Go To Seminar or Stay Home?
The Mary Kay sales directors and national sales directors will twist your arm to attend all the events….
Prior to joining Mary Kay, you’re told about all the money you’ll make, and how you’ll be able to stay home with your family.
Then you start working, and it’s not happening. You’re not making money. And the little that you were making on some product sales is turned into even less because you’re encouraged to recruit your customers and earn 4% from them instead of 40-50%.
You find yourself gone all the time. Every time you turn around, there is another meeting or event you’re expected to attend. Oh sure, they’re “optional”. But if you don’t attend and bring guests, you’re just a loser. But after a while, conforming to this behavior becomes old.
You want to make money and stay home, just like they told you. So the lies have to get more elaborate in order to convince you to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on events which really do nothing for your business. Events like the Mary Kay seminar in Dallas, TX or Mary Kay Career Conference in a city near you.
Here’s one way to convince you to waste your time and money on these events:
Myth: I just need to stay home and work.
When evaluating the BIG 4 (Seminar, Career Conference, Fall Retreat and Leadership (for directors only). The biggest MYTH OF ALL is: I don’t need to attend I just need to stay home and work.
People who say that need more money or have a lack of money. That is a result not from lack of work but from thoughts about their work. They have had plenty of opportunities to work but their work has not produced results. Everything begins with thoughts.Thoughts then create action and action creates income, not work.
I remember vividly the turning point day in my leadership when I came to this realization. I actually said out loud to my NSD “I know I could do what you do if I knew what you knew.” I understood that day I couldn’t be a NSD until I thought like a NSD. I knew that above all else I needed to attend every thing I could so I could learn to think differently.
Even if the funds came from my family or I had to do without something personally, events took priority over everything else. Staying home, driving the same roads, eating the same foods, listening to the same people, looking at your life through the same eyes does not create more income.
No one in the history of my national area has ever stayed home and made more money. In fact time and time again those who believe this isn’t a MYTH move further and further down scoreboards and provide less and less income to their family. That is a fact not myth.
Myth Busted: Staying home costs your family money.
She’s probably right. Those who stay home don’t get wrapped up in the rah rah of the business and start recruiting and frontloading like crazy.
Visit the
“I couldn’t be an NSD until I thought like an NSD.”
Correct. You have to fully embrace that actually helping people is a lie. Instead of leaning in to “enriching women’s lives,” you know that the whole flopportunity is about enriching YOU, the nsd. Once you think that way, you’ve got a better shot. The math is still not on your side, though, and you still have a very high fail rate due to minor details like the limits of the population of the earth and stuff. But I’m sure you can positive think your way out of that one, too! “Baby girls are being born every day” and all, don’t cha know.
“People who say that need more money or have a lack of money. That is a result not from lack of work but from thoughts about their work. They have had plenty of opportunities to work but their work has not produced results. Everything begins with thoughts.Thoughts then create action and action creates income, not work.”
Translation: “It’s your fault you’re not making money because you THINK wrong!”
“No one in the history of my national area has ever stayed home and made more money.”
Well, sure, because 99+% of people lose money in MLM.
Seminar makes me think of a little kid who’s sad because they don’t have enough Legos to build a house and telling them they need to go to the Legoland and buy enough Legos to build a Death Star. On their bike, with what’s left of their allowance. And the hell with the parents when they say it ain’t happening. POSITIVE THINKING UBER ALLES!!!
Ow, I hyperextended my metaphor again 😣
MANIPULATIVE AF
“I knew that above all else I needed to attend every thing I could so I could learn to think differently.”
Jim Jones would be proud.
Tell me you’re a cult without telling me you’re a cult.
Showing up is critical to success, but analysis is fatal, so DO NOT THINK. Do not think simply do. Do as we say, do what you’re told, do not speak to those who criticize and question the long range results to be expected from what you are being instructed to do.
Do as I say, and Do AS I DO, and do not delve into the ethics of those actions. This is the way to making mk work.
Do not think and do not let the guilt rise to your consciousness once you’ve stomped it deep into the repression files. Repress, repress, repress, suppress, and so on.
SUCCESS IN MARY KAY.
Oh, so it’s someone’s THOUGHTS about their business that makes them not succeed, it couldn’t POSSIBLY be that the MLM model just sucks. Could it?
Do you know how long it took me to uncover this truth for myself? A long time. Two decades. Two decades of thinking something was wrong with me. So much self-inflicted gaslighting. Awful. I hope many people find this site and start thinking and asking questions. For themselves & their families.
We’re having a heatwave here in the northeast – upper 90s at least through the weekend and humid. I’m hot and grumpy just going from my air-conditioned house to my air-conditioned car to my air-conditioned office, and it probably feels like Siberia compared to Dallas in July.
Don’t go to Seminar. Stay home and keep cool.
Looks like I hurt some Dallasite’s feelings 🤣
Yeah, we are supposed to be upper 90s/low 100s for the next couple of days as well. I’ve had to get all my old fans out of storage because there was a run on them in the stores over the week-end.
I always enjoy hearing from those who went to Seminar and quit as soon as they got home, or even quit while they were still in Dallas.
I posted in another thread about quitting AT Seminar. It was truly liberating!
Your story is the best. I’d like to hear more details!!
I came back at the end of the day to read all the fun comments, and after scanning the article again I had a thought: Just how silly is all of this? If you talk to real entrepreneurs or real salespeople, nowhere do they talk about “investing” by buying their own products, or “thinking differently” to get themselves to profitability. Yes, they study the techniques and habits of real business or salespeople…but not at sales conferences!
Sales conferences are not to “learn” how to sell, but to meet with customers, partners and industry players outside your company with lots of networking and hobnobbing opportunities. No one pays out of pocket to meet with folks within their own company….that is just absurd.
The whole MLM conference thing is such a naked money grab. I can’t believe anyone who has ever been in sales or worked a corporate job could see it any other way. But still, there are enough out there to fill those hotel ballrooms in Dallas!
I remember seeing FB photos from local SDs and IBCs on their way to Seminar, some even starting in their bedrooms as they packed. Look what I’m taking!
Photos from the airport food-court where they drank tap water and split a single sandwich. Selfies on the plane, like excited kids on their way to Disney.
Photos from the “over-occupied” hotel rooms, eating from foam carry-out containers while seated on the floor in their PJs.
Back home, photos of their trinkets and ribbons spread out on the bed.
I don’t see those photos these days. Some SDs are now IBCs. The IBCs have quit Mary Kay. And many who are still around simply stopped attending Seminar.
I guess they can’t afford it.
Can you imagine the shock of seeing all those SDs and NSDs sans filters?
I think about the atmosphere in the 60s for female saleswomen, and I want to think that Mary Kay started seminar TRULY to give these rare ducks a place to gather with their own kind, to bond, to share, to truly celebrate emerging into a different world, together. BUT. They have never tracked sales from what I understand, and if that is the case, then there was zero altruism associated with seminar by the original bot, MK Ash. Calculated, cunning and cold. The three Cs of MKash..
If I am wrong, and sales did used to be tracked and celebrated, when did that stop? And if I am wrong – PLEASE LET ME BE WRONG. Let there have been SOME truth to the image, not just cellophane and hair spray.
I was just saying this on a response to the newest post! It couldn’t have started out so cunning… or did it?? Is the narrative they project really that big of a lie?? There weren’t credit cards then. If you needed a loan, you’d have to have your husband (or some male)’s help. What’s the real story??
Ick.
I looked it up because I do that 😀 Credit cards as we know them have been around since the 50s, and single store credit accounts since the 1880s. The store I worked at had been around for a long time, and some of the little old ladies still had charge plates made of metal from the 40s or plastic ones without magnetic stripes from the 50s-60s. They were longer and narrower than modern ones. Issued, of course, to Mrs. Husband Lastname. They were a pain because you couldn’t swipe them and had to handkey them.
Unfortunately, Mary Kay Ash’s only reason for starting any kind of company was to make herself a heap of money and chose the MLM model because the money flows upward, specifically to her. She landed on cosmetics as something appealing to women and nonthreatening to men but the actual merchandise was secondary to making money. From the get go she manipulated people, lied about her past, and played on people’s greed and desire for the limelight to make them compete with each other.
I’m sure that back in the 60s, having parties to socialize and try something new was a bonus, and having her own money that she didn’t have to get from her husband – my mother had to do that and hated hated hated it – would have been appealing. But the only reason she started the company was to make herself a bunch of money.
Lazy Gardens has written some good articles about the REAL Mary Kay on here – that’s where I cribbed most of this from 😉
I’m going to go look for those articles! I’ve seen her extensive list of last names (Mary Kay) and did some digging on that on my own accord – yep, that checks out. Craziness the level of brainwashing they’ll go to to get the pink army to stay in line.