Nowadays, authenticity gets quite hard to attain. Many people tend to copy another person’s work, style, or tone to sound more professional and knowledgable. However, most people can easily detect inauthenticity. In other words, people can tell when you’re not being honest or truthful. Trying to put on an excellent performance while copying another person’s way of speaking or delivering a specific work or piece can do more harm to you than good.
Authenticity allows your readers, viewers, or audience to trust you and your brand. In turn, your audience can then also believe that your content is real and valuable. Today, authenticity has become a thousand times more important than impressive and perfection. That being said, it’s essential to remember that when producing content, delivering products and services, and attending to your clients or viewers’ concerns, authenticity should come first before anything.
Haven’t entirely figured out how to sound real and be authentic? Here are a couple of helpful ways to help you learn how to be more authentic with your audience:
Be Open With Your Audience
It’s very important to remember being open to your audience. If you tend to sound defensive, you might lose clients, readers, or viewers along the way. Now, the next question is: how do you become open?
Well, that’s easy. As much as possible, try to be transparent. Deliver everything that needs to be delivered either through written or spoken content. Don’t try to hide anything from your clients or viewers as they can easily detect when you’re trying to sound secretive or defensive. If worse comes to worst, you might as well consider getting a friend or a family member that could criticize your work and help you out. After all, you will really need help somewhere along the way.
Tell A Story
Including stories within your topic or content is an effective and powerful way to sound even more authentic and real in front of your audience. Think about all those times you attended presentations or conferences. Did the speaker incorporate a story that resonates with his content’s context?
However, you have to be very careful when it comes to telling your story. Don’t go overboard by putting a lot of emotion and personality into your story. Some audiences may be put off by how emotionally compelling some content or stories are, so do keep that in mind. An effective way of storytelling is thinking about past situations you’ve personally gone through before and relating it to your current situation or the content you’re trying to produce now. Studies show these kinds of content are most likely to be remembered by most people because of the story itself.
Use Humor
Never underestimate the power of amusing your audience through your sense of humor. Good humor is almost always welcome when it comes to creating content as it can lighten up a particular topic in a good and non-offensive way. Normally, people would think, “what’s so special or authentic about adding humor into your content? Everybody does that.”
Yes, a lot of people do add humor almost all the time. However, it’s up to the deliverer whether or not to add a little more touch of “you” into it. There is a fine line of difference between adding humor for the sake of humor alone and integrating humor to sound more fun and light but credible at the same time.
Be Passionate
Lastly, be passionate about your work. No work ever seems like work when you put your heart into it. In the same way, no work can ever be deemed as inauthentic if you apply passion. Passion is what’s supposed to keep you going. With passion, you can never run out of ideas. With passion, you will always have something new, educating, and innovative to share with your audience.
More than passion, you must also learn how to input valuable information for your audience effectively. Try to blend in both things you’re passionate about and things you think your audience will benefit from. Through this, no one can ever take your authenticity away.
Wrapping Up
As mentioned, authenticity has become very rare these days. Most people tend to copy other people’s ideas to sound more knowledgeable, but instead, they seem inauthentic. In this world where almost everything is available on the Internet, where you can quickly grab other people’s ideas, be that person who comes out real and original, allowing your audience to distinguish you as different from the rest.
Author’s Bio:
Edwin Deponte is a motivational writer who is also passionate about Social Marketing. He believes in others’ abilities and tends to bring out people’s hidden potentials through his words of inspirations and motivational articles.