Flattered into a Bad Investment

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No, this was not a scam. I would recommend my first coach to anyone in her niche. I just did not have a clue how this side of business actually worked in the real world. But I want to be honest about what happened inside me when she said that. I did not evaluate the offer on its merits. I evaluated it on how good it felt to be told I belonged somewhere I had not yet earned my way into. Flattery about my potential quietly replaced an honest assessment of my actual readiness, and I did not notice the substitution happening in real time. It felt, in the moment, like recognition. It was actually a sales technique, effective precisely because it targeted something true about me, my genuine hunger to be taken seriously at a higher level, and used that truth against my better judgment.

I remember the specific conversation where I said yes, sitting on my back porch, phone against my ear, feeling a flush of pride I mistook for clarity. I did not run the numbers first. I did not sit with the decision overnight the way I would have advised any client of mine to do. I said yes in that call, in that moment, riding a wave of validation I had not realized I was so hungry for until someone finally offered it to me directly.

I said yes. I could not really afford it. I did not get nearly what I had hoped out of the experience. And if I am fully honest, I am still paying for that program today, long after the ninety days of value it was supposed to deliver came and went. There is a particular kind of regret that accompanies a debt outliving the thing it purchased, a quiet, recurring reminder every time the payment comes due of a decision made in a moment of flattery rather than discernment.

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Potential and readiness are two very different things, and an invitation into a room does not automatically mean the room was built for where you actually are.

This is not a story about a bad coach. She was not wrong that I had potential. She was simply speaking to my potential as though it were the same thing as my current capacity, and I let the compliment do the work that due diligence should have done instead. I do not think she set out to manipulate me, exactly. I think she had learned, whether consciously or not, that potential-focused language sells more effectively than readiness-focused language, and I was simply the kind of buyer that particular language worked on.

I have thought about that decision often since, particularly the speed of it. Good decisions, in my experience, rarely require that kind of urgency to feel right. The pressure I felt to decide quickly, before the flush of flattery faded, should have been information in itself. I did not read it that way at the time. I read it as excitement. I have learned, since, that excitement and clarity are not always the same feeling, even though they can feel remarkably similar in the moment you are choosing between them.

I share this because I think a lot of capable leaders have a version of this story sitting quietly in their own history, an investment made because someone saw something in them and said so, persuasively, at exactly the moment they were hungry to hear it. Being seen is not the same as being ready. The next time someone tells you that you belong in a room you have not yet built the capacity for, let that be information worth examining, not a decision you make on the spot, however good the recognition feels in that particular moment.

I think about the specific words she used often, because they were not generic. She had clearly listened to me, referenced things I had actually said, built a case that felt personal rather than templated. That specificity is, I now understand, precisely what made the flattery so effective. Generic praise is easy to dismiss. Praise that quotes you back to yourself, accurately, feels like proof of genuine insight rather than what it more often is, a well-practiced sales skill aimed with real precision.

I do not fault her for having that skill. Skilled selling is not inherently dishonest. What I fault myself for, gently now rather than harshly, is not building in the pause that skill deserved before I let it move me toward a $10,000 decision. I have since adopted a simple rule for myself, one I recommend to anyone who has ever made an expensive decision too quickly. Any offer above a certain threshold gets a mandatory forty-eight hours before I am allowed to say yes, regardless of how urgent the enrollment deadline claims to be. Urgency, I have learned, is very often manufactured, and clarity rarely arrives on someone else's timeline.

I paid off that program eventually, more slowly than I would have liked, each payment a small, recurring reminder of a decision made in a moment rather than a season of genuine readiness. I do not carry bitterness about it. I carry, instead, a very specific kind of vigilance, the sort that only comes from having paid, literally, for the lesson in full.

-- Dr. Rhonda