Today's blog post is about the separation of emotions from business. Too often, people utilize emotions to make important decisions, and business is one of the worst areas in which this occurs. Business should involve a calm and collected mind, but MLM is different as they tend to focus on the high-energy and fast-paced illogical hard-sell. MLMs specifically focus on the emotions and irrational side of the brain, because the numbers are particularly horrific. In a cursory Google search, one can find income disclosure sheets for a number of MLMs, and they show MLMs have extremely high failure rates and below minimum wage earnings across the vast majority of their population. Therefore, it is important for MLMs to go out of their way to distract from, or ignore these numbers, if they intend to continue to grow.
Emotions can be synonymous with temperature, hence the term emotional thermometer. It is important to regularly check our emotions, and analyze why certain situations evoke a larger or more intense emotional response than others. For example, if there is a particular situation in which I get angry, then I often reflect on that experience and try to understand why I got so "hot headed". This is important because the higher the emotional level, the less likely rational thought will be implemented. It is important to have emotions but they must be balanced. Any emotional extreme can lead to poor decision making, and ultimately can cause a lot of harm.
MLMs utilize psychological techniques to make people as emotional and non-rational as possible. They hold seminars, sometimes as long as an entire weekend, designed to eliminate critical thought by means of high-intensity content. Instead of pitching the "opportunity" as accurately as possible, they utilize "love-bombing", music, lights, anecdotal commentary, and dreams. These mechanisms are designed to obfuscate reality and invert the damning statistics. They do nothing to prepare a potential prospect with training, and they do not reveal the costs of the "business" until a person has been primed by hours of meaningless content. Their ultimate goal is to get a person as "pumped" as possible, because the higher the "pump" the less likely people are to question the motives and information.
Again, if MLMs were as accurate and direct as possible then they would fail, which is why they spend tons of money holding "seminars", "meetings", "trainings", and other unnecessary "functions" to subvert a person's critical faculties. They want someone's emotional thermometer to be as high as possible, because that will lead to a person's inability to dissociate fantasy from reality. Salespersons often focus on building relationships over the quality or content of their goods and services, because that can be more effective when closing the sale. It is important to remember this, because the "opportunity" is actually a big hard-sell to get a prospect to spend their hard earned dollars (or other currency) on the MLM.
One of my favorite expressions is: "If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." (Paul Newman) The same can be said for MLM. If you can't tell why the MLMers care about you so much, especially compared to the way an average person treats you, then you are the perfect sucker they target.
Emotions can be synonymous with temperature, hence the term emotional thermometer. It is important to regularly check our emotions, and analyze why certain situations evoke a larger or more intense emotional response than others. For example, if there is a particular situation in which I get angry, then I often reflect on that experience and try to understand why I got so "hot headed". This is important because the higher the emotional level, the less likely rational thought will be implemented. It is important to have emotions but they must be balanced. Any emotional extreme can lead to poor decision making, and ultimately can cause a lot of harm.
MLMs utilize psychological techniques to make people as emotional and non-rational as possible. They hold seminars, sometimes as long as an entire weekend, designed to eliminate critical thought by means of high-intensity content. Instead of pitching the "opportunity" as accurately as possible, they utilize "love-bombing", music, lights, anecdotal commentary, and dreams. These mechanisms are designed to obfuscate reality and invert the damning statistics. They do nothing to prepare a potential prospect with training, and they do not reveal the costs of the "business" until a person has been primed by hours of meaningless content. Their ultimate goal is to get a person as "pumped" as possible, because the higher the "pump" the less likely people are to question the motives and information.
Again, if MLMs were as accurate and direct as possible then they would fail, which is why they spend tons of money holding "seminars", "meetings", "trainings", and other unnecessary "functions" to subvert a person's critical faculties. They want someone's emotional thermometer to be as high as possible, because that will lead to a person's inability to dissociate fantasy from reality. Salespersons often focus on building relationships over the quality or content of their goods and services, because that can be more effective when closing the sale. It is important to remember this, because the "opportunity" is actually a big hard-sell to get a prospect to spend their hard earned dollars (or other currency) on the MLM.
One of my favorite expressions is: "If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." (Paul Newman) The same can be said for MLM. If you can't tell why the MLMers care about you so much, especially compared to the way an average person treats you, then you are the perfect sucker they target.
