Episode 59: Transparency as a Woman in the Self-Help World
Mar 20, 2024Season 1Episode 59
Sara Fisk
I want to have a conversation with you about the tension in this self-help marketing space so that you know where I’m coming from. I want you to know what my values are and I want you to know what I'm striving for. I want you to look at the lens of your own values through the products that are being marketed to you, because it is relentless. Making informed decisions about the self-help industry is so essential. Marketing can be misleading. We’re blamed for our problems and then sold products to fix them. There’s a multi-billion dollar industry backing the narrative that we need more. We need that one thing or ten things that might make our lives easier and happier. I’m here to tell you that you don’t need some fabricated form of healing made by society. Healing is feeling like you have the support and opportunities you need to make meaningful change happen in your life. Take care of yourself. Can’t wait for you to listen.
I want to have a conversation with you about the tension in this self-help marketing space so that you know where I’m coming from. I want you to know what my values are and I want you to know what I'm striving for. I want you to look at the lens of your own values through the products that are being marketed to you, because it is relentless. Making informed decisions about the self-help industry is so essential. Marketing can be misleading. We’re blamed for our problems and then sold products to fix them. There’s a multi-billion dollar industry backing the narrative that we need more. We need that one thing or ten things that might make our lives easier and happier. I’m here to tell you that you don’t need some fabricated form of healing made by society. Healing is feeling like you have the support and opportunities you need to make meaningful change happen in your life. Take care of yourself. Can’t wait for you to listen.
You are listening to the ex good girl podcast episode 59. I had a completely different episode ready to go today. And the more I tried to finish it and get it ready to record today, it just, this other idea that I've been mulling over for a while just kept demanding my attention. And so this is what we're talking about today. Um, I want this on the record for myself and for you because as a woman who is in a self-help space, who has a career, who makes money, who has clients, who does marketing in a self-help space, I'm constantly thinking about the tension. Between the blame that is so readily keeped on women for the way their body looks for the condition of their relationships for the type of mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, they are for the careers. They either do or don't have the money that they do or don't have how they manage their financial finances finances. Um, the condition of their mental health and the stigma around being strong mentally. The way that aging is talked about in our society, I mean, there is just a never ending list of things that women are taught. To blame them for there is a never ending list of things that women are taught to blame themselves for. And wouldn't you know it, there is also a multi billion dollar industry that is there to sell you the thing that you need to look better, be better, smell better, be healthier, be thinner, do your job better, not worry about your kids anymore. And it's just, it's there and I want to talk about it. All of this has kind of come about for me because I've been doing an audit of the way that I market. I am marketing. I am trying to take the learning and the ideas and the experiences and the training that I have around. Not people pleasing and getting out of perfectionism around mental and emotional health and trying to create products that you buy that help your life. And there is, there's a tension there and the tension is that women are blamed and then women are sold products. Women are blamed for the problems that they have, and then they are sold products to fix those problems. And I'm a woman who has bought, I mean, I'm looking at my bookshelf right now. I have lots of books on how to feel my feelings, how to understand my attachment, how to lose weight, how to not lose weight, and just don't care. I want to have a conversation with you about the tension in this self help marketing space so that you know, as someone who listens to this podcast, as someone who potentially thinks about becoming a client of mine, either a personal one on one client or a client in one of my groups, or even just joining one of my free webinars. The free people pleasing, uh, stop people pleasing group that I offer on Facebook. I want you to know where I'm coming from and what I'm striving for. And when I get it wrong, I want you to feel comfortable reaching out to me and telling me because I don't always get it right. I don't think it is possible. I mean, what is right? Even that's, that's tough. I want you to know what my values are and I want you to know what I'm striving for. And I want you to look at. The lens of your own values through the other products that are being marketed to you, because it is relentless. Women are blamed for having problems, and then they are sold the products that will fix those problems from head to toe, hair loss to toenails, right? And everything in between. And in the self help arena, it is really easy. To hear messages like this product can fix you, or to believe that this coach or this therapist or this book is going to be the silver bullet. It has the secret. It's going to make everything easy. And when you hear from a lot of people, especially in the coaching space, they use their expertise to say things like they have the thing that will solve everything for you, that they've discovered it. You don't know it. But for X amount of dollars, they can teach it to you. And I mean, I mean, I'm, I I'm feeling the tension of that, even as I talk about it with you, not because I believe that coaches or programs or books or serums are bad or wrong. I just want, I want on my side, I want my marketing because I am marketing to be driven by my values. And I want to stay clearly what those are. And I want you to be able to make informed decisions, especially about my product, which is my coaching and coaching groups from an informed place. It just feels good to say that it feels good to have it out in the open because. I think from the perspective of a coach, and I know many of you who are, um, coaches listen to this and many of you who are self employed and who are selling things we want. I want to be able to offer the value of what I have learned. That I have put into what I think are the pieces that need to be understood to escape something like people pleasing. So one of the things that I value is transparency. And one of the ways that I try to be transparent is in teaching that people pleasing is taught to everyone. Women are born into systems like patriarchy and capitalism that teach us explicitly That our value is connected to what we do, to what we produce, to how we accommodate, to how nice we are, to what other people think of us, and then it's no fucking wonder that we, then it's no fucking wonder that we spend inordinate amounts of time trying to be Transcribed The good girl trying to be the good employee, trying to be the good wife, the good sister, the good everything, because we also have a biological need for connection and for safety. And for many of us, for all of us, that's how we get connection and safety is by belonging to groups. And when those groups tell us how we have to behave and what we have to believe and what we are allowed to do and what we're not allowed to do, that's what we do. And then we grow up and it doesn't feel good anymore. So when I get women, when I was at a place and let me, let me just back up when I was at a place where it didn't feel good anymore. And I was looking around for how to stop people pleasing. I didn't find a lot of tools. I had some knowledge and some training. And so I set to work. Creating first and foremost for myself. The path out of people pleasing, and then I found that it was valuable and I found that other people were stuck in people pleasing too, and I wanted to offer it to them. So, in all transparency, this people pleasing issue is global and it is not something that gets solved quickly. It is a slow process. The first time I created my group coaching program, it was six weeks. And I just kind of chuckle about that now because people pleasing when it's connected to safety and connection, it takes a lot longer than six weeks to learn, to tolerate. The discomfort that comes from not people pleasing, and that is the secret right there. If you want to boil people pleasing down to its simplest. Um, it's simplest terms. People pleasing is self abandonment. It is giving up what you want and what you need for what other people want to need. And the way out of people pleasing is you have to be able to tolerate the discomfort of not abandoning yourself. The reason that's hard is because self abandonment is how you get to Belonging, friendship, connection, community, love from some people. It's not how you get all of it, but it is how you got some of it. And so feeling shitty is part of the process. Now it's hard to market feeling shitty because that's not what a lot of people think they want to feel. And so one of the tensions that I have to deal with is how do I help people feel like they can do this. And that it's going to be hard, but I'm going to be right there with them and yet at its core, we're not going to be doing something that feels shiny and happy. We're going to be learning to tolerate negative emotions in all kinds of different situations. As you stop. Self abandoning, but in 100 percent transparency. That's what it is. Some people are going to be able to take that and run with it on their own. They're not going to need to be coached on it. They're not going to need someone to help them evaluate every situation and. Figure out why it worked in one situation and maybe why it didn't work in another. It's kind of like going to the gym. Some people can look up some workout videos online. They can take that to the gym and they don't need a personal trainer. And that is fantastic. Other people want or need the guidance of someone. And who has done the exercises before, who has walked the path before to help them know if they are doing it correctly and to be able to evaluate their form and give them some exercises in addition to what they might've seen online. That's actually the best comparison that I know of to what it's like to hire a coach. So in all transparency, if you are someone who does not need the coaching, you don't need to pay a coach. If you are someone who wants and needs the additional help, paying a coach is the best thing you could do because that person, if they are representing themselves accurately, is going to be able to help you get those results with less pitfalls or obstacles or things in the way. Then if you were to do it by yourself, some people don't mind pitfalls and obstacles, and they would rather just work through it on their own. I think that's fantastic. And other people want guidance. So in all transparency, what I am marketing to you is feeling shitty to be able to gain the tools and skills. To do something new. It's not magic, but it can feel like magic because it feels so amazing to not self abandon. I have a client that I'm working with right now. She's amazing. And I always suggest that clients start to become aware of their people pleasing and then also assess their capacity to not self abandon because you have to have both. You have to be aware that you're doing it. And have the capacity at the time it's happening to take it on. So one of the common things that happens to her and to others is you go to Starbucks, you place your order and they get it wrong. And because she doesn't want to be a bother, she doesn't want to ruffle any feathers. She just takes the drink and drinks whatever they give her. And that is self abandonment. Because that's not what she ordered. That's not what she paid for. It's not what she wanted. And she's telling herself, you have to drink it anyway, because that's what you get. So on one day, she noticed she was doing that, but she also assessed her capacity and she didn't have the capacity to deal with it. Totally fine. On another day, same thing happened. She got the wrong drink. She noticed it was happening. She had the awareness and she assessed her capacity and she was Actually able to take the drink back to the Brisha and say, this isn't what I ordered. Could we please try again? And it felt amazing to not self abandon. So what I am not, what I am selling is not magic, but it feels like magic. Because do not abandon yourself, even in little ways is so important. Another value of mine is honesty to share examples of real women who are just like you and just like me, who are doing the work day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute. To feel the discomfort of not self abandoning and the results that they are getting. It is very common in marketing to show results and then they say really quick results not typical that's really rampant in diet culture. And I don't want to do that. I want to share examples of women who you can relate to. I want to create communities of support of women that you can relate to, where we can hear our own stories reflected in the experiences of others. Communities that look like us brown women, white women, indigenous women, um, black women, LGBTQ members of that community. Um, I'm going to start over brown women, white women, black women, indigenous women, Asian women, people who do not even identify as women who are LGBTQ and who share the reality of being socialized as a woman and the programming that comes from being a woman. I want to be able to offer you authenticity in my own journey. Honesty. I am not totally over my people pleasing. It still pops up all the time. Let me just share two recent examples. One where I could see some growth. And another where it kind of took me a while to get there, but it's a little step of growth. Um, I left the community, the religious community that I was raised in, and I have been open about that in other episodes. And every year, this community does a big Easter pageant. And every year, my mom invites our family to participate in this big Easter celebration. And ever since we left, I have not been honest with her. That we don't want to go. I say things like, let me check the calendar. Let me get back to you. Let me check with so and so and sometimes I plan something else. So I can tell her we have this thing planned. Sorry, we can't go. And this year for the first time, I've been a coach for six years. I've been deeply involved in The people pleasing world for more than four, it's 2024. And she called with the invitation. And I finally said, mom, I don't think we're interested. We are not interested. I heard the disappointment in her voice. That's what I was trying to avoid disappointing her. But all I was doing was giving her the run around and not being honest. And that's not who I want to be. So I told her and it took me a long time. So I want to be honest. About my journey. The second example, I'm actually really proud of my husband and I share a lot of the household duties. And we have two sons that live at home with us and I take one son to school and he's kind of in charge of the other. And the other day, son number two, the one that he's in charge of didn't get up on time. I had just gotten back home from dropping my son off at school. And. My husband came into the kitchen and, um, let me know that son number two was not up on time and was going to need a ride. And I noticed he was in his workout clothes and he was heading out the door. And so I just said, uh, so what's the plan for son number two. That is huge for me because a past version of me would have just taken on the discomfort and the responsibility without even a second guess a second without even a beat. And we had the conversation that we needed to have and son number two got taken care of. So in some ways, the progress that I'm making is really big for me and it might not be that big for you. In other ways, I am still learning to make progress and I still fall into people pleasing. So being honest in the way that I market includes being honest with you about my own journey and progress and never, ever, ever, ever, ever. Wanting to look like or make it sound like I have it all figured out and that I know everything about this subject because I don't. I know what I know and I know that the tools and the skills that I have developed and put into words, they're not even necessarily unique to me. The words I use might be unique and they might connect with you in a unique way. A lot of what we do is repurposing and regurgitating and reworking and retooling things that other people have already put into rule or to not rules, things that other people have already put into words for, uh, for our clients. And I do that too. All of this is to say that you and I are both in this self help, self improvement space together, and I am marketing to you. I am hoping that what I have learned and created will benefit you and show you skills and tools that you can use. That you can practice to have more freedom in these systems that you and I were both born into it is the system that is wrong patriarchy is wrong. Capitalism the way we choose to practice it in this Western based way where everybody is valued and rewarded for what they produce is wrong. It doesn't honor us as humans. Or the human experience, but it is not your fault. It is not your fault that you were taught that your value is connected to what you do and produce. It is not your fault that you were taught to worry about what other people think of you. It's not your fault that you were rewarded for being accommodating and being pleasing and being nice and not rocking the boat. It's not your fault that you learned that pretending and performing would get you love and acceptance. What I do want to say is that it is your opportunity to change and Your responsibility to change if you want something different, only because no one can change it for you. The systems are not going to change quickly, overnight, but we can change. And it's really changed women, who I believe will have a hand in destroying the systems that we create. Are currently so unfair. And that's the work that I want to be a part of. That's what I truly believe is revolutionary. It's revolutionary in your own life. And I think it is revolutionary on a system scale. That's what I wanted to say. If you have any feedback for me, you can always DM me. I look at every single one. You can also email me Sarah at Sarah Fisk dot coach. I read them all and I will respond to every single one because. What I want is a partnership with you, a communication with you so that together we work and inform and learn from and have this experience of being human together. Have a great week.