Meeting Introductions

It's yet another day of meetings.

At each of them, we tend to go around with each person introducing themselves.

And it occurs to me that the people who seem to feel most vulnerable spend the most time introducing themselves.  Not the people who have the least status, necessarily, but the people who feel the least status, if that makes sense?

A typical person, for example, might say, "I'm Bardiac and I teach deep water basketweaving in the underwater basketweaving department."

But someone who feels really vulnerable will refer to their degrees, their history with underwater basketweaving, and so on.


I feel sort of bad that these folks seem to feel so vulnerable.  I especially feel bad that they feel so vulnerable in the meeting where I think no one is likely to be condescending or snide about qualifications and such.  (My thinking may be wrong about that, of course.)  And I feel bad because the longer introduction made me think they felt more vulnerable.  (My read on that may be totally wrong, I suppose.  They may be staking a claim in this discussion that other people don't feel the need to stake, and feel totally not vulnerable in staking it.)