Be yourself in business…

I’m going to start off by being brutally honest (hence the worried face in my pic!).

I haven’t written a blog post for nigh on seven months now, and that fact has been weighing on my mind for quite a while, but for some reason I’ve also felt incredibly resistant to getting it done. I wasn’t feeling the fear and doing it, if you like! I will admit that I was feeling the fear and just hiding. Getting a case of the old imposter syndrome, catching a bad dose of comparison-itis, wanting to hide under a blanket and watch repeats of Sex and the City (they have the entire box set on Sky Anytime, you know!).

Reminding myself to be visible

A few weeks ago I was attending the only local networking group I go to (and again I’ll be honest, this is mostly because I work on my own and like to go along and sit with a cuppa and chat to other grown ups), and the theme for the week was ‘What’s my Quote’. The one I came up with was the well known Oscar Wilde saying, ‘be yourself, everyone else is already taken’.

This was particular apt for me at the time, and I really should write it on a post it note and stick it on my laptop, because I’d forgotten one of the most important rules when you’re running a business – people work with people they know, like and trust! If you can’t be yourself in business, then who are you pretending to be?

I’d got myself all bogged down in despair when I looked at one of the groups I’m in on Facebook (one of the ones I don’t contribute to very often, because I’m scared I’ll say the wrong thing) and saw that a number of people were recommending a cheap and cheerful transcription company to transcribe their audio and video recordings.

I had a look at their website and saw that they are based in the US and use a big team of associates to do the work with incredibly quick turnaround times, plus only charging a dollar per audio minute.

Okay, that was a bit depressing. I know the exchange rate isn’t brilliant at the moment, but I’m a bit more expensive than that.

Then I remembered something (which reminded me that I need to become more visible again, both on here and in groups). I do all my own client work in my business. That means you can always rely on my attention to detail and my pedantic disdain of misplaced apostrophes. You can rely on me going above and beyond the call of duty to Google endlessly to find out how to spell a complicated word. I really don’t like putting an ‘inaudible’ timestamp in unless I have to! I don’t send work out to other people because I would then have to check it against my own high standards.

So effectively my USP is me!

It can be difficult to be in a situation where you actually meet your clients when you work online like I do – hence making the effort to go to networking once a week – but if I do a good job for somebody, I hope that they’ll come back for more, or even recommend me to their friends. And that they’ll do that because they feel they’ve connected with me, and not just with an anonymous and dare I say faceless company.

Thoughts? I’d love to hear yours, so please comment below, or get in touch via my Facebook page.