The Unmarketed Self - The Version They Couldn’t Sell

Each part of my work in marketing had been centred around authenticity and confidence and being yourself. And being honest, NüBloomDigital has had a really rough start in that I became a version of myself that I couldn’t buy into. So how was I going to make my livelihood out of a version of myself that I myself didn’t feel was sellable. A version of myself that didn’t understand just how much was bubbling beneath the surface, but only felt immovable and heavy? A version of me that consistently lied to myself that everything was just fine and that she couldn’t even admit to herself that she was struggling?

Marketing requires emotional capacity and creativity and the bandwidth to listen.

I was trying to perform stability. I was trying to perform a version of myself that didn’t exist anymore who I became didn’t feel congruent to who I’ve always been as a person. I didn’t realise what I was making visible was what everyone tries to hide. Bids for emotion, maybe even sympathy, trying to connect and build emotional closeness at the same time as retreating into myself and trying to disappear. Everything became outside of my emotional window of tolerance. My nervous system was doing somersaults. And that’s not the kind of energy that people want to be around. Even I didn’t want to be around that. My emotions became un-brandable or bad for branding, at the very least.

And so I found myself concentrating on things like empathy, connection building, relationship building and guidance and brand analysis because it was something that I could offer at an intellectual level. But marketing is emotional. Marketing requires emotional capacity and creativity and the bandwidth to listen. I was putting the emphasis into the output that NüBloomDigital could produce, and it was messy and it was inconsistent and it was all I thought I could muster. And the irony is I always tell people to be themselves to be consistent and to be authentic. And the consistency that I had was consistently low energy and feeling like I was trying.

Our emotions are the biggest communicator of them all

I was trying to edit all of that into a marketable and approachable persona. Someone that looks like she knows what she’s doing despite the fact that her in her emotional world was in turmoil. I didn't want to be someone that brings emotions to work. But we forget that work is emotional. Work is our livelihood what keeps us staying afloat, where we spend the majority of our lives. You need emotions to build connection and you need emotions to tell you exactly what you need to be happy and in a good state of mind, and in a good place to attract the energy that you want. I didn’t think that my psychological state and that my inner self was marketable and so my output became very misaligned and there became two versions of me in the world; who I wanted to be and thought I still was and who I actually was as a mirror image. I thought that it was the version of me that I was inside that no one actually wanted to work with, but actually it was who I was presenting as, who I was masking as and I put on a professional performance that I wasn’t able to upkeep. And so now it feels like I’m constantly pressing Ctrl + Z to reinstate the unedited version of me. Because that’s the very essence of where powerful marketing enlies. It’s the messy truth. It’s the things that make us human and our emotions are information. They tell us what we need and our emotions are the biggest communicator of them all.

Being emotionally receptive starts with yourself. If you can’t hear yourself, you can’t hear the others around you and that’s when gimmicks and smoke screens take centre stage. Which at face value, looks like good marketing, but it isn't connective enough to have the impact that you hope for.

Business can be healing, through autonomy and building the world that you want to see

The past year has been a year that held me and caught me when I fell. I did fall and it felt like a height, but it also gave me grace. I grieved a lot of things that I didn’t actually have in the first place because they were things that I thought that I shouldn’t have had. I survived inside my 25 year old self that was long gone and I became enveloped in in my past self that I couldn’t be present for things that were happening around me. I was so stuck in what should’ve been.

And telling the truth about what kept me going was the self-flagellation of unrealistic expectation of telling myself that I could still get there, despite what I want for the present version of myself was realigning with things that I actually want. But I couldn’t hear it because I was still presenting a version of myself whose world looked entirely different. And if I could sit beside her today, I tell her to do exactly that. Sit with yourself. Mute out the distractions and the noise. Mute out people who have opinions louder than your own. No one knows you better than you do. Ask yourself questions. Be curious, get to know yourself. Be around people that want to know you just as much as you do. Don’t ever let people tell you that you’re too much or you’re not enough or that you can’t make it. Because actually if you know yourself and you set your mind to what it is that you want, that’s your power. There will be no stopping you.

I realise that this is why marketing speaks to me. My academic background is history, politics and languages. But I have a deep interest in wanting to see and understand people. I want them to tell me what their dreams are, what their passions are. What they want for themselves in their life. What they’re good at and what they enjoy doing. That’s business. That’s the best part of business.

Whether that’s food and they’re able to package up their heritage and their sense of belonging in a main course meal and feed a room full of people through sharing part of their livelihood to make it. Programming an app that makes everyone’s life easier because they can grant access to worlds that were designed for the privileged few to people just like them. Whether that someone that makes art or cards or arranges flowers because making someone’s day or making spaces feel safe and comfortable and even joyful, is their passion. Even if it’s building industrial components that are massively overlooked but make someone’s life safer.

We forget that business can be a medium of expression, for people to feel heard and seen and address emotional and physical needs in a very accessible way. Business can be healing through autonomy and building the world that you want to see. It’s a professional version of manifestation. It’s the part where you have to have boundaries and discipline and focus because if you don’t, you don’t have a business. It can be a channel of where can cater to our requirements as people whether that’s neurodivergence, working around a family, honouring our needs by them becoming our niche. And none of that is unmarketable. Actually, all of that is feedback and marketing is about using creativity within yourself to find solutions that work for you.

I always dread failure or dread feeling like I’m failing. Because I don’t wanna disappoint, I don’t want to fail people with unmet expectations. But I realised that I am punishing myself for being human. And that’s the kind of branding that I want to be known for. Human and alive. Attractive through truth. Intelligent and emotionally intelligent. If you’re looking for marketing because you feel unseen and invisible, let me hold up a mirror and ask you the things that you’re avoiding to ask yourself.