How To Be Yourself In Business & Succeed
In a world where everyone is trying to outshine each other, it can be difficult to stay true to yourself and your values. Professor Adam Grant wrote that people who are perceived as “highly authentic—they know and express their genuine selves... receive significantly lower performance evaluations and are significantly less likely to get promoted into leadership roles.” So does that mean it pays to be inauthentic?
Staying authentic and true to who you are can be the key to success in the workplace. It pays to be yourself, but only if you do it in a manner that is both respectful of the people around you and beneficial for you.
As a former corporate CFO turned CFO for entrepreneurs, Bridgette Boucha has invaluable knowledge and experience in scaling her own business while staying true to herself. In fact, Bridgette firmly believes that she found great success in entrepreneurship when she let her true self shine in the workplace.
In this blog article, we will use Bridgette’s lived experiences to discuss how you can stay true to yourself in the workplace and still succeed. We'll look at tips on how to stay authentic while still being professional, as well as how staying true to yourself can help you stand out from the crowd. Finally, we'll discuss how staying authentic can lead to greater success in your career.
Let’s get into it!
In a world where it’s easy to follow the trend of the week, being different has never been more valuable. Authenticity is key in order to stand out and be successful in business. It is important to be true to yourself and embrace your unique qualities in order for you to find your people and reach your ideal version of yourself. Taking acts of authenticity can help you become more successful in business as it will help you find the right people who share similar values and goals as you do. Bridgette uses the phrase “wave your weird flag.” By this, she means to show off your truest, quirkiest self so you attract like-minded people.
When your audience (potential clients, coworkers, etc.) sees you displaying these authentic emotions and acts, it evokes trust. Trust builds relationships.
Even at work, don’t hide it. If there’s one thing Bridgette has learned in her CFO career, it’s that others’ ability to sense deception far outpaces your ability to deceive them. Some methods to avoid this kind of insincerity are:
- Put your true self out there.
- Speak and act with confidence.
- Collect role models (supervisors, women founders, bold entrepreneurs).
- Boldly follow your core values.
Choosing to be your authentic self at work is easier said than done. And how much of your true self can you show without crossing the line of being “unprofessional?”
It’s important to find balance. Creating a work persona might seem like a great way to separate work life from home life. In reality, you are creating conflicts within yourself, soon leading to stress and mental fatigue.
These conflicts will also damage your self-esteem: how are you supposed to be confident if you don’t act in accordance with your real values?
By creating an alternative version of yourself at work, you won’t be able to build meaningful relationships. No one will be able to know the real you. That’s fine if you don’t want to engage with colleagues. But as ambitious professionals, you need to know that genuine relationships are crucial to career success.
Here are Bridgette’s 5 tips for being authentic (and professional) at work.
- Build your personal brand around your core values
- Develop your listening skills
- Admit when you’re wrong
- Embrace feedback, give feedback
- Think before you act
In the US alone, around 627,000 new businesses open each year across a range of industries. And that figure is expected to grow this year. Virtually every startup is met with intense competition from the outset, especially if you are working in a nascent but potentially high-growth industry. To succeed, you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd.
The key to success? Authenticity.
Okay, we won’t sit here and say that there’s just one thing that makes a business succeed. However, Bridgette knows a thing or two about scaling a successful business and here a secret has always been authenticity.
Building authentic relationships by being your true self is arguably the best way to stand out from the crowd—while enhancing loyalty and brand advocacy.
Aside from authenticity, here are 5 tips to make you and your business stand out from the crowd:
- Survey the landscape. The first step in standing out from the crowd is understanding where your prospects are. Do prospects search for the product or service that you offer? Do they congregate somewhere? Do they share a common interest?
- Be seen where your “people” are looking. If your prospects search for what you offer, make sure that you’re seen prominently in search results. If they congregate on other websites or social media platforms, make sure you have a presence there.
- Differentiate yourself from the competition. Research your competition and assess its strengths and weaknesses. There’s nothing wrong with copying what they’re doing right.
- Capture your audience’s attention. Once you’re being seen, make sure you have a way to convert visitors into prospects. Calls-to-action enable qualified prospects to tell you that they’re interested in more information from your company.
- Connect with your customers. Anticipate their needs and exceed their expectations. In doing so, you will begin to elevate “customers” into “fans”. Fans are those customers that tell others about your company; invest in them and your business will surely stand out from the crowd.
If you’re not sold on the importance of authenticity in business– just keep reading.
To be viewed as authentic, you are honest about who you are, and what you believe in, and are true to these beliefs. It’s pretty simple really. In our over-informed, over-marketed, over-connected world, this very human quality of authenticity is being prized above all others. It creates value and benefits for businesses that are the key to growth and success at all levels. And more importantly, being inauthentic can harm your brand in equal measure.
Consider authenticity like a sliding scale. At one end, a fully authentic business, honest and transparent, true to its values and core beliefs, open and responsive to its stakeholders. But what is at the other end of the scale? An unreliable business? A business with no respect? It’s hard to imagine that this option would appeal to any business owner. And truly the space between the two ends of the scale is hardly appealing too. There really is only one option if you have a goal to launch, grow, and make a success out of a business you care about. Do it with authenticity at the forefront or spend time later wishing you had.
Through authenticity and staying true to herself, Bridgette Boucha’s soulful approach to financial strategy, professional development, and personal empowerment has helped hundreds of business owners simplify their money. By doing so, business owners can run profitable businesses while living a fuller life.
Don’t be afraid to throw the idea of your “true self” and “work self” out the window and lead with authenticity!
