The Prompt for the Introduction You Wish Someone Would Make About You

There is a version of you that only exists in other people's mouths.

It's the way a good friend introduces you at a party — "you two have to meet, she's the person who..." — a sentence you would never say about yourself because it would sound like bragging, or because you genuinely can't see yourself from that angle. The introduction a colleague makes when they send someone your way. The reason a former client recommends you before you've said a word. That version of you is often sharper, warmer, and more useful than anything you've ever written in a bio, and you have almost no access to it, because it happens when you're not in the room.

This is a prompt for getting into the room. It's useful whether or not you ever build a page — it will hand you language about yourself you've been unable to reach on your own. Paste it into any AI assistant and answer honestly.

The prompt

I want you to help me find the introduction I wish someone would make about me — the way a friend or colleague would describe me to a stranger they think I should meet, when I'm not there to be modest about it.

Interview me one question at a time. Don't move on until the answer is specific. I'll be vague at first; push me toward the concrete.

Start by asking me to describe the last time someone introduced or recommended me to another person. What did they say? What did they lead with?

Then work through these, one at a time:

• When people send someone my way, what problem does that person usually have?
• What's something I'm known for among people who know me well, that isn't in any bio I've written?
• Tell me about a time I helped someone and it mattered more than they expected. What did I actually do?
• What do I get asked about repeatedly — the thing people assume I'll know?
• Who is the person I most want to be introduced to right now, and what would make them lean in?

After the interview, write three versions of a spoken introduction — the kind a friend would say out loud to make someone want to meet me. Warm, specific, no résumé language. Then tell me which parts of what I said I'm underusing when I describe myself.

That's the whole thing. What comes back is usually a small shock, because it's you described from the outside — the angle you can't occupy yourself.

Why the framing does the work

Most self-description prompts ask you to describe yourself, and self-description fails in a predictable way: you either inflate or you hedge, and both produce mush. "I'm a strategic, results-driven operator" is what happens when a person tries to introduce themselves and flinches. The words go abstract precisely because you're uncomfortable being specific about your own value.

This prompt sidesteps the flinch by never asking you to describe yourself. It asks you to report — what did they say, what problem did that person have, what got asked. Reporting is easy and honest in a way self-description never is. You're not claiming you're good at something; you're recounting the time someone was glad you existed. The value comes out sideways, in the concrete, where it's actually usable.

And it targets the right artifact. A bio is a description held at arm's length. An introduction is a description meant to make someone want to talk to you — it has a purpose, an audience, a lean-in. That's a far more useful thing to have written down, because it's shaped for the moment that matters: the moment a stranger is deciding whether you're worth their time.

What to do with the answer

Read the three introductions and notice which one you'd be slightly embarrassed to have said about yourself. That one is usually the truest, because the embarrassment is just you being unaccustomed to seeing yourself described well.

Then use it where introductions actually happen. It's better bio copy than anything you'll write cold — but its real home is the front door itself. The whole reason the "friend introduction" is so much better than your bio is that a friend tailors it to the person they're introducing you to. A static bio can't do that. A page that can hold a conversation can: it can take the raw material this prompt surfaced — the problems you solve, the thing you're known for, who you're trying to meet — and make the right version of that introduction to each specific visitor, the way a friend reads the room and leads with the part that'll land.

You've been making your own introductions your whole professional life, and making them badly, because introducing yourself is a job nobody is good at. The point isn't to get better at it. The point is to capture the introduction you wish someone would make — and then let something make it for you, warmly, to the right person, when you're not in the room.

Parlei is in early access — turn the introduction you wish someone would make into the one your page makes for you.