Signal this week from Kenzie Collins - audience psychology, brand strategist.

My brother called on Tuesday, properly annoyed. Could hear it before he said a word.

"Go on… what did they say this time?"

One word, as it turned out. He'd been at a conference all weekend, speaking on panels. A lot of industry people, some not.

The same word kept finding him from every direction.

“Just be authentic.”

"Authenticity wins."

“She’s so authentic.”

"That's so true… it all comes back to authenticity."

You have to laugh.

It was good advice once, genuinely useful. Over a decade in social media, and I, too, am done with it. Said by enough people, in enough rooms, for enough years, it has quietly become the most generic piece of advice you could offer someone.

Pretty useless, too.

You see, most people would be authentic if they could. If they didn’t feel the weight of a cold camera lens judging their every move. A looming 60-90 seconds to say or do something ground-breaking.

But plenty of us do.

The industry response? Talk to the camera like you're talking to a friend.

If it were that simple, we'd all have millions of followers.

Many of us have bored friends, lol.

That's because we confuse being authentic with being effortless.

So you’re a serial oversharer? It’s a start. But it won’t fix bad storytelling.

Great storyteller? Cool. You’re changing characters every time you press record.

Authenticity that works demands two things.

Knowing what makes you distinct… that’s unique and interesting.

Being capable of showing it everywhere. Over and over, on purpose.

You can fail at BOTH parts.

Starting with your distinction. Not everyone's distinct trait lives in the unfiltered.

Look at Victoria Beckham. What makes her distinctly Posh is not that she's stripped back and vulnerable. Quite the opposite.

She's glamorous, dry, a little untouchable. Always slightly in on her own myth.

That’s the Posh we expect, and the Posh we know.

Honesty was never her ingredient. Her fierce commitment to character was. The same character that showed up icy and unsmiling, in full glam, for decades.

The people we recognize as the most “them” are ALL doing something specific.

If it’s reached your desk, that’s not a sign they stripped back. That’s a sign they doubled down.

The most successful kind of authenticity is a curated truth. Something interesting, repeated often enough, intentionally enough, that the world can’t help but notice.

Quenlin Blackwell did a headstand on a red carpet. If you've watched her TikTok, that tracks. Some people called it pick-me. Everyone in the personal branding world called it brilliant.

So did her audience. More eyes. Same Quenlin.

That doesn’t make her an act to follow. Because, and I’ll say it again, not everyone's distinction lies in being unwaveringly unapologetic and goofy.

Performed imperfection is still a performance.

And that's why "just be authentic,” although well-intentioned, gets most of us nowhere. Fake a candid version of yourself for the camera, and the audience will spot it like they do a corporate persona.

Waffle on about everything you love, without any consistent throughline, and the best bet you have is accidentally stumbling on one. Or failing.

Authenticity doesn't work the way we've been sold.

It works because it asks you to find what's unmistakably you and be so clear about it.

Enough for your day ones to say: yep, she’s been doing that.

I’ll give you a personal example. Back in the early days of Instagram - statics and captions - almost everyone was keeping it short and snappy. Some users were so nonchalant that a single word did the trick.

Very few were punching out a Monday soliloquy.

But writing was my bread and butter, and blogs were dying. So I did it anyway. When long captions rose in popularity (and then again, with the wave of AI), someone remarked: "And you've been doing it since way back!"

Upon finding a post of mine 6+ years ago, co-founder of 1DS, Sam, said, "It was clear you took pride in your writing." Hired me the next day.

Being authentic (and good at it) does not always mean being nonchalant. For me, it meant staying chalant af in a sea of idgaf energy.

Press record, be raw, don't think about it - is stage one advice. It's the Old Game, and eventually, that belief will become your invisible enemy in all of this.

Stage two is realising that if being raw is not your natural baseline - if it’s not the way you show up in your own kitchen - then that kind of authenticity is probably not your secret sauce.

It’s someone else’s. And even they will need to recognize what’s landing, and why, to double down.

Good news is, there are so many other ways to be consistently you. We talked about this in You Don't Need to Be an Extrovert to Build a Personal Brand on The Authority Shift. It's the same argument in another shade.

We've known offline that the most extroverted people are not always the most trustworthy. Audiences can feel out a fake, too.

YouTube | Spotify | Apple

A while ago, I stopped telling clients to “be authentic” and started using the questions that actually helped me get there. Like, what's genuinely distinctive about you? And can you hold it, unbroken, from your kitchen to your camera to a stage?

That’s why they call this building a personal brand, not just “posting online.”

You can’t be something you’ve never defined.

That goes for being yourself, too.

Head of Communications, 1DS Collective

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