Tag: fear

The most important moment

FabrizioLeave a comment

There is a time, in every marketing story, when the things you are working on do not deliver the expected results. Perhaps you have overpromised, perhaps the campaign is not effective as you imagined, perhaps a pandemic unexpectedly changed the rules of the game, perhaps your team is not as good as it should be, perhaps your leadership is not as good as it should be. One way or the other, pressure mounts, your job is on the line, your team is on the line, and people around you start to question everything you say.

I believe this is the single most important moment.

Because what is easy to do in such cases is to start blurring the boundaries between urgent and important, following shiny objects that can deliver short term results, draining your team to exhaustion and demotivation, putting more weight on opinions and less on facts, limit communication to a restricted circle of trusted people.

And the difficult thing to do is stay the course, spread your message wide, understand what is happening and involving people in finding solutions, expand beyond your team to tap into new knowledge, measure, defuse the situation, learn from the whole process and repeat.

Nobody forces you one way or the other. It is a choice.

Defuse

Fabrizio1 Comment

Caught in the heat of an argument, the challenge is to find the lucidity to defuse. Do that while you are in a position of power, and you will have made real progress.

Going head against head, second guessing, paying back, raising your voice, smashing and controlling. Those are short-lived strategies that will just feed into the next argument.

What is strength?

Ready

FabrizioLeave a comment

When a crisis hits, the human tendency is to focus on the crisis itself. Finding ways to mitigate it, get past it, sometimes leverage it.

But if you have a system, a strategy, a story you have built throughout the years, the focus should not be on the crisis. How does the system/strategy/story changes? What can you keep, what do you have to put on hold, what will you add? What can you do today that serves it and how will the crisis enhance all of this?

When you take this longer term approach, you’ll be ready to go once the crisis is over (instead of depleted of energy). It takes time, and it’s worth it.

Above yourself

Fabrizio1 Comment

Being a parent is not so much about raising your kids as it is about rising above yourself.

Kids do not comply, they rarely listen, and when they do it’s mainly to make sure they remember what you said when they can use it against you. And so, trying to make them fit, to make them adjust, to change them is not only futile. It is counterproductive.

The only way you can be a decent parent is by looking within yourself and get a hang of all the things that stand in the way.

If there’s a behaviour that makes you go mad and shout, flag it and work on it. If there are some things you really like to do with your kids, and some things you really don’t like to do with them, notice that soon, and be anyway prepared to yield more often than not. If there are some days in which you’d just like to be left alone, first forget about it, then make sure you can be aware of that, so that you will express it with words rather than with shitty reactions. If there are occasions where you screwed up, say so, and also say you are sorry.

You are the only one who can change this.

P.S.: this is certainly valid also when you are not in a parenting situation.

Jigsaw puzzles

FabrizioLeave a comment

The pain that we feel, the fear that stops us, the worry that keeps us up.

They rarely go away for good. They are hardwired into our brains and they tend to come back as the circumstances around us shift towards something we have already experienced in the past. Somebody who hurt us, a sudden scare for our wellbeing, an highly anticipated event.

We must be happy when we manage to put them in their place.

Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We cannot lose any of them, and yet as we progress, their relevance diminishes in front of the full picture.