When Thelma and Louise aka Maria and Carina went to America ...
to learn about online courses and getting rich but ended up in something completely different (part 2).
I have a certain fondness for syncronicities and see them as something that happens when you open up yourself to opportunities. Some might call it magic, others the universe conspiring to support you. Shakespeare, I think, were talking or rather writing about the spheres and how we shall not mess with them. OK, now I am not going in the direction I intended.
A couple of weeks ago I started writing my two-part (or maybe it will morph into several parts) series on what happened twelve years ago when my bestie Maria and I went to the U.S. to take part in the “Rock Your Prosperity” event in Boulder, Colorado.
You can read the first part and get a feeling about the context here:
Did I really write Boulder? Maybe beacuse that was the original venue for the event. It eventually took place in Denver, Colorado at a very fancy four star hotel. At that time the fanciest I´ve ever been to. But hey, we are not there yet.
When my family, consisting of me, my husband and our almost teenage daughter out of necessity bought a bigger apartment so that our daughter finally could get a room of her own, we did not know that right at that very moment there was a huge housing bubble bursting in the U.S.
We bought the new bigger home when house pricing was peaking in may 2008. Then everything crashed and suddenly no one wanted to buy our old lovely 1920 apartment. We ended up with a huge mortgage with no extra money to renovate the kitchen which now had no stove and no oven, concrete floor and severly ugly cupboards.
We did get to fix the bathroom (thanks to a water damage in the building) and change some of the floors (the bedrooms still have the old 1988 floors). It´s during this time that we also chose to paint the WC lime green instead of putting ceramic tiles on the walls.
A year later my husband got fired from his job, but luckily at the same time we finally got a buyer for the old apartment, albeit for a muuuch lower price than we had hoped for. I am still paying for that mortgage 14 years later, and will probably do so until I retire (almost wrote until I die).
Just for the record, I love my home and hope to be able to live here as long as possible. Paying mortgage is just part of the game if you want to buy your home instead of renting it. Unless you have the possibility to pay in cash of course.
If you wonder what on earth all this has to do with Thelma and Louise going to America and that Rock Your Prosperity event I mentioned. Well, the answer to that is - everything.
We were in such a financial distress during those first years in our new home, that we had to borrow money from friends, max out credit cards, pay only half of the monthly fees for the mortgage and what not.
And this was the reason why my eyes started to wander on the internet to how I could find ways to be rich. And that is how I eventually two years later found the Prosperity Tribe online course. Because syncronicities you know, or maybe the I´ll rub your back and you rub mine mentality that seemed to be part of the entrepreneurial scene.
In part one I wrote about how I after I had finished my one year life coaching diploma stumbled upon a lot of mainly American personal development entrepreneurs preaching the Law of Attraction. These people promoted each other and if I would go through my cabinet of broken dreams (my 60 notebooks from those webinars) I could probably be able to trace the exact line from the first person I listened to up to the last one.
This is a classic case of one thing leading to another beacause thanks to all of these webinars with all of these people, I then signed up for the Prosperity Tribe. Until then I had mainly consumed hours and hours of free material. But something about this ‘everything is energy’ and ‘your thoughts create your reality’ gave me a glimmer of hope that my outer circumstances could change if I just wanted to and did all the inner work as well as action steps required (as in bying people´s online courses on how to be rich).
The Prosperity Tribe was a community online course where we gathered on one of the platforms trending during 2010-2012 (Ning?). Writing posts, doing home work, sharing hopes and dreams and aha’s from the teaching. Meeting people from almost all of the world. The teaching consisted of webinars with energy meditations and discussions mainly lead by the couple who had created the course.
During one of those webinars the couple shared that the grande finale of the course would be a big event in Boulder, Colorado called “Rock Your Prosperity”. They were so convincing in selling the event and framing it as an opportunity that you would not want to miss out on, that I caved and decided to join. You were only to pay a depository of 300 dollars which you would get back upon arriving at the event. Which really sounded as a good deal.
But I had never been to the U.S. and did not want to go there alone. Now it was my turn to first get my husband and daughter on board to agree that this was indeed an opportunity of a life time for me. That they would both support me and be ok handling our two kittens while I was away.
Then it was time for me to turn on a sales campaign to get my bestie Maria to join me. I made her an offer she could not refuse and the wheels were in motion. I started to feel unstoppable. Of course we would find the means to be able to afford the travel, of course we would be able to afford the living costs for nine days. And we did.
A combination of the vibe of the Prosperity Tribe course, the successful sales tactics paired with my curiosity and a ‘je ne sais quoi’ amounted to a growing sense of confidence. This combined with asking people for help, being bold, did I say confidence and opening up to all kind of opportunities led us to formulating such a stellar application to our university that we got a grant to cover some of the travel expenses.
The stocks I had inherited from my dad and that had been almost worthless during 2008-2009 had started climbing and I was able to sell part of them for a small profit that pretty much covered the rest of the expenses.
Maria had a cousin in Brooklyn that she had never met. We got to stay at their place for two days which meant that we had one day in New York before boarding the plane to Denver as well as having the opportunity to get to know this lovely generous family.
In Denver we shared the big fancy hotel room with another participant from the Prosperity tribe. A woman we had a date with in New York at Barnes & Noble because I had promised to buy a t-shirt from her and needed to check if the size was right before hooking up in Denver a couple of days later.
The Rock Your Prosperity was advertised to us as a possibility to learn more about creating online courses but using different technology and tactics than the expertise we had at our university where we had created online courses since 1999. This was the angle I sold to our university and why we got the grant.
So what did we end up with at that three day event in Denver (not Boulder), Colorado in april 2012?
Not a single word about online courses, but we did get a brown binder that I still have somewhere. A lot of EFT-tapping, a lot of WOO HOO’s, a lot of dollar notes falling down from the sky, a lot of lovely people that we befriended and went out for drinks and beer with, and several stories from people with horrible experiences trying to find their ground again by creating businesses.
And learning the vast difference of living in a neo-liberal society where it is up to you as an individual to fix any wrong doings and then doing that by starting a business. Compared to living in a welfare state where you pay higher taxes but where there is some kind of safety net if everything falls apart. Or at least there used to be…
I still remeber how affronted I felt when one woman at the event who had also been part of the Prosperity Tribe, said something a long the line of “Ahh, so you are from a socialist country” when I told her we were from Finland. Finland has been many things, but a socialist country? No.
Many years later I wrote a very critical article about this neo-liberalistic, highly individualized view, inspired by both Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die book as well as the experiences from the Rock Your Prosperity event paired with a disillusion with all these female entrepreneurs who seemed to be totally blind to systemic and structural obstacles as well as their own privileges.
I rewrote the article a year ago for a magazine published by my former student organization. The gist of the article (s) as well as the facebook memory that popped up in my feed about a month ago, was what sparked me into writing this article for Substack.
There is so much more to say, but I´ll leave it for another post. May it be part three or an article on it´s own.