I had a completely different topic ready for you today, but the latest Rachel Hollis debacle really caught my attention for so many reasons. So I’m bringing you another episode of teachable moments from our pop culture. And to be honest, at first I wasn’t even going to touch this, you know. I’m not even a big Rachel Hollis person myself, not even a little Rachel Hollis person to be honest with you. And my first thought was, “oh, God, here goes canceled culture again”. You know, I don’t like partaking in cancel culture. To be quite honest with you, I believe that we’re operating on a degree of self righteousness when we just outright cancel someone you know, everything that they’re about, try to see to it that they meet their demise personally and professionally. unless they’ve done something that is completely egregious. It’s a little self righteous to claim to know what’s in someone’s heart, whom you’ve never met before. Some people are just clumsy with their words. Some people are just naive to certain things. And I like to give people room to grow, otherwise, I wouldn’t be in the personal growth and development space, if I didn’t believe in it.

So then I did a little bit of digging, and I went on Rachel’s Instagram. And I thought initially that it was just an offending comment. And there was an offending comment. But it was in response to a Tiktok video that she made. That is what’s at the root, essentially, of why everyone got so pissed off with her in the first place. So today, as we unpack Rachel’s recent incident that offended so many, we’re going to kind of identify the lessons for ourselves to grow from it. And of course, you’re gonna want to stick around until the end and get the 1-3 thought-provoking questions that I always leave you with. At the end of one of my solo episode they make for excellent journal prompts and they scratch the surface of your self-awareness self.

I know you hear my papers rustling! I’ve got a lot of papers today. If you want the short and sweet version of this, feel free to hop on my Instagram at personal @growth_lifestyle and check out my latest IGTV.

So, the powerhouse brand that is Rachel Hollis, it includes her blog, her books like Girl Wash Your Face, Girl Stop Apologizing, and I think her latest one is Didn’t See That Coming. Boy if there were ever a fitting title! Oops, sorry about that diesel just knocked my brush off the table. You know how cats can be. Um, so yeah, it’s her books, and her motivational speaking gigs. And I think that was through her brand Rise. And she did a lot of that with her now ex-husband, Dave Hollis.

I want to make one thing clear right from the get-go. I’m not gonna slam this woman. That’s not the purpose of today’s show. But I’ll say this, I’ll say the things that I’m going to say. And you can take it however you want. I have a long history from my first 11-year relationship with my high school ex-boyfriend and then went on to a second more dangerous relationship after that. And they were both narcissists. I’ve got a pretty keen sense of the energy of a narcissist. For that, among other reasons, I was just never able to get into Rachel Hollis.

I heard so many wonderful, wonderful things about her. And a few groups that I’m a part of on Facebook, I got the impression that you either love her or you hate her. And there wasn’t too much of an in-between on that. So you know we’re in the same space. And of course, she’s on my radar. She has no idea who I am and that’s okay. But the couple of times that like I said that I did try to get into her, her vibe repelled me and that’s cool. And this is an important lesson right from the get-go here. Not everyone is for everyone. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone is to blame for that. Right? You know you know that you just vibe with certain people and you don’t vibe with other people. So maybe you’ve never give that person a chance. Right? That doesn’t necessarily mean that they were bad or that you’re bad. But you picked up on a vibe and you rolled with it. So that’s exactly what I did.

You know, I knew just from being on social media that there had been a few incidences prior to this tiktok video that got everyone’s feathers ruffled with Rachel. The first thing was, she has been accused of this, this peddling of toxic positivity. And it reminds me a lot of a podcast episode I did. And I’ll link it here in the show notes about When Self-Help Sucks. That’s the title of it, when we get kind of gaslit into this idea that it’s supposed to be positivity on tap, 24-seven, we’re not supposed to acknowledge our negative feelings and dig deeper and understand them that creates toxicity within us. So that’s the first thing that she’s would typically get a lot of crap for.

Second is plagiarism, which is it serious. She has been accused of plagiarizing all sorts of people, including Maya Angelou on her Instagram and never giving credit to the real, the real original sources. That’s a big problem. As a writer, as someone who is, you know, a micro-level thought leader, that’s a big problem. You know, when you have someone on that level that comes in grabs from you and never gives credit, that kind of is like a knife in the heart.

Third, apparently, she and her now ex-husband were teaming up selling out, like I mentioned before, the motivational speaking events for Rise, and selling them on the premise that they had a perfect marriage. And then they blindsided their fans with their divorce. And listen, I don’t believe you should go through something that painful and feel obligated to have to give a play by play just because you’re a prominent figure. But to the flip side of that, I can also understand how fans of hers slash there’s at the time, right because they were kind of like a package deal and in a lot of aspects. So I can understand how their fans who spent their time attention and hard-earned money, taking relationship advice or looking up to them as this kind of picture of a perfect marriage and how marriage can be and marital bliss, right? I can understand how they would feel like they got duped, you can definitely see that.

So no transparency the entire time while accepting money to teach people something that they themselves are struggling to keep together. And here’s the thing that’s crazy. There is no shame in struggle. It makes you human relatable. And then there was also and I quote this on one or two posts and comments of hers, that apparently some people feel like she engaged in body shaming. I don’t know exactly how she went about that. Because again, I never was able to dig into her stuff deep enough, but I have seen accusations of that as well. Now fast forward to this week’s debacle. Keep in mind now, you have to keep in the your back pocket this whole time that this is a woman who has an empire built on being relatable, and likable. The relatable mom, the relatable entrepreneur, with the mantra that you can do it all on your own, all you need is your mindset.

So apparently, the trigger for this event was a fan commented to her that she’s no longer relatable, and that she’s privileged as fuck. In response to a prior video that Rachel posted where she talks about her cleaning lady that she hires two times a week who cleans her toilet. She mentioned twice that this woman who she said is lovely, you know, lovely woman, a lovely person, cleans her toilet, which I’m sure she does way more than that. And as a homeschooling mom running a business from home, trust me, I can tell you and I’m sure you can relate, I can tell you the mental and emotional kind of rescuing, that having someone help you keep your home and your shit together really offers it goes a hell of a lot deeper than she cleans my toilets.

You know how you feel operating in chaos, versus everything being where it’s supposed to be no clutter, no mess. It has a huge impact. I’ll be honest with you, my toilets are the least of my concerns. Mental clarity is what it is all about. Okay. So after posting about her house cleaner in a demeaning way, and that’s a whole other layer to unpack. And seeing that comment about being privileged as fuck, Rachel allowed herself To get triggered to the point that her brand is now in serious jeopardy. What was Rachel’s response, this woman that built her brand on being relatable and likable? She said, What makes you think that I want to be linkable?

And then on the back of that, she goes on to say that she doesn’t want to be relatable because not everyone’s willing to work as hard as she does to have that privilege. Not everyone’s willing to get up at 4 am she says, and grind like she does with her team. I’m sure that helps just a little bit right. Not to overlook getting up at 4 am. Because Listen, I know a lot of people do it because there’s something that they are absolut