Some of you who know me know that I love to go golfing. I play 30 to 40 rounds a year, which sounds impressive until you see my scorecard. What all those rounds have actually taught me, the hard way, is this: if you grip a golf club too tight, you are going to miss. And after 11 years as a business owner, I can tell you the same rule applies to your business.
This post is not really about marketing. It’s about what happens to your judgment when the pressure shows up, because it always shows up. Take from it what you will.
Every business owner I know has had that morning. You check the news, or your inbox, or your revenue dashboard, and your stomach drops. Maybe it’s the economy. Maybe it’s a technology shift that feels like it’s rewriting your industry overnight. It may be a Tuesday, and three things broke at once. Tuesdays have a reputation for a reason.
Your gut instinct is to do something immediately. Board up the windows. Cut everything. React.
I’ve felt that pull plenty of times running Arcane Marketing, and I’ve given in to it more than I’d like to admit. Every time, I have to remind myself of the same thing: reality is shaped by our actions and our inactions. What I do under pressure, what I react to and what I choose not to react to, determines the reality I live in tomorrow.
The older I get, the more I realize leadership isn’t measured by how quickly you respond. It’s measured by whether your response actually improves the situation. Those aren’t always the same thing. We’ve all met leaders who pride themselves on being decisive, but speed without clarity is just another form of panic. Sometimes the strongest move is creating enough space between the problem and your reaction that wisdom has a chance to catch up with emotion.
That’s a heavy thought when people depend on you. My wife and kids depend on the decisions I make, and with 4 kids I already live in a state of professionally managed chaos. My employees have spouses and children who depend on the decisions I make. And the businesses that trust Arcane Marketing with their growth depend on those decisions too. If I make panicked calls at the top, the consequences roll downhill in a chain reaction.
So how do you make good decisions when everything in your body is screaming at you to react?
What Golf Teaches You About Pressure
Here’s what happens when the stakes go up on a golf course. You stand over a shot that matters, water on the left, your buddies watching and probably heckling, and your body betrays you. You grip the club tighter. Your shoulders creep up toward your ears. You stop breathing somewhere in your backswing. And your smooth, repeatable tempo turns into a violent lunge at the ball.
The result is never good. Tight muscles cannot make a fluid swing, and a rushed swing does not find the fairway. It doesn’t matter how expensive your driver is or how many lessons you’ve taken. My driver and I have been in couples counseling for years, and even that can’t save a swing made in panic. If you’re gripping and holding your breath, you’re going to miss.
The fix is almost insultingly simple, and every golfer knows it even if we forget it the second money is on the line. Step back from the ball. Take a full breath. Loosen the grip until the club could almost slip. Then swing at the tempo you’d use on the practice range, where nothing is on the line and everything mysteriously goes straight.
Now here’s the bridge, because this is exactly where business comes in. Like the golf club, if you grip your business too tight, you get the same result. Fear makes you squeeze and hold your breath, literally and figuratively. And an owner who is white-knuckling the club makes lunging decisions: slashing things that shouldn’t be slashed, keeping things that should have been cut months ago, and mistaking a hard swing for a good one.
The Pause Is the Skill
Stepping back is not weakness or indecision. It’s the pre-shot routine that makes accuracy possible. I don’t think enough people talk about this because “pause” doesn’t sound productive. It doesn’t look productive either.
Nobody posts on LinkedIn about the meeting they decided not to schedule. Nobody celebrates the email they intentionally waited until tomorrow to send.
Nobody congratulates the CEO who chose to gather another day of information before making a major decision.
From the outside, restraint looks like inactivity. From the inside, it’s often where the best leadership happens.
When something scary lands on my desk, the most productive thing I can do is usually nothing, for about 10 minutes. Get oxygen to the brain. Look at the actual numbers instead of the story my fear is telling me about the numbers. Then decide.
That sounds incredibly simple. It also happens to be surprisingly difficult. Fear has a way of convincing us that movement equals progress.
It whispers things like:
- “You have to fix this right now.”
- “If you don’t act immediately, it’ll get worse.”
- “Everyone is expecting an answer.”
- “Doing something is better than doing nothing.”
Sometimes those thoughts are true.
Most of the time, they’re simply fear trying to borrow the language of urgency.
The questions get clearer almost immediately. What actually changed, and what just feels like it changed? What can I control today? What decisions genuinely need to be made this week, and which ones am I inventing because doing something feels safer than thinking?
I’ve found it helpful to ask myself a few additional questions before making any major business decision:
- Am I responding to facts or emotions?
- Will this decision still make sense tomorrow morning?
- Am I solving the actual problem or simply trying to reduce my own anxiety?
- What would I advise one of my clients to do if they were in my position?
- If nothing changed for 48 hours, would I still make this same decision?
It’s funny how often that last question changes everything.
Fear has a way of turning possibilities into certainties. We start treating worst-case scenarios as if they’ve already happened. Before long, we’re solving problems that don’t actually exist yet. I’ve wasted more energy preparing for disasters that never arrived than dealing with the ones that actually did. That’s one of the hidden costs of reacting too quickly.
I’ve learned that entrepreneurs tend to have incredible imaginations.
That’s one of the reasons many businesses exist in the first place.
- We imagine possibilities.
- We see opportunities.
- We build things that didn’t previously exist.
The downside is that the same imagination that helps us build businesses can also create problems that haven’t happened.
We’re exceptionally good at forecasting catastrophe.
Here’s the truth I keep relearning: rarely is there a business decision that actually needs to be made in the moment. Fear compresses time and convinces you that everything is urgent. Most of it is nothing a short break, or honestly, a good night’s sleep, can’t fix. Some of my best business decisions were made the morning after I almost made a terrible one.
I’ve also noticed something else over the years. Bad ideas didn’t cause some of the biggest mistakes I’ve watched business owners make.
They were caused by making perfectly reasonable decisions at completely unreasonable speeds.
- Hiring too quickly.
- Firing too quickly.
- Pivoting too quickly.
- Abandoning a strategy too quickly.
- Launching something before it was ready.
- Giving up before the data had enough time to tell the truth.
- Very few things in business compound overnight.
Unfortunately, panic often does.
Eleven Years Gives You Pattern Recognition
One of the greatest advantages of running an agency for more than a decade is that you eventually stop seeing individual events. You start seeing cycles. You notice that uncertainty always feels unprecedented while you’re living through it. Then a few years later, you realize it wasn’t unprecedented at all. It just had different headlines.
When we started Arcane Marketing, businesses were worried about different things. Then mobile changed everything. Then social media changed everything. Then voice search was supposed to change everything. Then COVID changed everything. Then AI changed everything. Every few years, it seems like we’re told the old rules no longer apply. Sometimes they don’t. Most of the time, the fundamentals remain surprisingly consistent.
Businesses still have to earn trust. Customers still want credibility. People still buy from companies they know, like, and trust. Relationships still matter. Reputation still matters. Consistency still matters. That’s one of the reasons I don’t panic as easily anymore. Not because I know what’s going to happen, but because I’ve seen enough change to know that change itself isn’t the enemy.
Over the last eleven years, I’ve watched businesses cut marketing just before demand returned, fire agencies weeks before strategies began producing results, completely redesign websites when messaging was the real issue, chase every new platform because everyone else seemed to be doing it, ignore small problems until they became expensive ones, and make emotional decisions they later described as “obvious mistakes.”
I’ve also watched businesses do the opposite. They stayed patient. They made thoughtful adjustments instead of dramatic ones. They trusted proven systems. They communicated well with their teams. They stayed visible while competitors disappeared. Almost every time, those businesses emerged stronger than expected.
Experience doesn’t eliminate uncertainty. It improves your ability to recognize which uncertainty actually deserves your attention. That’s a lesson golf keeps teaching me every year. And thankfully, it’s a lesson that’s much less expensive than buying another new driver.
If we’ve never met, a little context might help. I’ve spent the last 11+ years building Arcane Marketing and working with more than 1,000 businesses. Those experiences have shaped many of the lessons in this article. If you’re curious about my background, you can read more about me here.
Yes, This Applies to Your Marketing Too
I said this post wasn’t really about marketing. Here’s the part where it is, briefly, because after 11 years and 1,000+ companies I’ve watched this exact pattern play out in marketing budgets over and over. Entrepreneurs are wired for action, which is a superpower right up until it isn’t.
And let me be clear before I say any of this: I’m certainly guilty of doing it myself. Nobody is immune, including the guy writing the blog post about it.
If there’s one thing eleven years of agency ownership has taught me, it’s this: marketing rarely fails because of one bad decision. It usually fails because of a series of emotional ones. I’ve sat in conference rooms where everyone agreed on a long-term strategy, only to watch that same strategy get abandoned a few months later because the business hit an unexpected bump. Not because the strategy stopped working, but because fear became louder than the plan.
When business owners get scared, marketing is usually the first thing they grip too tight. They cut the budget the moment revenue dips, right when visibility matters most. They fire an agency at month 4 of a strategy built for month 12. They abandon what’s compounding to chase whatever new platform promises faster relief. Then they wonder why nothing works, which is a bit like blaming the driving range for your slice.
Those are white-knuckle decisions. They feel like action, and they almost always miss the fairway.
After working with more than 1,000 companies, I’ve noticed that the businesses that consistently grow aren’t necessarily making more decisions. They’re making fewer emotional ones. Instead of chasing every trend, they keep doing the ordinary things well, over and over again:
- Continuing to publish helpful content even when traffic temporarily plateaus.
- Investing in their brand before they feel like they can afford to.
- Improving customer experience instead of obsessing over competitors.
- Making decisions based on data instead of headlines.
- Staying committed to a strategy long enough to know whether it actually works.
Those habits compound. We usually think of compounding as something that happens in investing, but it applies just as much to business.
- Trust compounds.
- Reputation compounds.
- Relationships compound.
- Content compounds.
- Search visibility compounds.
Most of those things don’t produce dramatic results in thirty days, but over time they become incredibly difficult for competitors to replicate.
One thing I’ve learned is that entrepreneurs often confuse movement with momentum. Redesigning your website, switching agencies, launching another campaign, or jumping onto the latest platform all create movement. Whether they create momentum depends entirely on why you’re doing them. Thoughtful decisions move a business forward. Emotional reactions usually become expensive distractions.
Working with businesses across so many industries has also taught me that while every company faces different challenges, the psychology is remarkably similar. We all want certainty. We all want reassurance that we’re making the right decision. The best leaders I’ve worked with don’t chase guarantees, they focus on improving the odds. They ask better questions, trust the data, and make decisions they believe will still make sense six months from now.
One thing running Arcane Marketing has given me is a front-row seat to thousands of business conversations. When you spend that much time around entrepreneurs, you stop paying attention only to what works. You start paying attention to how people think, because thinking almost always comes before results.
The businesses that continue growing through uncertainty don’t possess some secret marketing tactic. They simply develop disciplined thinking. They don’t mistake anxiety for strategy, they don’t confuse urgency with importance, and they don’t abandon fundamentals simply because something new appears.
The businesses that come through hard seasons strongest are the ones that breathe first: they look at real data, make deliberate adjustments, and keep executing the fundamentals while their competitors lunge at the ball. That’s true in marketing, and it’s true everywhere else in your business.
Looking back over the last eleven years, I don’t think the biggest lessons came from the wins. They came from the moments where I almost reacted… and didn’t. Experience hasn’t made me fearless. If anything, it’s made me more aware of how much I still don’t know. But it has taught me something I wish I’d understood much earlier: the best decisions rarely happen at the highest emotional temperature. They usually happen after you’ve dared to let things cool down.
That’s a lesson I’ve learned in business. It’s a lesson I’ve learned as a husband and father. And, thanks to golf, it’s apparently a lesson I need to relearn several dozen times every year.
The Takeaway
Whatever pressure you’re staring at right now, the sequence is the same one that saves a round of golf. Step back. Breathe. Loosen your grip. Then make the swing you already know how to make.
Sleep on the big stuff. Take a walk before the scary email. And remember that the panicked version of you has never once out-decided the rested version of you. Including that text from your accountant. Ehhh… probably.
You have more power to shape your reality than fear wants you to believe. Use it on purpose.
Tomorrow will bring another headline, another unexpected expense, another algorithm update, another challenge that feels urgent. That’s part of the job. The real advantage isn’t avoiding those moments, it’s becoming the kind of person who doesn’t let them dictate the next decision.
