Grifter

Grifter. Crazy. Gone.

I have a friend who lost her mind. Literally. Her business went south and she lost all her money and way to make an income and it broke her. She’s broken.

It was a long slow slide from someone with so much promise. Talent. An eye.

And, she was always a little suspect. I met her after the glory days. I met her once she had already fallen and was hustling. I didn’t see it in real time. I thought she was still on top of her game because I came from a different industry, a different work ethic, a different way to judge accountability.

I thought she was on fire. I felt happy to be in her orbit, I needed to feel important and she did a good job of putting you in the center of the picture. Until she didn’t.

I didn’t know the term grifter until after she had already taken money from me and let me down. I didn’t realize the elaborate lengths she would go to to keep the image alive.

I’m a hustler by nature, trying to sell my ideas to the world in the form of words, support, help, tools that can make you better. Not only am I a teacher and a coach, I’m an actual trained coach—life coach—a made up industry to help others with their troubles. My crew and I, we studied for a year and did practice sessions and certifications. I spent a lot of time and money to be a coach and there are others out there that just claim coach with out any training. Which is fine, maybe there are people that need that as well. The people in my orbit though are trained, highly trained, skilled, practiced and in that world, you have to hustle for clients.

We set up websites and pay plans, we offer free sessions and group coaching, we talk to each other and coach each other to practice and to get better at our craft. We hustle. Which is different from grifting. Grifting is where you trade on your charm to manipulate people out of their money without giving them what they expected in return. There are a lot of grifters in the life coaching world—they say—pay me $5000 and you’ll get a bigger client list, a load of people opting in to your program, your retreat, your whatever and they do it in a way that makes you feel like everyone is doing it and if you don’t you are missing out. So you try it once, maybe twice and realize it is a scam. The beauty of doing your training with a team of humans is that hopefully only one of you has to be scammed for the rest to learn the lesson.

Coaching is not regulated but there are people and industries trying to regulate it or at least put standards to the work. Our program was recognized by the ICF (International Coaching Federation) and we follow their ethics and competencies. There are many training organizations that fall under ICF and many that do not.

Coaching is not the story here, just the background. I’m trained by an industry leading ICF-accredited coach training program. And as part of my work I also saw myself as a soloprenuer—an entrepreneur going out alone. So I needed to network. Well, as you can imagine, networking in an unregulated space can be an interesting endeavor.

I went to ICF local events but that was just coaches talking to coaches and no clients. I then thought going to local women’s events may be the answer. I found a conference that was coming to Phoenix and I jumped at the chance to attend.

It was called Unstoppable and Glennon Doyle was going to be a featured speaker along with a lot of other people I had heard of or knew about but Glennon was the draw. I signed up, I had Tim drop me off and I entered into a very well organized, well planned, beautiful 2 day event. The food, the venue, the decorations, the vibe all hit. The speakers were polished and good. I sat down and chatted with a few women around me and danced when the fun music came on. The first day I talked to a fellow ASU alumni during a break and by the afternoon I was befriended by a lovely woman from Canada. On the second day, we set out for lunch and talked so much we missed a speaker but that was okay because we were making connections, and I love a connection.

Around the table was a independent business owner running a highly successful Medspa in Scottsdale, a independent contractor working in the aerospace industry in the midwest, a leader of a non profit that supports single moms in Canada, and me—a school principal working and writing for a non profit focused on ending loneliness but trying to find her own way to independent work. Not only was the lunch lovely but we became friends.

But this isn’t the story either.

The story is about grifters and there were grifters in that space. There were real humans doing real work and there were people trying to get them to part with their money. Social media hollow shells that you could follow and pay and get closer to the action but never really anything more. People with huge followings. And real life success stories. It was confusing to me because I didn’t know about grifting before this conference.

I knew that some of it felt weird like really—do they make money? Do they help you make money? How are they making money? One of my favorites was the book medium—she would sit with you and help you publish your book by manifesting it with you. Wait. What? You could pay her $10,000 and your book would appear? Sign me the fuck up right now. I don’t have to sit and toil for a year, I can pay and you will publish me. YES. No. Wait. That can’t be real. It isn’t real is it?

Or the one that couldn’t speak on stage without making eye contact with her husband in the wings. It was weird, my dudes, really weird.

And there were some really good, quality humans sharing really good quality content and ideas. Well respected, good humans. Truly good. Not grifters. But for some reason I’m am a magnet for the weird and wild so I introduced myself to one of the speakers who turns out was the biggest grifter of them all.

We shared a birthday so I thought, what a great opportunity to meet someone and I introduced myself. We became friends and would start a conversation that led to her offering me a spot on a retreat she was putting on in England—because we met in such a great way, she would gift the registration to me and I only had to pay half and travel. I was hooked and I was on my way to Europe. Over time I learned that we had a group of friends in common and I thought that was a sign from God that I was with the right person. But alas, some of the biggest grifters in the world today are the true believers and the ones connected by God, but at the time I had no idea this was a thing.

It is a thing. And, I also don’t think they think they are grifters. I think they might be grifting themselves. Because grifting is really just convincing yourself that the hustle is real and necessary and a part of it all.

From my vantage point there are a lot of women in the world trying to do the right thing. They are trying to be the stay at home beige moms that instagram rewards but they also want to make enough money so they can buy the beige things. They set out to do something to fill in the gap between their husbands income and all the things so they start a business and they want to grow it so they sell to their friends and their friends sell to them and it feels like money is coming in and then they get a few real clients and some follows on the socials and there is momentum. In the early stages, it worked, you got free stuff, lots of follows and there was some legitimate work going on behind the scenes.

In my bubble a lot of these women were photographers. They had an eye, beautiful images emerged and the market was hot so they made a lot of money all of a sudden being photographers. And some were really good and could build a business out of it and some were less good at saving their money and creating an infrastructure that would support their new lifestyle. Some “retired” their husbands—that is a whole other story—and some became coaches because just being a photographer was no longer what they wanted to do. NOW, do not get me wrong, there are amazing qualified reputable photographers that also coach everything from photography to business, to writing and entrepreneurship and I can help you determine which ones those are, but there are some that are not.

So, my story goes like this. I met a woman who shared a birthday with me and I traveled with her for a summer going to retreats in beautiful places while I wrote, she took pictures and coached others in how to take pictures, but all the while everything was crumbling behind her facade. She had been a world renowned photographer. And covid hit and the bottom dropped out. She took what she knew to try to rebuild and it became a shell game, take the registrations from this event and pay for that one, move this money from one account to another, delay payments, create excuses and hope that eventually the water spout would open again. Meanwhile she got sick. Her sickness would morph during the telling of it so I’m not sure what is real and what is part of the grift, but she wasn’t well. But I also know what stress can do to a person. She claimed allergies, lupus, Ms, brain tumors, she claimed bad investments and people not honoring their deals, she claimed greed and disloyalty, but she never owned her missteps. She just kept asking for money and because she could make things look pretty, people kept paying. She couldn’t catch up though and I watched as it all fell around her. I think the lying became the thing that broke her because she couldn’t remember who she said what to. I can’t imagine the conversations at home, her husband had to find work and her children who knows.

But before I could see the crumbling was the orbit that she created. A perfect, beautiful retreat in the Cotswolds, with daily treats and incredible meals, travel, pictures, models, but with small cracks starting to show, a credit card that wouldn’t work, a change in plans. A request for help—while I was writing, she would be taking pictures and then talk about how she wanted to create retreats for more people like me that didn’t want to take pictures but wanted the solitude of travel. Should we stay longer and make a plan. YES! We should. Your experience, my vision, let’s do it. We got a hotel in London and saw the sights and planned a new company, we designed a logo and visited Buckingham Palace. We brought on a partner and pooled our resources, we mapped out an entire plan.

I’d meet her in Nantucket and we could keep planning while she ran another retreat.

The weather was rough and travel was hard. I got stuck in DC for the night and spent a day watching Marine One practice their landings at the White House and finally made my way to the island. When I arrived it was a smaller group than expected but with a magazine in tow so she could share how she did that kind of photography. The magazine paid for things. We shared a room. I was to help carry her bag as my payment for the trip. And then I tripped, I hit my face on a fence and there was blood and a concussion and I had to stay in bed for the day. My focus shifted and when I came to I saw different things. Her credit card wasn’t working at all. We were staying far out of town, we had to walk to everything, there was no plan, she had the others paying for their own food and she would reimburse, she sent them off to do their own thing, a lot. They had to ask for her to take photographs, they clumped together as a three and all of a sudden I could see that they felt swindled.

She wanted to talk business—trips to Paris and our new adventure. But also could I spot her a couple thousand.

It wasn’t until much later that I googled her and found out that for years people were concerned about her decline and her grifting. Her robbing Peter to pay Paul. But photography is an interesting community—it is all reputation and relationships so you don’t say too much, you don’t go too far. I wondered why the people that ran in the same circles with her never said anything to me about their concerns, but from where I sit now, years out from the events, balance sheets budgeted. They were hustling just as much and if you called out someone else wouldn’t that expose you, too?

I noticed that one of her brands followed me on social media this week. And I thought I hope she’s well. The current story is that she has an inoperable brain tumor. Maybe. I’m not sure I should be hoping that for someone but it might explain things. I also hope not, I hope it is all a part of the story she has concocted and that her health is really not as bad as she portrays it to the world. I hope that her miracle arrives and she’s healed. Her pictures are incredible and her eye is unique. She has incredible ideas and is a great generator of possibilities. She is all con man in pretty dresses, 100% grifter. She is sweet and stuck. She is sick. She has lost her mind. And all of us are collateral damage because the person she really hurt was herself.

That’s the story. We are only open to grifters because of the brokenness in us. We are searching to be seen, to make a buck, to have our big chance and we will do almost anything to get it. They are the mirrors in our society, for it to work we have to notice our flaws. We have to know where we come up short and when we look in a mirror and we see magic we need to recognize that maybe the mirror is not reflecting back the reality of our situation.

I still go to conferences that market to women entrepreneurs. I still want them all to be legitimate and real. I am still friends with that crazy Canadian non profit leader that befriended me at Unstoppable. I still hustle to build my brand and I am still a coach. But I’m also a professor, a writer, a doctoral student and a mom and a wife. I podcast and host retreats. I create content and sell merch. And I’m always on the lookout for people that are grifting, swindling, not giving you what they promise. I habitually overdeliver to ward off the worry of feeling like I might be part of the problem.

We live in crazy times where people say and do a lot of crazy things. We are all being conned every day, are we paying attention?

I don’t have any ill will towards her because I got what I paid for. Maybe not in real time but over time. I connected with even better people. One thing led to another and the real quality humans that I discovered that led from the trail I started down when I met her have changed my life.

And really aren’t we all just trying to be charming to get others to like us, isn’t this whole connection thing about figuring out our approach to get others in our orbit. So, yes, be careful, but also be forgiving. We are all just doing the best we can while the world takes its toll on us.