Here’s How to Nail Authenticity in the Workplace

Hey, Happy Monday. It’s John Garrett coming to you with another episode of Green Apple Slices. I’m going to bring her right in, so she doesn’t hang-up. Rachel Fisch, everybody.

Rachel: Hey, John. How are you doing this week?

John: Doing great. Every Monday, we always talk through an article that we find online. This one, I thought it was pretty good. It was campaignlives.com which I never heard of, but the article was great.

Rachel: These random online magazines are just popping up all over the place.

John: Pretty much, pretty much. An article by Rob Davis, Here’s How to Nail Authenticity in the Workplace. This especially struck accord because just a couple of weeks ago, on the Wednesday episodes, I talk with Blake Oliver. I believe one of his quotes was how people are just starving for authenticity in the world.

Rachel: Absolutely.

John: But especially in the workplace. I love the quote here that they have from Groucho Marx that starts out with authenticity as the most important thing, once you learn the fake that, you’re set.

Rachel: At first, when I read it, I’m like, yeah, it is the most important thing. Once you learn to fake that. What? Wait a minute. This isn’t how it was supposed to work. I think I know a lot of people who thinks that’s how it works. The funny thing about authenticity is that the more you try to fake it, or the more try to be genuine, the less genuine you are, and the less authentic you are. I certainly saw this in practicing life where — anyway, there’s a lot of that going on. I think Blake is absolutely right. Good job, Blake.

John: Yeah. No, I mean exactly. It’s not common unfortunately just that authenticity. The thing is that in this work environment, it’s not optional anymore. I mean people aren’t going to put up with it. They could see right through it and they’re not going to do it which I think is fantastic.

Rachel: The thing about you as a professional, we’ve talked about your hobbies and we’ve talked about your identity outside of work is that all of these things are classically you and all of these things can be built on or leveraged in a way that other people in your industry or in your own company even honestly can’t compete with because there are qualities you have that other people simply don’t have. This was actually something that I realized recently. We’re having an “aha” moment here a little bit.

John: Look out.

Rachel: When I sit and think about what a differentiator is in the area that I’m working in, part of that is actually me. What do I personally have that I can bring to the table that nobody else at any other company can bring to the table? I’ve really started to dig to what some of those are and I’m really excited about some of the projects that are coming out of all of that. It’s a really powerful thing to realize it and start to leverage and get advantage of professionally.

John: Right, no. That’s awesome to hear. In the article, it talks about it and so many of us do this is subconsciously for some reason professionalism just takes a hold of us and we have our work persona and then our rest of our life persona and that’s exhausting. I mean it’s absolutely exhausting. The reason why we do that it says is we want to fit in or we want to soften bad news or something like that. If you’re not feeling that or if you don’t think it’s a good idea, you should be okay to say that. We’re all different and we all bring such different talents to the workplace and different points of view that if you don’t encourage everyone to share that, then you’re really short changing everyone involved.

Rachel: Absolutely.

John: The co-workers, the clients, I mean everything. It reminds me actually just recently, I went to a concert here in Denver, in one of the people before him is Gavin James and he’s got a big song, Hearts of Fire that everyone’s heard over the radio. But he has another song called Boxes and it was such a great song and I put it on a Facebook group page as well. But it talked about basically we’re all different underneath. On the surface, everyone looks like there the same. We all have a CPA or we’re chartered accountants or we’re lawyers or whatever certifications. But if you’d peel back that layer underneath is so much cool stuff going on that. That’s where that authenticity comes from. I think it’s great.

Rachel: For sure. I like that there’s a one chunk in this article that talks about acknowledging and embracing the differences. If you see somebody being successful at being a hard ass and you also try to be a hard ass, it probably wouldn’t be as successful because that’s not who are naturally. That can go with any other type of persona that people are or outputs from different people is that it needs, it really needs to be authentically you in order to be successful because then everybody knows you’re not trying to fake it. You’re just trying to be who you are.

John: Exactly like me trying to be funny. I mean so fake —

Rachel: Exactly.

John: Just trying so hard.

Rachel: Stop trying, John.

John: I mean that’s exactly what it is. It’s great. You can got greenapplepodcast.com. You can click the link there. You can see the whole article. Don’t forget to hit subscribe while you’re listening and you could follow on Twitter at GreenApplePod if you want and FischBooks and RecoveringCPA or all the Twitter handles. So don’t be fake out there.

Rachel: Be authentic.

John: Yeah. Be authentic, have the confidence to do that. It worked for Rachel. It can work for you too. But there we go, everybody. I hope everyone has a great week and thanks for Rachel and we’ll talk to you next week.

Rachel: Yeah. Talk to you later, John.