 The longer I've been in business, the more I have understood truly what it means to succeed in business for the long term. And just a little bit of background, I started my business in 2009, and by the end of the first full year, I had started making a full-time monthly income. Now, I am both grateful and wish I had been different, okay, and I'll tell you why. Because I started using tactics in marketing and sales that, to me today, feel very salesy. Because I was learning from all the big players in marketing and online business that were teaching sales funnels, FOMO, fear of missing out, scarcity strategies, persuasion psychology, and just ways of essentially manipulating other people into converting the sale into buying from you. So that's what I learned in the early years. And the reason why those tactics, which to many of us who are here, they sound maybe obviously not something we want to do, something that's not aligned with the values of many of us here, why is it that it's still so popular these days and will be popular for many, many years to come? And why has it been popular for a long time? Because it works in the short term to make money. Because it's easier to measure, oh, if I create this manipulative, essentially, email and send it to this many people, you know, studies, not studies, but my past experience has shown if I send this kind of email to these people, X percentage will buy. And so that's why you're going to hear from others in my field who are trying to sell you on how to build a successful six-figure, seven-figure business. Just sign up for my program and I'll give you the emails, I'll give you the messages and the formula to essentially parrot what they give you so that you can make money too. George, what's wrong with that? Of course, we need to make money. We need to support ourselves and our families and if someone can give me a predictable way of making money, why wouldn't I want that? That's so silly. And plus, if we can get them to sign up, then we can really do our hearts work with our clients, right? Because the marketing is just a means to an end. It's a necessary evil. Well, if you've been watching some of my other videos, you know what I have to say about that. So let me give you first the practical reason why these things are not a good idea. I did that in the first couple of years in business. And then I noticed something strange. My marketing and selling did not get easier over time. In fact, it just kept being hard, meaning I always had to work hard to try to manipulate, persuade, convince, charm people into buying from me. I always had to work hard to launch, in other words. Always had to get clever and try to use various scarcity tactics, FOMO, salesy tactics. It just kept going like that. And many of the people in my industry, they don't realize that that's what's happening. That's why their business just stays hard year after year. In fact, many of my peers who started with me in 2009 are no longer around. They're still alive, but they're no longer doing the business that we all started doing together, because they couldn't stomach perhaps the doing of the salesy tactics year after year after year. They didn't have the stamina to do it, or they finally their conscience got to them and say, it's not relying with your heart the way you're doing this, the way you're treating people. You wouldn't treat friends that way. It felt, it would feel weird if you send an email to a friend like that. They would say, what are you talking about? And the way I have hopefully, perhaps you agree, treat all of you the way I think about authentic marketing is that it's making friends at scale. It's making friends at scale. So how do I treat my friends? Not with weird sounding emails that try to manipulate you into doing this or that. No. My emails are messages, my sales messages. When I try to sell something, it's very transparent, direct and just calm. And so I was going to give you the practical reasons. Why? Because marketing, if you do it with salesy methods, like most of the people in my industry are teaching you, your marketing will stay difficult and stressful year after year after year. And yet now that I am 13 years after, you know, having started my business full time, 13 years of full time business, full time income, all those time, all that time, I can now say with grounded experience that, my goodness, I'm so glad that I shifted the way I did. They did marketing starting in about 2014 was I got smart. I go, wait a second, I can't do this anymore. This constant launching with persuasion, psychology and copy, you know, very mainstream copywriting tactics and scarcity and FOMO and, you know, treating people like they have zero attention span. People have have no attention span because they don't trust you. That's why they have no attention span. But you're still watching this boring video because you probably trust me more than most marketers when you have someone's trust, their attention span is quite deep and and broad for you. And of course, when you're talking about something they're interested in, but it doesn't have to use persuasion, psychology. I get got rid of that. I know I have the book influenced by Robert Chaldini as well and I've read it and I'm like, no, and of course, I've studied so much of the persuasion, psychology stuff, I'm like, screw this, all this stuff. It's so manipulative. It's like consciously manipulating people. It's sickening to me. Whereas authentic marketing means to return to the childlike nature of connecting from the heart with another friend, something that you're genuinely excited by because you enjoy them because you want to play with them. Now, there's both the childlike nature and the adult nature. The childlike nature just exudes with love and passion and connection. And the adult nature is says and I let go. I bless the childlike nature says bless and the adult nature says let go. So it's kind of like this marriage of these two is authentic marketing. It's like I bless, I serve, I offer my products and services as in a childlike, passionate, joyful, playful way. And then the adult nature says and then I let go of the results. The more mature side of me says, oh, and then I'm unattached. The results that the child would probably scream and tantrum, which is what a lot of mainstream marketers do, right? They they're so clever and cunning like an adult when they're manipulating you and then when they don't get the results, they scream, they tantrum like a child, right? It's like the opposite. So so the practical nature of it is that ever since 2014, since I started doing authentic marketing year by year by year, my marketing has gotten easier and easier and easier. And my sales have gone up year by year. That's the practical part that I was going to say. I'm going to sell you on it. I don't have to sell you on it because that's just the experience that I've had. And I've seen other people with the same kind of experience. You know, I actually one of the most successful marketers in my field, Seth Godin and a lot of you probably know him. He is probably the original authentic marketer. He is not salesy, but he shows up consistently day after day. I mean, literally he blogs every day. He's been blogging every day since 2007 or no, since almost 2002 or 2003. It was really like about 20 years ago, just about been blogging, giving every single day, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving. And then so he doesn't have to sell hard at all. He is so well known now. He just he always just whispers when he has something and then hundreds of people, thousands of people by, he just whispers because he has our trust and the trust happens because he shows up consistently and that signals reliability and that signals care and he really does care because you can see it in his words and his and his reliability. So basically the practical result of this shift that I'm encouraging all of us to make away from the mainstream persuasion psychology, selling, trying to look impressive. That's another part of it too, right? It's like I stopped trying to look impressive. I mean, I look at some of my peers' websites and they're like so well branded, so gorgeous and honestly because I know how much has gone into that. I'm like, I'm so tired already just looking at the website. Oh, my God, all the branding and graphic design work. I'm exhausted. I was looking at and I want. Do I want all my clients to do this? Do I want myself to do this? I'm like, I'm exhausted. You know, it's like what what is and they have to keep everything they do has to be so well branded and, you know, has to continue symbolizing authority like they have to like try. They have to it's they always have to try to be impressive, persuasive, authoritative. When what I've discovered over the years is if I see authentic marketing as an exploration of my of my real and highest way of service, authentic marketing is my way of providing my highest service in a in a sustainable and scalable way online. And I show up reliably day after day. I don't have to look impressive. I don't have to try to persuade anybody because by showing up and continuing to hone my skillfulness, day after day, month after month, I naturally become truly skillful. My trust and credibility with my audience is actually grounded. And so therefore I can whisper and enough people buy. And year after year, more and more people have bought just by whispering. So the next time you hear from a marketer that, oh, you know, my formula works to convert sales and to make all this money or to and you're like, OK, my question is always, OK, your formula converts. You're giving me a story about how it converted this many people and made this many sales. I'm really curious, dear marketer, you convert a 10 percent. That's impressive of your audience or 20 percent. Super impressive, whatever you made, you know, a hundred thousand dollars. OK, now I want to know. What about the 80 to 90 percent of people you did not convert in that campaign? Do they trust you more? Or do they trust you less? The sad part is that for most of my peers who are doing the conversion psychology and the the stuff that you will learn elsewhere, basically, not I have a few colleagues that are I think teaching the true authentic marketing stuff. But a lot of people are just teaching persuasion, conversion psychology branded as, you know, holistic or spiritual or marketing or whatever they want to call it. It's just still conversion psychology and persuasion. It's still being manipulative. That's it. So they don't step back and look at even their own business and go, why is it so damn hard year after year after year? They just don't even step back and look at it. And so then they don't step back and realize that they have to keep building a larger and larger audience because their audience doesn't trust them. They haven't built a long term royal audience. Which I've noticed has become easier and easier for me over the years as I show up and practice. Skillfulness in service and authentic, you know, with authentic content with whispering my offerings, trying it out, being unattached, whether people buy. But if I keep on experimenting and trying, obviously, I find something that works and I keep leaning into that direction. It's quite simple if you look at it that way, because it is simply a practice month after month, year after year of heartfelt service in a sustainable way. You got to keep boundaries with yourself and with others. That's part of the practice. Joyful productivity. Year after year showing up with sustainable, heartfelt service, being unattached to the results and then noticing you're getting some more skillful over time, which naturally transforms into results. Sales results, money, new clients, word of mouth. So I gave you the practical case for making the shift, which is that you'll make your marketing easier over the years rather than harder, like most of my peers are experiencing. And that's the practical case, which I think is a good case for why you should do this. It does, however, take more patience in the beginning. That's why people don't do it. And that's why you might be finding it hard to do it, too. You're like, I need to make money tomorrow. I need to make money two weeks ago, George. I can't do your authentic method. I have to use persuasion psychology to get people to sign up. Fine, you can do that. You can do that just like I did in the first couple of years. I did that. I made money, some money. I don't I make more money now than I did in the first couple of years because then it's even easier now. But first couple of years I clawed and I crawled to make to make my my money. And yet I burned out in 2012. I burned out three years later and I said, I can't I can't do this anymore. This is this is not a joyful life to keep doing this. I burned out and then I really spent two years kind of in kind of this gray zone of I'm not sure what to do until I finally said, I'm going to just experiment with authentic business, authentic marketing. I'm going to see what that means to me. And then since then I've been building, building. It took me two years, by the way, 2014 and 2016. You know, it really took me two years to build back up. I was still making a gratefully a full time, lower full time income, but enough to survive because I had some clients and I kept them going. But but it took me two years of experimenting with authentic marketing, the stuff I'm teaching you these days to like suddenly have a waiting, not suddenly, but I know that. Oh my God, 2016, I have a waiting list and it's been a waiting list since then. Gratefully, and it's gotten bigger and bigger, waiting list since then. So I that's the practical case, the spiritual case, which hopefully will help you with your patience in the first two years. Right. The spiritual case for this is that if you decide to say, OK, George, I'm going to just not do the persuasion psychology conversion, copywriting and all the FOMO and scarcity tactics that just about every every other marketer teaches me, I'm not going to do that. And I'm going to try. I was going to say, George's way. No, it's not George's way. It's not my way. You're going to experiment with your own way of authentic market. It has to be your way because that's the definition of authentic business. You can you might learn some of my principles, but I want you to integrate these principles and see how it comes out of you in your own voice and methods and style. It may look very different than mine. You might really enjoy dressing up and and doing some video editing and making more entertaining. Sure. Great. Wonderful. It's got to be joyful to you and not manipulative. You've got to feel like I'm not trying to manipulate anyone, but I'm trying to express art. I'm trying to express my soul. That is what I try, right? So that's the spiritual case is when you do this, you essentially. Practicing. Authentic expression every time you do your marketing, when you're exploring and expressing yourself in ways playing with what feels really alive and real for me. And isn't that the deeper purpose of life? Isn't that wonderful that by doing authentic marketing, we're essentially basically activating deeper purpose of life versus the mainstream marketers and business coaches will teach you to do business as a means to an end, marketing as a means to an end. You just have to do this gross feeling marketing stuff so that you can work with clients and really fulfill your life's purpose. But most of the people who are touching your business because your marketing is touching them because your marketing is touching them aren't going to become your clients. You have to understand that, at least not now, maybe in the future. But it's like means to an end is the start of wrongdoing. When I say wrong, I don't mean wrong for me. I mean wrong for you. Your own conscience knows that if it feels not right, not joyful, not authentic, you're going against your own values. And so you don't have to live like that. You don't have to build business like that. You can build business essentially the same way you build a deeper life by exploring and practice, exploring your authentic voice, practicing joyful productivity and consistency of showing up, which is part of integrity, practicing that. And by doing so, your marketing gets easier and easier because you actually build real trust with people and they therefore will show up and talk about you and you can just whisper and and if you're whispering an offer that is aligned with with their wants, which is the matter of compassion, compassion towards their wants. And then you create or curate a product that is aligned with their wants. Of course, they're going to buy, but all it takes is a whisper. I hope this is helpful. I hope this is inspiring for you to continue making that shift towards your style of authentic marketing. Thank you for joining me on this journey.