Do you ever find yourself curbing what you really want to say or do because you feel you might offend somebody, or because it’s what everybody else is doing? I know I do. As small business owners, we need to quit that.

I finished reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! this weekend and he made a key point about being true to our DNA. What that means is as small business owners, we pretty much are our business, and as such, we need to be ourselves. What Gary is comfortable with, I’m not comfortable with because we’re two different people. I don’t have the same preferences you do either. Authenticity is what we’re talking about.

A case in point is your preferred method for interacting with your community online. Gary likes to do video and be vibrant because that’s in his DNA. I’m most comfortable with writing because that’s in my DNA, although I’ve not tried video and may do it in the future. Others are more comfortable interacting with their community by audio. I wrote about that this morning on my company’s blog.

The real kicker is Gary’s point about people’s bullshit filters. If you aren’t being true to yourself, your community will sense that and tune you out, and that makes a ton of sense. I curse. It’s a bad habit, but I do it, and in hiding that in my online interactions I’m not being true to myself all the time. I’m also impatient and sometimes don’t spend as much time fine tuning my writing as I should, so that may mean video or audio may be more tuned to my DNA. But enough about me. What about you?

What have you been doing which isn’t part of your DNA and true to yourself? Can you turn it around? Are you willing to turn it around?

Photo credit kyz

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