimacy, and you want to be in a long-term relationship in which you can share cozy evenings and long conversations with your partner and a small circle of friends. In order to achieve this goal, you make an agreement with yourself that you will push yourself to go to social events, because only in this way can you hope to meet a mate and reduce the number of gatherings you attend over the long term. But while you pursue this goal, you will attend only as many events as you can comfortably stand. You decide in advance what that amount is—once a week, once a month, once a quarter. And once you've met your quota, you've earned the right to stay home without feeling guilty.

Or perhaps you've always dreamed of building your own small company, working from home so you can spend more time with your spouse and children. You know you'll need to do a certain amount of networking, so you make the following Free Trait Agreement with yourself: you will go to one schmooze-fest per week. At each event you will have at least one genuine conversation (since this comes easier to you than "working the room") and follow up with that person the next day. After that, you get to go home and not feel bad when you turn down other networking opportunities that come your way.

Professor Little knows all too well what happens when you lack a Free Trait Agreement with yourself. Apart from occasional excursions to the Richelieu River or the restroom, he once followed a schedule that combined the most energy-zapping elements of both introversion and extroversion. On the extroverted side, his days consisted of nonstop lectures, meetings with students, monitoring a student discussion group, and writing all those letters of recommendation. On the introverted side, he took those responsibilities very, very seriously.

"One way of looking at this," he says now, "is to say that I was heavily engaged in extrovert-like behaviors, but, of course, had I been a real extrovert I would have done quicker, less nuanced letters of recommendation, would not have invested the time in preparation of lectures, and the social events would not have drained me." He also suffered from a certain amount of what he calls "reputational confusion," in which he became known for being over-the-top effervescent, and the reputation fed on itself. This was the persona that others knew, so it was the persona he felt obliged to serve up.

Naturally, Professor Little started to burn out, not only mentally but also physically. Never mind. He loved his students, he loved his field, he loved it all. Until the day that he ended up in the doctor's office with a case of double pneumonia that he'd been too busy to notice. His wife had dragged him there against his will, and a good thing too. According to the doctors, if she had waited much longer, he would have died.

Double pneumonia and an overscheduled life can happen to anyone, of course, but for Little, it was the result of acting out of character for too long and without enough restorative niches. When your conscientiousness impels you to take on more than you can handle, you begin to lose interest, even in tasks that normally engage you. You also risk your physical health. "Emotional labor," which is the effort we make to control and change our own emotions, is associated with stress, burnout, and even physical symptoms like an increase in cardiovascular disease. Professor Little believes that prolonged acting out of character may also increase autonomic nervous system activity, which can, in turn, compromise immune functioning.

One noteworthy study suggests that people who suppress negative emotions tend to leak those emotions later in unexpected ways. The psychologist Judith Grob asked people to hide their emotions as she showed them disgusting images. She even had them hold pens in their mouths to prevent them from frowning. She found that this group reported feeling less disgusted by the pictures than did those who'd been allowed to react naturally. Later, however, the people who hid their emotions suffered side effects. Their memory was impaired, and the negative emotions they'd suppressed seemed to color their outlook. When Grob had them fill in the missing letter to the word "gr_ss," for example, they were more likely than others to offer "gross" rather than "grass." "People who tend to [suppress their negative emotions] regularly," concludes Grob, "might start to see the world in a more negative light."

That's why these days Professor Little is in restorative mode, retired from the university and reveling in his wife's company in their house in the Canadian countryside. Little says that his wife, Sue Phillips, the director of the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, is so much like him that they don't need a Free Trait Agreement to govern their relationship. But his Free Trait Agreement with himself provides that he do his remaining "scholarly and professional deeds with good grace," but not "hang around longer than necessary."

Then he goes home and snuggles by the fire with Sue.

10

THE COMMUNICATION GAP

How to Talk to Members of the Opposite Type

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

—CARL JUNG

If introverts and extroverts are the north and south of temperament—opposite ends of a single spectrum—then how can they possibly get along? Yet the two types are often drawn to each other—in friendship, business, and especially romance. These pairs can enjoy great excitement and mutual admiration, a sense that each completes the other. One tends to listen, the other to talk; one is sensitive to beauty, but also to slings and arrows, while the other barrels cheerfully through his days; one pays the bills and the other arranges the children's play dates. But it can also cause problems when members of these unions pull in opposite directions.

Greg and Emily are an example of an introvert-extrovert couple who love and madden each other in equal measure. Greg, who just turned thirty, has a bounding gait, a mop of dark hair continually falling over his eyes, and an easy laugh. Most people would describe him as gregarious. Emily, a mature twenty-seven, is as self-contained as Greg is expansive. Graceful and soft-spoken, she keeps her auburn hair tied in a chignon, and often gazes at people from under lowered lashes.

Greg and Emily complement each other beautifully. Without Greg, Emily might forget to leave the house, except to go to work. But without Emily, Greg would feel—paradoxically for such a social creature—alone.

Before they met, most of Greg's girlfriends were extroverts. He says he enjoyed those relationships, but never got to know his girlfriends well, because they were always "plotting how to be with groups of people." He speaks of Emily with a kind of awe, as if she has access to a deeper state of being. He also describes her as "the anchor" around which his world revolves.

Emily, for her part, treasures Greg's ebullient nature; he makes her feel happy and alive. She has always been attracted to extroverts, who she says "do all the work of making conversation. For them, it's not work at all."

The trouble is that for most of the five years they've been together, Greg and Emily have been having one version or another of the same fight. Greg, a music promoter with a large circle of friends, wants to host dinner parties every Friday—casual, animated get-togethers with heaping bowls of pasta and flowing bottles of wine. He's been giving Friday-night dinners since he was a senior in college, and they've become a highlight of his week and a treasured piece of his identity.

Emily has come to dread these weekly events. A hardworking staff attorney for an art museum and a very private person, the last thing she wants to do when she gets home from work is entertain. Her idea of a perfect start to the weekend is a quiet evening at the movies, just her and Greg.

It seems an irreconcilable difference: Greg wants fifty-two dinner parties a year, Emily wants zero.

Greg says that Emily should make more of an effort. He accuses her of being antisocial. "I am social," she says. "I love you, I love my family, I love my close friends. I just don't love dinner parties. People don't really relate at those parties—they just socialize. You're lucky because I devote all my energy to you. You spread yours around to everyone."

But Emily soon backs off, partly because she hates fighting, but also because she doubts herself. Maybe I am antisocial, she thinks. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Whenever she and Greg argue about this, she's flooded with childhood memories: how school was tougher for her than for her emotionally hardier younger sister; how she seemed to worry more than other people did about social issues, like how to say no when someone asked her to get together after school and she preferred to stay home. Emily had plenty of friends—she's always had a talent for friendship—but she never traveled in packs.

Emily has suggested a compromise: What if Greg gives his dinner parties whenever she's out of town visiting her sister? But Greg doesn't want to host dinners by himself. He loves Emily and wants to be with her, and so does everyone else, once they get to know her. So why does Emily withdraw?

This question, for Greg, is more than mere pique. Being alone for him is a kind of Kryptonite; it makes him feel weak. He had looked forward to a married life of shared adventures. He'd imagined being part of a couple at the center of things. And he'd never admitted it to himself, but for him being married meant never having to be by himself. But now Emily is saying that he should socialize without her. He feels as if she's backing out of a fundamental part of their marriage contract. And he believes that something is indeed wrong with his wife.

Is something wrong with me? It's not surprising that Emily asks herself this question, or that Greg aims this charge at her. Probably the most common—and damaging—misunderstanding about personality type is that introverts are antisocial and extroverts are pro-social. But as we've seen, neither formulation is correct; introverts and extroverts are differently social. What psychologists call "the need for intimacy" is present in introverts and extroverts alike. In fact, people who value intimacy highly don't tend to be, as the noted psychologist David Buss puts it, "the loud, outgoing, life-of-the-party extrovert." They are more likely to be someone with a select group of close friends, who prefers "sincere and meaningful conversations over wild parties." They are more likely to be someone like Emily.

Conversely, extroverts do not necessarily seek closeness from their socializing. "Extroverts seem to need people as a forum to fill needs for social impact, just as a general needs soldiers to fill his or her need to lead," the psychologist William Graziano told me. "When extroverts show up at a party, everyone knows they are present."

Your degree of extroversion seems to influence how many friends you have, in other words, but not how good a friend you are. In a study of 132 college students at Humboldt University in Berlin, the psychologists Jens Aspendorf and Susanne Wilpers set out to understand the effect of different personality traits on students' relationships with their peers and families. They focused on the so-called Big Five traits: Introversion-Extroversion; Agreeableness; Openness to Experience; Conscientiousness; and Emotional Stability. (Many personality psychologists believe that human personality can be boiled down to these five characteristics.)

Aspendorf and Wilpers predicted that the extroverted students would have an easier time striking up new friendships than the introverts, and this was indeed the case. But if the introverts were truly antisocial and extroverts pro-social, then you'd suppose that the students with the most harmonious relationships would also be highest in extroversion. And this was not the case at all. Instead, the students whose relationships were freest of conflict had high scores for agreeableness. Agreeable people are warm, supportive, and loving; personality psychologists have found that if you sit them down in front of a computer screen of words, they focus longer than others do on words like caring, console, and help, and a shorter time on words like abduct, assault, and harass. Introverts and extroverts are equally likely to be agreeable; there is no correlation between extroversion and agreeableness. This explains why some extroverts love the stimulation of socializing but don't get along particularly well with those closest to them.

It also helps explain why some introverts—like Emily, whose talent for friendship suggests that she's a highly agreeable type herself—lavish attention on their family and close friends but dislike small talk. So when Greg labels Emily "antisocial," he's off base. Emily nurtures her marriage in just the way that you'd expect an agreeable introvert to do, making Greg the center of her social universe.

Except when she doesn't. Emily has a demanding job, and sometimes when she gets home at night she has little energy left. She's always happy to see Greg, but sometimes she'd rather sit next to him reading than go out for dinner or make animated conversation. Simply to be in his company is enough. For Emily, this is perfectly natural, but Greg feels hurt that she makes an effort for her colleagues and not for him.

This was a painfully common dynamic in the introvert-extrovert couples I interviewed: the introverts desperately craving downtime and understanding from their partners, the extroverts longing for company, and resentful that others seemed to benefit from their partners' "best" selves.

It can be hard for extroverts to understand how badly introverts need to recharge at the end of a busy day. We all empathize with a sleep-deprived mate who comes home from work too tired to talk, but it's harder to grasp that social overstimulation can be just as exhausting.

It's also hard for introverts to understand just how hurtful their silence can be. I interviewed a woman named Sarah, a bubbly and dynamic high school English teacher married to Bob, an introverted law school dean who spends his days fund-raising, then collapses when he gets home. Sarah cried tears of frustration and loneliness as she told me about her marriage.

"When he's on the job, he's amazingly engaging," she said. "Everyone tells me that he's so funny and I'm so lucky to be married to him. And I want to throttle them. Every night, as soon as we're done eating, he jumps up and cleans the kitchen. Then he wants to read the paper alone and work on his photography by himself. At around nine, he comes into the bedroom and wants to watch TV and be with me. But he's not really with me even then. He wants me to lay my head on his shoulder while we stare at the TV. It's a grownup version of parallel play." Sarah is trying to convince Bob to make a career change. "I think we'd have a great life if he had a job where he could sit at the computer all day, but he's consistently fund-raising," she says.