Introverts: Leveraging Your Personality to Manage Your Pharmacy Business
Confessions often range from the mild to the macabre. Mine is a happy medium in between. It was a difficult, but ultimately liberating confession to myself. I am an introvert.
Have you made that confession to yourself in your life? Does the thought of engaging in a conversation with a complete stranger - strangers - cripple you to the point of limiting yourself in your personal and business life? Do you know or work with someone who seems that they just can’t come out of their shell?
Meet the introvert.
You like to think of us as a select few, bumbling around social situations and fleeing once the painful interaction is complete. The fact is that introverts are more common than you think.
I often imagined myself as a jovial presence. I thoroughly enjoy engaging in conversations with one or two people who I can relate to or have an accommodating charisma. These sporadic and lucky interactions with these very people throughout my life led me to the wrongful conclusion that I was a people person. Sure, I didn’t like to be in a crowded room of strangers, but I chalked that up to mild anxiety. Of course I needed my alone time after a party or social outing, but who doesn’t? I am the epitome of an extrovert, a go getter, the one who can make people feel at ease with my presence. Right?
Wrong.
Passing curiosity one day led me to actually look up the difference between the two - extroverts and introverts. Directed to the book Confessions of an Introvert: The Shy Girl's Guide to Career, Networking and Getting the Most Out of Life, the information floored me. Extroverts derive their energy from social interactions, whereas introverts are depleted after them. They need to recharge. Those bells resounded in my head after reading that. The main difference between the two is how they derive their energy. I am not exhilarated after a particularly crowded social gathering. On the contrary, I need to go home immediately and get some down time. I don’t look forward to a presentation or meeting. Rather, I stress myself going over every detail until I can numbly regurgitate the information as quickly as possible.
How do you derive your energy? This might not affect you if you are an extrovert, so maybe you should ask yourself - how does your staff derive theirs? Do you have an employee who seems wholly capable and competent until they need to project numbers to a handful of people?Or maybe you work with someone who is brilliant at working by themselves.
We are everywhere. We are the people who are behind the camera - and we love it. After realizing where I truly fit, I am proud to call myself an introvert. Rather than limiting myself to that pigeonhole, I can redirect my strengths to initiatives that make me happy and that I would be much more efficient at. I learned to not feel guilty about needing my personal time after social functions and I learned to pace myself and breath when presenting.
The sooner you can come to terms with either realizing your own source of energy or realizing how to work with your staff’s, the sooner you can get that competitive advantage and things can start to become more effective. For example, if you have an employee who is timid but extremely efficient, maybe the best position for them shouldn’t be working the front end. Or the coworker who is brilliant at facts and research should probably partner with someone who does the presenting.
The cold, hard fact is that we live in a world where extroverts are prized and treasured. As a pharmacy business owner or manager, do you know someone who is trying to force themselves to acclimate and become that aggressive personality? You may very well have a few of those. You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole, but you can make that square peg work to your advantage. Know your strengths and the strengths of the people you work with. Realizing how you derive your energy can ultimately lead you to free that clog that is preventing your business or work environment to flow.
