Spiritual teachers: your marketing makes greater impact than your “real” work. Marketing = Ministry.

Many spiritual teachers are too hands off with their marketing. And I think that's a real problem for how they're actually communicating their values and their presence in the world. So one of my friends just told me recently that she had unsubscribed from a well known spiritual teacher's email list because the emails that she was getting was starting to feel too disconnected from the kind of deeper values that the spiritual teacher typically teaches with. And I think what's happening is that the spiritual teacher had outsourced their marketing, their copywriting, their email newsletter writing to some marketing company or person. And you know, us marketers, we are so much about the means to an end. You just got to do whatever. You know, we marketers, I put myself in that industry, although hopefully I've reformed a bit. We marketers just do whatever we need to do to get you to take the action, to get you to click, buy, or to even click. First of all, we get do whatever we need to do in the subject line of the email to get you to open the email. And then we do whatever we need to do, whatever language, whatever persuasion psychology we need to do to get you to click on the link in the email and then on the webpage. We do whatever we need to do, any kind of scarcity tactics or whatever, hypnotism and charm in our branding and design and, you know, copywriting to get you to sign up for our product or service. And so spiritual teachers, what do they do? They're like, yeah, you know, marketers, let the marketers do their thing. And then when the people sign up for our programs and our services and our events, then they get to experience the spiritual teacher's presence and the real work that we do with our students and with our clients and our audience. So this is a real problem because the spiritual teacher doesn't understand that they are actually impacting way more people with their marketing than with their real work of teaching or counseling or writing or their programs, their retreats, workshops, whatever it may be. It's like for every one student who signs up for their service or their program, they probably impacted at least 10, if not 100 other people who didn't sign up for that program or service through the marketing of that program or product. You see what I mean? So marketing is not a means to an end. I mean, you could see it that way. If you disconnect your values from the impact you're making on most of the people that your business touches. Let me say that again, if you care about the kind of impact you are making in the world, then you have to understand that marketing is not a means to an end. You don't do the marketing just so that you can have clients to do the real work with. Your presence is communicated to many more people in the marketing than who end up signing up to work with you. Do you understand that? So, in other words, you're developing a lot more karma through your marketing than through your real work with clients. Because, and here's what's amazing about marketing is that the more successful your marketing is, the more true that becomes. So in other words, the more your marketing message reaches more people, the more people you're impacting, then eventually work with you, right? Like, for example, let's say one of your articles or videos goes viral. You know, maybe typically you make a video and 100 people watch it and you're pretty happy about, you know, 100. You make a Facebook Live video and 100 of your friends or your fans or, you know, watch, watch the video. That's wonderful. Fifty hundred, let's say whatever your number is. And then one day you make a video and it goes out. It's for whatever reason people start sharing, gets picked up by some influencer, and it gets a thousand views, five thousand views, ten thousand views. Do you think that suddenly you're going to get 5,000 clients? Doesn't work that way. You know that if your video gets 5,000, 10,000 views, you might still get maybe 10 client inquiries out of 10,000. You see what I mean? Or 10 client inquiries out of 500, 5,000 views. Or if you're lucky, a thousand views. But it's not like everybody who watches that video becomes your client or the vast majority don't. In other words, the greater the reach of your message, the lower your conversion rate to clients or sales. That's just a law of marketing. It's not that you are less effective. In fact, you're more effective because your message is being shared by lots of people. But just the law of statistics and marketing means that the more people your message touches, the fewer of them are ready to work with you. Or it's the right timing for them to work with you, or it's the right fit for the kind of person who needs to work with you. Do you see what I mean? So you want your marketing to be successful? Yes. Because, well, you're on a mission. I'm assuming if you're a spiritual teacher or a messenger of some kind, you're trying to communicate some kind of transformational message, you want to make the world a better place. So you have some kind of technique, some kind of exercise, some modality, some process, some transformational framework to help make some segment of the population's lives better? Right. So you have a message to share. And of course, you want your message, your content, your videos, your articles, your social media posts to get out to a lot of those people. Yes, but do you understand that that itself is making more of an impact than your paid work is making? Spiritual teachers who outsource their marketing just don't realize that. So please send them this. You don't even have to send them this video. Just send them that one line. Dear spiritual Teacher, did you realize that your emails are impacting way more people than who eventually signed up to work with you? Why are you using values of strong arming and fear and, you know, in your marketing, in your messaging? Why are you using trickery to get me to open your emails and using, you know, something that's less than your normal deep presence in your. In your messaging, in your marketing, in your website, your emails, your social media posts, in your selling? Right? Let's understand that I want you to open yourself to this idea. Marketing is part of your ministry. Yes, marketing, it's your. The way you market yourself, the way you put your website together, the way you do your social media posts, the way you do your emails, your copywriting, your selling, all of that is part of your ministry because like I said, it touches way more people. It makes a difference on people's day, their day, their lives, and how they have hope for humanity or not, how they feel about themselves, it makes more of a difference for them than the few who end up working with you. Now, the irony, you might say, I'm not sure if I'm using that word correctly, is that if you bring your deep presence, your values, if you're. If you effectively communicate your values in your website, your emails, your social media posts, your videos, your copywriting, your selling, if you communicate your values effectively in that way, you don't use fear in the way. That is cynical. I mean, yeah, there might be certain things that I'm not saying. You know, for example, I do tell people, hey, my class is starting soon if you want to sign up. If this is the right fit for you, go and join us before the class starts or I have an early bird price. Thanks. For those of you who are signing up early, I'm gonna give you a discount for trusting me before I have my. All my marketing materials together. You can sign up early if you want to get A little discount. But I don't push it to say, you better sign up, otherwise you're gonna really regret this. You're gonna. You're gonna have a terrible business or whatever it is. Right. It's like you are simply, you know, when it comes to a real deadline or a real scarcity, meaning something is starting soon, or I actually just have, you know, 100 spots in this program. Whatever may be, you know, realistically, that you just communicate very directly. Gently, gently. That's how I try to communicate it. But again, you know what I'm talking about. If you subscribe to spiritual teachers newsletters, especially the bigger ones, they have become detached. They have left their marketing to. In the hands of others who don't have the same values and deep presence as the teacher themselves. Because they, you know, like, if you ask that spiritual teacher, they say, yes, I want to make. I want my message to reach more people. I want my. My presence, my transmission, my values to make a positive impact to more people. Yes, I do want that. Then you do this. Do you realize what's happening with your marketing? Like, no, I don't. Let the marketers do their thing. No, no. The marketers are the ones who are creating more karma for your. For your brand than you realize. So this is why I always encourage my own clients, my students, everybody. You. I encourage you to learn and do the marketing yourself first. You know, there's this. There's this fantasy that a lot of you have that if only someone else can do my marketing. Have any of you ever felt that. Oh, George. The marketing thing. And I'm sorry, I have to turn on this heater more. The marketing thing is such a pain in the ass. It's such a means to an end. I just. I just want to do my real work. Your real work. The marketing is part of your real work. Because marketing is you trying to find your calling. Let me explain. Your marketing is the most powerful way for you to find your calling. Not journaling, not even working with a brilliant Purpose coach to find your calling. Yeah, Purpose coach. What the purpose coach ends up doing is guiding you to interact with the world in a way that you get the feedback that tells you whether you're making a positive impact and trying a bunch of things to see whether you enjoy it. Guess what that's called? Marketing. It's called marketing. The purpose coach guides you to learn how to market yourself in order to find your calling, your deep purpose in life. The thing you were brought here to do, the thing you were born to do, is found through marketing. Isn't that weird? Let me explain. Marketing is not a means to an end. Let's stop with the I hate marketing. Marketing is for someone else to do. I just do my real work. Who told you this? Where? Where? I'm really interested to know. Please comment below. When did you stop hate? When did you start hating marketing? When did you start disliking marketing? Where did you learn it from that made you dislike marketing? Hopefully not from me now. So again, you might dislike marketing because you think it's about manipulating other people and tricking other people and it's about showing off and being, being pretentious. And you know, you know me. That's not how I do marketing. I hope you agree. I guess. And right here I'm, I'm doing my marketing right here. But you could see I'm not trying to sell you anything. Most of my mark, most of my marketing, quote unquote, my content is not trying to sell you anything except to sell you a message that I deeply believe in, in a way that I think will make your life better, your business better. But so marketing is finding your calling how? The way we, the way we do marketing is basically we explore a bunch of different ways of showing up and to say what's authentic for me? Do I show up as funny? Do I show up as loud? Do I show up as soft? Do I show up as really excitable? Do I show up as really slow and quiet? Is that authentic to me? You have to test all those out because within you are many ways of being. And you don't know which of those ways of being makes you feel most like you're making a difference in the world. And that makes you feel purposeful. You have to try them all out. Now that's. On the one hand, marketing is exploring all the different ways that, that make you authentic, that allow you to feel authentic. But on the other hand, marketing is also you trying a bunch of different things out. You're trying a bunch of different ways of being. You're trying a different, a bunch of different messages and ways of framing what you know and ways of exploring your life's experiences. You're trying a bunch of stuff out to see what, where you feel authentic and in, in intersecting with where it really makes an impact in the world. That's called finding your calling, right? Because what's your calling? Your calling, just like Frederick Buchner has said, is where your deep gladness meets the world's deep hunger, right? That's your deep purpose in life. And we do that through marketing. So please stop hating marketing. Where did you start? Learn to hate marketing. Now, you might have learned to hate marketing because someone told you, oh, you can make some social media posts and make a million dollars, or you can send some emails and get a bunch of clients. That's called means to an end marketing. And I never teach that to you or I try not to. I always try to teach you marketing as a process of finding your calling and serving the world. With the lucky, blessed occasional occurrence that when you do these. Well, when you, when you dedicate yourself to the practice of exploring yourself publicly public journaling. The practice of public journaling to explore yourself and to serve the world. When you do this effectively and consistently, the natural result is that you get clients. It's the natural result. Not you like trying to strong arm people or trick people or pay someone else to do it because they're gonna not bring your presence because it's not you. You see, the spiritual teachers, holistic counselors, deep embodiment facilitators, personal development experts, all of us need to understand that we make more impact on people's personal and spiritual growth through our marketing than through our work with clients and students. And if we do our marketing from the place of authentic service, authentic exploration and service, and as heart of service, and we do it consistently without attachment to the results. Without attachment to the results. Okay. Because that's what authentic exploration and heart of service means. You're not attached to. Someone must buy from me. Otherwise I'm going to, you know, not going to do my content anymore. Right. If you do it from an authentic place, client inquiries become a normal occurrence. But you can't attach yourself to that because once you start attaching yourself to that, you're no longer authentic. That is the. But spiritual teachers, you know what I'm talking about. Spiritual growth is also paradoxical, right? So I hope this is interesting, I hope this is helpful. I hope that you will email and message your spiritual teachers. You don't have to share my video. I don't care. But I care that you let them know to please understand that their marketing needs their presence and themselves. So, so let me end by saying when I said I tell everybody in the world, and you included, please learn marketing. Please learn to do your own marketing. Not that you have to do your own marketing forever, but you've got to learn to do your own marketing to find your calling or to find more of your calling, to understand it more deeply. That intersection between your explorations and the world's great excitement about what you provide, that intersection has to be explored again and again and again to find out, right? It's not a one time thing. So do your marketing, learn how to do your marketing so that you can find, you can explore, learn how to explore your calling. But secondly, you can learn how it's done with true authenticity so that when your business grows. Because if you do it authentically and effectively and consistently, your business will grow. But don't get attached to that, right? The timeline anyway. Don't get attached to the timeline, that's the key. But if you do that, your business grows and you'll have the funds to outsource it to other people. The parts of your marketing that are quite rote, you can, you know, are quite repetitive. You can outsource to other people, but you're always monitoring that your values are being transmitted properly through the marketing. Don't just say, please, someone save me by taking on my marketing, promote me, and then I've been just going to do my real work. You have completely lost the understanding of what authentic business means when you do that. Marketing is how we find our calling and it's how we transmit our values to most of the people that our business touches. I hope this helps and I wish you well and I wish you a dedication to the practice of authentic marketing. Until the next video, be well.