What is the wolf hiding inside the Women's Empowerment Coaching complex?

Getting real about the influence of Toxic Bro Culture in Marketing and Business

Oct 12, 2022

After I wrote the article called 4 things diet culture and women’s "success” culture have in common, I was contacted on Facebook by a woman who thanked me for bringing up this topic.

A year earlier, she’d bought a manifestation business course by a well-known influencer and online businesswoman.

After realizing that the course dealt with uncovering trauma without being qualified to do so, she tried to withdraw and get a refund. They refused. After trying to dispute the response, she was contacted by the lawyer of the influencer, who threatened her to shut down her request or they would come after her.

She was terrified to tell me the influencer's name out of fear of retaliation. I was horrified by our conversation, but sadly it’s not the first time I’ve heard a similar story.

While the surface of the Women’s Empowerment complex is polished and full of high-vibe live streams from luxury locations, there’s an underbelly that is far from shiny.

There are a few things that I want to cultivate awareness around related to the business of Women’s Empowerment.

Before I tell you what those things are, a few notes about me. I’m not a marketing expert who has made millions (other than for my clients) or even someone with a degree in marketing.

Here’s why I think it’s worthwhile for you to listen to me; read on, and let’s see if you agree.

I’ve been involved in online marketing in various capacities for over ten years
I’ve helped produce online summits and live events in Boulder, NYC, Seattle, Chicago, and Stockholm
I’ve put on workshops, certification trainings, and created online courses
I’ve helped launch dozens of ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram
I’ve worked with clients with over a million Instagram followers
I’ve set up more than ten marketing funnels
I’ve sent hundreds of emails for dozens of clients
I’ve done over twelve launches, some made over 75k, and others failed miserably
I’ve grown an Instagram following for a client to over 38k, a client’s Facebook group to over 16k organically over three years, and grown my own Instagram account using various organic and paid tactics to 10k
I’ve partnered with designers, marketing experts, SEO experts, and ad management teams
I’ve trained with marketing experts Ross O'Lochlainn of Conversion Engineering and, in a smaller capacity, Feminist Marketing Expert Kelly Diels
I’ve written website copy for dozens of clients and email copy for hundreds of emails

But most importantly, for a decade, I’ve studied the funnels of many dozens of 6- and 7-figure coaches and those who claim to help other women get there.

Do I have your attention?

Good.

One of the main points I will make below is the level of manipulation and deception in the online marketing space, so I wanted to make sure I am as transparent with you as I can before diving in.

There are three aspects of the current online marketing climate that I want to highlight.

The pervasiveness of women positioning themselves as various forms of Money/Abundance/Manifestation/Prosperity/Manifestation “Gurus”/Teachers/Coaches
The marketing tactics that are currently normalized are deceptive and unethical
The collective marketing PTSD many women are struggling with

1: The Best Way To Make Money Is To Say You Can Help Other People Money

Where the heck do I start… Let’s take it waaaaay back to when I started looking at who made big money.

2009-

Back in 2009, I was ready to graduate as an IIN Health Coach.

Brought to the stage were two Health Coaches who made their money helping other health coaches be successful. While most coaches were barely getting by, these ladies started making bank, and I took notice.

2015-

Then a few years later, I learned about an online business school. They cracked the code on affiliate marketing by paying the affiliates $500-$1000 per new customer. This created droves of “successful coaches.” The money they were making was from affiliate marketing, not their coaching programs. Yet when these coaches shared how successful they were in their business and revenue numbers to back up their “success,” they seemed to forget to mention the affiliate marketing part…

Next came an Australian powerhouse who was ahead of the curve in using provocative and compelling language like “Queens making millions” and luxurious-looking photo shoots to attract her customers.

Fun fact: This was the time of the predominantly black or red websites with the gold details promising 6- or 7-figures through their various coaching packages and masterminds.

2017-

Enter the next wave of money coaches with a cosmic, divine feminine sort of angle. Now came the websites with symbols, geometrical shapes, moons, and deep purple tones.

These women were the ones making up names for their customers, creating a “tribe” vibe, calling them “witches,” “Divas,” and “goddesses,” etc.

2020-

These last few years have been dominated by the Spiritual Boss Babes with their wealth code downloads, quantum leaping, and manifestation courses.

Their websites usually range from pale pastel pink and purple to hot pink and holographic details to earthy and Scandinavian-looking to black and muted “luxury brands.”

While these women undoubtedly have helped others, there’s an undeniable dynamic at play that is also causing harm.

If you’re going to be a coach that makes a lot of money – which seems to be the usual goal no matter how you slice it – there’s an undeniable draw toward being a money/success/manifestation/abundance coach.

Why say you can help people by taking their photographs (and you have to show up to take pictures) when you can be a photographer turned manifestation coach and sell a signature program that helps other photographers make more money? And, even better, you can make that program evergreen. And even better, you can make a funnel that sells your program on autopilot. All you got to do is crank out social content that reinforces your social status, wealth, and success, and voilá, you have yourself an online empire.

Enter FLEB.

We can’t go further into this conversation without discussing FLEB: Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand.

Feminist money, justice, and culture maker Kelly Diels has elegantly defined FLEB as:

“She’s The Perfect Woman, in the form of a business or a brand.⁠⠀
She’s everything we’re supposed to be in order to be socially acceptable — white, thin, pretty, straight, cis, able-bodied, uber-positive and smiley…⁠⠀
The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand is what our culture insists womxn embody AND a business blueprint that leverages privilege to create authority over other womxn.⁠“

In short, imagine your classic influencer, and you got yourself a FLEB Ambassador.

The challenges we face as a result

The challenge we face from this behavior is when we put money at the center of the goals and outcomes we strive for and use strategies and tactics that originate from capitalist and patriarchal values, we end up:

Exploiting each other
Creating unsustainable systems
Corroding trust in each other
Limiting creativity in how business can and should be done
Perpetuate unjust values and systems
Showing up with a façade that leads to mental health challenges
Bending the truth to look good
Sacrificing our mental and emotional wellbeing

Something, a LOT of things, has to change.

2: Manipulative Marketing Tactics

As it turns out, there’s a vicious circle happening:

Women want to have more money (and power). And this is a GOOD THING. Women only get 2% of VC capital and earn less than men. (And, of course, when you look at the stats for queer people, disabled folks, or People of color, the numbers are even more dismal.)

If I generalize to make my point, the typical way to get money and power is to utilize some or all of these strategies:

Create a signature program (bonus points if it helps other women make money).
Create a brand identity that mimics “success”: thin, white, rich, jet-set lifestyle, influential.
Make a website that shows a rags-to-riches story.
Give your course for free to get people to give you testimonials in return. (Ideally, they will also give you images where they look FLEB approved).
Build a marketing funnel that pushes pain points, upsells, coerces, creates fake scarcity, uses “in-crowd” language, timers, promises, and a “money-back guarantee.”
Produce free content relentlessly positions you in a positive state to reinforce your superior status that makes you look “successful.”
Only highlight the people who are successful in your program. (Don’t worry, you’re in luck about the people who don’t have good results – they won’t say anything because the patriarchy and the New Age movement have shamed them into thinking it’s their fault if they fail. So you’re off the hook there.)
Share how much money you’re making and how quickly you fill up your programs as a way to reinforce your authority - share revenue numbers, not your actual PROFIT. (If you’re not yet making that much money from the program - simply share how much money you’re making from other things. A white lie never hurt anyone.)
Bonus points for having the money or getting it from a relative, partner, or trust fund) to buy a photo shoot, brand, and website that looks super exclusive. Don’t have that? NP, just whip out your credit card and invest in yourself.

Now, nobody is overtly saying these things. Yet, here we are with a wildly unregulated coaching industry, despite ICFs efforts to bring some order to the chaos.

We must take stock and look at what’s happening right now.

If I need to listen to one more woman telling me she’s wasted anything between $1.000-$75.000 on a non-functional marketing funnel or “Abundance Coach,” I’m going to scream!

🌸 Let me tell you the story of my client “Lisa.”

Lisa was a mother trucking badass at her job. She had all the live clients she could want, even a waitlist. Her quiz was bringing in tons of leads, but when it came to enrolling people in her online course, there were crickets. As I went into the funnel and website, it was a mess. Sure. It was all set up correctly, but the customer journey was so complicated it was impossible to figure out what people should do on the site. So they left. Lisa spent THOUSANDS on that funnel.

🌺 Then there was my client “Susan.”

Susan was a single mom of two and did OK in her yoga business. She had enrolled in an expensive coaching certification, and one of the things she was told was to sell “high ticket” items. She told me about the 25k package she wanted to sell to prospective clients. I asked her if she felt comfortable in her body sharing that offer with prospects, and she said no. But she was ready to step into her greatness and abundance like she was told to do. Luckily, she found her groove with her business that came from her soul, not someone outside herself.

🌻 Oh, let’s not forget about “Mel.”

When I saw her VERY expensive website and funnel, her essence had been taken out of everything. While the look, brand, offerings, and setup were flawless, nobody was buying, and she was desperate and so ashamed.

THIS IS NOT OK!!

I’ll be the first person to tell you:
Yes, you can create anything. Your life can be better than you ever dreamed it could be!

I know because I’ve done it for myself. I’ve gone from being a co-dependent, self-hating woman barely able to charge $15/hour to a powerful, self-loving, evolving woman who can charge $250/hour, and I’ve also been able to charge for the value provided, not hours. I have a lot of free time, a house, a (slowly) growing bank account, a financial plan for the future, and I only work with people I love and respect. I also have a long-term vision for my legacy and I know how to create it.

I have friends who’ve created million or multiple six-figure businesses from nothing. I know people whose start-ups were acquired. I know successful coaches and entrepreneurs.

It’s 100% possible!

And toxic business and marketing practices are happening, and we need to talk about that.

Recently I signed up for a freebie, and in the subsequent emails, this happened:

I was told to watch a webinar before it was “taken down for good” - it’s still live, two months later.
I was sent - by automation - a manufactured email that the person selling the service “had been told by her assistant that I hadn’t watched the webinar” - a blatant lie - complete with a made-up “FWD message” subject line.
Pressured to buy with a fake deadline.
“Upsold” through a multi-layered sales funnel using a countdown clock that restarted every five minutes.

These are only some of the many other high-pressure, dubious practices promoted regularly.

This leads us to…

3: mPTST - Marketing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Lastly, people are dealing with marketing PTSD right now.

I know this because my client recently received an email that read, “nice try making your email come across as loving and caring when all you want to do is lead people to your stuff! Unsubscribe me at once.” I also know it from personal experience and through the tales of many friends who are burned out from constantly being marketed to in manipulative ways.

But it’s so hard to get away from the whole thing!

It’s like an internal battle raging; you want the wealth, ability to invest in your retirement, more ease, time, and money for the things that bring you joy, vacations with your loved ones, and money to share with causes you believe in… and yet, the marketing is pushy and doesn’t feel right. But you can’t figure out how to create success on your own, so you NEED that money coach… you probably don’t have the success because you haven’t “invested in yourself” yet…so you take a deep breath, pull out your credit card, and put the $11.111 program on your card.

I get it. Because I’ve fallen for it in my mind a million times. It just feels like it HAS to be the golden ticket. (And, in complete transparency, I love luxury and look forward to having many luxurious experiences in my life! It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.)

But then I remember what I know

There isn’t a cookie-cutter approach that works for everyone
It might not be suitable for me just because it works for others
Some people are exaggerating how effective their programs are
Some people do not have the experience and knowledge to do the work they advertise
A lot of people are manipulating their earning numbers
People are bundling and selling programs and courses that they made a while back that are no longer effective, sometimes even saying they are “retiring”
If I meet someone who says: “In 2021, I made $204,300 gross, $93,000 in profit, and spent $50k on ads,” THEN I might want to listen up. But stay clear of the “Omg, I just had a 50K launch!” people

Why is this happening?

Many of the marketing tactics that we’re taught are exploitative and manipulative.

Why? Because that is what has been available for us from a toxic capitalist, colonial past.

The “lineage” of marketing is kind of a mess, TBH. It’s a weird mix of multi-level marketing strategies, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Hetero-Patriarchal-Christian-elitist-hustle culture, and so on.

I am grateful to the ones who made it this far and taught us what we now know, but it’s about damn time we evolve our thinking, culture, and approach.

It’s time for a new era in marketing and business.

We don’t need more women trying to manifest (or manipulate) their way to the top, to a perfect existence, where they can live a peaceful, luxurious lifestyle in a bubble of “Sovereignty.”
We need a new system.

To quote Kelly Diels again:

“In their individualist, privilege-seeking model, empowerment is for a few exceptional queens, not the rest of us peons. They’re preaching to the people who aspire to be at the top of the pyramid while leaving the pyramid in place (I call this position switching — and so much of contemporary, mainstream ‘feminism’ or ’empowerment’ is actually advice to switch positions in the oppressive system rather than CHANGE THE WHOLE SYSTEM). In fact, the pyramid has to exist in order for you to be a queen. Someone — lots of someones — needs to be at the bottom of it to serve you. So you’re leveraging the inequity to become queen. A queen requires inequity to reign.”

With a recession in full swing, people are waking up to the incredible toxicity of creating free content for an endlessly ravenous social media machine. We have a general mental health crisis on our hands and a raging war. I have a feeling that the next internet bubble is about to burst…and this time, it will come for the experts spouting hyper-individualistic money-generating content using performative, exploitative (often white) privilege.

I’m here to tell you there is another way!

A more equitable, fun, kind, pleasurable, just, inclusive, sustainable way to create REAL wealth and legacies and make all sorts of global change that start on the INSIDE. There is no sustainable change that doesn’t start with extensive inner work.

That’s what I’ll continue co-creating and exploring, and I hope you’ll come along on the ride with me! I don’t have all the answers, but I have some, and even better, I believe in us and the Elevation Ecosystem we can create together.

Please consider sharing this post with a friend who might need to hear this, and be sure to drop me a comment to share how this article landed for you.

Big Blessings + Love 💜,

Karna