The book is informed by action research carried out over a long period of time, one-to-one work with coaching clients, my online group coaching workshops, and years of experience of facing the challenges of life and work as a quiet soul.

“Everyone should read this book. Not just quiet people.
I am stunned by your book. It is wise, reassuring and kind. It goes deep. I like the way you generously refer to your own experience. How reassuring for readers who wonder if there is something wrong with them. There is a delightful and gentle sense of humour."

Danielle Barbereau - Author, After the Split.

Who is this book for?

• Anyone who feels their quiet nature blocks them from growing, changing or participating fully in life. Anyone who feels pressure to behave in a way they don’t want to or feels they are pushed to ‘fake it ‘til they make it’.

• Savvy leaders and managers who would like to understand their introvert and quiet colleagues better and take steps towards working more inclusively with them.

• Introverts and quiet people at work who want to find ways to contribute more fully without having to behave like extroverts.

It's not just for introverts - It's a book for people who live with, work with or love a quiet person.

I want to offer you a different narrative around quiet, to draw the debate away from introversion, ambiversion and extroversion. It's more complex than that. 

Quiet may exist for us in the moment. Or it may be an aspect of our character. We may be quiet by nature or become quiet through the impact of life events and circumstances. Whatever happens, the nature of our quiet as an individual is informed by all sorts of things – how we are in the world, our past experience, our immediate context. 

Every quiet person’s experience is unique – not to be labelled or reduced – a mix of genes, family system, nurture, lived experience and, above all, context and circumstance. Your ability to show up – irrespective of whether you believe you are introvert, extrovert or whatever – is hugely dependent on a blend of all these things. Don’t seek to simplify it. Explore it, befriend it. There are opportunities galore hidden within our quiet.

Let me share what being quiet means for me. What has fuelled my energy, frustration and buzz about this topic?

I was a shy little kid. I had a couple of childhood illnesses: one was painful and recurrent over many years, one nearly killed me. It was only later in life that I began to understand how those illnesses and the experiences surrounding them had traumatised me. I found social interaction difficult. I missed out on the rough and tumble that would have toughened me up a bit. I grew up in a quiet household with quiet parents. It was an environment from the ‘children should be seen but not heard’ era.

I became an anxious teen but didn’t know it at the time. Later, when I discovered the concept of anxiety, I couldn’t even pronounce the word properly. A psychology student I shared a house with fell over laughing and put me straight.

I learned how to body scan and progressively relax. But it didn’t work. I ended up relying on too many beers, to socialise and to sleep. The meditation practice fell by the wayside because I didn’t know the nature of the problem I was trying to solve. At the age of 16 I asked my dad to send me to see a psychologist, but he refused. No son of his was going to see a shrink. I didn’t cope well and fell into a pattern of risky behaviours as a result.

We all carry pain…

Sometimes we get knocked down and it’s a long time before we realise it – a lifetime perhaps. We might, years later, come to a dawning realisation that the life we have lived is not the one we were born to. Trauma occurs, we learn to live with it. Pain, if it is a regular part of life, becomes something we live with, absorb and tolerate. We become numb, quiet, unresponsive, strangers to ourselves. We come to see pain as normal, and even seek out pain within the relationships we forge – the familiar being easier than the shock of an easy and trouble-free experience.

In my mid-40s I started reading about introversion. Bingo! I thought. I had an explanation for a hefty chunk of the discomfort I’d felt throughout my adult life. Much of what I read mapped quite accurately onto my life – so much so that it was enough for the moment. I did the tests: I was clearly an introvert. Myers–Briggs mapped me out as an INFJ-T – one of 2% of people who had these introverted, intuitive, feeling and judging attributes. I wore my INFJ like a badge. It explained my intrinsic quietness, linked to my shyness and social anxiety.

Some of the traits I had also seemed to relate to the concept of high sensitivity. I did a Highly Sensitive Person test. Not only was I a highly sensitive person (HSP), but I also rated as an Orchid – the highest level of HSP traits one could have.

This is why I think it’s important to get to the root of your personal experience of quiet – to find your truth and benefit from the release and renewal that brings. 

Think about all the quiet oddballs there are around us. Recognising and nurturing your unique quiet energy is an amazingly empowering thing to do. In some sense it is a political act. You will run counter to the mainstream, and in doing so can create ripples of change that ultimately benefit everyone within your professional and social realm.

Freeing ourselves from labels

Conventional wisdom says that an introvert would struggle in a meeting full of extroverts. If we flip that, does it hold true that an extrovert would struggle in a room full of introverts? Not so much, perhaps?

What if we suspend the use of terms such as introvert and extrovert for the sake of freeing up our thinking? What if we instead use the terms quiet, less energetically engaged, more reflective – compared with more vocal, more energetically engaged, faster processors? Would there be more nuance in the thinking? And if we briefed those who are more energetic to simply take the time to listen to the slower, more reflective thoughts of the quieter souls – what might happen then?

After one of my Quiet Person’s Guide courses, a team leader said to me, “I’ve never been outnumbered by quiet people in a meeting before – it was deeply insightful for me.”

A lightbulb had gone on for them. Quiet is a complex thing. At best, labels like introversion and extroversion stop being helpful quite early on in the conversation. At worst, labelling can be a rejection and avoidance of responsibility. A label may impair a person’s ability to find help if they need it. In the world of counselling and psychotherapy, the difference between a label of cPTSD and one of borderline personality disorder (two conditions which have many shared facets) can make the difference between successfully accessing treatment or being rejected.

“A diagnosis limits vision: it diminishes ability to relate to the other as a person.” – Irvin Yalom, The Gift of Therapy

“Be yourself – not what other people think, or say, you should be. You have the power and the right to create your own framework of possibility.” 

I explore the whole ‘scatter graph’ of reasons for quiet: shyness, social anxiety, introversion, dissociation, chronic worry or pain, lack of confidence, etc. Sometimes quiet shows up as a result of several other factors working together. 

It's the complex nature of quiet that fascinates me – and how we can make sense of our quietness, reframe it and work with it. 

A Quiet Person's Guide to Life + Work is not just a narrative around quiet. It contains self-coaching exercises, thought experiments and many signposts to wider exploration.

“Pete Mosley has taken being quiet beyond the binary of introvert-extrovert and brought it into the realm of thoughtful and purpose-led people. There are many reasons why we may show up as quieter at different times in our lives and Pete draws on fields as diverse as trauma, the nervous system and attachment theory to help shed light on the wide spectrum of quiet.
As a trauma-informed coach working with thoughtful, passionate people, I will be recommending ‘A Quiet Person’s Guide' to my clients.”

Kathryn Sheridan

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