Self promotion is a must have skill at your work and in life in general. Many learn it very late. One of the most common mistake is ‘exaggeration’. Here are a few points to help you avoid it:
Don’t exaggerate your small achievements, it undermines your credibility and projects a picture of you that, you are attention seeker.
Exaggeration is relative to the audience. What is exaggeration to one set of audience, might be an achievement to the another set of audience. For example: learning to ride a bicycle is an achievement for 5-8 year old kid. But, getting a driver’s license at the age of 20-25 is not.
Here are 2 sharp questions you can ask yourself to know if you are exaggerating, unknowingly:
- How hard is it to achieve what you achieved for the average audience (at least 50% of them) ?
- If you were to state your achievement in layman’s terms, does it sound less appealing than what you are stating with jargons ?
While stating your achievements, you can be mindful of these points to sound genuine and not attention seeker:
- Don’t use superlative adjectives if you don’t really mean it. For example - ‘I’m thrilled’, ‘ it was my dream’, etc.
- Speak in layman’s terms as much as you can. Most of the times, people tend to use jargons when they don’t have credible way to explain something. Speaking in layman’s terms quickly adds a credibility to your statement and you are seen as a person who knows his thing very well.