Authenticity in Business: You Don’t Have to Become Someone Else to Succeed

Yesterday, I joined Elisa Boogaerts on the Authentically Elisa podcast for a panel conversation with three other coaches. We came from very different areas of work: business systems, conflict transformation, photography and data management, and digital accessibility.

Yet much of our conversation kept returning to one idea: authenticity.

What does it actually mean to be authentic when you’re also trying to build a business?

The Business I Want to Help People Build

When Elisa asked us to introduce ourselves and talk about who we love working with, my answer came back to something I see all the time through Wonder EA.

I work with solopreneurs and small business founders who are brilliant at what they do, but somewhere along the way, they’ve become the person doing everything in the business.

They’re serving clients, answering emails, making decisions, fixing problems, creating content, managing operations and carrying dozens of tiny details in their heads.

Often, the business is working.

But the way they are working isn’t.

My background is in people, systems and operations, so I help founders look behind the scenes of their businesses.

* Where are they carrying too much?

* What’s sitting in their head that needs to become a process?

* What are they still doing simply because they’ve always done it?

* Where would the right support make a difference?

I call my approach The Ease Equation: Systems + Support = Sustainable Success.

I especially love working with founders who don’t necessarily want to build the biggest business possible. They want a successful business, yes. But they also want a business that leaves room for family, health, creativity, relationships and everything else that makes up a life.

That distinction matters to me.

What I’m Building Next

There are a few things I’m excited about right now.

Through Wonder EA, I’m continuing my work with founders around building businesses that don’t depend on them holding everything together. I’m also doing more speaking and workshops around the Ease Equation, mental load, systems and sustainable growth.

And on the publishing side, I’m working on Voices Across Borders: Becoming Here, an anthology bringing together immigrant women’s stories of leaving, landing, belonging and becoming.

At first glance, consulting, speaking and publishing might seem like very different parts of my work.

For me, they’re connected.

A lot of what I care about comes back to the same question:

How do we create enough support and structure for people to become who they’re trying to become, without losing themselves in the process?

That question applies to the founder overwhelmed by her business.

It applies to the woman rebuilding her identity after moving countries.

And it applies to many of us trying to grow into something new while still holding on to what matters.

So, What Does Authenticity Actually Mean?

This was probably my favourite question from the panel.

For me, authenticity is when the person people meet online, the person they work with, and the person I am when nobody is watching are essentially the same person.

That doesn’t mean sharing everything.

I think we sometimes confuse authenticity with visibility or vulnerability. You can be a private person and still run a deeply authentic business.

For me, it means I don’t have to perform a version of myself because I think that’s what a business owner, consultant or speaker is supposed to look like.

I’m naturally a calm person.

For a long time, especially in business, I won