So you speak French, right?

Well say you meet a French girl. What's the first thing you tell her?

"Oh you're French? Cool. I speak French. I studied in Paris for 6 months."

Because that's how you connect with someone, right? Through similar experience. And it has the added benefit of showing off your intelligence and all that good stuff.

It soooo feels like the perfect thing to say in that moment, but consider this for a second...

What would you say if you didn't say THAT? If you kept your cool French skills (and all of your other impressive achievements) to yourself in that particular moment?

... I'm asking because your urge to impress might be so automatic that you haven't even considered that you CAN just shut up about those things.

What would happen is that you'd talk about other stuff. And if you saw each other again, she'd eventually find out that you speak French. And she'll be genuinely impressed by you... not just by the French skills.

Because it's not the French that makes you impressive, you see. It's the fact that learning French is such a small thing for you that it doesn't even occur to you to tell a French girl that you speak it.

That you're so interesting that you manage to keep people's attention WITHOUT using those obvious responses.

So people wonder what other impressive things they're yet to learn about you...

You're mysterious and exciting.

On the flip side, if you regularly talk about your achievements whenever an obvious opportunity presents itself, people will assume that they already know all the impressive things about you. Because you've told them.

You're stale fish.

Now let's be clear. I'm not saying you should deliberately withhold information about yourself from people. I'm saying you should see what it feels like to stop using it as a default reflex response, just because it's the most obvious thing to say in that situation.

Fight the urge to impress people, and challenge yourself to find another less obvious way to connect.

If you speak four languages and someone tells you they speak three... say "Oh cool, what made you want to learn three?"

Fight the urge to say, "I speak four." Just don't even tell them. Show real interest in what they're saying and forget about yourself.

This is also just a really good exercise for improving your conversation skills. Because it forces you to come up with things that aren't obvious... and constraints breed creativity... and creative conversations are the best ones ;)

And if you want learn how to connect with people deeply through conversation, check out Stop Being Boring: Flex Your Interesting Muscle. It's a free course that teaches you what to say, how to say it, and why it makes a difference.