Iconic Speaker - a review

“The dark lives in the light as much as the light lives in the dark. I can see what I was attracted to - the opportunity to share, be powerful and be seen - but I can also see the danger. I can see Jesus AND I can see Hitler - because with great power comes great responsibility…”

Iconic Speaker is a 3-Day event for presenters, run by Cherie Eilertsen and Ethan Donati.?

I jumped into this experience because I saw something powerful coming down at me from the stage -? Presence, power and potential. I saw an opportunity for me to shine, engage a group of people, move energy, and make a ‘business that works’. And I admit, the 'FREE' one day event had me feeling a genuine connection with this duo!

Cherie met Mr Funnels at his youthful age of 24, took his 'shy story' under her glistening wing, taught him the one thing that apparently you can't teach people (confidence), and he filled up rooms with people for them to sell to... And sell they do - be warned his team is good!?They got us all involved, excited and nodding in agreement from the get go... and I was the first one up to throw 3K at a 3 days experience that promised to teach us how to become ‘rainmakers’ as Cherie called it -? aka MONETISE the shit out of our offerings.?

And truthfully I cannot fault them on that. We got the ‘step by step’ manual on how to close from the stage and they used all their tricks of the trade in full 'transparent' view. Indeed Cherie and Ethan have mastered the art of taking people’s money, feeding upon our primal human desire for power - and when it comes to selling MONEY, it's pretty easy to crunch numbers, list the things you need to do, and badabing badaboom, voila.

It's a “free” market and no one is patrolling...

Throughout the workshop, Cherie helped us to understand that we become FAMILY when we stick around the iconic speakers inner circle (only 35k for the retreat and 49k for the works!), and considering the power and potential that would come with having one of, if not the world’s greatest business women by your side, it’s actually a bit tempting! And what’s 10k-20-50k when you are gonna make millions right??

Iconic Speaker is a MASSIVE business of self perpetuating wealth. And they are not alone - they just represent the model. There are many people using similar Models these days, where number crunching to the millions becomes relatively simple maths.?

In this program we were warned against ever charging less than 3k (unless it was an online course), and to work our way up to 50k a punch. No wonder it's so easy to become a millionaire these days! Especially when you use the META MODEL - advertise, funnel, speak, close. Get rich.?

Tapping into the market necessarily means looking for your target audience - i.e. someone to ‘serve’? -? but in this model, where people are literally being sold to for thousands and thousands of dollars every time they buy into a room aka an event, the reality is SERVE is synonymous with HUNT.?

Now for the nitty-gritty: the free one-day workshop that sold me into the three-day paid event covered A LOT of the same material - like, word for word. And yes - repetition is key to agreement learning and believing in something enough to do it. Hours of repetition and echoey content, including a trail of emotionally charged stories that I had already wiped my tears for during the free one day event - made me wonder… had I been a little bit scammed??

There is a point in the program (the free day AND the paid event) when Cherie’s pulls out all her pictures with famous people, (says the same things word for word including a round of relatively judgmental comments about Robyn Williams to make? some kind of mental health example of him, when its also well known by now that he was sick with Lewy Body Dementia) and suggests the whole room take photos with celebrities as social proof - a perfect formula to ensure all 70 people in the room took photos with the hosts at the end of the event and posted them on 70+ social channels. Noice.?

The? rest of the time was made up by the 70 odd people in the room taking to the stage to try their voices out on a microphone. Plus, each of us got 10 min on a hot seat where businesses were busted out like brain farts, dreams were fanned with dollar signs and in my case, bank accounts scrutinised as equations of personal success.?

The dark lives in the light as much as the light lives in the dark. And I can see what I was attracted to in all this - the opportunity to share, to be powerful and to be seen - but I can also see the danger. When it comes to ‘Iconic Speakers’,?I can see Jesus AND I can see Hitler - and the reminder that with great power comes great responsibility.?

I know all this because I am what Cherie (and Ethan by default) calls ‘a woo woo’. A “woowoo’? is pretty much anyone who’s into anything to do with wellness, including mindset, meditation, yoga, faith, and absolutely anything remotely spiritual, non-physical or non-capital based. It’s like the word ‘Hippie’. A nice friendly socially acceptable label to humorously denigrate a particular type of person who has a particular set of values and way of perceiving and living in the world - ie a sensitive soul, rather than a desensitised one? - connected to the elements and energies of the planet, and of course, spirit itself.?

Such people are typically not consumed with capitalism, being rich or having a lot of power -? In fact they are usually sensitive empaths types, traumatised veterans of? a system that doesn’t value people for people's sake, only for what they can bring to the economy in financial measures.? In a sense we are all veterans of the capitalist patriarchy to some degree - and it's the level of sensitivity/type of trauma we experience that usually determines whether we are more the narcissistic type (ideal in a capital driven world), or the depressive/anxious type (difficult to survive but leads to fabulous ART), or a combination of both.?

One thing I re-learnt is that one of the most important things anyone on a mission needs is a solid WHY. A drive, a reason to get up in the morning to keep crackin’ at the thing that they are working on creating. Money is an obvious and common one, because people sell freedom as a dollar sign. As I sat up there in that hot seat being grilled about my bank accounts and supposed failures, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that I was being made out to be some kind of example for the group for not reaching a million bucks yet. And it wasn’t just me - there were a number of us up there having our finances interrogated in direct relation to our ‘success’… awkward?!! More like some kind of horrendous! Nevertheless - a certain point was being made: You haven’t succeeded to monetise your offering if your bank account isn’t reflecting it. Again, I couldn’t argue with that, but it was the notion that we were failures if we hadn’t, that felt like a knife to the heart. But maybe im just too much of a ‘woowoo’. ??

Over the course of this event, it became more and more obvious that WE were the product - that every minute of being in that room was an opportunity for us to be groomed into climbing their ladder of success via the next. point. of. sale.

It’s a full proof business model - upsell to the moon, baby!?

But the question that this has all left me with.... is it ethical?

?Are we not preying on people's hopes and dreams and calling it ‘transformation’ whilst taking extortionate amounts of money away from hard working people? Are we not contributing to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer when we invest in this kind of business model??

Don't get me wrong, I learnt so much from these guys, both from their intended content and from their META perspective of building capital ‘one starfish at a time’. I learnt about what I am and what I am not and I got the explicit opportunity to ask myself WHAT IS MY WHY? Money for Money's sake has been boring for a long time. ‘Making a difference’ is a beautiful outcome but attachment to such an intention is the worst of our Ego pretence. Let's not pretend....

What I know is that in the end, we do what we do because we want to. Because of how it makes us feel. Sure, we love to be able to share our wisdom and yes it can make a difference, but there are no guarantees on any of it.? We love the idea of one to many so we can expand our reach and scale our income to support the masses and FEEL POWERFUL. Even Altruism could be argued as the selfish pleasure of knowing ourselves to be GOOD SAMARITANS. Of feeling good about being good. Ultimately, we do what we do because of how it makes US feel - and I question human integrity inside of a system that feels successful because it can make millions ‘in a heartbeat’, as Cherie aptly reminded us over, and over again. We need to wrestle, work, dance and play with our ego. Least of all deny it or pretend it isn’t there.

Nothing is black and white - and neither is my review - in many ways, they do what they say they are going to do - and they do it all right in front of our faces... I learnt more about the terrifying reality of moving energy in big groups than I did about anything else. As Cherie added to her mantras,” it's not what you say it's how you say it”.... Human history shows us that attraction to power and prestige has lead us into fiery hells - and so despite coming out of this 3 days event with a roadmap to convincing a room to give me their money, I question the ethics of a model that cares more about counting dollars than it does about the impact of capitalism upon the fragility of the human condition.