Tag: fear

The two options

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Are you building thought leadership or are you looking for leads?

It might seem like it’s just a marketing question, but it is actually much more than that.

Are you establishing deep connections or are you greeting everybody and move on?

Are you here to make a change or to share your numbers?

Are you interested in telling a story or in surfacing shortcuts?

Are you creating or copy-pasting?

And the one that I personally prefer.

Are you for quality or quantity?

Certainly, the two can be simultaneously present. And yet, you can’t go all in on both. Eventually one will prevail, projecting your work in very different directions.

Also, the more you stick with one the more difficult it will be to move onto the other. But this is more true when the movement is from leads to thought leadership. So, the idea that “we are going to do quality work when X and Y will happen” is a mirage.

I bet you already knew that.

Two attributes of stories

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We are much more likely to show empathy to people who are not regularly in our life.

That’s because our partners, colleagues, bosses, friends, acquaintances, parents, kids at some point become characters in the stories we build. Stories that have two interesting attributes.

First, they are unnecessarily brutal in representing our situation. We make our stories worst than the reality is, partly because we need to motivate our ambition, partly to excuse our feelings, partly as a byproduct of the laziness of our brain. What is negative sticks, and so we are never happy, never achieved, never quite there yet.

Second, they establish an escape to our responsibilities by assigning over proportioned weight to the context in which we live. A huge part of this context are the people with whom we spend most of our time. And so, our negative status is often because of what others do, how they treat us, the opportunities they miss to recognize us, the time they suck out of our days. Why should we show empathy to those who are keeping us down? To those who always have it their way?

Stories are brutal, and they solidify over time.

Yet, they are still stories. And as such, it is in our power to change them when we realize they are roadblocks on our path.

Give yourself a reason

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What is the reason you give yourself to continue doing what you’re doing?

If it’s to make things better, to support, to spread an important message, to grow and make others grow, to change toxic habits, to repair something that is worth it. That is fantastic, and you are lucky.

If it’s to feed a habit, to continue a routine, to leverage information that no one else has, to make yourself indispensable, to add layers of complexity and titles to your business card, to keep your mind busy so that you do not have to face bigger, more painful questions, to share your opinion on things you don’t know even when not asked.

Then it is time to find new reasons.

What you need

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You don’t need another article that tells you how to get what you want to get, no other “how-to” or “five steps” guides to determine what you are going to do today.

All you need is a starting point and a destination.

In between is the journey.

Let it be your own story.

The same

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We are stuck in patterns.

We do the same things over and over again. React to the same things in the same way. Behave the same way with the very same person. Think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings, fall into the same narratives.

We do this until it becomes our reality, who we are, what we breath. And it is often self-destructive.

If only we could take a step back, point the finger at the pattern, and laugh.