“Reminding ourselves that, that commerce is not the same thing as capitalism. Buying and selling things is a really old thing that human beings have been doing for way longer than capitalism has existed.”
Today's episode features anti-capitalist business coach Bear Hebert (they/them). We explore Bear's definition of capitalism as exploitation for profit and discuss principles for running an anti-capitalist business. We examine manipulative tactics often used by entrepreneurs and consider more justice-oriented alternatives.
Bear and I discuss the pressure to have an "ideal" business and how to align money-making with our values. With over 20 years in social justice work, Bear brings insights as both a radical business coach and educator, highlighting how capitalism intersects with white supremacy and patriarchy.
⭐ Key moments
03:57 - How Bear got politicized
10:11 - What makes us feel gross about marketing
18:46 - Authentic alternatives to manipulative marketing tactics
28:44 - Debunking the myth of the perfect dream job
33:47 - Rethinking niching from an anti-capitalist lens
36:15 - Business as a garden, not a machine
43:37 - Key areas to integrate anti-capitalist values in your business
47:58 - Aligning business policies with anti-capitalist principles
52:18 - Bear's sources of nourishment
56:51 - Closing
📚 Resources & Links
"Hild" by Nicola Griffith (book)
bell hooks (reference to "power over power under" concept)
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Transcript
Bear Hebert: Like reminding ourselves that, commerce is not the same thing as capitalism. so buying and selling things is a really old thing that human beings have been doing for way longer than capitalism has existed.
I think that it's possible to try to do commerce in ways that are actively anti capitalist, even inside a capitalist system.
Jeremy Blanchard: Welcome to the Wider Roots podcast. A show about how we can use the power of coaching and personal transformation to help create the world we most want to live in.
I'm your host, Jeremy Blanchard. I'm a coach for social movement leaders. And today's episode is with anti-capitalist business. Coach Bear Hebert.
My favorite part of this conversation was bear's really simple and straightforward definition. Of what capitalism is all about. And as you'll hear in the episode, they describe it as anything that's exploiting for-profit exploiting people, exploiting the planet.
And we circled around that theme. As we explored a lot of the tactical approaches and principles to running an anticapitalist business.
What are the ways that. Business owners, coaches, entrepreneurs, and up using manipulative tactics.
And what are more anticapitalist justice oriented ways to run a business.
We also talked about the pressure that we put on ourselves to have the ideal dream business and how we can. Move away from that. And. Make money in a way that aligns a little bit more with our values even admits the system of capitalism.
Bear has been involved in social justice work for over 20 years and has been self-employed since 2014. In addition to working as a radical business coach, there also a social justice educator with a really deep understanding of how capitalism is rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy. And I think you'll hear that come out in this conversation.
And dear listener. If you find something in this episode that resonates with you, I invite you to take a moment and share it with a couple of folks in your life who might also find it meaningful. Since the show is pretty new. This helps these conversations reach more folks like you.
All right. Let's dive in.
Hello, Bear. Welcome to the show. So glad you're here.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, really excited to be here.
Jeremy Blanchard: I've been really excited to have someone on the show since I started this project who's focused on business, marketing in a radical justice oriented, anti capitalist way, and you are one of the handful of folks out there who are really focused on a very specific subset of the need out there.
But I think there's so many people who have these values. Yeah, so it's, a joy to have you here
when you post things on Instagram or in other places, it's one of the few bits of like business related content that I'm like, Oh, I'm actually going to get something really interesting and useful and think of posts I've seen of yours that I was like chewing on for a few days afterward.
When so much of what's on social media is like ethereal and of entertainment and here and gone. So just very grateful for this. Specific niche that you've, found yourself in.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, thanks, that's so nice to know. Yeah, definitely, for so many of us, being on social media can feel like shouting into, the abyss. So it's nice to know that, the things that I say sometimes are landing with people.
Yeah, and I'm certainly not the only person out there who's thinking and talking about these things, but definitely in the scope of, people talking about business on the internet. I would say the, percentage of us that are trying to talk about business in an ethical or radical or, justice oriented, anti capitalist kind of way is, we're a small percentage of the whole.
Jeremy Blanchard: totally, totally.
[00:03:57] How Bear got politicized
Jeremy Blanchard: To start us out, could you share a little bit about how you got politicized and how you got into coaching? I know that's two big questions, but just lay a bit of a foundation here.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, some backstory is that I grew up in South Louisiana and my family is political in the opposite direction of me. So I sort of grew up in a pretty conservative community, conservative family and, started to realize the like, seed of my politicization is rooted in my own queer identity.
So I started to realize I might be queer when I was a teenager and, lived in a, small city where I didn't know any other queer people and, so going to college and like meeting other queer people and people with a sort of feminist, alignment was the beginning for me. Just rooted in my sense of, my own oppression, is the place that I started to become politicized from.
And then, Yeah, my, more overt politicization that didn't have to do with my own kind of personal identity I think happened twofold. One, 9 11 happened when I was a senior in high school, I'm 40 now, and, I got involved in, like, Iraq war, political stuff in college, and then, I moved to New Orleans when I was, 21 and, it was a year before Hurricane Katrina.
And if you want to talk about, a real life, microcosm of the macrocosm, , yeah, that was a real, awakening for me in terms of, systemic racism, the way that class was affecting people's lives so those things were the beginning of my politicization and I've been Involved in justice work for the last 20 years. You can't really close your eyes after they've been opened in that kind of way.
Yeah, and I started coaching in 2014 I think, I had been teaching yoga for a number of years before that and I wasn't teaching fitness classes, I was teaching like how to be a whole person kind of yoga classes.
And, out of that, some of my yoga students started, asking for more support than I could give them in the 15 minutes between classes at the studio. And so,
yeah, I did three quarters of a coach training that turned out to be not a good fit. But it was also, in 2014, the options back then were much fewer and farther between in terms of anything that was even, remotely politicized, and so I became, I started doing coaching, with some of my, yoga students and people in the community and that's the origin story there,
Jeremy Blanchard: Was it the lack of politicization that was part of what had you, it not be a fit or maybe it was many things.
Bear Hebert: yeah, I think it was a variety of things, but that was certainly one of them and, Some of the specific coaching methods felt really un informed in terms of, analysis. Like, it turned out that it was a really sort of, you create your own reality kind of coach training. And I think there is some truth inside of that. We do have some agency to influence our own experience.
And also, if we're not looking at the context that we live in. I know you're in agreement and your listeners are in agreement with this, that's how we're all here together. But I feel like there's often like too much emphasis on one or the other, either like an overemphasis on context that strips us of any agency or an under emphasis on context that puts too much responsibility on the individual.
Jeremy Blanchard: Amen. I would say it's the single most talked about thing on this podcast so far is that over reliance in personal transformation, spiritual spaces on, that you create your own reality. And that's it. If you just keep working on that enough, obviously, you'll get where you personally want to go and there's nothing else to consider other than where you personally want to go.
So end of story.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, it's, such a, damaging, approach. It really aims to be, helpful, and it's actually so damaging.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, totally. And then you found your way, as you were saying, into business coaching and consulting and you're doing, anti capitalist, business coaching, which is just so rad. I'm so into even just framing it that way.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, I had no idea that I was gonna end up being a business coach. This was not, like, a thing that I was aiming towards, but I, was working really hard at building, my life coaching business. And then people started hiring me as their life coach, but they really wanted to talk about marketing or they really wanted to talk about pricing or they really wanted to talk about the kind of inner workings of their own businesses because they were watching me publicly talk about how I was trying to run my life coaching business.
And I realized, Oh, this is also a skillset that I now have. This is a thing I can help people with. And, a thing that I've, at this point been thinking about for more than a decade and yeah, so I accidentally became a life coach and then I accidentally became a business coach, but both of those things I really love and I'm really grateful to get to do,
Jeremy Blanchard: one of the things that breaks my heart the most is seeing coaches, especially coaches who have a justice orientation, trained in coaching or whatever other sort of helping profession they're in, they have good skills, they have something great to offer the world, and they have like two clients and they are struggling to get clients they just feel really stuck in that.
And, the biggest question that comes up is, okay, how do I get clients? Whenever I introduced myself as a coach, I don't know if you experienced this, the first question always after I say, yeah, I'm a leadership coach for social movement leaders. First question is always, how do you get clients?
Which I always think of as Huh, there's so many other questions you could ask me about this, but, in a good way, maybe they're just curiosity about what it's like to be self employed. And there's also like, whoa, how do you make money at that? It's like the secret underlying question, which is a legitimate question.
But yeah, that's what really breaks my heart is seeing these folks who have something so great to offer and having such, difficulty. And I know that's true across the whole coaching industry is like there's the whatever average number of clients that, average dollar that, many coaches are making after training, is just so low and the length of time that people stay in it is can be very low.
There's lots of causes for that, I think that's extra true for people who have social justice values, they're having extra hard time marketing themselves because people feel gross about marketing themselves and people with anti capitalist social justice, transform the world values have a really hard time finding their place within marketing.
[00:10:11] What makes us feel gross about marketing
Jeremy Blanchard: So what are some of the reasons that you see why people feel gross about marketing when they have these social justice values? What's stopping them from finding a way to get their services out there?
Bear Hebert: such a good question. One of the, things that I think happens, or maybe this isn't one of the things, maybe this is the thing writ large, is that inside of capitalism, all of the sort of traditional, business advice is rooted overtly or subtly in a dynamic of exploitation. where you as the person trying to sell something, inside capitalist ideology, you as the person trying to sell something, are inherently going to try to manipulate or exploit the person who you hope will buy from you.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.
Bear Hebert: And so then that's the model that all of us who are working as coaches, or really anybody who's self employed, that's the model that we have all been exposed to for our entire lives. And so of course we look at that and go Oh my God, I don't want to do that. Oh my God, how could I participate in that?
And then I think we end up feeling stuck because there isn't another, map, there isn't another, established model that says, here's another way of doing things. Everything else sort of feels like experimental or, avant garde or like, is that even gonna work?
Can I pay my rent using some kind of other strategies? But I think really at its core, it's like a kind of gut response to the way that we see, traditional business functioning and not wanting to replicate that.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, that rings really true that just replacing the word capitalism with manipulation and exploitation yep, that's what the, like one simple thing that we are trying to say when we say capitalism and to say, well, I don't want to manipulate and exploit people in my community.
Cause that's usually who we're trying to serve are people who are connected with in some sort of meaningful way. So, there's maybe two parts to this. I'm thinking about like, how do we do marketing in a way that doesn't feel gross? And then there's also, how do we do it in a way that aligns with our social justice values?
And maybe those overlap quite a bit, but they also feel like, sightly distinct questions like there's a lot of marketing training out there that's like authentic marketing and heart based marketing and you can find a way to pull away from some of the worst aspects of manipulative, salesy stuff. But then there's this like affirmative possibility of Oh, what if I move toward things that really are a, an enlivening creative demonstration of my social justice values? So yeah, you lead whole courses about this question, but if someone's maybe newer to coaching or really stuck in this, Oh, I'm trying to get myself out there, but I just keep not seeing the light.
I don't see a way to do it. Where would you suggest they start?
Bear Hebert: One thing that I think is really crucial is to give ourselves permission to put ourselves into the vision for liberation that we hold for the world. People like me and you and the people who are listening to this podcast, like so many of us have a vague or concrete vision for how we wish the world was instead of the way that it is.
And so many of us, for better and for worse, I would argue mostly for worse, don't put ourselves in that. We see ourselves as being, like, necessarily sacrificed on the path towards liberation for other people.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.
Bear Hebert: that is like some really deep inner shit to like figure out how do I let myself have needs, how do I let myself have desires, how do I let myself access beauty and joy, and, connectedness, even inside this world where those things are, not available for so many.
How do I position myself in a way that allows me to do that? And to me, that also includes making enough money to pay the bills, maybe making enough money to pay more than just the bare minimum of the bills, but doing the inner work to let ourselves believe that could be possible, that we do deserve it.
Hadassah Damien, who, is a radical money coach and teacher, She wrote a piece a long time ago that I really hold in my heart where she talked about, for queer people and for other, marginalized people that, part of what happens inside of systems of oppression is that we, we get trained to believe that we don't have a future, and so part of what I've learned from her is I have to believe that I deserve a future, and then I have to act as though that is the thing that I'm aiming for, and I have to do that in terms of my finances, and so that's been a real kind of place of personal growth and development for me, and really seeing myself In the right size and at the right position inside of these systems where I'm not trying to make millions of dollars.
I'm not trying to like, over emphasize money or like personal financial success as like that is not the path to liberation. But also, my own financial struggle is also not the path to liberation. And so I think a starting point for lots of people has to be figuring out like what is that middle place for us in terms of how much money we make and allowing ourselves to, need what we need and to get what we need to work towards getting what we need.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. I love that because it makes sense to me that the place to start is permission. Permission to be in business and then, permission that you are included, letting yourself, allowing yourself to be included in your vision for liberation, your vision for the future, as a necessary step to, participating, to showing up fully.
And I think there is a particularly in activist circles and social movement spaces, that word, like treating ourselves as sacrificial, I just like really felt like a gut punch when I heard you say that. I'm like, Oh man, that is so how we treat ourselves in so many settings. And the activist minded folks who then find themselves in coaching or any other kind of self employment, bringing that mindset very often of like, Oh, well, I'm just here.
I'm going to give my entire self to the movement and in this case, to my business, and I receive nothing, I just barely scrape by as though that's going to be sustainable, you know, or as though that's what's necessary.
Yeah.
Bear Hebert: And in some ways that's like the inverse of what we see, in terms of capitalist business strategies, which say, exploit others for your own gain. I think sometimes justice oriented folks, invert that and say, exploit myself for the benefit of others. And so how do we actually show up in a way that is not exploiting others?
It's not exploiting our customers or our clients, but it's also not exploiting ourselves as business owners what would it look like to try to move from a position of aiming for reciprocity instead where it's like, I want equal exchange. I want you to get good stuff and me to get good stuff.
I want enough for everyone. I want abundance, not in the New age, abundance mindset kind of thing, but that means, too much, but abundance in terms of enough for everyone. But I think it steps out of the kind of like dominator paradigm of power over power under the way bell hooks talks about it, right?
And instead, like, orients into a power together power from within kind of mentality inside the business, which is like, Okay. The people who are listening can't see me right now, but I'm like waving my hands around because like I feel so enlivened by that possibility that actually it's possible for us to make enough money and for our clients to feel really well served for us to stay in alignment with our values and also to have enough to get by and then some and to really build, Like business ecosystems of reciprocity so that everybody is okay.
Everybody has enough and nobody is in the position of being manipulated or being exploited.
Jeremy Blanchard: Preach. I'm into it. Yeah, I mean, I really share this passion for folks who are self employed to be able to, be in it for the long haul. Like if this is what you want to do or for any length of time that you want to do this, like you get to keep doing this.
That's one of the places I came to early in my wrestling with this question was, okay, there's a very practical equation here where if I don't. get paid, I'm not going to be able to keep doing this. And then the goodness that seek to offer, and contribute to people and to my community, like just, it's no longer happening, something else is happening.
[00:18:46] Authentic alternatives to manipulative marketing tactics
Jeremy Blanchard: So yeah, I'm curious, do you get into like marketing principles in your, marketing for weirdos course, so we've got this sort of foundational level of including yourself in the vision. And then I'm curious, okay, let's say someone's great, I'm down. I see that it's like a valid thing for me to be out there, but I still feel really uncomfortable because the only models I have are ones that say, spam people and pressure people and fake deadlines et cetera, et cetera.
I'm curious about is there like one or two principles that you find yourself coming back to often when teaching folks about this.
Bear Hebert: Yeah. A couple of things come to mind.
One of them is maybe just a reiteration of permission, but it's more of an analysis piece, like reminding ourselves that, commerce is not the same thing as capitalism. So buying and selling things is a really old thing that human beings have been doing for way longer than capitalism has existed.
And, capitalism is this sort of like relatively new invention in the history of humankind and, I'm sure there are people who have other perspectives on this, but to me, buying and selling is not inherently bad. It's sort of ethically neutral. And it's a, you know, a way of human beings relating to each other through more complex webs of relation is part of what buying and selling allows us to do. So that's, what I would think of as activities that happen under the, topic heading of commerce. I think that it's possible to try to do commerce in ways that are actively anti capitalist, even inside a capitalist system.
I don't know if that exactly answers your question. I certainly can say more about like other ways for people to approach marketing, but I feel like that's a principle that I come back to over and over again whenever people are like, what about this?
Or I'm not sure about that. I'm like, well, that's just commerce and commerce is okay. Or oh yeah, that feels yucky because it's capitalism. And so we can still do commerce in a way that's not, replicating these capitalist, you know, what you said of like fake deadlines. I think about urgency as one of the, tenets and working strategies of capitalism.
And it's like, okay, well, we don't have to do things that way. If there's actual urgency, If the class starts on, May 15th, then people need to sign up by May 15th. That's not fake. That's not fake urgency. That's real urgency.
And that's fine, right? But if, like, the thing is available 24 7, 365, and you're like, Ah, you have to hurry up and buy now, you're playing into false urgency.
And there, you're like, okay, I'm manipulating my clients for my own gain. And. So we can put that aside as like not a tactic that we would want to use, but I think that principle of like commerce is different than capitalism can help us to discern between what's a usable business strategy and what's something that we would want to step away from.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, I'm appreciating the way that you're really trusting the wisdom of the people that you're supporting in this way you're pointing to that wherever something that feels gross to them. That's actually a sign of like, Oh, right. Don't do that thing. Trust your voice of wisdom, trust your intuition. Like that isn't how you want to do it, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a way to do that thing that you're trying to accomplish, I feel empowered thinking about that. Like, I don't want to do that fake pushy manipulative thing. How can I flip that? How can I find the truth underneath that that doesn't play into the existing models that don't resonate.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, I think there's a follow up question, which is, like, what should I do instead? But so many people get stuck at, I don't want to do that, and then there's just collapse, you know, or there's freeze, or there's, nowhere else to go, because I don't want to do any of these kind of manipulative strategies that are so loudly and relentlessly talked about, especially on social media, as like the only way to do business.
I'm not interested in dogma, I'm not interested in people taking on the like, bear a bear method of, you know, anti capitalist business or whatever. I'm really interested in like, helping people to build their own, analysis, their own critical thinking skills, their own discernment to be able to say, this is not right and I'm going to go a different way.
Because, capitalism is so pervasive and it's so relentless in its, forces that it's going to take so many of us doing things creatively, thinking for ourselves, pushing the boundaries, like trying to, go a different way. And, So I'm really not interested in trying to give anybody a single answer that's like, here's how to do it.
Here's how to fix capitalism. Here's how to run a business, you know, check plus everything's done. I'm really interested in like empowering people to think for themselves and make their own creative, interesting choices that might be different than mine.
Jeremy Blanchard: Right. I love this invitation into experiments, Or the questions that someone could pose to themselves what are my values? Like, what are the social justice values I hold? And the one that's coming to mind. First is like consent as like one of the things that is non manipulative is like full informed consent.
This is one of the values I and many of us and all of us in the social justice spaces are holding. And then there's just like a creative question. And I love that you're not filling in an answer to the question, but it's to me immediately sparks ideas of like, Oh, okay, well, what does consent look like if I am running a business?
Oh, I would do my free intro call in this way. And I would only put these people on my email list. I could imagine other questions like that sort of bubbling up from the inquiries that you're offering.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, I love that. And I, I think too, like, allowing ourselves the space to experiment then gets us out of that, place of stuckness around feeling like I either have to do it this way or there's nothing.
I have to do it the way that I've been told or I'm just gonna fail or that, you know, there's nowhere else for me to go. And I really think that a spirit of experimentation inside of business makes space for possibilities that you haven't thought of yet that I haven't thought of yet and that to me is actually so exciting to think about.
Yeah, what does anti capitalist business look like? Yeah. I have no idea.
Jeremy Blanchard: Let's find out.
Bear Hebert: You know, we're making it up as we go, and that feels really, imaginative and really life giving to me, really generative, instead of trying to, like, hurry up and get it right, I understand the pressure that people feel.
And so let me not, understate the very real, financial realities that people live inside of. And, we do live in a society where, the financial stakes are very high and,
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.
Bear Hebert: People literally die because they don't have enough money because they can't afford a place to live.
They can't afford the medical care that they need, I emphasize my really deep understanding in my own body and for the ways that this stuff lives in the bodies of, everybody listening to this, that like, if you're freaked out about not making enough money, if you have a big deep fear about that, That is right and correct in a lot of ways.
And so it's like, Oh yeah, that's nice. Just experiment. Okay. But like, how am I going to pay the rent? How am I going to keep, a roof over my head? And so, I get it. I think it's not a, one or the other kind of thing.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. What I'm getting from you is like middle path. Middle path. Which I love.
Bear Hebert: yeah,
Jeremy Blanchard: as we're talking about these foundations, like what are the base permissions and visions that we allow ourselves to hold so that we can show up to being self employed? I think the other one that I hear come up a lot is this tension between the people I most want to serve and the people that I believe can actually afford my services or can afford them at the degree that is going to make this business sustainable for me. And I wonder, how do you help folks navigate that tension between who they really want to serve and who can afford their services?
Bear Hebert: I have a really practical answer to that. And I have a philosophical answer to that. And the philosophical answer, which I'll give first and hopefully briefly, is just that like, coaching only exists as a career path because of capitalism. Like the things that we do as coaches are things that like, It just sort of happened in a pre capitalist, world and, we didn't have to figure out who can afford to pay us to do this emotional support work because we just lived in a different world where like This was not a paid profession.
So that as, the sort of overarching context, yeah, I think, there's lots of ways to think about how to, set up your business so that you can do the work that you really want to do with the work that pays enough, which sometimes overlaps some and sometimes, does not overlap.
I think that really thinking very clearly and strategically about some numbers can really help people. I am consistently surprised by how many small business owners that I work with who have no idea how much money they actually need to make. And then are just winging it in terms of their pricing and perpetually feeling like they don't have enough money because they don't actually know how much money is enough.
So that's my like, real talk, tough love, like, make a spreadsheet, my loves, please make a spreadsheet. Put down how much money you need to make, and start from there because the feelings about money those may persist for a long time, but the facts about your money are things that are somewhat changeable.
And so, yeah, figure out how much money do you actually need to make I like to think of, like, income projection as spellcasting, you know, where you're, trying to figure out, okay, if this is my capacity, I can work with X number of clients per month, and this, number that I've come up with is the amount of money that I need to make per month, how many of your spots do you need to have filled by people who can pay your full fee, easily and immediately and not on a payment plan?
How many people do you need to get? Okay, figure that out. Then from there, how many spots can you afford to give to, people who can't pay as much, who might fit more in your, bucket of, most favorite people to work with, you know, most delightful kind of work to get to do.
[00:28:44] Debunking the myth of the perfect dream job
Bear Hebert: And I think sometimes we get a little bit hung up because the myth of the dream job has really fucked us up, I think, because, it makes us feel like if 100 percent of our work is not the thing that we most love doing and feel most deeply fulfilled by, that somehow we have failed.
And I just think that's bullshit and I think like most of us are gonna have to do some kinds of work that we love and some kinds of work that we don't love forever. That is just true. And so I think letting yourself off the hook a little bit. in terms of trying to only work with the people that you most adore working with, can make some space for you to then also do work that is good and meaningful and ethical and helpful for the world, and that also maybe pays your bills a little bit better than the stuff that you think of as, dream job kind of work.
Jeremy Blanchard: I don't think I've ever heard anyone call that out before. The myth of the complete dream job, which feels very connected to the American dream. But to me, I associate it very particularly with the rise in personal growth culture stuff.
Bear Hebert: Absolutely.
Jeremy Blanchard: From the like eighties into the nineties, into the early two thousands of like, Oh, you should be living your highest and best dream, and it's sold to us in a very individualist context.
Yeah, I really appreciate, unpacking that. I don't think I've pulled on that thread before.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, I think that's so important. And, I didn't say this before, but part of my path as a self employed person. I've never had an office job, I worked in restaurants from the time I was 17 and, didn't quit until I was 30, so, a good long time of waiting tables and a big number of years of overlap for me of both waiting tables and being self employed and, It used to really just, grind my gears that there was this kind of pervasive, ideal that was held up in the online business world that said, Success looks like being fully self employed.
Doing only the one thing. Success looks like, a business that runs like a well oiled machine on autopilot. And that did not reflect my life, and it felt really classist to me, to be frank, it felt really rooted in, a reality that had a financial safety net that I never had, that, was like, Oh yeah, it's really easy to, like, take those kinds of risks if you have a spouse with a, six figure job, or you have, family wealth you can rely on or whatever, and I was like, I don't know, if my Coaching business doesn't work.
I'm just going to go back to waiting tables full time and that would be okay. There's no, like, ethical edge at being self employed over being a worker in a restaurant. There's no personal value inside it. You know, like, I enjoy my life much more not waiting tables, don't get me wrong. But I don't think I'm, like, morally superior because I have, cracked some kind of code and I'm, living the entrepreneurial dream or something.
Jeremy Blanchard: I love that. And I also love the very practical suggestion of knowing how much money you need to make and doing financial projections so that you can include in those financial projections, discounted spots or free spots or whatever you want to do, to serve the people that are most like heart aligned for you.
For five years I ran a program that was for coaches who want to do marketing in a more like justice oriented, authentic, non manipulative way. And that was one of the things I found that was most powerful too. And I found it in my own coaching practice too, is every time I get into a period where I'm feeling confused or stressed about money, one of the most powerful things is, Yeah, let me go figure out, how much money do I need to make right now?
How many clients is that? Not always, but often the answer is you know, if I just had like three more clients right now, I'd be pretty close to paying the bills or wherever that next like threshold is I'm trying to get to. And it's like, oh, well, I can get three clients.
Like that's not, too bad.
Bear Hebert: Yep.
Yeah, I think the nervous system leap from there is the, threat of possible financial, discomfort to, I need to panic because I might die. Like our nervous systems are really trained by capitalism to just jump from like possible threat of financial discomfort to, emergency, red lights flashing, sirens blaring, nervous system response.
And many of us like carry that level of anxiety all the time, because we never quite feel financially settled. We never quite feel, financially enough. And so, Yeah, I think the numbers can really help to ground us back into a reality that says, okay, I don't quite have enough right now and I have some specific things that I'm working for.
I know exactly how much I'm trying to go and get. It's not just like an endless expanse of like never enoughness, you know, stretching out on the horizon in front of me, but instead like, I need to get three more clients in the next three months or the next three weeks or whatever the timeline is. I also think like for people to just like, make some lists of other things you can do to get money.
If you're an entirely self employed person, write the list of like, what else could you do if this falls? Many of you maybe have already done this, but if you haven't done that, please, that will also help, I think.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. I love that.
[00:33:47] Rethinking niching from an anti-capitalist lens
Jeremy Blanchard: Along the lines of marketing, I'm curious, a lot of business advice is about niching. I know you probably know of Tad Hargrave, niching marketing for hippies, and there's a lot of things out there about, how do you find your exact ideal client, or your avatar, like all these different things.
I'm curious, how do you think about that from an anti capitalist perspective?
Bear Hebert: I have sort of resisted niching in some ways, I think that niching is oriented around, a presumption of what it is we're trying to do with our businesses.
And so the advice to hurry up and find a niche, hone in, get super narrow, pick the one thing you do, that advice is based on the idea that what we want is to have, a singular repeatable thing that we do that we can make money from forever. And capitalism says get the most money possible for the least effort possible.
And niching is potentially a strategic way to do that. Especially in the short term. But for me as a small business person, I'm not necessarily interested in making a lot of money as fast as possible. I'm interested in doing work that I care about for as long as I want to or have to, in a sustainable way.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yes.
Bear Hebert: And to me, if I have to do the same job forever, I will be very bored. And I don't want to be bored in my work. If I wanted to be bored at my job, I would go get a job that pays a lot better than the one that I currently have.
So I think that, if you are a person like me who has a business that is complicated and you're like, I do this one thing, but I also do this other thing.
And I also do this other thing. And also I have this side project that's not even on my website because like, it's so out of the box of the other things that I do. If that's you, I think that is a, a fiercely anti capitalist approach to running a business in general, because it says, I am here as a full and complex human being and creator of things instead of I am a singular machine that is just going to do the same thing forever and make a lot of money at it.
Jeremy Blanchard: Nailed it.
Bear Hebert: Yeah.
[00:36:03] Business as a garden, not a machine
Jeremy Blanchard: And there's so many beautiful parts to that, but like the machine versus a garden metaphor comes up, right? Of Oh, capitalism machine efficiency, repeatable, just automated, and efficiency and optimized to make money for the purpose of making money.
And like, A garden is not efficient by any like sort of mechanistic definition of efficient. And it has many things going on. It is a living system. Part of its function is just beauty and pleasure. That's the immediate comparison that comes to mind of yeah, there's a lot going on.
We actually like a lot going on. We don't want it to be the most efficient possible. We want it to be enjoyable and make a difference.
Bear Hebert: Yeah. And I love that garden metaphor too. Cause I think about that in terms of capitalism wants the garden to be at its peak bloom and harvest a hundred percent of the time. And that is not how a garden works. And so if you are running a business and what you're doing is like building hoop houses, cool, great, good job, keep going.
If what you're doing is like soil remediation and you're like, I'm just planting some cover crops right now, and like by the end of this season of, work on your business, you're gonna have beautiful patch of dirt that, too, is really valuable, even though it's not, sexy, it maybe doesn't have as many, good looking deliverables, it's not as, promotable in terms of, what are the takeaways here?
It's well, I got some nice dirt, but, that also matters in the long term, right? Like, how do you build a garden that you can, grow things from over time, all of the inner work matters. All of the relational work matters. All of the analysis building matters.
All of those different pieces matter. And sometimes I'm going to have a season where I'm making a lot of money, getting a lot of clients, growing a lot of food and flowers, metaphorically, exactly. And sometimes that's not what's happening. Not only is that okay, it's like necessary and good in the life cycle of the garden.
Jeremy Blanchard: Oh, I love it. It's speaking to me personally. With all the activism that I'm getting involved with right now with Palestine and Gaza, I have been really wrestling with how little I have been focusing on my business for the past few months and it has been stressing me out.
It has been a frequent topic in my coaching sessions with my coach and with my therapist and there's something just so sweet and causes my whole system to relax to think of like, yeah, I'm just like planting cover crops right now. That's just what's happening in my business, given everything else that is happening in the world.
So I'm going to like definitely take that one with me.
Bear Hebert: Yeah. I feel it too. You know, in 2022, I moved across the country from New Orleans to New York where I had lived in New Orleans for 17 years. And my dad died and I just was like, okay, like growing the business is not on the front burner. Growing the business is way down the list.
And that was really good to be able to say, okay, there are some things that, how can I actually scale down? How can I scale back? How can I do less? And that, that again is not failing, which I think it's such a pervasive and, insidious idea inside of capitalism and inside of the, like, small business world that, we inadvertently buy into this idea that we have to be continually growing in order to be succeeding.
But for me doing less, making less money, doing less public facing stuff, being not very active on social media, like, all of those things were actually signs that the business was working for me. That I was succeeding at having a business that was serving me and my actual needs and my actual life.
There was like a huge moment of upheaval and, to be able to, not stop entirely, but put things on pause and scale them back for a while, was just such a, relief to be able to do that.
Jeremy Blanchard: Oh, so big. I love that. It makes me think about there are so many times in the life of a business where we're wrestling with what's happening in my own personal life, personal upheaval, and what's happening in the world, like global upheaval, and what do we do when the world's on fire?
How do we keep a business going? How do I send an email to my list or post on social media when the for me, like, all I can think about is Gaza. I'm like, what am I doing? Putting the attention on, Hey, I've got an offer coming up. Do you want to join my program? , and I know these are, the kinds of questions that happen inside your programs and with the clients you work with.
So I'm curious. Yeah. How do you hold that tension?
Bear Hebert: Yeah. I feel like the world is always sort of on fire. And that's the bad news, but it's also kind of the good news. Yeah, I have a couple of things that I think about in terms of how to deal specifically with like marketing and promotions in moments of, collective upheaval.
One is that I really try to think about my business and therefore also my marketing as a body of work that I am building over time. And so if I feel stuck
in posting one thing or sending one email because I'm afraid somebody is going to misunderstand this singular, dispatch, what I hope is that the people who receive it see it as, uh, a continuation of things I have said before and things I will say after.
And that really gives me some space to not need every single post or every single email to contain every nuance and every subtlety and every caveat and point to every cause, because we couldn't possibly, right? Because there's, the world is on fire in so many places, and giving myself permission to trust in the body of work that I've been building.
And if somebody picks up a single thing that I've done and misconstrues it, because they don't understand the context of my work, the body of work that I've been building over time,
that's okay. And I think the other thing for me about posting about my own stuff on social media, I try to really remind myself of what I'm doing offline and letting that really, again, root me back into what my own values are and what my own, commitments are.
I have a commitment to show up for justice and there are some specific ways in my life and some specific people in my life who I'm, in accountable relationships with, who I am committed to doing those things with and for and through. And my social media audience, my like newsletter list is not the people that I feel in accountable relationship to or like I don't need for, all of those people to be the people who I feel accountable to.
And so if I feel like, oh, I shouldn't post about this program that I'm running because of everything else that's going on in the world. I have to really remind myself, I'm actually doing plenty and some of it's happening on social media but like a vast majority of it is happening in other spaces.
And if you feel guilty about posting on social media about your own stuff and you don't feel like you're doing plenty, well that's a thing to think about too. Like where could you be doing more off the internet, right? Are there ways that you could be plugged in more, could be doing more, so that you could feel, released of the guilt of needing to promote your own program or promote your own business in the midst of the sort of perpetual calamity that we live inside of.
[00:43:26] Key areas to integrate anti-capitalist values in your business
Jeremy Blanchard: Wow, I love everything we've touched on so far. I think another curiosity I have, I'm thinking of the folks who are listening who, maybe are newer to considering where anti capitalism fits into their business. I'm curious if we could, like, come up with a little bit of a table of contents together, of, things to think about.
We've hit on marketing. This is one category that we can like, Oh, I can question it there. I'm curious, like where else in the spectrum of what makes up a business do you think there are places to like, yeah, look here and look here if we were like, name those?
Bear Hebert: Yeah, I think how we do marketing is definitely one of them. How you write about your work on your website, matters. Yeah, and I have a, set of personal pet peeves about website stuff.
Jeremy Blanchard: What's one of them? What's one of them? Hit us
Bear Hebert: Not putting your prices on your website feels like a real personal pet peeve in terms of anti capitalist approaches to business.
Jeremy Blanchard: What else? Give us a couple more.
Bear Hebert: Leading with pain points. Trying to, over emphasize the way that people's personal failures mean they need to hire you or spend money on your product or your book or whatever. Yeah. I learned this one from Kelly Diels, who's another, radical business person on the internet. She always does like a little TLDR, like a little bullet point at the top of every sales page that she makes where she says this is the name of the program.
This is the dates that it runs. This is the time that it meets. This is how much money it costs. Here are the payment plan options And that's before, that's at the very top, before she says anything else about it because her, consent politics say Don't manipulate people into reading 5, 000 words of a sales page before you tell them the relevant information that says they know they can never come to a class that happens on Tuesdays because they have something else then, or they know that, 5, 000 is well beyond budget for them, so like, why make them read, paragraphs of text to get to that information?
Just tell them the information up front so that they can, make an informed decision about if they even want to read your sales page.
Jeremy Blanchard: That's so right. Oh my gosh.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, so, I think in terms of how you run a sales call or like an inquiry call if you're a person who works with clients, there are some really great ways to do sales calls and some really not great ways to do sales calls.
I've been on the receiving end many years ago of a, sales call that like wanted to, She was like, I was like, I'm not sure if I can do this 10,000 dollars program or whatever. And she was like, why don't you give me your credit card number? And I'll just hold that for you. So that, yeah, anyway, so there's some
not great.
Oh my
Jeremy Blanchard: god. Or please sign up before you get off the phone. Like, oh, there's a discount I, I mean, I've been on the, administering end of sales calls like this early in my business before I, you know, started questioning what I was being taught as much.
Bear Hebert: Yeah. And there's, people who say, do this. And again, it goes back to that question of what is the purpose of this advice? If this advice is pointing us towards make as much money as possible, even at the expense of our potential clients, then it's great advice.
If that's what you're trying to do,
Jeremy Blanchard: and I would add perhaps that if you believe that people, don't have the capacity to make wise choices for themselves. I think so much of these techniques are like, well, if I tell them the price on the sales page too early, they're not going to be able to make an informed choice.
They're not going to yet see the value in the program. So it's for their benefit. I'm being benevolent by making them read all of the benefits first and then and only then telling them the price or getting on the call and I have to talk to them about all the reasons first before I tell them the pricing, or I have to give them this discount because they're going to get caught in their worries if they leave the call and they, they won't be able to make a wise choice.
So it's really, I'm, helping them
Bear Hebert: Yes.
Oh man. Yes, I really appreciate you naming that because I feel like so much traditional business advice assumes that our audiences and our potential clients are stupid My clients are like the smartest, most brilliant, most thoughtful people that I know. And so I cannot do those things to them.
One, because it wouldn't work. But two, because I don't think anybody is, right? I don't think that anybody needs me to soft manipulate them into saying yes to something with me. That is gross. If you feel like that's gross, you're right.
Jeremy Blanchard: That's right! That's right! We approve this message
[00:47:46] Aligning business policies with anti-capitalist principles
Bear Hebert: One more thought that I had about like topic headings is like your policies. I like, man, I love to nerd out about how to write anti capitalist business policies. I've like recently rearranged my cancellation policy to be more in alignment with my values and like I'm forever tweaking the policies that I have, for how to work with people, more in alignment.
And I think that's a great place for people who are, new and trying to think of. How can I bring my business more in alignment with my values? Comb through your own policies document and see where you're being, inadvertently, punitive or less consent based or manipulative, or trying to, squeeze your clients for your own gain
Jeremy Blanchard: Yep.
Bear Hebert: because it shows up in all these like subtle ways.
Jeremy Blanchard: so much. I know in my own system where I start to get tense. If I start to get tense about my policies, just like we were saying before, like, oh, listen to that. That's information that you're about to do something that's against your values. And I've done that too with my, rescheduling cancellation policy.
It's like, Oh, well, it needs to be 24 hours of notice otherwise I charge you for the session. It was only this year that I was like, that's still in my contract. I can not tell you the last time I actually followed through on that policy, but it's still in there. And I'm like, I don't care if they, as long as they communicate, I don't care if they reschedule, I know that's not true for everybody, for some people it's like, I need my schedule full for that day, or I'm not making the total amount of money that I need to make, my like a barber or something, if you cancel them, like it's messing up their, total income.
But, yeah, I love that.
Bear Hebert: Yeah.
Jeremy Blanchard: And then another topic heading is like, service delivery, right? What can we be doing inside our delivery to live our justice values, which could be a whole, five podcast episode series
Bear Hebert: Totally. Yeah. And then I think like the other thing I would name as like topic heading is noticing where my own emotional and bodily reactions are out of alignment with my stated highest values or analysis. The example that I always think of is like when was teaching yoga I was very consent oriented in the way that I was, you know, like in a room with people's bodies, like doing this particular thing.
And, I emphasized that , everybody should feel free to opt out of anything at any time. And so I would say, okay, we're going to do this thing. And if you want to opt out, here's another thing you could do, or find a different pose that feels better to you if this is not the one that feels better to you.
And then people would do that. They would opt out, and it would immediately feel terrible to me. Like, I would be like, oh my god, did I do something wrong? Do they not like me? Is this a bad sequence? Am I, doing too much? Is it too little? You know, really just in my own head about it.
And so I was like, overtly giving people permission to do what they wanted. But in my heart and in my, nervous system, I wanted them to just do the thing I say, because it's easier for me that way. And so really feeling that friction and having to really work on myself to be like, Oh yeah, if I give people permission to do what they want and then they do what they want, like, I got to learn how to be okay with that.
Jeremy Blanchard: Not take it personally, so much.
Bear Hebert: Totally not I take it personally. And so now, you know, for instance, at the top of all of my coaching calls, I offer that we can take some breaths together to, start the session. And I have some clients who prefer not to do that for whatever variety of reasons. They don't like to close their eyes and breathe or have their eyes open and breathe.
That's not their thing. And, I'm like, great. Thank you so much for saying no. And I genuinely mean it now, right? Like it doesn't trigger me that they've said no. But it took a long time of like doing the actual inner work to bring my body and my heart and my nervous system in alignment with the thing that I espoused to believe.
And so I think noticing where you feel those frictions of like, I say that this is okay, but I actually don't like it, or I offer a sliding scale, but I actually hate it whenever somebody pays at the bottom, or whatever the things are, where it's I have a, I have an ideal about how I want this to go, but like, also, I feel some friction there.
Look at those places, because that's actually where there's inner work to do to help bring us, in an embodied way, in an emotional way, in a coherent way, into the values that we say that we have.
Jeremy Blanchard: I love that. Yes. What a good table of contents.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, we should write a book. Called Perpetual Calamity.
Jeremy Blanchard: We should! I'm in! Collaboration is underway.
[00:52:07] Bear's sources of nourishment
Jeremy Blanchard: as we start to draw to a close here, one of the questions that I like to ask every guest is, where you're getting your nourishment.
The name of the podcast is Wider Roots. And, one of the meanings for that is about like getting to the root of the political analysis and like the root causes of systemic oppression. But another sense of the term is where are we drawing up nourishment from around us?
And so I'm curious, are there books or podcasts or poets or practices or anything, like where are you getting your nourishment right now, to sustain you?
Bear Hebert: Yeah. The first thing that comes to mind, honestly, is the student uprisings. The students are out on campuses around the country and I feel really nourished and really inspired by their clarity and their commitment.
Their dedication and their determination feels really nourishing to me. I feel really inspired by what they're doing and the ways that they're working.
I'm also really nourished by the flowers that are blooming around me. I lived in Louisiana for my whole life before I moved to New York two years ago.
And, I never experienced Spring like the way that it happens here in the Northeast, like in Louisiana, it's green all year. There's always something blooming. The changes in season are like from hot to more hot and it's not as dramatic. But here in New York, it's it's cold and gray and just like dead sticks on all the trees.
And then suddenly the colors just started really exploding everywhere. And I feel really heartened by this, explosion of nature coming back to life and the persistence, of nature that it always seems to come back even when it goes away.
I've only been here two years, time will tell if it always comes back, but so far it's always coming back.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, honestly, I felt really nourished by reading fiction lately, which I don't always make time for. I like, I read a lot of nonfiction, and I don't always make space for fiction, but I've read some really good fiction this year and that has felt really nourishing to give myself a hard stop at the end of the day where I'm like, no more
real world thoughts. N
Jeremy Blanchard: what's your top, fiction rec
Bear Hebert: I recently read, a book called Hilled by Nicola Griffith that is about, the rise of capitalism and the church in England in the middle ages. So, you know, just some really light fiction.
Jeremy Blanchard: I love that. And yeah, I resonate a lot with, the inspiration of the student protests right now. I found myself as soon as they started, the encampments started, that I was just like, man, I wish I was a student right now.
But, yeah, there's something so clear about this moment and the particular role that the student encampments have. So it resonated a lot with that.
Bear Hebert: Yeah.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Before we close, is there anything else that you want to leave our listeners with that we haven't gotten to?
Bear Hebert: However you're doing, you're doing a great job. You are doing enough.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.
Bear Hebert: kind to yourself. I like to say that inside of all of the work that I do, the like secret mission that I have is actually just to help people love themselves better so that we can love each other better, so that we can love the world better.
And it doesn't say that anywhere on my website because it's not a marketable, catchphrase for me. But yeah, just my perpetual reminder to myself and to everyone around me, is to just be kinder to ourselves, be softer.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Oh, I love that. I just find myself so inspired and energized from this conversation and the particular mix of like really great analysis of capitalism and other systems of oppression that you bring with like a, softness and like a caring heart at the same time that those two sometimes go together.
But whenever I encounter them, I'm like, yes, more of this, we can tear the system down and rebuild it. And also, hey, just like a lot of like care underneath that. So I really appreciate that.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, I feel like everything I know about that particularity comes from just like the long lineages of, of queer Southerners, particularly, like that, Alternate Roots and songs, Southerners on New Ground, like I just have learned so much from, the writings and the teachings and the activism of those organizations around, how to have both, how to be fierce and militant in our politics, but also soft and loving with one another because, at the end of the day, we're all we've got.
So
Jeremy Blanchard: Well, thank you so much for having this conversation.
Bear Hebert: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was really fun.
[00:56:39] Closing
Jeremy Blanchard: Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to Bear Hebert for sharing their wisdom with us here.
You can check out the show notes for links to all the resources that we mentioned in this episode.
As always the website is widerroots.com, where you can find our newsletter. You can email me [email protected] and you can follow the podcast on Instagram at wider roots pod.
Thanks as always do wildchoir for the theme music for the show. You're currently listening to their song. Remember me, which will play us out.
See you next time.
Bear Hebert: I know, I don't know if you've seen this on Instagram, but the, um, there have been some autonomous actions that have happened outside the, um, the university president houses, like the, where people have been doing primal screams, uh, at midnight.
There's been like a gathering of like hundreds of people doing primal screaming outside of their, their personal residences.
Jeremy Blanchard: Wow, I've never heard of I just imagined being in that meeting where they're like, Okay, we're gonna do something. We're gonna do something disruptive. What could we do?
Bear Hebert: Yeah.
Jeremy Blanchard: Well, you know, we could do like horns, we could play music, we could sing. What about primal screaming? You guys remember primal screaming?
Oh, yeah. Let's do that.
Bear Hebert: Yeah. It's pretty great. I hope this shows up on your Instagram feed because it's really, it's really delightful to watch. It's
Jeremy Blanchard: Oh, I'm gonna go.
Bear Hebert: like, yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.
Bear Hebert: Thank you students for,
yeah, keeping keeping the creativity and the
movement.