Boss Babes: How MLM's and Alcohol Lure Women In Similar Ways
The Toxic Underbelly of Multi-Level Marketing and How It Relates to Addiction
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Last week a Facebook friend asked me some questions on travelling to Hawaii (I went there over spring break) and I promised to DM her with my tips. She was an acquaintance, a friend of a friend, really. I had only met her IRL once, in fact, but we have been Facebook friends ever since.
You can imagine my cringe, then, when I opened a new DM to her to see our message history. In 2017, I wrote her this, and I quote verbatim: “I love watching your beautiful family grow on FB! I wanted to connect because I've joined (company name redacted) and I'm building a business working part-time for a full-time salary. It will enable me to be home with my kids and do life on my terms. I'm not sure where you are in your career. But if you're looking for a secondary source of revenue, or if you want more time home with your baby, I hope you'll consider joining my team. As a health & wellness coach you could teach others how to live healthier lives with the best nutrition and skincare products in the world. Would you be interested in taking a peek at the business?”
She’d politely declined, in case you’re interested.
My heart races even as I share this, as I still have so much shame over this part of my story. I joined a Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) business around 2010, and I rejoined again in 2016 — hoping to ‘hustle better’ this time around. Both times, I spent far more money than I made and I isolated myself from friends and family in the process.
I convinced myself to send messages like the above to both people I knew well and hardly knew at all because I thought this was how I would succeed, and it was how I was coached to succeed. My upline (the folks above me in the pyramid, and yes, MLM’s are a pyramid) told me to reach out to 30 people a month and with a Facebook contact list of 400, well — I went though contacts quickly.
While I felt extremely ick about these cold messages, even back then, I reminded myself what I’d been coached: “Every no gets me closer to a yes, A no just means ‘not now,’ and this business is for everyone and I’m doing my contacts a favor by sharing it.”
It reached a point where one of my closest friends told me to BACK OFF, and a family member sent me a very stern email that I was making everyone uncomfortable. Even then, it still took me months to finally let go, and I think that was just my ego begging me not to admit to myself and everyone around me that I was wrong.
My drinking had skyrocketed in my later MLM days, not so much because of the business itself but for the very reasons I was drawn to the MLM in the first place: I was lonely and seeking community, I felt unfulfilled both at work and home, I was struggling with mental health and needed something to look forward to or sustain me.
Not so long after the MLM and early into my recovery I connected with Emily Paulson on Instagram. She sent me her book on her recovery, Highlight Real and I read the book cover to cover in one sitting. Our stories were so vastly different and yet so succinctly similar. Motherhood, MLMs, addiction, relationship trauma… each topic she addressed felt like a notifications ping straight to my heart.
Unlike me, however, Emily was extremely successful in her Multi-level Marketing experience. She was a Million Dollar Earner, the top 1% on the pyramid and she was a walking billboard for how to succeed in an MLM. Yet she walked away… She saw her drinking tearing her life apart, she realized her alcohol use distanced her from the increasingly unethical practices she saw first hand behind the closed doors of MLM management and top earners. She realized the lines between what success and fulfillment looked like were blurring more and more each day and she wanted to put her values back in focus.
Eventually Emily founded Sober Mom Squad and we have been best friends and business colleagues ever since. Her new book, Hey Hun: Sales Sisterhood and Supremacy digs into why she walked away from the MLM as well as offers a deep dive into the sick underbelly of the industry (spoiler alert: You will not believe how bad it really is).
Hey Hun is available May 30th, and I asked her to pop on here to answer some pressing questions around recovery, MLM’s and the surprising connection between the two.
Question: Emily, your first book was a memoir on addiction and recovery. Tell us a little bit about your new book and what compelled you to write it?
Writing was very cathartic for me though my recovery process, and so was reading others’ stories. That’s what lead me to write my first book, because I thought if my story could help one person, it would be worth it. When it accomplished that goal, it kept my wheels turning about writing a second book. By that point, I’d become disenchanted by my MLM experience and wanted out. I decided that I needed to tell the story, again, fully out loud, because I knew it would help people. As I started talking to others, I realized I wasn’t alone, and that a book like this was desperately needed!
Question: Can you speak briefly on the lure of MLMs and what makes them so problematic, even dangerous?
They are selling a lie - full stop - but it is packaged in a very pretty way. MLM’s are sold as empowering, when they are actually incredibly disempowering by keeping you stuck in a failing system. They are sold as the key to financial freedom, when in fact, 99.7% of people never make a dime. They are sold as a way to make friends, when you actually isolate yourself from true friendships and become indoctrinated in a cult. They co-opt religion, misinformation, diet culture, misogyny, racism, and so many other problematic frameworks of white supremacy. They prey on the cultural epidemic of isolation, and on the fact that women’s unpaid labor upholds our capitalistic system, while relying on meritocracy so you blame yourself when you fail.
Question: Alcohol and MLMs seem to go together. Every party, every trip is fueled by alcohol. Are problem drinkers simply drawn to MLMs or do MLM’s incentivize problematic drinking?
I would say both. If you’re a person (like I was) who was already escaping with wine, then it’s a perfect way to hide a drinking problem. If you are someone who is looking to remedy loneliness or isolation or overwhelm, wine is offered as a band aid for what ails you. MLMs are also offered as a way to remedy these pain points. An MLM creates a duty to host parties and events, which generally call for wine. It’s a double edged sword.
Question: You and I have talked in the past about people with strong, addictive or driven personality types who are drawn to similar things like alcohol, MLM's or even extreme fitness activities. What are the red flags we should be looking out for and how do we have these conversations with people who are neck deep in something that feels toxic?
Ultimately it comes down to asking yourself, “what am I trying to fix with this?” If I’m reaching for the wine because I’m stressed out, perhaps it’s time to look at the sources of my stress. If I’m looking to join an MLM because I’m not feeling productive or purposeful, it’s worth looking at WHY I don’t feel good enough on my own, and why I feel the need to add more to my (very full) plate. Asking for the “why” behind the behavior (excessive shopping/exercise/drinking/joining an MLM/so many things to add here) will hopefully lead to more critical thinking, and thus, more healthy and productive methods of remedying the actual need.
Thank you so much to Emily for taking the time to talk to me before her book comes out. The book is available for pre-order now and pre-ordering is a huge factor in an author’s success, so please pre-order her book today! Anyone who pre-orders by May 29 receives some free goodies too.
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