3 Ways to Tell Your Story Better

First Impressions are critical, we know this. Recently in a network I’m a part of, I participated in a cohort that lasted a month with one goal: Improve an introduction.

Whenever I’ve given introductions in the past, I had one of 2 problems, I’d give too much detail or I hyper simplified. My background is complex, but aren’t we all? Depending on the setting, I may say that I build software or run a cleaning business or produce a podcast or write blogs. Worse than picking one of the above, I would sometimes try to squeeze in all the above.

We all want to believe that we’re special. The bridge to getting others to understand what is special about us can be a frustrating one to cross, but the models I learned in this cohort helped me to create a digestible narrative for my background that feels leaps and bounds above my previous introductions in quality.

Here are the 3 takeaways from that cohort that helped me the most.

Don’t let details cloud clarity.

This was perhaps my biggest problem coming in whenever I would branch beyond over-simplification and attempt a full introduction. I aim to be precise by nature and so when I’m explaining something in any domain, much less my own background, I have a natural tendency to over explain at the expense of the understanding of who I’m talking to.

One week in the cohort, we talked about a famous psychological phenomenon known as “Miller’s Law”, which in short suggests…