Professional content can be authentic. It should be authentic. And it can also be personal (which is not the same). In a world where information is often easily available, our unique perspective can be a differentiator. It makes our content memorable and builds a relationship with our audience.
In this issue, you will find three ideas for professional content that is not only authentic but also provides a glimpse into what happens in your mind.
Something You Changed Your Mind About
Stories of evolution are generally more engaging than a description of a static condition. When evolution is personal, it is even more so.
When you write about how you changed your mind about something, you expose yourself. You are being vulnerable. You share your journey with your audience, and this brings you closer to them. Many of them might still hold the view you had before, and sharing the story of gaining new insights paves the way for them to follow in your footsteps.
Write about what made you change your mind. Share how it felt and the pushbacks you have experienced (both internally and externally). Talk about your doubts and your epiphanies. Be honest. Be real.
Something that Caught You By Surprise
We live in a chaotic world, and none of us knows everything, even when it comes to our professional domain. A perfect way to illustrate that notion of complexity is by sharing something you didn’t expect to come across.
Just like changing your mind, when you talk openly about a surprise you had, you admit you don’t know it all. Reality can surprise you just like it can anybody else. At the same time, surprises teach us and enable us to evolve. Sharing that experience with your audience will help them identify surprises in their professional lives and leverage them into an evolutionary experience.
A Failure
We all fail. There’s no reason to deny it or hide it. But apart from being natural, any failure is a growth opportunity. Often, we learn more from our failures than from our successes. Sharing that with our audience is more valuable than sharing just the bottom line, if only because it shows them how they can learn from their own failures instead of being discouraged by them.
Write about your expectations, what went wrong and how you leveraged the failure to learn something new and achieve even better results than the ones you aimed for. Don’t leave out your frustration and how you overcame it. That’s a crucial part of the story.
