Being Yourself in Business: How Authenticity Removes the Hidden Bottleneck
If you walk into a board meeting, or a sales pitch, or a network event, and you find yourself doing a quick internal scan of who else is in the room, and then quietly adjusting your tone, your posture, the way you sit, the way you speak — to be “the version of you” that fits this particular room — please read this carefully.
You’re paying a tax. It’s invisible. It’s enormous. And it is, in the most direct way, why you are tired by Wednesday lunchtime.
Being yourself in business isn’t a personal-development slogan. It is an operational efficiency that the founders who scale past £10m all eventually crack. The ones who don’t, plateau. And the plateau is shaped exactly like the gap between who they actually are and who they keep performing as.
This week’s podcast guest is Sara Davies. MBE. Dragon. Founder of Crafter’s Companion. She has scaled, plateaued, hit £40m, written two books, had two children, sat next to Deborah Meaden on national television, and bought her own business back out of administration through a turnaround. She is one of the most candid voices on what authenticity actually buys you in business.
And what it costs you not to have it.
The hidden tax you pay every meeting
In the episode, Sara talks about the years before Dragon’s Den, in her twenties, when she would walk into any board or steering group she’d talked her way onto, and immediately ask herself, “who do I need to be to earn my seat at this table?”
She would scan everyone else in the room. Read what kind of person they were. Then modify her behaviour to fit. Different room, different Sara.
Her husband once said, “I don’t know which version of you is the real you. There are so many versions, I don’t know which one to back.”
That is the line that hit me. Because if your husband can’t tell which version of you is real, your team can’t either. Your clients can’t either. Your future self can’t either. You are running half a dozen parallel performances, all of them effortful, all of them slightly off, none of them durable.
That’s the tax. And every owner I’ve coached over the last decade pays it, in some corner of their business, until they catch themselves.
The moment Sara stopped paying the tax (and what it unlocked)
The catalyst was Dragon’s Den. They wanted her. The exec producer rang her on the train down to a screen test and said, “Sara — I think you could be right for it. The only thing is, you’re a bit nice. We need you to be a bit more dragon-like.”
Sara wrestled with it the entire journey. And by the time she walked into the offices in King’s Cross, she had made the decision. If I sit in that den and I’m not me, then whoever I am in that room is who has the job. And then I have to keep being that person for the next six years.
She walked in and was herself. Open body language. Legs crossed. Slightly colloquial. And at the end she looked into the camera that would carry her audition to the head of the BBC and said, “I’m aware I’m very different to all the dragons you’ve recruited before me. This might not be right. But if you do hire me, this is the version you’re going to get, and you need to be okay with that.”
They went away for weeks. They came back and said yes.
And what got unlocked in Sara from that moment is, in her own words, a domino effect. She found her style — the purple spotty dress, not the structured suits. She commissioned a 30-page brand document that articulated who she actually was. She started running her own businesses by that document. She set a five-year BHAG. She ticked it off in 18 months.
None of it was possible while the bandwidth was being eaten by the performance.
Being yourself in business is an operations decision, not a personality one
Here is the bit I want you to take into Monday morning.
You think authenticity is a soft topic. It’s a hard operations topic. Let me show you the maths.
Every meeting where you’re performing a version of yourself takes — conservatively — 30% more bandwidth than a meeting where you’re just being yourself. You’re running two processes in parallel. The actual conversation, and the meta-conversation about how you’re coming across. The meta-conversation is exhausting. It is invisible to everyone but you. And it compounds.
By the end of a day with four “performed” meetings, you have spent the bandwidth of six honest ones. You have nothing left for the decisions only you can make. You are short with the team. You snap at home. You can’t write the strategy doc because there’s nothing left in the tank.
You are the bottleneck on your own business, and the thing using all your bandwidth isn’t the work. It’s the performance tax.
This is the actual operational case for being yourself in business. It isn’t about confidence. It isn’t about self-acceptance. It’s about reclaiming the 30% of you that’s currently being burned to maintain a performance no one actually asked for.
The thing Sara does that most owners don’t
The other piece I want to give you is from Sara’s leadership work. She has a phrase she uses constantly. “Every conversation, I’m always overthinking the other side of the conversation.”
That isn’t anxiety. That is empathy as an operating discipline. She is asking, every time — what is going on for the other person right now, and what are they bringing to this room that I need to know?
It allows her to give the kind of feedback most owners can’t. She quotes Kim Scott’s radical candor framework. She used to do, in her own words, “the shit sandwich — a wafer-thin slice of feedback ham inside an enormous Stottie bread of fluff.” Her coach made her stop. “Just deliver the steak,” she was told. “Lose the pita.”
That’s only possible because the empathy is already there. People will take direct feedback from someone they trust loves them. They won’t take it from someone who’s performing care while delivering judgment.
Authenticity is what makes radical candor land. Performance is what makes it feel cold.
What this looks like for you this week
Three small things.
First — at your next meeting, notice how much of the meeting you spend running the meta-process. Adjusting tone. Checking how you’re coming across. Worrying about who you need to be in the room. Just notice. Don’t try to fix it. The noticing is the start.
Second — pick one room where you are habitually performing rather than being. Maybe it’s the board meeting. Maybe it’s the client review. Maybe it’s the partner call. Decide that the next time, you will just show up as yourself. No scan. No adjustment. Whatever happens, happens.
Third — borrow Sara’s question. “What’s going on for the other person in this conversation, that I need to know about, that they might not have told me?” Ask it before you open your mouth. Once a day. For a week.
(If you want a structured way to spot the corners of your business where the performance tax is highest, my Upgrade Audit is one focused session that will surface them.)
Sara’s line, by the end of the episode, was this. “It is so much less exhausting, always just being yourself.”
That’s the maths. That’s the operations case. That’s why being yourself in business is the highest-leverage bandwidth recovery you can do this quarter. Stop being the bottleneck on yourself. The version of you that you’re hiding is the one your business actually needs at the table.
Sara Davies is the guest on this week’s ActionCOACH Podcast.
Want a 5-minute honest read on which corner of your business is most tax-heavy from performing? Take the Score Card Quiz.