I spent the last three days participating in a virtual “bootcamp” designed to teach me how to offer high-ticket coaching groups.

I am not new to this world.

I enrolled in a high-ticket mastermind in 2009, was hired as the supporting coach for my coach’s next group in the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010. And I offered my own mastermind group in 2010, though at $8,000 for the year, it was not exactly in the league of the going rates of $25,000, $40,000 a year or more.

When I first stepped into this world of high-end offers, and high-ticket masterminds, it was a giddy experience. I had plugged away for 11 years and built a nice, solid private practice including private clients and small group trainings. I had developed rock solid content and an original approach to messaging that was a welcome antidote to the traditional marketing messaging. I knew what I was offering, but I had no idea how to jump from $75,000 and into six figures (funny now, it seems like such a small step).

Like the good student I was, I bought into the high-end mastermind mystique. Staying at luxury hotels for our in-person retreats. Bonding with the other group members as we dreamed bigger and bigger about who we could be and what we could create. Expanding my sense of possibility. I watched my group mentor sell over a million from the stage in one afternoon at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

I imagined becoming like the women in this world. Thin and beautifully groomed. Shining on stage. Sharing their voices. Wanting people to be look up to me. Imagining how good it would feel if more people invested in me at those high levels.

I went full in. I raised the price of my introductory course, and gave everyone a short window to buy at the old price, telling them it was the last one I would be offering. I offered a six-month mastermind to my favorite private clients. I turned my four-week introductory course into an information product (remember those?) and launched that. I planned a live three-day event where I proudly offered my $8,000 mastermind.

I did end breaking six figures ($137,000 to be exact).

Some of what I did was hugely successful. But a lot of it wasn’t.

I made the most I had ever made from my introductory course, but the info product bombed, selling only five copies. I got six people for my six-month mastermind, but I struggled to sell spots in my live event, and ended up with nine people, including the people I’d comped from my six-month group and others who came in on a bring-a-friend ticket. We were a tiny pod in the huge ballroom I had rented.

I would have lost my shirt except I had the good fortune of having signed a contract with the hotel where I paid per person, with no minimum, instead of a flat fee for the conference room and for the meals they provided.

That fall, I was calling regularly to check my credit card balances to see if I had enough to pay for things as small as my airport shuttle.

But the live event helped me get five people into my year-long mastermind group, and I was okay.

I spent 2009 and some of 2010 traveling once a month or more, barely spending time with my eight-year old son. I was spending big on event tickets, and travel and lodging, and buying info products to help me learn to sell from the stage or charge what I was worth. I just knew that everything I spent would come back to me in greater revenue and greater success.

Many of the folks in the mastermind I was a member of ended the year disappointed, never having gotten clear enough on what they were offering to put together new programs of their own.

In January of 2010, the members of the mastermind I was the support coach for revolted and all but the two who had paid in full quit.

I loved the folks in my own mastermind group, and offered them my insights on how they could position themselves and what they could offer. What their powerful message could be. But somehow they weren’t able to get off the ground and launch their own offers and make the kind of better money I had implied they would.

I was exhausted and financially stretched. Despite having nearly doubled by income, I had tanked my profitability with all this optimistic spending on products and programs I didn’t even have the bandwidth to implement well.

Not only that, I had made most of my money with offers I didn’t want to continue offering. I didn’t have a sustainable business model. Fortunately, I love creating programs, offered a few new ones, and finally came back to the training I’d been offering before that was at the heart of my work.

By mid-2010, the bubble had burst for me.

I realized this world of high-ticket offer was a fairyland.

An illusory world where everything spins faster and faster and everyone reassures themselves and each other that it’s totally normal to charge $1000 an hour, if you can get it. That you’re doing people a favor by inviting them to take on credit card debt or take a mortgage on their homes in order to seize the opportunity to be part of the dazzling group you are assembling and work with you as their mentor. To live in a world where you don’t ask “what is the track record of this program?” or “what percent of people in your program get that result?”

Where skepticism is a sign of having a poor mindset or poverty mentality.

Where you hear glowing testimonials from the people who’ve succeeded, but you don’t ever get to hear from those who didn’t. Or know the proportions of each.

Where you don’t test and refine your programs, you build them while you offer them and hope they work out.

Where you have to keep up appearances because part of what you are selling is the fantasy of how great your life is.

It finally dawned on me that this wasn’t a world that reflected my values.

Those beautiful ladies on stage? They weren’t my role models. I heard more and more stories about the ugliness behind the pretty pictures. The failures. The anger. The burnout. This was no longer what I aspired to be.

I started to look for mentors who sold with less ick. Who valued creativity and originality and treated those who didn’t invest in their high-end programs with as much care and respect as those who did. Business owners who talked about humility, something I didn’t see much of in that high-ticket world. Who talked about the risk of charging more and not finding the clients you needed to fill your practice.

I slowed down.

I let go of trying to be a shiny lady on stage and focused instead on doing my best work in my small training and coaching groups. On doing my best work with my clients.

I had to put down so much of what I was taught in all those live events and information products so I could find my way to be in the world with integrity. So I could feel good about the work I did and about how I engaged with people before, during, or after they bought from me.

And it’s still taken me years to let go of some of the embedded values of that world: the exhausting, relentless pursuit of personal wealth, the urgency to produce and the urgency pushed on potential clients to buy, the worship of who makes the most money, the demand for more and more productivity. The insistence on monetizing anything and everything at your disposal. The refusal to look at collective or community impact.

As many of you know, life also gave me a lot of other things to focus on instead: my mom’s health, my son’s health, my own health. So I had a lot of time to reflect and almost no capacity to do much beyond serve my beloved private clients once I stopped leading groups.

I was drawn to this week’s virtual bootcamp because the promise was a new way to do a high-ticket group, one that created true connection and community. That was something I could get behind.

During the virtual bootcamp, I worked with one of the volunteer coaches on the pitch for a potential high-ticket program I might offer. I shared “I am starting an intimate group of fierce women coaches and consultants 45 and up, who are ready to ditch colonialist and capitalist values so they can step into being powerful, original thought leaders and share their voice with greater impact and reward.”

Guess which part of the pitch she didn’t like?

Yeah, she said I lost her at the “ditching of colonialist and capitalist values” and that I should just take that out.

But the truth is THAT is what I think liberates us to create our True work in the world. To do our Life’s Work in a nourishing and sustainable way. To be brave enough to reject models and systems that don’t work for us and don’t reflect our values.

And it’s hard because in that world it can feel like what they are teaching is the only way to succeed.

But it’s not.

You can make money in innovative ways with integrity.

I promise you.

To be continued . . .