You’re not meryl streep – and that’s ok

Meryl Streep has appeared in nearly 100 movies. She’s been nominated for an Oscar 21 times. She’s won 3 Oscars, 4 Emmys, 9 Golden Globes, and countless other acting awards.

You’re not Meryl Streep.

Remember in high school, when all you wanted to do was fit in? To the point that – every now and then – you would change who you are.

Maybe you pretended to like baseball. Or maybe you feigned an interest in musical theater. Or maybe, like me, you took just about every science class that your high school offered. (Yes, this is a weird “trying to have friends” strategy, but damn did it work super well for me.)

But whatever you were pretending to do – do you also remember how exhausting it was? Thank god we had more energy in our teens, because these days I would not be able to keep up with all of that.

So why do it?

Plenty of people fall into this trap when it comes to marketing their business. They feel that it’s necessary to be whoever they think they need to be to attract everyone as a client.

Maybe you think you need to be chronically online, but you can’t stand gen z slang. Maybe you think you need to be anti-technology, but you love your phone. Maybe you think you need to be perfect all the time, but you’re literally a human (this is super common).

Why spend any of that limited time and effort you have on being someone you’re not?

Instead of creating a separate persona for your online presence – which, by the way, you will slip up and post something that feels disjointed from that persona and hurt your following – just be yourself.

Who you are contributes to your story. Contributes to your business’s story. Even if you consider yourself flawed, those flaws make you who you are and makes your business different from the next person’s.

In fact, if you sit with those flaws, odds are you can find a strength in them. Something about it that makes your business even stronger, even more effective, even more perfect for your clients than it would be without that aspect of yourself.

It gives you another way to build a connection with your clients (because odds are that they’re flawed too).

So ditch trying to be someone you’re not.

Be a beacon for your ideal clients. And the sooner you lean into it, the sooner they’ll find you.