Why polished content is working against you

We are absolutely overwhelmed by perfect, polished content. I’ve been saying it for years, and I’ll keep saying it until someone takes the microphone off me.

We need real human you. We need your bloopers and your ums. We definitely don’t need another perfect presenter with a ring light and nothing to say.

Why perfect doesn’t work

Nobody relates to the king. He lives a completely different life to the rest of us. So why are we all out here pretending we’ve got everything together, when really we’re just as human as everybody else?

There’s a quieter cost too. When you perform perfection at your audience, you teach them that they have to be perfect before they can start. I think that’s a genuinely heavy thing to hand someone, and most of us are doing it by accident.

If you wear a mask and pretend to be someone you’re not, the people who’d naturally be drawn to you can’t see you.

And now polish looks like AI

This part is new. Your audience uses AI tools all day, so they know what super-smooth looks like. The glossier you get, the more they wonder whether a person made it at all. I’ve written more about why that makes going live so valuable.

What I do when it goes wrong live

I leave it in. Every time. It goes wrong on my show a lot, and honestly I’m often glad it happened on air.

One of my favourites was a double forward slash. One tiny extra character in a web address broke a redirect, live, in front of everyone. I left it in. People remember that kind of thing far longer than they remember a tidy demo.

The door handle

Back in the 2020 lockdown, I literally got locked in my bedroom because the door handle fell off. Mid-live. The laptop was about to die, and I had to shout for the kids to come and rescue me and let me out.

Raw leadership. Raw leadership.

That’s what I call it, and I mean it. When you show up like that, people see what you’re really like when things go sideways, which is precisely what they need to know before they hire you.

Where the professional line actually sits

At the end of one training, which ran over because we always like to give as much as we can, my little man woke up from his morning nap and came and joined us on the call.

Having your children around at work is considered unprofessional, and as mums I think we often feel we have to put them away somewhere to look professional. I’d much rather make space for them.

Here’s where I draw the line instead:

• A baby who’s there and audible is fine.
• A baby who derails the whole call isn’t, because your client isn’t getting your attention.
• Moaning to clients about your life isn’t either, however bad the week has been.

Unprofessional means your clients aren’t getting your focus. Your life being visible is fine.

“But I’m not a big personality”

You don’t have to be. I’m not asking anyone to become loud or wild or a character. The wildest version of you might be really quite calm, and that’s brilliant.

I’ll be honest, I find “authentic” a slightly icky word. The question underneath it still matters, though. And if you spent years being told you were too silly or too loud or too much, I know showing up as yourself can feel properly frightening. That isn’t a small thing.

Not everyone will like you. There are plenty of people who don’t like my content, and that’s absolutely fine. They were never going to be the people I work with anyway.

So here’s the smallest possible start. Next time something goes wrong on camera, leave it in. That’s the whole homework.