I don’t mean to spoil things here, but there are a few ways many of us are doing it wrong when it comes to business online. We…

…yell TOO BUSY! every time someone writes us an email that’s longer than 2 sentences and then delay responding for daaaaaaays.

…wrap ourselves up in how others are doing it (SHE HAS THIS WHOLE LAUNCH THING DOWN PAT).

…join every Facebook Group under the sun and then never introduce ourselves in a solid 78% of them.

…prioritize things like obsessively checking our inboxes, refreshing our Twitter feed, or finding that perfect custom photo filter that doesn’t quite look like it’s filtered at all, thankyouverymuch.

We essentially forget to be what we were born to be. Entrepreneurs? No.

Humans.

Remember: you’re a human being, you aren’t a human doing. You aren’t DOING business, you’re BEING in business. You, every single bit of you and all that comes with your you-ness, makes up the beautiful wonder that IS your business.

valgeisler.com without Val Geisler would just be .com.

There’s a human behind every single computer screen out there. That means that every email that hits your inbox, every comment in a Facebook Group, every carefully crafted launch series, every passionate/over-said/well-written/tired/glowing piece of content published to these vast interwebs… there’s a human behind each keystroke.

We forget, you see, huddled behind our laptops in our home offices and kitchens and coffee shops. We fail to remember that the Internet was made for and is filled by actual human beings, just being their full human selves.

You want to run a wildly successful business online (or anywhere else for that matter)?

Be human.

Think about what it took for someone to reach out to you, to listen to every podcast episode you’ve put out there, to read your blog posts and then email you to say hi. What did it take when you did the same thing for someone you admire?

Guts, that’s what. Actual human guts.

Yes, there will always be the emails/tweets/pitches that are pure garbage written by Internet trolls (formerly known as humans but too far gone for the rest of us to try to manage) and you know (you KNOW) when those show up. But the rest of them? You can still help. You can still show them that being human wins time and time again.

Look, this fast-paced world can have us all forgetting that simple mantra learned in grade school: Kill ‘em with kindness.

You wanna kill it in business? Kill ‘em with kindness.

Be human (not a doormat, ever) and just be kind. That’s truly all it takes. The business of your dreams is in your hands. How will you treat it?

Note: the above applies to yourself too. Mostly I wrote this note for myself, but feel free to adapt it to your life and start being a little more kind to that human at the end of your nose: you.