Using pressure's potency to your advantage
When pressure wants you to lie flat, it’s time to find the people who stand up for ideas and to protect your belief in optimism.
Optimism is thin on the ground these days. We’re the second year in on inflation, staring down some very weird political changes.
The pressure can scare you into activity. But how that activity plays out can be very different.
It can make you want to do whatever the herd is doing. Doing instead of activating, shuffling instead of momentum.
This is risk-aversion at its finest. We follow what everyone else does in marketing, advertising, community strategy, and cling tightly to roadmaps.
We think we’re making progress. We’re certainly sweating from the labour. But what we’re really manufacturing is fluffy kind of doing, an unthinking ritual, where our confidence used to be.
Step one, step two, step three…surely, they wouldn’t have created this roadmap if it didn’t lead somewhere, dammit!
Others run like Beaker after one too many sherbet sticks. Forever in motion, arms flailing. A bit here, a bit there, it’s an art piece about the power of panic.
Many others simply freeze, unable to take big swings. Rabbits in the business headlights, hoping the crisis disappears eventually.
A small few see it as alchemy. A spark inside the medicine. There is magic under the disruption. A different kind of recipe. Nobody will come to save you, so you may as well get to it.
The beauty of viewing pressure as your own personal mixology is:
· You can add a dash of what you already know
· Get curious about new ingredients
· Try things complacency and safety usually rule out
· Pull it together and see what you end up with
Businesspeople who get good at leveraging pressure:
· Let go of “I can’t do another social media platform, soz” benefit as an early adopter
· Learn and reinvent the rules of marketing or sales to create change
· Embrace change and value the people who help make change possible
· Measure what matters on a change level rather than get caught up in vanity metrics
· Change their relationship with failure
If you don’t have enough courage of your own to rise above the pressure, look to other business owners and seek the right kind of validation from optimistic companions on LinkedIn, via networking events, and exploring new digital spaces like Substack or Bluesky.
Image: Cloudy skies over Wollongong. Includes title - Use pressure's potency to your advantage
How to survive the pressure you’re feeling
Pressure is not an easy thing to navigate. It hurts our mental health, amplifies problems, and often clouds our judgement when it comes to creativity and curiosity at the time we need it the most.
It can also make us difficult to deal with. Fatigue can make us say and do thoughtless things. It invites entitlement to our door.
But you can choose to flip the narrative on pressure by:
· Learning your way through it. The more we understand of the technological and habitual changes of the world, the better our planning and strategy will be
· Carving out time for experimentation. Make smaller tests early and often can help you see what is and isn’t working instead of the perfectionist “all-or-nothing” basket shoot
· Building community over pandering to algorithms. Truly likeable communities are not a poorly disguised sales funnel. It's about creating places where people can speak up and find meaning
· Engaging with curiosity instead of resistance. The more open-minded we are and the more curios we become, the more likely we are to find a solution
· Not taking yourself too seriously. Allowing yourself to pull things a part and make a change in a strategic way can be so inspiring
· Choose inspiring people. Optimistic people and their ideas are infectious. They are a rising tide that helps you surf the next wave. When was the last time you spent an hour talking through things properly with someone who gets it?