Treading Gently (even when it goes against everything we've been told)
© Pip Wilcox
I thought I'd be writing you a promotional email today, to tell you more about next June's Middle Years Monday in-person Retreat. But on Sunday - to my delight - the last remaining spot on this Retreat was booked. Wow. Thank you so much for all of your good wishes and the lovely energy that has been sent my way over these past few weeks. I'm utterly thrilled that in-person retreats are now part of what Middle Years Monday offers. After such a gorgeous vote of confidence I'll now crack on with planning further retreat loveliness to take place in January and June 2025. I'll keep you posted with the full details, but for now, if you think you might like to join us in Lincolnshire in the Summer of 2025 then do keep 6th - 9th June free as I have those dates pencilled in with the Retreat venue and chef!
But this is not a thinly-veiled humble brag of an email or a marketing one either. Honestly, I am utterly blown away that something I was expecting to be promoting for many months has sold out this soon. And I hate the thought of adding to the nervous system-activating messaging that suggests we should all be doing more, bigger, better, sooner. I do not want to give you any false impression of my supposed 'success'. I have never earned anything close to the much-lauded six-figure income and I don't expect that to change. In fact, over the past few years my earnings have barely merited me paying income tax. So I am definitely not here to trigger any comparisonitis. But I do want to share with you something of my experience over the last few weeks - in case it speaks to you or helps you in any way.
For many years I worked in *sales*. I sold Tampax machines; hotel leisure club memberships; reasons to donate to the Charity I worked for as a Corporate fundraiser; my services as a Humanist Funeral Celebrant; women's clothing in a high street store; investments to financial advisors; my pottery (the making of which is on long-term pause for now) - and so on.
The older I've become the harder I have found this. In fact - and melodramatic though it sounds - almost every time I have thrown open the doors to Middle Years Monday to invite more women to join as Members I have had to work at staving off a full-blown existential crisis. Every time I have to sell MYM I start thinking about what else I could do for a living - because doing almost anything other than selling myself and what I offer has seemed appealing. Many times I have fantasised about throwing in the towel and closing Middle Years Monday - just because of how hard I find it to struggle through those sales periods. Seeing as I find the work of leading Middle Years Monday in almost every other regard off-the-scale beautiful and rewarding, this is crazy.
I thought that this discomfort was brought about by a feeling of vulnerability, the sense of missing a layer of skin that comes with the particular type of visibility which accompanies selling something so personal. But I'm not sure that's all it was. I think it may also have been the prickling discomfort that comes from following what I'd been told over the years about selling.
Extraction - that's the word I've recently heard Bear Hébert use when describing a key value of Capitalism. Underpinning this is a belief in getting the most money from the least output, as quickly as possible and no matter what it takes. We are told that when selling we need to press on people's pain points, highlight their problem so that we can sell them our solution. We need to hint at their brokenness, their incompleteness. And then we need to create a sense of panic and urgency with a suggestion of scarcity - that if they don't act NOW they'll miss out and will have to limp on by themselves. We are taught to persuade them that we have the answers they're looking for - regardless of whether or not we do. We may end up twisting ourselves into all sorts of unnatural shapes to sell our wares. We may offer incentives to buy quickly, discounts to those who pay upfront - and penalties to those who pay in instalments. We might hint at our stuff flying off the shelves, even if it isn't. This all sets up the people we're selling to as our prey. No wonder I wanted to swap my job in for supermarket shelf-stacking every time I was in a sales period.
A mixture of things radically altered my approach when it came to promoting Middle Years Monday's first in-person Retreat. I’ve been thinking lately about integrity and transparency in business; about the Buddhist concept of ‘right livelihood’ (which I only recently encountered); about how financial enoughness might be more important and healthy - for us individually and collectively - than abundance; and about living by what author bell hooks calls a ‘love ethic’ - and what that might look like for me in relation to my work. And specifically, when it came to promoting this Retreat.
Another huge factor which was so clarifying for me was that this time, for the first time in my life - during the first few weeks of promoting the Retreat when bookings were only open to Middle Years Monday Members - I was communicating with human beings with whom I already had relationships. These were not anonymous 'targets' - these were beautiful, three dimensional people who I felt love for. And importantly, I knew that some of them would absolutely not be able to afford to come to this Retreat. I detested the thought of bringing suffering to them by carelessly dangling something in front of them which was out of reach. And to those who could afford to be a part of this experience, I wanted to give them space to make a full and considered choice without manipulating them into panic. It became obvious that I needed to find a way to sell with love and to tread gently - and so I set about figuring out what that might look like.
This email isn't intended as a guide, and I certainly don't consider myself an expert. But it has been really potent to experience the impact of the decisions I made, so I thought that sharing them with you here - and telling you a little about the incredible warmth that this way of going about things has resulted in - might be of interest to you. Because I know that selling is something that many of us need to do, but find deeply and incredibly icky.
So, here's what I did and didn't do...
I committed (both inwardly and also explicitly in my emails) to not creating any false scarcity. So I kept a public running tally on the Retreat sales page of the numbers of places available on the Retreat. Every time I received a booking form I updated this, which meant that anyone interested in coming along to the Retreat could judge for themselves how urgent it was for them to make a decision.
I didn't speak of the ways in which this Retreat will offer life-changing transformation. No matter how much love and skill and good intention we put into our offerings, we can't ever be sure how someone is going to experience what we invite them to be a part of - and certainly can't guarantee this kind of change.
I decided to be transparent about the numbers when it comes to Middle Years Monday’s costs and profitability in relation to this Retreat. This meant that anyone reading about the Retreat was given enough information to reach their own conclusions about whether or not it is priced reasonably and is value for money. This level of openness felt vulnerable but made me feel proud too. I was nervous about what judgements people may make based on not understanding the amount of work that has gone and will continue to go into this Retreat (far in excess of the 4 days over which it will take place) and therefore thinking the potential profit is greedy. On the other hand I also worried about people thinking that the profit is pathetically low and forming opinions about my naive approach to running my business. It's interesting what stories we tell ourselves about others and how they think isn't it?!
I didn't play into a sense of panic and urgency in either myself or others with early bird offers. This felt hard. I had to lay out what to me is a considerable sum of money in securing our Retreat venue and private chef and had no idea how many of the 16 available Retreat places would be taken up. I understand why people offer discounts in exchange for quick action - because that helps to alleviate the seller's anxiety and their financial risk. But I decided that rather than try and discharge this anxiety by incentivising others to take quick action I would learn to sit with it and trust that all would unfold in the right way. I enjoyed knowing that in this way I wasn't penalising those who needed time to get their financial ducks in a row before booking their Retreat place. And it felt good to be respectful of the nervous systems of those who might want to come along to this Retreat.
The cost of attending this Retreat is the same regardless of whether it's paid in full upfront or spread over several months. This meant that I was not rewarding those with easier access to money and penalising those who would need to save or make arrangements that took time.
The method of payment I opted for was bank transfer. This meant that I wasn't encouraging anyone to accumulate potentially problematic debt on their credit card. This was one of the things I was most nervous about. I wondered whether it would deter people from booking. I know how scarily easy it is to press a Buy button and after just a few seconds of sharing credit card details make a big purchase. But it felt aligned with the gentler and calmer marketing approach I was choosing - and it also meant that I didn't need to inflate the prices in order to recoup the platform and card charges that I would have incurred.
And here's how it felt, to me and others...
I'd love to be able to tell you that I floated along on a cloud of ease during the weeks when I was promoting this Retreat. But that wouldn't be true. I felt a mixture of huge excitement and terror. Excitement at the loveliness I had conceived of and pulled together and terror in case I had somehow 'got it wrong' and no-one came. I knew that the resultant dent to my confidence and finances wouldn't be at all easy to absorb.
BUT I felt clean and that was a wonderful experience. I didn't feel sullied by manipulation or shady tactics. I felt a sense of quiet pride. And this may sound soppy but I also felt love. Like I had committed to promoting this Retreat in the most loving way possible - loving to both those who would be able to come and to those who would not. And that felt incredibly good and was worth any tightness around my jaw and shoulders and disturbed sleep whilst I sat with the uncertainty of what the take-up would be.
And the love that came back to me was incredible. From those who booked to come to the Retreat and expressed their utter delight and excitement about the whole thing. But also - and in some ways more powerfully - from those who could not come along. This blew me away and moved me to tears on several occasions. The voice notes and emails I received from women who could not afford it or who could not justify the travel or who already had commitments on the dates of our Retreat were just SO loving.
It has felt like such a precious and affirming learning experience. To witness what happens when we feel like part of a loving collective and choose to sell from that energy was deeply special.
Of course I can't promise a particular outcome from this approach and I recognise that there was likely a big element of luck and right time, right place, about the way in which these Retreat places were booked up so quickly. But I can tell you that it feels really, really good. And that it's possible to sell our offerings without feeling like we're selling our souls. What a relief and what a joy.
I'll close here with these beautiful words from a Middle Years Monday Member because she expresses so eloquently what I was hoping to embody in the way I promoted this Retreat. I will cherish this email - and the other incredibly kind and generous words I have received in these past few weeks from other women. And I will hold them close next month when I open the Membership doors to invite a new group of women to join our online community - I think that how it feels to me to be promoting my work has been forever changed by this experience.
With much love,
Pip x
“It is such a relief, to be treated like an equal by you, rather than like a prospect. It feels so affirming. And also soothing, quite frankly, in this violent world.
I am not going to come, I absolutely cannot afford it. Strangely, or maybe it is not strange at all but just a consequence of how honestly you made the offer known to us, not using any manipulation tactics, not playing on our emotions, not creating a false need that the retreat would then meet, I don’t feel envious, I am not annoyed at not being able to join what is going to be a wonderful, special, life-affirming moment of sisterhood. I have no doubt that that first retreat is going to be amazing. Yet, probably because you have not highjacked my emotions to sell it to me, I feel nothing but secret joy at the mere fact that it is going to happen and be bloody brilliant, brilliant beyond words.”