Hello learners. I want to talk about authenticity and I hope you wanna listen about authenticity. And then go to the forums and talk about authenticity some more. What is it? Well, it concerns the truthfulness of origins and commitment and it's associated with sincerity. Now authenticity, in terms of your brand, and given that definition, mean that your brand should always be a truthful reflection of your values. Remember your three key words that you had to come up with for your brand? Those three words should be reflected throughout your brand. You should have chosen three words that had a lot of true meaning for you and what you want to give to the world, and those should be your guide. Now, I wanna clear up one thing that I think is important. Authenticity doesn't necessarily mean politeness. I think a lot of the time people equate the two, and that's not entirely accurate. If your authentic self is that you're super sarcastic, well that's authentic. Now, just because we've all heard kind of mean people use the excuse of that's just how it is and I'm a truth teller and if they don't like the truth, I'm just keeping it real. Well, that's super. Thanks for keeping it real. But, you also want to present your best self. Now, there are peer professionals in my field, who kind of have objections to the work that I do with reputation management, and also, probably, with branding because they see it as a form of fakeness? And as a way to cover bad things up. I, for the record, I do not teach those techniques and I do not help people do any of those things. I tend to see reputation management and managing your digital presence, which we'll get into in later modules, as a way to present your best self. In the same way that I would not want to meet someone for the first time when I was sweaty and nasty in my gardening clothes. Hello, I smell really bad right now. Nice to meet you. That's the same way that I would not want to present myself with the digital equivalent. We all want to put our best foot forward because as the saying goes, you never have a second chance to make a first impression. So I just think of it as putting your best foot forward. So again, it doesn't necessarily mean being polite. But, I would say that keep in mind, that your email is very sharable and it can live forever. I'll give you an example, out of my own life. A few years ago, earlier in my career, I was appointed to a national board. And some of the current board members apparently were not really happy about me as a choice and so expressed those feelings in an email that was supposed to go only to current board members but ended up going to the entire membership of the organization. Yes, so you can imagine probably how I felt when I opened this email and it kind of exploded in my face. It really hurt my feelings and, you know, I don't expect everybody to like me. I'm fine with that. And I'm certainly not here to dictate how people should feel about me or anything else. But I would urge you to think about how, if you're gonna email something, or you're gonna tweet something, do think about the effect that that might have on another person, and just kinda put through the filter of your three key words. Again, you wanna be authentic. And sometimes I think when we get upset or experience other negative emotions, those kind of tend to drive us. And I think if we have those three key words as speed bumps to kind of slow us down when that rush of emotion is carrying us forward and we kind of bump up against that first key word. And it slows us down a little, we bump over the second one and it slows us down a little more. And by the time you get to the third one, it's maybe slowed down your emotions enough that you can stop and think about whether or not this is authentic to you, and if you want that to become part of your digital identity. So think about that. Please go to the forums, go to Twitter, or your county's equivalent and share your thoughts about authenticity. I'd really like to know what you think about it, and what you think about how it affects your brand and any experiences that you've had with this. I hope this has been helpful.
