You Are Allowed to Outgrow Your Introduction

What happens when the story people tell about you no longer reflects the person you are today?

You arrive at an event, meet someone new and wait while a person who knows you makes the introduction. Before you have spoken, they have explained your old job, a difficult period in your life or something that happened years ago. There may be nothing inaccurate about what they have said. Yet you find yourself standing there thinking, “There is so much more to me than that now.”

Perhaps you have changed direction, developed new skills or built something you are proud of. Perhaps you are still working out who you are after a significant change. Whatever the circumstances, the introduction feels strangely out of date, like being handed a business card for a role you left a long time ago. The person describing you may have good intentions, but their understanding of you has not quite caught up.

When a description becomes a limitation

We use familiar descriptions to make sense of people. Someone is the quiet one, the successful one, the person who looks after everyone or the friend who has been through a lot. These descriptions can begin affectionately, even respectfully. The difficulty comes when they stop being observations and become expectations.

The quiet person speaks up and everyone acts surprised. The reliable person says they cannot help and suddenly needs to explain themselves. Someone who has experienced significant hardship starts talking about their ambitions, but the conversation keeps returning to what happened to them. There is very little room to be different when every interaction begins with a reminder of who you have always been.

It is worth noticing when familiarity turns into certainty. Knowing someone for twenty years does not mean we know everything about who they are today. We might know their history exceptionally well and still need to ask about their present.

Your lived experience is part of your expertise, not the whole introduction

As a speaker and disability advocate, I value lived experience. It brings a perspective that cannot be borrowed from someone else’s story. My experiences inform what I speak about, the questions I ask and the assumptions I challenge. I would not remove them from my work, but I also do not want the conversation to end with what I have survived.

I bring what I have learnt through building businesses, supporting authors, creating opportunities and finding different ways to work. Those lessons matter alongside the circumstances that shaped them. An introduction that focuses entirely on hardship can leave out the judgement, creativity and practical knowledge a person has developed.

There is an important distinction here. Disability is not an old identity that someone must leave behind to demonstrate growth. A person can continue to live with disability while developing professionally, changing their priorities and pursuing new interests. We do not need to become less disabled to become more experienced, more capable in a particular field or more certain of what we have to contribute.

Sometimes we are the ones repeating the old introduction

It is not always other people who keep an outdated description alive. Sometimes we reach for it ourselves because it is familiar, easy to explain or once gave us a clear place in the world. We introduce ourselves through a former career, apologise for being new to something we have now been doing for years, or describe our work as a little project when it has become a substantial part of our lives.

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging where you started. The question is whether your description still fits. Are you sharing useful context, or quietly talking yourself back into a smaller role? Are you explaining your present, or giving people a detailed account of why you are not quite entitled to claim it yet?

A useful exercise is to write down what you normally say when someone asks about you. Then look at what is missing. You might discover that you explain what you used to do but never mention what you are building. You might list your responsibilities without saying anything about your interests. Updating your introduction does not require exaggeration. It requires giving your current life some space in the conversation.

Change does not have to come with an impressive announcement

There is a temptation to believe that a new introduction must be earned through something visible. A promotion, a qualification, a successful business or a major achievement seems to provide permission to describe ourselves differently. But some changes are quieter than that, and they still deserve recognition.

You may no longer be willing to organise everything for everyone. You may have stopped treating exhaustion as evidence that you are doing enough. Perhaps you are learning something simply because it interests you, without a plan to turn it into an income. These changes might not belong in a professional biography, but they can alter how you understand yourself and what you need from the people around you.

Not every season of life produces a polished answer to “What do you do?” You are allowed to be exploring, recovering, adjusting or reconsidering. You do not owe people a triumphant new identity before you can stop performing an old one.

Give people something current to work with

People cannot always recognise a change they have not been told about. Before assuming someone is determined to keep you in the past, consider whether they know what matters to you now. A straightforward correction can be more useful than hoping they will notice your discomfort.

You might say, “That was a big part of my life, but these days my work is focused on something different.” In a professional setting, you can provide a current biography and make clear which aspects of your experience are relevant to the event. In a personal conversation, it may be as simple as saying, “I would rather tell them about what I am doing now.”

You do not need to make the correction confrontational or apologise for it. You are giving someone more accurate information. They may welcome the opportunity to understand you better, particularly when their old description came from habit rather than an intention to diminish you.

An introduction is a responsibility

For event organisers, hosts and leaders, this is worth thinking about before the microphone is switched on. An introduction should help an audience understand why a person is there and what they bring to the conversation. It should not reduce them to the most emotional part of their biography.

Ask speakers how they would like to be introduced. Use the biography they have provided rather than assembling a more dramatic version from things you have heard or read. Someone may choose to discuss deeply personal experiences during their presentation, but they should have room to introduce those experiences in their own way.

The same courtesy belongs in workplaces and everyday relationships. Instead of reaching automatically for the story you always tell about someone, ask what they are working on, what interests them or what they would like others to know. You may discover that the most interesting thing about them is something you have not heard yet.

Make room for the person who is here now

One of the reasons I speak is to challenge the assumptions that limit how we see people. That includes assumptions about disability, resilience, success and what a person’s future should look like because of their past. I want audiences to consider not only the stories they tell about themselves, but also the space they give other people to change.

Think about the people you know well. When did you last ask them a question without assuming you already knew the answer? When did you last let them surprise you? Sometimes a meaningful act of respect is allowing someone to introduce themselves again, without interrupting to explain who they used to be.

Through Justine Martin Speaker, I bring lived experience and practical insight to conversations about resilience, disability and possibility. To bring these conversations to your next conference, workplace event or community gathering, contact Justine Martin Speaker to discuss your audience and what you would like them to take away.