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Marketing Hype: Debunking Life-Coaching Lies

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The dream…

Lies hurt. Lies lead to actual pain

This is important. And the sooner we all learn this lesson the better, because the world cannot take much more lying.

Lies are dangerous because even if you know they are lies, your ego mind isn’t so smart.

Especially if you don’t have a healthy mechanism for “aligning with your Truth”, a phrase which here means: “getting cues from your body and your heart so you know what to do and what feels right”.

And you can trust me: unless you practice a lot of yoga and meditation, you don’t. Western culture has made sure you are as lost as… As no other creature at any point in time could be.

I’m serious: you would be better off if you had been raised by wolves; you would have your instinct intact, and you could go back to it for directions.
But I digress.

My point is, in the absence of a healthy mechanism for “aligning with your Truth”, we cannot stop the lies from seeping into our subconscious.
Even if you’re a smarty pants cookie, you can’t stop them.

Lies are like fuel for your monsters, your “limiting beliefs”, your “inner critic”. Call it whatever you wanna call it.
Lies are what lead you to wonder at 2 in the morning…
BUT WHYYY AREN’T WE FAMOUS AND WEALTHY LIKE THAT WOMAN SAID?!?!?!

Oh, maybe she didn’t “say it”… But she “implied it”.
And baby, your ego mind can’t tell the difference. That’s why you bought into it in the first place.

That’s why marketing exists… to get you to buy things by leading you to believe things that aren’t really possible.
This makes me want to spit feathers, because it’s like staring at a bottle neck when it comes to my business.

I don’t want to say to people “here’s how you can cure all your depression foreverz”. Because I know the reality is: “you can cure the worst aspects of your depression, but it won’t stop visiting you, so the best you can do is learn how to work with it while it shows up”.
It’s far less… “hot”, ain’t it?

It’s 100% Truth, though. Or at least, as “true” as I can ever imagine it being.
I do know “the way out of depression”, but I’m far too scared of saying something which people might use to beat themselves up.

Like… all this marketing hype in the Life Coaching world…

Yesterday I stumbled upon a woman’s website that promised me, wait for it… “The life you want in 7 days”.
It goes past “ludicrous” to arrive at… “insulting”.

“Do what you love”.
“the life you want”
“you can really have everything you want”

All of these lead to hurt. Because when they fail to “manifest”, and they invariably do, we default in self-abuse, blame, “something must be wrong with me”.
And it’s really fricking hard to believe that “there’s nothing wrong with me” when you bought in the lie that you could have the life you want by Tuesday.

People lie.
Or they forget to mention things, such as how “Bob’s their uncle”, or that they have contacts in MTV and The New York Times, or that they live within walking distance of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet.

If lies hurt, Truth heals

I’m gonna smash some marketing lies right here, right now.

smash copy

“Live the life you want (in 6 days or less)”.

Ehm… NO.
Here’s why.

  • The life you want takes time.

It just does. Our dreams tend to go far further than our capacity. Because Western culture.

  • You have no idea what you want.

Because Western culture. What I said above about not having a healthy mechanism for aligning with your Truth? Exactly.
Chances are, what you want is not what you really want, or not the way you want it, or something. Because you are not in alignment with your heart, you can’t possibly be sure.

  • What you want changes. All the time.

You change all the time. When you were 15 you wanted to be old enough to do the “fun things”. Now you want something else. (unless you are me, and you’ve always wanted to fly spectacular aircrafts from a secret island, which I still secretly want).

What you want is a moving target because that’s how humans work: by wanting things all the time.

Which is why Very Wise People (like the Buddha) have devised a system for being “content”: “let go of attachment and learn to be happy in the now”.

Way less “hot” than “the life you want in 6 days”, but full o’ Truth.

“You can have everything you want”

Ehm… NO.

  • You can’t, actually.

I would like to fly spectacular aircrafts from a secret island. It ain’t happening any time soon, since said aircrafts or island aren’t actually, you know, real… That said:

  • You can always incorporate elements of what you want in your daily life.

Which is how you get to have what you want. Far less “hot” than “I’ll show you how to get everything you want”, but hey, it means I can have elements of “flying spectacular aircrafts from a secret island” every day…

Also, see above: you don’t know what you want.

  • Plus, you cannot possibly know what’s best for you.

Until you practice yoga and meditation and you are so aligned with your Truth that “what I want is what is best for me”. Which will never happen *all* the time, since it’s a “work in progress”.

“Do What you Love” (and make a living out of it)

All of the above, plus what I like to call “Barbara Sher’s Awesome-tastic BS smashing Truth”:

  • You can’t do what you love all the time.

Period. Much like you can’t eat cheesecake all the time.

If you did what you love all the time exclusively, you would hate it.
Barbara says simply “you’ll get bored”. But the thought of eating nothing but cheesecake for days is enough to make me sick, so I’m pretty sure that if I did “what I love” all the time, I would hate it.

Here’s Barbara Sher:

“You wake up in the morning and you feel good, that’s terrific, you will really have a nice day.
You wake up and you feel rotten? Too bad, you’ll still do what you have to do”

Her point is:
you can make great things, even if you are feeling crappy and uninspired.

  • Not doing what you love is useful.

I can’t believe anyone actually likes doing yoga. Or meditating.
Apparently, some people do, but I find it baffling.

The fact is, without a yoga teacher telling you to get into a hip opening pose, you won’t do it because it sucks balls. It hurts, it’s uncomfortable, it’s painful, it’s excruciating, and on top of it, you have the added perk of “releasing emotional trauma from the past that gets stored in your body”. YUCKS!

So yeah. You can get an awful lot from not doing what you love. Like grounding and healing. Unless you are super enlightened and you are aligned with your Truth, which means what you love and what you need tend to align.

The point: Learn to be in alignment with your Truth.

You work with your stuff. You acknowledge your pain. You show yourself compassion.
You learn about what you love and what you can’t stand.
What works for you and what doesn’t.
And you learn to forgive yourself for what you wish worked for you but doesn’t.

And as you do all that, you learn what it is you love doing… And you slowly and intentionally start moving towards it…
And you learn how to bring tiny elements of it into your daily life.
Because it’s in alignment with your Truth, with who you are. And you couldn’t imagine not doing it.

I’ll leave you with Barbara Sher on “Doing what you love”. She says it better.

Barbara Sher: “Why you must do what you love”

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