How to Break the Habits Holding Introverted Leaders Back
Norman Farb on why breaking habits isn't about willpower — it's about letting your senses back into the room.
Most of us think we change by gritting our teeth, making a plan, and forcing ourselves to act differently.
Norman Farb, neuroscientist at the University of Toronto and author of Better in Every Sense, spent two decades studying the brain and found a better approach.
The habits that hold introverted leaders back—like staying silent in the meeting, shrinking from the room, deferring when you should push—aren’t really habits of behavior. They’re habits of perception.
Your default mode network builds a tidy, efficient model of who you are and what you can do, and under stress it stops letting new information in.
The fix isn’t more effort. Surprisingly, it’s reconnecting with your senses.
What struck me most in our conversation is how directly this maps to the experience many introverted leaders share: that moment of anxiety before you speak.
Norman’s reframe is that the racing heart isn’t the obstacle. It’s a signal you’ve been organizing your behavior around avoidance.
The work isn’t to make the sensation disappear. It’s to become familiar enough with it that you can notice it—and act anyway.
He shared some very practical ways to do that:
Notice three things in the room you’ve never really looked at.
Pay attention to sounds you usually filter out.
Sit with the tightness in your chest before the meeting instead of trying to override it.
Small steps that can even feel a bit silly.
But this is how the model updates—not through one dramatic breakthrough, but through ongoing repetition.
Until one day, when your moment to speak comes, the fear is still there, but you speak anyway.
What I appreciated most is that Norman doesn’t sell transformation as erasing your current self.
You don’t become a different person.
You don’t get rid of your introversion.
You simply include more of yourself—the anxious part and the curious part, the careful part and the part that has something worth saying.
That’s the version of change that actually lasts, and it’s the version that doesn’t require pretending to be someone you’re not.
If you’ve ever felt stuck in a pattern at work and assumed the only way forward was a personality overhaul, this episode offers a different invitation.
Give it a listen.
Connect with Norman:
Better in Every Sense (book)
Norman Farb at the University of Toronto