Introverts Hold Grudges. Sometimes That's the Right Call.

Before we dive in, here are two resources worth bookmarking:

A colleague took credit for three weeks of my work. In a board meeting, in front of the people whose opinion mattered most.

I didn't say anything in the room. I went quiet the way introverts do when something significant happens. Not from lack of thought, but from too many thoughts with nowhere safe to go.

I spent days trying to find a version of events that wasn't exactly what it looked like, but I couldn't.

What I couldn't see until much later: the grudge didn't start when he took the credit. It started the moment I decided not to speak. That distinction matters more than most introvert advice is willing to say out loud. Admitting it means looking honestly at a decision I'd made, rather than just at something that had been done to me.

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Holding a grudge at work is a decision-making problem that shows up quietly.

You stop sharing early-stage thinking. You wait until everything is polished before showing anyone, and you stop putting your hand up first. That feels like being careful. It's being reactive, and it costs you the chance to shape a conversation before it starts, which is often the only chance that matters.

You keep score: how much room people take, how fast they claim things, how little they leave for others. That attention is energy, and energy spent watching is energy not spent building.

Most expensive of all is the replay. You reconstruct a moment that's already over instead of building your position for the next one. After twenty-five years watching these patterns, I can tell you: introverts rarely lose ground in the original moment. They lose it in the weeks of replay that follow, when energy that could fuel the next opportunity goes into reconstructing what's done.

The grudge itself isn't always wrong. But it almost always tells you to watch your back without telling you how to move forward.

This breaks into two separate jobs.

The moment someone presents your work as theirs, a window exists. One sentence is enough.

"I'm glad this landed well. Let me add a few things from the thinking behind it."

You're not attacking anyone. You're simply entering the room that your work already earned you a seat in.

Five experiments involving 1,800 participants found that supervisors consistently rated extroverts as more passionate than introverts, even when passion levels were identical. Staying quiet reads as uninvested, not composed. That isn't fair, but it's the room most of us are in.

Assertive introverts capture most of the same professional advantages that extroverts enjoy. One clear sentence in the right moment does more for how you're perceived than months of general visibility. The window is small. Using it is a skill.

Surveys on workplace credit theft show that 91% of workers had either experienced it, witnessed it, or done it themselves. The person who did it to you probably didn't see themselves as doing anything unusual. That's not a reason to let it go, but it is a reason to understand the mechanism rather than just the malice.

Once the moment passes, ask honestly: is this grudge still protecting me, or has it started shaping how I see everyone?

A grudge that keeps you from handing the same person the same access twice is useful. A grudge that makes you expect the worst from every colleague has outlived its purpose and is now costing you in caution applied indiscriminately.

The line between appropriate caution and quiet captivity is real. You usually know which side you're on.

The colleague who took my credit probably didn't experience what happened the same way I did.

Extroverts build energy in rooms. They think out loud, claim space naturally, and often assume that shared context means shared credit. Not because they're taking something that isn't theirs, but because their relationship to the room is genuinely different.

What they need from you isn't a confrontation weeks later. It's a clear signal in the moment.

Something like: "Before we close this out, I want to walk everyone through the thinking behind it."

That one sentence gives them a cue they can respond to gracefully. The ones who can't will reveal something worth knowing early, rather than after you've invested another three weeks.

Introverts and extroverts at their best are complementary. Together, they bring the room to life. You give it depth and something worth remembering, but that only works if you're present and visible in the room.

When you're trying to figure out whether a grudge is still doing useful work, or has quietly started running the show:

That gives you the distance to examine the hurt without being rushed past it before you're ready.

Three small moves. None of them require forgiveness.

The Invisible Work of Not Taking Up Space

Why you disappear to make a room comfortable, and what you stop becoming in the process.

I don't think the answer is forgiving everything quickly. Some things deserve time, and some deserve a boundary that stays.

But twenty-five years of watching quiet, careful people navigate rooms not built for them taught me this: the most expensive mistake isn't the grudge. It's the silence that came before it.

The grudge is what you carry after you've decided not to speak. We rarely question that original decision. We carry the weight and call it wisdom. Sometimes it is wisdom. The kind that protects you from repeating something costly. But sometimes it's a story we've been telling ourselves to avoid the one sentence that would have changed everything. The difference between those two things matters more than most people are willing to sit with.

That's where the work needs to be done. Not in processing the hurt after the fact, but in choosing to be in the room fully, visibly, on the record, before the hurt even has a chance to arrive.

In your corner,
— Steven

P.S. Share this with the colleague who goes quiet when they should speak up. They need this one.

P.P.S. If this edition hit close to home, you might find this useful: From Invisible to Unforgettable is my free guide for introverts who are done being the most prepared person in the room and the least remembered one.