The Everyday Scaries
Two thoughts to set you free from the Sunday Scaries that I had to learn from the Everyday Scaries
I used to get the Sunday Scaries every day.
This story for context is specific, but if you worked with me in 2013, you might remember "The Dailies." Every day, all Sales leaders were directed to send in a report from their markets summarizing the business that day:
What business got closed
What opportunities were being pursued
What might the challenges be standing in the way of that day's success
Any best practices to share
During that same time period, the department I was overhauling was in the thick of it.
For those who don't know the story, we fired all 100+ employees in March 2013 and relaunched the team in August of that year with about 40% fewer full-time employees and a brand new vendor to handle a part of the process that had never been outsourced before.
At the time, my team was responsible for 20,000 pieces of creative annually for our clients, and those projects (mostly thirty-second TV commercials for small businesses) were essential to our Sales teams closing deals and getting clients on the air. No commercial = no media buy. Delayed commercial = revenue impact. Clients not stoked about their commercial or production experience with us = potential revenue impact and a disappointed Account Executive.
A department undergoing that kind of overhaul, with that kind of volume at 20,000 projects a year, plus the potential revenue impact any single mishap could impose, on top of the fact that we were producing television commercials for about $800 a pop and trying to turn them around in less than two weeks from order submission to approved creative.
Let's say that when "The Dailies" started getting sent out every night from dozens of different market leaders in time zones from Hawaii to Maine, my team consistently showed up in the "challenges" section of those emails for several weeks. And it made me nauseous coming home from work every day. And it gave me the scaries going back into work,every day.
Along with many others on my team who were pouring their soul into doing the impossible by overhauling the team in this fashion with a long-term vision of creating the greatest creative agency ever assembled to scale creative like this for businesses of all sizes; any bump on any project was taken personally, and the volume of both the work and the bumps was staggering.
The two biggest lessons I learned during that time that would become more polished in the years ahead are two foundational thoughts that can help set anyone free from the Sunday Scaries. Once I realized these to be true, they pulled me lower before setting me free because neither is easy to accept. But they are empowering.
#1 - Accepting what I could control and should control
#2 - Admitting what I could not control could never be an excuse not to do my best with everything that I could control
These two thoughts helped me get honest with myself and my best efforts and fully push away any victim mentality thoughts that could be used as a blanket to deflect where we as a team needed to get better, starting with me.
Eleven years later, I walked out the door in tears. It became the greatest job I've ever known, and the acclaim the department would go on to get is one of the greatest stories in advertising history yet to be told not to mention the bonds and friendships, along with the war stories, that will last me forever.
I share all of this and the video because there is so much discussion around the Sunday Scaries, and I know for a lot of you who are in the earlier stages of your career; it's bewildering to wrap your head around.
Accept what you can actually and should control day to day. And be okay with admitting that what you cannot control is never a good excuse not to do your best with everything that you can control.
Do those things with solid efforts and best intentions, and watch the scaries start to disappear.