“Marketing is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become…Marketers offer solutions, opportunities for humans to solve their problems and move forward.“
— Seth Godin
I wanted my marketing to be a byproduct of doing good work, and for a while it was. But when the work needs to pay the rent, ‘organic’ becomes an excuse to hide. Referrals are gold, yes, but attention lives online now, and attention is where business growth is either won or lost.
From the beginning, I thought my marketing could be “organic,” kind of like a byproduct. It was a little idealistic. This was in large part from my training as a pastor, and specifically in things like team building, networking, and community relationships. I liked the idea of skipping the marketing triangulation (the typical dance between the business, agency, platforms, and consumer where humanity gets lost) that much of marketing is built on (a blog post is coming down the line).
The Entrepreneurial Pivot
Now, networking and my existing clients are still my primary means of gaining new customers. In theory, a non-digital strategy of building clients and a business is doable. Many people do it all the time, and they’re often my target audience. However, I was also a new entrepreneur, barely with a business idea, and jumping back into a very quickly evolving and highly competitive niche industry of marketing after just a couple of years of recovery.
My website helps, especially after the rebuild, but it’s still not effective enough. It resembles my effort to simplify and pivot, to evolve and learn. All along the way, there’s also been that thing called life. And at 40, almost 41, there was a lot to figure out and quickly. I needed to get my head into marketing, my own marketing, and be better about content creation.
The Pastoral Shadow and the Fear of Success
For the last couple of years, building a business was the public and bill-paying side of life. In truth, it was also the most terrifying for a number of reasons, one of them being what was mentioned earlier: it reminded me of pastoral work, and that was digging a lot of stuff up. I’d have deja vu moments and sometimes even fun, and that was scary.
It had a not-so-surprising effect: I didn’t want to tell anyone about what I could do, what I knew, or what I thought. I didn’t want to explore topics, come up with my own campaigns, or make my own calls. While networking events have been great, and I do mostly like them, they can also be socially taxing for me as an introvert.
So, here’s a bit of an inside look into my head, as well as what goes on in enough of us that I feel comfortable throwing it out there.
*Spoiler alert: If you’re like me, it’s your inner child.
Creation/Idea Block: The Perfectionist’s Wall
I just didn’t want to, for one reason or another. The fear of success is one of those things most people in recovery get, but I’ve also found that most honest humans do too. It held me back for so long. “Success,” whatever that means, can be a double-edged sword: sure, you get the win, but you also must be responsible for it now, too. It’s less risky not to try.
At the end of the day, I also always had the excuse that networking and doing good work were more effective and important. Not to mention that I’m a recovering perfectionist as well. “Roughly right” became a core value of mine not because I liked it, but because I needed it. The same can be said of authenticity, and that was another thing: not so much the lack of it, but the uncertainty and self-doubt. It was the newness of it all. I was unsure about so much.
From the beginning of recovery, I started adopting rules, like mantras, and they helped get my alcoholic brain back on course. One of those was to stop “faking it to make it.” If you knew me before, this was my norm. Imposter syndrome was another thing I was struggling to overcome.
The Disease of Overthinking
The other thing at play here was that I’m also a recovering overthinker. A couple of smart people, more than a thousand years apart, both said that overthinking was a disease. I’m here to testify, “Amen and amen.” Now, I also love thinking: it’s one of my greatest strengths and why I love to get to work and learn at the same time. However, molehills can morph into mountains real quick for me, and so procrastination and avoidance were common defense mechanisms. Burnout crept in, and it’s been a few months of catching my breath.
All of that, and plus there was the loneliness of the holidays, the trudging of recovery work, and rebuilding a life. Life hasn’t always made it easy. So, when it came to making my own content, there was often no mojo left in the tank.
So, when it came to my own content creation and social media, in truth, my inner child just didn’t want to. And I think a lot of us are the same: we just don’t want to because of any number of reasons. And it was my “I didn’t want to” that I was tired of. I could see it too much in my past selves that I was working to bury.
Facing the Camera and the Mirror
I’ve avoided content creation for two years. Sure, there’s been some reels, and I’ve been pounding the pavement and will take any opportunity to work the rust out. However, I wasn’t stepping up to the plate fully, and when I did… I felt awkward, like I was trying to swing something I used to handle with ease. Self-doubt, frustration, and urgency weren’t working in my favor. Yet again, there was more of those inner child issues holding me back when I should have been practicing more.
In my defense, I also wasn’t building a “marketing” business. It was something different with a personal development framework that is still my baby and will have a heartbeat as long as I do. This wasn’t copy and paste business model or concept. It took time to formulate the ideas and then test and develop them enough before I could consistently apply them for my clients.
A few years ago, sitting in a UM marketing class, I had a bit of an “authentic marketing” epiphany, and trying to bridge it with business development and leadership: Not because it didn’t work, but because it did. From Leadership & Self-Deception to Seth Godin, authenticity and relationship were clearly there, and I could just see how the standard customer-centric model was actually backwards… but not fully. AI’s presence and advancement, not to mention the marketing industry’s funding of over 30% of the current AI bubble1, implied there were a lot more implications. And that meant potential work.
The Heartbeat Beneath the Brand
“Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.”
— Philip Kotler
Still, I had to pay bills, make brochures, edit KDPs, draft emails, help set up a podcast, etc. If you get to know me for more than 60 seconds, you’ll learn that Stigma is just an outer layer for me, meaning it’s not the heartbeat of what I do, although they radiate out from it. I love philosophy, science, and psychology, and it’s about all I can think about if you ever wonder what I zone off to. I’ve always loved to learn, and humans were my favorite subject matter.
So, there was this resistance, and definitely an imposter syndrome gap I was trying to overcome with marketing, since I didn’t feel like I was doing it. There was, yet again, that inner kid who didn’t want to. I didn’t want to embody marketing; I didn’t want to carry that label. It was in part because I was still trying to figure out how to market myself, and that was coming from the fact that I was trying to finally find myself after a long journey. There were a lot more things I had to work on than just business stuff, which also related, so it’d force me to become it. Or so my rationale went. I was really in a “burn my boats and go all in” mindset back then.
The Power of Small Disciplines
It was the small things, the daily things, that carried the days between any major growth moments. The classes, trainings, achievements, and skillsets matter not when the wielder is double-minded and unwilling. Strengths then can come off as threatening and weaknesses as liabilities. Yes, the big things helped, and I needed every last class and 2×4 across my face to get here.
But it’s been the consistent little things that have started to bleed and connect moments. Growth and maturity, confidence and competency, have been coming back. And it was never about results or proof, nor performance or validation, but rather that byproduct of habitual becomings and unbecomings, of accepting and letting go. Growth was found especially in small disciplines like self-control, restraint, and focus, and I knew this was also true for marketing and business.
Recent CMO surveys show average marketing budgets have fallen, while digital spend remains significant. That means we can’t waste budget, but we should invest where return and efficiency are provable: referrals, owned content, and high-engagement digital formats. Again, this is all about authenticity, trust, and humans, which boils down to you and me: do we actually have a thing that helps people or not, that is truthful and relaible, or not? If so, then the rest is just intentional consistency over time.
“The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.”
— David Ogilvy
Conclusion: The Linear Path of Authenticity
I think, in some sense, this is Seth Godin’s Purple Cow summarized, if he’d permit me to insult his work like that. It’s the people who see and do things the right way up that naturally make true believers of us. We’re the ones catching up to them. Too many experts from across industries and subject matters have weighed in.
If you really boil it down, then it’s about humans, mindsets, and relationships. Authenticity doesn’t work unless the mindset can actually function authentically, and no mindset can function authentically unless the person is authentic. While that sounds circular, it’s not: it’s linear. The “you,” or “self,” is always the source of everything and what is being marketed to: nothing else. This is the 6th P of Marketing: the Person.
However, authenticity can backfire if it’s performative, inconsistent with actions, or overshares in ways that confuse expectations. And this is always inner child stuff: from CEOs to recovering pastors. We just “wanna” to admit it.
So, if you’re someone like me, with creative block, hating the idea of being on camera, throwing yourself out there, and seeing what you’re actually capable of doing, know that there’s a middle-aged dude in Missoula, MT, trudging through recovery who cried more in the last year than a 40-year-old should ever admit. You got this. And if you’re looking for a little help, I know a guy.
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”
— Brené Brown
- Recent 2024/2025 venture capital data suggests that “Marketing and Sales AI” is one of the top three funded sectors, with between 25-35% of specialized SaaS investment. ↩︎
