 two time. Number one, New York Times bestselling author. She connects with a highly engaged and growing global audience of women who treasure her transparency and optimism. She is one of the most sought after motivational speakers and plays host to one of today's top business podcasts and is a proud mom of four who uses her platform to empower and bull the women around the world. Right. I'm super freaking privileged, but also work my ass off to have the money, to have someone come twice a week and clean my toilets. You're unrelatable. What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable? Rachel Hollis, bestselling author, motivational speaker, became a spearhead in the motivational speaking industry, an inspiration to women and a success story. And then it all seemingly collapsed. After a messy and public divorce and a lot of bad PR, it seems that Rachel Hollis's career has completely fallen off. And you can now find her books in the discount section in almost any given Walmart. So what happened to Rachel Hollis and how did she destroy her career? Throughout my time on YouTube, I've gotten a ton of requests to cover Rachel Hollis. And I haven't just yet, because first off, there's so many great YouTubers who have covered Rachel Hollis, two great creators, Savvy writes books and me and Kat have been covering Rachel Hollis and doing an incredible job at it. But recent events that have transpired in Rachel's career and the kind of timeline of how it all happened has really interested me and made me want to kind of look into it and cover it. I think a lot of what happened to Rachel Hollis really speaks to the dangers of the self-help industry in general and the toxicity of motivational gurus cleaning the toilet. Who likes to have someone else be able to do that if at all possible, right? Work my ass off to have the money, to have someone come twice a week and clean my toilets. I always forget to say this nowadays, but if you're new and this is your first video of mine that you're watching, subscribe if you want to and like this video if you like it. Right now, I'm just kind of making whatever video I want to make. But if you want to join that journey, then subscribe and come along with me. And yeah, let's get into the video. So first off, if you haven't heard of who Rachel Hollis is, let's talk about who she is and what she's known for. I thought we'd read the about page on Rachel Hollis's website so that we can know straight from her perspective who she is and what she's known for. I'm Rachel Hollis. I'm a proud working mama for living in Texas Hill Country just outside of Austin. I worship coffee like a deity, read books like My Life Depends on It, and think LaCroix is one of the greatest inventions of the last decade. How relatable. I'm probably most well known as the author of the book Girl Wash Your Face, which has sold about 4.5 million copies in the last couple of years. Bananas, I know. Long before I wrote all my books, there are nine total now, or hosted one of the most successful podcasts in the world, or produced massive conferences, or founded a media company, the Hollis Company, I was a food blogger. Definitely giving me very relatable, I'm just like you, vibes. I started from the ground and worked my way to the top, kind of, vibes. So Rachel Hollis is an American author, motivational speaker, and blogger who, as most of you probably already know, really rose to fame through her book Girl Wash Your Face. I don't know why, but that book title always just threw me off. I think that's what it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be shocking, or like, what's this book? But for a while, I thought it was like a self-care book about how to practice hygiene, and I was like, that's very odd. I also don't like being told what to do, so a lot of her titles just don't fit with me. But Girl Wash Your Face seemed to resonate with a lot of people, and was a top bestseller for a pretty long time, which is definitely an accomplishment. When you really look into Rachel Hollis and the content that she makes, her YouTube videos, her podcasts, her self-help books, her Instagram, it's really just taking self-help as a genre, and the things that have been said and passed around for years and years and years, and then repackaging it to a primarily women audience. And you start realizing, I'm living in a home, and the most of them I don't want, you can change it. No matter who you are, and no matter what you're going through, and no matter what you're afraid of right now, real or imagined, you can control your mindset. The number one thing that I have seen as I've gotten older that has been very obvious to me is that most of the people here today do many of the things they do because of one to five people's opinions in their lives, whether they're parents, their spouse, their older sibling, their neighbor. Guys, comparison is the death of joy. The second that you start comparing your life to hers, your marriage to theirs, your relationship to those people, your business to that business, the second you start to compare, you take all of the wind out of your sails. It's basically age-old self-help rhetoric, but with a girl boss twist. The main message Rachel Hollis preaches is once again a standard self-help message, which is that you and only you at the end of the day are responsible for your own happiness. No matter who you are, and no matter what you're going through, and no matter what you're afraid of right now, real or imagined, you can control your mindset. And I want to challenge you in the idea that you are the one who is ultimately in control of this. Is life happening to you or is life happening for you? Which I definitely think is a good message to teach in general, that we have a certain level of control over our lives, and that no one can truly take our happiness away. But I also kind of think a lot of that is a privileged outlook as well. At least if you're dealing with a serious chronic condition or illness or you're neurodivergent or things that society doesn't commonly accept, and I always find the you're only responsible for your happiness message to be a little bit too simplistic because it really does ignore those greater issues in society that so many people have to struggle with. Just because you don't struggle with those issues, just because you're a white, healthy, rich woman doesn't mean that everyone is. But anyways, girl wash your face contains a memoir, motivational tips, and bible quotes. Once again, self-help for the girl boss. And I think Rachel had really great timing in terms of when she entered into the self-help arena because it was not a similar time that there was the rise in the girl boss rhetoric. I was in ink magazine. I was one of the top 30 entrepreneurs under 30. Every time I heard no, I figured something else out. If you can't get through the front door, you go in through a window. I'm doing a video right after this one on girl boss and the rise and fall of the girl boss movement. So it's just kind of on my mind. But Rachel really launched into her career right around the time that the nasty gal founder came out with the book hashtag girl boss. I think the girl boss movement had a lot of great intentions, but the movement was basically taken, turned into these basic quotes and commodified so that it could be sold to the masses. Also, if you want to learn more about Rachel Hollis's life leading up to her career, my husband and I actually did a podcast on that, diving more in depth into her early life. But in this video, I just want to focus on the rise and fall of Rachel Hollis's career and not go too much into her personal life details, unless it's absolutely necessary to this bigger picture. Another big breakthrough in Rachel Hollis's career was in March of 2015, when an Instagram photo of her celebrating her stretch marks went viral. Yeah, that one. Did anyone see that? I have stretch marks and I wear a bikini. I have a belly that's permanently flabby from carrying three giant babies and I wear a bikini. My belly button is saggy, which is something I didn't even know was possible before kids. And I wear a bikini. I wear a bikini because I'm proud of this body and every mark on it. Oh my knee. Ow. This once again was really good timing because body positivity was becoming more movement and Rachel Hollis was really able to position herself as a spokesperson for these various movements and was able to in a way kind of piggyback off of these growing movements and find her audience through voicing the messages of those movements. It seems like in the early days of Rachel Hollis's career, she was really unstoppable. She had entered into the self-help arena at the perfect timing and found a really strong audience through women that really resonated with the messages that she was sharing. But even still, her early career was not devoid of controversies. On January 31st, 2019, BuzzFeed News published an article by reporter Stephanie McNeil detailing multiple, multiple times where Hollis plagiarized quotes from other authors on her Instagram and claimed them as her own. So that whole repackaging, classic motivational rhetoric thing is no joke. Like, that's literally exactly what she did. She just took everything that worked for other motivational speakers or inspirational figures and then applied it to her own work, copy, paste style. The most egregious example of this is when Rachel Hollis plagiarized Maya Angelou's Still I Rise as if no one would notice as if no one would notice that. Hollis issued an apology after that one specifically and blamed her team for the oopsie, which seems to be a pattern. But it seemed like even though some were calling out Rachel Hollis, for the most part she was largely adored by people and absolutely unstoppable. She became lifted up on a pedestal as this idealized version of what women want to be. The thing that Hollis was really genius at was identifying an untapped niche and untapped demographic and becoming the face of that demographic. Hollis marketed herself to more conservative women who wanted to feel empowered but didn't necessarily identify as a feminist. These women were maybe even struggling with where they fit into the recent wave of women empowerment. Politically and ideologically they may have not fully identified with feminism and the Me Too movement but they wanted to feel a similar level of empowerment just in the categories that they value which is mainly the capitalistic ideologies of success in business, making money, and excelling at family life. Girl Wash Your Face sold predominantly to women in the South and Midwest and also found a niche in the Christian community. Even at times being sold in the Christian category at bookstores. My daddy was a preacher so speaking to a church is not something I've done since I was a little girl and I was really nervous about coming here so I am washy taped the back of the last card because when I'm nervous I craft and this made me feel better about talking to you today. And Rachel Hollis very much knew her demographic. You can even see in the conferences that she's done over time she's developed more of a southern accent. Like you got all the stuff and you're super excited but dang it now you're embarrassed to sell. I'm sorry my accent shows up. Sale. My grandma would say we're gonna sale something today sister. My theory personally is that Rachel Hollis just knew that the majority of her audience were southern women and wanted to speak more to her audience like both literally and figuratively. The most ironic thing out of this whole video is that Rachel Hollis built her career off of being relatable to these women. All the confessions that she makes in her book have to do with relatable things. I shave my toes. I used to be bad at sex. I'm failing all the time. Because just in life I'm going for a target sports bra. Why would I wear underwear? I don't hate myself. I'm only wearing underwear like a normal bra if I need it for an outfit which I did and I forgot hashtag sorry hashtag pig socks. Look at that. Who wouldn't want to be with this? I don't know because I got a list of men in my phone. I got a roster. No I don't. She was relatable but simultaneously painted herself as an idealized version of what these women wanted to be. Successful but with a great marriage and family life. Self-empowered but also present and there for her kids. She made a great role model for these women because a lot of this specific demographic didn't have very prominent female role models at the time. Rachel Hollis also found an intersection between these women and the demographic that she tapped into and MLMs and very soon Rachel Hollis began to work with a lot of MLMs. I think the main reason for this is that MLMs exist in a lot of conservative and Christian communities. The same market that Rachel Hollis was tapping into. So not only was Rachel Hollis already speaking to a lot of the women who are in MLMs but on top of that MLMs became a great way for her books to be shared. I've talked about this briefly on my channel but there's a huge intersection between the MLM world and the motivational speaking world and a lot of it has to do with toxic positivity. MLMs often spread the message to not look at the hate to ignore the haters and to just focus on the positive. So if you want to just focus on the positive who do you go to? You go to a motivational speaker and MLMs love this because a lot of motivational speakers will say the same thing again and again and again. Put your head down, work hard, hustle. You can create a beautiful, blessed, abundant life if you stay focused on where you want to go. Not what you fear might happen. Only you can make yourself happy. Don't listen to others. Don't listen to outside voices. If someone's telling you you can't do something, cut them off. See right now a lot of you who are watching this are allowing the world to decide your perspective. You're allowing the news to decide the way that you look at this. You're allowing your friends, you're allowing your fears to be the thing that controls your mindset. Ignore all of that and just focus on yourself and your own happiness. You have to have a why that is so strong that nobody can throw you off where you're going. Because when people see us start to change, when the people that we love see us start to change, if they're not changing too, it scares them. Which is interesting too because that kind of sounds sociopathic? It's not just me, but MLMs and motivational speakers are kind of mutually beneficial, which is why you see so many MLM conferences where motivational speakers will come and speak. They get to promote their work to the MLM audience and the MLMs get to encourage their reps to ignore the haters and focus on themselves and just the positive, which remotivates them to keep working on their business. But I definitely think Rachel Hallis was the most successful motivational speaker when it comes to tapping into the MLM market. How do I promote myself for my business? You've spent all of this time and energy to build your Etsy shop or get your first kit from Noonday or you're selling rodent in fields or you're doing Luluro or whatever it is. A lot of her books were shared between MLM reps and all of their down line. So that whole dynamic was extremely beneficial for Rachel Hallis and a big way that I'm sure she made a ton of money. I mean, I can't even imagine. When I did my video on Gary V, I listened to a Joe Rogan podcast where Gary V spoke with Joe Rogan and talked about how he gets paid upwards of $100,000 per conference that he does. And Rachel Hallis is even on another level than Gary V, I would say personally, in terms of her success and best sellers and all of that. So to just think about how many MLM conferences she did, how much she must have gotten paid for each conference on top of selling 4.5 million books, a lot of it through the downlines of MLMs and that whole pipeline. It's fascinating. I mean, a lot of money was involved. But in a way, all of these niches that allowed Rachel Hallis to succeed also became the very reason for her downfall. The reason why is because Rachel Hallis now had to sell herself as all the things that these niches and demographics value. The reason why so many women wanted to buy her books and go to her conference is because they saw her as the idealized version of what they wanted to be. They saw her as the definition of their idea of empowerment. So now she had to be that. She had to fully embody that. And surprise, she didn't. Because in my opinion, the con of motivational speakers like Rachel Hallis is to sell you their success story in an idealized way. When in reality, their life is so, so far from the perfect picture that they paint. I mentioned this in the rant that I posted about a week ago, but I like to call this aspect of motivational speakers performative success. Performative success is when people are performing their success to you or to the masses. You can see it with Instagram influencers who have to perform their lifestyle. You can especially see it with motivational gurus and get rich gurus who have to perform their success so that they can sell you their conferences and courses. You can even see it with MLM reps who have to perform their success so that they can sell you the MLM dream. Performative success first relates to your insecurities in your own life. Whether you feel bored in your job, like you're not being challenged in life, whether you feel like you're so far behind your peers in terms of career success, whether you feel like you haven't found the relationship of your dreams or the lifestyle of your dreams. Performative success says, look, I am doing the thing that you are lacking in your life, and it exploits those insecurities that you may have with your own life and where you are. There's a lot of problems with performative success. The problem on the performers part is they have to paint their life in a perfect way or else you wouldn't have a reason to listen to them. Even if they are painting it in the quirky, relatable way, it's still with that tone of, but I'm still better than you. You know? They have to make you believe that their life is perfect or else you wouldn't buy every book they make, you wouldn't go to every conference that they have. But performative success is problematic for an even greater reason. Performative success teaches people what success is and what it isn't. And a lot of what performative success is, is obtaining materialistic or very, very expensive things. But is that really success? Is that really success? Or is it just a success that's much easier to perform? There's so many aspects to life fulfillment and it varies from individual person to person, so this whole idea of success in itself is fake. It's not real. All motivational speakers are really selling you is just a dream, plain and simple. And every dream has an ending or a point where we have to wake up. And unfortunately for Rachel Hollis, her made-up reality began to slowly crack until it completely shattered, which brings us to the downfall of Rachel Hollis' career. You know, we were together 18 years and I don't consider that a failure. I think our marriage was a massive success, but it looks different now. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Guess what she used to tell people? Go to therapy, which if you feel like your life is falling apart, go do that. And I think it's all marketing and I think that's disingenuous. I don't think it's authentic and I think it's making money off your audience who is trying to find a way forward in really difficult times and I think it's gross. What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable? While there has been a lot of missteps that I could cover in depth, I think there are really three major things that super sealed the deal. So I think the best way to illustrate the downfall of Rachel Hollis' career is through three strikes. There's an old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee that says, fool me once, shame on you. If fool me, we can't get fooled again. Strike one, divorce. Now, I absolutely hate talking about people's personal lives. I think it's rarely ever relevant to the conversation and I really, really hate that I have to do this. But unfortunately, Rachel Hollis' divorce really matters in her career because she built so much of her image around the fact that she has a perfect marriage. Both her and her husband really played into this idea that they were living the perfect life, had a great marriage, were so happy together, and they used that relationship strategically to benefit both of their careers. Even to the point where Rachel's rise motivational conference also did a rise together conference for couples where couples would spend over $1,800, $1,800 on tickets to learn from Rachel Hollis and her ex Dave about marriage as non-experts, as non-marriage counselors, just motivational speakers. People paid $1,800 to learn from their expertise and what they had to say about marriage. Imagine the anger and frustration of spending $2,000 at least in terms of food and hotel and travel expenses on top of the ticket to go to a conference to learn from someone about how to have a great marriage, only for them to get divorced less than two years later. I would be pissed. And it sucks because Rachel Hollis' divorce has been picked apart so much by people, making articles about it, videos, all that kind of stuff, and I'm sure that sucks. I'm sure that's a horrible feeling to go through something personally and then have it kind of speculated and dragged into the public eye. But at the same time, you put yourself in that position. Unfortunately, if you didn't lift yourself up and make a huge part of your brand, having a great relationship and marriage life. All right, five tips to do immediately following this video. Number four, hire a cleaning lady. I'm not even kidding. I'm in on this. Yeah, that was one of the greatest things we ever did in our marriage. I don't think if you didn't do that, people would still be picking apart your marriage in this way. A lot of people just feel lied to. The couple would also regularly post marriage motivational stuff on social media, like all the time. A lot of their Instagram photos having the same exact face. Oh, okay, let's just learn from social media stars. Let's just say if someone is always making the same fake face all the time, let's maybe take that as a red flag in the future. Like let's just take that in as a red flag. So anyways, Rachel Hollis and her ex Dave would constantly post photos together, work together, talk about how great their life is, and they were never really open about there being huge problems in their marriage until all of a sudden one day when they announced their divorce. Because I mean, who would want to spend $2,000 to get advice from a couple who's just kind of doing okay? So it is, it is my duty and frankly, I think it's everybody's duty who is in the influencer space to show what real life looks like to show the beautiful pictures. Heck yes, I love scrolling through that before I fall asleep, but you've also got to show us what it took to get there. So once again, you have to sell the perfect marriage and say our lives are perfect and we have the best relationship so that you can get that money from people who want the relationship that you're portraying to have. On June 8th of 2020, Rachel Hollis announced the divorce. There's a lot of drama and like Instagram posts going back and forth and Dave kind of turning a lot of her fans against her. A lot of it is just messy, but once again, a lot of it is just assumptions that people have made off of Rachel and Dave's social media postings. And as you can probably tell from the fact that they were happy go lucky in a great relationship all the way up until like literally the day that they announced the divorce, yeah, I don't think these people are going to be very truthful on social media. I don't think we should necessarily take what they post on social media at face value. Reality is we really don't know what happened within their marriage and we will never probably really know the truth and some serious stuff could have gone down so I don't think it's good for anyone to place blame on Rachel or Dave for their divorce. A lot of people kind of turned on Rachel at the time of the divorce because she had supposedly just sprung this on Dave and was like hey I want to get divorced but like we don't know that and I just don't think it's anyone's place personally so you know that's a situation that I must stay out of and not speculate on. The one thing that I will speculate on is I do have to wonder how much pressure it put on the marriage to have to portray the perfect marriage and the perfect life and relationship constantly. Like I can't imagine how much pressure that puts on a relationship. Similar to how I wonder if family vloggers run into problems having to portray the perfect family life all the time. The second that you mix your personal like very personal and professional life together and portray it all to be perfect I have to imagine that puts strain and pressure on the whole dynamic. Though I'm not a psychologist so I'm not well versed on how it could mess one up psychologically. So anyways people were outraged by this news because first off the tea, the drama but also because much of the brand that they built was built around having the perfect marriage and once that was found to not be true cracks began to emerge on Rachel Hollis's seemingly perfect life. Strike two, Rachel Hollis denounces MLMs in her latest book. Ever heard of the saying don't bite the hand that feeds you? Rachel Hollis who made tons of money speaking at MLM conferences denounced them in her latest book. In the book Rachel Hollis says if you're not sure how to make extra income there are so many ideas to help you but please remember this important prerequisite. Figure out a way to make new income that doesn't cost you any money to start. Which by the way is super hard I mean even with YouTube you have to pay for video equipment and editing software and all of that. Not that you should join an MLM but I'm just saying is it that realistic to start a side hustle and not have to pay any startup cost? For now I'm positive that someone is going to read this and be inspired to head on over to the internet and ask how she can make extra income and then four weeks later her starter kit has arrived for the new at-home business she paid $700 to join. Don't be dumb, figure out a way to make money that doesn't require money. I just have to laugh at the the don't be dumb port part. Rachel why why did you have to say it that way? Why did you have to say it that way? I mean even I out of all the criticisms that I've made on MLM reps have never called anyone dumb and you've accepted hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars from MLM reps in this whole industry and you're telling them to not be dumb you basically turn around and say yeah yeah dumb got you. I can't tell if I think this is a boss move or horribly offensive I just can't. Why she chose to do this I will never know. In a way I partially respect it because at least it's more authentic at least she's sharing her true thoughts and opinions and not simply just conforming her entire brand into what her audience wants to see but at the same time this outraged so so many of the women who had supported her endlessly and so many of her fans turned on her I do think it was toxic and dangerous for Rachel Hollis and for other motivational speakers to speak out all these MLM conferences and basically put legitimacy on MLMs by being like I'm a respected motivational speaker who's speaking at this conference you're basically giving that company your vote of choice you're saying this is okay I'm cool with this I support this today I'm answering your number one business question to me which is Rach how do I promote myself for my business you've spent all of this time and energy to build your Etsy shop or get your first kit from Noonday or you're selling rodent in fields or you're doing Luloro or whatever it is and you want so badly like you've got all the stuff and you're super excited but dang it now you're embarrassed to sell and in all of those conferences she repeats the message of like keep grinding keep working out your business keep being a boss babe go all in you can have the business you can have the relationship you can have the family you can have the health you can have living debt free you can have whatever it looks like in your life if you're willing to stick with it the problem is that so many people leave because it gets hard right go for it don't listen to haters there is this um like deep thing in us that says when we're unsure or when we're insecure about something that we need to look outside of ourselves for the answers and encourage probably so many women to keep going in their MLMs so to just turn around and be like yeah no this is not a good idea yeah stupid for doing an MLM I mean I would be pissed so here's what one former fan had to say about this decision an open letter to Rachel Hollis as I read the post flooding my facebook news feed last night I sighed shook my head and felt every ounce of the shock disgust and sadness of your ex fans as you sat on your throne and judged and labeled an entire group of women as dumb yikes sister not really your best moment but neither was you spending years openly plagiarizing other people's words and ignoring it and neither was you knowing your marriage was falling apart and painting a totally different picture to your fans and followers and giving them relationship advice under the guise that your own marriage was peachy keen but let me ask you this Rachel did you think at all about the many network marketing events that you've spoken at overflowing with women hanging on your every word before you wrote these extraordinarily insulting words I guess you didn't think it through or you might have thought twice about mocking someone getting their starter kit and insinuating that the 4.6 million women network marketers across the world are dumb listen you are allowed to have your feelings about MLM and I'm not even saying you are wrong for voicing your thoughts however your delivery was atrocious rude and demeaning to the women who you're supposed to be uplifting encouraging and empowering unfortunately when you paint yourself as positive only and insert yourself into the MLM world where they only accept positive sentiments any sort of criticism on that it all of a sudden you will be ousted just like you have told you specifically have told women to cut off people in their life because they weren't supportive when people see us start to change when the people that we love see us start to change if they're not changing too it scares them and if you truly think that women who join and direct sales are dumb and you want to stick to what you said great you should stand in your truth but then you need to stop taking their money honestly I agree with this pro MLM her in that sentiment it's your ongoing lack of responsibility and overwhelming hypocrisy that's going to cost you your audience girls start apologizing and honestly I can see where Chelsea is coming from there even though I don't agree with the MLM business model I can't imagine how ridiculous I would feel to put a ton of money into a motivational speaker who's basically encouraging me to keep going in whatever thing that I'm doing and then they just turn around and they're like yeah you're dumb haha jokes on you it's like if you were I don't know like a Honda Civic driver who likes Gary Vee and likes to listen to Gary Vee and is a huge Gary Vee fan and maybe even Gary Vee spoke at a Honda Civic conference and was one of the main figures who encouraged you to drive a Honda Civic and then all of a sudden Gary Vee comes out and is like yeah you need a car to go anywhere but if you drive a Honda Civic if you drive a Honda Civic you are disgusting you are stupid why would you even do that to yourself a great weakness of the human being if that happened you'd be like whoa wait a minute what that's kind of a weird analogy but that's the only thing I can think of at the time for explaining what this would feel like if Rachel Hollis has a problem with MLMs why did she offer credibility to them by speaking at their conferences that's not very girl boss women supporting women of you and once again I just can't think of how many people were encouraged to keep wasting money on their MLMs side hustle through Rachel Hollis content and now maybe feel ridiculous because she's come out and called them dumb like that's noble of you to think that way and to hold that opinion I respect you for sharing it but why did you share it after taking hundreds of thousands if not millions from these companies and the MLM reps within these companies so that was strike two when Rachel Hollis lost a huge huge chunk of her fan base and it all just gets worse from there I also came across a video by Emily D Baker an awesome YouTuber who pointed out a really big issue with Rachel's latest book in the fact that Rachel Hollis marketed her latest book didn't see that coming as a sort of solution to the pandemic or a self-help book for 2020 itself and how to recover from the aftermath of 2020 and this is a book that well let me just ask you what this book is about what motivated you right this book I guess first so I went into quarantine here in Austin in March I have a lot of experience with crisis and trauma and grief and what I feel like I'm seeing is people are having identity crisis but they don't understand that that's what's going on Rachel Hollis seems to be through the marketing of this book and the way that she talks about the book and why she wrote it she seems to be praying on people who are struggling during 2020 or who had struggled during 2020 and that's a little crummy a little sus are you kidding me are you are you kidding me are you kidding me you're lying to people to sell a book because they are grasping for a lifeline in the middle of a motherfucking pandemic and a crazy election cycle and you're like I have a one hour e-course that will fix that and give you the tools to rebuild your life you're not a therapist Rachel Hollis and I doubt you've got your life back together and I think it's all marketing and I think that's disingenuous I don't think it's authentic and I think it's making money off your audience who is trying to find a way forward in really difficult times and I think it's gross so while that's definitely not an action that directly led to the downfall of Rachel Hollis's career I thought that was an important aspect to talk about because I do see it as problematic and potentially dangerous if people are reading Rachel Hollis's book didn't see that coming and not actually seeking therapy or help for traumatic things they may have experienced in 2020 strike three the toilet controversy otherwise known as the moment when Rachel Hollis's career went down the toilet while Rachel Hollis has also done a lot of other problematic things the nail on the coffin of her career is in early April of this year when Rachel Hollis posted a pretty problematic video on instagram and this is what she said doing a livestream and I mentioned that there's a sweet woman who comes to my house twice a week and cleans she's my my house cleaner she cleans the toilet someone commented and said you are privileged af and I was like you're right I'm super freaking privileged but also I worked my ass off to have the money to have someone come twice a week and clean my toilets and I told her that and then she said well you're unrelatable what is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable no sis literally everything I do in my life is to live a life that most people can't relate to most people won't work this hard most people won't get up at 4 am most people won't fail publicly again and again just to reach the top of the mountain literally every woman I admire in history was unrelatable if my life is relatable to most people I'm doing it wrong so there's a lot of things wrong with this post but the worst part to me in my opinion was the caption also that she put under this post if I can find it the caption reads Harriet Tubman Ruth Bader Ginsburg Marie Curie Oprah Winfrey why can I never say Oprah Winfrey's name right Amelia Earhart Frida Kahlo Malala Yufsi the last name I'm just gonna leave a clip of how to pronounce because I did not research how to pronounce it beforehand I'm just realizing and I don't want to mispronounce this woman's name Empress Wu Zetian of China all unrelatable AF happy woman's history month so the only thing that you're noting all these women for is for being unrelatable I think there's a little bit more to these women maybe just me so that whole post is about how she's so unrelatable and that's a great thing and something that other people should aspire to be which also is interesting to me because in terms of successful people and relatability I feel like more successful people need to be more relatable and grounded in reality and that a huge problem in society is that so many rich and privileged people lose touch with reality are no longer relatable can't relate to anyone anymore and that either causes the downfall of their career or it causes problems as they just don't no longer treat people with respect or understand the struggle of the everyday person like in the video when Rachel Hollis says yeah I'm privileged and like where's that so proudly it's bizarre to me how so many people just lose touch completely with others and just how it is not something necessarily to be proud of to be privileged it's something that's important to acknowledge and how you can maybe help others using your privilege but the main thing in this video is how Rachel Hollis is speaking as if she is the only person who's responsible for her success and privilege as if her privilege comes from her hard work alone and all of the success she obtained is only due to her and herself but there are so many people and environmental factors that help you to gain opportunities that help you reach successful milestones in life just like I am currently growing a baby right now but that wasn't without a little help so this whole notion that her success comes solely from herself is just not true it is not true at all but what's so interesting is you look at how she attributes only herself for her success and you look at the main rhetoric that she was sharing with people which is that you are only responsible for your own happiness and you realize holy crap that's what I've been listening to this whole time someone who thinks that all of their accomplishments come from only themselves and that only they're responsible for everything that's happening in their life and may have no ability to understand or discern from things that they might just be lucky for and things that are outside of their control that have happened in their life and the thing is this isn't the only time that Rachel Hollis has said similar things ultimately nobody is gonna do this for you who's gonna want you to say I got this her approach was just so shocking and harsh that it really flabbergasted a lot of people so a lot of people started sharing and talking and posting about how wrong this instagram post was even if they didn't know about Rachel Hollis beforehand but I mainly want to focus on her fans surrounding this controversy because like I said earlier the main thing the main thing of her book was like I'm just like you but a little better basically is what she was sharing with people and now she's turned around and people found out that she lied about her marriage she disavowed a huge portion of her audience and now she's like also I'm not relatable to you at all all of these central and integral points of her entire persona and brand how can someone just flip like that going against everything that they claim to be when building up their career and who is the real Rachel Hollis well I really don't know who the real Rachel Hollis is that's something I can't say in this video but the real Rachel Hollis is certainly not the woman who was sold to us all I think in general we tend to idolize a lot of people that we see on social media that we see as having the perfect life or the life that we want and so often we hear the message that nothing is real on social media but rarely is there ever such a huge case of that as in the case of Rachel Hollis where it really just slaps you in the face how much of her life that she shared on social media was just a complete lie who has a friend like not a close friend but maybe someone you went to like middle school with or high school with and your friends with them on facebook and they're always talking about how in love they are anyone have a friend who's like oh my boo no my boo and they're like vacationing and they're swimming on that island where people swim with the pigs you guys want to talk about anyone have a friend like that and then they get divorced have you ever known anyone on social who pretended life is here I am here's my new car here I am here's my new house here's all of these things and then all of a sudden they're filing for bankruptcy anyone know what I'm talking about nobody knows what I'm talking about so the problem with that is we are so busy pretending that we're swimming laps that nobody knows we're drowning to make matters worse after all the backlash on Rachel Hollis's instagram post she posted her first apology which put basically not really basically like literally all of the blame on her team so the initial post was basically her saying I'm privileged because I worked my butt off but then she makes a mistake and she's like oops I made that mistake because of my team you know the team of people that I have working with me that have helped me get to this point in my career like I can only imagine how toxic of a work environment that is and also I have to mention a friend of mine Savvy writes books here on youtube did a video interviewing a former Rachel Hollis employee so that you can hear from the employee themselves and their perspective working with the Rachel Hollis company and team so I'll link that below in the description so you can watch that too and learn from that perspective if you'd like then after that apology also received backlash she posted another apology and I just got to say girls stop apologizing we already know you don't mean it it's also especially ironic for Rachel Hollis to compare herself to women of color when so much of her career was built off of plagiarizing women of color so Rachel Hollis's public persona completely shattered at that point and the former put together girl boss in a successful marriage just no longer exists in the public eye it also looks like Rachel Hollis is facing further repercussions and being dropped by major companies for example if you go on the target website and you search the name Rachel Hollis her books no longer pop up none of her stuff pops up on the target website anymore and instead her ex Dave's most recent book pops up and not her the shade the reality is bad PR is not always a bad thing we've seen this with so many people who use bad PR to their advantage to get their name out into the public eye to get publicity and articles written about them and sometimes bad PR is used as a strategic advantage in one's own career but where Rachel Hollis went wrong is that her entire niche demographic that she had built up and built her career off of she ended up losing touch with and that's where I think that Rachel Hollis's career is not going to bounce back as easily as other influencers and motivational speakers who have gotten into major controversies before because a lot of times when that happens the influencer will still maintain a relationship with their audience unfortunately the most egregious case of this is the James Charles situation where he's being called out for some very very serious acts but his core fan base seems to still love him support him and care for him Rachel Hollis did not maintain that relationship with her core fan base and instead went against their values and even at times blatantly disrespected them the women that she pretended to relate to she no longer pretends to relate to so I wonder if she will ever become the huge motivational speaker that she once was and I'm not sure if that means that Rachel Hollis's career is completely done but it kind of should be in the nicest way possible Rachel Hollis is kind of a fraud a modern snake oil salesman a charlatan of sorts who sold a complete lie of her own life and life story to so many people Rachel Hollis is constantly talking about how it's okay to fail and I agree with that but failing is like posting youtube videos on content that no one's really interested in failing isn't blatantly plagiarizing people's work and passing it off as your own in college if you get caught plagiarizing you can't just be like oopsies but everyone fails though right that's just not how this works and it's bizarre to me how motivational speakers will get away with time and time again just spewing blatant lies and in the process spread really toxic ideologies not only do I honestly think that Rachel Hollis did all of this to herself I'm also surprised with how much she got away with for so long like how so that's the end of this deep dive in my perspective on Rachel Hollis and the downfall of her career and if you enjoyed this video don't forget to subscribe if you want to like if you want to and stick around to watch some more of my other videos if you want to and if you made it this far in the video comment on the civic and just confuse everyone else who didn't get to this point and I'll catch you guys in the next one