Posts Tagged ‘Resistance’

What Will Happen if I Do My Marketing?

June 17th, 2010

Recently I was working with a woman, who, like the rest of us, knows she needs to market but resists doing it.

This is causing her a lot of pain. She doesn’t bring in enough work, which creates severe financial stress. It also causes her to feel bad about herself. (”I know what I need to do. Why in the *&^^&%$## don’t I do it? What’s wrong with me?”)

So I asked her, ”If you do your marketing, what will happen?”

Here’s what she said:

1. I’ll be overwhelmed with business that I can’t handle and everyone will get mad when I drop the ball.

2. Marketing will create too much work for me and I’ll collapse in exhaustion because I don’t have enough people I trust to help me when I can’t do it all myself.

3. I don’t really like this work I’m doing and I don’t want more of it.

In this client’s mind, doing the marketing would actually cause MORE pain than not doing it. To her, this seems perfectly logical.

Can you relate?

If you aren’t doing your marketing regularly, it’s time to find out why. Understanding the nature of your resistence is the key to doing your marketing.

Now that my client knows what’s driving her behavior, she’s in process finding trustworthy help and shifting her perspective about her business. Her work is not what she wants to do for the rest of her life, but rather a stepping stone to better things. She’s made the commitment to regular marketing because she knows that making this business consistently profitable is how she’ll fund her next venture.

Marketing can actually be enjoyable, especially if you use social media.

Here are the links to get you started on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. (Warning: profanity alert on the Twitter link).

But before you jump in, ask yourself the question above, and really listen to the answer.
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Your Brain on Change

April 16th, 2010

CHANGE HAPPENS

My life has changed profoundly in the last month. I moved my home and office, which together put me at the DefCon Five level of stress–right under graduating from college without a job in the middle of a deep recession.

This amount of change, even if it’s all good, produces intense disorientation in the brain. There’s a physiological reason for this feeling.

When you do anything repeatedly, your brain cells physically line up to facilitate doing that thing. The cells make it easier and faster for you to do it. This is true if whether you’re setting aside 90 minutes every morning to do your marketing activities or shooting heroin. Your brain doesn’t care. (Well, it probably cares right before you die of an overdose, if you’ve decided to make using heroin the habit that your brain is facilitating for you.) But in general, it doesn’t care. Your brain cells’ job is to make the things you do over and over, easier to do each time.

Why the brain rebels

Addiction and Grace by Gerald May offers a detailed and fascinating explanation of brain physiology and changes that result from giving up an addiction. Few changes are more radical than kicking drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc.

When you stop doing something you’ve done for a long time, your brain rebels. It sends SOS alerts like, “Hey, this is wrong. What are you doing? Where are we? Why did you do that? We haven’t done that before. This feels weird.”

Your brain rebels even when the change you’ve made is positive. In my case, the changes are positive. And yet I still carry this vague sense of unease, as if something’s wrong and I’m not sure what.

What does this mean for business?

When you change something, especially something big, such as marketing program or a product line, even if all evidence says the change is beneficial, you’ll still feel a sense of unease. This is your brain on change.

For people who rely on their intuition, the vague sense of unease can mislead you into thinking you’ve made the wrong change, when all you’re experiencing is change malaise.

There is enough fear and resistance to go around already. Knowing a bit about the workings of your brain can help you weather some of the feelings that arise when you make changes. We have to make changes in our businesses all the time or the market leaves us behind. At least now you know why your brain objects to change, even when it’s great for you and your customers.

The solution is patience

As so many other problems in life, the solution to fear and unease is patience. Practice your new change as much as you can, so you can retrain your brain cells as fast as possible. Be patient with your poor old brain. Remember, she’s had the rug pulled out from under her.

Have you weathered any big (or small) changes lately, that have rocked your world, or at least given you a vague sense of unease, even if the change is good? Leave a comment below.

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