I Changed My Approach to Business

Read now (4 mins) | After I saw how most online marketing practices promote capitalism and white supremacy

April 28, 2023

I’ve been working with so many clients lately who are struggling to complete the basic marketing and sales tasks of business ownership:

• get in front of new audiences

• collect leads

• nurture leads

• make offers

• close sales 

None of these tasks are difficult in the slightest. None of them on their own take that much time even. But client after client fails to do it. 

One client, who has a 6 figure word of mouth consulting business, told me she wants to get to 7 figures but right now she is only working 5 hours a month (a MONTH!) and never seems to get around to booking speaking gigs or media opportunities and just isn’t growing her list. Clearly she has time. She has the skills. She just doesn’t want to do it enough to actually do it. 

Another client keeps hiring VAs and OBMs to build funnels and run ads and do LinkedIn outreach, but the leads aren’t turning into sales appointments and clients. She wants to hire a chat sales team now but she can’t afford it and is struggling with the catch-22 of spending more on her business than she is making but not being willing to do it herself. 

Pre-COVID/pre-burnout me would have told these clients to buckle down, get tasks on the calendar, create a reward system so when you do the tasks you trigger some dopamine, and most importantly: change your thoughts. 

I used to spend hours with clients teaching them how to identify self-sabotaging thoughts and then replace those thoughts with ones that got better results. 

We would identify places in their life where they had the outcome they wanted, identify the thought that created that outcome and transfer it to the sales and marketing problem they were facing so they could get it done. 

This worked roughly 20% of the time. Meaning about 20% of the time my clients were willing willing and able to change their thoughts and buckle down and do the work.

For years I tried to improve that 20% number. Hypnosis? NLP? Human Design? What trick could help more clients do the simple work of driving traffic and converting leads? I was always searching. 

Now my coaching is so different. 

I have stopped preaching the productivity gospel. Not because it doesn’t work (it for sure can) but because success isn’t the real end goal—happiness is. Productivity brings the opposite even when it leads to success. 

I learned this the hard way. I did productivity perfectly. I changed my thoughts, rewired the chemicals in my brain, became a master of my calendar, and I got more shit done in a day than many people do in a year. 

Have you heard of the 90 day year? I was living the 1 day year and I’m not really kidding. 

But what exactly was the point? Satisfaction? Money? Impact?

That’s what I would have told you. It felt like I was thriving. I wanted everyone to learn these skills. I even agreed to let a Hollywood producer make a movie about how productive I was…Which is exactly how systems of oppression are perpetuated! 

The productivity gospel is fundamental to the perpetuation of capitalism. Capitalism ties your value to what you produce. The more productive you are, the more valuable you are. 

My experience with burn-out was tied directly to my learning how inescapably tied white supremacy is to capitalism and how inescapably tied capitalism is to productivity. Capitalism is about getting more based on your power. More power. More things. More things. More power. 

England has a stronger military, they go to India, they want tea, they just take it. (Colonization way oversimplified but you can’t say English colonists weren’t massively productive.)

Capitalism is a system that normalizes, empowers, and encourages the exploitation and marginalization of populations with less power—specifically Black and Indigenous folks, but also fat people, Autistic people, Queer people—my people…Me. 

I had found a way through life coaching, thought work, productivity hacks, self-hypnosis, NLP, tarot card readings, meditation, neuroscience, and other tricks to become the unconscious oppressor. I was doing my part to uphold white supremacy and the patriarchy without even realizing it. 

So what do I tell a client who is struggling with sales and marketing today?

• I ask: what feels most fun, most playful, most joyful, most creative?

• I say: Forget the rules. Forget sales and marketing. Let’s focus on creativity. 

• I explain: The only answer I have found to happiness is true creative freedom and expression. 

You want satisfaction? Money? Impact? Don’t look for it in productivity.

You won’t find it in the next online course or coaching program. You find it by expressing deeply what’s in your soul. That satisfaction will be worth more than money and if money and impact follow, let them be the cherry on top. 

The gift of life is to love and create. That’s it. Any moment you can spend loving something or someone or creating something to give back to the world to be loved, is a moment well live. 

The purpose of life is to have as many of those moments as you can. 

Those experiences of love and creation themselves are the meaning of life—not the byproducts of those experiences—though capitalism will have you think otherwise. 

This week I told clients:

• Play more pickle ball

• Paint some animal ceramics and bring them to our next call

• Have lots of seggs in the Caribbean

• Apply for a job

• Create the most fun outline for an event you can think of

• Take a restorative yoga class

• Don’t write any more emails

I know this might seem like less than ideal sales and marketing advice but weirdly it is more effective long term. Money needs are real so sometimes you need a job or a path to being able to pay bills. That should take as little headspace as possible.

Prioritizing joy is wildly underrated and leads to the most long term money and impact in my experience. 

I can’t guarantee doing what you love will bring money, but if it doesn’t, at least you are doing what you love and that IS the actual point of life!

How do you pursue creative fulfillment? Tell me about it in the comments!

Related episodes from The Autistic Culture Podcast:

Episode 38: Productivity is Autistic

Episode 47: Autistic Centered Therapy - AuCT

*Background note: Most people only have a vague (often, highly stereotyped) version of autism in their minds and believe that autistic children need (traumatic) ABA therapy to "overcome" their disability and appear "normal."  After receiving an autism diagnosis in her thirties, Dr. Angela Lauria realized that she too had been mostly unaware of what it means to be Autistic.  Like so many people, she started her journey by first gathering information and resources from the omnipresent (and problematic) Autism Speaks, but eventually moved away from the 'autism community' in favor of the 'Autistic community,' where she found kinship with other Autistic individuals and learned to let go of pathologizing language like 'autism spectrum disorder' and 'Asperger's Syndrome.'  This autism blog (and her autism podcast, "The Autistic Culture Podcast") is meant to share her lived-experience insights to support others on a similar journey of diagnosis, understanding, and community. Embrace Autism--differences are not deficits.