Run Game Conversation

How to talk about yourself without bragging

6 min read

You talk about yourself without bragging by sharing specific details and short stories instead of labels and claims, and by handing the conversation back with a question. "I'm a great cook" is a claim, while "I'm trying to get my grandmother's tomato sauce right, and I've ruined it four Sundays in a row" is a story, and it tells the listener more while leaving the judging to them.

That's advice, not a law of nature, but there's some research behind the worry. Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein and Joachim Vosgerau (Psychological Science, 2015) ran three experiments. In the first two, some people described a time they had bragged and others a time they were on the receiving end. Self-promoters overestimated how happy and proud their listeners felt and underestimated how annoyed they were. In the third, recipients of excessive self-promotion rated the promoter as less likeable and as a braggart. The press release doesn't report sample sizes, and the first two experiments relied on recalled episodes, so it shows a tendency to misjudge, not an exact line.

Why people hold back, and why it can backfire

Many people go quiet about themselves because they fear sounding arrogant. The problem is that someone who shares nothing gives the other person nothing to work with. A conversation needs material, and you're the one holding it.

Sharing about yourself is also something people tend to enjoy doing. A 2012 PNAS paper by Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell reported that talking about yourself activated reward-related brain regions, and in one study participants gave up a small share of their possible earnings (about 17 percent) to answer questions about themselves instead of about someone else or trivia. The studies were small, with 17 to 117 participants each, and measured how the discloser felt, not how listeners reacted.

Two sides, then. Saying too little leaves a blank. Saying it in a way that sounds like an announcement can leave people cooler toward you than you expect. The middle is a skill, and it's learnable.

The core move: swap the label for a detail

Labels are the words you'd put on a resume: "successful," "athletic," "well-traveled," "good with people." Listeners hear them as claims and have nothing to check them against. Details give them something to picture.

Claim Detail
"I'm really fit." "I run three mornings a week, and I'm doing a half-marathon in March. Mostly to have a reason to get up."
"I travel a lot." "I spent two weeks in Portugal last year and ate the same custard tart every day."
"I'm good at my job." "I fix the thing that breaks at two a.m. so nobody else has to."
"I make good money." (Many people leave this out early on, since it can set an odd tone.)

Notice that the detail versions are specific, a little self-deprecating or playful, and open a thread the other person can pull on.

Tell a short story instead of stating a fact

A story has a moment, something a bit off or surprising, and a payoff. Thirty seconds is plenty. The achievement can sit inside the story without being the headline.

Instead of "I won a hackathon," try "My friends and I stayed up for 30 hours to build a thing to track bus delays. At 4 a.m. it crashed, and we won anyway because the judges had never seen a bus app that apologized." If you want to build this skill on purpose, storytelling in conversation has a simple structure.

Humor and honest effort

Two things take the edge off an achievement.

Be careful with the humblebrag, a boast dressed as a complaint, such as "I'm so tired, my flight home from the business-class lounge was awful." Listeners can usually see what it's doing. That one is an observation, not a finding.

Balance with questions

A reliable pattern is to say a bit about yourself, then turn it back. "I just started rock climbing. Have you ever tried it?" gives the other person a way in.

There's some evidence that questions help. Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Julia Minson and Francesca Gino (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017) had 430 people chat in pairs by instant message for 15 minutes. People told to ask more questions were rated as more responsive and more likeable, especially when they asked follow-up questions. Asking far too many, or rude or repetitive questions, could backfire, and the chats were text-based, so face-to-face results could differ. The question to avoid is the one you ask only to get back to yourself.

A rough ratio some people use is about half and half over the course of a conversation. That's a rule of thumb, not a finding.

What to say about achievements

When something good happens and it comes up, a few approaches work for most people:

Honest context also helps. If you're asked what you do and you want a short, true answer, what to say when she asks what you do has examples for different jobs.

A short drill

Pick three things about your life. For each one, write a version with a label and a version with a detail and a tiny story. Say them out loud twice. A good test is whether a stranger could repeat the detail back an hour later.

  1. A thing you do for work or school
  2. A hobby
  3. Something recent you're a little proud of

What to do next

  1. Write your three claims and rewrite each as a 20-second story with one concrete detail.
  2. In your next conversation, try the pattern: one thing about you, then one question about them.
  3. Cut one label from your intros this week ("successful," "outgoing," "adventurous") and replace it with what you actually did.
  4. Watch for the moment you start explaining why something matters. Stop one sentence earlier.
  5. After a conversation, jot down what you shared and how the other person responded.

If you're logging approaches in Run Game, the session notes are a handy place for step 5, so you can see over a few weeks which stories got a response and which didn't. It's a notes field, nothing more.

For the broader skill of making yourself worth talking to, see how to be interesting, and for what to do when you run out of things to say, conversation threading and what to talk about when your life feels boring help.

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