zushi's place

This one is going to be a short, slightly-disorganized one. It's more of a braindump of a checklist.

Recently I've been pretty curious about what about introversion goes away after an introvert knows someone for a while. It's well known that most introverts turn into extroverts around people they know, but what precisely about the relationship has changed that allows people to talk to people they know with ease? If so, can you accelerate the process and become easy to talk to even for new people?

It helps that I'm an introvert as well, and here are the draining things I came up with and a list of ways to deal with it, in order of most notable to least:

Introversion: – Trying to figure out how to continue the conversation – Managing others impression of me, because it is unstable during initial encounters – It's a lot of information to learn about a new person – Trying to understand who they are – Long conversation might be default have low valence – Dislike covering the same topic over and over again – Want to avoid appearing as boring – Prolonged conversation is slightly boring – Didn't get to talk about what I want to talk about – Anxiety about whether they will like me – Wanting validation – Figuring out their humor style – Figuring out what is politically ok to say vs not – Not sure how much trust to place in them for vulnerability

Solution: – Don't worry about what they think of you – Figure out what they want to talk about, ask questions they would be intrigued to be asked – Pay full attention – Do not judge – You need to be interested too to be fully present, find that common ground – Break up the conversation to fun topics sometimes, or punchuate with humor – Have lots of things to talk about, optimize for mentioning things they can ask questions about – Give them context about yourself, lots of details – Avoid commonplace topics if they seem bored. But such topics can be slightly good if they are tired. – Allow them to be fully themselves – Validate parts of it that's hard to understand for others – Be open to light joking and teasing

This ended up being a huge list that's difficult to start with, so I would distill the top 6 down to the following: – Don't judge and don't worry about being judged – Optimize for interest on both sides – Pay full attention – Find ways to have fun!