So a friend of mine, the one who started Melee, asked me one year if I would be interested in participating in a fund raiser for a domestic violence center. This sounded like such a sophisticated and mature thing for me to do so I said yes. He told me they were doing a Madrigal dinner, basically a recreation of a medieval dinner. He need people to play the royalty and tapped me on the shoulder. I was to play the Castellan of the castle, basically the chief financial officer. I dressed up in some medieval garb, was assigned a lady to escort, and sat at the head table with the king and queen and the Chancellor and his lady. We would march in behind tumblers and jugglers, act royal, and make some occasionally pronouncements about the next stage of the dinner. My good friend Tim would be part of it as well so while neither of us had done anything like this before, we vowed to have a good time at it.

Time for the dinner arrived and we were briefed on the parts we needed to play. There were no actual lines to memorize, just some general direction. We would welcome people to the dinner, have a “queen of the bean” contest, do some general announcements and just occasionally make a statement. Pretty simple stuff. So off we go, marching into the room. As befitting our status, our table is actually on a stage in front of everyone so we get to parade in front of them first. We take our place at the table and the king picks up a microphone, hidden behind a handkerchief, and welcomes everyone to the party.

The dinner kicks off and I can tell everyone there is having a great time. Soon it comes to be my turn to speak to the crowd, so I take the microphone and welcome them. I felt quite a bit of nerves when I did this, but nothing terrible. The biggest problem I had was that most peoples’ attention was on something other than me. I switched on my authoritative voice and soon gathered enough attention to make my proclamation. As the night went on, we all became more relaxed, joking amongst ourselves and the donors that were close by. I spouted off some Rowan Atkinson shtick I had seen recently but was obscure enough that those around me thought I had made it up. I was reveling in the attention, it was great. Probably the highlight was when Tim fired off a grape at me while I was talking and I was actually able to nonchalantly grab it in mid air. I’ll probably never have reflexes like that again, but when it needed to happen, it did.

When I got home, I was telling my wife about it, still excited in the afterglow of a good performance. “I really enjoyed performing for these people.” I told her.

“Duh.” she replied.

“What do you mean?”

“You love being the center of attention. You always have.”

And that really stunned me. I always thought of myself as more introvert than extrovert and that was why my joy in performing was such a surprise to me. Apparently thought, my wife knows me better than I do. As I thought more about it, I realized that she was correct. I performed most of my life: magic acts, drama in middle school, role-playing games, Melee, telling humorous stories at large gatherings, being an instructor, the list kept going. And this was something that I never realized or knew about myself.

Back in college, I knew that as a Marketing major I would be giving a lot of presentations. So I figured that I needed to take a speech class to hone my skills. It was an easy class for me and from that point forward, I rarely felt nervous about public speaking. When you hear surveys saying public speaking is the one thing more people fear than anything else, I simply can’t relate. And here I am thinking I’m some kind of introvert.

The point of all this is that often there are those around us who know us better than we know ourselves. We have convinced ourselves that we are one way when in reality we are something different. It took a casual comment from Amy to completely change the way I perceived myself. The funny thing is that Amy thought I already knew this, which was why she was so casual about it.

So talk to those around you. See how they perceive you in different situations and look at yourself objectively to see if you agree or not. You might find out you are someone better than you ever thought you were.