The worlds of marketing and agency life are fast — for many, it’s one of the main attractions of the work, being able to regularly do something new.
But that thirst for speed creates a hamster wheel that executives, particularly as they step into leadership roles, find hard to get off, according to executive coach and former The Monkeys and Coca-Cola comms manager Leigh Morrison.
“People want to feel important and relevant and like what they’re doing matters,” Morrison told B&T after the launch of her first book, Recalibrate.
“Busy is just so natural. I would ban the word busy. When people come into the coaching room, I ask ‘How are you?’ and they say either good, or I’m busy. They’re not emotions, they’re not feelings, they’re just actions. People glorify being busy.”
For agency staff, in particular, being busy is often equated with business success. Much of the chatter B&T has had with industry insiders of late — particularly so around the start of the year — has revolved around the volume of pitching. But this isn’t new — headlines about this topic have been knocking around for years.
However, Morrison believes that leaders do not do staff, or themselves, or indeed their families, any favours with a relentless busy-ness in business.
“Doing something makes them feel like they’re achieving something rather than stepping back. Part of the book talks about slowing down to speed up. I don’t think people understand how to get off the hamster wheel,” said Morrison.
“There’s a lot of people with big mortgages, big expectations of themselves, big school fees to pay. They need to have a really good look at themselves. That’s why I speak about values and what’s important. Is it about being busy and this external life that you’ve created and the expectations of what you need to do to keep up with that?”
The solutions to the crisis of busy-ness are manifold. But they are not necessarily straightforward.
“It often comes back to really basic things,” said Morrison.
“If I could teach everyone — and it sounds really woo-woo and crazy — how to breathe properly. It sounds really simple but most people don’t know how to breath properly. They’re in this fight or flight state constantly. If they can regulate themselves through their breath and put themselves into a parasympathetic nervous system they can then think through their decisions and slow their brains down.”
Sleep, Morrison said, is also massively underappreciated. Think about the last time you lay in bed thinking about what you needed to do the next day at work and what didn’t get done the day before, for instance.
There are more practical in-office ways to reduce tension and stress, particularly within meeting environments, according to Morrison.
“If you can teach people to listen properly, to sit in a conversation and make eye contact, that immediately brings the pressure down in a meeting room. You don’t need to sit there and do meditations and all this stuff. Just take a breath together, all breath out, put on the table what you’re there to talk about, bring some structure and take 30 seconds to recognise that you’re in the room before kicking off the meeting. It sounds basic, but centre everyone in the room,” she said.
Making these small changes could have significant benefits for both client and agency teams, Morrison believes.
“I was both client and agency side. I still love the industry. I think it gets a bad rap but I love the people that it attracts. I love the problem solvers, the thinking and the creative ideas that come out of it,” she said.
“My biggest advice is to trust yourselves. There’s all this keeping up and pressure. There’s a big opportunity for the industry to trust itself. Creativity is going to have its day soon.”
Recalibrate is available to buy now.
