Capsules of Emotion
She may have broken my heart; but she unleashed my core self with the lessons I learned. What a gift!
A funny thing happens when you search Unsplash or any stock image depository for an emotion. You see how a photographer or artist captures their perspective or interpretation of the emotion in a still photograph.
And sometimes, when you look through the results of your search, you stumble upon that one photograph that turns your original idea for a blog post on its head
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I’ve had more than my share of heartache and betrayal in my lifetime. I had an experience recently that wasn’t a betrayal of any sort by a lover - but it felt EXACTLY like it.
Mondays in my community are #MavenMonday which is essentially when I post content for the midlife entrepreneur segment of women in my community. And I hope they can learn what NOT TO DO to their people from this story I’m about to share.
The emotions are still pretty raw so I hope I’m able to articulate this experience clearly. This month, already, I have experienced TWO sales calls that went horribly, horribly wrong. The most recent one was so brutal, I wanted to crawl into a hole and quit. Let my business die - and me along with it. I’ve been quickly reminded as to why I left this industry 6 years ago. I find myself beginning to question my own sanity as to why I thought I wanted to return to it.
The same person took me on a pendulum swing of emotion. My first experience with her was amazing. She reached out to me after I reacted (not commented) on a post she made in a facebook group. And her humor matched mine. She gave me this incredible gift of seeing me. Really seeing me. In a way I long to be seen that rarely others pause and take the time to see.
It’s inspired me to focus on pausing and seeing my people in ways they want to be seen. It was such a profound experience. She invited me to a call to learn what it would be like to work with her. And I was transparent with her. I did not have the ability to invest with her right now - but I knew I wanted to work with her - but needed financial investment information so I could make a plan for it in the future. She said she was okay with that. She told me I was going to be blown away by this hour-long call we were to have and I would “find the money.”
The time for this call came and I have to say, I just wasn’t blown away. She repeated the things she’d already told me and they just weren’t landing the same way they did before. While she was saying all the things that resonated with me, this sinking feeling washed over me like a tsunami as I realized I was back into the same exact cycle I had been with another coach from a couple of weeks before - only this one wasn’t obviously reading from a script. Yet, somehow, this experience was way, way worse.
This coach who said she wasn’t like all the other coaches out there and did things her own way - was sounding like and conducting this call exactly like most every other cookie-cutter industry-trained coach on the planet conducts their calls. In fact, in 2013 I had nearly the exact same cycle of a sales call with someone I still cringe anytime I hear her name or her brand mentioned.
She ignored me completely as to where I was at. Then, when I reminded her - she belittled me and raked me over the coals about how I could say I was in this position. For a moment, I perceived anger from her at me over something I was clear with her up front before I ever agreed to this call to begin with. I told her I could probably do this later - and her response was, “Oh, no, no! We do this now or you don’t work with me!”
And my decision immediately was in my head and my heart, “Then I don’t work with her.” My decision at my core self was made at that point even though my mind wasn’t really ready to give up on it. She came back and gave me 24 hours to sell one of my packages that would cover a fee for her mini-intensive. My words didn’t say so, but my core self is never going to let me work with her.
After I hung up, I cried. I felt so small and insignificant and like a failure. I’m tearing up as I’m writing this. It’s still fresh. But the other thing it did was piss me off! The longer the day went on, the more pissed off I got. And an offer I had originally put up to expire in 24 hours, I took the 24 hour expiration date off of it - and left it up as a September special.
Instead of crawling into a hole and burying myself and disappearing, I am believing in myself and trusting my own intuition and all the things she reminded me of in our first call that I am both damn good at and proud of. I will take these things, show the world, sound my battle cry and I will be damned if I disappear in a hole again.
I don’t need to borrow her intuition to see my people and tell me what to say to them! Why? Because I do NOT want to make my people feel like the way I felt after that last call with her EVER. And if her intuition was really that good, then she would have known that the things she said to me to manipulate the sale and close the deal were the exact things that would shut me down.
I had a call scheduled later this week with another coach who offered me an hour of her time to blow my mind and it will be the best hour I have spent for my business … and after the two other calls on that same promise already this month, I canceled that call. I don’t need my mind blown now that I know what that really means. Thank you anyway.
I also already have a coach I know I will be working with (as long as I don’t have to get on a bullshit sales call with a team member to enroll). She never fails to see me and makes me feel like a rock star. When I told her I wanted to be in her Mastermind, her response was, ‘It will be here when you’re ready, it’s not going anywhere.”
I went back and questioned everything I was doing. Why am I doing this? Why am I doing that? Because some coach who doesn’t know me said to do it this way?
What do I really want to do and how do I best serve? This journey led me back right there to Substack. I left when they brought in the social media type segment into Substack - which I hated. But I don’t have to use it or pay attention to it if I don’t want to.
I changed the domain name and my email address so it broke a bunch of links, etc. But I feel like I’ve come back home and I’m finding my own voice again.
I’m back in coaching - and I’m here to stay. I’m not going anywhere. September marks my official large-scale return. I hate to call it a launch because this is evergreen.
It’s my restart. It’s my coming home to my core self and trusting my own intuition and heart for people.
I hope it is yours, too.
Challenge:
If you are in this online industry, I challenge you to truly see and truly hear your people. Trust your own intuition when it comes to serving them. It is in serving them that you will sell to them.
Don’t hold their pain hostage for the ransom of your coaching fee. Don’t get them to get vulnerable and trust you with their pain only to turn it against them.
People will NEVER forget how you made them feel.
Be a champion for your people. And do it from the authenticity of your core self.
Thank you for being here, for reading, for sticking with me. I’ve got work to do and I’m sure you do, too. So, let’s get to it!
Unapologetically,
MelAnn
If you haven’t already, this is your invitation to please join my FREE facebook group community. I have free training dropping really soon for community members.
I will ALWAYS have an offer at the end of my posts here. Don’t hate me for it. I am not apologizing for it. I am proud of what I offer and deliver in my coaching services. This is here for those ready to take that step. If you’re not, then that’s okay, too! I will keep posting free content and offering free training in my group, etc. My coaching offers will be here when you’re ready.
If you are ready to take another step on this journey with me, here are my two specials to celebrate the new focus and restart of my coaching practice.
I have no special sales copy or NLP tactics and I most certainly don’t want to get on a call with you to tell you to sell your soul to the devil or at the very least, borrow money from him to pay for my coaching.
If you are reading this after September, then you can check out this link to discover my current packages / offers.