Shyness Can Be Changed - Your Voice Is Valued

Lola Garay Abad has been a teacher for over 20 years, a teacher coach/trainer for over 10, and a team leader for most of her education career. In all these years she has worked with thousands of people including educators, who have struggled with expressing themselves, due to the stigma attached to introversion.  As an introverted woman herself, and having such stigma very present in her mind, has, at times, made her feel that her voice was not as valid as the voice of an outspoken extroverted person. Lola also sees it in the many classes she observes and coaches, in which extroversion is praised but introversion is diminished. In this episode, Lola shares her thoughts and her own personal experience of how introversion, unfortunately, is seen as a negative aspect of our personality, and it is often looked down upon and confused with shyness and the inability to be entrepreneurial.  She feels that, in general, leadership is not associated with introversion, as it is believed that introversion means shyness. But, shyness is a behaviour that can be coached and we can build consciousness around it to be able to make our voices heard. As a team lead, being in a management position and being introverted, Lola believes that one of the main things she has to thank her introversion for, is the ability to LISTEN actively, to pause and actually LISTEN to the needs of the people she works with. About Lola Garay Abad Lola is a teacher at heart, an educational psychologist, a teacher trainer/mentor and a specialist in SLA, SLDs, CLIL and metacognition.  She has been in education for the last 20 years, and isthe team lead for author development at Eduki.  Lola has managed academic programs, published academic material and create and deliver teaching training programs, conferences and workshops for educators in main stream education and language teaching in Spain, Portugal, the UK, the US, Latin America, among others. She is also involved in research, and work as an educational consultant and mentor/coach in various public and private schools across the country, for the MECD, for regional governments and private foundations. Academically Lola's principal areas of interest are STEAM, PBL, skills development and formative assessment, curriculum and syllabus design/evaluation, literacy , educational psychology (specific learning differences), and research in education. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lolagarayabad/