An “Unsubscribed” Life
• The spiral downward starts with them asking for your name and email address.
• Then you get a free download pdf full of regurgitated information.
• Then you get the opt-in for the *complimentary* webinar that’s an hour long.
• On the webinar you spend 18 minutes hearing the sob backstory of how the presenter got “here”, 12 minutes on the 5 bullet points of recycled information that you were promised and 30 minutes of being pitched the mid-level paid package if you want to “really” learn the strategy.
• You get “access” to a private Facebook group to commiserate with a community that also paid the 179.99 only to be consistently pitched to get one on one access to the “funneler” for the top package price ranging from 499.00 to thousands and I mean THOUSANDS of dollars.
Your emails are full of messages from them that you are tired of opening. Sure, they shared a few good tips, but you can’t help but feeling that the time you’ve spent treating them like an all-knowing celebrity could have better been spent expanding your brain power by reading, learning and researching things on your own.
THINK. Do we really need to save THAT much time that we are willing to risk losing our own ability of deductive reasoning, discovery and application of principles?
I went through my emails the other day and discovered that over time I had “opted-in” to at least 61 different guru’s, newsletters and free downloads that crowded my emails daily. Again, I have gleaned decent information from some of them. They promised “hacks” for everything I thought I needed to know. Yet honestly, it was nothing that I couldn’t have learned on You Tube, read in a book, following the directions or God forbid…trial and error and all by myself.
This “hack” phenomenon is diluting a critical piece of character development in leadership and ingenuity is dying. We are looking for quicker, easier, shorter, cheaper. The thought now seems to be if someone has done it, let’s just copy them and change the color. We may gain time. But we lose even more.
Well, the funnel phenomenon is even worse. Why? Because before you know it, you are spinning in several different funnels to learn Canva, How to do a webinar, How to encourage yourself, Doing Facebook Ads right, How to Periscope to your target audience, Build your Instagram following and more. You even subject yourself to people reduced to profane language used as a drawing tool to market themselves as risqué and cutting edge. You drool over funnelers that show private jets in the backdrop, show off their bank statements and indirectly share that they are streaming live from their beach house in the south of France. Admirable indeed. Their accomplishments should be heralded and yes you better believe I have a jet and beach house on my vision board. BUT the fact remains, that very little they have done is something beyond your own reach. Yet, because we pour so much time and energy into trying to learn all of their how to’s and keeping up with their social media, we never take what we DO know out for a spin to see what it can do when the pedal’s to the metal.
One of my board members called me on the carpet on falling into this hole and caused me to snap out of it. I shared with her about this latest award winning phenomenal person I started “following” and she responded.
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She’s ok, but quite honestly she isn’t saying anything new. Camille, you already know what you need to know, you just need to DO it.
She was right. I was drawn in by the shiny lights. You know the pretty white IG backgrounds, coordinated fonts, neat office spaces and meticulously chosen color schemes. Her content was good, don’t get me wrong. But how many “get up off your butt” speeches did I need to hear AND pay for, before I moved?
We lose something as leaders when we don’t have to truly strive for much. By just waiting to see who else has figured it out and just getting their feedback gives you a tainted view of expertise. At what point do YOU become the expert? When do YOU figure something out and contribute? When do you offer your own opinion instead of simply revising the thoughts of the latest & greatest and making their thoughts your own? I decided for me that now was as good a time as any.
Thus the 3 step detox began. How?
1. I made a list of any area that I felt I still needed insight on and came up with three traditional ways (that pushed my OWN brain) to get it figured out.
2. I went on an unsubscribe witch hunt. I went through every email address I own and unsubscribed from everything remotely close to a funnel system.
3. I created a maintenance system. When a new guru is recommended to me, I ask the person to name 5 things that they learned from them that they could not have found out on their own.
My goal is to keep this at a low roar until the end of first quarter 2017. I want to see how much more productive I can be without setting aside hours on Saturday to listen to replays of glorified sales pitches. I want to see how much computer space I save by not downloading every free pdf known to man. More importantly, I want to know what’s it like to breathe the exciting air of discovering things on my own, even if I mess up first. For a little while, I want to see what I am made of. The reason that nothing seems to be fixing me, may be because I am not broken. I am opting out of being spoon-fed and learning to enjoy an “unsubscribed life”.
I’ll report back on this next year. If you want to follow my journey you can subscri….
And just like that you are sucked down the funnel.
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Camille D. Jamerson is a global speaker, author and entrepreneur. She is the Senior Consultant and CEO of CDJ & Associates a boutique management consulting firm. Her amazing assistant Reema handles her wacky calendar and about 76–94% of the rest of her life as well. Reema can be reached at info@cdjandassociates.com to book CDJ for your next event, conference or workshop!
