The “Spiritual” Spin of Mary Kay
Written by SuzyQ
This was the hardest part for me. I remember running into a director at a gas station after my first seminar in 1998. I asked her “I don’t get this part of making God my business partner.” She said “You will.” At that seminar I heard Cindy Williams say “God does not call the equipped, He equips the called.” I was stunned. Born and raised as Episcopalian, I had never heard God’s name evoked in any business opportunity before, and I was at a loss for words.
Fast forward a few years and I am a member of a semi-elite Bible Studies group for directors only. This involvement calls for me to drive 100 miles round trip to breathe the same air as other directors who are more worthy than me. I remember the first time we prayed for more red jackets and more production. Another stunning moment. The leader of the group was a soon to be nsd and we were all in awe. She referred to women like me as “baby Christians.” I knew I was lacking but was unclear where my growth needed to be focused.
We read all the books (Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, whoever wrote The Prayer of Jabez, some Beth person) the list goes on and on. Whatever the “Christian” book of the moment was, we bought it and read it. My business did not grow. I was not successful…
I remember going to church and asking my Priest for a moment after the service. I told him that I had been learning that my goals are not big enough, my deserve level isn’t high enough, and I asked him if I had been saved. I was in tears and he held my hands in his and suggested that maybe I try a different Bible study group. He also assured me that we had the “saved” thing covered when I was baptized as an infant.
My senior director was fond of saying that when she died, she was going to have to face Mary Kay and God, in that order. She was a lapsed Catholic and I always thought that was kind of hinky, but then again, when we got the call from MK Corporate that MK had died, I cried, so there you go. The point is that Mary Kay became entangled with God in my head and it was devastating.
I am not a stupid woman. I have advanced degrees. (That would be plural.) I can’t believe I fell for this shit. It got to the point in my head that if I quit MK, I was also quitting God. Can you take a moment and breathe and think about how powerful this thinking was for me? I was letting “the enemy” steal my dreams; I was letting negativity into my life. The response from my sister directors when I mentioned reading MK Sucks (PT way back then) was devastating. I was quickly id’d as the person to avoid and to pray for because I was letting satan into my head. I was doubting. I was not working enough, I was not believing enough.
I quit, after telling my unit to read PT, make their own decisions, and decide what was best for them. I circumvented the MK return form by using the one on PT and surprised my senior with a huge hit in June the year I quit. Rumor has it she was really pissed. We have that in common.
So some 5 plus years out, I am still amazed at the women who fall for this crap. That’s what it is, it’s crap. The money is in recruiting and that is the entire focus. The product line is changed to make sure consultants order and the directors get their cut. I am appalled at the nsd’s who quote Scripture out of context as a way to justify their behavior. This twisting of “religion” and “God” and “spirituality” is morally corrupt and emotionally damaging.
To put the period on my sentences here… the woman who led my super special Bible study sessions did in fact become nsd. She did her 5 years and quit. I wonder how she sleeps at night. How do any of the “leaders” in MK sleep at night?
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Comments (15)
MLM Radar Detector
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If you do The Right Thing in the first place you need not fear the consequences. If your SD had not been knowingly frontloading inventory onto her downline, she need not have feared the consequences of an untimely product return. Sooner or later the predator-types get paid back in kind, and it’s not pretty. When you don’t stop to ask whether you’re doing The Right Thing, you invite Satan to make that choice for you.
Moving on…
One of the things that traditional businesses do in their accounting is set up allowances anticipating a variety of contingencies. Product returns, warranty claims, bad debts (bounced checks), and spoilage of inventory-on-hand are common. You know these things are going to happen, you use an educated guess to predict the rate, and you plan for it.
Our Mary Kay SDs encourage us to throw up a wall of “no negativity” and not think about such things. Allowing such thoughts into our minds will somehow attract the negative “vibes” and make bad outcomes a reality. “Can’t have that. I am successful because I only focus on being successful. I believe therefore I will be blessed.”
Yeah, right. That works until reality comes crashing through the door.
Smart businesses budget their finances around these bad things happening. There will always be inventory spoilage, product returns and bad checks. If they happen, our plan ensures we will still have money available to pay for essentials. If they don’t happen, everyone gets a bonus.
Now you tell me… Which is more positive? Planning that only the best will happen while living in constant secret fear? Or embracing the likely negative events and pre-planning how to deal with them, so that no matter what happens you can look forward to a good future? Tell me whether your house is built on sand, or built on good stone.
Doesn’t the bible tell us to help others? If we ignore the common sense God gave us to make things right today, and instead cast our entire fate into believing that tomorrow will be better, how can we be a reliable resource to help anyone else?
Is the glue holding your Mary Kay business together that of “I’ll keep my outlook positive because any moment now GOD WILL BLESS ME and things will get better”? If it is, stay away from slot machines. Casinos just LOVE people like you.
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raisinberry
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They were “blessed.” They were telling us how they got “blessed”. If we did what they did, then wouldn’t we also be “blessed”.
It has been difficult over the years, to explain to outsiders how exactly we all ended up loosing our minds. We had a vulnerability that was capitalized on, and exploited by, the Mary Kay cult-ure.
My last Seminar, i shared with my NSD that my “other” work was growing…and she declared that Satan was trying to derail/distract me off the goal of NSD. Using the chasing two rabbits metaphor, she labeled my God given talents as “demonic”…”satanic”, because they took me away from full blown NSD focus.
This is the world of Mary Kay…where women with a un-grounded education in business, simply parrot the information and ideas of the upline above them, passing themselves off as able and experienced when all they really are are skilled manipulators and frontloaders who build their organizations off the credit card debt of the newly recruited, and those coerced up the career path. It’s simple. It hasn’t changed. I check back in periodically to see if anything has been overhauled…and it hasn’t. The method remains the same, because the method works.
You are wooed in by those telling you your life is NOT as grand as theirs. They look for the weakness in your situation, and that’s exactly why you need Mary Kay. Once recruited, you are CONSTANTLY made aware that you have not achieved the next plateau and your laurels are soon wilted by your lack of goal setting. In Mary Kay you are in a constant state of comparison to the next woman. It is a contrived agitation that allows for complete distraction off of the reality of the situation in favor of the hype. You watch the dancers and the singers, and the stage walkers and the ribbon getters with your soul enthralled, and catch yourself smiling in awe…
Until it hits you. DId I ever want any of this?
Stay away from MK events for even two weeks and watch the hype slowly dissolve and the reality set in and you soon discover how manipulated and yes, controlled you were…and for those of us with spiritual longings, the abuse was even more severe.
“Satan” was distracting me away from the Mary Kay Career path? How likely would it be that a force for righteousness, calling itself “Love”, would want me to live lies of omission, and pretense, drawing others into the same world? How likely that “God” would be favorably attuned to false “profit levels” and ordering bait, and pretense on real results?
A life without transparency and authenticity isn’t a God centered life…but if you told the truth at every juncture in Mary Kay you’d HAVE no recruits or red jackets or team managers or DIQ’s.
The father of lies they call “him”. Kinda makes ya wonder who does the talking at Seminar.
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Deflated Pink Bubble
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Raisin, thank you for this. Kind of put everything in perspective for me.
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Philip Arlington
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Does anyone know how Mary Kay plays things in less religious countries? For example here in England, where religion is very much a minority interest that people tend to keep quiet about, or in their big growth market of China, which is also a very secularised country.
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exIBC78
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It wouldn’t surprise me that they felt they were part of a “Ministry” and that they push it as sharing the word of Jesus. Sadly there will be a lot of new Christians who think God is a greedy materialistic God.
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Mi Ki
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I think the point is that even though individual countries might seem more or less religious at any one time, that bit of human nature pushing us toward the spiritual, the numinous, is distributed throughout humanity. People may or may not go to churches etc to distribute love and kindness and goodwill, but many people like to go *somewhere* they feel they can make a difference beyond their own families. And this is something that can be exploited, both by unscrupulous churches and by unscrupulous organisations that hijack the emotions that kindly people might otherwise invest in their churches.
In Asia there is a great communal morality: honour your family, kin, village, ethnicity, country. Do not embarrass your brothers and sisters in front of guests. And in my mind this can be just as ripe for exploitation as the Western model of individualism. If a woman feels she would be letting her sisters down she will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent this. I tremble to think about the MLM mentality–one of the most unwelcome exports imaginable–hitting individual Chinese women like a tonne of bricks.
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oshunanat
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Can’t speak for Europe but if I had to guess that the Chinese consultants lean heavily on providing for your family- children are still the main support for ther elderly patients – so MK provides a way to guarantee you’ll have enough to take care of them.
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gotheart
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SuzyQ. Whew!
I am with ya on all of this.
Don’t even care to go to church either.
Too much like mk.
Simcerely,
gotheart
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Kristina
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That is sad, why let a “cult” keep you from what God really wants? Break from MK and seek God :O)
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Lazy Gardens
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It got to the point in my head that if I quit MK, I was also quitting God. This is a very potent manipulation technique: religious entanglement.
If the manipulators manage to subvert your religious beliefs and tangle them into their purposes, they have a double hold on you. Quitting becomes blasphemy, selling lipstick and recruiting becomes godly.
The Bible study was not about studying the Bible, it was about melding and merging the soon-to-be NSD’s business needs with the attendee’s religion for stronger control.
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mlank64
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“SuzyQ. Whew!
I am with ya on all of this.
Don’t even care to go to church either.
Too much like mk”
I feel the same way. I often wondered how many other faiths feel when they are in in the throws of these MK women who spout on and on about partnering with god. My recruiter was muslim and she just failed again for the 2nd or 3rd time at DIQ. Yet, she eats it all up. I never asked her when I was in MK if she ever felt uncomfortable during the meetings as a muslim woman. She didn’t wear the traditional garb but I knew she was muslim and my director knew and was not comfortable with that at all. I know this because when I went to career conference in 2011, i roomed with my recruiter and her mother. Her mother is also a devout muslim had to pray often during the day in our hotel room. It didn’t bother me at all as my feelings about religion is live and let live as long as you don’t try to cram your believes down my throat. However, my sd made a face when I told her about the praying. She asked if I felt uncomfortable. I told her no, and why should I. She has as much right to pray. So, funny that SD objects to the praying, but not the money she has made of my recruiter and her mom who at the time were her top “sellers”. You just have to sit back in amazement at these women.
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Mi Ki
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Yes, that’s another thing about the ‘spiritual’ aspect of a company like this–since it co-opts the tenets of one particular faith, it reinforces bigotry and exclusionism with respect to those of other denominations/faiths, the nonreligious, etc etc. If you want the blessing of the Mary Kay God you must cultivate even more disrespect for nonbelievers than you might have brought in with you–and then MK seeks to grow your disrespect for nonbelievers in MK as well.
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mlank64
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“Yes, that’s another thing about the ‘spiritual’ aspect of a company like this–since it co-opts the tenets of one particular faith, it reinforces bigotry and exclusionism with respect to those of other denominations/faiths, the nonreligious, etc etc. If you want the blessing of the Mary Kay God you must cultivate even more disrespect for nonbelievers than you might have brought in with you–and then MK seeks to grow your disrespect for nonbelievers in MK as well.”
This is one of the many reasons why I got out within 6 months of my short career in MK. I just couldn’t stand the religious disrespect/intolerance of different faiths or of those who didn’t align with any faith at all. Since they are in the business of recruiting anyone with a skin, you’d think they take that into consideration. Unless, the motive is to ‘save souls as well as recruit them into MK. I guess to them it’s the same thing.
On a slightly different note…did you realize Ambit Energy..another mlm uses the phrase “god first, family second, and ambit third. They are also based in texas and use alot of christian tenets to push on their recruits as well. I got the hell out of that too…felt like post traumatic stress when I saw that phrase.
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CJ
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I sell Mary Kay right now. I started out because the girl I met who is now my Director was so laid back and NEVER brought up MK. I thought that was a sign that maybe MK had changed its tactics. Boy, was I wrong.
And it is all I can do NOT to just shriek when I hear them misquoting the Bible. I kid you not, two weeks ago, we had a “Glamour Shots” party. I thought, “FINALLY, an MK party that will actually be fun.” Again, boy was I wrong. All that happened was that they crammed a bunch of MK nonsense and propoganda down my friends throat who came to get a “Glamour Shots” that ended up being a picture of her with MK makeup on that she had to put on herself. Oh, and they took the picture in the Director’s backyard. REAL glamorous, huh?
But the part that about unglued me was that the Director kept talking about God. Really? God? She even said (and I quote because this is EXACTLY what she said), “What does it say in the Bible that God gives us?” Dramatic pause. “Our fruits. That’s right. He gives us our fruits so we can go out and share them to enrich and empower others women’s lives.”
I am no theologian, but I can pretty much guarantee you that God gave us our “fruits” to glorify Him – not Mary Kay.
These women absolutely do worship Mary Kay – the woman and the company. God first, family second, career third? In whose Universe does ANY MK rep put these first?
Honestly, if I didn’t just LOVE the makeup, I would quit. However, between me, my mom, my boss and a couple of my friends, we love paying on a couple of bucks for eye shadows. So we make a $200 order every few months and then I pretty much hit IGNORE when that Director calls. Ridiculous.
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Kristina
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You are not saved at baptism…you are saved through Christ. I would submitt that God wants to be a part of every aspect of your life. Don’t let the brainwashing of MK keep you from what God would have for you. Study the Bible…infant baptisim is no where to be found. Salvation is a clear gift of God through Jesus that YOU CHOOSE to recieve. Baptisim always follows a confession of faith, and babies can not give a confession of faith in Christ. Study for yourself, you seem like a very smart woman :O)
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