Latest / Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease / 195 // Network Marketing & Hashimoto’s: Pros, Cons & The Financial Reality of MLM Health Supplements

Transcript

195 // Network Marketing & Hashimoto’s: Pros, Cons & The Financial Reality of MLM Health Supplements · Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease

• 0:00
  It is mid-April, and April 15th in the United States is Tax Day,
• 0:03
  so today's episode is inspired by something I said to my tax guy,
• 0:07
  which is, I don't even know how I made that money. It wasn't a lot. It was less than $300.
• 0:12
  In actuality, I know where it came from, but I really don't know how I made it.
• 0:16
  In this episode, we are going to explore the pros and cons of network marketing
• 0:20
  for people with Hashimoto's.
• 0:22
  I'm going to talk about how MLMs can be really good at education,
• 0:25
  and they can deliver real health wins for some, yet they often fail in other categories.
• 0:32
  Welcome to the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.
• 0:34
  This is where you will find clarity and simple, sustainable strategies to feel better.
• 0:40
  I want to help you figure out your root causes.
• 0:43
  My name is Esther Yunkin. I am a registered nurse. I know how exhausting it
• 0:47
  is to live with fatigue, brain fog, and the ups and downs of Hashimoto's. And that is why I'm here.
• 0:53
  I'm here to cut through the confusion and to give you practical steps that support
• 0:58
  your body, calm your immune system, so that you can regain your energy and feel like yourself again.
• 1:04
  People have very strong opinions about today's topic. I don't know how your opinions are.
• 1:08
  If you ever want to get some good or bad conversation going in a Facebook group,
• 1:15
  just mention network marketing or MLMs.
• 1:18
  People are very divided.
• 1:20
  There are some people who love them, some people who despise them, all of that.
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  So let's define our terms first. Network marketing, MLM or multi-level marketing
• 1:29
  and pyramid schemes, they are often used interchangeably, those different categories
• 1:35
  or those different titles.
• 1:36
  In general, one of these companies is a company that offers a product or a service and a business.
• 1:44
  It's more like a franchisee where you don't have control.
• 1:48
  You don't have control of the sales, of the prices, of the products,
• 1:51
  anything like that, you are just doing the job of talking to people and educating them.
• 1:57
  So that is network marketing. People get paid on commission.
• 2:01
  They get paid based on products sold or services offered or the business side,
• 2:09
  which is telling your friends and family and network about the actual business and having them join.
• 2:15
  And then you get a small commission off of what they do.
• 2:19
  This leads to the negative term pyramid scheme.
• 2:23
  I don't know about you, but if you've ever looked at a business scheme,
• 2:27
  a business layout, there's always one person at the top as triangle.
• 2:31
  There's a lot of people at the bottom. That's how businesses are laid out.
• 2:34
  That's how families are laid out. That's how like a lot of stuff works.
• 2:38
  I find nothing wrong with the actual shape of a network marketing company.
• 2:43
  It's just, it is what it is. The thing is in network marketing,
• 2:46
  it is the one place where you can rise above the person who enrolled you.
• 2:52
  For example, in the company that I am currently a part of, I believe that my
• 2:57
  checks are bigger than like three different people directly above me because I have done more work.
• 3:05
  And this really depends on the compensation plan for each company.
• 3:09
  But I really appreciate that in most network marketing companies,
• 3:13
  you really do control what you make.
• 3:17
  You can't just join and say, I'm going to make a million dollars and make a
• 3:20
  million dollars. It's based on a lot of things. And here is a huge caveat.
• 3:25
  It's not easy. Not easy. There's a lot of people who basically promise that
• 3:30
  it's going to be easy and it is not.
• 3:32
  I joined my first company back in the early 2000s. My husband and I had seen the research.
• 3:39
  We had seen lives change. And so we joined.
• 3:42
  And the goal was to make a full-time income for at least one of us.
• 3:46
  We worked really hard. We did what our upline note, the company said.
• 3:49
  We were never like gross and spammy about it. But I will tell you that we never
• 3:54
  made even close to a full-time income.
• 3:57
  In fact, we never made what we spent in a month.
• 4:00
  We never broke even. And that was the first goal.
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  So number one question, are network marketing companies worth it if you have
• 4:09
  a condition like Hashimoto's?
• 4:11
  And I would still say yes. And here is why.
• 4:15
  Nothing, no product is going to, quote, cure Hashimoto's. None.
• 4:21
  Hashimoto's is an autoimmune condition where your body, your immune system,
• 4:24
  is attacking your thyroid.
• 4:26
  Now, there are multiple reasons why it might be attacking your thyroid.
• 4:29
  Maybe there's toxins in your thyroid and your body is trying to get those out.
• 4:33
  But we know that there are root causes.
• 4:36
  If you have gone through Hashimoto's Decoded, the Root Causes Revealed mini
• 4:40
  course, it's less than an hour.
• 4:42
  In that time, you're going to figure out what your likely root causes are.
• 4:47
  If you've gone through that course and you know your root causes,
• 4:50
  then you know what areas of products that you're looking for,
• 4:54
  because there are areas to support your root causes.
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  So for example, maybe you went through that and you haven't done the lab testing
• 5:02
  yet, but you know based on where you live and how much you're outside,
• 5:07
  you know that your vitamin D is probably low.
• 5:09
  So of course, you're going to number one, get your labs checked for that one.
• 5:13
  And then you're going to look for a vitamin D supplement because research has
• 5:17
  shown us that most people cannot get enough vitamin D from the sun and from
• 5:23
  their food. They need a supplement.
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  And that obviously depends on what kind of fish you eat and where you live,
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  how much time you're outside, when you're outside, what season it is, a lot of variables.
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  But back 20 years ago, people didn't really know about vitamin D.
• 5:39
  Speaking as a nurse, When I got out of college, I knew about vitamin D.
• 5:45
  I had been taught about it. I didn't know as much as I do now.
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  I didn't know that it's responsible for so many different functions of the immune system.
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  And it's important for other, like so many different things.
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  I had no idea. I didn't know how much people need it every day.
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  I just knew that, oh, vitamin D is in fortified milk because that's what it
• 6:04
  says when I look at the, you know, my bottle of milk.
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  And we should be able to get everything from our food because that's what they
• 6:10
  taught me in nursing school. Well.
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  Because of network marketing, because of the really good education they provide,
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  I learned more about vitamin D, and I learned how beneficial it is,
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  and I started taking vitamin D as a supplement.
• 6:24
  Now, fast forward 20 years, and it seems like everybody's talking about vitamin D.
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  The education has caught up. Most people know the importance of vitamin D,
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  and now it's not reliant on the network marketing companies' supply and demand.
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  The network marketing companies educated people who educated other people.
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  And now there's more demand. And in response to that demand for good quality
• 6:48
  vitamin D supplements, more companies, not necessarily network marketing companies,
• 6:52
  more companies are making good vitamin D supplements.
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  That's how this works. We've seen it happen in other things too.
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  I've seen it happen with essential oils.
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  Back 15, 20 years, there were really only two different sources of essential
• 7:08
  oils. And those were the two network marketing companies.
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  Well, those people educated the masses, and now there's enough education in
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  people demanding good quality essential oils.
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  And now there's a lot of companies that are not network marketing that provide essential oils.
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  So network marketing companies do one thing really well, and that is research and education.
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  They kind of go together because the education is based on the research.
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  Now I'm talking about good network marketing companies. There are scams.
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  There are. There are companies who are more focused on hype and media and how
• 7:43
  well they can advertise through people.
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  And there are other companies that focus a lot on research and development and education.
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  Those are the ones that I gravitate towards because I'm not a hype person.
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  I will not tell you something because of hype and because of media and because of ads.
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  I talk to you about things because of research and science and because things work.
• 8:03
  Like I said earlier, there is no cure for Hashimoto's. You get to identify your
• 8:08
  own root causes, what is unique to you, and then you get to address those root causes.
• 8:14
  And then upstream, downstream, if you listened to episode 189,
• 8:18
  I talked a lot about this.
• 8:20
  What you do for those root causes is going to have a downstream effect because
• 8:24
  you are cleaning something up, just like cleaning up a river.
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  And then everything downstream is going to be cleaner. It's going to work better
• 8:31
  because of what you did upstream.
• 8:32
  So when anywhere in this episode or anytime you hear somebody talking about
• 8:38
  how, you know, a product is going to help something, think upstream, downstream.
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  So let's review a couple of the root causes and see how this applies.
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  Because again, we're not talking about curing or preventing any disease like
• 8:51
  Hashimoto's. We're talking about addressing the root causes.
• 8:54
  One of the big ones is gut health. And there are a lot of network marketing
• 8:58
  companies who focus on health, specifically gut health.
• 9:02
  Plexus comes to mind. I used to see a lot of people in my social media talking
• 9:06
  about Plexus because it had a really good gut drink. I think they called it the pink drink.
• 9:12
  Now, what they didn't know is that recipe was leased.
• 9:16
  And so a lot of people had really good downstream effects for a long time until the product changed.
• 9:23
  And this is one problem with trusting a company.
• 9:28
  Just wholeheartedly falling in love with a company is
• 9:32
  that when the product changes you don't have control of that and
• 9:35
  plexus did not reveal at least to everybody that their recipe was changing and
• 9:41
  so then some people are like well my gut health you know didn't it's going back
• 9:44
  to how it used to be and they were upset i know this because one person who
• 9:48
  was fairly high up in plexus was talking to me about it during this time and
• 9:52
  she was trying to figure out what was going on.
• 9:54
  And she's the one who told me that they actually leased their recipe.
• 9:58
  They lost the lease or it expired and they were trying to figure out a new recipe for gut health.
• 10:04
  So there are a bunch of different companies who focus on gut health.
• 10:08
  I believe that Plexus now has another gut health drink that also works well,
• 10:14
  but I don't know that for sure.
• 10:15
  I personally use the LifeVantage P84. P84, or the Healthy Edge stack,
• 10:22
  that came from a company that LifeVantage acquired because of this gut health product.
• 10:28
  P84 activates your gut, so it activates, tells your body to do what your body
• 10:35
  is supposed to do, so that your gut makes the right peptides again. And that is so powerful.
• 10:40
  I think there's at least 13 different peptides that they've studied that when
• 10:44
  you drink this P84 that your gut does what it's supposed to do as far as these 13 different peptides.
• 10:51
  One of them is GLP-2, which is super interesting.
• 10:55
  But there are a lot of companies, network marketing companies,
• 10:57
  they put research and development money into figuring out root causes.
• 11:03
  Like how to solve problems. So another root cause is environmental toxins. They're all around us.
• 11:10
  We all have our stories. We all know that there's so many different toxins all around us.
• 11:15
  Well, there is one company that has come across my feed quite a bit lately.
• 11:19
  Maybe you have seen it too. It's called Pure Haven, and their goal is toxin-free cleaning products.
• 11:25
  Now, here's another thing about network marketing industry.
• 11:28
  Like I said earlier, when people tie their identity or their loyalty to one
• 11:33
  product, sometimes they...
• 11:37
  They have something good, but then as years go on, there are other things that
• 11:42
  are better on the market.
• 11:43
  But these people who have tied their, what is that, tied their court,
• 11:48
  their cart to one horse? Anyway, they don't know about the new things.
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  My mom joined a network marketing company when I was in junior high or maybe
• 11:57
  high school, and they claimed to have really good cleaning products and good
• 12:01
  clean cleaning products.
• 12:03
  Well, maybe they were at the time. I know they worked well, but they are absolutely
• 12:08
  not clean. Are they greenwashed? Yes, absolutely.
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  But are they clean? No, they are not. And so people who trusted that company
• 12:17
  and who still trust that company, they might not know that there are better products.
• 12:22
  And that's just something to be aware of if you decide to join a network marketing
• 12:26
  company is just be aware of developments outside of your company.
• 12:31
  So when it comes to root causes and triggers, we can look to a lot of the network
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  marketing companies for solutions to that.
• 12:40
  I mean, another one is stress. Stress is a huge trigger for autoimmune problems.
• 12:46
  And essential oils is a really good example of lowering stress.
• 12:50
  There are different aromas that you can use for aromatherapy that will lower
• 12:54
  your stress response. And there's also ones that can help you sleep better.
• 12:59
  There are different things you can use to support your different root causes and triggers.
• 13:05
  Blood sugar issues is another one. There are companies that have products to
• 13:11
  help you stabilize and balance your blood sugar. And these are not medications.
• 13:15
  These are things like herbs. If you have gone through my GLP-1 webinar.
• 13:22
  It was a three-part series that I did on the podcast, I think back in the early
• 13:26
  hundreds of my episodes, but I turned it into a webinar so that it's got slides
• 13:31
  and everything. And I'll put the link down in the show notes.
• 13:34
  But there are companies that specialize in helping balance blood sugar issues.
• 13:39
  And I did talk about, not the companies, but I talked about some of the products,
• 13:43
  like the ingredients, like inulin, which is a fiber.
• 13:48
  I talked about that in the webinar. So you can check the link down below if you're interested.
• 13:52
  So in general, network marketing companies do a really good job of education.
• 13:56
  In fact, sometimes they educate so well that the demand increases and then there
• 14:01
  are non-network marketing companies to supply the supply, which I actually love.
• 14:06
  It makes everybody better, in my opinion.
• 14:09
  Let me share my story. When I was in junior high or early high school,
• 14:14
  my mom joined a network marketing company.
• 14:17
  I didn't know it was network marketing. I just knew that she had new lotions
• 14:20
  and potions and cleaning stuff.
• 14:23
  The problem was the education was ill-informed.
• 14:27
  I do not know if this came from the top from the company itself or if it filtered
• 14:32
  through a bunch of people and we were given bad information.
• 14:35
  This was in the mid-90s, early 90s, and we didn't have the internet.
• 14:40
  We didn't have distribution and my mom was not like an active consultant or anything.
• 14:46
  So she was just hearing from the people who told her about the products,
• 14:50
  this is what you can use them for.
• 14:52
  Well, one of the products or a couple of the products had essential oils in
• 14:56
  them, which they didn't use that term.
• 14:58
  I didn't learn that term for maybe a decade or two.
• 15:01
  And we were taught to use them.
• 15:04
  Wrongly. I have a physical effect from that usage. I developed a sensitivity.
• 15:10
  It's not an allergy, it's a sensitivity.
• 15:12
  And to this day, if I have any exposure to that specific essential oil,
• 15:19
  I break out in weeping hives. It's gross.
• 15:22
  And unfortunately, this essential oil, it's tea tree oil, is in everything.
• 15:27
  So even though I'm really careful to read labels and everything.
• 15:30
  Every once in a while, it sneaks in. I remember a couple years ago, I had a new shampoo.
• 15:35
  I didn't think it had tea tree oil in it. And all of a sudden,
• 15:38
  my scalp started itching and weeping, which is, you know, really gross.
• 15:42
  And that is a result of the bad education that my mom received and I received
• 15:48
  back when I was in junior high or high school. I'm 46.
• 15:51
  That's a really long time to have a consequence for bad education.
• 15:56
  And that is one of the downsides of network marketing. it is built on trust.
• 16:01
  The system is built on trust. So.
• 16:05
  With the internet now, thankfully, we can double check things and you can get
• 16:09
  information even from network marketing companies.
• 16:11
  Usually you can get education from like the scientists and the research and development team.
• 16:16
  But because of that experience, I am very leery of by mouth education.
• 16:22
  Probably that is one of the things that really caused me to always want the
• 16:28
  research, always want to know exactly what's happening and why and know from the source.
• 16:33
  Maybe that is why I'm so skeptical of just media and hype because that caused
• 16:39
  a decades-long problem for me.
• 16:42
  Well, let's fast forward. I went to college, became a nurse,
• 16:45
  had one semester of nutrition in that.
• 16:49
  And as like one little segment of that nutrition course, I had to do a food
• 16:54
  log and I learned or was taught that you can get all of the nutrients that you need from your food.
• 16:59
  So I graduated, went on to my second job, which was up in Alaska, met my husband at.
• 17:05
  And he was telling me about this company and multivitamins. And I was like,
• 17:10
  you don't need a multivitamin. You can get everything you need from food.
• 17:13
  So he said, I have this CD from a doctor. Would you be willing to listen?
• 17:16
  At the time, I didn't want to tell him directly, but I'm like,
• 17:19
  you're kind of a sucker. You don't need this.
• 17:21
  Why are you getting sucked into this? but I decided to listen because of course
• 17:25
  my boyfriend was telling me too and I wanted to make him happy.
• 17:29
  So I listened and I'm like, oh, actually this is really good research.
• 17:32
  This is really good to know.
• 17:33
  Our foods are not the same as they were a hundred years ago.
• 17:37
  Like a vitamin or vitamin C content in orange is not the same as it was a hundred, 200 years ago.
• 17:42
  Like our food itself has changed. The mineral content of our food has changed
• 17:46
  and there's more pesticides and GMOs and stuff in our food.
• 17:49
  While that's been happening, our stressors have been going up.
• 17:53
  And as you have more stressors, your requirement for more nutrients also goes up.
• 17:58
  So our foods have gone down in what we need and our needs have gone up.
• 18:02
  And you put those two things together and we're not getting what we need from our food.
• 18:05
  So I learned all of this from several different doctors, not from my boyfriend,
• 18:09
  now husband, but I learned from the doctors at that company.
• 18:12
  I was like, okay, I'm willing to try. We tried. We got married.
• 18:17
  Like I said, we lived in Alaska, came down to Minnesota to get married in the fall.
• 18:21
  I have lifelong environmental allergies. They were so bad in the fall.
• 18:25
  I knew they would be bad because I grew up in Minnesota and I was taking a prescription
• 18:30
  allergy medicine and an over-the-counter allergy medicine.
• 18:34
  And I still could hardly breathe during my wedding.
• 18:37
  And I remember I had to get up in the middle of our wedding night,
• 18:42
  I ended up sitting in a chair in the hotel room because I couldn't breathe if
• 18:46
  I was laying down. My allergies were so bad.
• 18:49
  Fast forward one year later, I had been on these multi-nutrients for one year.
• 18:54
  We went back to Minnesota, same season to visit fall, and I was taking only
• 18:59
  one over-the-counter allergy medicine, and I realized I can breathe.
• 19:03
  What is up with this? And then I started figuring out, oh, there's a lot of
• 19:08
  other things that are different too, because my cells had the ingredients that they needed.
• 19:12
  This wasn't the product changing my allergies.
• 19:17
  This was the product giving my cells the ingredients that they needed.
• 19:21
  And then my cells and my health responded.
• 19:24
  This was a downstream effect.
• 19:26
  Well, fast forward, this company was fantastic for the next like five, 10 years.
• 19:32
  And then they started to kind of rest on their laurels and other companies started
• 19:37
  doing better in specific categories that I had joined this company for.
• 19:42
  So I moved. I moved companies, which is why I am now at LifeVantage,
• 19:47
  because I am not going to tie myself and the products that I recommend.
• 19:52
  I'm not going to tie that to a company who is not on the cutting edge.
• 19:55
  And that is why I recommend currently the LifeVantage products,
• 20:00
  because they tell your body to do what your body is designed to do.
• 20:02
  And LifeVantage is a network marketing company. I wasn't necessarily looking for network marketing.
• 20:08
  I was looking for products that I could trust, a company that I could trust and recommend.
• 20:12
  And yes, I wanted a commission. And that is part of network marketing.
• 20:17
  So let me, I'm already at 20 minutes, let me quickly sum up.
• 20:20
  When I talked to my tax guy and I said, I don't know how I made this, it was true.
• 20:25
  That was from the initial network marketing company that my husband and I joined in the early 2000s.
• 20:31
  I've not looked in that back office for years, maybe a decade.
• 20:35
  I do not know how I'm making even that teeny tiny bit of money.
• 20:40
  I do know what I'm making for LifeVantage because that's what I'm currently promoting.
• 20:46
  If you are interested in network marketing, now I am not a tax guru,
• 20:50
  but I'm going to tell you what I have learned over the years.
• 20:54
  Number one, the IRS controls what you can and cannot write off.
• 20:57
  Not your company, not your tax guy, not you, the IRS.
• 21:02
  They have strict guidelines and they don't believe that you can use personal
• 21:06
  consumable products for a tax write-off.
• 21:08
  But you can write off things like equipment. So if you dedicate one little corner
• 21:13
  of your house to your office, then you should be able to obviously check all
• 21:19
  of this with your tax person.
• 21:20
  You should use, you can use that as a tax write-off.
• 21:23
  If you dedicate some of your cell service to specifically business,
• 21:28
  or this one's a big one, travel expenses. If you go to your company's convention, that's a tax write-off.
• 21:36
  All of that education and your meals and your lodging.
• 21:39
  There's specific criteria, but that's a huge tax write-off.
• 21:43
  And while in our first company, my husband and I never even broke even.
• 21:48
  We never ever, despite how hard we worked, we never ever made as much in one
• 21:53
  month as we spent on the products.
• 21:54
  But we did get a bunch back on our taxes because of things like that.
• 22:00
  So we got better health as a downstream effect from what we were and it benefited us in taxes.
• 22:08
  So I guess a couple of things to sum up. Number one, look for products that
• 22:13
  will support your specific root causes.
• 22:15
  Figure out your root causes and then figure out the products.
• 22:19
  Number two, there are some really good network marketing companies.
• 22:22
  There's also some really bad ones.
• 22:24
  Do your research, learn about a product, learn about the company,
• 22:28
  learn the compensation plan.
• 22:29
  That first company that we were with, I remember one person was super excited
• 22:33
  because she made a sale and then she never ever got paid any commission because
• 22:38
  that company made you balance out what you sold and you had to have two sales,
• 22:43
  one on like either side of your business to balance out and you would get a commission.
• 22:48
  I remember her being just so sad because she worked so hard.
• 22:51
  She finally made a sale and then got nothing.
• 22:54
  So look at the compensation plan and get outside opinions, not just from the company.
• 22:59
  And the other thing is the money issue.
• 23:01
  Choose products that you want to use no matter if you make a commission or not.
• 23:06
  And then share that with others following the best practices for your company
• 23:11
  and following the examples and help of whoever is mentoring you in that.
• 23:17
  And then learn about the tax stuff.
• 23:19
  Learn how to ethically write off as much as you can because that's a huge benefit
• 23:23
  of having a network marketing business.
• 23:26
  The reality is the dream of a full-time income with network marketing rarely
• 23:31
  matches up to real life, but there are or there can be some financial benefits.
• 23:38
  And every single company should have an income disclosure PDF that you can download
• 23:43
  that shows how quickly different people rose to different ranks and how much
• 23:47
  the average person makes is a very interesting thing to look at if you are considering
• 23:52
  joining a company either as a customer or as a consultant.
• 23:57
  Thanks for hanging with me. I did go a little bit long, but I wanted to give
• 24:00
  you a really balanced view and cover the good and the mad of network marketing
• 24:05
  because there are some really good tools that can help you with your root causes, your upstream events.
• 24:11
  And just remember, Hashimoto's, there's nothing out there that cures Hashimoto's
• 24:16
  because it's an autoimmune condition.
• 24:17
  Your immune system is attacking your own body. It's often trying to deal with
• 24:21
  toxins, deficiencies, other triggers.
• 24:23
  And the best path forward is always addressing your individual root causes,
• 24:29
  common sense, solid testing, and supporting your own body's healing process.
• 24:35
  I would love to continue this conversation. Come over to our school community
• 24:39
  if you've been burned by an MLM before, or if you're curious about what other people use.
• 24:45
  I am sure that there are different members of our community who have all used
• 24:50
  different products and different companies.
• 24:52
  So come over. Let's have a conversation about it. I will see you next week on
• 24:56
  the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.
• 24:58
  This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only.
• 25:02
  Please discuss any changes with your trusted healthcare provider.
• 25:05
  To take your next step, join our school community and explore the courses available
• 25:09
  there. You do not have to figure your health out alone.
• 25:13
  So that is school, S-K-O-O-L.com, and it is the Health with Hashimoto's community.
• 25:18
  I'll see you next time on the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.