Posts tagged networking
How to talk about your accomplishments without sounding like a jerk

So you just got a promotion, or maybe you got a nice compliment from a passing stranger on your outfit, or maybe you won a free cruise. It’s human to want to tell people about the cool stuff that’s happened to you. It can amplify your excitement to share with someone who “gets it,” and it can help inspire and motivate others who hear about your successes. But nobody wants to seem like a jerk, and more importantly, you probably don’t want to make other people feel badly if they find themselves comparing their lives to this great thing that just happened to you. That’s why we’ve put together some tips for sharing the good stuff without making other people feel badly.

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How to write better e-mails

“Tuesday at 3 pm is great. Thanks for your flexibility. Looking forward to chatting then.”


Imagine that the above e-mail pops into your inbox. Do you get the impression that the message’s author is actually looking forward to talking to you? It probably depends on context, of course, but stock language like, “Looking forward to chatting,” or, “Thanks for your patience,” or even, “Sincerely,” are so overused that they’ve mostly lost their meaning. Those phrases and others like them are the “small talk” equivalent of e-mail; they’re polite, they usually don’t offer meaningful content, they don’t require a great deal of thought for either person in the interaction, and they are often the easiest mode of communication for people who don’t know each other well. (We’ll focus on work e-mails in this blogpost, but everything here applies just as much to other types of e-mails or online messages.)
 

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How to escape small talk in two simple steps

We’ve all been there. You’re at a party, and somebody asks you a small talk question that you’re afraid will beget more small talk and before you know it, you’re thirty minutes deep into a discussion about traffic patterns in your local area. Whether the question that somebody is asking you is, “Where are you from?” Or, “Wasn’t the traffic getting here awful?” You can prevent your conversation from slipping into a night of small talk by responding the following way:

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