I’m getting a lot of searchers looking for Amway WWDB Spring Leadership 2012 and curious about what goes on there because due to the high rate of IBO’s quitting Amway, the majority of attendees are coming to Spring Leadership for the first time. What more can I say that I didn’t already say before so I’m rehashing a Spring Leadership post from last year. Keep an eye out over the next couple of weeks for a couple of other reruns.
Spring Leadership is an Amway WWDB sponsored event held in April. Its one of the four major functions held every 3 months to keep IBO’s motivated not to quit Amway.
I was a bad little IBO. I stopped attending Amway meetings because the pompous sack of shit Platinum had forced his personal and religious beliefs on me (us) one time too many. The only thing I had left to say to this bastard was fuck off.
Spring Leadership is a good day’s drive from our house. Ambot forked out $125 for his ticket and booked a hotel room on the World Wide Dream Busters web site so WWDB must have blocked off hotel rooms to sell to IBO’s. Ambot asked if he could take my car because it gets better mileage and his plan was to drive down with two other “fired up” IBO’s. I grudgingly said he could borrow my car. Bottom line fuel efficiency, drives better for long journeys, new model, and safer. Those other fuckers drove clunkers that were always breaking down.
OK wait for it.
Those little bastards changed their minds about going!
Oooohhhh...... Apparently I am not the only bad little IBO running amok in this town!
Spring Leadership = Amway WWDB brainwashing session!
Amway World Wide Dream Builders Spring Leadership sucks!
And NOBODY wants to go!!!!!!
I have several friends who are IBOs I get a kick from your blog because i can relate. I dread picking up phone calls from them because I know they'll give me some bs abt showing me their "business plan"
ReplyDeleteI love my friends dearly and can see how it's consuming their lives. What is the best way to lovingly let an ambot know to F off?
Anonymous - thanks for stopping by! No need for censorship here by the way. You can spell it out! Come on I know you can!
DeleteReally there is no way to get rid of an Amway salesman. They are as persistant as timeshare salespeople in Mazatlan!
Try some of these tips on how to piss off an IBO and maybe they'll stop bugging you.
http://marriedtoanambot.blogspot.com/2011/08/101-ways-to-piss-off-ibo.html
http://marriedtoanambot.blogspot.com/2011/11/101-more-ways-to-piss-off-ibo.html
PS - once they quit Amway they will likely start being friends with you again. The people they shut out of their lives after counselling with upline is usually only temporary. Once they quit Amway their new BFFs won't have anything to do with them.
Anna is right. As with all cults, they brainwash their minions through endless sleep-deprived meetings and "motivational" CD's and books. Not only are those the tools they use to keep their followers brainwashed, but they make a ton of money off of their lackeys for the privilege of using them to get brainwashed. A win-win for them, a lose-lose for the IBO's.
DeletePart of that brainwashing (as in religious cults) is to separate their dazed followers from all family and friends who are "negative" because they are not "one of them". Cults cannot have any voices of reason in their lives to compete with their demand for total and complete devotion and worship to them. They are trained not to think for themselves, which is why so often listening to them is like listening to a parrot squawking what it heard on a CD. So "normal" friends often find themselves surgically cut from the life of the cultist. But it's not hopeless. Should your friends some day come to their senses (after either running out of money or being away from the CD's and brainwashing long enough for the cloud of make believe to clear away to the truth), then they will find that the only thing faster than how quickly their new Amway "friends forever" leech onto them when they join, is how fast they drop them by the wayside once they realize they aren't going to squeeze another drop of financial blood from that downline. It may be difficult for your friends to look you in the eye once they realize how much of a sucker they were taken for, but with understanding of how the cult made your friends into obnoxious moonie-like assholes you could have the friendship you had with them before they got sucked into the Amway cult with lies of "the plan".
~Dave
Dave - you have very good insight. You should be writing your own blog or writing guest posts for other bloggers!
DeleteDave - Anna is right, you have got very good insight into how cult brainwashing works, by employing devious techniques to dissociate ill-informed people from external reality.
ReplyDeleteHave you read Margaret Singer's book, 'Cults In Our Midst,'
The critical and evaluative faculties of core-cult adherents have stopped functioning, but only a minority of people who start to fall for cultic lies, go on to become long-term core adherents. A lot of people know that, in extreme cases, cult adherents have literally destroyed themselves and their friends and families rather than admit to having been duped by a sinister game of make-believe, but few people realize that the process of getting people to commit physical suicide, is essentially the same as getting people to commit financial suicide. Sadly there are a lot of well-educated observers who still refuse to accept that 'Amway' is a cult.
However, all genuine advisers say that you should always try to maintain contact with loved-ones who have fallen for a cult, and that you should always keep trying to stimulate their critical and evaluative faculties, by asking them searching questions.
Personally, I have found that some Ambots will start to think if you explain to them that, in life, it's your real friends who tell you the truth, no matter how painful this might be, but it is your enemies who tell you ego-building lies.
David - the insight comes from watching someone close to you that is caught in a cult.
DeleteNope, haven't read Margaret Singer's book. I don't read or study or go around surfing the Internet finding information about cults.
My knowledge is all first hand!
Yes thats good advice about maintaning contact with loved ones in a cult. I finally got my husband to watch the Dateline exposee on Scamway and read Merchants of Deception. He finally got it that no matter how hard he tried it was next to impossible to make money at Amway. Only a small fraction of 1% of IBOs will make money. Only when he start to go it about the money and the upline's refusal to answer his questions that he distanced himself. Oh and their little prayerfest that I would find another man and leave him helped too to make him see how evil this cult is.
Anna - This is a very good description of how a convinced cult adherent can be encouraged to start to think critically again, and explains why cult bosses are so hell bent on keeping their intellectually castrated foot-soldiers away from the likes of you and me.
ReplyDeleteIn my own case, no matter what evidence I showed to my Ambot brother, he simply refused to accept it. Back in the 1990s, a UK regional television company, HTV West, made a programme about 'Amway' in which various victims (including an HTV cameraman)confessed to losing up to $50 thousands in just a few years. When I sent a copy of this to my Ambot bother, he described the programme as 'a bunch of left-wing journalists duped by a bunch of whining losers'. At that time, 'Amway UK Ltd.' had a promotional video fronted by a former, popular BBC television presenter (who had fallen on hard times). This comprised interviews with Ambots who recited scripted lies explaining why 'Amway' is not a pyramid scam. My brother had bought dozens of these fraudulent videos which he gave to all his prospective recruits.
Sadly, 'MLM income opportunity'lie is so big, and has been allowed to grow for so long, that few people can comprehend the scale of this particular cultic deception. However, the hidden loss/churn rate in not just 'Amway,' but in all so-called 'MLM income opportunities,' has been effectively 100%.
Recently, I was talking to someone who once tried to calculate the fraction of 1% of 'Amway' participants who could have received a significant payment from the scheme, but this figure is so small that it is almost impossible to represent.
It was Dave's choice of words that led me to think that he might have read 'Cults in Our Midst.' During her distinguished career as a psychologist, the late Margaret Singer interviewed more than 5000 persons whose lives had been invaded by cults. Margaret was a woman full of common sense. She realized that the majority of Americans are potential cult victims, simply because most Americans are completely-convinced that a cult can never deceive them.
David Brear (copyright 2012)
David - our sack of shit Platinum used to brag that our upline Emerald was in the top 25% of 1% of Amway money earners.
DeleteLike that was supposed to really wow the ambots! They must have thought they were in the presence of someone really rich!
Until you read Merchants of Deception and find out that an Emerald is probably only making $2000 to $3000/month and that 99% of IBOs never make money in Amway.
Yeah real impressive!
Lol - I was one of the 'losers' featured on the HTV programme - the loses weren't as high as you suggested ( around £3,000) but high enough! Interesting to look back and see how the domino's fell once the lie was exposed.
ReplyDeleteHi Simon - glad you got out of Scamway! Everyone's losses will be different. Much of it depends on the abuse from the assholes in the Amway upline, how much money they can force the ambot to spend. Some people say they lost a few hundred. Others tens of thousands of dollars.
Delete