The Tricks To Bragging At Work Without Sounding Arrogant
It’s possible to talk about your accomplishments without coming off as an arrogant show-off.
My old boss at Apple would always tell me to speak up about my accomplishments, because in the corporate world, no one is going to do it for you (they’d rather change the narrative to show how they played the primary role). His observation, sadly, is usually correct, which is why I started acting on his advice. The only problem was, he didn’t tell me how to talk about my accomplishments without sounding arrogant. And if there’s one type of person people loathe more than any other, it’s blatant braggarts.
“Bragging, whether in the form of self-promotion or through humblebrag, often backfires. But people do not seem to understand this is the case,” says Francesca Gino, a behavioral scientist and Harvard Business School professor, and author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life. “Braggarts overestimate how much their bragging makes others see them positively, and they underestimate how much it triggers negative reactions and emotions.”
It’s because of this misunderstanding, according to Gino, that bragging often has the opposite of our intended effect. This leads others to…
