 Live from Houston, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference in Houston, Texas. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host. I'm joined today by my co-host, Tori Bedford, who is a tech reporting fellow, and also a junior fellow, Alicia Meese, who is a senior at Palo Alto High School. Our guest today is Susan Cain, the New York Times best-selling author of Quiet, and also a book for middle schoolers named Quiet Power. Thank you so much for joining us, Susan, and we're excited to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Susan, thanks for being here. You wrote this book a few years ago and kind of popularized these terms of extrovert, introvert, ambivert, these things that we now, that are just kind of a part of the zeitgeist. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between some of those terms, like what makes someone an introvert or an extrovert? Yes, and excuse me for a sec, because I am battling a cold, and I'm fighting a cough. Could you excuse me? That's okay, yeah, of course, take your time. So we just went to Susan's talk about the book. Yeah. I wanted to get kind of your perspective, because you had some really interesting questions that came out of it. What did you think of the talk? Yeah, I think I have a unique perspective as both a young female student and as someone who has lived in Japan, basically my whole life. In Japan, the general culture is no small talk. Why would you small talk? So moving to California when I was in ninth grade, really, was such a culture shock for me. And I think in that, in those terms, I've become way more extroverted. I've become more, I guess, eager to talk to people and eager to kind of solve issues. But listening to Susan's talk about the power of introversion, it kind of made me reminisce about the times in which I was more introverted. Yeah, she had mentioned that people can change sort of their personality types and their characteristics. How long did you live in Japan for? I lived in Japan for 10 years. So I was there through K through eight. And yeah, it was a really transformative experience in terms of the way I approached talking to people. Can you talk more specifically about some instances in your life where you really felt that culture shock, where there was a really stark difference between extroverts and you? Sure, so I live in Silicon Valley, Pal, so. And in Silicon Valley, a lot of buzzwords get thrown around. Innovation, cooperation, stuff like that. Whereas in Japan, we didn't have words like that. We had, you do this, I do this. And I think kind of, I learned the power of just talking to talk and not specifically to forward any sort of thinking or anything like that, really. Great. Do you feel like, how did you start to notice that you were going into a more kind of extroverted personality type? What were some of the characteristics that you noticed within yourself? Yeah, so after I got into journalism, which was my junior year, I realized that more and more it was easier to talk to people. I didn't need to prep what I was gonna say before I was gonna say them. So I think I just become more, I've become more able to think off my feet, I guess. Okay, yeah. Susan, welcome back. Apologies about that. Sorry about that. No worries. So we were just talking about your talk. It was really impactful and what we thought was really interesting was when you were discussing, I mean, we talked, we kind of know now what is an extrovert, what is an introvert. Amberverts, I guess, is sort of a mixture of the two. But I think something that really strikes people is that Alicia was just talking about how she really used to be a lot more introverted and now she's become more extroverted. And you were talking about how that can really change over time. I feel like it is really difficult for people a lot of times to tell kind of what category they might fall into and in what ways that can help them or hurt them and how they can work with that. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah, sure. I mean, so it's true, especially for introverts. Most of us from the time we're very young get into the habit of acting more extroverted than we really are because there's so many societal messages that we get telling us that we should do that. So if you want to really tune in and figure out who you are, ask yourself, how would you spend your time if it were, let's say, Saturday morning and you have nothing in particular scheduled that day. What would you truly choose to do and with whom and with how many people would you choose to do it? And if you start noticing that really your ideal time spent when there are no pressures around you is spent in solitude or maybe with a couple close friends or family, that's probably a sign that you're more in the introverted side of the spectrum. I mean, of course, having said that, I also think that nowadays we are all living in a society that is so 24 seven that even the most extroverted among us feel sometimes like, God, it's too much and I just want a little bit of downtime. You talk about it though, you mentioned it's a spectrum. It's not a binary. It definitely has sides of each part. What are some of the ways that people kind of along the entire spectrum can work together and how can we start to do that better to create better teams? Yeah, I mean, that's an important question because we know from management research and also I just think from our daily lives that the best performing teams do tend to be a mix of introverts and extroverts and amberverts because we do tend to bring such different strengths to the table. If you had a team that was all extroverts you kind of like, I'll be rushing off in a direction and not even sure it's the direction you want to take. If you had a team that was all introverts you might be suffering from a sense of not enough, let's say, dynamism propelling you forward. So you really need both types there. And a lot of this, what we're trying to do with Quiet Revolution, which is an organization that I founded around these issues, a lot of this has to do with just normalizing this discourse so that just an everyday conversation people start talking about who they are, when are they more introverted, when are they more extroverted? All of this should just become no big deal so that people can talk about their preferences of how they want to spend their time and be able to adapt to their friends and their colleagues' preferences as well. I think something that I've come in contact in the classroom is this idea that men are extroverted whereas women are introverted. So being someone who's amberverted and being able to turn on and off, what would you say, how could I approach the classroom and how could I maximize my potential in terms of how I work with both girls and guys? Well, I mean it's interesting because I think you're getting a really interesting aspect of this which is the part of introversion and extroversion that's not biological or temperamentally based so much as cultural. And there is this question for women this kind of narrow channel that we're supposed to serve of being not docile and too quiet on the one hand but not too loud or aggressive on the other hand. And I don't know, I mean the way you describe yourself I think you are perfectly situated to just kind of talk and just be yourself and get everybody talking and not even really have to think about it too much. I mean from the little I've gotten to know you so far and what you described you might be just perfectly situated within that narrow channel that I think for many women they have to consciously tweak. Until we're able to change the culture to widen that channel a little bit more. What would then be your message to introverted women in the classroom to kind of become less in conflict with extroverted men? Right, well it's a couple things. So one thing I would say is to get in the habit of pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. So it's something I often recommend is thinking in advance before you go into class of a point that you might like to make or contribute and then giving yourself a little push to speak up early in the class discussion instead of waiting towards the end. Because when you do that the point that you're going to make becomes a kind of anchor in the discussion and people start directing their energy more to you instead of what often happens to women which is they, as they wait and wait to talk they become ever farther on the margins and feel that emotionally. And then when they do go to talk they tend to get drowned over. Is there a responsibility for women to amplify other women's voices as well? I mean now that we're getting into the gendered issue of men talking over women. I think there's a responsibility for all of us to amplify each other's voices because we're really just in this like the whole project of life, right? To just find out what everybody thinks and get the best ideas. So I don't know, you know it's funny I started out with this whole project because I was really interested in women's issues and feminist issues back when I was a corporate lawyer. And I started noticing that when you look at the dynamics of meetings and negotiations and things like that gender is playing a huge role but it's also temperament that's playing a role. And all of this with these problems of identity we're getting in the way of people actually being able to just fully talk to each other. And I think that's really the goal at the end of the day. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you, thank you. And we will be back with the cubes coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference live in Houston, Texas after this short break. Hi, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE.me.