A little over a week ago it was my birthday and mid cake cutting my husband asked me what I hoped for myself for the year ahead. More of this please. More healthy kids, more family time together at the beach, more coffee on the deck first thing in the morning, more movies, more writing, more hiking, more sun on my face. More of the indescribable nothingness that is the contentment of the day to day. At the moment he asked the question I didn’t have a single aspiration for more speaking events, podcasts, career advancements, or other respectable personal and professional goals. How sweet to want more of what you already have. Yet, shouldn’t I want more for myself and my business?!
Writing a book with a “how to” message inadvertently threw me into a world where it is customary to build a business around my ideas. In the last 8 months (since the launch of Crummy Conversations) I have been introduced to the concept of “thought leadership”. Thought leaders are experts on their topic area and people seek them out for advice and consultation. I understand that by selling a book I inadvertently thrust myself into the world of sales, but I didn’t anticipate being inundated with constant opportunities to learn how to rake in the dough. At least once every time I scroll through social media someone in my feed suggests that I too could be a “6 or 7 figure” entrepreneur.
The whole concept of selling is problematic for me for a few reasons:
My content. The thought leadership industry seems to be built on the idea that others are lacking something you, the expert, already possess. It suggests that I am selling you something you should want for yourself. The problematic part for me is that my people, the people who would want my content, already have the solutions within themselves. I’m not the expert on their children or the children they work with, they are. As a parent and an educator, I’m in this mess with them and I’m offering ideas based on my work and my life and my content is truly optional.
My audience. My readers are parents, caregivers, educators, family resource program facilitators, and other childhood specific specialists who work in an under-funded industry and are chronically overworked and under-paid. So, sell culture wants me to sell to a group of people (primarily women, but that doesn’t really need to be spelled out here, does it?) who work their hearts out, yet still may not have the funds to purchase anything I’m selling?
My family. I write a lot about parenting my kids because it is the most polarizing experience I’ve ever had. It is simultaneously life-giving and life-sucking, the best and the worst all at once. It also happens to be a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week type gig that requires constant flexibility, adaptation, and course correction. If I’m not doing the parenting, I’m thinking about the parenting, reading about the parenting, or planning for the parenting I’ll be doing in the future. There is no beginning and no end, just a constantly consuming workload that I care too much about to ignore on weekends and holidays. Sounds a lot like running a business to me…Except the pay is shit. This payless all-consuming business takes up most of my waking hours, not leaving much time for selling anything to anyone else.Along with being problematic for the above reasons, it also has very much annoyed me that the sales industry chant of “sell, sell, sell” has a not-so-subtle suggestion, in my experience, that a lack of hustle directly connects to a lack of self worth. Is it true that my potential shaky self worth is holding me back from making all the money and having all the success or is this yet another clever marketing strategy to play on my vulnerability? Is that message being said to men too or just to women?
I work in (and write for) a profession that is under-funded and under-paid and I spend my days and nights raising children for zero dollars and sell culture has the audacity to suggest to me that my lack of revenue has something to do with my self worth? Or my lack of hustle? Let me respectfully formulate my response to that:
Until the industry of raising and educating tiny humans is recognized and valued as the fundamental and foundational job that it is, I’ll be over here blowing out birthday candles and wishing for more of the mundane day to day. I’m not wishing for it because I don’t want more for myself and my business, but because my business is the everyday. It is in the boring, unglamorous, thankless, payless (or low paying) seemingly insignificant details of caring for children and families that, I would argue, matter the most.
Turns out, you can’t sell me on selling when my heart belongs to a business where energy, effort, and dedication have never been rewarded with revenue.
-Michelle