Feel, Think, Do: From Content Strategy to Life?
A few weeks ago I sat in on a content strategy exercise for a client’s website. The agency partner asked us to imagine what we’d like a reader to feel, think and do upon visiting each page.
Close-up inside my tiny, imaginary, NYC apartment
Some of the participants struggled with the ‘feeling’ words, intellectualizing despite themselves. Others leapt to doing.
The exercise stuck with me. So much so, that when I participated in a focus group later that week, I found myself returning to the concept of feel, think and do. In the focus group, we were supposed to imagine what a perfect 10 would look like in an area of our lives – How would we act? What would we wear? When would we wake up? It wasn’t the first time I’d imagined what perfection would look like – when I turned 30, I did a similar exercise sitting outside a Starbucks with a friend. I can still feel the experience – cool weather for Houston, metal chair digging into my backside, the aroma of the coffee, the lightness of escaping weekend errands for this luxury – an easy morning with a friend. We sat with our journals and pens and wrote about a perfect day.
At that time, mine was waking up in my tiny apartment in New York City that somehow still had lovely light. It was cupping a warm, round mug of coffee in my hand, eating a piece of toast, hair up in a messy bun. It was changing into layers for walking to the subway and riding to the studio for a few hours of dance class or rehearsal.
While I haven’t (yet) realized that tiny apartment, I have incorporated bits of that vision into my daily life. I live surrounded by lovely light; my routine includes a leisurely cup of coffee and, typically, toast. I make it to a studio about twice a week for dance class. I have woven some of the feeling and some of the doing of the bits of perfect that I imagined into my daily life.
But why am I writing this?
When life doesn’t feel good, when I feel fractious, when my creativity feels dried up (look at those ‘feeling’ words sneaking in…) I realize it’s often because I’m leaning too heavily into either the thinking, feeling or doing: I’m overthinking everything. I’m letting my feelings override what I know in my heart. I’m doing too much.
The serendipity of this concept coming up twice in one week reminded me what a potent exercise envisioning can be – made more so when we also tap into the feeling and doing parts of our brains and bodies. So if you’re struggling with a challenge – in work or life – imagine what it would be like if it went well. What would you be thinking? How would you feel – both emotionally and physically? And what single step can you take right now – what can you do, what would you do – to get yourself closer to that state?
