Do it scared

Hey,

I’ve been trying something new lately.

Whenever I start to notice the slightest hint of that glass-half-empty feeling creeping in, I get in my car, put on my go-to playlist (aptly titled songs to undo my most rancid mood), and I go get myself a treat.

Treat Time, as I lovingly call it, is my way of Pavlov’s Dogging myself into a better headspace. And yes, it works.

The other night I set out in search of bubble tea and found myself in the McGill University district, forgetting that it was grad week. I sat bumper to bumper, looking out to see hundreds of people in their caps and gowns pouring into the streets with big toothy grins.

That joy was palpable, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling of low-level dread because I knew these grads were moments away from stepping into an uncertain future.

I don’t have to take a poll to know that many of them are probably pretty freaked out. Even if they haven’t experienced this job market first hand yet, they’ve all been reading the same headlines we have.

Even in the face of it, there they were—celebrating anyway.

Every person out there, regardless of their educational background, can remember a moment where they stood at the precipice of the unknown, feeling some messy mix of pride, possibility, and fear all at once.

But they also remember the moment they stepped forward anyway.

That was the aha moment that pierced my dread and transformed it into something more hopeful—the realization that we're all doing it scared.

Call it kismet, but when I returned home I opened my phone to see this note from artist Talia Barnes:

Talia coined pessimoptimism in response to the idea that sometimes the things intended to improve our lives can sometimes make them worse, but that those failures can ultimately reveal the value of what remains: our humanness.

Here's where I have to remind you that I'm a marketer, which means I spent ten minutes in that traffic earlier feeling what I felt, and another ten minutes thinking about what it means for us. Because that scared-but-moving-forward energy is also the emotional state of pretty much every audience we're trying to reach right now.

Most marketing is trying to rush past the tension to get to the fantasy. But tension is where people are living right now, and acknowledging it is how trust is built.

That means asking what your audience is actually feeling before anything else. It also means naming the real pain before you offer the fix, and letting that tension breathe for one beat before you resolve it.

When audiences feel seen before they're sold to, the outcome lands as something they can actually believe.

Somewhere between the pessimism and optimism is honesty. And if fear is what feels most honest for you right now, then do it scared.

It’s already taken you this far.

Keep going.

Ines

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