"Little Pink Soldier"

I am a consultant and I do love it. I do value the friendships, growing self-esteem, the great product, and the business. I am successful at this business (to the extent that I chose) and see even greater success in my future. However, that is not to say that my experience in Mary Kay has been easy or even my experiences in Mary Kay have always been ideal.

I have what is seemingly from the outside as a Great Director. We are one of the top units in our area and my NSD is featured monthly as one of the top five. I am a very driven person in everything that I do and I do not stop until I succeed. And in my experience, there are people that will always cut you down or slow you down in anything that you do.

However, I naively thought that this would not happen to me in Mary Kay. I found out that it does happen in Mary Kay and that it happened to me by my Director.

Every time I would get my momentum going with warm chattering (acquiring about 5-10 leads a day), my director would tell me that what I was doing was too hard. Basically, her lack of confidence in me would place enough self-doubt for me to stop. Then I would get moving again, only to be ignored because my production wasn’t high enough or I was not recruiting enough.

I would walk into my meetings week after week and see the wolves in sheep clothing. I would listen to the half truths and false recognition. People would go into DIQ and I would make a prediction as to when they would fall out. I knew these women personally and knew that they didn’t have the skills to go through DIQ. Some all had family and friends on their team or others couldn’t even talk to a stranger – let alone ask for their number. In one year, I recruited 5 - to have 1 send back her inventory, 1 not reactivate after a year, 1 not ever purchase an inventory and tell me she changed her mind and didn’t want to be in MK, another going 3rd month inactive, and the last to barely be active at this moment.

Later, my director took a client from me, right from underneath my nose and I WOKE UP! I realized that my director was not the woman I thought she was. Sure she had shaken up my self-esteem before, but to blatantly break a MK rule and steal a customer, especially from a team member. Is she serious? Well, she did and she’s been back peddling ever sense. I haven’t told anyone in my unit what happened and I don’t intend to. It’s not my place to tell. I, however, have reconnected with my recruits, the ones that are barely there, because I realized that I trustingly and lovingly placed them in her hands. Only to find out that she had been pressuring them to purchase inventory and now making my intentions of providing a money making opportunity for them sound not genuine.

Now, some may be thinking – See right! They are all swindlers and MK is a bad company! But what I wanted to say is that there are two ways of me handling this situation. A: I Quit! Say good riddens and do something else or B: I Keep working! Take control and be the best MK consultant I can be and one day the best director. 

I have chosen another approach…….

I have chosen to do B: I Keep Working! And I’m doing the best I ever have. I am booking and selling and it feels great. I’m paying for season tickets to pro-football games for me and my husband and its all MK money. That is a luxury I wouldn’t have had before this business. And now that I am making more money in Mary Kay and really doing good, my director has been placing more attention on me. I knew this would happen.

However, there is an amount of satisfaction knowing I did it, with just me and God, and she really has nothing to do with it. And it’s not just the money, but my customers that I love too. This past weekend I taught a woman how to do her makeup and she was so grateful because she did not have enough courage to ask someone to teach her before. Being the only friend to a woman that I met in a department store, with such low self-esteem that she depends on me to tell her she’s fabulous. I love customer service and making peoples day and that’s what I do.

There are bad people everywhere in this world and in every facet of life. However, the important thing is to not allow the bad people distract you and keep you from your dreams. Honestly, MK is the only opportunity I have to provide me the lifestyle I want to have. So, it is the opportunity of a lifetime for me. So, if you go to this site because you have been burned, but you still want to be a part of Mary Kay, then do it. Don’t let bad people keep you from doing what you want to do.

I still go to my meetings, but not for me, for my MK girlfriends. I tell the truth to them. When the director tells them – you don’t have to warm chatter – just book from bookings. I walk up to them afterwards and I say well “Booking from Bookings is the easiest way, but if you want to warm chatter effectively – here’s how you do it…” I have for a very long time now, been frustrated with the dirty little secrets of MK that director’s hold. But the best way to remedy these secrets is to dust them off and tell the truth. 

This is not a hard business. The hardest part is overcoming your fears – PERIOD. But if you don’t have anyone that acknowledges your fears and helps you through them, then a lack of self-esteem and the development of self-doubt will drag you down and out.

I think the biggest problem is that these directors are not qualified to teach women how to become better sales/networking women, they think you can heart and flower people to death and they will succeed. 

This is a business and I think that is often forgotten. Inventory is to be sold like any other retail establishment and does not do any one good if it’s bought once and never sold. 

Sorry, this was so long, but I want to show another side of Mary Kay. There are those of us who are aware of the discrepancies and the bad directors and consultants. And for me, I think the best way for me to beat them is to join them. And to help the consultants that need my help and become a director to lead other women to success with this opportunity. But to really lead, not just be a cheerleader, to teach women how to genuinely run an honest business with Mary Kay. I’m a little pink soldier. Remember, another option of fleeing, is joining the cause and making a difference.