Episode 35 Introducing Yourself Well in Business English Conversations

Today we're thinking about your business. If you're trying to build your business, or make some business connections then we need to have a little bit of a different conversation compared to yesterday's focus. This time we're really thinking about how to talk about what you do.  Remember in English 'What's your job?' and 'What do you do?' are exactly the same question. Asking about your job is very often the second or third thing we want to know about you, so if you have to meet new people, it's good to think about how you can answer this question well. Have a great weekend and I'll chat to you next week.  When we start a conversation with a new person in English there are some very common questions. What's your name? Where are you from? (Especially if you look or sound different or are somewhere (like a conference) where everyone is from different places. What's your job?/What do you do? Are you married? Since 'What do you do?' is the third question you might be asked, it's pretty important to have a good answer, or one you can deliver easily. First consider who are you talking to? I suggest two possible answers, one for personal situations and one for business situations. If you know you're going somewhere special or different you might think of an answer especially for that group of people. If you're talking to a friend of a friend, a personal situation, you want to keep it simple and easy. Very often you are making the answer far simpler than it really is, but you want to give that person enough information to decide: do I want to know more about this? 'I work in a factory and make sure everything runs smoothly.' Is much easier for them to understand than 'I'm a Distribution Engineer.' That sentence above is not really exactly right for your job, but it's enough for this situation. In a business situation you are maybe trying to connect with business people or build partnerships or business opportunities. In this case you can go into more detail. 'I own my own business' Is enough to start. The other person will then decide whether to ask you 'Oh really, what kind of business is it?' Or 'Doing what?' Or whether they'd rather to talk about something else. If they ask you for more information you might say: 'I'm a business consultant, mostly working with energy companies to improve their environmental footprint. How about you?' This is a little bit like the 'elevator pitch' sales people talk about. It's enough information to get people interested, but not enough to bore them or confuse them. Remember, an easy way to keep a conversation going in English is just to throw the question back to them. Additional Vocabulary 'tailor the conversation' - to organise or adapt the conversation to better suit the person you're talking to oversimplification - when someone reduces the complexity of something to make it easier to understand or they make it too simple, so the important thing is lost 'Pick your audience' - Decide the right thing for the right group of people 'throw the question back' - idiom - 'to throw something back' we use this when someone asks us a question or asks us to do something and we just say 'what about you?' 'drop something into the conversation' - idiom - when we casually mention something that we want to talk about so that people can ask us or we can change the subject 'Don't freak yourself out' - idiom - don't scare yourself 'Scare yourself to death' - idiom - scare yourself a lot 'Widened a few brains' - actually I said the wrong thing here the correct idiom is 'to expand minds' or 'stretch your brain' it means to give people some new information that they might not know or be particularly comfortable with 'to jog your memory' - idiom - to tell somebody something to help them remember something 'talking point' - the idea that there can be a kind of topic that is more interesting or easier to encourage people to talk about