Meet Jenn Granneman, founder of IntrovertDear, the biggest online community for introverts, and co-founder of HighlySensitiveRefuge.com. She's also the author of two acclaimed books: "The Secret Lives of Introverts," celebrating the quiet ones, and "Sensitive," an Amazon Best Book of the Year.
Jen shares how understanding her sensitivity transformed her life and offers practical advice for navigating challenges. They explore the benefits of community and how sensitives can thrive in supportive environments.
Why Listen?
- Discover the strengths of sensitivity and how to use them effectively. - Learn tips for managing overwhelm and creating supportive spaces. - Understand the importance of community for sensitives. - Find inspiration to embrace your sensitivity and contribute your unique gifts to the world.
Join the conversation and learn how to celebrate your sensitivity. Share this episode with fellow sensitives seeking guidance and support. Together, let's embrace our sensitivity and create success on our terms.
Meet Jenn Granneman, founder of IntrovertDear, the biggest online community for introverts, and co-founder of HighlySensitiveRefuge.com. She's also the author of two acclaimed books: "The Secret Lives of Introverts," celebrating the quiet ones, and "Sensitive," an Amazon Best Book of the Year.
Jen shares how understanding her sensitivity transformed her life and offers practical advice for navigating challenges. They explore the benefits of community and how sensitives can thrive in supportive environments.
Why Listen?
- Discover the strengths of sensitivity and how to use them effectively. - Learn tips for managing overwhelm and creating supportive spaces. - Understand the importance of community for sensitives. - Find inspiration to embrace your sensitivity and contribute your unique gifts to the world.
Join the conversation and learn how to celebrate your sensitivity. Share this episode with fellow sensitives seeking guidance and support. Together, let's embrace our sensitivity and create success on our terms.
Connect on her social media account: Instagram: @jenngranneman
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Frida Kabo:
Hi, it's Frida Kabo. I've had some great conversations with awesome people and I thought, why keep the conversations in the archive? I want to share them with you. So here is one of the conversations from the Sensitive Success Summit. Enjoy. Welcome to the Sensitive Success Podcast, where we explore the unique challenges and opportunities that comes with being a sensitive changemaker in today's world. I'm your host, Frida Kabo, and I have spent the last decade recreating my life. I moved from Sweden to New Zealand and now live in the beautiful bush with my husband and two kids, homeschooling and creating a life and business that works for me with the help of my sensitivity and support others to do the same. I'm excited to share conversations with experts, thought leaders, and fellow sensitive people who also see the world through the lens of sensitivity. Thank you so much for being here because it means that you're creating sensitive success too, which is precisely what the world needs. Let's get started. When I really embraced that I'm a highly sensitive person, I started to read all I could about the trait. Let me know in the comments if you did the same. So lucky for us, there's an increasing number of research, books, and resources out there for us to understand more about the trait and ourselves. And today I have the honor of having a conversation with Jenn Granneman. Jenn is one of the creators of Syntheticity of Refuge, the world's largest communities of For Sensitives and founder of introvert dear.com, the world's largest community for introverts. She's also the co-author of Sensitive and the author of The Secret Lives of Introverts and Education, and a generalist. She's been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the BB, C and more. Since embracing her own introversion and sensitivity, read too many self-help books and live a pleasantly boring life with her son in St. Paul, Minnesota. Welcome, Jenn.
Jenn Granneman:
I am excited to be here.
Frida Kabo:
I'm so glad that you're here. It's such an honor to have you here. So welcome to the Sensitive Success Summit. I would love to hear why you think it's important to come together and celebrate sensitivity like this.
Jenn Granneman:
Yeah, absolutely. I think sensitivity is one of those traits that's often misunderstood. People don't understand what it means to be a highly sensitive person. They think it means that you cry too easily. You're weak, you're fragile, you get offended too easily. I heard all kinds of comments from people when I was writing my book about how they didn't want to be called sensitive or, Oh my gosh, you're going to tell people let's have enough with your book. Right. So that told me right away, they didn't understand what sensitivity really was. So, I think we need to celebrate it because sensitive people have so many amazing strengths and we are not appreciating those strengths enough.
Frida Kabo:
Definitely. So, tell us a bit more about your journey and how you became an expert in sensitivity and introversion.
Jenn Granneman:
Sure. So, I have been writing about this topic for, oh my gosh, probably 10 or more years at this point. I came across some research by Dr. Elaine Aaron. Many years ago, and it really helped me to understand who I was. It really helped a lot of things about my life. It made my life make, make sense. So I got excited about this research. I thought, wow, if only more people knew about this, this could be really empowering. So I started my blog, introvertdeer. com. I wrote about introverts and highly sensitive people. At the time people knew what an introvert was, but they didn't really know what a highly sensitive person was. So I remember saying. Writing about highly sensitive people is my labor of love because, you know, I'd write these articles about sensitive people and like nobody would really click on them or comment on them. It was just sort of like people didn't really know what that was. So I thought, I'm just going to keep writing about this because it was so useful for me. I think it will be useful to other people. And then, you know, uh, fast forward. 10 or so years, and I got to write my book, Sensitive.
Frida Kabo:
Yeah, beautiful, and so many are having benefit from the work that you do now, and it's just snowball affecting, I feel like.
Jenn Granneman:
Yeah, I hope so, yeah.
Frida Kabo:
Yeah. So when you found out that you were a highly sensitive person, what did it change for you?
Jenn Granneman:
You know, I was always that person who needed more downtime than other people. A normal day at school or a normal day at work could feel really draining and exhausting for me. There were, of course, all of the sensory things that I took in, like, you know, noise and lights and visual cues, things like that. Uncomfortable, physically uncomfortable spaces. But a lot of times I felt drained because I was noticing. So many things around me, cues from other people, you know, their, their emotions, things like that. And I would often just feel really tired from taking all of this in. And I noticed that other people didn't feel the same way. My friends could just, you know, keep going after the school day was over. And I was like, that was just a normal day, but like, don't you just kind of want to sit and relax for a little bit, you know, and I found myself having reactions to things that other people didn't really have the same reactions to. I can remember crying after watching a musical and my friends and I all stood up and, you know, I'm like crying, right? Because I'm just like feeling really moved by this play. And my friends are like, Well, that was cool. What do you want to get for dinner? Right. And I'm like, how can you even go on right now with life? Um, so I, I often just felt, you know, just a little different from the people around me. And so when I learned about high sensitivity, it was like, Oh my gosh, that's what's going on. That's who I am. I like makes that it was such an incredible feeling.
Frida Kabo:
Wonderful. Yeah, I can, can relate a lot to that and I think the listeners can as well. So you created the sensitive, co created the sensitive refuge, one of the biggest communities for sensitives. Why do you think it's important with community and why do you think we crave community?
Jenn Granneman:
I think everybody craves community, whether you're a sensitive person or not. But I think, I think as highly sensitive people, we, we really, really crave community. We're people who are often. People, people, you know, even if we're introverted or shy, you know, we, we tend to really enjoy meaningful relationships of other people. And when those meaningful relationships are lacking, our life feels very lacking. Plus I think community is important for sensitive people because we need other people around us to support us in our sensitive journey. It helps us to see that we're not alone in the things we experience. I think there can just be a really. Nice feeling of camaraderie among sensitive people. Like, Oh, you do this too. Me too. Or, Oh my gosh, I, I had a hard time with this, you know, has anyone else ever struggled with something like this? So I, I just think it's, it's really important for sensitive people to know that they're not alone in what they experienced.
Frida Kabo:
Yeah, totally agree. It's like being highly sensitive. It is a thing and it's not just me and how do you experience it? I think it's so important to have that space to express those, those feelings. Yeah,
Jenn Granneman:
absolutely. It's a real thing and other people are like this, not just me.
Frida Kabo:
Yeah. Definitely. So I read your book, Sensitive, and I love the mix of research, story and encouragement. So why did you feel the need for this book about sensitivity?
Jenn Granneman:
I think there has been quite a bit written already about high sensitivity. So I was not, I did not set out to, you know, introduce a brand new concept to the world. But what I wanted to do was show people that it can be a strength. I think a lot of times we talk about sensitivity as well. It's, it's kind of this package trait, you know, they're good and bad. And that's true to some extent, right? There are things we struggle with as sensitive people, but there are also incredible strengths that we have. And yes, you do have to take the good with the bad, but I really wanted to show, show not just sensitive people, but society at large, that sensitivity can be an amazing gift. Yeah,
Frida Kabo:
I love that. So, Was there something that surprised you while you wrote the book? Was there some new information that surprised you or something else?
Jenn Granneman:
That's a great question. I would say there's two things that surprised me. The first thing that surprised me was people's reactions to the topic I was writing about. So I mentioned how, when I would be talking about my book, when I was, you know, uh, drafting it with my co author, Andre Solo, you know, we, we would talk about this book and people would say, Oh, you know, thank goodness you're writing that. People are becoming too sensitive these days. So you need, you need to tell them how to toughen up or you need to tell them how to not be so offended. Uh, I remember we gave a draft of the book to another writer friend of ours and she shared it with the man she was dating. And she said, I think I'm a sensitive person, and I think you're a sensitive person too, you really fit these characteristics. And he said, if anyone called me sensitive, I would be really offended. So he got upset, just the idea of being called sensitive. So, you know, it was, it was surprising to me how, the reactions that people had to this. The other thing that I was surprised about was we really dug into the research as we were writing this book and we came across a number of studies that show how sensitive people really do have this advantage in life. They are able to take basic supports And go further with those supports. And we call this the sensitive boost effect in our book. Uh, you know, everybody benefits from therapy. Everybody benefits from self care and healthy relationships and a peaceful environment and good routines and things like that. But for sensitive people, all those. Good healthy practices, sensitive people get an even larger benefit from those things because our brains are designed to just extract everything out, right? We extract the bad out, we extract the good out, and we just soak it all in and suck it all in. Uh, so those good things that we do in our lives can help us go even further than someone who is not sensitive.
Frida Kabo:
I love that concept of the sensitivity boost. And that was something I wanted to ask you about as well. But it's so, so amazing to see that. Yeah, it's easy to focus on the more negative things, but actually we benefit even more from things that support us. It's even more important that we do this work as it support us even more. So that's awesome that you push that as well. So you also had a free resource that we can take part of. So can you tell us a bit more about that?
Jenn Granneman:
Sure. So I made a checklist that has, uh, it's a practical guide for what sensitive people can do when they feel overstimulated. Sensitive people often experience this thing that we call overstimulation. And overstimulation is when your body and mind have processed enough. Um, the sensitive mind takes in so much, our body's taken so much. We take in all these cues and details from our environment, all these nuances and little things that other people might miss. And, you know, we can only take in so much without eventually feeling overloaded. So sensitive people. Often tend to feel more stress or anxiety than others do until they learn how to manage that stress and overstimulation. So I created a free checklist that sensitive people can use with just some short simple reminders of things they can do when they feel overstimulated.
Frida Kabo:
Perfect. Yeah, we'll share, share it here as well and be sure to check it out. So what is the biggest strength with being a highly sensitive to you?
Jenn Granneman:
Oh my gosh. Biggest, um, . . That's a tough question. Um, so we, in our book, we identify five strengths of sensitive people. Is it okay if I name all five of those?
Frida Kabo:
Definitely
Jenn Granneman:
Okay. Okay, great. Okay. The first one is empathy. So sensitive people on brain scans show that their brains are more active in areas related to empathy. Uh, so we easily take on other people's perspectives. We easily put ourselves in other people's shoes. Uh, the second one is creativity. And, you know, I'm, I'm not saying that every sensitive person is some sort of artist or musician or writer. A lot of them are, but not everyone follows that, you know, follows that path exactly. But because our brains take in so. Much detail and then make connections between ideas. We're often naturally creative in a number of different ways. The next one is called sensory intelligence. And this is the idea that you are more in tune with your environment. You notice little details, you notice little things that other people might miss that sound that no one else heard, or kind of the way the sunlight hits the leaves. Um, and this can be a really incredible strength. You know, for everyone, but we especially see it, or I should say one good, really good, clear example of it is in sports, right? You have to be able to be very in tune with what's going on to be very good at athletics and sports or in the military. Anywhere where details in your environment can give you an advantage or keep you safe. The next one is depth of processing, and that means that our brains take in all that information. We reflect on it deeply. We think about it a lot, and brain scans show these differences, right? Um, areas of the brain and sensitive people, they, they light up more related to this depth of processing. Sensitive people aren't just looking at superficial detail, superficial things. Their minds are going deep and really thinking and reflecting on things. And then the last one is one that people often say to me, well, I don't know, is that really a strength? Cause it sometimes feels like a challenge, but it is depth of emotion. Um, you know, sensitive people have strong emotions, they experience joy in an intense way or sadness or grief in an intense way. And, you know, that can be hard as a sensitive person because. Life is hard, right? And, and when you have these stronger emotional reactions to things, that can get hard, but having those strong emotional reactions also just gives you a really valuable tool in life because it really gets at what the heart of, heart of being human is, right? Our, our emotional world, that that's who we are as humans, and you can use your emotions to connect with other people or create great art or just live a more personally meaningful life.
Frida Kabo:
Mm. Love that. So
Jenn Granneman:
there's all five . There's my five.
Frida Kabo:
Perfect. Thank you so much. And what can we do to embrace these? What can we do to enhance these even more if we don't feel like we're taking advantage of our our best traits?
Jenn Granneman:
Yeah. You know that, that's a big question, but I would say the first thing is to just become aware of your sensitivity if you are a highly sensitive person. Recognize that and honor that about yourself. And then I think you can go from there. I think you can start to build environments that work for you, set up your schedule in a way that works for you, start listening to your body and your emotions so that you can know how to navigate situations and relationships better. But I think it really all starts with being aware of your traits and then noticing how that trait affects your life. Hmm.
Frida Kabo:
Yeah, and I think that, at least for me, I started overthinking if I was highly sensitive or not. Like, am I really? Am I not? And the question was, okay, if I am, how would I support myself better? And when I started doing that, I realized that, yes, I am definitely a highly sensitive person. This is definitely supporting me to think this way and to, to see this way. So you don't have to be 100 percent certain that you are a highly sensitive person to support yourself better in this way.
Jenn Granneman:
That's a great point. I mean, I think the things that sensitive people do to support themselves are things that are beneficial to everyone, whether they're sensitive or not. We come back to the sensitive boost effect. If you do those things to support yourself as a sensitive person, you'll get even more benefit from them. But yeah, those good supportive things are good for everyone.
Frida Kabo:
Yeah, definitely. So is there something else that you would like to say to those sensitives that are listening?
Jenn Granneman:
I would tell sensitive people that you're not broken. You're not wrong for being sensitive. It's not a flaw. There's nothing wrong with you, despite what you might have been told by parents or teachers or friends or a significant other or just society at large. It's not a flaw. It's not a weakness. Yes, there can be challenges. Yes, there will be hard moments. And for sensitive people, those hard moments can feel even harder sometimes. But you also have incredible, amazing gifts and the world needs your gifts.
Frida Kabo:
Love that. Thank you so, so much. I know there's so much more that we can talk about. I feel like we have covered a lot as well. So thank you so, so much for being here, for sharing your wisdom with us and for the work that you do for us, Sensitives. It's so much and it's so important and it's so powerful to be able to connect with you, but also in the community that you create. So thank you so much.
Jenn Granneman:
Well, thank you. This is. Such a pleasure. Thank you.
Frida Kabo:
Thank you for listening to sensitive success. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share it with someone who could benefit from this message and come over and connect with me on Instagram @fridakabo. And remember, sensitivity is neither good or bad. It's what we make of it. Embrace your sensitivity and use it to create sensitive success your way.
