How many advertisements do you see every day? How many of those impact your behavior? Researchers disagree on the answers to these questions – some say the number is in the dozens, some say it’s in the hundreds, and some say it’s up to 10,000. The reasons for such a wide spread are based on someone’s location and lifestyle (city life exposes someone to more outdoor advertising on a daily basis, but so does spending hours each day online), but also on what is considered advertising. When I look in my kitchen cupboards, I expose myself to dozens of Trader Joe’s logos (it’s as ubiquitous as the Dharma logo was for Desmond in LOST); while I never (knowingly) see Trader Joe’s advertising in the wider world, I’m already advertising to myself every day. If you count up all the brand names and logos you see every day (consciously and subconsciously), that number could easily reach the thousands. And as research shows, repeated impressions can impact behavior (and make a sale!). So why not advertise to yourself?
That notion can seem counter-intuitive, of course. Surely we’d be better off by reducing our exposure to advertising. This may be true, but I’m suggesting that you advertise to yourself how you want to spend your time. In fact, you may already be doing it. If you enjoy spending time with your family, you might have fun family photos on your walls at home, or even at work. If you want to spend time on a project, you may have the materials for it sitting out in plain view as a reminder and encouragement. This isn’t advertising in a brand sense, but it is advertising in that it’s enticing you to take action.
This is a common tip for neuroatypical people, from childhood to adulthood. Neurodiversity brings with it a wide variety of ability to focus on things you want to spend time on if they’re not present. But the behavior itself is incredibly difficult to change just by willpower alone; quite often, it’s a matter of out of sight, out of mind. So a common suggestion is to make those things present by moving them back into sight. This might involve posting pictures of friends you want to be in touch with on your (physical or computer) desktop, scheduling calendar reminder pop-ups for projects you want to work on, disrupting your muscle memory by moving distractions out of view, and instead placing the things you want to work on more into view. Advertising to yourself about where you want to spend your time.
Wherever you sit on the neurodiversity spectrum (neurotypical is also a place on the spectrum, after all), I wonder if this tip might be helpful for you too. Reorienting what you focus on can take time, but advertising to yourself about where you want to spend your time – and who you want to spend it with – can ultimately lead to you moving forward with the projects you care about, both at work and outside of it.
This Week’s Tip:
Advertise to yourself. To start, pick three areas you want to move forward in – this could be projects you’ve been putting off, conversations you’ve been wanting to have, ideas you’ve been wanting to explore, connections you want to make (or remake!), hobbies or interests that have sat by the wayside, or something entirely different. Find ways to advertise those things to yourself; place pictures on your desktop, schedule time on your calendar, expose yourself to creative work that explores these themes. Whatever form the advertising takes, set up repeated exposure – impressions, to use the advertising term – to make a difference. Add more advertising as necessary. Over time, when you start to see change in your own behavior, these three areas might not need so much advertising; at this point, consider advertising other areas you want to take action in.
Try this out this week, and let us know how it goes. We’d love to hear from you!
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