Pt. 2: Why Launching Is Broken - Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!
The scientific method, the toll of ignoring reality and gaslighting for sales.
Did you miss Part One? Read it here.
What kind of harm are you perpetuating for yourself in creating timelines that force you to overtax yourself in every way?
And what oppressive systems are you upholding, whether you want to or not, by staying overtaxed?…
Ignoring reality at a huge cost.
There’s a very special brand of pink-washed, girl-boss feminism that’s taken over the online business world.
Much of the advice and education we receive on how to launch comes from celebrity coaches and “patriarchy-smashing” mentors who are essentially telling us that the road to equality lies in you being able to make a whole bundle of cash.
The idea here is that if you have money, you have the power to affect change. It seems like a logical solution to a glaring lack of societal balance, right?
The only problem is that this solution only works for a very specific type of person. Remember that “fully able, slim, white, conventionally attractive, cis-hetero woman” I mentioned earlier?
Yup, that’s the one.
The non-solution being sold to us as both the justification for and end result of the standard online launch is nothing more than the polished turd that is white feminism.
Anti-Racism Coach Alyssa Hall recently put out a newsletter (which you can subscribe to here!) on the issues with white liberal feminism, (about which she insightfully notes “Btw, you don't have to be white or a liberal to follow this particular ideology.”) :
It tends to ignore the societal structures at play and focuses on very narrow (individualistic) solutions.
If we solely focus on gaining capital and power as a way to uplift and liberate women, we ignore the fact that there are actually more structures at play. Mainly because the method of gaining power and capital is exclusionary at its core.
In other words: white feminism doesn’t change anything for anyone except straight white women with access to certain resources.
The only real “change” that occurs is in who holds the power inside of the same problematic systems already in play. The people being left behind already just get left-behinder.
In an NBCBLK article from 2021, (also featured in that kick-ass newsletter from Alyssa Hall,) author Koa Beck was interviewed following the publication of her book, White Feminism: From The Suffragettes To Influencers And Who They Leave Behind.
Marie Solis, the author of the article, wrote:
This ideology is fundamentally exclusionary, [Beck] says, functioning to keep women of color from enjoying the benefits of any feminist gains or otherwise enlisting them in creating the illusion of equality for their white counterparts, such as by performing the domestic labor that allows white women to succeed in the workplace.
White feminism, however, is not exclusive to white women, Beck says. Because it is so pervasive, people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds often buy into the promises of white feminism, believing that if they work hard enough, they may be able to reap its alleged rewards.
In the interview, Beck explained further:
White feminism as a practice and ideology aspires to those things rather than interrogates them…
There’s this idea that you should look inward, rather than looking outward at systems and examining the way those systems treat you, me and people we’ll never meet. White feminism casts you as a revolution in and of itself…
There’s something so easy about it, and it fits within the rhythm of the shows and media we consume. You can basically identify as a “feminist” without really challenging power, and that’s very satisfying and welcoming to a lot of people.
The promise of “reaping white feminism’s alleged rewards” means that many of us are essentially operating on bad intel.
We assume we’re working within a certain set of conditions which actually don’t exist.
And, I’d argue, these imaginary conditions have been further sold to us as a distraction from the reality that allows people in power to continue profiting from our false assumptions.
Not only do these false assumptions hold us back, they can cause many of us to put ourselves, and be put, in situations where we end up making rash, half-baked decisions based on incomplete information.
We base our decision-making within concepts like manifestation, positive thinking, belief in a meritocracy, etc. because we’ve been taught to believe that everyone is working within the same set of conditions.
So, if something ISN’T working, it must mean there’s a deeper, more personal, maybe more intangible reason.
Once we’ve decided all of the responsibility for our own failure or success is squarely and solely on our own shoulders, the logical next step can only be a serious doubling down on the strategies we already know, come hell or high water, because we’ve been told they “work”.
Except by now, you know that most of these strategies are not only unhelpful-and-harmful to us—they’re also harming our audiences and clients, which ripples out to their audiences and clients…
We dismiss our own realities based on blind trust in someone else’s idea of what reality even is. We dismiss our clients’ realities because we’ve been told that anyone’s reality can only look one way.
Ultimately, we’re removing our agency within our own lives by making someone outside of us the actual expert on our existences, and then we do the same thing to our audience.
How often have you heard (or maybe said them yourself, we’re all learning…) things like:
“Is it that they can’t join the program, or is it a mindset issue?”
“Learn how to address objections and turn a ‘no’ into a ‘yes’.”
“Where people will get the money from isn’t your responsibility—just price yourself at what you’re worth.”
“It didn’t happen because you weren’t all in.”
“Coaches aren’t responsible for their clients’ outcomes.”
The definition of the term “spiritual bypassing” as described by the dude who coined it, John Welwood, goes like this:
Spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.
There are entire business coaching empires that have been built on selling and using intangible concepts that rely on manipulation and gaslighting dressed up as “gut-feelings” and “intuition.”
It feels extremely important for me to point out that I am writing this as a professional Intuitive who uses Tarot in her own business practice and with her clients. I believe in the power of intuition and forces outside of ourselves that we can’t always see and touch.
But any spiritual practice that is not firmly grounded in the realities of the world we all live and operate in is a scam.
Using intuitive tools does not entail perverting them for your own gain, using them to manipulate other humans or placing responsibility where it does not belong in order to make a profit.
Spiritual bypassing forces people to take responsibility where they cannot, then blame themselves for failures that weren’t their fault to begin with. We try to exert control where we don’t have any and dig ourselves deeper and deeper into the hole of desperation.
That desperation just re-primes us for another round of ignoring reality at the cost of our own businesses and wellbeing. The cycles repeat and we’re no closer to our goals than when we started this thing.
If these are the thoughts from which all of our actions are originating, it’s too easy for us to keep harming ourselves while using the same tactics within our own business processes to harm our audiences and clients.
“Manifesting success” should not require you to make a drastic, completely foolhardy play in order to pull off some eleventh-hour-Hail-Mary on your fucking livelihood.
Calculated risk is great. Desperation and operating on a hope and a prayer and someone else blowing smoke up your ass without knowing and acknowledging the reality of your business, resources, circumstances, needs or goals is the literal actual worst possible thing you could do.
Not only does it hurt you, it keeps the web of lies intact so that others continue to be caught in it. It undermines the integrity of entire industries and makes sure the changes that take us to a more equitable future never fucking happen.
Believing the lies keeps ALL of us stuck - you AND me AND everyone else.
The flash in the pan wins.
I was talking to some friends and fellow small business owners about the nonsense of one-size-fits-all launch strategies and in the middle of our discussion, one friend said “OR, it works once and then never does again.”
It turned on such a huge lightbulb for me that I fully gasped and shouted “OH MY FUCK, YOU’RE RIGHT!”
In science and other disciplines where theories are tested before being proven or disproven and accepted as either fact or fiction, outcomes are required to be repeatable based on conditions that are either able to be replicated or will naturally reoccur.
If you don’t have complete knowledge of and control over the conditions in which you’re launching, and a certain strategy works—was it the strategy? Or was it something else?
You might argue that it doesn’t matter, because a win’s a win, right?
But what happens when you go to use that strategy again and it doesn’t fucking work?
First off, correlation does not equal causation.
Just because something worked once doesn’t mean it’s a great strategy. It could mean that.
It could also mean there was a person in your small audience who was already ready and waiting for your offer.
It could mean you were able to capitalize on the conditions of a currently-common sentiment based on news cycles and where people’s attention was in that moment. (”Recession-proof your business!” ringing any bells?…)
It could mean someone signed up because a mutual friend told them about it and they never even went through your sales funnel.
There’s a misconception that pro-coaches, manufactured confidence and all, really seem to enjoy operating off of:
It’s the idea that we have more control over things than we really do.
Can you recreate the conditions you need in order to replicate that last outcome? Do you even know for sure what those conditions were?
How do you troubleshoot something you don’t control? Or something you don’t know will ever “naturally reoccur”?
This not only brings up the fact that the way we’re taught to set launch goals in the first place is flawed (ie: “I will sell five spots in my program.” You don’t have control over other people’s actions and without enough of the right kind of data, you won’t be able to predict the number of sales you make…)
It also brings up how little of that right data we’re able to collect.
Having the right kind of data means understanding the environment of the experiment you're undertaking well enough that you know you’re measuring the right variables.
As entrepreneurs who are coming up in the ever-increasingly fast-paced environment of manufactured urgency and “just do it” and “start before you’re ready,” we’re often not following a strategy enough times in a row, or measuring our progress by the most important factors, to have any real proof that they actually work.
By the time you come back to that celebrity coach you learned from to report your first win, they’ll already be selling you on a new strategy anyway, because “trends and algorithms,” etcetera.
The combination of all these factors means that ultimately launches-as-we-know-them are unpredictable, unwieldy. It means using a monstrous amount of resources in order to potentially gain absolutely nothing. It means cruel self-talk and emotional ups-and-downs that exhaust the nervous system. It means we ignore our intersectionality in favor of the unmessy aesthetic of white feminism and spiritual bypassing.
It means, in a word, destruction:
Of self, of a sound business foundation, of future security and growth, of safety—of everything that launch strategy was supposed to get you in the first place.
So. If there’s so much in the way of a successful and less harmful launch process, what—if anything—could ever work?
Here’s what has worked for me instead, perhaps it will help you find your own new process:
Accept + acknowledge, clarify and accommodate.
Thanks for reading Part Two of Why Launching is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!
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Click here to read Pt. 3: Why Launching is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My! (How can we make this better?)
About The Author:
Zoha Abbas is an Intuitive Tarot Reader, Business Coach and writer who aims to explore the small business conversations around doing business better, together, and in the grey-area of real life through data, divination and dismantling harmful systems. She is the CEO and Creator of The Ownership Method, a coaching practice where she helps fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners make change in their own businesses and beyond.
If you’d like more personalized help with:
building your next launch
reworking your business processes
strengthening and clarifying your offers
for a less harmful, more human business, join me for a 1-on-1 intensive and lets make it happen.
For any other inquiries, please email: zoha@theownershipmethod.com