communication
Self-Presentation: How Should You Tell Listeners About Yourself?

How should you tell listeners about what you are, what you are busy with and what you can be useful for? We shall show you and analyze an example of the scheme of self-presentation

To tell listeners about yourself clearly and in an interesting manner, keep 4 points in your mind: Greeting → An event → An achievement → A story

The Greeting

The task of the greeting is to begin a talk and lead an audience in the context: help the listeners to examine most quickly what you are, where you are from and what you are busy with.

EX. Hello, my name is Gregory Balon. I'm a trainer at BEsmart studio of communications. Today I'll tell you about our experience of development of soft skills in big companies. But first shortly about what we are and why it's worth trusting our evaluation in this question.

The Event

This is a timeline of the presentation. The event is the starting point of the story, in which you may highlight the experience and the vector of the development. E.g.:

  • the start of work in a new professional direction;
  • a meeting with a ”wise man," who shared his useful knowledge and experience;
  • an incident that changed your attitude to the theme of discussion.

EX. Seven years ago, my colleagues and I united around the idea of development of communication culture in our country.

Big companies quickly appeared among our clients: inside sections and departments many pains concentrated, connected with the communication and presentation of their ideas.

Then we began to create educational products, that helped and go on helping to work out public speaking skills, business communication and arguments of one's position.

The Achievement

This is a proof that will prove your words and once more confirm your valuation. Use:

  • the facts: the result in bright and expressive details;
  • statistics: the result in figures;
  • cases: the result with the help of the method and experience.

EX. We took part in the designing of the course for one large telecommunications company – we made a teaching bot. It became a part of a big program.

As a result, 97% of collaborators, who had studied that course, mention, that they stopped using cliché answers and started to preserve animated communication with the clients. That had a great positive impact on their work.

The Story

This is an instrument of emotional influence. You may natively build in the block both about the event and about the achievements by highlighting important details for the audience. E.g.:

  • observing the pains: your work experience and reputation in the sphere, if the customer has already failed with the dishonest contractors;
  • observing the interests: your cases from IT for the companies with complicated technical specific characters.

Here you can also use metaphor as a part of a story. Here we discussed why we need metaphors and how to approach it.

A Piece of Advice to Make a Note:

The more speech for self-presentation is, the more chains “event → achievement → story” may be built. The main criteria here are your communication purpose and the use for the audience. But if there is a shortage of time, a single chain with a short example is quite enough to tell the audience clearly about yourself and your experience.