Hey Reader

Hope you had a great weekend 🥰

I've had a thoughtful weekend and this is something I've be mulling over all weekend, should I tell you, should I just keep quiet and do the British thing and just carry on. Well, no this is something that has riled me and I want to let you know that this is NOT something I ever want you to feel or have to experience.

Grab a cuppa and read on.....

This is all about the day I realised I'd been played, and what I want you to know because of it.

Like I said at the start, I've been sitting on this for a while.

Not because I'm ashamed, although honestly, for a long time I was. But because I wanted to make sure that when I finally said it out loud, it meant something. That it might save you from going through what I went through.

So here it is.

A few years ago, when I first started my business, I spent five figures on a coach and mastermind that nearly broke me.

Not just financially, although yes, that too. I mean the kind of broken that creeps in quietly. The kind where you start to question your own judgement. Where you lie awake at 3 am, wondering how someone like you, capable, experienced, switched on, got it so spectacularly wrong.

And if you've ever felt that way, I need you to keep reading. Because this is for you.

It didn't feel dangerous, that's the point.

It never does.

It started the way these things usually do. I was at a point of transition, everything was changing, I was still driven, but depleted. Successful on paper, but quietly wondering if this was it. Watching other women in my space seemingly thriving, and feeling that familiar pull of I should be further along by now.

Then someone appeared. Polished. Compelling. The kind of presence that makes you feel like they've cracked something you haven't. The testimonials were glowing. The lifestyle was aspirational. And the promise, "this will change everything", landed right in the middle of everything I was feeling.

I got swept along and went to the 3-day event for £1. I wanted to believe it, and they were very, very good at making me do exactly that.

Here's what I didn't fully see at the time, and what I want you to see now.

The tactics being used on me were deliberate, formulaic and engineered. I'm an NLP Practitioner, and I know these techniques. I've been trained to spot them, but I still got pulled in. That's not a reflection of my intelligence. It's a reflection of how sophisticated the manipulation was.

Urgency and scarcity, "This price is only available today, it’s a special offer whilst you’re here, a thank you for coming”, are designed to bypass your rational thinking entirely.

Identity attacks dressed up as insight. "The reason you're not where you want to be is your mindset", making you feel broken before you've even started, so that they can position themselves as the solution.

Financial pressure reframed as self-belief, "If you can't commit financially, you're not ready to commit to change", weaponising your own self-worth against you.

And the isolation, that’s the subtle discouragement from talking to anyone else before signing, stopping you from thinking before signing.

But I was in, I signed. I paid, and what followed was months of feeling more lost, more ashamed, flip-flopping between business solutions, and significantly poorer than when I started. The promises and guarantees didn't materialise.

So when I tried to make sense of it all, the message was clear: you didn't work hard enough, you didn't believe enough, you are the problem.

You are NOT the problem. You are NEVER the problem.

This is the part nobody talks about.

The financial loss is painful, of course it is. But the deeper wound, the one that takes longer to heal, is what it does to your confidence.

You start to doubt your own judgment. You become afraid to invest in yourself again, even when the right support is right in front of you. You shrink, second-guess, wonder if you're just fundamentally bad at this.

You're not, I knew I wasn’t. I was let down by someone who put their income before my wellbeing, that is not a character flaw on your part. That was a failure of integrity on their part.

But this is what makes me genuinely angry: there is no regulatory body holding these people to account. Anyone can call themselves a coach tomorrow and be charging five figures by next week.

No qualifications required, no ethical framework enforced and no one checking. I believe that this needs to change. Until it does, the responsibility to protect yourself falls to you, and that is not fair. But it is the reality we're working in.

So what does good coaching actually look like?

I'm not just asking that as a rhetorical question. I'm asking as someone who has sat on both sides: as a client who got burned and as a coach who has built her entire reputation and business in deliberate opposition to everything I experienced.

Good coaching is transparent. You should know exactly what methodology your coach uses and why. No smoke, no mysticism, and no vague promises about transformation. A framework you can see, understand, and trust.

Good coaching gives you time. Any coach worth working with will actively encourage you to sit with the decision. To ask questions, to speak to people you trust. If it’s the right fit for you, it will still be the right fit tomorrow.

Good coaching has lived experience behind it, not just qualifications. Qualifications matter; they give a coach the techniques and the practices. But what they can't give you is the knowledge that comes from walking the path, learning from making mistakes, from rebuilding, sitting in the uncertainty and coming out the other side.

That is what turns knowledge into wisdom, and wisdom is what actually changes people.

Good coaching measures itself by your growth, not your dependency. Every session should leave you clearer, more capable, more connected to yourself, not more reliant on your coach to tell you what to do next. A coach should never tell you what to do; they are there to guide you.

And good coaching will tell you honestly if you're not the right fit. Not whether you can afford it. Whether you are genuinely suited to what's on offer.

Why am I telling you this?

Not for sympathy. I'm long past needing that.

I'm telling you because I built StrongHer, the FAB Method and the Circle, the community, everything, with this experience sitting in my bones. Every choice I make about how I work with women, what I charge, how I show up, what I promise, all of it has been shaped by knowing what the alternative feels like.

I know what it is to hand your trust and your money to someone who didn't deserve either. I know that for many of the women who find their way to me, there's often a version of this story in their background, too. Sometimes smaller, sometimes worse, always leaving a mark.

You deserve support that builds you up and then steps back. That hands you the tools and trusts you to use them. That celebrates your wins without making you dependent on someone else to generate them.

You deserve a coach who wants to work themselves out of a job, because you've grown that much.

If any part of this landed somewhere tender, I want you to know: your instincts are good.

Your worth is not determined by someone else's sales tactics, and if you've been burned before and you're still here, still trying, still looking for the right support, that's not foolishness.

That's courage. And it deserves to be met with integrity.

With love and zero countdown timers,

Jo 🧡

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