What are your vices?

    Mine include coffee, chocolate and buying more reading material than I can read.

    Those closest to me could I’m sure add to the above list!

    Anyway, one night recently, after coffee & chocolates, I went to the reading pile, pulled out an issue of “Success” magazine, and read an interview with a branding specialist.

    Typically with interviews it’s the answers that are (hopefully) interesting.

    With this interview though, it was one of the questions that caught my attention.  Here’s what the interviewer asked:

    “So if people are going to put themselves out there, be authentic and risk their true selves turning off the people who aren’t in their intended audience, what’s the remedy when that eventually happens?” 

    The question really surprised me.

    You’re putting yourself out there.

    You’re being authentic.

    You’re turning off people who are NOT in your intended audience.

    Where’s the problem?

    I was hoping that the interviewee would respond along the lines of “Why is a remedy needed?

    His answer disappointed me.  He suggested offering a full and unconditional apology.

    I added this comment:

    “Why is a remedy needed?  If people are behaving with authenticity & integrity, and have a clear view of their target market, so what if that turns off their non-intended market?”

    Are you clear on who your target market is?  “Crystal” as Tom Cruise once said to Jack Nicholson?

    If you have that clarity, and if you put yourself “out there“, I can guarantee you something:

    You will repel some people.  It’s inevitable.  But are they the type of people whom you’d like to work with anyway?

    Perhaps you’d be more popular if you were less forthright and if you apologised for things where you neither did nor intended to do wrong.  But do you want that sort of popularity?  Would you be proud of that person?

Your business.  Your rules.  And it’s you who looks in your mirror – no one else.