Your name is the least interesting thing about you

I see it all the time. Someone comes on stage or stands up in front of a crowd for the first time and they introduce themselves.

"Hi! I'm Hari and I'm here today to talk to you about storytelling. I've been teaching storytelling for about five years, first as Accenture where I was the Storytelling Coach for the UK and Ireland for about a year and since 2020 independently under my own company, 13 Times."

And I understand why people do this - we want to reassure the audience that we know what we're talking about. We want to highlight our credentials, our experience.

But, is that really the best use of the first few minutes on stage?

John Medina in his book Brain Rules says that the first 2 minutes of any speech or presentation are the most critical because that is the moment where the audience decides whether or not they are going to listen to you.

He calls this the Cognitive Hallowed Ground, but with all respect to Dr Medina, I would shorten this time – I think it’s more like 30 seconds rather than 2 minutes.

That’s only 30 seconds you have to grab the audience’s attention, and there is no introduction of yourself which compares to a good hook when it comes to grabbing attention.

If I’ve been told I have to introduce myself I keep it as short as possible:

“Hello, I’m Hari and I’m a storytelling coach.”

Keep it short so you can get to whatever attention grabbing content you have as quickly as possible.

If you absolutely positively have to introduce yourself, why not do it at the end? By the end of your speech you have either won over the audience or not – either way they know whether they want to hear more from you. So ending your speech with your name is a great way to ensuring that those people in the audience who do get in touch know it.

If you start your speech with an introduction, unless you have a very memorable name, most people will forget it almost immediately. This can even be a distraction to audience members as during your speech they may be trying to remember what name you said and as a result have stop paying attention to what you’re actually saying.

“Thanks for listening, you’ve been a great audience. I’m Hari Patience-Davies and I'm a storytelling coach.”

Using your introduction as an outro is both helpful (audience members can write it down) and neat (it’s clearly a planned ending and serves as a verbal full stop.)

It may feel like a risk, but if you don’t introduce yourself at the beginning, so long as you have a good hook on your content, you’ll be delivering a stronger speech.

I'm Hari Patience-Davies and I'm a #storytellingcoach. I help people, teams and companies improve their storytelling and #presentationskills by way of #training and #coaching programmes.

I regularly get the feedback that my training courses are "the best I've ever attended" from my students and over 97% of those surveyed have told me my 6 module Storytelling for Business course is extremely or very helpful. 100% of the surveyed attendees of Storytelling for Leaders consider that course extremely or very useful too!

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