500. Choose What’s True: MLMs, Social Media, and Video Games

As human beings, one of the things that we do naturally, without even thinking about it, is look to our “tribe” to determine how we’re going to think about things, especially new topics or subjects in our lives. We look to the people that we care about. We look to the people that we trust or respect. We look to people whose opinions we care about. And we gather information about how they think about things, and we consider it, and for the most part, go along with what the majority of our tribe believes.«

This is fine for many things in our lives. But there are times when you’re going to want to back up and choose for yourself how you’re gonna think about things because the truth is my friends, it’s all subjective. It’s all up for grabs. And today I want to teach you how to intentionally choose what’s true for you when it’s useful to do so.

This is Episode 500. Choose What’s True: Thoughts On MLMs, Video Games, and Social Media. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

Sometimes, listening to a podcast is enough. But sometimes, you’ll feel inspired to go deeper. If you hear things that speak to you in today’s episode, consider it your invitation to a complimentary coaching workshop.

On this live, interactive Zoom call with me, you’ll get a taste of the power of this work when applied in real life. You can participate, or be a silent observer. But you have to take a step if you want to truly see change in your life… two steps, actually. Head to jodymoore.com/freecoaching and register. Then you just have to show up. Your best life is waiting for you. Will you show up for it? JodyMoore.com/freecoaching. I’ll see you there.

Let’s be honest. You kind of like my voice this way. It’s a little bit cooler, a little bit sexier, a little bit raspier than my normal voice, right? I kind of like my voice a little bit better this way, but also I apologize because obviously I’m getting over a cold. Hopefully I’m not going to do anything too gross into the microphone today, but no promises.

Thank you for being patient. This is Jody Moore. I just don’t sound like myself, but I’m delighted to be here with you today. I sound way worse than I feel, and I’m kind of on a high right now, if I’m being honest.

I gotta give you a little update. I’m on a high because of two things that I just did back to back. First of all, a five-day, almost six-day girls trip to Cancun with seven other incredible women. I mean, I don’t have to expand on that. You already know how amazing that would be, right? But what I do want to say is this. Cancun is beautiful and the weather was amazing and the food and the resort and all of that.

But I could have been at the Holiday Inn Express Salt Lake City with these women and still got the healing and laughter and connection and just whole experience of it because that’s what it’s really about, right? Is the people you’re with, the relationships, the memories. I mean, we had a great time. I won’t go into detail, but anyway, highly recommend that you give yourself the gift of some, whatever’s fun for you. Maybe that’s not fun for you, but for me, being with girlfriends is just amazing.

And especially those of you who are, maybe stay at home parents, or you’re working in a job you don’t love or something, please give yourself breaks and recreation and rest and time to laugh. It’s so healing and so necessary. So I did that and then right after that, I went to a conference of sorts, a seminar and workshop, you might say. I had no idea really what it was gonna be. I went with some people that I trust and respect and they said it was great and they’d been before and so I’m like, all right, let’s go.

And it was incredible. It was a personal development workshop and focused on things like understanding your conscious and subconscious mind and how they work together, and then understanding how to leverage breath work and meditation and visualization and things, and goal setting to create your ideal life and achieve impossible goals. And you know I love all that stuff. So that was phenomenal.

Again, amazing people, great, really well-facilitated event. And I hope you’re doing things like that for yourself too. I hope you are getting some personal development and I hope this podcast is a piece of that for you. But I want you to go deeper as well in whatever you’re doing in terms of your personal development. Your fitness, your mental and emotional fitness matters and it will make all the other stuff easier.

Even if you still have to go home and do a job you hate or your life is really hard in a lot of ways, I’m telling you, it will be exponentially easier if you’re investing in your own development and growth and self-care. There, just saying that as your life coach.

Okay, so today, you might have thought the topic of this was kind of odd, right? Like the choosing what’s true part, not so odd, but to get as specific as MLMs and video games and social media is not really common for me in my podcast titles. But I noticed that when I don’t put those things in, people later on will come back and go, what was the episode where you talked about MLMs again? And I’ll go, I don’t know. I don’t remember. So I’m just trying to make it easier to go back and find if you want to revisit this at any point.

But my objective today is to teach you a process that you can use in your life to make your life better, both today in your current experiences, in your day-to-day emotions, your relationships, whatever work you’re doing in the world, but also to create what you want for tomorrow. And tomorrow meaning anytime in the future, right? 

So I wanna teach you a process. I wanna give you some tools and skills and tell you how I decide what I’m going to think about things, what I’m going to believe is true in the end about certain subjects.

And I’m going to use those topics of MLMs and video games and social media to demonstrate for you because those are three topics where I think that I think a little differently, if not really differently, than most people. And so it’s not to persuade you. It’s still the way I choose to believe, the things I choose to believe about these topics. That’s not to say that they’re for everyone. That’s the last thing I want, actually. I want to teach you how to decide for yourself, to decide on purpose, because there will be many times in your life when it is useful to do so. And most people have no idea that it’s even an option.

And I know people sometimes get riled up with the whole like, this is my truth kind of talk. And I would agree that there are times when we use that as like an excuse to not be our best selves or not live into our values or something, or to judge or mistreat other people, and I’m not talking about that. But the reality is, it is all subjective. We are all deciding what’s true. It’s just you’re either deciding it unconsciously or you can decide it consciously.

And again, much of the time unconsciously deciding it is going to be fine, but on occasion, I want you to have the tools and the know-how to decide it consciously. Are you with me? Okay, good, I’m gonna assume that you’re in your car or on your walk or whatever going, yes, Jody, I’m with you. We’re gonna proceed, okay?

So I think what I’ll do is I’ll give you the three basic steps, And then as we go through these examples, I’ll try to flesh out what I mean by each of them. Hopefully that will work for us here today.

So the first thing I want you to do is to give yourself time to be undecided about things. Okay? Now again, for much of your life, you don’t have to worry about this. You can just decide like, you know, maybe in your family you love country music and other people say they hate country music or you love, you’re a cat person and some people hate cats. Okay?

So you don’t have to, with every single thing, be like, wait, I need to decide, is country music good or bad? It’s okay to just love country music and love cats, even though some people don’t, or hate cats and hate country music, right? It’s okay to just have opinions.

But let’s say I hate cats and then somebody in my family really wants to get a cat and I’m starting to consider that maybe, you know, we should be considerate of people’s opinions. Maybe this is like, maybe my spouse wants a cat and he or she has some reasons or desires and I want to hear them out, I might decide, you know what, I’m going to be undecided because I’ve been walking around hating cats.

That’s not true for me, I like cats. But you know, some of you hate cats. I’ve been on board with this idea that we don’t like cats. We’re dog people, right? And cats are dumb and there’s whatever. All the reasons why people don’t like cats. And I’ve been thinking that’s just true. Cats aren’t as good as dogs. But maybe I should be open and undecided for a minute here about this.

These two go together, obviously. I don’t want you to think that you have to make a decision even in a fast timeline. Sometimes we have like things going on in life that mean we kind of need to make a decision by a certain timeline, but I like to let myself be completely open and undecided for as long as possible. 

God, I don’t really know how I feel about cats in the example I gave, right? I used to think I hated them, but you know, I’m starting to reconsider that maybe I could like cats. I’m going to be open to being wrong about the idea. And again, we don’t have to go down to like whether cats are better than dogs, but we could be wrong about the idea that we hate cats. Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe I’ve just been believing that or I’ve been creating that, but maybe I actually like cats. I don’t know.

This is so useful to be open to being wrong. I was just talking to my health coach today and I told her, you know what? I think I like veggies. I’ve been working with her over a year and she’s laughing at me. She’s like, I remember when we first started working together and you’re like, I’m just not a salad girl. I don’t like, I can’t just like eat a salad for lunch. And I was telling her, I still need more than just salad, if I’m being real. 

I need a piece of bread with it and lots of protein and things, but I kind of think I might be a veggie eater. I think I’m on the lookout for getting more veggies and I’m liking it actually.

So anyway, staying open to being wrong about yourself, about what’s “true”, because we’re talking about subjects here that are highly subjective to people’s opinions, so there is no actual truth, this can be very useful. And I like to stay open as long as possible.

The last thing that we’re going to talk about is, again, all of these overlap a lot, but like remembering that it’s all subjective, that it’s all made up. Like people should drive the car in this way. You should put your hands at 10 and two. Someone made that up. Now, I’m not saying this made up out of thin air. Like there’s such a thing as the scientific method and research and studies, and they’re experts who make recommendations.

And it’s all, I’m not saying it’s like, there’s not good reason for why we made it up. It’s still made up, right? We see examples of this all the time. I think about how when I was a baby, my mom put us to sleep on our stomachs because that’s what they were told was best for babies. That was best for our health and our development and our safety and whatever reason. And then by the time I started having kids, they’re like, don’t put them to sleep on their stomachs, put them to sleep on their backs. That’s the safest way.

Again, not just made up out of thin air. We have studies and data and all of that. I’m not ignoring any of that stuff. I’m just saying it’s still someone’s perspective and in every study, every scientific study or research that anyone could bring us about something, there’s no 100%. There’s always the exception, right? And so that’s why I like to think about what’s true for me.

I’m not out there trying to say this is what’s true for everyone and everyone should follow this with what I’m teaching you here today. I’m saying decide what’s true for you. And it doesn’t matter how many studies we have or how many people feel a certain way. That may or may not serve you to believe that thing is true for you. Do you get what I’m saying? It’s all subjective. It’s all made up and it’s actually all changing and evolving regularly.

It’s so crazy to think about this, right? Like the best way to raise kids, the best way to discipline kids, the best way to parent kids, changes so much. This is why none of us are perfect parents, and this is why we make our grandparents’ mistakes. Because maybe in one generation, the loudest overarching message about parenting is you need to be strict with kids and expect a lot and have consequences when they don’t obey, if you will. 

And somebody inevitably goes too far, and then in the next generation, the message becomes be kind and loving and nurturing and not so hard on kids. And then inevitably, we take it too far, and then in the next generation, the message has to be stop coddling kids, expect more from them, encourage them and even expect them to do hard things.

Like, why does it go back and forth like this, the pendulum swinging? Because it’s all subjective. And so many people are not choosing for themselves, for their specific situation, what’s the best way to think about it? And I don’t want you to be one of those people, I want you to choose for yourself. Okay, are you with me? 

All right, here’s the thing. We’re gonna talk first about social media. So this is what I think is interesting about social media, the overarching story that I hear a lot about social media. And I don’t disagree with this story entirely, but let me just set up the premise. 

When I say, what do you think about social media? If I were to ask the average person today that question, most people would give me some kind of an answer about how it’s really not very good for us. It’s creating a lot of problems, especially with our youth. It’s highly addictive, causes us to compare ourselves to one another in a way that’s not useful. It gives us quick dopamine hits in a way that’s not healthy for our brain. 

Not only bad for our mental health and especially for a young developing mind, but it can be very dangerous, right? For somebody that is susceptible to outside influence that might not be good for them. And at the same time, it’s hard not to get sucked in and find yourself scrolling more than you want to. 

Now, that same person who has kind of that viewpoint on social media would probably also say that there is some good that can come from it, right? And there can be some really useful ways to utilize social media. 

Now, like I said, I don’t actually disagree really with any of that. It’s just not my main story that I go with about social media because here’s the thing, The way some of you found me, a lot of you found me, was through social media. And the way that I get my workout into the world and find more people that want to increase their mental and emotional fitness level and, you know, want to learn from me in some capacity or another in ways that I want to teach and make an influence is through social media.

 And so it feels not good to me to think that social media is terrible and evil and bad and then be on social media trying to promote my business. Not to mention, I like to get on social media every now and then and learn from other people, other experts, develop myself and just see what my friends are up to and see what’s going on in the world. So it feels like such a double standard to me to villainize social media and then turn around and use social media.

And so at one point I decided, what am I gonna think about social media? Now, before I tell you that, I also wanna add, for those of you who are entrepreneurs like me, I got a lot of coaches here that listen, or other kind of service providers, online marketers, if you will. There’s also a big story in that world about the algorithm.

And even in the general public, if soon as I say the algorithm, what do you picture? You picture something positive and good or do you picture something negative? That’s mysterious, like a villain that’s dark and hidden. And it’s always changing, and as soon as we figure it out, then it changes again. Now we have to relearn how to do all this stuff, and it’s just feeding me content, and it knows where I live, and it hears everything I say, and it’s capturing all my personal information and ooh, the evil social media people and machines and AI and all that, right?

So again, back to what I was saying about the fact that social media has been an amazing tool for me both to learn and find help for my own life, but also to go out there and help others. I don’t feel good about villainizing it and then being a hypocrite and turning around and utilizing it.

And so I gave myself a lot of time and I still, I have the way I currently think about it, but I’m still open to being wrong. I have plenty of time to decide how I want to think about social media. And I can change my mind at any time and I’m totally open to being wrong. But again, in the very beginning, I had to be really open to like, maybe I’m wrong about this, about the way I’m thinking about social media.

Again, I remember that it’s all subjective. I can think about it any way that serves me and what I want to think about it. So this is what I think about it currently. I do think that it’s an amazing tool.

I feel so grateful for it as a tool because again, I can get in front of more people and help more people because of social media. And I can do it with very little money. I could even do it with no money. I can do it with ease because the tool is set up. Everything I need to edit my videos, for example, or to put it out there to more people.

Again, just like I can put work out and help people, I can receive help, I can hear from experts at like no cost and very little effort even to learn from the most educated minds and experts in any topic I might want help with. And I can learn from them in quick sound bites. I don’t have to invest necessarily two hours. I can just get a little tip, a little bit of help.

I think of social media as the new yellow pages, right? Those of you who are too young to remember this, we used to have a big phone book with everybody’s phone numbers in it, which is interesting, right? We’re like, social media knows everything about you. I’m like, well, I mean, we used to put all of our numbers in all of our phone numbers in a big book and just send them out to anyone who wanted it. Interesting, but whatever. I’ll talk about that piece in just a minute.

There was a section of the phone book in the back called the yellow pages. And that was where you went if you needed to find, like, let’s say I need a plumber. I would go to the yellow pages of Spokane, Washington, where I was living as a child, and we would look up plumbers in the area. And then we’d have some, you know, options in there.

I wouldn’t have to do that anymore. I can go to social media and look up plumbers in my area and I can see their social media account and then I get a better feel for who these people are. Do I feel like I trust them? Does it seem like they do good work? Do they have proof that they do good work, are other people saying nice things about them? And then we go from there. It’s just a much, much better way to serve one another, if you will.

Originally it started as connection for families and friends, and I think it can serve that purpose too. But my main use of social media is to learn from others and then to try to also serve others through my business. So that’s what I think about that.

Now let’s talk about the whole privacy thing. Again, everybody gets so up in arms about how they know everything. That if I was shopping for something, next thing I know in my social media feed, it’s showing me those things. And my thought is like, why is that bad? I mean, If I’m shopping for a pair of red shoes and suddenly red shoes start showing up on my feet, isn’t that useful? Because I was looking for red shoes and now I’m getting red shoes and thank you because I wanted to buy some red shoes.

And I get it, there are limits to how much of your personal information you want available and to how many people, but this is not new, my friends. Everybody who works in your children’s school district knows your address and your phone number. Everybody who works for your gym or your bank or any number of other things has access to your name, your email, your address, they can find out anything they want to about you. And that’s been the case for a very long time. They can find out a lot, I should say. Not anything, but a lot. And that’s been the case forever.

So again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have some regulations around it. I’m not saying there aren’t boundaries maybe, but I don’t really care if they know what I’m shopping for or they know what I’m struggling with, or they know what I like. I’m like, yeah, please show me more of what I like. I don’t really have anything to hide at this point. I guess if you got something to hide, maybe that’s a bad thing, but that’s a whole ‘nother problem, right?

So whenever people get mad about the algorithm, they’re like, I was just talking about this in my kitchen and now it’s in my feed. I’m like, isn’t that amazing? I love that so much. People look at me funny. Just saying, that’s what I just decided to believe because I stayed open and I realized it’s all subjective and it’s all made up and maybe I’ll change my mind one day, but not today, that’s how I feel about it today. Does that mean I don’t need to teach my kids and keep people safe and be cautious? Of course not. 

So the other thing I think about social media is that just like any other tool, it can be used as a weapon. And so we do need to be cautious. My scissors are a tool, but they can be a weapon. That’s why I need to carry them in the proper way and I need to teach my children how to carry them in the proper way.

And I need to teach my kids more so than like guarding my kids against, I mean, again, not that we don’t talk to them and don’t give them social media until they’re mature enough to be able to handle it. I’m on board with all of that. I’m just saying I would much rather develop in my kids confidence and critical thinking than try to prevent any negative, harmful person from coming in their life, because that’s just not even possible.

I will try, don’t get me wrong. I’m going to try to prevent people from taking advantage of them, but if I’m teaching them confidence and critical thinking and how to come and talk about, to their dad and I, about anything that they feel uncertain about, that’s the best way to protect them against whatever might come, if you will.

Last thing I wanna say about social media is I wanna talk about the algorithm. For those of you who are entrepreneurs, coaches like myself, and you hate the algorithm, you definitely should rethink that, in my opinion. I rethought it long ago. I was on board with everyone being like, the stupid algorithm, you can’t even figure it out. You have to play this game. And then one day I went, wait a second, it doesn’t feel good. It’s not changing the algorithm. It’s not making this whole thing go away.

And what I realized at some point is the algorithm is amazing because you know what it does? It just puts my stuff in front of the people who need it. That’s what it’s trying to do. It’s trying to find the people who want and who want to listen to me or watch my video or hear what I have to say and it’s trying to exclude the people who don’t. And that’s what I want too. We want the same thing, the algorithm and I.

Now the algorithm wants it because they want me to pay money and whatever, it’s a business, okay. I have thoughts about how I feel overall about the people making money off of all this that are not all positive. But I’m just saying in general, the algorithm’s a brilliant thing because before the algorithm, we just had to like put up a billboard and hope that the right person drove by and saw it or take out an ad in a magazine, or a newspaper, or on television, and hope that our people come by and see it.

But with the algorithm, we don’t have to do that anymore. We just make good, engaging content, and we talk to our person, and the algorithm will go and find them. And it rewards high quality work and valuable information, as it should. 

That means rather than try to play the game, I just need to work on getting better. I need to do a better job of helping people. And I need to be more specific about who I help and then the algorithm will go find those people. I love the algorithm so much and I’m glad it changes. You know why it changes? To improve upon what its mission is, which is the same as my mission, go find people who want my help.

So that is how I think about social media. Now, notice what I did to get there is I stayed open, I consider that I could be wrong, and here’s the other thing I forgot to add that’s really important too. I listen to the thoughts of people who are quote unquote successful and how they think about these topics. And I consider the way they’re thinking about it. Doesn’t mean I just blindly follow anyone, but I consider the viewpoints of people who are successful.

Now what is successful? That’s for you to decide, okay? So to me, when it comes to social media as both a consumer, a mother, and also a business owner, I’m looking to people who are similar to me, people who have similar values to mine. 

In other words, they care about honesty, they care about serving people, they care about safety and protection. Also though, people who are succeeding in their businesses and are using social media to do so. Those are the people whose stories I want to listen to and consider, not just the default people necessarily in my life. Some of them have different opinions than me about social media. That’s cool. No problem.

I’m not they don’t have to think about it my way. But it’s okay if I don’t think about it their way because they’re not “succeeding”. They don’t have businesses. They don’t care about that part. They don’t even understand that part. So it’s totally cool for them to think about it that way. But I’m going to think about it in the way that still feels true to me. I’m not talking about trying to trick myself, but I can see the logic behind the way I just described it to you. And it serves me really well to think about it that way because then I don’t have to feel like I’m doing something outside of my value system, outside of my truth.

Social media. All right, let’s talk about video games. And then I wanna talk about MLMs. That’s the one I’m most excited to talk about. So I’m just going to do a quick video game thoughts. You know, as a mom, if you’re a mom or a dad or a parent or grandparent, whatever, you probably like me hear everybody talk about how terrible video games are for kids, which is interesting because we used to hear about video games a lot and now we hear about social media and phones way more, which is interesting. It’s going to add to what I’m going to tell you in just a minute.

But I went through this process of deciding and the reason why I had to decide is because I have kids who like to play video games and I don’t really like being the video game police. And for some of them, I think the video games are their hobby, and even some of them play games online with people, and that’s their kind of one of their forms of social connection. And I didn’t want to just say no video games.

Now you can. Again, I’m not trying to convince you how to think about video games. I’m just telling you why I had to reconsider the idea that video games are terrible and evil and rotting everyone’s brains and no one should play them.

So here’s what I think about video games now. Again, just like with social media, they need limits, they need boundaries. I don’t deny all the research that exists about what it does to your head and your emotions and your mental health and all of that. I’m not denying any of that.

I’m just saying not always, not necessarily, and everyone’s unique and different. And I do think that video games, again, like I said in the beginning, that they get talked about less because now phones are the new villain. They were new for a while, right? The extent to which we had these really complicated games anyway that were really detailed and really appealing to our young people especially was new enough that we villainized it.

But did you know that when baseball first became a thing, all of the adults sat around saying, that is a terrible thing to be doing. Why would you go out in the street with a stick and hit a ball? What a waste of time. Our young people are wasting their time, they’re not being productive, they’re not accomplishing the things that they could accomplish because they’re so busy playing baseball. It sounds so funny now when I say it, right? Because baseball is actually a really fun thing for some people. And has some benefits.

And I do think the same is true of video games. It’s fun for some people and it has some benefits. And does it need some monitoring and some guidelines? Sure, of course. But I’m not gonna villainize it, especially if my kids love it. Because now we’re going to war, and I don’t like going to war with my kids. I wanna at least understand why they love it. I wanna be curious about what they love about it. I want to guide them and teach them and have parameters, but I don’t want to villainize the thing that they love.

And so I’ve shifted how I think about them. And I, again, might change my mind at some point, or I might look back and go, that was wrong. I should have thought about it differently. But for today, that’s what I choose is true.

Okay, let’s talk about MLMs, my favorite one. MLM, multi-level marketing. If you haven’t heard of an MLM, I bet you have, but these are the types of companies where somebody sells something and they make a commission off of it and then they recruit people to sell the product as well and every time the people they recruited sell it, you get a little bit of commission off of what they sold even and so on and so forth. They recruit people on down the chain.

You can make a lot of money in an MLM because of the system of making a little bit of something off the people that you recruit and off of who they recruit, etc. Now, this business model, this is just a business model is all it is, right? Has gotten a pretty bad rap in recent years. And for valid reason.

Most people when you say MLM, by the way, here’s the new thing people do, they don’t say MLM anymore, they say direct sales. Because they know that the word MLM, a lot of people have a negative conversation with it, so they’re like, you know what we’ll do is call it direct sales. That will sound better. When you hear people talk about a direct sales company, they’re talking about an MLM. Same thing, just a different term. Okay?

And so I like to say MLM on purpose because I like to see what comes up for people. And I like to be confident in my own view of it. Because I actually love MLMs. I think they’re amazing. I think it’s a great business model. I don’t think it’s for everyone, and I don’t think every MLM out there is a great company doing great things. I think some of them can be shady and whatever, just like any other business model, just like any other company.

But there’s so many things about MLMs that I love. Now, why did I decide to think that way about it? Well, first of all, 11 years ago, 12 years ago maybe, I decided to start selling a product for an MLM. Why would I do such a thing? What’s the matter with me?

Well, because I found the product and I loved the product and I couldn’t stop talking to everyone about it. Which is typically how it goes with an MLM. They produce some of the best products on the planet because they rely on that in order to succeed. They don’t usually do traditional marketing. 

They rely on everybody in their company to love it enough that they can’t stop talking about it. And that’s why I was years ago with the product that I found was cleaning product and so as you talk about a lot people like I wanna try that. If you have a link to give them and you make a little money off it, that’s a win for everyone, right?

So at any rate, when I decided maybe I’m going to sell this product, I was kind of looking for something to do. I was in between my corporate job and this was right before I started coaching. I had to decide how am I gonna think about MLMs? Because everybody hates them.

Now, let me, again, let me give you the backstory about why most people hate them. Not everybody hates them, I’m just saying some people do. And here’s why. There are some people whose approach to building their MLM is to really hound all their family and friends. Okay? So I’m not talking about like just introducing it and offering it and providing value. I’m all for that. 

I’m talking about the people who just don’t, they won’t take no for an answer. Every time you see them, you know they’re going to talk about it. You’re kind of sick of it. And there’s something that feels a little shady about it.

And the only reason for that, I believe anyway, it’s not because most people are slimy and selfish and they only care about making money off of you. I just don’t happen to believe that about most people. I just think that most people when they get into sales and recruitment, they’re not very good at it yet. They don’t quite know how to do it in the “right way”, which is a way that serves everyone but still is honest and truthful.

And that’s okay, I’ve been that person. I had sales jobs back in the day that I wasn’t good at, and I probably at times was like too soft and didn’t talk about it enough, and at other times I was probably too aggressive and pushy and annoying. And that’s just the reality. Like learning how to sell a product or service or something and learning how to recruit people onto a team is a skill.

So anyway, you get a whole bunch of people into MLMs and you’re going to get some people that aren’t very good at it. And eventually they can become better at it or maybe there are some people who never do. And again, just like in any company, in any business model, most people have good, honest intentions, but there’s a handful that don’t. There’s a handful that are selfish or slimy or greedy or whatever. That’s the reality of any business model. But certainly people chalk it up to MLMs, right, when they hear that.

The next thing is sometimes these companies will kind of over-promise, if you will. This is what I hear people say anyway. I hear people say they over-promise. They tell you that you can make all this money and they show you examples of people who have made all this money. And the reality is it’s really hard to do. I’ve heard this about the coaching industry too, by the way. I’m sure people say this about a lot of industries, but certainly MLMs.

So here’s the truth. I don’t like personally to oversell things. I try really hard not to. Those of you who came to Marketing Bootcamp that I taught yesterday, I begin with like, I try to inspire people about what’s possible because I like to be inspired about what’s possible. 

And then I like to follow it up with the real truth, which is this is going to require a lot of you. It’s gonna require your time, it’s gonna require your effort, may require a financial investment. It’s certainly going to require that you grow and develop yourself. And growth and development is often uncomfortable. It’s filled with also moments of fulfillment and satisfaction, but it also is uncomfortable and challenging.

And so I think most people want to tell the whole story like that. They just, again, are not good at it. And then there are some people maybe who are kind of shady and they oversell it. Again, I think the biggest one is because we’re just so wanting to fit in with the tribe that if I am gonna join an MLM and most people don’t like MLMs, then they’re gonna judge me for that. 

But I decided long ago that people can judge me all day long. And if I’m out there doing what I want to do, which is helping people, making an impact, and creating a life I love, making the kind of money I want to make, then they can judge me all day long. I’m good with it, right? They just don’t understand, okay?

So again, I apply my process. I listen to thoughts of people who are “succeeding,” in a way that I wanna succeed. So listen, if you wanna hear some ideas about how to think about MLMs, listen to people who are succeeding at MLMs and are also what you consider to be good, honest, forthcoming people. 

People who you like being around, people who value their relationships and have balance in their life. People who maybe have a spiritual practice or a personal development practice. People who want to give back and who really care about others. That to most of us is what success is. And there are people like that in any business. And there are also the shady kind. 

Don’t listen to them, but certainly don’t get your story from someone that tried an MLM and failed at it and quit and walked away. Or somebody who’s, this is the thing we get most of our stories about how to think about things from people that are unhappy and grumpy and bitter and upset. 

And I’m not saying we don’t have valid reasons for being unhappy at times. I’m not saying that you should judge those people. I’m just saying they’re not the ones that I decide how I’m going to think about things from. They’re just not. Because if you think about things the way other people think about things, you’re going to get the same results those other people have. 

So make sure that the people you’re listening to have a result that you want. And if they have the opposite result, I would definitely filter out what they’re saying. But if they just don’t have a result in that area at all because they have no experience in it, they’ve never tried it, they’re not the best person either to get your story from. Okay?

So this is what I think about MLMs. I kind of said earlier I love them. I actually have an affiliate link or a link to a product called The Feel Great System because again, I found it a year ago and it changed my life so much. It made it so much easier for me to eat better. It helped me reverse my insulin resistance and it helped me, just like it’s called The Feel Great System, it made me feel great. 

And I’m not gonna go into detail on that today because that’s not the point of this podcast. We’ll put a link in the show notes if you want to learn about that. What I want to tell you is that I took with me the story I already had developed about MLM so I didn’t have to do it this time.

I did it years ago with that other product, but this is what I think. I think it’s one of the best business models out there, and it’s not a perfect business model. It has some shortcomings that I don’t love, but these are the things I love about it. I love that people are incentivized directly through money to help one another. Because we all have this little bit of altruistic gene within us or this human need to help others.

And so I’ve worked in corporate America, I’ve worked in small, tiny little small companies, I’ve had my own company and I’ve worked in MLMs. I have a little bit of experience in all of those kinds of areas, if not a lot. And in every company, there is a component for most people of just wanting to help you out of the goodness of their heart. And that’s great, I love that. But in an MLM, there’s that and the person above you is financially compensated by helping you. And so it’s a win both ways.

If I make more money in my MLM, then the person who’s my coach, who’s guiding me, supporting me, teaching me how to be successful also makes a little bit more money. And I’m so happy. I’m so delighted for that. Right? I think it’s a great business model.

When people are like, oh, well, MLMs, they overpromise. Again, just like in coaching. You know, coaches out there saying, you can make so much money. I’m like, but you can. Actually, like when I worked in corporate, could I make tons of money? Yes, I could technically, But I was at the mercy of many other people. Like, is my boss going to recognize the value of what I’ve been doing enough to give me a raise? And even then, the raise I’m gonna get is probably gonna be like a 5% raise, maybe 10%.

If you’re in a sales job, maybe you’re making commission, maybe you can get you can make more money that way right, but there’s still a limit for me there was anyway in my experience based on the way the company set up based on their regulations and the other way would be to get a promotion, right? As I move up.

So those things for me anyway, and most people took a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of, or at least a little bit of politics. Like, they don’t like you, you’re kind of subject to what they say, right? And then there was a pretty low cap on what was possible unless I’m going to become the CEO one day.

So that’s the other thing people say about MLMs, only the people at the top are making the most money. And I’m like, wait, what company is that not true in? True in every company. I guarantee that at Google, the top level execs are making lots of money and then it gets less and less as you go down the chain to the frontline staff making not that much. That’s how every company is set up.

The difference is that in an MLM, if I’m a “frontline person”, meaning I just joined the company, then I can in very little time, if I’m willing to put in the effort, I’m really willing to learn and grow and go out there and work hard and execute, I can “move up”, make lots of money, and influence a lot of people for good in a pretty short amount of time. It’s up to me. How long it takes is up to me.

And I’m not saying you have to do that. I think it’s great to join a company and make just a little bit extra to help out your family, because you don’t want to put in tons of time and effort. That’s cool too. I’m just saying, it is possible. Just like as a coach, if you own your own business, it is possible. Is it easy? No. Will it require a lot? Absolutely. But it’s doable and you’re not subject to anyone else’s opinion about whether or not they like you, right?

So anyway, the other thing I love about MLMs or direct sales companies, as we say now, is the skills that you learn. And this can be true in a lot of companies too. But I learned a lot of skills in my corporate jobs, in jobs working for other people that I’m really grateful for, that serve me today.

I learned how to sell. I learned how to teach as a corporate trainer. I learned how to present. I learned how to talk with other people. I learned some customer service and things. I learned a little bit about how businesses run. Anyway, I’ve learned a lot of skills, but in a direct sales company, you’re sort of learning it by getting tossed into the pool and you’re either going to sink or swim, right? 

So there’s still, in my experience, and again, I’ve only worked for two companies, but with both of them and from what I hear from other people, there’s usually a lot of trainings available, a lot of videos, a lot of, you know, calls you can come to, conferences you can attend, other people who know how to do this that are excited to teach you how. But you also have your own sort of more or less business in a box where you can go and practice it all and learn it all because the best way to learn it is to get out there and do it.

And one of the things that’s great about an MLM is you’re not selling, “yourself”, you’re selling a product usually. And that makes it easier to learn the skill of selling. When I see coaches come in who want to sell programs, they feel like they’re selling themselves, which you’re not, by the way. You’re selling a transformation for your client. Let’s be clear about that. 

But it feels personal because you’re going to be the one delivering it. You’re going to be the one fulfilling on what they sign up for. Whereas if I’m selling somebody else’s product, then it’s not so personal, which makes it a lot easier to learn the skill of selling.

Not to mention, you don’t have to fulfill on that product. There’s a whole company set up that is usually manufacturing and distributing the product, handling the customer support. It just takes a lot off your plate so you can focus on being an entrepreneur. And learning how to be an entrepreneur is the most valuable skill. Learning how to sell things, learning how to serve people in such a way that they want more help from you is invaluable for anybody, I dare say, to learn. And MLMs are a great way to learn that.

Now, some of the drawbacks are that it isn’t your company. So you have your version of your company within a bigger company, but that bigger company might make changes at some point that you don’t care for. They may change the product.

They may change the comp plan, that happens sometimes in these businesses. So there’s some risk involved. But again, that’s the case in any company I’ve ever worked for. In fact, I used to think working for corporate is the safe way to go. Just go work for a big company and you’ll have a job and you don’t have to worry about running out of money. Jokes on me when I got laid off after 15 years. 

My husband got let go several times from really healthy companies. So anytime you’re working for someone else, they’re the ultimate decision maker. And I’m not saying that to scare you away from getting a job somewhere or whatever. I’m just saying it’s no different with an MLM than any other company in that regard. So you wanna do your due diligence and make sure that you like the values of the company, et cetera.

Okay, like I said, I’m not trying to sell you on MLMs here. I’m trying to use this as an example. Where did I get this viewpoint on MLMs, I wonder? Well, I looked around at people that were succeeding in the world in the way that I wanted to succeed, people that inspired me, people that are happy, generous, kind, wise people that are doing good work in the world, that are helping others, and that are making good money doing it and supporting their families and having good lives and people I respect and look up to, people that are “successful” and winning.

And there’s still tons of people out there who don’t agree with me and it’s cool, I’m cool with it. I love it, in fact. I think it’s great. I think everyone should decide for themselves what they wanna think about it. But if you wanna think differently about any topic in your life, all you have to do is step back and recognize that it’s all subjective. 

And you have to be willing to be wrong about what you’ve been believing. And then you gotta hold space for the time it might take for you to formulate the way you’re gonna think about it now, and even then go into it knowing that you can change your mind at any time. But what is your reason for changing your mind? Do you like your reason? Don’t change your mind because you just feel dumb and you are trying to fit in with the cool kids. Come on, people.

We’re past that, right? Change your mind because it would serve you to change your mind, because it will help you be more of who you wanna be today, and it will help you create what you wanna create in the future. That’s the reason to change your mind. And if other people don’t get it, it’s all right. Just sit back and smile and say, I can totally understand why you would see it that way. And then go home and reinforce believing it however you want to believe it.

If you want help with it, come and sign up for a free public coaching call because that’s what I happen to be very good at doing is helping people choose how they’re going to think about things and what they’re going to believe.

All right. I love you. Thanks for joining me today. Episode 500. What? We should be celebrating, right? I should go get a cake or something. Maybe I will. Get yourself a piece of cake too. I love you. I’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: jodymoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s jodymoore.com/freecoaching.