Professionalism vs Personality

After a busy few weeks involving a lot of conversations with clients (and potential clients), I’ve been thinking a lot about the language we use to build relationships.

We all want to be professional when speaking to clients so we come across as trustworthy and reliable. We want them to know we’ll deliver quality results in a timely manner with no silly shenanigans or tomfoolery! But we also don’t want to sound like a corporate robot with no personality (or even worse, ai!). Sounding like an automated response isn’t likely to get your clients coming back to work with you.

So is there a perfect balance to be had between sounding professional and adding some personality to your interactions?

I’m sure there are differing opinions on the matter, but I wanted to share my experience. Having worked in many administrative and office roles, the classic ‘hope you’re well’ and ‘kind regards’ e-mails became second nature and I found them utterly boring. Eventually, I started adding a little extra to some of my emails like, ‘hope you’re enjoying the nice weather’ or ‘hope you’ve had a great weekend’. Now, this may not sound like a lot, but back then, it was the most I dared go for within that strict corporate atmosphere. Even then, I found that this left the receiver open to comment and guess what? Lots of them did! It was a small stepping stone to start a proper conversation, along with whatever accounting or data issues we were sorting. Turns out, most people get bored with sending basic emails all day.

So once I started working for myself as a voice actor, I realised I had free rein to communicate exactly how I wanted! After a little thought, I decided to be true to the kind of person I am and give potential clients an idea of what they were getting upfront. And that is a fun, bubbly gal who’s passionate, not only about giving stories a voice, but about connecting with people and building lasting relationships.

Over the years, I’ve found that almost all of the people I interact with are super responsive to how I communicate. I’m sure there may be a few people out there who like to keep things utterly professional, but actually, I think most people just respond better to something that’s honest and human. I’ve gotten to know clients by chatting about gardening & allotments, holidays, travel, food and pets. You name it, we’ve had a good ol’ chinwag about it.

Ok, maybe I’m a little biased because I have ADHD and I actually find it difficult to NOT be a little hyperactive and 100% myself, but it certainly seems to work for me and people respond positively (or they just think I’m a little crazy and are being polite 😂) but either way, I genuinely believe we get better responses from people if we’re brave enough to be more ourselves in professional environments. I’m always a total professional, but I’m also a human being and I want to enjoy my work and have fun doing it!