Mastering the art of how to introduce yourself professionally can be the key to making sure you bring your whole authority and reputation to every room.
As a personal branding consultant, it is my job to make sure that my client’s brands are memorable and recognizable.
In this article, I’m going to share with you some frameworks that will allow you to get the respect and recognition you deserve in every professional encounter.
Specifically, I will cover:
- How to promote yourself without losing your executive status
- The different types of self-introduction you will need to command attention
- The secret technique to become someone who needs no introduction
Contents
When do you use a self-introduction?
There are many situations where you will have to introduce yourself professionally.
Here are a few examples of such situations:
- Being interviewed on a podcast
- Writing a thought leadership piece
- Giving a keynote address
- Participating in an expert panel
- Introducing yourself as a new member of the board
- At a networking event
As an experienced and seasoned professional, the way you introduce yourself in each of these situations is the key to retaining the influence and reputation that it’s taken you years to build.
Each of these situations requires a different approach to introducing yourself.
Ideally, someone else should be introducing you. Status can be implied by how and when someone is introduced in all of these situations.
In the best-case scenario, you won’t even need an introduction because everyone will know who you are (and we’ll share more about how to achieve that status later), but even in those situations, you will at least need a short introduction.
How to prepare a self-introduction?
Given that an introduction is such a high-stakes situation, you shouldn’t leave it to chance.
At this point in your career, you probably have introduced yourself so many times that you feel you are good at it.
And good is the enemy of great.
You should spend making sure that the way you introduce yourself creates the desired results every time you do so. Every. Time.
If not, you are not a professional.
Just like world-class comedians ONLY record specials after they practice their jokes until the delivery is perfect if you are committed to becoming the go-to thought leader in your niche, you must practice your self-introduction with the same level of discipline and obsession.
We won’t go into detail about the process here, because we’ve done so in our personal branding statement guide and have also covered the topic of unique value propositions separately.
But it’s important for you to use a proven personal branding framework to craft your professional introductions.
Some of the key elements in this process are:
- Always think about your audience and the value proposition you are offering to them
- Build a “greatest hits” list of your professional accomplishments so that you can easily recall them when you need them
- Practice your “professional stories” so that you can expand on your greatest hits if the situation allows you to
- Make sure you are looking out for the reactions of your audience when you deliver your introduction (in the virtual world you have analytics to optimize, but in-person you are the only one that can tell if the introduction is working or not)
- Remain flexible and open-minded to test different approaches until you find the one that works for you
In the real world, the key elements you need to pay attention to are, in order of importance:
- Body language
- Voice tonality and cadence
- The specific words that you use
In the virtual world, these are:
- Photo
- Design elements of your profiles and overall digital presence
- The specific words that you use
As much as I like to rely on science, technology, and data to optimize the self-introduction of my clients, it’s key to keep in mind that branding, and human connections, involve emotions.
It’s all about the feelings that we evoke during our professional interactions with others.
How do you introduce yourself in a creative way professionally?
They say that being creative is “thinking outside the box.”
Well, if you want to introduce yourself in a creative way professionally you first need to find out about what’s inside the box.
To find the blue ocean opportunities in your niche and industry, you first need to make sure that you identify all the red oceans in which you don’t want to compete.
Positioning yourself as the go-to expert in your niche starts with a personal branding audit to help you understand the arena in which you are competing and deep introspection to identify the element of uniqueness that will allow you to stand out from the competition.
If you want to get some creative inspiration, here are some books that I’d recommend:
Ready to explore how to introduce yourself professionally?
If you want to tap into a brain that has consumed, dissected, and integrated all of these insights and principles into your personal branding strategy, book a call with me so that we can go over how to make sure you are commanding the attention and recognition you deserve as an accomplished expert in your niche.
If you are not ready to book a call, you can check our personal branding statement guide and download our personal branding statement generator to get started introducing yourself in a creative way professionally.
