How to Sell Your Work Without the Skeevy Sales Tactics That Made You Stop

This is the second essay in my predtech series here on Substack.

My first one traced the history of the online marketing playbook — where it came from, who built it, and why so many people who tried to use it just cannot make themselves do it.

Every time I talk about the way standard marketing tactics are built to bypass deliberation and extract compliance, I get asked version of the same hopeful question and it goes like this: THANK YOU…but how do we do it differently?!!!

I’ve been answering that question for ten years. I’ve trained more than 3,000 entrepreneurs in the counter-architecture — through courses, coaching, and a body of work that has been building since 2016. Some of what I’m about to share, below, lives in that curriculum. (Obviously I can’t compress a decade and 30+ courses into one 10,000+ word essay…)

But I want to give you something more durable than a new set of rules to follow. Rules are just another compliance sequence with a new authority figure to obey. What I want to equip you with is the marketing literacy to evaluate any tactic, in any context, on your own terms.

That is what this essay is for. Sally forth.

PS If you’re using these tools to bash other people’s marketing or their character, you’re missing the point. This is not a virtuous sales contest. This is about what you do with YOURS.

The email is sitting in your drafts folder.

You wrote it, or started to write it, or opened a new draft and closed it again. The launch has been postponed twice, now indefinitely. The sales page exists but you haven’t published it. You have been building a business that you believe in, using the marketing infrastructure that everyone who went before you used — the same courses, the same coaches, the same playbook — and somewhere in the execution something seized up.

You tell yourself you’ll get to it. You don’t get to it.

Or: you got to it. You ran the playbook successfully. The revenue came, the audience came, the launches that other people studied. And then you saw something you couldn’t stop seeing, and now the playbook you built the business on is the thing you cannot make yourself run anymore. You are privately diagnosing yourself as burned out, or needing a rebrand, or blocked in some way that requires more inner work. You are doing the inner work. The launches still aren’t going out.

Both of these are the same problem.

The diagnosis you’ve been offered — money block, visibility block, upper limits, self-sabotage, fear of success — locates the problem inside you. That is a structural feature of the self-help and business coaching industry, which has a financial interest in the individual diagnosis and a long history of providing it. I’ve written elsewhere about that history. The short version: the standard online marketing playbook was built by a specific group of people, from a specific set of sources, for a specific purpose — and the experience of recoiling from it is not a personal failure. It is accurate detection.

This essay is not a new set of rules.

I am not going to tell you to stop using countdown timers and testimonials and free training and everything else in the standard toolkit. Some of those tools are fine. Some can be predatory in specific contexts. Most are somewhere in between, depending on how they’re used, at what stakes, stacked with what else, aimed at whom. The difference between marketing that serves everyone in the transaction and marketing that extracts from the person with the least power to resist is not always visible from the outside, and the answer is not always binary or obvious.

What this essay is: a tactic-by-tactic guide, with nuance.

We’re going to take a tour through the standard toolkit — the things you’ve been taught to use, the things being used on you — name what’s actually operating in each one, and identify where the line is and what you can do on either side of it.

The goal is for you to own your discernment rather than substituting my judgement for yours.

I put this together so that you can look at any tactic, in any context, and build your high-consent literacy and predtech spotting ability to make deliberate choices about your marketing — rather than just doing what you’re told, or almost as bad, not doing any marketing at all.

That is what anti-predtech, high-consent marketing literacy can look like. May it be of use to you.¹

In 2016, I had a correspondence with Dr. Michelle Mazur — a communication scholar who had taught persuasion at the university level — about what I was developing in my analysis of the PLF trigger architecture.² She gave me a framework that has been the spine of my thinking ever since, and that I want to give you before we go any further into the specific tactics.

The high-stakes/low-stakes distinction.

Social triggers are not inherently predatory. They are human and inside all of us, for good reasons. The scarcity reflex that gets you to gather resources because you pick up the signals that they’re disappearing is what kept your lineage alive and the fact that your ancestors had this reflex is why you are here, on this planet, today. Authority deference saves cognitive labour when you genuinely cannot evaluate every credential from scratch. Social proof is a useful shortcut when the consequences of a wrong decision are small and the cost of full research is high. Reciprocity is how we keep things fair between us in community and relationship. These instincts, which marketers have codified into “triggers,” are how humans survive and thrive and they are not a problem in organic, ongoing relationship and life. They only become abusive when they are engineered for the benefit of one rather than many.

And there is a way to spot when they have genuine utility or when they are predatory. That’s the low stakes/high stakes distinction.

Here is my version of Dr. Mazur’s distinction: say you are standing in a grocery store, trying to choose a yogurt. You have approximately forty-seven other decisions to make in the next hour while shopping. You reach for the one with the most yogurts around it on the shelf — social proof, the most popular brand — and you keep shopping. If the yogurt is terrible, you are out $2.79 and forty seconds. The social trigger of social proof saved you research time, prevented decision fatigue, and the downside is negligible.

That is social proof in a low-stakes context. The trigger did exactly what it is supposed to do and it was useful to you.

Now say you are on a sales page for a $25,000 coaching programme and say that’s a lot of money for you — you’re going to have to go into debt for it. Maybe that will be a good decision. Maybe it won’t be. The page has a testimonial stack presenting the most exceptional results from a curated selection of clients, a countdown timer showing the cart closing in four hours, a scarcity notice saying there are only three spots left, a before-and-after story positioning you in the “before” state and subtly making you feel ashamed and anxious about who you are and how defective you are, and the free training series you’ve already received has, below the level of consciousness, installed a reciprocity obligation — a debt owed to the person you’re considering buying from — you cannot quite name. Six social triggers, stacked in combination, in a compressed time window, for a purchase that could mean five years of credit card payments at 25% interest.

This is a high stakes decision that could be life-altering for you, and not in a good way.

The distinction is not about the trigger. It is the stakes, the combination, the compression, and — critically — the structural position of the person being targeted.³ Someone making this $25,000 decision from a position of genuine financial precarity, or with a history of authority deference that means questioning a credential feels dangerous, or with a scarcity history that makes a closing window feel like an actual survival threat — that person is not making a $2.79 yogurt decision.

The trigger fires the same way in both cases. The cost it produces is not the same.

This is why I call them social conditions rather than social triggers. How much impact they have is materially impacted by the person’s position in our social environment. They land differently depending on what social and identity history the person is carrying when they encounter them. The higher the stakes, the more triggers you’re stacking, the more compressed the window, the more you must ask: who absorbs the cost if this decision goes wrong?

Where does the benefit flow? Was the decision conscious?

Those are the two questions. Run them on everything you send. Run them on everything sent to you.⁴

Think of it like switching between windows on your desktop. Most of the time, when you encounter marketing, you have one window open: the personal window. Everything that arrives gets interpreted through that lens. Is this true about me? Does this mean I’m failing? Is this what I need? It is the default operating mode — and predtech is designed for it, because the personal window is where shame lives.

When copy produces a shame response — when you feel called out, inadequate, like you’ve been seen in your worst moment — that is your cue to toggle to the other window.

The second window is systemic, social, structural. This window gives you a different perspective: you zoom out, and ask yourself what conditions outside me produce this experience? Who else is in this situation? What system created it?

When you find the structural answer, you often realize that in fact you are not defective or the problem and the personal shame dissolves. On the spot. (It’s hard for shame-based marketing to work if there’s no shame!) Because what you’re navigating is not in fact a personal defect. It is a structural position — one that many people occupy, that the industry produces, that has been named and documented and is not your fault.

And when the shame dissolves, you are in a different place: conscious, deliberate, evaluating from your own ground rather than from inside a state that was manufactured to produce a particular response. That is the place the next tool operates from.

I teach The Toggle as a self-coaching tool in my course We Are The Culture Makers and it is how you get out of shame and into power: toggle between the personal window and the structural window. You can use it everywhere, in every domain of life, including your purchasing decisions AND your marketing.²¹

Years ago, I was dating, and I discovered after the fact that a man I had been seeing had purchased a pickup artist manual — David DeAngelo’s Double Your Dating, the same Eben Pagan whose career trajectory is documented in the previous essay — and had been practicing the tactics on me. A woman called to tell me. She was his wife. She explained everything.

My response, after my initial horror (for both of us) and mortification (for myself), was to buy the same manual.

Once I had read it — once I knew the specific sequence, the negging, the preselection, the compliance testing, the freeze-out — I could see it operating in real time when someone was running it on me (and lo, the men on these apps are running the hell out of these tactics). Now I could name it in the moment: you’re negging me, that’s a freeze-out, that’s manufactured preselection. And when I could name it, it stopped working. The spell breaks the moment the mechanism is visible.¹⁴

Social triggers only work when they’re operating below the level of consciousness. When they’re visible, they lose the ability to drive behaviour automatically. You are now evaluating whether to cooperate rather than cooperating without having chosen to.

Toggling gets you to this place. The shame dissolves, the window opens, and now you can name what’s actually happening. That is spell-breaking: the naming that makes the mechanism visible and returns you to deliberate choice.

This works in both directions.

As a seller: you can do the spell-breaking for your buyers by making your own tactics visible. Tell people what you’re doing and why. On an opt-in: when you download this, you’ll start receiving sales emails from me from time to time.The lead magnet is now identified as sales collateral rather than a gift. The person is making a deliberate choice about whether they want to be in a selling relationship with you rather than accumulating an unconscious obligation. Many of them will still download. They will do it consciously, with their judgment intact.¹⁵

On a sales page: name the structure. This is a launch. It opens on [date] and closes on [date] because [reason]. Here is what the programme involves, here is what it requires, here is who it is for and who it is not for. Naming the structure filters for fit. The people who buy have exercised judgment rather than been triggered into it.

As a consumer: when you feel the mechanism operating — urgency, obligation, shame, the need for this specific person’s approval — that’s your cue to toggle. Look at what’s happening to you through the structural window. Then name what you see. This is a manufactured closing window. This is sales collateral positioned as a gift. This is a shame state the copy produced. The problem isn’t the free gift; it’s that there’s an automatic behavioural sequence clicking into action, unconsciously. 90% of our decisions are below the level of consciousness. Making it conscious puts you in a place of deliberate evaluation. If, from that deliberate place, you still decide to do the thing, cool cool. You decided.

You will recognise all three tools operating throughout the scenes below.

The first piece of content in a PLF launch is almost always a story. I was broke, struggling, overwhelmed, just like you.Then I discovered the thing. I became a different person. I can teach you to do the same.

The copywriting formula is called before-after-bridge: here is the before (you, now, unacceptable), here is the after (me, transformed), here is the bridge (buy this). It is what I call makeover copywriting, and makeover stories have contempt baked in: the “I was just like you” implies that being like you was something to escape. Who you are right now is the before state — which is to say, the unacceptable state.

What is also stripped out: everything that actually produced the result. The years of practice, the specific training, the methodology, the conditions under which the transformation was possible. The makeover story collapses all of that into a magic-secret narrative — I discovered X and I can teach you. This is the magic bullet. The secret solution that only this person has. It implies the result was personal and sudden rather than built over years of explicit work.⁶

The PLF launch uses this formula as its first video for this reason: it does two things simultaneously. It manufactures authority (the after state is the seller’s current life, positioned as evidence that they know something you don’t) and it activates the liking trigger (performed identification creates warmth and the sense of being understood before any evaluation has occurred) AND it triggers shame that leads us to find a solution: buy the thing.

That doesn’t mean, stop telling your stories! The makeover story becomes predtech when it strips out the lineage, the training, and the specific conditions that produced the result — and replaces them with a magic-secret narrative that positions the buyer in the unacceptable before state, with the offer as the only bridge out.

What to do instead: tell the whole story. Not the before and the after — the middle. The lineage. The training. The specific methodology and how you developed it. The actual conditions under which your clients get results. A decade of work documented and visible is the large version. The makeover story is the small one.⁵

As a consumer: when you encounter a makeover story, ask what was stripped out. Ask for the middle.

The email that arrives in your inbox with a subject line that sounds like it already knows you. Are you still struggling to get clients? Do you feel like a fraud? Is your business not growing the way you thought it would?

Second-person language — you feel, you worry, you’re exhausted — makes the copy feel like a voice already inside your head rather than a message arriving from outside.

That is the technique: saying YOU feel this, you do this, makes you identify with it and feel it. The copywriting systems that produce this are called PAS (problem, agitate, solve — one of the oldest formulas in direct response, in its current form dating to around 1898) and AIDA (attention, interest — which in practice means “create an urgent problem” — desire, action). All of them begin in the same place: activate a shame state, position the offer as rescue.⁶

The gentler cousin looks sympathetic: What if you could finally feel confident selling your work? What would it look like when you no longer dreaded launching? These forward-pacing questions perform empathy — they seem to be imagining a positive future — but they work by contrasting that future against your current unacceptable state. The “what if” implies that you currently don’t. The formula is the same. The coating is softer.

What’s operating in both: shame activation, then manufactured rescue. By the time the offer appears, the reader is already in the state the copy was designed to produce.

The copy becomes predtech when it gets you to personally overidentify with the content and start feeling the subconscious distress and positions the purchase as the only escape from the state it just installed.

The test: did you feel this way before you read the email, or only after?

What to do instead: this is the toggling tool operating on the seller side. Instead of manufacturing a shame state, you build the structural window for your reader. When you are talking about things that could shame or trigger a person, use third person to name the problem — people in this situation often find themselves going quiet three months in — because that creates psychological distance and deliberate evaluation. Use the second person for the vision, the possibility, the place you’re inviting them toward — the positive power states not the shame states. Using third person for witnessing problems acknowledges people’s realities without leveraging them. It is the difference between bearing loving witness to a real pattern and installing distress in the reader’s body.

Bearing Loving Witness is one of my marketing tools: locate the problem in the external structure, not in the reader’s character. The makeover story says you are broken, I will fix you. Bearing loving witness says this is a real pattern produced by real conditions, you’re not the only one experiencing it, and here is what I’ve built for navigating it. The first move — the makeover story — produces shame and subconsciously triggered behaviours. The second — Bearing Loving Witness — produces recognition, and recognition is what moves people to deliberate action.²¹

The 5-Step Messaging Model is a copywriting framework I built on this sequence throughout: start with shared values, name the external villain, bear loving witness to the real pattern, describe what you do differently, return to the shared vision and call to action.²¹

As a consumer: if the email arrived and then you felt like a fraud, name it. Read it again and swap out the ‘you’ with ‘they’. Does it still land the same way? Give yourself a couple of hours or days before you decide. Ask someone else what they think, but don’t let them read the sales page or email. Explain it to them verbally — that way they’re not receiving the psychological triggers you did, and they can tell you what they hear and see without that clouding the lens. You are not obligated to make a purchasing decision, now, from inside a state the copy manufactured.

Free gifts, freebies, and lead magnets are not inherently a problem. Genuinely useful content, given over time as an introduction to your work and your selling relationship — that is real generosity, and it can be a genuinely mutually beneficial exchange.

Free training becomes predtech when it is deployed as an undisclosed obligation-manufacturing device — when five days of real content arrives before a cart opens and the person never knew they were inside a launch. By the time the offer appears, the nervous system has registered a debt. That is the reciprocity trap.⁷

What I wrote in 2016 is still the most precise description of the mechanism: this is an attempt to force you to receive.⁷ The Hare Krishnas at airports in the 1970s pressed flowers into travellers’ hands — gifts nobody asked for, remarkably effective at generating donations from people who hadn’t planned to give. The PLF free training is the same mechanism at scale: real content, real value, deployed as obligation engineering before any explicit ask.

The counter-practice is simple: tell people at the beginning that it is a launch — that they are about to receive days of free content and that at the end of it you will make an offer. (I’ve often had a line on my subscribe pages that said, roughly: You’re going to get this and this, and from time to time I’m going to sell you my shit.) That transparency doesn’t reduce the value of what you give. It changes the register. You are a business making a generous offer, not a benefactor incurring a debt. People still sign up and they do it knowing what they signed up for.⁸

As a consumer: reframe the gift as sales collateral. Literally tell yourself: this is not a gift. This is a brochure. You are not obligated to reciprocate anything, because it was not a favour. Receive it and evaluate the offer on its merits, from deliberation.

It interrupts you. You were reading, and now there is a box in the centre of the screen asking for your email address.

Pop-ups can be annoying, but annoying is a preference, not a principle. A pop-up that transparently tells you what you will receive and what will happen next if you sign up is in fact a consent tool. It interrupts you to ask a question. You can say no. The fact that it is an interruption actually makes it more consent-oriented, not less, because you have to consciously decide to do something to proceed.

But if you personally hate them, don’t use them on your site — but don’t conclude that other people are nefarious because they do have them. We’re all allowed to be annoying.

The countdown timer in the bottom right corner of the sales page. The “only 3 spots remaining” on a digital course that can be duplicated infinitely. The “cart closes at midnight Friday” for a programme that will reopen in three months. The number ticking down.

Our scarcity reflex evolved to help us survive actual famine — hesitating has historically meant losing. When we pick up any signals of scarcity, our human instinct activates the same survival circuitry, and it does whether the scarcity is real or manufactured. When it fires, the part of the brain that deliberates goes quiet.

The test: is the scarcity real? Would this offer genuinely become unavailable if you don’t act by the stated deadline, for reasons that have nothing to do with the marketing strategy?

An evergreen course with a per-visitor countdown timer is a structural lie.

A live cohort programme with a genuine start date and a finite number of spots has real scarcity and telling people that is good information.

The countdown timer becomes predtech when the scarcity it signals is manufactured — when the window is artificial, the deadline resets per visitor, or the programme will reopen next quarter regardless. At that point it is not communicating real information. It is activating a survival reflex under false pretences.

Real scarcity should be communicated — honestly, with adequate lead time, so the person has the time and emotional stability to make a deliberate decision. The higher the stakes, the more time they need.⁹

On countdown timers specifically: they can trigger panic-based decisions in people whose scarcity histories make every closing window feel like a survival threat. And they can be genuinely useful to people who are neurodivergent.

For people like me with ADHD, decision deferral can be a problem in our life and sometimes tracking time itself is a challenge. A countdown timer is an external time structure that does the work our internal executive function system isn’t doing. It converts an open loop into a bounded one. For people who experience time as non-linear or diffuse — a common feature of ADHD and of some autistic cognition — a visible, concrete deadline anchors the decision in a way that “whenever you’re ready” simply doesn’t. In other words: countdown timers have genuine social utility for us.

Similarly, for people whose anxiety or perfectionism means decisions stay in analysis indefinitely, a real external deadline can be a genuine relief — it closes the loop that would otherwise stay open and consuming cognitive resources for weeks.

These are not edge cases. A significant portion of the entrepreneurial community that makes up the audience for most online courses is neurodivergent in exactly these ways. The countdown timer that activates a panic response in someone with genuine scarcity history is the same countdown timer that provides essential structure to someone with ADHD. These are not contradictions. They are a reason to use timers transparently — with a note directing attention to the timer, naming what it is, and naming both of these realities. I used a countdown timer recently in my birthday sale, and I put a note on it explaining everything I just explained to you. The deadline is real; and the timer is here to help you track time; AND please don’t feel triggered into buying something. When I attach a note like that, what did I just do? I drew your attention to how the thing works and asked you to make a deliberate decision about what you want to do rather than a subconsciously triggered one.¹⁰

Seventeen testimonials on the sales page. Revenue claims. Before-and-after photographs. I made $50K in my first launch. I replaced my corporate salary in three months. This changed everything.

What you don’t see: the people who didn’t get the result. The people who did get a solid result but not the sexy, outrageous one we’re compelled by. We also don’t see the other conditions — existing platform, existing network, existing capital — that the person with the exceptional result might have had that don’t apply to the person reading.

The curation of testimonials is not necessarily cynical. But the effect is structurally identical whether it is cynical or not: exceptional outcomes are presented as standard. The person evaluating the offer is working with a systematically biased information set — and the higher the stakes, the more that bias costs them.¹¹

Testimonials become predtech when the selection presents exceptional outcomes as standard results — when the person reading cannot tell what a typical client experience looks like, and is making a high-stakes financial decision based on a curated picture rather than an honest one.

What to do instead: honest representation of outcomes across the whole client base. What does the typical result look like? Under what conditions do people get the best results? What does a person need to have in place to implement? On high-price offers, I often do not use client testimonials at all.

(Actually I don’t personally use them very much but not for reasons that apply here; the reason I don’t is because people in the wider business world hate my critique so much — or me!!! — that they will target the people I mention in my testimonials and I don’t want to bring that kind of trouble to their door.)

What I recommend using instead: emphasize your tools, your documented methodology, a body of work that is publicly available, AND a range of testimonials with honest descriptions of what working together involves.

Even without testimonials, all my offers including my high-price offers still sell — to people who have evaluated the work and decided on their own terms.

But: that doesn’t mean don’t use testimonials. It means do it carefully and honestly.

The husband introduced prominently as part of the brand — his professional achievements, his role in the business. The famous mentor casually namedropped in the bio. The celebrity client photographed at the event. The logo wall.

Sometimes more direct: I have seen a FLEB promote her husband to their women clients as a coach with the job title “Chief Masculinity Officer.”

Proximity to power becomes predtech when the borrowed status is doing the work that your own earned authority should do — when the presence of a high-status person in your orbit is being deployed as evidence of your own expertise, and the person evaluating you has no way to distinguish the association from the credential.

What’s operating: the authority trigger via proximity. The presence of a high-status person in your orbit transfers their status to you. The nervous system reads the association and registers: trustworthy.

The version involving male figures has an additional layer: it signals to a particular audience that financial visibility and power don’t require sacrificing acceptability to men. The man’s presence says: she has power and is still acceptable, still loveable. It also uses gender hierarchy as a credibility mechanism rather than dismantling it.²⁵

Male approval becomes predtech when the presence of a man — husband, mentor, celebrity, spiritual authority — is deployed as the credibility evidence, encoding the message that women’s authority requires male sanction to be real. The authority claim is not what she built. It is who he is.

What to do instead: build your own power and make it visible. Your ideas. Your work. Your track record. Your analysis. The generative power you have developed — which is the only kind that doesn’t require borrowed credibility from someone else’s status.

An email arrives the day after a painful news event — a killing, an indictment, a disaster. The subject line acknowledges the pain of the moment. The email invokes it, holds it, suggests a way to transform grief into something generative. You click through. The content has nothing to do with the news event. It is self-help content. Mindset content. The emotional current of the moment was the traffic mechanism, not the subject.

This has a name in content marketing: newsjacking. But newsjacking is not inherently wrong, and the distinction matters.

Speaking to current events is sometimes exactly what a body of work requires. When I wrote about the Epstein files, for example, I wasn’t using the news cycle as a traffic mechanism — I was contributing to a body of analysis about predtech and extraction that had been building for years. The news event was the occasion for naming something that was already true, that my work had been building toward. That is not newsjacking. That is doing your actual work in the world.

Speaking to current events becomes predtech when you are drafting on collective grief or outrage to position yourself in its path, taking no risk and taking no real stand, from a position of structural safety and you can only benefit from it. It looks like doing something while doing nothing. The authority installed during the grief — this person understands, this person cares, this person is safe — is then available to be drawn on later.¹⁹

As a seller: the test is whether you have something real to say. Real analysis. A genuine position. Skin in the game.

If you are speaking to a news event because the emotional charge is running through your audience and you want to position yourself in its path and benefit from it, risk-free — that is newsjacking.

If you are speaking to a news event because your work has been building toward this naming and the moment has finally arrived and you have something meaningful to contribute — that is in fact your work. Carry on.

The comment section of the sales page where every comment is glowing. The online community where no one expresses doubt. The coach who responds to every concern with a reframe toward positivity. The unwritten rule — which everyone understands — that naming a problem, expressing anger, or raising a structural critique will get you quietly removed or publicly redirected.

The mechanism is manufactured consensus. Social proof fires on the apparent unanimity — this works for everyone, and if it isn’t working for you, the variable is you. The relentless positivity is also a suppression mechanism: it removes the information that would let a prospective buyer evaluate accurately. The failure rates, the experiences of people who didn’t get the result — all of that is structurally excluded from the environment where the purchasing decision is made.

A community space becomes predtech when it is structured to suppress the information that would enable accurate evaluation — when the cost of naming a problem is removal, and the apparent unanimity is enforced rather than earned.

The counter-practice: allow the full range of experience into your community and your copy — including the conditions under which the work is difficult, the analysis that complicates the sales narrative. Trust your work enough to let it be evaluated accurately.¹²

You raise a concern in the community. Maybe the programme didn’t produce the result you expected. Maybe something in the teaching conflicted with your existing knowledge or maybe it doesn’t consider your lived reality at all. Maybe you have a genuine question that the content didn’t answer. But instead of grappling with any of that, the response you receive is not engagement with the substance of what you said. It is a reframe. That’s your upper limits talking. That’s your fear of success. That’s your resistance to the work. That’s not an aligned question.

The critique is rerouted inward. The problem is located in you, not in the programme. The community watches this happen and learns the rule: dissent is pathology. The unwritten contract is that your membership depends on your visible alignment.

AND: sometimes it is someone’s conditioning that’s getting in your way. So just because a teacher reframes your thinking doesn’t mean she’s gaslighting you. A way to discern: is she taking your identity, your history, your lived experience into account? Is it informing her advice? (It should — we need to be culturally fluent to be competent!)

A learning environment becomes predtech when it responds to honest dissent, honest questions, and honest conflict by locating the problem in the person who raised them — when “I have a question” or “this didn’t work for me” is treated as a symptom of psychological resistance rather than a legitimate contribution. The mechanism converts the buyer’s critical faculty into evidence of their own deficiency, which is the deepest possible suppression of the deliberation the buyer needs.

The counter-practice is a community and coaching with actual capacity for honest conflict — where people can name what isn’t working, where questions get substantive responses, where critique is treated as information rather than insubordination. This is hard to build and easy to fake. The test is what happens the first time someone says something the leader doesn’t want to hear.

A caveat that needs to be named: there is a difference between honest dissent and targeted abuse. You are not required to absorb harassment, bad-faith attacks, or sustained personal malice in the name of “openness to critique.” A community policy that removes people who are abusive is not the same as a community policy that removes people who ask hard questions. The distinction matters because predtech often conflates them — framing the removal of a legitimate critic as a boundary against harm. Name the difference. Protect your community from abuse. Do not protect your work from close scrutiny.¹²

A note on what this is not about: you having images and selfies are not the problem. Photoshoots are not the problem. Having nice things, being thin, being pretty, having various markers of privilege, getting professional photography — none of that is the problem.

The problem is deliberately deploying those as status signals specifically to manufacture the authority reflex — to get the nervous system to register this person knows something I don’t before any evaluation of whether they actually do.

The photoshoot becomes predtech when it is staged specifically to deploy status signals — wealth, leisure, social acceptability — as proxies for expertise, and the person viewing it has no way to distinguish the signal from the credential.

What to do instead: decide what story you want your visuals to tell and tell that story — not the story of social acceptability, but the story of the actual work. Frida Kahlo made lush, gorgeous self-portraits and included her hospital bandages, her scars, her unibrow and moustache — counter-cultural details alongside extraordinary beauty. Not imperfection performed against wealth. The whole thing, on her own terms.⁵

As a consumer: The Stripe screenshot is not expertise. The luxury location is not a credential. Ask what this person is claiming authority in, what the basis is, and whether you can evaluate it independently of the visual.

Related but distinct: what does your brand imagery actually show?

The safe status quo: photos of people with socially desirable bodies. No fat people. No wheelchairs. No visible disability. Quote cards with platitudes that make no one uncomfortable. If figures who were revolutionaries are quoted, it is for the aesthetic resonance, stripped of political context — Ivanka Trump’s brand used to quote women of colour and civil rights icons all the time. Mostly no humans at all: pristine desk still-lifes, perfect countertops, arranged objects. Pesky humans disrupt the perfection.

A brand visual vocabulary tells certain people they belong here and certain people they don’t. A person who looks at the brand imagery and sees no one who looks like them receives information. The information is: this is not for you.²⁴

Brand imagery becomes predtech when it uses the default visual vocabulary of social acceptability — specific body types, specific aesthetics, specific markers of belonging — to manufacture a trust signal, and that signal functions by excluding the people it doesn’t address.

What to do instead: interrupt the visual norms of your industry. Ask what those norms are, why they exist, and who they exclude. Ask whose presence your work genuinely serves, and make that visible.²⁴

Naming the mechanism is the foundation. The specific practices are what you build on it.

The pre-launch consent refresh. Before a launch sequence, send an off-schedule email to your list. Tell them a launch is coming. Tell them what it is. Invite people who are NOT interested to click a particular link to opt out of receiving those emails. Make an automation that tags everyone who clicks that link, and then use that tag to exclude them from subsequent launch emails, without unsubscribing them from your list as a whole. (I call this Email Zero — it is what goes out before Email 1 in your launch sequence.)¹⁶

Payment plans without predation. Charging 25%, 30%, 66% extra for payment plans — which happens — is not a neutral business practice. It turns the people least able to pay into a profit centre. It extracts most from the people who can absorb it least. *You can’t say you’re here to empower your clients while actually extracting a 25–30% fee from them.*¹⁷

There are real costs to running payment plans — software, processing fees, time. The best practice is to calculate those costs and spread them across your pricing as a cost of doing business, rather than charging them specifically to the people who use payment plans. If you are genuinely undercapitalised and need more people to pay in full, tell people that directly on the sales page. Many people will choose to pay in full specifically to support someone they are invested in — not from guilt, but from deliberate, genuine solidarity.¹⁸

The specific counter-architecture for copy and content is a model I developed by intuition — I was writing sales pages as love letters, trying to find what actually moved people to deliberate action — and then validated against research on political messaging from the Center for Community Change and the cognitive linguistics work of George Lakoff on how people make decisions.²⁰

The PLF formulas — PAS (problem, agitate, solve), before-after-bridge, and the PLF itself — all begin in the same place: your problem. Your pain. Your inadequacy. Second-person language (”you feel like a fraud,” “you’re exhausted and overwhelmed”) so the pain feels intimate, like a voice already inside your head. Shame is activated. The offer appears as rescue from the shame state.

The 5-Step Messaging Model begins in a different place entirely.

Step 1: Shared values. Start with what you and your reader already hold in common. Not what’s wrong with them — what they believe, what they’re building toward, what kind of world they’re trying to make. We trust women. We believe work should be sustainable. We are done with marketing that requires us to feel bad about ourselves in order to buy something. The reader’s heart answers yes. You are inside the same tent.

Step 2: Name the villain. The villain is not your reader. The villain is the external system, the structural condition, the architecture that is working against what you both believe. The PAS formulas make the reader the problem. This model makes the problem the problem. No shame attaches to the reader. They are not defective. They are navigating something real, and you are naming it.

Step 3: Bear loving witness. Acknowledge the specific ways the problem manifests in your reader’s life. This is where second person returns — but in the service of recognition, not shame. You have tried the playbook and it keeps going dark on you. Not: you have a money block. The difference is a verdict about character vs. an accurate description of what is happening structurally.

Step 4: Name what you do differently. Not the magic secret, not the transformation story. The specific, documented, nameable alternative — what you have built, how it works, why it produces different results from the standard playbook.

Step 5: Return to the shared value + call to action. Close where you opened: in the vision, the shared commitment, the thing you both believe. The call to action follows from that vision as a logical next step, not as an escape from a shame state.²¹

The research from the Center for Community Change tested this shared-values structure against pain-point messaging in political contexts and found that messages starting with shared values produced deliberate informed action at significantly higher rates than messages starting with pain. Not because people don’t have pain — they do — but because pain activates defensiveness and shame activates helplessness, whereas shared values activate agency. (The Toggle and Bearing Loving Witness in action!)

The model expands or contracts like an accordion. Five sentences for a social media post. Five paragraphs for a newsletter. Five sections (or fifteen!) for a sales page. Expand and contract as needed. The structure holds at any scale.

I want to be specific about this, because the implicit argument against building the counter-architecture is: it doesn’t convert as well. You leave money on the table. You sacrifice business results for principles.

This is not what I have found.

First, if you can’t make yourself sell using the existing status quo tactics, then you already know you won’t make a whole lot of money, at all. So obviously having a sales and marketing system you CAN use, enthusiastically and often, changes your revenue for the better.

Second, the counter-architecture produces different conversions — it might convert fewer people in certain contexts, but recruits people who are more right for the work. It produces lower refund rates because people who made deliberate decisions are more likely to stay. It produces better implementation because people who weren’t triggered into buying are more likely to actually use what they bought. It produces compounding reputation because the people who work with you, having been treated with genuine respect for their decision-making capacity, tell other people. It produces the best thing any business can have — and the most cost-effective marketing available: repeat purchases from clients who stay with you for years. The business case and the values case are not in tension.²²

And it produces something harder to measure but equally important: it produces businesses that stay running.

The women in my practice who had built businesses on the PLF playbook — and who came to me privately, because something had stopped working — were not, mostly, experiencing revenue problems. They were experiencing the moral fatigue that accumulates when you run a system that you have come to see clearly, and the seeing has made it impossible to keep running it the old way. The architecture required violation. The violation accumulated. The business went quiet.

The counter-architecture is what you run instead — not as a set of rules imposed from outside, but as a set of practices that emerged from asking: what would this look like if the person receiving it got to keep their judgment? What would the launch look like if I was genuinely trying to help them decide whether this is right for them, rather than trying to produce a yes before the question is fully formed? What is the outcome of this tactic in a low-stakes or high-stakes decision? What are the lines between low-stakes and high-stakes decisions for my particular client?

You cannot out-virtue your infrastructure. Good intentions running on a predtech platform still produce predtech outcomes. But you are not obliged to inherit the infrastructure without examining it.

The examination is not a one-time event. It is a practice — one you build with your own analysis rather than borrow from mine or anyone else’s. That is the point. The goal is your judgment. Developed, operational, yours — and embedded in your marketing, which I hope to see a lot more of, soon.

¹ The counter-architecture — the specific practices that make up the high-consent marketing system — is documented across: My Values + Feminist Business Practices; the FLEB 10-tactic series running through Tactic 10; Business Tip #521 on the pre-launch consent refresh; Business Tips #611 and #626 on payment plans; and the Business Tips archive. The methodology was built through explicit R&D: isolate the problem tactic, identify the opposite, build the counter-tactic, apply and test, measure by whether practitioners can sustain it without the collapse that signals moral injury, then teach. It has been running since 2016.

² Dr. Michelle Mazur holds a Ph.D. in Communication with emphasis on persuasion and taught at the university level. The high-stakes/low-stakes framework came from our direct email correspondence in 2016 and was first published in my essays “On the Abuse of Reciprocity and Women” and “Liking Someone Can Be Terrible Information” — both from May 2016. The framework has been central to my teaching since. Cite as: “As Dr. Michelle Mazur, who taught persuasion at the university level, explained to me in correspondence — the higher the stakes, the fewer triggers you should deploy.” Her published work: drmichellemazur.com; 3 Word Rebellion (Communication Rebel Press, 2019).

³ The high-stakes/low-stakes framework is fully developed in the Copywriting for Culture Makers curriculum, Module 4, workbook pp. 13–14: “In a scenario where you’re trying to buy a cup of yoghurt that’s $2.79, relying on the social trigger of social proof is probably a smart move... If the yoghurt is terrible, you’re out less than three dollars. You won’t pay extravagant rates of interest, for years. You won’t mortgage your house. This is a low risk buying scenario.” The workbook goes on: “Someone who takes on $30K of debt to do a business training/coaching program, for example, might end up declaring bankruptcy if they can’t service that debt. I’ve worked with women who are in debt for more than they earn in a year or have lost their houses, because of online programs and coaching they’ve purchased. These are high-risk buying scenarios, because they have life-altering consequences.” The yogurt example is mine. The framework is Dr. Mazur’s.

⁴ The two questions — where does the benefit flow? was the decision conscious? — are the spine of the previous essay and the recurring audit tool throughout this body of work. They originate in my 2016 analysis of Walker’s flashlight story: On the Mental Triggers of Online Marketing and the FLEB. The structural argument: a transaction in which both parties benefit and the decision is fully conscious does not require operating below consciousness. Only a transaction designed to extract cooperation that would not survive conscious evaluation needs to operate below the threshold of awareness.

⁵ The counter-practice for authority: leading with substance rather than status signals. Fully developed in FLEB Marketing Tactic #1: Fake Authority and in the CFC curriculum, Module 4: “Instead of signalling privilege to manufacture (fake) authority, lead with your ideas. Your client outcomes. Your lineage. Your cultural analysis. Your actual expertise, qualifications and experience.” The About Page as counter-grooming tool: Module 9, CFC workbook pp. 6–12; the naming framework (Name Your Methodology, Name Your Lineage, Name Your Audience) is developed in Module 2. Earned authority says: here is where I came from, here is what I learned from whom, here is what I built and tested and named. On naming your lineage as a political act for women and marginalised people: “documenting our lineages is how we push back and claim the space we’re often systematically denied” (CFC Module 2 workbook).

⁶ “The makeover story is a form of playing small” — from my CFC Module 4 transcript and the 2016 mental triggers essay. The full argument: the rags-to-riches formula strips out everything in the middle that actually produced the results and replaces it with a magic-secret narrative. It looks large. Structurally, it is small: it shrinks the real story to fit the before-and-after arc. The three copywriting formulas named in the body — PAS (problem, agitate, solve), AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action — where “interest” is operationalised as “create an urgent problem”), and before-after-bridge — are all analysed in detail in my CFC Module 4 curriculum. PAS is the oldest formula in direct-response copywriting, in its current form dating to around 1898. All three are named and deconstructed as “oppressive copywriting formulas” in that curriculum. The counter-practice — tell the whole story, the middle not just the before and after — is documented in CFC Module 4 workbook.

⁷ The full analysis of weaponised reciprocity as structurally connected to sexual predation: On the Abuse of Reciprocity and Women, May 21, 2016. Cialdini’s Hare Krishna example is in Influence, Chapter 2. The phrase “force you to receive” is from that essay — the most precise description I have found of what the mechanism does to the person on the receiving end. Riviere makes the same structural connection in her Vol. 1 essay: “If you’re thinking that there’s such an obvious thread of sexualized violence under all of this — so am I.”

⁸ The counter-reciprocity practice — transparency about the selling relationship at the point of opt-in — is in the CFC Module 4 workbook, pp. 14–15: “We can say things like ‘Get this ____; and from time to time, I’ll also send you sales emails!’ That way the person is not feeling the tug of subliminal reciprocity; the tactic is visible so they realize they’ve downloaded sales collateral rather than a gift... They still sign up, but they do it knowing what they signed up for.”

⁹ FLEB Marketing Tactic #2: Fake Scarcity: “Real scarcity is valid. Fake scarcity is a scam.” The financial model for compensating for a lower conversion rate when you stop using manufactured scarcity: more visibility and bigger audience, or niche specialisation, or price adjustment. “There are lots of places to intervene in this equation and produce the same financial outcome.” The higher-stakes implication: “The higher the stakes, the more time and emotional stability people need” — from the CFC Module 4 workbook and the predtech archive.

¹⁰ The gender lens framework — evaluating a tactic through all the lenses of who it could affect and in what way — comes from a conversation with a former political science professor who worked in a Prime Minister’s office as a gender lens policy analyst. Her job was to evaluate proposed policies through the lens of how they would impact different categories of people, then modify accordingly. Applied to marketing: before using any tactic, run it through the range of people it will reach. The countdown timer analysis in this essay — that the same timer that activates a scarcity panic in one person provides essential external time structure for someone with ADHD or non-linear time experience — is the gender lens framework applied. The response is not to ban the timer. It is to use it with disclosure and transparency that acknowledges both realities, so each person can decide whether the structure is useful or a mechanism they want to opt out of.

¹¹ FLEB Marketing Tactic #10: Testimonials as Triggers: “What if we don’t need client testimonials on sales pages? What if it might be better for our clients if we don’t? What if we can still achieve & even exceed our revenue goals without them?” My practice: on high-price offers I currently do not use client testimonials at all. “This year my sales are up 190% compared to all of 2020.” h/t Toi Marie for the original critique of testimonials as triggers. The Mazur high-stakes/low-stakes distinction applies directly: testimonials as social proof are a low-stakes time-saver for a $3 yogurt; in a high-stakes selling situation, curated testimonials presenting exceptional results as standard override critical thinking at exactly the moment when it should be strongest.

¹² The full analysis of the liking trigger: Liking Someone Can Be Terrible Information, 2016. The liking trigger is where manufactured relatability and manufactured consensus both live — the car salesman’s friendliness, the comment section where every response is glowing, the online community where criticism is quietly removed. On the relentlessly positive space as a structural feature of FLEB communities: FLEB Marketing Tactic #6: Relentless Positivity and Conflict Avoidance. The mechanism: the more closely a brand embodies the status quo, the more reach and revenue it generates, and the more threatening any expression of pain, anger, or structural analysis becomes to that brand.

¹⁴ The PUA / spell-breaking story: from my Roots of Online Marketing course, Part 1 transcript, and documented in the CFC Module 4 workbook, pp. 14–15: “Back in Year Thirty-Sex, when I was dating up a storm, I got profiled and preyed on three times, by three pick-up artists. One, unbeknownst to me, had a wife who very helpfully called me and filled me in. She told me her husband had bought a manual from ‘David DeAngelo’ that taught him how to manipulate heterosexual women for his own benefit... As a defensive measure, I bought the materials too and learned all the tactics that were being used against me. After that, whenever a guy used one of the PUA tools, I’d be able to raise it to the level of consciousness... And so those tactics stopped working on me.” Eben Pagan = David DeAngelo: same person, same trigger architecture, applied first to sexual compliance and then to purchasing compliance. Full documentation: Lovers, Leaders, and the Ways of Superior Men.

¹⁵ The visibility principle: “Social triggers only work on people when they’re happening below the level of consciousness. When they’re obvious, they lose their ability to drive us.” CFC Module 4 workbook, p. 14. Cialdini makes the same case in Influence: naming the mechanism immunises against it. The counter-grooming architecture makes the mechanism visible to the buyer, which restores the deliberation faculty that the predtech sequence is specifically designed to suppress.

¹⁶ Business Tip #521: Refresh Consent with a Pre-Launch Email. The practical implementation: send an off-schedule email before any launch — on a day your list doesn’t expect to hear from you — that names what is coming and invites people to opt in explicitly. The three-step version (CFC Module 9 workbook, pp. 35–36): off-schedule email stating you have something coming, if interested let me know (hit reply) → live, personalised response to everyone who replies → sales page only for those who have explicitly expressed interest. “Old-school permission marketing: only marketing to people who explicitly give you permission to have a sales convo.” The back-and-forth correspondence is essential — this is a conversation, not a sequence. The core principle: consent is not one-and-done. The person who subscribed three years ago has not consented to receive a five-day launch sequence today.

¹⁷ The quote is from my CFC Module 9 curriculum. Full argument and practices: FLEB Marketing Tactic #4: Predatory Payment Plans; Business Tip #611: Stop Charging Extra for Payment Plans; Business Tip #626: Charging Extra for Payment Plans Can Be Exploitative. The practice: calculate the real costs of running payment plans (software, processing fees, time) and spread them across your pricing as a cost of doing business — the way any other overhead gets absorbed. Everyone pays proportionally. My own historical disclosure: before 2019 I charged 8–10% for payment plans based on actual costs; I have since absorbed those costs into my pricing entirely. Payment plans are a form of financial accessibility and income stability both — h/t Bear Hebert for that framing.

¹⁸ See note ¹⁷ for the full argument. On the undercapitalised entrepreneur: if you genuinely need more people to pay in full for cash-flow reasons, tell people that directly on the sales page. Many will choose to pay in full specifically to support someone they are invested in — not from guilt but from genuine relationship. Transparency is the counter-practice, not prohibition.

¹⁹ The practice of aligning marketing content with breaking news to capture emotional traffic was named “newsjacking” by David Meerman Scott (Newsjacking, John Wiley & Sons, 2011) and has been explicitly taught in digital marketing curricula since. The fuller account: Let’s Get Off This Ride and Get Justice. On relentless positivity and conflict avoidance as a structural feature of FLEB communities: FLEB Marketing Tactic #6: Relentless Positivity and Conflict Avoidance. On the proximity-to-power tactic: FLEB Marketing Tactic #3: Male Approval.

²⁰ The 5-Step Messaging Model — full development in CFC Module 4 curriculum. The George Lakoff connection: cognitive linguistics and political framing research on what actually produces deliberate action in political messaging. The Center for Community Change research: tested message structures starting with pain/problem against structures starting with shared values and found consistently that shared values messaging produced higher rates of deliberate action. I arrived at the same structure independently, building sales pages as love letters, before encountering the research that validated it. The model is mine; the research parallel was identified by a student who sent me the Center for Community Change handbook. On Lakoff: Don’t Think of an Elephant (Chelsea Green, 2004) is the accessible version of his work on framing and values-based communication.

²¹ Toggling — switching between the personal window and the structural window — is a self-coaching tool from We Are The Culture Makers, Kelly Diels’ programme on culture-making, thought leadership, and building a substantial body of work. The practice: when you feel shame or inadequacy in response to marketing, a critique, or a moment of comparison, toggle to the structural window — ask what conditions outside you produce this experience, who else is navigating it, what the industry does to people inside it. The structural answer dissolves the shame without bypassing the real information. The 2nd/3rd person rule and bearing loving witness are both developed in the CFC (Copywriting for Culture Makers) curriculum, Module 4. Second person for positive states; third person for naming problems — because the personal window is where shame lives, and copy that uses second person to name pain is deliberately installing the reader inside a shame state. Bearing loving witness is the named counter-practice to the makeover story: both acknowledge difficulty, but the makeover story locates the problem in the reader (shame) while bearing loving witness locates it in the external system (recognition). The 5-Step Messaging Model is built on this distinction throughout. On the model as anti-rules: “I do not want you to substitute my judgement or critique for your own...” — CFC Module 4 workbook, p. 16.

²² On the business case for the counter-architecture: the conversion rate argument — that you leave money on the table by refusing to run the full trigger stack — confuses conversion rate with business result. The relevant metrics are not conversion rate alone but: conversion rate × retention rate × implementation rate × referral rate × lifetime client value. An audience converted by manufactured urgency and obligation has a different profile on all of those downstream metrics than an audience converted by genuine fit and deliberate decision. Business, Capitalism, and Money Guilt. A Cure. is the full argument that the business case and the values case are not in tension. Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn, The Myth of Capitalism (2018), is the companion read.

²⁴ FLEB Marketing Tactic #8: Safe Status Quo Imagery. The five categories documented there: Status (socially desirable bodies only), Positivity (platitudes that make no one uncomfortable), Apolitical (quoting revolutionaries for cool points stripped of political context — Ivanka Trump’s brand did this with WOC and civil rights icons), Inhuman (still-lifes and pristine objects rather than actual people), Weaponized Imperfection (deliberate mess displayed against expensive backdrops — the imperfection signals relatable, the backdrop signals authority). Counter-practice: What Would Frida Kahlo Do? She made gorgeous self-portraits AND included her hospital bandages, scars, unibrow, moustache — counter-cultural details alongside extraordinary beauty.

²⁵ FLEB Marketing Tactic #3: Male Approval. The proximity-to-power tactic as documented: leveraging or displaying proximity to male power reinforces the norm that only grants some women power as a function of their relationship to men. “We’ve got to build our own generative power, display it & share it.” The specific example of the “Chief Masculinity Officer” job title comes from my direct observation in the FLEB ecosystem. I’m not naming the person who created this position because it isn’t about blowing back on her. I see this stuff all the time and it’s not about bad apples (they’re not even bad apples!), it’s about the barrel. The tactics. On the authority trigger via association as distinct from the liking trigger: the liking trigger produces identification and warmth; the authority-via-proximity trigger produces deference. Both are social conditions. Both can be manufactured. The proximity-to-power tactic deploys both simultaneously.