Influence: A Great and Delicate Power
Gather round one and all…
Today, I wish to tell you a story of one of the great and delicate powers that exist in our world.
For it is these powers that often contain the most misuse and abuse.
Many of you are familiar with said powers, as you have chosen to dedicate your life to the exploration, purification, and advancement of them.
Powers like…
…sex, the body, the feminine, the masculine
…money, media, influence, fame
…parenting, birthing, ancestry, lineage, land
As I've moved through endless assignments with these great and delicate powers… or, simply —
with the exploration of power itself
I've discovered that to move from having knowledge of the power into consciously stewarding it; there must be a walk through the valley of shadows.
You wish to be a steward of me? You wish to restore me?
Let me show you what has happened to me.
Come with me into the wise wound — so that you know exactly what and how to transform…
Today, the power we will explore is…
influence
Or, modern-day marketing and selling
One of the deeper reasons why many have difficulty engaging in marketing and selling from felt embodiment, shimmering coherence, and utter sincerity is because…No matter how much of the “selling is soulful and marketing is a spiritual service" ideas we intake…
These ideas do not truly support us in transforming the incredible pain that lives within the energy of influence that imbues most modern-day businesses.
The profound harm that, in some way, lives inside all of us.
We have all paid and are continuing to pay for these significant harms.
Because to slap "selling is a spiritual service" on top of the stranglehold these realities have on the collective psyche is like putting a bandaid on a wound so deep it requires stitches and calling it a day.
The year was 2014
My days were spent in college, learning public relations and communication theories. My nights were spent exploring consciousness through psychedelics. My learnings in both classrooms were melding together.
The class in which we learned the origin story of public relations burned into my brain.
PR was brought to life by understanding that people could be manipulated using proven psychological techniques blended with communication strategies. Edward Bernays, deemed the Father of Public Relations, said, “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an essential element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
We learned about the first massively 'successful' PR campaign in class. The campaign of renaming cigarettes 'torches of freedom' and turning them into a symbol of female power and equality.
"Bernays hired women to march while smoking their "torches of freedom" in the Easter Sunday Parade of 31 March 1929, which was a significant moment for fighting social barriers for women smokers."
I was hit by the weight of awareness upon learning this.
The powers of PR had been used to dupe an entire generation of women into smoking.
I knew…
this was a great and delicate power.
THE YEAR WAS 2015
I was doing 2 different PR and marketing internships.
One was for a luxury PR firm in downtown San Diego, and the other was providing marketing services to a non-profit running a community center and garden in an impoverished part of the city.
The boutique firm was akin to being thrown into some sort of fun-house sorority, where all the women were in intense competition with each other in every area, from their looks to their professional success.
I was assigned tasks that ranged from spending hours writing fake reviews on their client's products' websites to calling their 'connections' to make promotional deals with them. Deals were driven entirely by money and recognition, with no morsel of attention paid to whether either party believed in the product, the company, or the ethos.
The firm was profitable and growing. Yet, I discovered that most women working there were secretly plotting their way to higher-paying jobs at other companies.
I would always leave with a migraine.
Meanwhile, at the non-profit internship, I spent my days working with the volunteer garden manager, excitedly helping her set up the first community service agriculture program in which the area was given access to very inexpensive weekly boxes of garden-grown food.
While there, I built the CSA program into their website so people could place their orders and pay online, wrote various marketing emails, and reached out to local media outlets to spread the word about the CSA.
As a result, I rapidly single-handedly garnered a fair amount of attention towards what we were doing, and with that came donations, volunteers, and more of the like.
I fell so in love with the garden, the community, and what we had created there that even when my time ended, I continued spending as much time there as possible.
During my time there, I watched over half the small staff be let go due purely to an inability to pay them.
These polarizing experiences were vital for me.
I had just used the tremendous and delicate power that is influence to amplify aims in service to wounding and in service to the whole.
The year was 2016
Taking everything I had learned thus far, I drew a line in the sand. "If I'm going to work in this field, I will only do it for a company whose mission I believe in."
I got a marketing job at a company that was profoundly contributing to the expansion of consciousness by creating events that introduced people to the power of art, permaculture, healing, ancestral skills, and so much more.
I had been deeply impacted by the world they were co-creating and wanted to play a part.
I very quickly discovered that all that glitters is not gold.
Though this company was producing incredible experiences, the people on the inside were overworked, miserable, and pummeled by the illusion of form first.
The stresses of a growing company imprisoned them from reaping the benefits of what they were intending to create.
These experiences shaped me.
They demanded that I understand the forces driving a zero-sum business game where few win and most lose. They unveiled to me how rapidly the powers of success, recognition, and the like can consume those unprepared to steward them. They crystallized ideals that lived in my consciousness as vital north stars.
They initiated me into seeing where I was, in ways, no different from the energies I had bothered.
They asked me to enter a personal and transpersonal underworld of shame, pain, and scarcity. An underworld that, when left unvisited, made it all too easy to practice business in service to the wounded self and the wounded world.
I don't know the great and delicate powers of influence (marketing and selling).
I am an initiate of them.
They led and continue to guide me on an excruciating journey of integration and liberation, comedically popping me into the world of owning my own company. A world where, every day, I get to see what I'm truly made of. Where the wisdom from the exploration of power can bear fruit.
I know my journey is not by coincidence.
I know it's no mistake that this blog post will reach thousands of people with great commitments to life-giving success, business as a sacred ecosystem, and marketing as medicine.
In service to Devoted Ones making peace with selling influence, I wove everything from this exploration into my program on creation, selling, and marketing – Reveal.
Like with all great and delicate powers, if we want to emanate coherence, we must go deeper than spiritual axioms, like selling is just a spiritual service. We must breathe life into the bitter parts of these personal and transpersonal fields that the spiritual arena tends to leave untouched so that we may be granted access to wielding the influence that creates worlds.
I don't want to teach you how to sell.
i want you to become a steward of influence
The influence that needs no explanation, fancy trappings, or convincing.
The influence that carries the energy of there's nothing to market when the offering is real…
…so, marketing can become the generous and sincere art of amplifying that which is available to feel.
. . .
