The NRL and AFL grand finals are not only big days for sport, they are massive days for advertising. With so many eyeballs glued to the telly, the cost of buying each 30 second ad slot shoots up to over $100,000. In the time it takes to play two games, a phenomenal amount will have been spent encouraging people to gamble, drink beer, eat fast food and buy the latest SUV’s. Of course, a great deal more is spent producing the commercials and paying for celebrity endorsements.
Frankly, we are a little jealous. We have far more important messages. We just don’t have a budget to match that of an online betting company.
If we did, we would tell people something they don’t hear very often. We’d say “you are enough.”
You don’t need a shiny SUV to be enough. You don’t need to be as manly as the bloke in the beer commercial. You don’t have to have be as thin, pretty and smiley as the model mother in the frozen peas commercial.
Chances are your teeth won’t be as straight as hers. Your kitchen won’t be as sleek as hers. Rather than gleefully eating their peas and looking up at you with a radiant smile exuding pure love, your children will probably try to stuff those peas up their nose or fling them at the cat.
Still, you are enough.
An incredible amount of stress, struggle and dissatisfaction comes from trying to be just like the actors cast in these commercials, the stars in the movies and the photoshopped celebrities in the magazines. Even the lives of friends and family are painstakingly curated on social media into something which bares little resemblance to reality.
Just like all these people in their carefully constructed fantasy worlds, you are supposed to be smart, sexy and successful, with flawless skin, amazing baking skills and the latest iPhone. And by the way, you should also be a happy little Vegemite, as bright as bright can be.
Chances are you have wrinkles and pimples and stray hairs in weird places. You probably don’t have the time, energy or inclination to labour over a pineapple upside down cake. Your phone may very well have a cracked screen and a failing battery. But do you know what?
You are enough.
It’s a message which bares repeating, because we all hear the opposite message constantly. Trying to be all the things you “should” be is an exhausting, endless road, paved with dissatisfaction. We can keep travelling that road or we can stop, give thanks for what we have and treat ourselves with a little self-compassion.
I certainly don’t have the muscles, the karate skills or the fancy Aston Martin that James Bond has. I am however enough. Unlike Heineken, Mindarma can’t afford a prime time commercial with James Bond in it… but it’s enough too.
While it is easy to be envious of big budget advertisers, we’re thankful just to be able to create something which has the potential to make a difference. We’re thankful for the many people who have supported us and kindly gone above and beyond the call in creating Mindarma. With the project now close to completion, we look forward to being able to share a whole lot of really important messages, including those about being human, imperfect and okay with all of that.