3 Motivation Mistakes Sabotaging Your Marketing Ep.06

I’m glad to be joining you this week. I’ve had a terrible cold and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to record this for you. Luckily that has passed and I’m on the mend and I’m able to be here with you this week.

Today I wanted to go into some of the common mistakes that reluctant marketers make and using force to try to motivate themselves to do more marketing and why that often backfires. I think this comes from the idea that if I’m not forcing myself than nothing will happen. I wanted to record this episode to make sure that we bust this myth and it’s going to benefit your marketing and well beyond – into your life and definitely if you’re coming with this kind of force-approach to any of your relationships (beyond just the one you have with yourself) this episode will benefit the way you connect with others overall. your relationships as well.

I wanted to unpack the 3 common force-based strategies that I see reluctant marketers trying to use on themselves to motivate or, really manipulate themselves into showing up to their marketing or putting themselves out there.

Motivation Mistake #1 – Bribing

The first one is bribing yourself. This often sounds something like, “I’ll let myself enjoy a nice walk once I complete this marketing task I don’t want to do.”

For some things in business and life, this strategy of “I just need to get through this to the other side” might work… I’m thinking, for instance your taxes might be something you could use bribery on and it might be just what you need to do the task like gathering up your receipts. and move on. But I see several reasons why I don’t see bribing yourself working well for marketing.

The first is that marketing isn’t a one and done- you might be able to grin and bear it for a day, a week, maybe a a few weeks, but sharing about your business will be a fact for the lifetime of your business. – I just can’t imagine personally needing to bribe myself to do a foundational task, like marketing forever.

The second is that your marketing is based on relationships. Have you ever been on the receiving end of an invitation that someone is putting out not because they want to but because they feel like they have to? The energy isn’t uplifting, they’re not excited, you’re not excited, and you’re not likely to say yes to that invitation. If you feel like you’re obligated to show up to your marketing but you don’t want to, your people will feel that. And why would they want to show up for you if you don’t also want to be there?

There’s something about bribing yourself that emphasizes the lack of joy and obscures the inherent rewards that are present when you show up to your marketing and serving your people well. This translates it into “I’m only going to do it if I get an outcome I want.” Like I’ll do my marketing, I’ll put out this content or put out this value, but only if it gets me a sale or if it gets me a follower or a lead. And that feels like “I’ll spend time with you, but only if I get an award for it.” Well, guess who wants to spend time with that person. No one!!

Instead you can use your marketing as away to connect with your people deeply, provide my perspective or experience that may reduce their suffering, or help them solve problems that I’m great at solving. You’re going to learn about your people and yourself along the way. Bribing yourself to do your marketing just sucks all the joy of the journey and the experience of learning and growing in yourself and in your business.

Bribing yourself to get through your marketing is going to either not work for you for very long and it’s going to be a turn-off for your people.

Motivation Mistake #2 – Pressure

The second mistake people make in order to motivate themselves to show up to their marketing is pressure. This one has quite a bit of nuance, so I’m excited to dig into this one with you. Overall, a lot of things end up adding pressure and at some point it will go past a tipping point. So, the most important thing is to be ultra-aware of how much pressure you’re feeling around your marketing.

Pressure can be creating intentionally by setting a deadline or creating a goal. But it can also be ramped up in subtle ways, for instance by comparison/ feeling like you’re behind, or having someone you know register to attend your workshop and feeling pressure to perform.

You’ve probably heard people, or maybe you’ve had the experience and think “I do better under pressure.”

Let’s start with the science…
There is the Yerkes-Dodson law, which is a model of the relationship between stress or pressure and task performance. It’s an upside down U, which means that an intermediate level of pressure, stress helps you reach a peak level of performance. Too little or too much stress or pressure results in poorer performance. So, it looks like a mountain.

As stress or pressure surpasses an optimal level, your performance or ability to do the task well, begins to deteriorate. You’re too stressed and there’s too much pressure to do your best.

So, what’s the optimal amount of stress or pressure when it comes to marketing?

That depends on a few factors, including the complexity of the task, whether the task is new to you, and how confident you feel completing the task.

If something is new to you, that alone may be enough to provide a challenge, stress and pressure.

A moderate level of stress is manageable and can be motivational. You’ve definitely got skin in the game and there’s this boost of stress that will enhance your performance.

Intense stress can lead to a fight, flight, or freeze response. Stress and anxiety ramp up to an unmanageable level. You’re all too aware of the amount of skin you’ve got in the game and that starts work against you. There’s too much at risk.

Now let’s nest the science into the practicality of our every day lives…

We all experience stress differently, so the optimal level of stress for you won’t be the same as it is for someone else. Stress is different for us based on our past experiences.

This is one of the reasons why I think very few entrepreneurs provide support around this – they either didn’t experience the same stress from their marketing or they’ve diffused this pressure and no longer relate to this experience. That makes them hard to learn from when it comes to this stress response to marketing. But it also can give you hope that you can move through and create a new experience with your marketing, which is what I do with my clients and my members.

Not only that, but your stress response will be different during different seasons of your life.

What we’re talking about is a short-term acute stress meant to provide a little boost to your arousal, to create interest and help to provide a focus. But if you’ve been under chronic stress (and I mean, if you haven’t please tell me all your secrets), well we know that chronic stress is another matter entirely and isn’t likely to benefit you at all. In fact, long-term stress ravages your health and wellbeing.

So, adding pressure or stress to your marketing if you’ve been under chronic stress is unlikely to serve you.

The other nuance I want to bring up here is that even the WAY you add pressure can give you a little boost or stall you out. Consider the difference between creating an internal deadline and telling your coach/mentor or business supports to help cheer you toward what’s needed and that could be supportive versus announcing a deadline to your audience and forming and external expectation.

Adding pressure to motivate you to do your marketing isn’t a one-size fits all – it’s a nuanced strategy and requires you to be self-aware and able to ask great questions to help you identify whether that pressure is providing a healthy boost or is a heavy weight to bear.

Motivation Mistake #3 – Shame

Unlike pressure, shame has little-to-no nuance. I simply haven’t found a redeeming feature of shame when it comes to motivating yourself. The other way that you might think about this one is negative self-talk. So something like, “What is wrong with you that you can’t get over yourself and do your marketing?” or “I’m just too lazy and unmotivated to change the way that I do my business.” or “Obviously, I just haven’t suffered enough to make a different decision.” Or any number of other examples that I’m sure we could come up with.

These kind of shaming thoughts may be things that you’ve heard in the past and in all likelihood were meant to try to motivate you to change. Only, we weren’t so educated about emotions or motivation to understand that shaming has the opposite effect. Shame is a stop emotion. It’s used to stop people from doing something and it does that very effectively. And whether we’re shaming someone else or ourself it has the same effect.

Even if you imagine the feeling of shame in your body, often people physically shrink down, take up less space, their shoulders curl in, the chin goes down, they crumple inward. Now imagine from that body shape telling someone about your business and what you do and how you help. It’s not going to come across very effectively.

Shaming yourself for not following through on your marketing is driving you further away from marketing at all.

Motivation Starts with Compassion and Celebration

So, what instead, Amanda?

Compassionately and honestly turning toward what would be better. Giving yourself encouragement or positive reinforcement, acknowledging and recognizing each and every god damn step that you take. You can not celebrate yourself enough – trust me – give it a try.

I find that my clients and community members are so busy moving on to the next thing that they rarely take the time to give themselves the very thing that is going to help them continue to create the momentum they want – celebration, encouragement.  The first thing that I always focus on in our reviews and emphasize in our coaching calls and in our community are the wins and the places that we can recognize the accomplishments we have made.

Adding more Celebration into your Day

Here’s a simple way to remember to provide encouragement and celebration. Any time you find yourself noticing what you haven’t done yet or the things left at the end of your list, simply balance that out by ALSO noticing what you have done and the things checked off your list. There is ALWAYS two sides of the paper, so being aware of which side has your attention and how that effects what you’re doing. Ass in how does it make you feel and whether it’s moving you forward or away from showing up and sharing and connecting with your best-fit clients and building your business.

This is a major part of how I support people and there is a ton of research that suggests that positive reinforcement is how we motivate.

The Next Episode

Speaking of how I support people, next episode I’m going to be sharing how the Courageous Effect helps reluctant to move through the procrastination, avoidance, overwhelm and doubt that can arise when you experience excess risk and pressure to show up a certain way in your marketing.