Becoming an Extrovert

The first day of class we discussed multiple ideas on how to make the world a better place. While some ideas were extreme (naming one girl supreme overlord of the world) others were much simpler like smiling at people or getting more involved. Easy right? Let's give it a whirl....


Okay so the first thing you need to know is I'm one of those people that does three things: school, sports, and internet. That is my day, 24/7, 365. If I leave the house after school my friends are shocked and claim divine intervention. So my goals for the past week has been to:

             1.) Make eye contact and smile at people, maybe even say hi to people I actually know.
                   (That last part may be too much to ask but I will try.)
             2.) Go out to at least 1 of the multiple events on campus we are constantly spammed about.

I thought smiling at people would be the easiest part of my goals to accomplish. After years of training myself to avoid eye contact and duck my head whenever walking in crowds or really just in general this actually was the hardest thing for me. Half the time I smiled at people I felt like I was grimacing or making some terrible pyscho killer face....and judging by some of the looks I got I very well may have been.

http://mattasama.deviantart.com/art/Psycho-Clown-332082300

But I persevered and continued on my awkward smiling, eye contact, occasionally talking quest! The elderly people I smiled at always smiled back while people my age often times glared. Towards the end it wasn't so bad and it seemed that more people that I had previously known as acquaintances started having full conversations with me. Success on part one? Maybe. I still tend to duck my head and avoid eye contact in larger groups but hey sometimes you really just don't want to look at people and smile.


Part 2 was a little harder, I'm generally introverted. I don't like going out and doing new things in groups of people I don't know. So what to do when I have to go out? Take the best friend of course, everyone needs a little moral support.

http://www.123rf.com/photo_6643137_moral-support.html

A lecture seemed to be the best first place to visit. We decided to attend a lecture from Toni Ross about a ceramics gallery at hood. We wouldn't have to talk to anyone and could just sit quietly and listen. However we forgot about the gallery show after....we tried to hide at first but then discovered many of the people there were quite interesting. One woman offered us a lot of advice for our first ceramics class and provided us with a lot of new insight on the pieces in the show. We also managed to get one of our classmates to join us for outing #2. YOGA!

http://downdogrock.com/2011/12/22/the-new-yorker-pokes-fun-at-western-yoga/

Now the best friend and I have done yoga before and we learned several things 1.) any day we can touch our toes is a good day 2.) if you fall asleep in class the instructor will shamelessly call you out 3.) the people you don't expect to be better than you can kick your butt without even breaking a sweat while you shake like leaf and fall over interrupting the entire class.  Point is we aren't good and we generally avoid yoga but figured, "hey why not?"

With moral support in tow we headed to the "class room" and quickly discovered new things like if you are smiling and laughing people will talk to you more and people that you had previous assumptions about actually weren't so bad. We talked with several people in the class and actually enjoyed the experience.

I'm not gonna sit here and claim that my two silly little goals changed the world, I know they didn't. But my generally thought was that if i could go out of my way to smile maybe that would make others happy. Maybe if i did things outside my comfort zone enough doing new things wouldn't be so terrifying. "Life begins at the end of your comfort zone" was my general theme. If we all took the time to do things outside our "norm", our comfort zone, maybe we can change the "me" focused world and see it as a "we".