Going Mental

Simple Steps to Unleashing a Healthy Thought Life

by Jeremy Nulik

I want to share with you the shortcut to creating your next marketing plan. And it is a secret I feel most in the profession of communications and marketing don’t have the guts to reveal.

Go to that file folder on your machine that has your 2016 Marketing Plan. Replace the 6 with a 7. Call it good. (This is assuming you had a marketing plan, which would be a miracle for most of us, agencies included.)

The reason you could read those last few sentences and feel any form of recognition is because this is the way we live now. And leaders are constantly placed in the position of matching every challenge with a degree of emotional intelligence that drains us by the end of the day. A colleague lost a loved one to cancer. You have a big presentation in a few days. You and your spouse had an argument about the election.

While we do our best to compartmentalize, we are humans. And these forces, a daily fire, fatigue our faculties in various and sundry ways. This can look like stagnating sales, listlessness, strained relationships and marketing that is just plain unoriginal and boring.  

I realize this is a marketing column. But it is my observation that the confidence with which you can communicate ideas persuasively (marketing) is directly related to your mental health. I am not a coach or a therapist. But there are a few simple ways to attenuate your mind to dealing with the future and strategy of your organization.

Carve the time.

The sacred time is different for everyone. Generally, people have found that an hour earlier rising time is ideal, but others are night owls and the best thinking takes place starting at 11 PM. Do some A/B testing to find your optimal brain time. Your mind is less encumbered with the daily fire, and there is a natural peace or flow feeling.

Fill the pages.

My recommendation is to go old school. I hesitate to be prescriptive and say to get a journal. Get a pen and paper and write. Fill up a few pages with the ideas. It does not matter what they are at this stage. Any ideas you have about your business or personal life. Write it down. It is not for review. It is for writing.

Do it when it hurts.

You will not want to do this. You will be justified in your righteous indignation - surely a few more minutes of sleep or Netflix is deserved. It is not. What you deserve is to give your creativity and ideas the oxygen they need. Be ruthless and selfish in your pursuit of your ideas. Keep the time sacred.

Ideas will naturally emerge from a process like this within a few days. Use those ideas as a way to attain a vision that is beyond your circumstance. This is not a claim for a name-it and claim-it kind of philosophy. The insights you gather and what you accomplish will not be some form of soothsaying. However, you will be able to meet those daily fires with more confidence knowing you are on a mission to achieve something greater.

Jeremy Nulik (jeremy@bigwidesky.com) is evangelist prime at bigwidesky, a design futures agency, in St. Louis, Mo.