MENTAL HEALTH - A thought for the real Human challenges behind the great marketing work
Inspired by other industry pros opening up about their mental health, I want to interrupt my own monthly stream with a recap and an unpacking for new subscribers of my own journey and lessons!
When one suffers- it is often a real challenge to be able to work and deliver thoughts in a particular moment. Thoughts of creativity, of strategy, of planning or of informed analysis. Or of just everyday business and client management, or even just switching that laptop on.
Luckily feeling revived from a trip away. Writing this from Stockholm on a pleasure turned potential business weekend trip. Stockholm is a place of clarity, freshness, and owners of personal wellbeing. Higher taxes with a community focus and assumed trade-off of communal benefit for shit that actually works. All good stuff! Balance. You have a cream bun because it is absolutely OK TO DO SO. Maybe not this breakfast one I’m having right now as I scribe, a but hey ‘when in Rome’.
Quick preface on a couple of Swedish concepts I’m loving…
First one is no surprise - Fika is a very Swedish tradition where you take pause and enjoy a hot drink & snack. But it's not just about savouring a good cup of ‘kaffi’. Fika is a ritual, giving yourself a moment to have a break and socialise. Long story short - it mandates chilling and eating cake - enforced break time. Excellent. In fact if you want to read this I’d suggest getting that cinnamon bun at the ready.
Lagom is more of a rounded way of life and of balance and one which us marketeers could all learn from. More of a concept than a thing, it is loosely defined as ‘the principle of living a balanced, moderately paced, low-fuss life’. Buy a new shirt but throw/donate an old one. Fika is an example of balancing out your day.
The big one is finding the balance between hard work and healthy extra-curricular activities. Balance is a big one and many of us in the marketing and advertising industry have struggled with this since our junior days, despite often being preached to about it from leaders on panels. To restore our own balance, we need a little introspection.
Confession - My mental health, and indeed that ‘balance’, has been off
I have been on a journey for a few years and balance has never honestly been my forte. Many of you who read this/have known me for the last few years anyway will know about my burgeoning Mental Health journey. For those that do not - let me briefly bring you up to speed, after which point you can decide to ghost Front of Mind for good if you wish…
I had all the feelings. The feelings of despair, burnout, anxiety, depression, and, even at one point, suicidal thoughts. These things are interconnected, or perhaps more a compounded butterfly effect. Overwork led to burnout. Burnout was driven by Anxiety & Depression. This led to the numbness and depression, leading to some of the darkest thoughts. In a better place now thanks to a number of life choices, and especially learning to laugh at the seriousness of it all (we are only helping people sell stuff, right?) but the big area we often neglect is self awareness, and seldom listening to ourselves and our mind and bodies (which are massively linked up by the way).
As marketers and planners we can be good problem solvers and we often have to break things down. The same principles apply to studying ourselves like we would a comprehensive brief. As an example, when I break down my own brief to myself, there are 4 underlying macro-issues here which inform my activity today (some of which you may well relate to, I would love to hear which of these, if any, have impacted you too)…
Backdrop #1 - I’ve been depressed, and my Mental Health is a challenge
Touched on it above, but basically I have always been high energy, moving around jobs and sometime the world, and because of my enthusiasm and often non-quiet voice, often feeling like I didn’t fit in. On failing a previous business I went back to work in a big global media role and was a full-on gig that crippled me. I lost confidence as had to harbour a lot of shit outside of my control; I had daily breathing exercises in the cubicle and when it all came to a head with me writhing in despair on my bathroom floor vomiting and crying, I couldn’t help thinking something was wrong. I then was signed off work, was diagnosed with Anxiety & Depression. Started CBT which nullified the anxiety but left me feeling numb with something much worse - JUST depression. A couple of months into this seeming progress in the September of 2018 I was driving on the M25 and in a teary rant to my parents on the phone about how I felt so worthless, single, poor, a failure, ugly (and any other nihilistic thought imaginable), I contemplated swerving the car into a bridge and ending it all. They begged me to go to the doctors.
Next morning, my GP prescribed me with Sertraline, a punchy antidepressant. In the last 4 years I switched from Sertraline (“felt lobotomised, and neither happy or sad”) to Fluoxetine (“the opposite, no real impact just the side effects of weight gain”). My highs and lows were intense, and I took psychotherapy again in early 2020. I went on to Mirtazipine to help even off the lows (“trouble is I’m irritated all the time, the lows have to go somewhere”). As of February 2022 I am on Imipramine. a 3-a-day job, but it is the best I’ve felt for a long long time and has helped reverse weight gain. A key thing is reversing negative side effects, a sad irony of such tablets. But they work, and I will not accept stigma. Sometimes the medicine is the panacea. You’d never tell a diabetic to give up insulin and ‘take a breath and go for a long walk instead’, but that is a whole other subject.*
* I want to caveat this is personal. Different things work for different people. This is just my experience and the problem for me may be the panacea for you. I am making a point, it can be a journey of trial and error
More about this backdrop in my delayed OG ‘announcement’ in 2019 on LinkedIn, the title of which captured the reticence to share such a sentiment in a commercial environment. The response of which however, both public and private, proved the problem is at large. Industry titans eye-wateringly sliding into my DMs saying they understood. Tellingly not responding publically. Each to their own though.
I have since gone on to start a Mental Health Series over on Medium. So far a 5-parter (P 6 in draft for last 8 months, has gone on back burner since lockdown and update on a pathetic cadence, but there’s more thoughts there if you want to read).
Backdrop #2 - I’m self employed
Either the ups-and-downs befit or exacerbate my own mental health challenges, but somehow I’ve got it to work. Different projects, variety, and time carved out to recoup have been key for this to work. By no means am I saying this is the preserve of the self-employed. Long term employees wrestle with huge problems whilst freelancers remain cool as a cucumber and never had a wobble. These things do not discriminate and would be reductive to suggest otherwise.
I set up my little marketing consultancy for a few reasons, but for me personally I needed a bit of a break and its more selfish reasoning was to enable a better work:life balance as I became disillusioned by some agency processes, and was re-evaluating what success meant to me, and now I am glad I did as I feel more holistically successful despite ups and downs, especially considering what I went through.
Where the self-employed almost always do have more anxiety is the security element. Financial cashflows. The short-term sacrifices made, and do not have that guaranteed salary on the 28th. In my company, I have some retainers, NED bits and partner revenues keeping things ticking, but overall lion’s share of my business output is from project and consultancy work, going into businesses or agencies for special marketing, planning or digital initiatives. These usually manifest as a few lucrative months but can equally lead to quieter interim period(s). The ebbs and flows are what I wanted, as I set up business to enable this, and have the freedoms in-between to live, to breathe, to travel, to decompress. But there are mindset changes and considerations. These ebbs and flows are something I have become better at managing. For example, I’d take less cash out of the company for personal income when things are very good, and the quieter times appreciate this temperance.
Bottom line here, I am grateful for my business, my multitude of experiences, the places I travel to, the people I meet and the work I do, and the life I have finally curated for myself. I just have had to think differently about risk and the pressure it can bring. As many business gurus say, you are your own greatest asset and when selling your brain/a service company, you have to take care of the vessel that delivers, so that Lagom life is key. It really can be worth it though.
Backdrop #3 - I may be neurodivergent
I am yet to achieve long-awaited resolution on this as yet, but following all the steps from Backdrop 1, and revisiting the early 2020 counselling, my therapist suggested if I had considered a certain condition, and looking into it more, it felt like she had me bang-to-rights. Alas, a psychiatrist is currently reviewing my extremely busy and exhausting head for a potential diagnosis of a mental health condition. Either way, I have unanswered questions and need some kind of coping mechanism/framework, and clarity on my inner workings. Never before have I struggled to relax as much in the evening and switch off. I feel the ‘everything-ness’ weight on my shoulders daily and have had to really learn and unlearn things to help things balance out. I cannot add much more on this right now, but it is a consideration for sure and adds to the complexity of a human that tries to deliver the work.
Backdrop #4 - My career journey has not been typical
Well nothing ever is really. But my career, even by my own fluid standards, is mad. Even my degree. I have not followed the typical marketing expert BSc in Business Management or Marketing Management playbook, and for years I felt like an imposter, but now I realise that the contrasts of my career have probably made be better in many ways. After a reasonable education in an East Midlands Comprehensive School, and a Saturday job increasing Advantage Card redemptions on health & beauty purchases, I did Geography for goodness sake as was not sure what I wanted to do, but I liked the idea of field trips, meeting girls and overseas travel.
My first job after university was in a large data company, that got me into demographics and regional segmentation, a counterpoint from my geography days, and started in sales. I then worked in a global telecoms business in the sales and marketing function, and due to that success then got jobs in media and ad-space sales, including magazines for Colleges and cinemas, became a Sales Director at 27 and Global head of partnerships in a lead gen (affiliate) businesses. After a couple of failed businesses I spent time in Agency trading desks (programmatic advertising), then digital leadership in agency (paid search, social) and graduated to direct response (e.g DRTV) to wider full funnel (traditional ad planning) advertising thanks to agency leadership roles. I was a marketing agency late bloomer, and my learning was kind of ‘bottom-up’ if we are thinking in terms of funnels, but the experiences working with and selling in strategies by channel I now realise have helped me. I think my ability to collaborate with vendors was improved by understanding their workings. As well as my recent certifications, accolades such as FCIM and thirst for training and development.
But for years, despite these experiences, I’ve still felt occasionally a little askew when I am surrounded by the classically trained, privileged marketing folk. On having interviews I often felt shamed by my unconventional route and my multiple jobs, but luckily I now have a business by design that celebrates diversity of input and duration, with the majority of our engagements on the 6-9 month stretch. Our paths may be different, but when we come together we explode with insights and good work. What matters is output as much as input; I’ve presented work on 5 continents and in many cases had to lead a room of Cambridge and Stanford graduates, so I know my 2:2 at Bath Spa must have kickstarted something half decent.
As a footnote here, the Marketing & Advertising Industry need to do a better job of embracing different people of different socio-economic backgrounds, career choices, neurodiversity, colour, race, age and more, we are the most elitist of industries. We also have a toxic leadership problem; I spoke with an amazing woman and friend who has experienced sexual harassment and is now a coach and has further had some toxic bosses that impacted her mental health, but she has turned it to good. I will keep her identity quiet but these are the people to draw inspiration from. This is where the alchemy of good work comes from.
People like us who have broken and repaired again. I love the Japanese word concept Kintsugi, where broken ceramics are put back together with a golden ceramic lining the old hairline cracks, making it more beautiful and valuable than before. I think about this analogy a lot, even though I’m no beautiful plate or anything.
To close - and to remember - marketing is a Human to Human discipline
So there you are, my backdrops shared. A combination of personal mental health challenges, a potential diagnoses, my masochistic self-employment situation and awareness of my atypical past can all lay heavy on the human delivering the work. Again would love to talk to anyone who has been through any of these. The big thing though is here and in the title, WE ARE HUMANS DELIVERING. We all have a richness of perspectives and stories.
We are not proven performance metrics. We don’t fit on an IPA graph or are 60:40 or 80:20. We oscillate by day. We are not algorithms to game nor consistent cells on a spreadsheet.
We’re all human, and as I wrote in August newsletter re briefing process:
Never forget - This is a human to human discipline, with humans signing off work by humans to advertise to other humans. A glorious chain of erratic links. So please, just talk!
Writing this from Stockholm, and having just talked and shared an overpriced cocktail with another human, one of the finest business strategy voices our world has seen by the way in JP Castlin. I’ve come away feeling - as well as the Bourbons in the exquisite Old Fashioneds - like there’s loads I can learn on complexity strategy, despite being what I thought was a solid strategist myself. But I love this. I love the constant idea of us becoming better in all we do and thanks to my consultancy I get to meet some fine folk who help add another feather to my marketing general cap. Pastor Ralph W. Sockman wrote so perfectly
'The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder’
Whilst on this curiosity island that I hope continues to grow, I have in recent months got into Twitter more and connected with a wider marketing community I never realised I wanted to be a part of. That was until I shared a personal challenge and seen accomplished fellow marketeers like John Lyons, Lisl McDonald, Thom James and Richard Huntington share their journeys. I realised I really am not alone, as well as many others who have offered support and shared their own mini bios of experience. Community and connection definitely make me better and well-rounded professionally, and personally by design because I live alone and I’m self-employed, I often resort back to my comfort bubble of me, and although 90% of the time I enjoy that solace, 100% is unhealthy. Connectivity is what makes the world go around, and a problem shared is often a problem up-to-and-including halved. Whether you are struggling, or trying to get a great plan over the line, another mind that might be feeling better than you that very minute can be a helping hand.
If you take anything away from this, just take one of a couple of things I can now guarantee. Firstly, despite the challenges, things DO get better. You find your way, we always do. Second - human connection and curiosity keeps us grounded - and actually accepting we will not always have all the answers and accepting what the Stoics said of Amor Fati, or ‘lover of fate’, vastly improves your mental wellbeing. Will talk more about the Stoics and their philosophical principles and how they can apply to marketing in a another letter (maybe)! Meanwhile, enjoy the journey. Marketing is about having a plan, seeing how things go, and responding accordingly. Much like life. Listen to yourself. Look after yourself. We’re all we’ve got.
Safe flight,
SA x
PS. I hope you are getting a semblance of value out of this, and my open book above hasn’t put you off for life. In fact, I am usually a lot more marketing discipline focussed. If so, and you think any other marketeer or business owner would too, feel free to share/forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe. Also, follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter or my company page. Or not. Thanks