Don't Spam People

I am that freak who clears my inbox to empty, every single day.

I see every single email that comes my way.

Even if I signed up for someone’s newsletter in good faith, I don’t want slews of emails from you.

I hate to be sold to, and I hate to be patronized.

I believe this is what initially made me a horrible salesperson.

Treat others how you’d like to be treated.

I would like to feel zero pressure to buy an item.

I would like to buy an item because someone I trust told me about it with excitement, and after trying it myself can validate how amazing it is.

The shift to me becoming a more financially successful entrepreneur was learning how to transparently sell to people.

I don’t want to be taken advantage of and I don’t want to take advantage of others either.

A shift was when I had been thinking about a posture corrector for years, for months thinking about it more and more frequently, never once bringing this up to my husband, who one night came into our room with excitement and said, “We should totally buy these!”

Flabbergasted that he seemingly read my mind (as he often does), we spent $21.99 each on Amazon Prime and two days later ate dinner together like the dorks we are, in our nerdy posture correctors.

I loved mine so much the moment I put it on.

After a lifetime of playing snare drum and having a heavy chest (and perhaps trying to downplay it after decades of bullying or harassment) I had no idea what it felt like to have proper posture.

Sure many yoga teachers have aligned my posture in many classes and workshops—put feeling a momentary adjustment contrasted to a lifetime of carrying yourself in a slumped letter “c” shape did me no justice.

This product forced me to thrust my shoulders back and the effect was immediate.

The physiological rumors of body language and power postures rang very true in my freshly aligned body.

I loved it so much I raved about it to my acupuncturist and massage therapist. During a session she asked if she could try it on. As I was paying and preparing to leave she made no indication of taking it off. Not on purpose, she just kept it on. I gave it to her and ordered myself a new one.

During my days as a yoga teacher I have the privilege of encountering many different students from many different walks of life. I often ask how people are feeling and what in particular they would like to work on.

Knowing a handful of students with chronic neck and shoulder tension, I told them about my recent purchase and how much they loved it.

Without making any commission, just telling someone honestly what I loved and why, several of my students had theirs on by the next week and were raving about it to others in the class.

It was a great “a-ha” moment when I realized I could ethically represent and suggest products I love without breaking one of my few and most adament rules of my business. Not too properly, my mantra was simply: “Don’t be a d-bag.”

Realizing that I already knew plenty of friends and students that did trust me helped me realize my responsibility in not leading them astray, and also finally allowed me to see that making a modest profit did not have to be pushy, salesy, or slimy.

It could be genuine, helpful to others, and bring my business a flux of income.

That was the moment that changed everything. The recognition that money is energy.

Like an amazing song, if I hear it too many times I'll likely need a break (or grow to resent it for a long while.)

Who are my ideal "clients"? People who enjoy my writing and happily buy the books I write that bring them joy, entertainment, or a sense of wholeness.

They are people who are intelligent, capable, self-reliant, hard-working, playful—mostly kind, inquisitive, warm-hearted humans.

They are people who see through bullsh*t and don't want to be pressured to purchase things they don't want.

They want to be inspired, and if they're anything like me, they celebrate great bargains.

If they're true people of the people, maybe not all of them have luxurious bank statements or the ability to pay high prices to invest in their mental, emotional, or physical health.

Arguably, don't these people need stress management techniques at least a little bit more than the well-off?

I've also come to know a great slew of extremely rich and fiscally prosperous people depressed, bitter, and as genuinely miserable as many from far worse circumstances.

What this tells me? We are all human, and in one way or another, we all experience suffering now and again, some far more severely than others.

Side note: I was born and raised in a small town in Northeast Ohio.

As a girl, I greatly awaited Friday mornings of summertime.

The night before, my long-legged blonde and gorgeous mother would sit at the dinner table with the local newspaper and highlight the address of various yard sales.

She would handwrite a list to visit the next day mapped in an order that made the most sense to drive to.

In the morning she'd pick up a coffee for her and a chocolate doughnut for me and we'd drive across the countryside searching for great deals.

Most all of my clothes were secondhand growing up, and most all of my clothes as an adult are as well.

When you stem from a rural background and establish a value for your Being that has little to do with material belongings, it becomes hard to swallow some of society's consumeristic must-haves.

I was fortunate to have people tell me I was beautiful on a regular enough basis that I understood beauty and popularity had little to do with what I wore. (Or even cooler, to recognize that beauty and popularity could still come plentifully in a jeans that cost a dollar and shirts that cost a quarter.)

Growing up in Wooster, Ohio was the best gift of my formative years.

To this day, I wear mostly all name brands. To this day, I refuse to buy a shirt for more than $10, if I dare go as high as that.

Clothes quickly depreciate and my sense in fashion swiftly shifts.

I buy great quality clothes at laughable prices, and this is one of my greatest pleasures in life.

To this day I adore knowing that still, my beauty or populatirty has absolutely nothing to do with a thousand dollar purse I just purchased, for I think to get off on inflated consumer goods is as shallow as it gets—plus, like attracts like.

Those who base friendships off of similar taste in expensive material goods are probably not the same people I'm looking to reach in the first place.

I keep thinking of who my "niche" market is. What an outlandish idea, in my counterculture take on running a modern business.

If shallow and rich people glean some depth or genuine heart from reading my words, awesome. Welcome.

But mostly as I'm forging ahead on my path of being a writer, I'm writing imagining all the people I don't know who may very well read my words one day.

Who are you? Why are you here? How did you discover these words?

I don't know and can't know before publishing them, but I suspect that the people called to read my work will be something like me at the soul level: people with senses of humor and heart, people who have been through plenty of good and bad times and still choose to show up to their lives each day with heart, kindness, levity, purpose, and power.

That's my niche.

I don't care where you live or what your income range is. I care about your inner beliefs and feelings, your spirit.

So I am not a target for Big Brother or enraged protests from materialistic advertising big wigs, I propose a society that invests in an economy of quality services in lieu of cheap and readily reproduced plastic products filling our homes and landfills with an endless amount of "stuff."

As an entrepreneur, I have long wondered if it is possible to be a widely successful business person without scamming people or selling them garbage they don't need.

Instead I hope to provide books and manuals and videos that people would want to purchase because they like me or the product itself enough to feel they are getting something they love and value.

I adamantly don't want to push salesy crap on my "clients".

I want them to want me on their own, and the best way of making someone want you is to not chase them down.

If they want you, they will seek you out.

This is at least my understanding of how the world works.

Bloom and bees will find you.

What I believe our American society (the only country I feel I can speak strongly enough about from personal experience) needs is a shift in consciousness and values, more so than more products to consume.

We're good on plastic products littering our globe.

What we need is much more simple, wholesome, and profound than useless products.

A moderate resistance to certain shallow consumerism should not make greedy business giants squirm.

For instance, instead of a $50 tablecloth that might not entirely make much of a difference to the grand scheme of your wellbeing, what if you invested that same money into a massage, or a fitness membership, or literally anything related to your health and wellness?

If we shift in small ways:

A) This is likely to be a more sustainable approach to change.

B) Change does not become so intimidating.

I keep up with current events, but mostly do not watch the news.

Again, fear not of shifting from negativity and fear-based content to something more wholesome.

Shifting from violent television.

I'm not prude, overly conservative, or naïve.

I have had one of my best friends willingly step from seven stories to end his life, family members and friends who sought an outlet for their pain via excessive self-mutilation, gashing their skin with surgeon's scalpels until the police arrived to find them lying in pools of their own blood.

I saw the crime scene photos. I have seen violence, I have felt loss, shock, and admittedly sickened to visualize or witness gore.

Though I do not condone censorship, I wish more people would willingly choose to not watch such f*cked up shows and programs that perpetuate such fear, anxiety, and primal portrayals of violence.

I don't think the problems of our society can be solved by law and policy alone.

We complain about society, but WE are society!

What each of us does really matters, and coming to age in this era of technological revolution has confirmed this all the more: what we put out into the world (as say, a writer, webmaster, or artist) could really impact the masses if given wings.

In other words, putting my words into a potentially very public sphere could have both positive and negative ramifications.

For years I worried about mostly the negative ones: what if I was stalked, murdered, bullied, shamed, mocked, laughed out—a fool and failure?

Or conversely, what if I stepped on the wrong toes after manifesting massive success? Would fame threaten the safety or privacy of myself or my family? Would I end up assassinated like a great handful of my greatest heroes? Would rising to the same greatness or legacy of my greatest heroes lead to similar cold-blooded murder?

What last launched my ability to "publish" my words here, on the world wide web where you are reading them was the realization that truly: very few people care.

The beauty is that the flower just blooms and the bees find it—take what they need, carry it to the next destination.

I am nothing more than a flower: a little sprout who took root in the soil I was born to, shot up and up and up and at last:

unraveled

blossomed

became heavy with my own scent, plump and saturated petals, rich in my own beauty.

I'll bloom and shine myself to the sun in celebration, blow in the breeze and offer myself to the bees, to the people passing who appreciate my presence: hopefully making their days brighter, colorful, or a little bit more beautiful.

I'll be a bold blossom as long as I am able and well cared for, one day perhaps lucky enough to grow old without tragedy—gradually drying, shrinking, crumbling, decaying, you get the picture.

Back I go into the ground as fermented fertilizer, ripening the soil and providing nutrients for the new seeds taking root.

In other words: I am a flower I think mostly developed, now in the stage of shining myself to the sun, offering what I have to offer, reproducing myself so my future flowers will grow, and providing a purpose or value to those around me until I should be so lucky to grow old and eventually, die, resting back to where I once came, a strong presence and impact on the future seeds taking root.

I am a flower.

If you are here, thanks for finding me.

If you are here, we've somehow found each other, no?

I wrote the words, and here you must be, reading them.

Thanks.

Without you, truly, what is the point of authoring words to a sea of unknown souls?

The potential to connect (at any time or place) to other people, first mentally, hopefully emotionally, and spiritually the whole point lies in the actual connection.

How did you land here?

How did I know you would arrive?

As Albert Einstein and many other wise people have suspected: everything has a frequency and there appears to be a magnetic call and response related to the law of equal and opposites. Physics, not magic.

Blah. Blah. Blah.

Happy freewriting.

Cheers.

In all of my marketing, I do believe one day I will ultimately succeed by not scamming or spamming my clients.

I will not knock down your door endlessly with sales pitches.

I do sell things: x, y, and z, and they are available 24/7 if you're interested.

If you know you're there and you're not interested, why would I bother you further?

I am an open book.

This, this, and this are right here.

If you want them, heck yeah. Come on in.

If you don't, no worries. Have a great day.

So…

However, there are ways you can encourage people to buy your products by being open, genuine, and honest, and until I understood that I a) wasn’t making many sales and b) helping very few people because I was so afraid of being perceived as a d-bag.

See also another topic: Using Pinterest to Reach Your Ideal Audience

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