Self-Development Guru Trap
Making you feel like crap, so you just keep on buying life-changing programmes.
I’m lately circulating around the growth, self-development, and brain space – to break a bit the focus from the usual skill set related to the technology and analysis.
And what I’m seeing is absolutely stunning.
It seems that, till now, I circulated in other realms of the Internet, so I didn’t know that there is a “thing” with all the Guru-culture, and, gosh, it’s crazy.
So, today, I want to have a take on the manipulation tactics that are designed and delivered in a way to cause the feeling of lack and inability to handle reality without the fantastic product (or training, meditations, or affirmation programme) that they are trying to sell for a sick price.
I don’t know what your algorithm feeds you currently, but there are plenty of people who are struggling with their life for many reasons. Loss, relationship issues, employment problems, feeling stuck in life, or going through a bumpy change…
And I can tell you what their social media wall tends to look like.
Depending on the gender and type of struggle, they can be served:
a man next to a plane or showing off his sports cars in a fancy mansion, in some high-end location – regularly motivating his audience to buy his programme to get rich
a good-looking, smart-dressed man in a nice surrounding – typically selling a programme on how to treat women and other people like crap to feel powerful in life
a woman in a nice car – promoting a course on how to attract rich men and how to not settle in mediocracy
a woman in a bath full of money, or with expensive purses, dressed in full-blown luxury brands – selling affirmation recordings to attract the wealth her target audience has always deserved
or tons of other similar scenarios with fake money and rented stuff, in locations they visited low cost for a day to film the scenes
You know the type, and you know the feeling.
Even if you're grounded and understand the manipulation, it does sting and moves some string in the back of your head which is pre-designed by some old imprinted belief.
Many of us feel immune, we can work that feeling off, but it’s not designed for the majority that are handling their life daily. It’s designed for the ones that are the most vulnerable. The people who, at that moment, struggle the most.
The goal is to make them feel even worse and then exploit, until there is nothing more left.
Because people who actually achieve success with the training or programme will stop paying. And they are being designed to pay, more and more, for a dream to come true.
One day, in Neverland.
We can all be at that point at the same stage of our lives, no one is safe. So, it’s key to understand how the trap is designed because acknowledging you're being manipulated is the first step for protecting yourself.
Let’s go down the road of the playbook.
Upward Social Comparison
Before the sale, The Guru needs to build the feeling of lack. Most of them use the basic social comparison – success.
It has to scream ✨rich and luxurious✨.
If the gap won’t be big enough, the receiver won’t feel the distance that needs to be there to create the image of deficiency.
That image launches the emotion of jealousy and a sense of inferiority. And the emotion is key – it can even be hate speech or discussion, whatever is painful enough to push into the sales page.
Festinger’s Theory of Social Comparisons refers to our tendency to evaluate our value basing on comparison with others.
If we compare ourselves to someone more successful, our well-being drops drastically.
And that is a designed feeling of feeling worse, even if, objectively, you're well-off, but not when The Guru sets the benchmark.
Studies show that people are more inclined to spend on conspicuous consumption.
So, buying a digital product that promises to close the gap between the current and the desired state is easier to explain to oneself that. Suddenly, it makes sense to throw out $5,000 if the product creates a belief in a 1000x return on that investment.
Victim Blaming
This is the absolute key to include in the picture in order to keep people in the trap.
The Guru will always claim the programme is never the reason for failure.
If it fails it’s because of the person and a subset of the most common reasons, whichever preferred:
being lazy
not using the methods correctly
having bad vibrations
not spending enough time on implementation
being a spoiled brat and expecting results instantly, below two years’ time, like everybody knows you should hustle for at least a decade to achieve a living wage, duh
not affirming your success correctly, whatever it means to do it correct
any other gaslighting you can think of to move the blame from The Guru to the poor person trying to change their life
The Social Proof
Another technique used widely, not only for toxic sales, but, probably, any sales currently.
If one person can convince you that something worked for someone already, and they’ve achieved the money and success, the brain considers it to be achievable for anyone.
This can be delivered as other participants’ comments on a landing page, or recordings of happy clients sharing their experiences.
The Guru takes it to the next level by surrounding themselves with fake millionaires (or whatever goal is being sold) who they claim their system created. So, there we have a bunch of people driving around in rented Lamborghinis, filming in Airbnb houses, and claiming this all came from the system you are just about to buy.
The thing is that our brain loves simplification.
We see wealthy, confident people saying that something works, using pseudo-science talk.
For the brain, that’s enough to become a believer.
Another thing is showing vulnerability to make their story more comparable and present themselves as a normal person who made it.
It can be shared as a specific trait that makes their life difficult and puts challenges on their achievements, or a heartwarming story from their childhood that makes you want to hug them. It makes them more likeable and more relatable.
Only the story is usually fabricated to present a very well-selected perspective that will resonate with potential clients. And when it does, they drop the price.
Considering all they went through, it does not sound so painful to pay a couple of thousands to support their journey, and, at the same time, solve the own problems.
Time Pressure & Wasted Resources
Typical sales methods.
You probably came across tons of: “Sign for a newsletter to get a free e-book 📚”.
Those usually sound like a great deal, but they do have a certain goal.
They create a thread of engagement that triggers the need to stay consistent. This then leads to making next steps, typically more bold (and expensive) in order to prevent cognitive dissonance.
The same goes with creating the feeling of scarcity:
Limited offer!
Only today 200% off!
Just 3 seats left for the next group session!
Guru triggers the fear of loss through artificial deprivation.
The pain of missing an opportunity stings twice as much.
People are more motivated by the prospect of losing something than by gaining something of equal value. The emotional arousal created in this way affects rational thinking.
And when an investment is already made, the sunk cost mechanism kicks in.
We feel we have invested too much to back out now, even if the offer turns out to be poor.
To prove to yourself that you weren’t foolish in the first instance, you buy the next step of the training. By this, you're proving yourself that you made the right decision all along, to protect your ego.
Brainwashing
The worst part of the mechanism – when the tie is already in place, we start to build an emotional bond with the group.
This can be achieved by isolation and building group identity.
This comes in different forms:
several days training sessions in an external location where the group is physically disconnected from the “outside”
mastermind meetings over-feeding the vision and mission
closed Discord (or other platform) groups
large conference events* with star guests that are other Gurus to embody a certain status of the gala
* Note that those masterminds, trainings, and conferences are often separately charged.
This builds feelings of being a part of something big and purposeful.
If you have some thoughts comparing this to a sect, you're not entirely wrong. This is a similar mechanism.
The goal is to isolate from “THEM”, so you can focus on the people who really understand you and want to help you to achieve – “US”.
Because “THEY” don’t understand, don’t want to help, want you to fail.
“WE” are your only friends and support group you have.
The more isolation, the harder it is to apply any external point of reference that could help with objective assessment of the situation.
This then leads to the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance.
In this state, if the entire group accepts even the most absurd situations and orders, this is taken as an assurance that this must be the correct way to act or thing to do.
After rejecting any external validation, it is hard to regulate your point of reference.
And even if something is off, at this state, the only ones you can talk to are other people in the same group undergoing the same brainwashing mechanisms.
One of the plain facts to keep in mind when coming across all described mechanisms: Guru’s make money from selling the methods, not implementing them. They are rich because you pay them, not because they used affirmation or became investment experts.
There’s even an urban legend.
A guy organized an online meetup “How to make $1,000,000 in 10 minutes”.
The event had a limited number of tickets and the cost was $1,000. Each person with the ticket dialled in for the webinar to see that it hosts 1000 people and The Guru.
The organizer appeared on the screen and said: “This is how you earn a million dollars” and left the meeting room.
This is exactly how this works.
The worst thing is that there are people who sell genuine knowledge and skills needed to build a career or improve life aspects. And it became so hard to differentiate between a real value and garbage, as they are usually packed with the same marketing methods.
Rule of thumb, question anything you see online.
Make every investment a wise choice by applying pre-buying investigation. It often doesn’t make much time to find negative comments and unbiased opinions.
And if you got yourself on the other side of the bridge already, don’t be afraid to seek help and cut ties entirely. You are not alone in the process, never.
Even if The Guru makes you believe in another narrative.