The oils found you

Last week a team leader sent me a voice message. Her team works hard, she said, honestly: they post, they share, they comment, all day long. But nobody dares to go out there. Nobody speaks to anyone. "Could you talk to them?"

I think every team knows this one. Online, everything works. In real life, with a real person, it stalls. And here’s the odd thing: it isn’t courage. The same women who won’t speak to a stranger will happily put up a post that hundreds of people see.

I think it sits somewhere else. Whoever doesn’t dare hasn’t yet answered one question: why me? Who am I to say anything about this? As long as that question is open, every conversation feels like a part you’re playing. And you’d rather not act when someone’s watching.

The answer to that question isn’t a trick, and it isn’t a line you learn by heart. It’s your lōve story.

The oils found you

Mine is Balance. In the book I tell you about the chair I didn’t want to sit in and the bottle that opened. What I don’t tell you there is what happened inside me afterwards. It was as if that aroma crept into me and set me down, from the inside, in my own life. As if I was looking out of my own eyes for the first time. For years I’d been cramming my days, working through tasks, going with the flow, and on that chair I thought for the first time: life is here to be enjoyed. I’m allowed to make it my own. I’m allowed to create my own flow and follow my own direction from now on.

I sometimes put it like this: the oils found me. As if they’d asked me to help. That’s how it felt, and it still feels that way. Without people like you and me, these oils go nowhere; they sit in a warehouse, waiting. We’re the ones who bring them into people’s homes.

Where "I" became "we"

And still, that wasn’t enough to get me out there. That only came at the first real doTERRA event in the Netherlands. I sat in a hall full of people who’d been through the same thing as me, each with a different product. I met people from doTERRA itself. Diamond Club came up, and I thought: that’s cool, I want to be able to do that. You had to be Premier for it. Fine, then I’ll become Premier.

That was the moment. I hadn’t suddenly become brave; I suddenly belonged somewhere. doTERRA says it in four words: We help the world heal. At that event I understood I’m a piece of that, in my own way, with my own story. Once you know where you belong, you don’t have to convince anyone. You just tell it.

Research shows, by the way, how skewed our expectations are here. The psychologist Gillian Sandstrom compared what people feared before a conversation with a stranger with how they found it afterwards. It nearly always went better than expected. Every time. Your head is budgeting for a conversation that doesn’t exist, and you’re scaring yourself with things that aren’t even there.

Not everyone has to feel this

Not everyone in your team will recognise themselves in "I’m a Wellness Advocate", and they don’t have to. Around 9 in 10 people who enrol are customers, and that’s fine: they use the products and they’re happy with them.

A small number have been touched in a way that makes them want to be part of something bigger. Those people want to improve something: themselves, the people around them, a piece of the world. They feel they’re meant to lead the way. Those are your builders, and that role of example is exactly what the ranks are made of.

And maybe you’re not the picture of health yourself. Even then. Your lōve story isn’t about how fit you are. It’s about the moment something touched you. Everyone reading this has that moment. And a less-than-perfect example is often better than an ideal that’s out of reach for most people. "If you can do it, so can I!" That’s the reaction you want from your (future) team partners. I still remember sitting in my first oil workshops thinking, every time: "If you can do it, I can do it better!" And that’s exactly what drove me to actually make it better. I’m not saying that to be arrogant or to put anyone down. I want to encourage you to let go of the perfectionism a little. A perfect role model can scare people off too. "I’ll never be able to do what you do!" That’s the one line you really don’t want to hear from your team partners, and now you know why.

Once, out loud

My task for this month is small. Write your lōve story down in two or three sentences. Which product, which moment, what it did to you. No illness, no diagnosis, just what happened. And this week, tell those sentences out loud, once, to someone you know. No offer, no link, no question tacked on. You’re only telling what happened to you.

Chances are it’ll go better than you think; see Sandstrom’s study. People listen to a true story. And you’ve said out loud, once, why you do this and where you belong. After that it gets easier every time, until it’s simply natural.

Are you a team leader? Then practise this with your team. Have everyone write down their own two or three sentences and share them in the team group, or read them out at your next leaders’ meeting.

Write your lōve story down today. Tell it to someone tomorrow.

In the book, the chapter "Who you’re becoming" belongs here, with the "I am" sentence and the scent anchor. All the ranks and numbers stay up to date in the online appendix, and every abbreviation is explained in the glossary.

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