Selling is NOT Serving – Ep. 004

Selling Is Not Serving – Ep. 004

Ever heard the phrase “Selling is Serving” and it just didn’t resonate? In this episode, Ashley digs into the unconventional thoughts around why this phrase is causing more harm than good by evoking subconscious responses based on individual experiences and programming.

Key Learnings:

• The power of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) in marketing and sales.
• Words and phrases can have different meanings based on individual experiences and subconscious programming.
• Changing the meaning of words can lead to shifts in beliefs and behaviors.
• Authentic messaging is crucial for effective marketing.
• Realigning with phrases that resonate personally can enhance communication and connection.
• Understand the impact of subconscious beliefs on marketing and sales.
• Redefine phrases that may not align with your authentic messaging.
• Implement NLP techniques to create more effective and resonant communication.
• Recognize the importance of authenticity in marketing strategies.
• Enhance your ability to connect with your audience through mindful language use

TRANSCRIPT

Hello everyone. I had absolutely no plans to record a podcast today, but this was so prevalent on my mind that I said, I need to go record this because someone really, truly needs to hear it.

This topic that I’m gonna talk about, I’m gonna share kind of my personal story, and I know it’s gonna resonate with someone like Intuition was screaming at me, go record this.

Someone needs to hear it. So what I wanna talk about today is this popular phrase that a lot of people are taught in marketing and in sales, that to be dead honest with you, never really resonated with. And this is the power of nlp. NLP is neurolinguistics programming. If you’re not sure what that is, it’s basically how our subconscious brain processes language to then be able to create our emotions and then our emotions create our actions, and then actions fuel, our results, right?

So I love going on an NLP level because, You will notice that a lot of words actually are very subjective. They’re not meaning to be, but the way that our brains interpret that was weird. Interpret words or sounds, or even smells right? Let’s see, for example, smell when made. Okay. For this, I’ll give a great example.

Skunk. The smell skunk will always remind me of my childhood because I lived in the middle of nowhere and we had to drive on back roads, and the smell of skunk was always there. There are just tons of skunks. People would hit the skunks and then the smell would be there forever. And so when I smell the smell skunk, I immediately am taken back to my childhood.

I’m immediately taken back to playing in the front yard and smelling the smell. And I actually, random fact actually like the smell of skunk, because in my brain it, it does remind me of a time where I was outside playing in the.

So a lot of the times there are words as well that our subconscious brain will immediately attach to things. And even though it is a good meaning word or phrase or something, our brains won’t evaluate it that way. And then because we are a herd mentality, because we are people who desire to be part of a community, a part of a tribe, that is just our human nature.

When other people. Enjoy. Or they say this phrase and they, it feels really good to them. We’ll subconsciously push our intuition down, even though it’s screaming Hey, this doesn’t resonate. It doesn’t align. We’ll immediately ignore it because we don’t wanna be exiled from the tribe. So this is that herd mentality, if you’ve ever heard about that, And they’ve done so many studies on this.

It’s fascinating. I remember even being in a, watching a study one time where they had 15 people in the room and there was one person in the room that didn’t know what was going on, but everyone else, the other 14 did. And so basically they, this guy, they had all these different sticks on the table.

Yeah, I would just call them sticks and the guy. Everyone, Hey, point out the longest stick. And you, it was so obvious, which stick was the longest. However, they had all 14 people go first and they basically picked out the one that was not the longest. And so then it gets to the 15 person and he’s kinda like, what’s going on?

Guess what? He picked the one, the same one they did. Even though he knew it wasn’t the longest. It’s because it is this innate feeling of we don’t wanna be separated from the. It’s so important, especially when it comes to sales and marketing, because you are dealing with people’s subconscious brain and how they interpret it, and 95% of all of our decisions are made from the subconscious brain.

And what are you doing as an entrepreneur trying to sell something? You’re trying to get someone to make a decision. You want that decision to be yes to you and your offer. However, sometimes they might not be a great fit for it. So the best decision is a no. But I actually tell my clients the only thing that you’re trying to do is to get someone to make a decision that is best for them.

Take your ego out of it. It doesn’t matter if it’s best for you, it’s best for them. If you know they’re not a good fit for your offer, you don’t want them to say yes to your offer. If you have to convince ’em to it, you’re gonna have to convince them through it, and that’s not worth it, I promise you. 100%.

Okay, I’m going on a tangent anyways, just wanted to give you a little background as to. Why sometimes words might not resonate with you and how, if it doesn’t resonate with you, but it resonates with everyone else around you, pay attention to that because you will intentionally block, you will intentionally block the things that are for you because you’re of following this herd mentality.

And so one of those phrases for me personally was the phrase selling is serving. Oh, and I know you’ve heard it and I know that you’ve probably said it too. You’ve probably repeated it. And to be honest, I used to preach this too. Because her mentality, right?

And I evaluated that. That actually doesn’t feel good to me. It doesn’t create this emotion or this drive to go out there and really quote unquote serve. And Took my NLP brain, right? I have a certification in this. So I did this on myself. What does this mean? Why is this not feeling aligned with me?

Why does it feel off? And here’s what I discovered, and I’m sharing this because I know someone listening to this will totally resonate. So the reason why the term. Serving or selling is serving does not resonate with me is because growing up I was always one told you need to have a servant’s heart. And two, I was around parents who were very, Un had very unregulated emotions.

There were lots of screaming. There was lots of tantrums. There was lots of yelling. There was lots of hitting, there was so much chaos around me. And so as a child, I learned that I had to serve my mom, mostly my dad too sometimes, but I had to serve my parents in order for them to not punish me in order for it to stay peaceful and quiet.

So I, I basically had to do things for. And so to me, serving meant doing, cause in my mind I thought of it as a waitress, a server. You are literally doing things for people. And so in my mind, the term serve correlated to having to diminish what I wanted and diminish who I am so that I could keep the peace.

And so I was never taught how to serve and I’m doing air quotes. I was never taught how to serve from a place of. Not being manipulation or not being avoidance of a consequence of getting hit or punished so deep. I know however, I realized that over time, even it started with, my parents and then it started with friends, right?

In the friends group. I am a very bold, you know, I have been at my core. I’m a very bold tell it like it is type of person. I am, apparently I have an Aquarius moon, I have Aquarius North node in astrology. And so what I’ve looked up on that is that I am the humanitarian, but the way that humanitarians I actually listened to a TikTok the other day and she So, well, I don’t remember what her name was, but she was talking about Aquarius being the humanitarians and how people are shocked at that because we don’t actually like people.

And I laughed because I was like,, oh my God, I like people frustrate me beyond measure because I’m over here like, dude, you have one life to live. Why are you wasting it on all this crap? And I waste my life sometimes too, right? It’s not just me, but. People frustrate me, but I want so so badly for them to be successful and reach their highest potential.

But they frustrate me. It’s such a love, hate relationship with people. And so she was saying that we’re the humanitarians because. We’ve realized that being kind and being nice actually doesn’t get people to change. It’s that sometimes we have to look at things objectively and be like,, this is the best for everyone,

And because it’s the best for everyone, we are willing to play the victim, we’re willing to ruffle the feathers, we’re willing to shock people and create tension. I also have the right angle cross of tension in my human design. So I’m literally here to create tension for change, and it was , Mind blowing, right?

But as a child, and as I, and as younger, I stuffed that down. I stuffed it down because I wanted to be in a servant’s heart and I didn’t grow up a Christian. I didn’t become a Christian until college, and even when I say that I’m a Christian today, I have been going on this very long kind of spiritual journey the past couple of years and really dissecting the Bible.

This is a whole different conversation, but I just wanted ask you guys to know that when I say I’m a Christian, it’s not I’m not the Bible thumper. I think a lot of things in the Bible have been changed. Historically it has, if you go and you look up the history as well as a lot of books have been removed from the Bible.

And I have, I’m, I said, I’m also a one three in human design. So I study detail very well. I’m the scientist as well as the what’s it, the experi, not the experimenter to the investigator. The investigator. So the one is the investigator line. So I tend to go way deep, and when I am what, when I have a A fixation on something when I want to learn something, I go so deep into the rabbit hole to where I am able I’m gonna toot my horn here for a second.

I am able to talk to people who have been experts in their field about this particular thing, and I’ve maybe studied it for two months. I’m able to have conversations with them where they’re like,, damn, you know your stuff? I’m like,, yeah, it’s just because I’ve spent hours and hours studying this, and I go deep.

I don’t love surface level. I am the most I, I don’t care about surface level conversations. Don’t ask me how the weather is unless you wanna learn how the weather was created by the clouds. Okay? So I don’t ask me, right? But anyways, all that to say when I became a Christian is one phrase that, that we’re told all the time is have a servant’s heart.

Have a servant’s heart, have a servant’s heart, and. That even confused me as well, because serving servant’s heart. So in my mind I thought, it just confirmed the narrative of that I have to put myself, I have to diminish myself and other to serve for others. So there you, that’s my perception of it.

And maybe that resonates with you and that’s great. If it resonates with you. I hope this is very helpful for you. But even if that doesn’t resonate with you, I want you to think of something else. Think of another phrase or think of words that don’t actually resonate with you. I actually will give you another example because this is something that one of our clients came with and she just had this horrible connotation with the word rest.

So she has an autoimmune. And so she actually is an autoimmune coach. She does incredible things, but she just kept saying I just really wanna rest. I really wanna rest. And she just had this desire to quote unquote rest.

However, she had such a negative. Connotation to the word rest. I asked her, how would you explain I actually had her do this exercise. You can do this exercise too. It’s very fascinating. I had her say, rest is dot, dot, dot. And I had her write down everything that came to her mind and the things that came to her mind were very negative.

It was, rest is unproductive, it’s lazy. It’s not reaching my potential. It’s. What else did she say? She just basically a lot of negative things that she said around the word rest, and I was like,, oh well, no wonder you, you aren’t actually resting because you’re literally shaming yourself when you have the opportunity to rest.

Of course it doesn’t feel good to you, but she really truly had this desire to just stop working all the time, stop hustling. She really, truly wanted to have this deep rest. Basically what we did is we had to shift the narrative and the meaning of the word rest in her head by either eliminating it completely or changing the definition of rest or replacing it with something else.

And so this is a whole NLP trick. It’s called Chains of Meaning and it might not be if you are another NLP or you’re probably like,, that’s not how we use it. It’s how I use it. I’ve come up with my own process, but it is really fascinating, and it’s incredible. It’s such an incredible thing to do.

I’ll get into her, I’ll come back to her and I’ll show you, share you exactly what we did for her. But I wanna keep going with the selling a serving thing. So basically when it came to now marketing and selling, I realized that. I kept trying to repeat to myself, selling is just survey. But what happened was I would show up and I would serve with an agenda because I’m like,, no, I’m gonna be doing all these things for you and you need to do something else for me.

So it was still coming to serving from a place of ego and manipulation. And I don’t even wanna say it was ego, it was just my programming as a child of that’s how I kept myself safe was I was showing up and I was. Others needs. I was serving their emotions. I was keeping quiet in the corner and not being myself so that I could keep the peace so that I didn’t get yelled at, so that I didn’t get spanked or hit

right. And then as well as like in friendships with my friends, I would be the one that would diminish herself or do what everybody else was doing, even though I didn’t wanna do it because I wanted to keep the peace. I wanted to belong. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t being a burden to somebody else.

And Think about all of that programming and then coming in to try and sell this amazing offer that I had and I was trying to sell myself that serving and marketing was, or of selling Ander, oh my god. Selling and marketing was just serving. Of course that didn’t feel good to me. Of course, when I showed up to sell, it was coming from a place of success entitlement as I said on a previous podcast episode of this I’m doing something for you, so you need to do something for me, right?

Or this I am serving for you. I’m doing things for you. I’m sharing all this information. Why aren’t you paying attention to me? Or why aren’t you applauding me for, all this incredible knowledge. So it was all of these programming, all of these subconscious beliefs coming up with this phrase, and it took me a while to figure this out.

And. What I kept doing and what I see a lot of other people doing is I kept trying to change the fact that I had these, this almost resentment feeling.

I kept trying to change the resentment, but I wasn’t changing the root that caused the resentment, right? If you understand the model, Your thoughts. Create your feelings. Your feelings. Create your actions. Your actions, create your results. And what I kept trying to do was I kept trying to change the feeling.

I kept trying to, and I was like shaming myself for feeling resentful. I’m like,, oh my God, actually, you’re such a shitty person for thinking this. You really do wanna serve these people you really do wanna help these people, but you are just a terrible person for resenting them and be manipulative about it.

And that just kept shaming myself for it. And so then I would immediately avoid being resentful and I always kept trying to be positive. So then, and trying to be positive, I just didn’t show. Or I would run myself ragged. I just kept, I kept showing up and kept showing up and kept overstepping boundaries.

I had clients who would call me at two freaking clock in the morning flipping out about something. I kid you not, one of my very first clients called me at two o’clock in the morning, cuz she didn’t, she had a change of heart about the email that was supposed to be out at 8:00 AM And so she literally woke up in the middle of the night and called me repeatedly on my cell phone over and over and over and over again.

And again, this was one of my very first clients when I used to give out my phone number. Never, ever again. And I got up at 2:00 AM in the morning when I still had, when I have freaking newborn. Started working on stuff for her. What? Right. So anyways, it was this perpetuation and this is how it showed up.

Because of this thought selling and marketing is serving, I had this horrible connotation around the word serving, or what serving actually meant. And so I wanted to share this with you because again, I had this realization so I used my own little NLP magic and I changed. And instead I decided to believe that marketing and selling is just sharing.

Doesn’t that feel so much better? My entire body, even just talking about this, my body was tensing up. Cuz it was going back to all those horrible . It’s horrible thoughts, right? And all that horrible energy. But what if you believed marketing? Selling was just sharing, ah, that feels so much more or less pressure.

It feels so fun as someone who loves to talk . If you didn’t notice if, for someone who loves to just get excited about things that I love and share it, that took all of the pressure off of me and when I started showing up this way. One. It was a lot easier actually. My messaging and my marketing got a lot clearer because I just wasn’t following some rules, copywriting rules of I have to have a great hook and, all these things.

I even will tell you this too. I actually started really disliking Instagram and nothing against Instagram. I know so many people love it. However, I just realized it wasn’t in alignment with me. I didn’t love doing the , Inspirational reels and taking a lot of time. I love just opening up my phone, having just doing a quick, one minute, two minute, three minute, story or whatever.

I actually love TikTok because I feel like everyone I follow in TikTok is just talking to the phone. They’re not making some really cool transitions and all that stuff that I don’t really have the time nor desire to do. That’s just me personally. I still sometimes scroll on Instagram cuz it is fun, it’s creative, but it’s just not me.

But I, I realized that and I was like,, oh my God, I am showing up in marketing in a way. I don’t even wanna market my energy behind it is so off. And. If I just showed up and shared how I wanted to share, wouldn’t that feel so much better? And it does. It feels so much better. And so I even wanna challenge you, maybe this completely resonated with you and maybe me sharing that marketing and selling is just sharing feels so good for you.

If it doesn’t feel for you, good for you, change it to something else. Maybe marketing and selling is a way for you to be silly.

Doesn’t that feel good? Like Maybe you’re someone who loves to be silly, but you’ve been afraid to be silly because you feel like you have to be professional and you have to share, be like an authority in your space on doing a lot of air quotes, be an authority in your space. But what if you changed it to marketing and selling is just a way for you to express being silly, but still sharing what you wanna share.

Doesn’t that feel so much better? Cause here’s the truth, guys. And this is from a subconscious NLP standpoint. The words that you use, the actual words the actual words with the letters spelled out are a very, very, very, very small percentage of what matters.

I’ll give you a great example. I’m gonna say the same word four times and it’s gonna have completely different meaning, so Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I literally said, yeah, four times. The first one was super excited. The second one was questioning, one was skeptical or three was of skeptical, and then four was Ugh.

Yeah, whatever. Same word. All had different energies behind them. Your brain interpreted them completely differently. If you’re a mom of maybe a teenager, you’re probably like,, oh God, that last one sounded just like my teenager. And then the first one you’re probably , oh, that was my best friend telling me an exciting story, getting excited for me.

Yeah. It’s, your whole brain is gonna interpret it completely differently. And this is why I just even wanna go into my brilliance here for a second. I’m gonna too my own horn. This is why the way that I approach marketing and messaging is so different because you’re coming at it from a subconscious standpoint.

You’re, I call this mind messaging. You’re coming at it from a subconscious standpoint because listen to me, listen to this. This whole example that I just shared, guess what? Your clients also have these examples. Your clients also understand this. So I’m gonna go back to my client earlier that I was talking about with the word rest.

And I’ll finish this example cuz it just ties it up in a ni, nice, neat little bow. She again, did not have the great connotation with the word rest, and so we did some chains of meaning. So I was like,, what if rest. What if rest equaled this? And I gave her some few examples. I don’t really remember what examples they were, but basically I said, what if rest was this?

What if rest was a way for you to calm your mind? Does that feel good to you? Oh yeah, that feels a lot better. What if resting was just calming your mind? Oh, that feels really good. Okay. And I said, how much do you believe it? She was like, mm, maybe 90%. Okay, we need to be a hundred percent. Let’s go okay, so what if calming your mind was just a way to practice peace? Woo. And she immediately was like,, yes. And I was , okay, so let’s completely erase rest out of your vocabulary and you’re gonna replace it with peace or peacefulness, right? And I even wanna add this little tidbit in there too, because a lot of the times your subconscious brain, if it doesn’t believe it, you’re gonna have misalignment. You’re gonna have, you’re gonna have misalignment with the results that you want. And so even like, people will sometimes be like,, I am a restful person.

Or I’m a person who rests. Your brain isn’t gonna believe that. So you can add Arun. I think that’s how you pronou. And act as if you’re actually doing it or actively doing it. So I am practicing. Rest feels a lot better. I am a person who rests, right? The, I am a person who rests, is an identity thing.

And you won’t enca, you won’t encapsulate it because you don’t really truly believe it on a subconscious level. So you could say, I’m a person who’s practicing rest. Does that feel so much easier? And you actually are like,, oh, I can find evidence that I’m practicing rest a lot easier than if I say I am a person who rests Because you won’t 100% believe it.

And that’s what we did with. And so she changed the word rest to peace and it was fascinating the difference in her, she came to the call the following week and she was , I feel so much better. I am experiencing so much peace. I’m finding so much evidence of peace in my life. I woke up and the whole house was quiet and I immediately said to myself , oh, this is peace.

This is peace. And it was just crazy, right? And it was fascinating. And here’s the thing, she as well started talking about that in her audience because guess what? Her audience, her ideal clients also dealt with that same thing. They also had negative connotations to the word rest. They also had.

This belief that they could never fully rest because their body was against them because they had an autoimmune disease. And so it was so crazy because when she started talking about that, potential clients started flocking to her because they were like,, oh my gosh, this totally resonates with me.

I get this. Wow, I’ve never thought of it that way. This makes so much. And this is the power of nlp, and this is the power of speaking to your subconscious mind. This is the very first portion of our match method, which is the mindset piece. We are gonna go through and figure out what are all of your beliefs about yourself.

About your offer, about your marketing, and about your ideal client because, and money, we’re doing an entire training on money because here’s the thing, as entrepreneurs, , what are you here to do? You’re here to make money. If you don’t make money, you don’t have a business. And there’s a lot of thoughts around you blocking making the money that you wanna make, and also too attracting the clients you wanna attract because, If you are, and actually I’ll share this cuz it’s really funny.

One of the things that same client shared about her ideal clients is she was , I don’t wanna work with these ideal clients because they, she’s or the people I’m attracting now I don’t really wanna work with because all they wanna do is hustle. And I just laughed and I’m , oh really?

Because what are you doing right now? ? It’s so funny And so of. When you have these thoughts about your I clients, you have to be there. There’s a whole, I can do an entire podcast on this, but you have a lot of thoughts around your I clients and those are who you’re attracting based off your thoughts.

If you’re thinking , my ideal clients are not capable, guess what? You’re literally gonna build your offer around believing your I clients aren’t capable. Cuz then you’re gonna build a whopper offer and you’re gonna have all this shit in there. You don’t even want to, you don’t even want to deliver.

And then your clients aren’t gonna get results because you’re still going to believe they’re not capable. And when you have those thoughts, how are you gonna show up? If you believe my clients aren’t capable on a subconscious level, how are you gonna show up for them? You’re probably gonna self-sacrifice yourself to do things for them, right?

You’re gonna jump in and create codependent relationships. All of these things. Sorry guys. I’m just , I’m sitting here just thinking to myself , God, it feels so good to be recording podcast episodes again, I just wanna say I’m over here beaming. I’m so excited to record podcast episodes cuz this is the stuff I love to talk about and this is the stuff I love to share.

And so I just wanted to, I just wanted to come on here and talk about that and figuring out what are those limiting beliefs? What are those maybe common phrases? I’ll give you a great another one really quickly. The oh my gosh, I just lost it.

What is the phrase? Oh, work hard or work smarter, not harder. That was also one I used to believe all the time, and it never resonated with me. And then I figured out, I literally asked myself how do I know what’s actually smarter? And what ended up happening is my mind what’s the word?

Translated work smarter, not harder, as a way to just do more of what I was already doing. However, what I was already doing wasn’t working, so therefore I ended up working harder on tasks that weren’t smarter. , do you get what I’m saying?

It was this, I started working harder on tasks that weren’t actually smarter, and so therefore I proved that I was working harder, right?

So this is what I do. I Take these beliefs that you guys have about your offer. About marketing, selling in general, your IDO clients, all of these things. And we clear all this crap out. We shift these things for you and or we help you shift these things.

We don’t do them for you. We help you shift these things through self hypnosis or hypnotherapy sessions we teach you how to do energy clearing. We do energy clearing for you. We have coaching calls every single week to where we can actually walk through the process this.

And this was that one call that I did with that client was a group coaching call, and so many people benefited from that. Everyone was like,, oh my gosh, that totally resonates with me too. I always like,, rest is lazy, blah, blah, blah. And they changed. They just completely broke up with the word rest because they realized.

They just kept fighting against the word rest. They’re trying to believe the word rest. Just get rid of it. This is just changing the circumstance of the word, right? They just get rid of the word. You can either change the definition of the word and view it as a different way, or you can just get rid of the word completely and do a chain of meaning and get to a word that you actually.

Love and then your brain’s on board with it fully. And then when your subconscious brain’s on board, that makes 95% of the decisions, guess what you’re conscious, which is the other 5% is like, oh my God, this is incredible. Let’s take action on this right now.

And it’s so much easier to take action. And, and there’s so many phrases, guys, I can go on. Even though like, you are enough, you are enough. Like Ask myself, how many times do you have to freaking hear you are enough to realize it’s not landing. You’re not actually embodying it.

It’s cuz you don’t subconsciously believe it. There’s too much underlying programming there that says otherwise in your brain that you are not enough. So you can say that mantra and that affirmation all day long, but you’re not truly gonna believe it in your subconscious brain until we actually go through and maybe we even change the definition of enough.

A lot of times I’m like,, how will you know you’re enough? At what point in time what do you have to achieve? And where do you have to be to know that you are officially. Because guess what? You probably said this a year ago and you made it, but you’re still feeling you’re not enough. It’s all of this underlying crap and all these people out here just keep preaching.

You’re enough. And I’m , like, uh. or they keep saying you just need to do the work. You’re not not doing the work because you’re lazy. You’re not lazy. You’re incredibly motivated, right? You’re incredible. Like You guys are motivated people. You take action. But the action doesn’t matter if you’re taking all the wrong action, right?

And a lot of the times, your lack of action is not because you’re not motivated. It’s because you have thoughts under there that are keeping you from taking that action. It’s not that you’re not motivated, right? It’s just, ugh. I can get all into it. But that is it for the day. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

I hope this was really enlightening for you. And we’ll see you on the next one. Bye.