[SI] Presentation Context

Here is a basic construction of self introduction in (business) presentations.

• Greeting
• Name, place
• Affiliation
• About your career briefly
• About your affiliation briefly

Everything except greeting can be skipped. Typical situation you drop some items from this list is the moderator of your session already introduced you and you shouldn't repeat that because it violates no-duplication principle. BTW, in that case, please don't forget to say thank you to the moderator before greeting.

The purpose of self introduction in this context is roughly these three:

• Provide essential background information which, without that, the audience must have difficulty to understand your presentation
• Show your warm and polite attitude to build good rapport with the audience.
• Give some ice-breaking to make audience relaxed and ready to enjoy and interact with your presentation.

So if you can improve any of these, it's okay to talk about items your moderator has already mentioned.

[SI] Contexts

I've just chosen three contexts you may be interested in.

• Presentations
• Interviews
  
  • Job
  • Academic
• Dating

Actually, I only have experience of business presentations. So I'm not sure what I will write about other contexts are useful or not. I will curate information on the Web for such contexts and, at least, it will help me improve my self-introduction skill for business presentations.

[SI] Background information

I think this is the last principle of self introduction: background information of both the counterparts and yourself is essential to build and deliver a good self introduction. This is also a premise for other principles. If you don't know the background of counterpart, how you can imagine what kind of relationship you would like to build with the person?

For non-native speakers, how well you can express your background is a key point of your self introduction and succeeding conversation. Your countries history, culture, tradition, issues, trends, etc.

Okay. Principles are enough. I would like to move on to more specific factors. In next entry, I will take a look at contexts of self introductions.

[SI] Be Unique

If you are thinking of self introduction, you must live in a city where millions of people live or your field of activity must be so large that your self introduction matters for your good achievements. See, the heart of the problem is the number of people in modern society. Too many people, you don't remember most of them. To be memorable, you have to be unique. At least, your self introduction should contain something unique. Otherwise, people don't remember you. Being unique to be remembered? Yes. That's a ridiculous and terrible idea. But it's the real world we live in.

Note that this factor conflicts with the principle of BoF. You should make a good balance between your uniqueness and homogeneity.

[SI] Define Your Goal or Blue Print

Before you introduce yourself to a new acquaintance, you should always ask yourself questions such as "What kind of relationship would I like to develop with this person?" or "How would I like to connect with this guy?", to define your goal or blue print that the self-introduction will initiate.

You don't need to have a clear goal. Our encounter is often to be more accidental or not planned. Relationships can develop in such a direction that we've never imagined. But if you can clarify or picture your goal and blue print, that will help build the content of your self introduction.

[SI] Birds of a Feather

Third principle of self introduction must be Birds of a Feather. If you are a programmer or an IT engineer you are likely to be familiar with this term. Birds of a Feather or BoF is a type of casual events, where people who are interested in a topic gather and chat about it. "Birds of a feather flock together."

So when you meet someone, you try to find similarities with the person, which you can use as a scaffold to develop the conversation. There are some subtle aspects in this topic. Firstly, you subconsciously prefer people who speak like you. For example, if you are visual type, you tend to use visual terms to express your understanding of abstract topics, such as "I see...", "From my viewpoint,...", "His new idea looks good.", and so on. Consequently, you prefer who use similar visual terms because you can understand the person easily. Secondly, BoF principle affects non-verbal communications: body language, eye movements, what you wear, etc. Research says these non-verbal factors affect counterpart's impression on you far more than what you speak.

BoF doesn't mean you have to pretend or mimic someone else to get attention from them. It means, by taking into account of this aspect of communication, you can avoid needless conflicts with or misunderstanding from new acquaintances, therefore increase your chance to create good relationships faster.

[SI] "Hello World" of Self Introduction

I would like to begin with American or casual setting as a "Hello World" example for self introduction. That is something like this:

• Hi, I'm Aka. Good to meet you.

Variations are:

• Hi, I'm Aka. Aka [family name]. Good to meet you.
• Hi, I'm Aka from [affiliation]. Good to meet you.

You can briefly add your attributes, which the counterpart can't avoid to ask you to follow the context you both are in.

• Hi, I'm Aka, the project manager of [project name]. Good to meet you.
• Hi, I'm Aka, an IT engineer. Good to meet you.
• Hi, I'm Aka. I work in the CE manufacturing industry for 10 years. Good to meet you.
• Hi, I'm Aka, 32 years old, single, and I like driving for my free time. Good to meet you.
• Hi, I'm Aka. I majored politics at [a name of university]. Good to meet you.

Economics of words always governs your expressions including self introductory statements like these.

"Good to meet you" is brief, hence the best. But you should avoid duplication in your conversation so if other guys already used "good to meet you" you should use different expressions:

• Nice to meet you.
  
• Pleased to meet you.
  
• It's good to meet you.
  
• It's nice to meet you.
  
• It's pleased to meet you.
  

No-duplication of words and expressions also governs your choice of expressions.

[SI] Self Introduction

There are tons of opportunities you have to introduce yourself in a variety of daily situations, and actually I introduce myself in English at least once a week both in business and private contexts. Recently, questions about self-introduction came up to my mind: what kind of self-introduction is considered good or attractive? Is there any technique to improve that? Is there any protocol I should follow?

I would like to dig into this topic for a while on this blog.