Late one evening, scrolling through my feed after a long day of editing, I counted how many posts in a row promised me a different life. A woman in a white linen shirt standing beside a pool, telling me she had made six figures in ninety days. A screenshot of a bank balance with a caption about freedom. A client testimonial announcing that she had tripled her income in a single month after one programme. By the time I put my phone down, I had been offered wealth, ease and escape at least a dozen times, and not one of those posts had mentioned what it would actually take to get there.
I understand why they work, and I want to be honest about that before anything else. When someone shares how much money they made, or how much their clients made, they are not selling a method. They are selling the outcome every tired, ambitious woman secretly longs for. The woman watching does not picture the work. She pictures herself on the other side of it, finally breathing out, finally proven right, finally free. Nobody wants to hear about the commitment, the consistency, the sleepless nights, the books you need to read or the processes you have to move through. They buy the result, and they buy the feeling the result promises, and very often they make that decision in a single emotional moment.
Brian Tracy, who has spent decades teaching the psychology of selling, built much of his work on this truth: customers buy solutions, not products. They do not care about your company, your background or even what you are selling. They care about what is in it for them, the change, the improvement, the transformation. Their decision is shaped far less by where they have been than by what they anticipate will happen to them next. A woman buys the future she can already see herself living in.
That is simply how human beings choose. We decide with the heart and explain it later with the head. There is nothing wrong with speaking to desire. What troubles me is what happens when desire is sold without the truth standing beside it.
And this is not only about coaches or online courses. The same promise is sold through business programmes and wellness retreats, beauty treatments and investment schemes, mentorships, masterminds and miracle routines. If you are a woman who has bought into any of them, perhaps more than once, and you are now sitting with the painful question of why it worked for everyone except you, I am writing this for you. What you experienced was not a personal failing. It was part of a system, one that was designed long before you ever saw that post, and it has been teaching women to question their own worth for far too long.
The Bill That Arrives Later
The price of the programme is the smallest cost a woman pays. The real bill arrives months afterwards, and it is never itemised on the sales page.
First there is the money. Sometimes it is savings that were meant for something else, sometimes it is a credit card she has not mentioned to her partner, sometimes it is a payment plan she keeps up long after she has stopped believing in what she bought. Then there is the time, which is harder to measure but just as precious: the weeks and months she spent waiting for her life to change, rearranging her energy around a promise, postponing other decisions because this one was supposed to be the answer.
And then there is the cost nobody talks about, the one that lands in her body and her mind. When the shortcut does not deliver, very few women blame the shortcut. They blame themselves. They look at the glowing testimonials and conclude that it worked for everyone except them, that they must be lazy, or not clever enough, or simply not the kind of woman who succeeds. I have sat across from brilliant, capable women who carried that conclusion for years without saying it out loud to anyone. Their anxiety grew, their sleep suffered, and the voice inside them that once said you can do this slowly became who do you think you are.
That is the true price of disappointment. It does not only take her money and her time. It takes her trust in herself, and that is far harder to earn back than any refund.
Why We Reach for the Shortcut
I do not believe the women who buy these promises are foolish. I believe they are tired. Most of them have been holding everything together for a very long time, carrying careers, children, households and other people’s expectations, and somewhere along the way they began to wonder whether this is all there is. When you are exhausted, a shortcut does not look like a risk. It looks like mercy.
There is comparison too, which social media feeds with relentless precision. We see the result of someone else’s life without seeing the years beneath it, and we measure our ordinary Tuesday against their most polished moment. Hope does the rest. Hope is a beautiful thing, but when it is handed to someone who profits from it, hope can become the very thing that keeps a woman stuck, always waiting for the next course, the next mentor, the next breakthrough that will finally make her feel enough.
I know this pattern from the inside. Before I ever sat in an editor’s chair, I spent years building a fashion house with my own hands, and there were seasons when I would have given anything for someone to tell me there was an easier way. There was no easier way. There was learning, failing, starting again and slowly becoming a woman I could trust. Nobody could sell me that. I had to live it.
A Different Way to Sell
The way most of us were taught to sell was built on conquest. Create urgency, press on the pain, overcome every objection, close before she has time to think. It is a way of selling often described as masculine, and I use that word not to blame men but to name an energy: pressure over presence, winning over truth, the deal over the human being on the other side of it. Many of us learned it because it was the only model we were shown, and many of us have been on the receiving end of it far more often than we realise.
I want to invite us to sell our way. Our way holds emotion and truth in one hand. It speaks boldly to the outcome, because women deserve to know what is possible for them, and it describes that future with all the colour and conviction it deserves. Then, in the same breath, it tells her honestly what it will ask of her: the commitment, the consistency, the uncomfortable growth, the seasons when nothing seems to move. It says here is what is real, here is what it takes, and here is what becomes possible for you when you do it.
Selling this way means accepting that some women will decide not to buy, and some will cancel once they understand the work involved. I have made peace with that, because a woman who says no with clear eyes has been respected, and a woman who says yes with clear eyes arrives ready to change. What we lose in sales we gain in trust, and trust is the only currency that keeps growing. It also means the numbers we share must be real. In the UK, income and earnings claims in advertising are expected to be truthful, evidenced and representative of what most people achieve, but I would hold to that standard even if no one asked me to, because every figure we post lands in the heart of a woman who is deciding whether to believe us.
Underneath the money, there is almost always a deeper outcome she is reaching for. When a woman tells me she wants to earn more, what she often means is that she wants to stop doubting herself, to be taken seriously, to walk into a room full of people she admires and feel that she belongs there. I have lived that journey myself, from watching industry figures from the back row with sweaty palms to sitting down to dinner with them as peers. That transformation is a result too, it is true, and it is one nobody can fake with a screenshot.
This Is Bigger Than Business
I do not believe this stops at our bank balances. When people are told, over and over, that their worth is measured by what they earn and how quickly they arrive, those who do not arrive begin to feel that they are worth less. Somewhere along the way, I believe, human life itself has started to feel cheaper, as if a person only matters once they can show the result.
In England and Wales, the Office for National Statistics recorded 6,190 deaths by suicide in 2024, a rate similar to the year before and among the highest seen in more than two decades, and for many years around three in every four of those lost have been men. Suicide is complex and never has a single cause, and I would never lay that grief at the door of one sales page. But I do believe we have built a culture that keeps telling human beings they are not enough unless they have the outcome, and that the same pressure-driven way of selling and living has been wounding men just as surely as it has wounded us. This is not about women against men. It is about pressure against presence, and all of us deserve presence.
If anything in these words touches something painful for you or someone you love, please reach out. Samaritans are there day and night, free, on 116 123.
You Were Never the Problem
If you are reading this as a woman who has bought the shortcut, and perhaps more than once, I want you to hear this clearly. You were never the problem. The promise was. You did not fail because you were not good enough. You were sold a version of the journey that left out the part where you grow, and growth was always going to be the part that mattered most.
There is no shortcut to becoming a woman you trust. There is only the decision to stop handing your power to people who profit from your hope, and to begin investing in work that tells you the truth. That decision may feel slower at first. It is also the only one that leaves you more yourself on the other side.
And if you are the one selling, whether a service, a product or your own story, I invite you to sell our way, with emotion and truth held in one hand. Speak to her longing, show her what is possible, and then respect her enough to be honest about the road. What you cultivate within becomes what you give to the world, and honesty is one of the most generous things we can give.
Elif Köse, Founder and Editor, Confidence Magazine