Hello Friend!
If you missed it, please do read part one of this post here.
Now onto today!
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How MOST Abundance Marketers ACTUALLY Made Their Money:
Then if we zoom out a step further, we’re likely going to find that said guru had at least one or maybe even several previous businesses they were involved in before becoming a sales guru.
They were a life coach, a nutritionist, a polarity teacher, a therapist of some sort or they were involved in an MLM.
You’re going to do just a little research and find that they almost never seem to disclose how much they were making in those previous businesses.
They almost never disclose whether they were financially independent or if they were being supported by spouses/parents/others.
They don’t often share what their lives and businesses were like BEFORE pivoting to being a success coach.
Before they used the business they were previously running and melded it into coaching other coaches of their same genre to have success in THEIR businesses, or before they pivoted to straight up business coaching for all kinds of people.
It’s all about what happened AFTER that pivot. Or the ‘I went from earning only a few hundred dollars a month to having my biggest launch of all time’ VIA their pivot to business coaching.
They are likely weaving their past business into their new boss babe coaching - their yoga therapy is now a part of how they sell. Their polarity teaching is weaved into their marketing. Their healing modality - whatever it was, it’s still there, and it’s now a PART of how they are going to teach you to sell. Often times again, they will use their previous business as their 'neiche' of the kind of people/coaches they like to work with.
The polarity teachers will turn into polarity teachers gurus. The nutrition coaches are now here to coach you on getting your nutrition business into the 6 and 7 figures. The life coach is now a coaches coach.
They're going to be telling you that they’ve figured out some secret sauce - the ultimate combo of spirituality/health/wellness practices that will supercharge your business efforts. They're going to be telling you that this course is them sharing all their 'masterclasses' on how to manifest wealth and abundance and they're going to 'transmit' these 'downloads' straight to you in their containers of love and light. They're going to tell you that anyone can have a successful online business, and that anyone from beginners to the most advanced can 'level up' their success by joining the 'community'. They're going to tell you that this is a massive opportunity not only to get all the tools they used to make it big, but also that you will be invited into a 'sacred space' where you can connect with other like minded souls who will be great networking for you.
You will be told that it’s their personal combination of spirituality/wellness practices that they’ve infused into their business approach that was the key that unlocked their abundance. They are going to tell you that they also invested in themselves in order to generate their success, and that the financial exchange for the program is you declaring to the Universe that you’re ready to 'play big' and get rid of all your self limiting beliefs so you can finally have the success you’ve alway craved. They're going to tell you that a LOT of what holds people back (ie. you) from making it big online is simply that you don’t believe in yourself enough, you’re not aligned enough, you’re not open enough, you’re not in your masculine/feminine enough, you’re not showing up in your fullest self enough - but don't worry they will teach you exactly how to do these things.
They're going to have a social media feed filled with photos of themselves luxuriating. Traveling. Pampering. Spending their money. Enjoying the good life. Connecting with other 'high level' people. It will be bright, saturated and will have all the right tones, colors and visuals.
There will be lots of talk of manifesting, energy, clearing, aligning, taking responsibility for ones self, upgrading, DNA shifting and quantum leaping. There will be a LOT of speaking to finding purpose and meaning. Finding your true self and that true service that only you have to offer. Stepping into your fullest potential, being your WHOLE self, transcending your limits and pain and FINALLY having that HUGE life you always wanted to have.
They are going to tell you that the thing that took them from failing/just making it to success was an alignment strategy.
A belief system re-orientation.
That they energetically shifted something.
That they healed their masculine/feminine balance.
That they used their pleasure practices or aligned their bodies with nature perfectly or opened their hearts in order to generate those elusive sales.
It all sounds so magical.
There may have been *SOME* of this in the mix. They may have worked through their limiting beliefs, they may have started playing bigger, maybe they honed their marketing in to match a more specific audience - and that’s really just basic business strategy.
But that isn’t WHY they are as successful now as they are.
The REAL Reason They've Found Success:
They're successful now because their business is selling that they can teach anyone to become financially independent doing something they love doing that is also effortless and fills their lives with meaning and purpose.
THAT’S why they are selling millions of dollars in programs.
They aren’t running a business like you’re running a business.
Their product isn’t like your product and their success isn’t going to be similar to your success.
They may really believe that it’s their alignment and spiritual practices that changed the game for them. They may earnestly trust that it was an energetic shift in awareness that caused the uptick in sales. They may be totally convinced themselves that it was their pleasure practices that finally unlocked the door to those million dollar years.
Because we are human who really like to see patterns even where patterns don’t exist. We are humans who like to believe in magic when something logical is actually happening. We are humans with blindspots and the tendency to follow lines of reasoning that started out incorrect, that just keep building on themselves. We’re great at looking for evidence and seeing evidence where evidence doesn't really exist and also at ignoring evidence that does exist.
In most cases, we’re going to find again that what ACTUALLY lead these people to success was:
- Being conventionally attractive.
- Having some capital that got them started/a partner or parent who was willing to support them while they tried all the iterations of their business. They had lots of wiggle room to try, fail and invest before success happened.
- Getting in on an MLM early.
- Getting in early on whatever business they were running before.
- Having high level connections with people who gave them a leg up.
- Having a product that was super niche and blew up without much effort on their part other than creating and offering the thing. (ie. they were going to make it big without a strategy or really doing much of anything)
- Telling people that they will teach them how to manifest money easily.
This is what actually did it.
It wasn’t their pleasure practice.
It wasn’t their manifestation technique.
It wasn’t their mindset.
It wasn’t their juice recipes.
It wasn’t their alignment or the fact that they did what they did on the specific moon.
It wasn’t because they surrendered or opened or found God.
It was having the right product (ie. I will teach you how to be financially free or some other very specific thing that just happened to work), the right support and the right look.
The Big Problem With Their 'Containers:'
On top of this, many of these courses don’t even contain the practical, basic business strategies that are necessary to know if you are working with an online business that isn’t selling wealth or something that you don’t really need to sell. Rather these abundance coaching courses and services are all (or mostly) energetic, ‘downloads’ of mindset shifts, ways you can alter your personal life to be more in alignment with abundance and so on.
Many of these courses aren’t even attempting to teach anything concrete and that’s for several reasons:
- You can find that kind of information for free now a days.
- It’s not very sexy or enticing.
- Many people who work in the online space have DONE all the practical marketing/branding/strategizing/backend set up and still aren’t having success in their business.
- The person offering the course never had to worry about those things because their product was one of the ‘it’s gunna sell no matter what’ types.
- The person never had success with those strategies either - because again the thing that made them their money was shifting to telling people they could teach them how to make money.
They will be selling the magical, esoteric, energetic things because that’s all they have to sell. That’s what they think did it for them. They aren’t seeing reality.
Or again, they really don't see that what took them into actual success was telling people they could coach them on how to have success. They didn't have success in their actual business - as in they didn't have success doing what they are attempting to coach YOU to do successfully. They are saying they are a a coach for struggling nutritionists, a coach for life coaches, a coach for healers - but when THEY were straight up nutritionists, life coaches and healers THEY weren't making money.
They don't actually KNOW how to have success in the business YOU are running.
Never having had actual success with their non-abundance coaching work is a big red flag many of us miss when looking for teachers to help US become more successful.
We really want to believe that these people know what they're talking about. We see them making money (or at least that's what's being presented). We've done all the mundane marketing things and they haven't worked - therefore we're easily convinced there must be something energetic that we're missing.
It's easy to fool ourselves - especially when what we're being presented with is exactly what we want to hear and LOOKS so much like the thing we want.
Finally, with these types of energetic programs - there’s never any way one can prove that what was sold didn’t actually work.
If you get success while using their program, it’s all because of the program of course!
If you don’t, it will be down to the fact that you didn’t do your work. You didn’t heal enough yet. You didn’t transform enough yet. You still have blocks to shift. Because there’s no real concrete way to tell what’s going on inside of a person, one can never prove/disprove what is or isn’t happening - and thus they can always sow doubt in you that it was YOU that failed the program, not that the program failed you.
You can’t prove you did the steps because the steps are all energetic. You can’t prove you did the work because the work is all esoteric.
There’s a dangerous level of mind games that can be going on in these kind of programs. These programs easily tap into our need to be seen as 'good', they tap into our desire to make things that we've invested a lot of time or money into SEEM like they worked or were helpful in some way even if they weren't, they tap into our desire to be part of a group/community, they tap into our fears and doubts that that which is holding us back is some deep rooted thing in US that need excavating and they tap into our willingness to blame ourselves for failures that aren't our fault in order to protect our own minds from the letdown of a guru or promise turning out to be fake.
These programs rely heavily on the cognitive bias we will enact on ourselves. That longing for community, the longing to believe that whatever we just invested in worked, the longing for magical rules and reasons for a lack of success and the tendency to protect the image of the person we're looking up to/the dream we want to believe in via blaming ourselves are all things that are going to be utilized in selling these programs that generally DON'T work.
We will find reasons to believe that the course helped even when it didn't. We will suppress our doubts and fears so that we don't look bad in front of the group. We will tell ourselves that the program didn't work because we just need to try harder and go deeper - the thing is right. The thing is true. It's just us that needs to push harder.
We don't want to let go of the fantasy, so we will convince ourselves of its legitimacy - and these coaches know that.
Even if they offer a money back guarantee there are likely catches. Most importantly, the fact that most of these programs cost SO MUCH money, means that again we are PRIMED to believe we’re going to get results. We’re far more vulnerable to drinking the kool-aid and convincing ourselves of success that doesn’t actually exist, benefits that didn’t actually happen and to blame OURSELVES for a lack of results. When you spend that much money on something your brain literally looks for reasons to believe it was worth it even when those reasons don’t exist in real life. The fact that these programs are focused so much on the energetics only inflates this possibility of self deception and being gas lit into believing you failed when the program was full of hot air.
We need to think critically about what we’re being sold and what we’re being told.
We need to look beyond the stories people are weaving - even the stories they are weaving for themselves - to look for the actual truth.
What True Business Coaching SHOULD Look Like:
True business success doesn’t come from inner alignment and love making.
It doesn’t come from a masculine and feminine balance.
It doesn’t come from God.
It comes from having a solid product that people want, that's being marketed strategically.
It comes from consistency, and having a solid back end set up.
It comes from having something that people want, and being able to connect to those people.
It comes from the right connections at the right time.
It comes from a lot of practical, reasonable things - some of which we have control over and some of which we don't.
Success isn't going to be for everyone - and that's something a good business coach will tell you.
Long term business success isn’t energetic.
There are SOME energetics to it - it’s going to be WAY harder to be successful when you really don’t believe in yourself and therefore aren’t putting yourself out there. When your whole life is work and you’re getting burnt out. When you aren’t taking care of your relationships and body.
But again, you totally CAN have success even WITH those blocks and you can totally fail even when you’ve worked those blocks.
The truth is, not everyone has something that’s going to be wildly successful - or even successful at all - even WITH good, solid marketing and branding. Not every product is going to have a huge audience. Not every person is going to be ‘attractive’ so as to be able to build a large following. A good business coach will tell you these things. A good coach will get you set up with the fundamentals first, and see how that goes. A good business coach will work with you on your blocks personally, and it won’t be all esoteric - there will be real 1-1 crossover between what’s going on in your personal life and how you’re showing up in your business - it won’t be all mysterious and totally metaphysical.
A good business coach, first and foremost, will have experience successfully running a business that was NOT telling people how to make money.
They will know how to sell an actual product or service that isn’t the dream of total financial independence that everyone wants to believe is real.
They will be honest with you about whether or not your thing has a chance.
They may help you with your pleasure and alignment. Your body connection and relationships. Maybe they will support you in loosening up or developing aspects of your character - and this may enhance your experience of work to a degree - but it won’t make or break anything.
Selling a real product or service is a totally different ballgame than selling making people rich.
I know we all want out of the rat race. We all want purpose and fulfillment. We all want work that means something. We all want independence and to believe that if we take responsibility for ourselves we will be free. We all want to believe that it’s an energetic/magical thing that’s holding us back from the success we want, especially when we feel we’ve tried all the practical things.
These desires make us vulnerable. To being tricked, and to being tricked by people who are also fooling themselves.
Just a reminder.
<3
