Keeping It Real (While Keeping Your Sanity)

Are you feeling exposed?

Being an online business owner can leave you feeling pretty exposed. On Day 4 of our Visibility Challenge for Introverts, we want to talk about how we maintain an authentic, intimate connection with our readers without feeling overly transparent or uncomfortable.

It’s interesting to note that we serve a lot of introverts, but many of you also have a high Intimacy value in The Voice Bureau’s Voice Values paradigm—in fact, we would guess that that’s the most frequent Voice Value among our clients. So while you’re feeling withdrawn, you’re still longing for understanding and connection. Guess what? There’s absolutely nothing contradictory about that! Every human wants to find authentic connection; the key lies in the nature of that connection. As introverts, we might be more inclined to connect one-on-one, rather than making ourselves known in a group. Unfortunately, (as we’ve all heard repeatedly) this isn’t always the most effective way to build a business.

Here’s the thing: intimacy is not another word for transparency, and the difference between the two is primarily about setting boundaries. If you want to build your business, you’re going to need to communicate with more than one person at a time, and if you want to do that consistently (and you do!), it has to be something that feels comfortable to you.

Decide right now what feels off-limits. Are you comfortable talking about your health? Your relationships? Your history? Keep in mind that you need to give something of yourself if you want to be fully present and authentic in your business, but it’s up to you what sort of access you give to your personal life. Being a real human within your business helps forge authentic connections, rather than sterile transactions. And being authentic means never having to worry that someone is going to discover that your public persona and your personal persona don’t occupy the same address.

At Dossier, we share certain things we love—songs that have a deep meaning to us or gifts we would love to give or receive. We’re happy to offer a meaningful quote or recommend a great book or something particularly delicious we’ve eaten recently. And we’ll even share broad strokes of our lives—but never personal details that aren’t ours to share, or names of people who didn’t choose to be put up for public consumption.

As introverts, it feels natural to us to hold back, but when we find a comfortable topic that we love, that connection comes freely and willingly. It’s not rambling to fill the silence, it’s sharing things that matter to us in a way that’s intentional and measured and real. It’s listening to what our readers and clients have to say, and engaging in an actual conversation. It’s not oversharing or making ourselves feel uncomfortable. Because that’s the opposite of what we want.

 

If you need help figuring out how to craft a brand conversation and content strategy that feels like you without feeling like you’re on display, we can help with that. Our discounted content strategy rates run through the end of this Visibility Challenge, to help support you in being more present—minus the stress.