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.
