How To Be The Real YOU In A Really Fake World

Blog > How To Be The Real YOU In A Really Fake World

We live in a world of a lot of opinions. We also live in a world of a lot of truths and a lot of untruths at our fingertips. The internet offers a whole slew of information and misinformation and it can be a tough job to weed out the real from the fake. 

This is also true when buying courses online. If you go to a college, you assume that the school would vet all the professors, but if you’re buying a course from the internet, how do you know it’s for real? 

More importantly, how can you show your potential customers that your courses are legitimate? One of the ways to legitimize your courses is to be transparent and remain your genuine self. How do you do this when you might feel like a bit of a fraud? Well, read on.

Be Relatable

You might try to be nothing but a positive influence in people’s lives, and this might be for noble reasons. You might want to be encouraging all the time. And honestly, no one wants to spend time around a downer. However, you can share your struggles along with your positivity, and this will only enrich your content. 

If you pretend to have a perfect life, people may like to look at it for a while, but then they will get discouraged because you don’t have the same kind of challenges that they do. They will think they have nothing to learn from you. Or they will get stuck in this rut of thinking they could do what you do “if…” They would always have something holding them back. They will always have a reason to fail because you aren’t being transparent.

It is your challenges, that you’ve overcome or that you currently struggle with, that makes you the influential person that you are–not just your successes.

Privacy

Now, this isn’t to say that you need to share all your hardships. Some things can be kept private. I have found that a good thing to do before you start your course is to decide what parts of your life are available and what parts are off-limits. 

Do you want to share that you are a parent, and is that necessary to make you relatable? 

Do you want to share problems with addictions or disabilities? 

Being transparent doesn’t mean that nothing is off-limits. It means that you are comfortable sharing the things that are pertinent to the goal of the course or blog that you are creating.

Consequences of Being Disgenuine

Of course, there are consequences to being a fake person–even if it’s just online with a bunch of strangers. 

Getting Caught

Have you ever told a little white lie? And then the lie kept growing and growing until it was out of hand. If you had just backtracked at the beginning and owned up to the lie, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but now it feels like there’s no going back. 

This is how your life would be if you tried to be anything but your genuine self. Even if your little white lie is that you are the expert in your field and you’ve never made mistakes. A lie like that would make a public mistake devastating. 

Come Off As Annoying

Have you ever had that one friend that always had everything going great all the time? It can be exhausting to be around that person and it can make you feel bad about the day-to-day problems that you face. You also might feel a disconnect from that person. 

It’s the same in your courses. You don’t have to show everything, but you should show that you are human. If you approach your course with an attitude of humility that doesn’t dip into self-depreciation, then you’ll be a pleasant person for people to spend time listening to.