Are Millionaire Gurus Helping or Hurting you?

This conversation is a reminder that success isn't about cold plunges, 4 a.m. wakeups, or copying someone else's blueprint. It's about knowing what you want, creating habits that support your real life, and defining success on your own terms.

If you've ever felt behind, stuck in comparison, or exhausted from chasing someone else's version of success, this episode is for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome back to We Lead Anyway. I'm Noelle, senior leader, career coach, and your host. Hey, how many of you listen to self-help millionaires? You follow their morning routines and frameworks, their five-step systems to the letter. You're up at 4 a.m. You've got your cold plunge. You've read seven pages of something. Your gratitude journal is perfectly filled out, and your vision board is color-coded and laminated. Now, how many of you are millionaires? Raise up hand. Yeah, I know. I know. Now, I'm not throwing shade at the gurus. I'm not saying that content isn't valuable. Some of it genuinely is. What I am saying is that we have a consumption problem, she says as she makes content to consume. I know, I get the irony. But listen, these experts, they did 9,012 things before they struck gold. Okay. They tried, they failed, they pivoted, they stumbled, they got lucky. And then, and only then did they look back and say, here's exactly how I did it. And listen, that's not criticism. That's actually how wisdom works. That's how I'm able to give advice too. I didn't just sit down one day and map out a perfectly executed plan to become a coach and a facilitator and a senior leader. I spent two decades of leading people pouring into them, watching what worked and what didn't. I lost people I love. I rebuilt myself from the ground up more than more than once. And eventually looked back and said, oh, oh, that's that's what that was all about. But here's the thing: we take their hindsight and we treat it like our roadmap. We consume their frameworks before we've ever stopped to ask what we actually want and why we're on this road. So we try to hold success in our hands before we know what success looks like for us. So then that gap between where you are and where they are, oh, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then you wonder, well, what am I doing wrong? This guy had $12 in his account when he started. But you're not doing anything wrong. But you are following someone else's directions to a destination that you haven't chosen yet. And that's that's exhausting. And that's why you're tired. That's why you do everything right and you still feel like you're behind because the finish line keeps moving. But that finish line wasn't yours. See, they chose what they did for a reason, with the resources and the circumstances that they had in front of them. Your circumstances may be totally different. And I know this intimately. I spent years consuming content, reading books, listening to podcasts, CDs, yes, CDs, I am that old. Sitting in trainings, all while feeling like everyone else had a secret that I didn't have, that I hadn't been given yet. And the part that just kicks me in the pants is that I was already leading, I was already coaching people just informally. I was getting results, but because my path didn't look like the path I kept seeing held up as the standard, I couldn't fully own what I had built. I was too busy measuring myself against someone else's highlight reel to really see my own movie. So what did my path look like? Well, the OGs know, but for the newbies, I built 25-year corporate career with a GED. I was a director-level leader before I ever had a degree. I got that last month. I'm black, I'm queer, I'm heavily tattooed, and every statistic said, yeah, you're not gonna make it. Corporate life probably isn't for you, but I did. I didn't follow someone else's five-step framework because I knew myself. I stayed curious, I kept showing up. And eventually, I stopped apologizing for the the way my path looked and started really trusting what I had built. And I mean, just stopped apologizing. And that's what I want for you. So I'm gonna give you a couple things to take with you. No, it's not my framework, but just some good old-fashioned advice. Okay. Number one, just get clear before you get busy. This sounds simple, but it's not simple. It's not, most of us have never actually sat still long enough to just answer the question. What do I actually want? Not what looks impressive, not what went viral on LinkedIn, or not what my parents wanted from me, or the industry. But what do you want for your life and career to actually feel like on any given Tuesday afternoon? I asked my coaching clients this question, and the room gets very quiet. Because we are so conditioned to chase metrics, the title, the salary, the followers, the corner office, that we never stop to ask whether those things will actually satisfy us when we get there. And some of you have gotten there. You have the title, you have the salary, and you're still sitting in my inbox at 11 p.m. wondering why you feel empty. That's not a hustle problem. That's a clarity problem. You're doing enough. But before you adopt anyone else's routine, anyone's framework or system, you have to know what you're building toward. Write it down. Not your goal or your vision. What does a life you don't want to escape from look like? What kind of work lights you up versus drains you? What do you need to feel like yourself? Start there. Everything else gets built on top of that foundation. Without it, you're just a very busy person, going nowhere in particular, very efficiently. I remember wanting to be a director so bad. I was like, once I get there, that's what I know. I've made it. That's how I'll know. And I worked so hard and I got there and I was like, it is ghetto here. What the crap is this? I knew too much. I saw too much. I actually got depressed. I thought I wanted the title and the salary, which were both nice. But what I really wanted is to feel validated and valued in what I know and what I do because I had imposter syndrome half the time. So it didn't matter. None of it mattered. So I had to work through that, but in order to do it, I had to get clear. What I realized is I should have done that first. And I'll tell you something else. Clarity is not a one-time event. Who I thought I wanted to be at 35 or 40 is not who I'm becoming at 50. The version of success that I was chasing in my 30s and 40s would have made me miserable by now. Getting clear is an ongoing practice. It's not a destination. Which leads me to point two. Number two is build a practice, not a performance. Here is what the self-help industrial complex tells you that discipline looks a certain way. The successful people, they all have this rigid morning routine, right? And if you replicate it, you just replicate that routine, you replicate the results. And so we perform discipline. We post our 4 a.m. alarm screenshot, right? We talk about our cold plunges, we perform productivity, and then we burn out. And then we feel like failures. And then we go by another course. Let me tell you what sustainable growth actually looks like. It is boring. It is boring and undramatic, and it does not make a good Instagram post. It is doing one small thing consistently in a way that fits your actual life over a long period of time. For me, it looked like having honest conversations with people every single day in every role I ever held. I showed up and I asked people real questions and I listened to their answers, and that was my practice. It was not glamorous. Nobody's going to be making a documentary about it on Netflix. But over 25 years, it built something that no framework could have manufactured. Never would have learned that. The habit that sticks is the one that fits you. Maybe that's 15 minutes of reflection in the morning. Maybe it's a walk outside without your phone. Maybe it's journaling. Whatever it is, it has to be yours. It's not borrowed or performed. It's yours. And here's the other piece. Rest is part of the practice. Stillness is part of the practice. You cannot pour from a place of chronic depletion. The gurus will not tell you that because rest does not sell courses. But I'm telling you, the most productive thing I have ever done for my career in coaching practice is learning when to stop. Learning how to recover, learning that my best thinking doesn't happen when I'm grinding. It happens when I give myself permission to just breathe. And I didn't learn that on my own. My spouse has really drilled that into my head and has to do it pretty much on a weekly basis. Build a practice, not a performance. I love long mornings with my coffee. Rest. All right, number three, I want you to close the gap by measuring against yourself, not them, whoever they may be. Okay, this one is the hardest because comparison is wired into us. It's a survival mechanism. And social media has weaponized it against us in ways that we're probably still reckoning with. But the truth is their chapter 20 is not your chapter two. And I mean that literally. The person you are comparing yourself to has context you can't see. They have a privilege that you might not have, or resources, or relationships, or timing. And frankly, luck that did not make it into their origin story. You're looking at a finished painting and you're comparing it to your blank canvas and you're asking yourself why you haven't created a masterpiece yet. I should not be where I am by every metric, every statistic, every assumption the society makes about a black queer woman with a GED and tattoos. Okay, I should not be here. But I stopped measuring myself against the standard and started measuring myself against my own last chapter. Yes, I was successful without the degree, without the network. But if I measured myself against somebody else, I would have misunderstood that I needed that degree to be successful, that I needed that in. I needed something else. So this can work both ways for someone. Don't measure yourself against anyone. I have to ask myself, am I further along than I was? Am I clearer than I was? Am I more myself? Am I helping more people than I was before? Those are the numbers that matter to me now. And when I graduated with my bachelor's at 50 years old last month, while planning my own wedding, while attending my daughter's wedding, while running a business and working a full-time director level job and moving and all of the things, I did not measure that moment against anyone else's timeline. I measured it against everything I had come from. And it was everything. And that is the metric that moves you forward. Not their follower account, not their revenue, not their morning routine. Just you. So here's what I'll say. You don't need the cold plunge. You don't need to be up before the sun. If that's you, great. But you don't have to do this to be successful. You don't need to buy a course or follow their framework or perform discipline for an audience that isn't even paying attention. What you need is to know what you want, build habits that serve your actual life, and stop consuming direction from someone, someone's path who isn't even adjacent to yours. And that's the work. Might not get you a million views, but it will get you somewhere real, somewhere that actually feels like yours when you arrive. And I'm not knocking it. I my channel is new. I settle for a hundred views just to know that I've reached someone. And listen, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this. Don't underestimate the power of luck in all this. Being in the right place in the right time, the right political climate, what the market is doing, the relationships you've built. I can sit here all day and give you a framework, but we don't hear from the millions of people who are waking up every day at 4 a.m. and journaling and doing yoga and still fail. Because where's the promise in that? But we can sit and talk and share successes and exchange ideas like we do here. And I want to make sure that you feel heard and seen and understood. Also, I think there's a real power in seeing someone who made it this far with no degree that looks like me, succeeding in a competitive corporate world, you know? So I say that to say, please like and subscribe to my channel. And if you have a topic you'd like me to discuss, email me at noelleadsanyway at gmail.com. And if you're interested in personal or professional development coaching, please visit leadwithnoelle.com. And until then, my friends, go take up space.