How to Introduce Yourself to New People

Hi! My name is Lee.
I am from Korea.
I live in London now.
I am a student.
Nice to meet you.

At a language class, on the first day.

YUKI: Hi! I'm Yuki.
MAX: Hello, I'm Max. Nice to meet you.
YUKI: Nice to meet you too. Where are you from, Max?
MAX: I'm from Germany, from a small town near Munich. How about you?
YUKI: I'm from Japan. This is my first week in Dublin.
MAX: Oh, really? How are you finding it so far?
YUKI: It's good — but the weather is very different!
MAX: Yes, I know what you mean! Are you studying English here, or working?
YUKI: I'm studying. I want to work in tourism one day.
MAX: That sounds great. Well, it was nice to meet you, Yuki. See you in class tomorrow?
YUKI: Yes, see you!

A short guide for someone who is nervous about their first day at a new job.

The first thing to remember is that almost everyone in the room remembers being the new person, and most of them will be kind. You do not have to be impressive — you just have to be real.

Before you arrive, take three slow breaths. This is not a test. Your only job today is to meet people and learn their names, not to prove you deserve to be there.

When you introduce yourself, keep it short. 'Hi, I'm Maya — I just started on the marketing team.' Say your name clearly. Make eye contact. Don't apologise for being new; this is a job, not an audition.

Ask real questions. Not 'how long have you worked here?' — which everyone has been asked many times — but something more specific, like 'what are you working on at the moment?' or 'how did you end up in this team?' You will learn much more, and the other person will feel that you are genuinely interested.

Listen to the answer. Don't spend the whole time thinking about what to say next. If you forget someone's name, it is fine to ask again later. People would much rather you ask than pretend.

Finally — and this is not in the guide — take a small notebook, and at the end of each day write down the names of everyone you met and one thing about each of them. On day two, use those facts. 'How was the presentation you were preparing yesterday?' The effect is small and remarkable. People notice when they are remembered.

Which version of myself do I introduce first, and why?

I have been noticing, with some discomfort, that I introduce myself differently at my partner's family gatherings and at industry conferences. At conferences, I lead with my job: 'I run the research team at a small design firm in Lisbon.' The sentence is confident, specific, and says something about how I spend Monday to Friday. At family gatherings, I lead with my connection to my partner: 'I'm Sofia — I'm with João.' The sentence is warm, modest, and says something about where I fit in the room. Both sentences are true. Neither is a lie. Together, they describe a particular kind of editing that I had not fully noticed I was doing.

The discomfort is not that I present myself differently in different places — everyone does this, and doing so well is part of being socially competent. The discomfort is that, at family gatherings, I consistently lead with the relational version of myself even when people there also know about my work and would be interested. I edit out the research team not because it is irrelevant but because I am unsure whether leading with work would seem arrogant or cold in that room. The edit is therefore defensive, not descriptive. I am protecting myself against a reaction that may not even be coming.

At conferences, a similar thing happens in reverse. I rarely mention my partner, my flat, my Sunday routines, the fact that I now read more fiction than non-fiction. I edit these out because the conference register has taught me that work is the currency of these conversations and personal material is off-topic. But much of what makes me interesting as a colleague — curiosity, patience, a willingness to think beyond the immediate problem — comes from those Sunday afternoons. Editing them out produces a version of me that is slightly thinner than I am.

The writer's distinction between honest and dishonest editing helps me locate the problem. The editing I do is not, strictly speaking, dishonest. But it is defensive — it protects me from reactions I fear rather than presenting me to the person in front of me. Honest editing foregrounds what is true and alive for this conversation. My editing often foregrounds what I think the audience will be comfortable with.

I don't yet know what to do about this. I suspect the first step is noticing it, and the second is, occasionally, to introduce myself less defensively and see what happens. I will report back.

Introducing myself in a second language.

I speak three languages fluently, and I introduce myself badly in all of them, but in different ways. In Portuguese, my first language, I introduce myself quickly and competently, barely thinking about it. The conventions are so thoroughly internalised that I only notice them when an outsider gets them slightly wrong. I can introduce myself in Portuguese while also worrying about something else, doing something else, meaning something else. The language is simply there.

In English, I am slightly worse, in ways that have taken me a long time to understand. My English introductions tend to be, to use the writer's word, slightly over-edited. I lead with my job more than I mean to, I hedge my opinions more than I would in Portuguese, and I find myself reaching — without quite deciding to — for the register of the British professional conversations I have spent the most time in. In contexts where a warmer or messier self would serve better, I often produce a tidier self than I would choose on reflection.

In Spanish, a language I speak well but learned third, I am worst of all — and in the most interesting way. My Spanish self is stranger, less authoritative, and more uncertain, because the Spanish-speaking worlds I know best are familial ones, not professional ones. My Spanish introductions reach for forms I remember from adolescent visits to a great-aunt's house, which are warm but not adult. I have been to a conference in Madrid and found myself introducing my role in a tone really suited to a family lunch. The registers I would need do not exist yet in the part of my Spanish that is available to me.

There is a lesson here about how the self in a given language is shaped by the occasions in which that language was learned and most used. My Portuguese self is complete because I have lived a whole life in Portuguese. My English self is narrowly calibrated to professional life because that is where English lodged in me. My Spanish self is affectionate and lightly competent because my Spanish is, in some deep way, still a family-visit language.

I do not know what to do about this, except to notice it. The writer observed that the people best at introductions are not 'good at introductions' as a technique, but seem naturally interested in the person in front of them. If that is right, the task is less to learn a better Spanish elevator pitch and more to ensure that my Spanish self, such as it is, has been given more of the kind of occasions it needs. Introductions are downstream of what your life in that language has been.

What my name does in different rooms.

I have one name, formally, and three pronunciations of it, informally, and a further dozen micro-inflections that I produce without quite deciding to, each tuned to the room I am in. This is an undramatic observation about an undramatic part of my life, and it has taken me forty years to notice it.

At home, my name is spoken in full only when something has gone wrong. The casual form, the two-syllable contraction my mother invented for a small child, still serves my parents and a few cousins. It is the form I hear at weddings, funerals, Sunday lunches. When I say it back to them, I say it the way they say it — reflexively, without strategy, with the easy flatness of a word I have heard ten thousand times in one specific cadence. To use the formal version in that room would be strange. It would imply a shift in status or a private joke, neither of which is wanted.

At work in London, where I have lived and worked for the last fifteen years, the formal version is what I offer. Two syllables become three; the stress moves slightly; the vowels tighten to sound more like the English vowels around them. I cannot precisely describe what I am doing. I can say that if I introduce myself in London with the family pronunciation, people do not register the name as English and slightly struggle with it, and the next ten seconds of the encounter are spent on the minor repairs this requires. The adaptation is, in small part, a convenience for my interlocutors; in larger part, it is something I took up because it felt smoother, and smoothness in a second country was, for a long time, what I was optimising for.

In the third category of room — among people who share my country of origin but whom I meet through work — something more interesting happens. The name I use there is a small negotiation between the family version and the London version, and I am never quite sure which I am producing. Sometimes I hear myself saying it in a way that is neither, as though a third self — the emigré self, the bridged self — had been forged in the specific register of these meetings. The sound is not one I would make at home, and it is not one I would make at a London meeting. It is a sound I have never consciously chosen. I am not sure whether to be pleased about this or suspicious.

I have come to think that the name, rather than being the stable thing about a person that it appears to be, is instead a small instrument on which the rest of the self is tuned. The other things I say about myself flow from the pronunciation I have already offered — because the pronunciation has already told the listener what kind of room we are in, and, therefore, what kind of me will be present.

This is not a complaint about inauthenticity. It is a quieter observation: that even what I might have taken to be my single most stable fact is, on inspection, already doing social work on my behalf. If this is true of the name, I do not think there is much about me that is not similarly situated. I do not know whether to find this a relief or a vertigo. I think, on balance, I find it a small marvel, quietly.