Content marketing is a tricky business for a lot of reasons. 

If you subscribe to the enneagram personality tests (type three here, nice to meetcha!), oftentimes we creatives battle big ideas against big personalities. If your client is ambiguous or their organization has too many folks up the chain to pass ideas, it’s difficult to put yourself out there. 

A few years ago, I had a client whose company had history of putting their employees through the ringer. There were lots of different projects with start and stop deadlines. Some assignments would be rush jobs and then would never see the light of day. 

Such is life. Such is business.

One day, a really genius marketing video circulated its way through an internal email chain. It was beautiful; lots of slow motion shots, artistic and stylistically compelling storytelling. I watched it, loved it, and made a commitment to start thinking outside the box for my own storytelling ideas.

But then an email from a colleague landed in my inbox with the one phrase I’ve committed to never utter in my business:

“Why can’t we do this?”

That phrase sucked the air out of the room. It dried up our creativity faster than a drop of canteen water on the desert floor. What’s more, it drew attention to a barrier we were creating in our own minds.

The fact was, we could create content like that. 

I understood the frustration. Heck, at times I felt it myself. But the truth of the matter was: we could do stuff like that. Absolutely nothing was standing in our way at all. 

Except ourselves.

The people we reported to couldn’t stop us from creating our best work. What was stopping us was our own negativity, and a habit of wallowing in self-pity before we even started because of fear, doubt and being tired of fighting for good - even great - work.

I made up my mind right then and there that I would do my best to refrain from being a “why can’t we?” person at work.

From then on, I Committed to being a “why don’t we?” type of worker.

Turning that phrase on its heel has done wonders for my life as a writer, blogger and now, a small business owner. And adopting that philosophy all together has opened up a whole world of possibility in a very tangible way.

Now it’s time to make your move: 

• Have you ever let negativity get in the way of creating good content?

• What would your life and work look like if you empowered yourself to make what you know is good content in spite of what people may think?

• What would it look like if you eliminated the words “why can't we” from your workplace’s vocabulary?

• How can Valor Media Group help make your content goals a reality? We have some ideas! Schedule a free consultation today to get started!