You’ve Been Introducing Yourself All Wrong.

Your Resume Is Someone Else’s Grocery List.

Can you name one item from someone else's grocery list? I didn't think so.

Yet that's essentially what most of us hand people when we introduce ourselves. Job titles, revenue figures, years of experience, impressive on paper, forgettable in person.

What I've learned from two decades of producing live events for millions of people: a list of facts is not an experience. And experiences are the only things that stick.

The real you doesn't live in your headline achievements anyway. It lives underneath them. In the levers you pulled to get there, the people you brought along, the 11pm phone call you made that saved a deal from falling apart because you'd spent three years building a relationship with the person who actually picked up.

Those are the skills that made the achievement possible and they never make it onto the resume.

Think about what it actually means when someone tells you they ran a marathon. On the surface: athletic accomplishment. What I hear: disciplined, comfortable with discomfort, and most importantly, a finisher. Someone who makes a plan and sees it through. You mention your mother-in-law lives with you. That's not a footnote, that's a character reference. You are patient, loyal, a partner in the truest sense, someone who shows up even when it's hard. How you do one thing is how you do everything. 

These are not soft skills. These are your actual skills. The ones that traveled with you through every role, every industry, every pivot. The ones that don't fit in a bullet point but are, in fact, the whole story of who you are.

So why do we keep leaving them out?

Ahna Tessler

Science has something to say here, and Pixar actually explained it quite well. In Inside Out, memories are glowing orbs tagged with emotions, joy, sadness, fear, etc. Turns out that's not far off. Dr. Daniela Palombo, a memory researcher at UBC's Centre for Brain Health, confirms the science: when we experience something, we don't just store what happened, we store the emotional context of how it felt. Visual, auditory, and emotional components get woven together across the brain. When you recall the moment, you recall all of it. Which means the memories that stick aren't usually the most informative ones. They're the most felt ones.

It is amusing and entirely on brand that the best neuroscience explainer I've encountered came from a Pixar film. 

Funny enough, I once was at a meeting at Pixar headquarters pitching a Disney on Ice production, don’t know which one or what year. But what I do remember is the date was May 5 and a Mariachi band was playing and someone put a sombrero on my head. Apparently even I am not immune to a well-engineered core memory. 

Anyway…

Memory isn't filed. It's felt. And the moments that hit multiple senses at once don't just get remembered, they get kept.

When guests enter an arena to see Disney on Ice, the memory starts before the show does. The smell of cotton candy filling your nose while you navigate the concourse. The chill of the ice rink cold slapping your face as you find your seats. The child next to you already dressed as the princess she is about to see in person. Then the familiar steel drum melody plays the first few bars of "Under the Sea" and the audience erupts in joy and applause. Thousands sing along to “Let It Go” while Elsa free skates to the anthem, cues pyrotechnics, and ice crystals dangle from the air. A spotlight hits center ice, Mickey skates forward, hockey stops, you hear his skate blade cut the ice, and he says, “Hello Pals” and the whole place roars.

Nobody leaves Disney on Ice and says, "it was fine." They say, “I was there, and we haven’t stopped talking about it.” That's not an accident. That's architecture.

Now answer this: when you introduce yourself, do you give someone information, or do you give them an experience?

If you want to be remembered after a room full of handshakes, you cannot hand people a grocery list and hope for the best. You have to give them something to attach to, give them a feeling, a visual image to recall. The marathon. The mother-in-law. That time you forgot the pitch deck but delivered the presentation as though you were the host of a game show and then you landed the account. The story underneath the title.

I have spent my career engineering those moments for audiences at scale. The same principles apply when your audience is one person across a coffee table.

The skills that made you exceptional didn't disappear when your context changed. They just need a new stage.

You are not a grocery list. Your introduction shouldn't be either.

Which is exactly why my friend Jenna Wolfe and I are hosting Say It Like You Mean It, a live workshop to help you build the introduction you actually deserve. One that sounds like you, not your resume. Sign up or reply here to be waitlisted.

From Your Biggest Champion,

Nicole