Handling the PPPPressure. (Four P's #171)
Coping mechanisms, pediatric vaccines, owning your data, and the First 365 Days.
Pressure.
It makes AND it breaks. It makes diamonds. It makes heroes. It breaks spirits and wills, even ruins lives. It is both mental and physical. It is rooted in expectation, anticipation, apprehension, and realization. It comes from internal and external sources. It has its hand it all of our failures and all of our progress.
There is no escaping pressure; only running towards it and tackling it head on.
Something Personal: Returning to Normal (ish)
Over the past year, I've thought a lot about the pressure that physicians, researchers, nurses, first responders, even COVID vaccine trial patients have felt to accelerate our collective recovery. Speedily, but safely. Their triumph, relief, and fulfillment is all understandable. Their successes in the face of pressure are nothing short of heroic.
As COVID vaccinations opened up for children between the ages of 5-12 this past week, there were lots of tears. No, not the tears of children (Has there ever been a less "painful" injection?), but the tears of joy from parents as we saw our kids get a layer of protection that will bring them and us one step closer to normalcy.
Others have moved on much more quickly. There was the indoor 40th birthday party this past weekend where no one had a mask. Weddings and bar mitzvahs. And professional networking and IRL events are back, from Advertising Week last month and NFT NYC last week, the gatherings, parties and dinners feel very much like 2019, with the only difference being that you need to show proof of vaccine to enter at least some of them. Things are feeling both foreign and familiar again, and with those feelings come the return of a different kind of feeling: The pressure to attend and participate.
Something Practical: Performing Under Pressure
This time of year, professional and personal pressures mount: End-of-year pitches and RFPs, renewal negotiations, deal-making to hit year-end targets in the workplace.... then there's holiday gifting, vacation travel, and impressing your boyfriend's family at your first Thanksgiving together. Preparation and performance typically go along with pressure, and the exposure to pressure at an early age can help prepare you for pressure in adulthood. How we rise to meet the pressure says a lot about our character, strength and development.
Once you get past all of the discussions about COVID-related health protocols for schools, the most sensitive topic of conversation, debate, and decision in our neighborhood's local Board of Education meetings is "testing." Overly sensitive parents complaining about the harmful impact that tests cause for children is such a foreign concept to me. I used to LOVE the pressure of standardized tests (well maybe not love, but appreciated?). Since my kids aren't going to be competitive athletes, learning to perform under pressure will only come in academic competitions, presentations, and, yes, tests. What is it about pressure that has this next generation so scared?
Stress and pressure are not synonyms, but a cause and effect. Stress creates pressure situations, with one big distinction between the two: the need to DO something. To perform. To succeed. Pressure comes from a blend of circumstances. Whether adult or child, professional or personal, life or death... high-pressure experiences all have a few elements in common: importance, uncertainty, and volume.
Importance: The stakes of any pressure depend most on how important the outcome is to you. You feel more pressure at a job interview if you really want the job, right?
Uncertainty: Unknown outcomes frighten us. Let’s say your company merges with another, and managers announce that a number of the employees will be made redundant. The period of uncertainty to follow will likely create pressure.
Volume: meaning the number of tasks or amount of information to process. There’s also a limit to what we can realistically focus on. For example, juggling multiple responsibilities at home and at work can create pressure.
Pressure produces a wide range of physiological and psychological responses in each of us. When you’re under pressure, your body typically responds by speeding up your breathing. As your heart rate increases, more blood gets redirected to your heart, reducing your peripheral temperature – the temperature of your hands and feet and other extremities. You might start sweating and your shoulders and other muscles tighten. Tunnel vision. Even nausea. Congratulations, you're on your way to hyperventilating or passing out!
For the past few years, I've kept a post-it over my desk: "Control the things you can control. Don't worry about the rest." Easier said than done, as pressure can cause performance to suffer. Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to manage your response. The first is understanding what kind of pressure it is: short-term or long-term pressure. Short-term pressure is a high-stakes event like a sports competition or job interview. In these situations, focusing on the stakes is often counterproductive, only adding to the pressure and making the importance of a result appear larger. Zooming out and thinking about the things in your life that won’t change regardless of the outcome - the love of your family, your health, etc. - won't change no matter what. These are the stabilizing anchors.
Focusing on what we can control means handling uncertainty with direct action. There are three things that are always within our control: your routine, breathing, and perspective. A set routine provides you with a flexible structure to adapt to uncertain circumstances. Your breathing, though automatic, is also under your control. It quickens during peak pressure moments, but by consciously slowing down and deepening your breathing, your heart rate has a chance to align with your breathing again. And then there's perspective. If you perceive something as a threat, you can reframe it and create an on-ramp to action by posing a couple key questions.
Mentors, colleagues, therapists, friends will advise us to eliminate sources of pressure that distract us. But passion and pressure also go together: the desire to achieve and succeed drives so many of us. But time management, prioritization, and reducing the volume of tasks that create short-term pressure for you, can be helpful.
Long-term pressure builds toward a peak pressure moment over the long haul. When pressure isn’t just a single event, but a long period, you need another approach to stay motivated and focused, and that requires finding meaning to carry you through. You can do that by checking if it provides any of the three core types of meaning: growth, contribution, and connection. Does long-term pressure should help get you closer to your goals in some way? Who is growing if/when I can endure this pressure. Whose life will improve? Will this help me get closer to those I care about?
Something Professional: Riding the Digital Waves of Transition
Last week, I wrote about the oncoming web3 (r)evolution that is changing the entire digital landscape. Well, recent news from the tech giants of web1 and web2 may hasten this transformation, while also creating pressure on brands, agencies, tech platforms and financial institutions to define a new playbook, and lead us away from the old ways of doing things.
You have to be living under a rock (or still using an iPhone 4) not to be aware of the $100B+ drop in market cap across some major social platforms over the past few weeks. The immediate result of Q3 earnings reports, many media, publisher and tech platforms missed their revenue targets and cited the Apple privacy changes that went into effect a few months earlier as the main reason.
While we don't expect these social platforms to take these changes lying down (Hello, Meta!), the brands that rely on these platforms as significant advertising channels are feeling the most pain. The cost per acquisition (CPA) for new customers has increased anywhere from 5-10x what they used to be before the Apple changes went into place.
And this doesn’t even account for Google's coming deprecation of third party cookies.
Ultimately, brands need to determine what their continued investment in legacy media platforms like Facebook and Google continue to be, as well as how they add newer platforms to the mix (see: Snap, TikTok), as well as how much to begin shifting to new web3 initiatives. Ultimately, it will come down to a unified measurement approach. The brands who build the most valuable sets of their own 1st party data will win, and social platforms and ad networks will continue to lean into enabling brands to bring their own data to the table to improve campaign performance.
Either way, the old/current ways of building a marketing plan, executing on it, measuring it and optimizing are already changing. Doing things the same way they were done, using the same tools and skills as even six months ago is recipe for failure. Blow up the playbook, and good luck as we enter the next round of "Build, Borrow or Buy?!"
Something Political: Achievements over Activity
Finishing off this week on a high note, let's keep it simple.
In the one year since the last Election Day 2020, Democrats have cut child poverty in half, added 5.3 million jobs, managed the most ambitious vaccine rollout in the nation’s history, and passed a $1.2 trillion investment in water, roads, bridges, and broadband. Stock market at all-time highs. Crypto values at an all-time high. Job creation in first 9 months at historic level. The Biden Administration has also kept its promise to ensure that people who making less than $400,000 do not see any increases in taxes or driving up the deficit.
Also in that time, GOP extremists staged a deadly insurrection at the Capitol, blocked a voting rights act that would have improved the republic, and have politicized health. Unvaccinated individuals made up 84.2% of COVID hospital patients. They are monopolizing hospital beds & resources, continuing to cause non-COVID deaths of innocent people who can't get care. Also causing tremendous mental anguish for RN/DRs when they ask for vax last-minute/die in front of them. If you still don't believe in the science that is now beyond proving these vaccines to be safe and effective by every medical & infectious disease expert for a year-plus, I'd question:
1) to whom you're asking the questions; and
2) whether or not you're truly interested in the answer.
As we head into 2022, let's remember what we're running from... and what we're running towards. No matter what, we need to pick up the pace, people!