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I’m paid to use creativity in solving business issues. To be creative is to be empathetic and emotional. It’s much easier to create compelling work when you can feel what it’s like to be your target consumer. Certainly, this emotional disposition also makes you vulnerable.

Couple that with advertising as a high-pressure terrain dominated by ridiculous timelines, impossible clients, frequent blunt –and sometimes brutal- feedback, flexible but long working hours requiring a lot of critical thinking and our fair share of corporate politics and you have a…very delicate situation.

Our cultural context where ‘mental health’ is demonized and brandished as lunacy adds another layer of complexity. Fixable situations are left to fester because well, a person has to be going mad to need mental health help, no?

All these have created a situation where if you are unable to develop a robust defense system, one that can withstand or evade the corrosive torrents of the trade, you end up being sucked into this toxic place where you completely abandon a potentially successful career you’re so skilled for, or you stay on, becoming a withered, gloomy ‘gruntesorous’.

Avoiding The Blackhole

There is such a thing as ‘the advertising blackhole’ and it’s possible to avoid it.

• Don’t interpret feedback about your work as feedback about you. You are so much more than a bad feedback.
• Don’t always back down when an idea or thought is challenged. Learn how to defend an idea in a way that will make unconstructive counter-opinion counterproductive.
• Formulate a plan for your career that factors in the need to endure BS for a while, but has an exit strategy for it too.
• Have a life outside of the agency. Pursue some other passion alongside, something you can escape to. Or a side gig that lets you have your way.
• Build value for your agency and clients very quickly. Become too valuable to be disregarded.
• Make strategic career moves, but do a lot of due diligence before you move.
• Be deliberate in building a reputation. The industry is small, get known for what you want to be known for.
• Talk about your frustrations, don’t bottle up. Talk to psychologists if need be. Don’t be macho, lest you’re brought to your knees by emotions you disregarded.
• Set lofty ambitions. Anchor it in something like a driving need to make lives better and embrace it fully. The more you do, the harder it will be for fickle shenanigans to bring you down.
• Give your best, but don’t have high expectations of people; you’ll be crushed when your favorite boss throws you under the bus, and it happens a lot.
• Respect yourself and your craft. Don’t become a pushover in your quest to please people.

Don’t lose your soul. If you give up what you believe in most, you’ll begin to mean nothing to yourself.

• Avoid toxic people and conversations that prophesy doom for the agency, the industry, etc; They will suck the life right out of you.
• Run, jog, play video games, travel, pray, marry right.

I know creatives who’ve crashed. Sometimes they suddenly unplug, with a major deliverable pending, unresponsive and unreachable. Unfortunately this is diagnosed as the bad side of a talented creative. It’s a really sad thing when we neglect the mind that makes us good at our jobs and fail to make necessary adjustments until we become depressed and unmotivated, feeling nothing or all the wrong things.

It’s even more dangerous because people experiencing it dismiss it or hide it till they cant anymore. If you’re reading this and you’ve ever been suicidal, or depressed or suddenly hated a job you loved, I feel you. Whether or not you have, be there for your colleagues, encourage them to open up to you and respect the sensitivity of what they tell you. Help them vent and be constructive.

I pray earnestly that no one gets into that space or stays there longer than this article.

PS: Originally written in Jun 2019 @ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/professionals-mental-health-issues-benjamin-anyan/

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