136- Gatekeeping Doesn't Work

136- Gatekeeping Doesn't Work 
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to the MaYapinion Podcast. This is a show where I share my opinions on entrepreneurship and leadership for women. My name is Maya. I'm your host, and today we're gonna be talking about gatekeeping. I have been wanting to talk about this for so long. I've been really excited to. Do this episode because it's something that I didn't have a term for.

I did not really understand what gatekeeping was when I was in corporate America. However, I could feel it because this not only goes on in entrepreneurship, it goes on in corporate America, but it looks a little bit different in corporate America than it does perhaps in the entrepreneurial world, coaching world, the online world.

So I wanna talk about what it is. What the differences are in the different spaces and why it's ineffective and why it's not a good practice. This is an episode [00:01:00] where I'm really diving into something that shouldn't be done, but needs to be talked about. So gatekeeping is essentially withholding information.

That's what it is, right? It's exactly what it sounds like. It's essentially withholding information. When we do this at the corporate level, what it looks like is. Someone like myself, let's say I'm running a team of a huge team, maybe a hundred folks, which I did when I was in corporate, and let's say that only I have the master sheet only.

I know all the information about my a hundred direct reports. I know when their calls are. I know when they're in the field. I know when they're doing certain things. This is just an example. It's ineffective. For me to gate keep this information, to only have this information because if something happens to me, God forbid if I have to take some time off, if I go on maternity leave, if [00:02:00] I lose a family member, these are all very real things and many have happened, right?

What happens? Why am I thinking that? I am? More valuable because only I know what's on this document, or only I know where this spreadsheet is, or only I know this information. That doesn't make me more valuable to the company. It doesn't make me better at my job or my role as a leader, as a mentor. It doesn't.

It makes me completely ineffective to gate keep information. If I think the only way that I can get ahead in my career and my job is to not share information with people. I have it backwards. Sharing information and being transparent is how you show you're a good leader and a strong leader. You're not afraid of transparency.

You're not afraid to show people. What you're doing. And it also shows that you're able to lead because you're not afraid to have people have access to that [00:03:00] information so they can learn it as well. Because if you're teaching other people and they're growing, then you can move and you can progress in your career.

But that's how it would look in the corporate space. And I'm sure many of you have experienced that. Where people don't share information or don't share processes or don't show, share how they do something or show how they do something. And it's just ineffective and it's not a good way to lead and it's not a good way to operate.

And it can be a really toxic work culture that happens when leaders are leading this way. And I hesitate to say lead because. It's not leadership. True leadership isn't afraid of transparency and showing how they do things and teaching other people how they do things. And then here's the real beauty and is when you have the transparency and you're not gatekeeping, when you share your process with other people, maybe your reports, maybe your superiors, doesn't matter.

They can give input about how you could potentially more effectively [00:04:00] do what you're doing. And that's when it becomes. Empower because you're growing and you're learning and you're moving forward together, but that's a little tidbit of what it would look like in the corporate space, and I'm sure you've experienced it.

If you have, drop me a message. Tell me what your experience was like with gatekeeping. I experienced it all the time. I didn't understand always how my, supervisors were doing certain things. I didn't always have the information. I still experience this sometimes with clients too. I do, and that's why I like to , dig and get more information.

'cause you, if you're on the outside, you can kind of dig and press for more information and that's why I, I enjoy what I do now. Right. You can kind of be that outside source. When I dove into entrepreneurship, this was in like 2017. With consulting consult, and when I started to do all of that, I noticed the coaching world had really exploded.

We see it on Instagram with influencers, TikTok, with influencers. It's gatekeeping is [00:05:00] huge. It's huge, but it looks slightly different and it's got the same effects though. So essentially these folks will say. I know how to help you do this, right? I know how to help you lose 30 pounds, or I know how to help you, um, make a million dollars in a year, or I know how to help you.

Like I do help you. Leave your corporate nine to five. I know how to, whatever it is, fill in the blank. And this might be something that many of you want to do, and it doesn't have to be just service based, right? It can be product based like, Hey, my product helps you cook. Dinner in less than 30 minutes, or my product helps you have, I don't know, less pain in high heels.

I don't know. I'm making it up, right? But the point is it helps you with something. Where the gatekeeping is a problem is when there's not information for you to decide if that product or person or [00:06:00] service is for you. So what I mean by that is, let's say it's a product, okay, we'll go with the high heel example.

It's something that goes in high heels that makes it more comfortable. If there aren't videos and testimonials and ways for you to understand how this product works. It's just claiming that it does this. That's gatekeeping. That's gatekeeping on a product. You don't understand how the product works. You just have to buy it to see.

That's gatekeeping. If someone's selling a service, like they're gonna help you lose 30 pounds in a month. Okay, amazing. Are there, are there videos, is there, are there social media, is there testimonials? Same thing. If there isn't and somebody's just claiming they can do this. No, you have to buy the program.

You have to buy the program. Sure. I understand that we all have to make a living and that we all have to generate revenue from our business, but there has to be a way for people to decide if they like your program, [00:07:00] product service, if they like you. So. With gatekeeping. We're also, uh, on the entrepreneurial side, we're also withholding.

If we're gatekeeping, we're holding withholding information that allows people to decide if they like you, if they like what you're up to, if they wanna work with you. And the problem with that is we want people, we identify as the entrepreneur and leader, who our customer is, and that can change and evolve as we talked about in pivoting, right?

That can always change and evolve in the previous episodes. But when we gatekeep, we prevent ourselves from finding that true audience, the right people for us. And what I mean by that is when you have people bought into you. And what you offer, the right people will be attracted to you. So when you're showing people who you are, the right people are going to be attracted to you, and you want the right people to buy from you.

When the wrong people are buying [00:08:00] from you, it's miserable. It's absolutely miserable. You want your tribe, you want your people. You don't want the people that dislike you to be consistently buying from you. At least I don't. If people don't like me, I'm not for everybody. You are not for everybody. That's, that's when we're not in our passion and stuff.

So I find that gatekeeping, the withholding of information about who we are, what we sell, or what we do, it's a problem because then we're not going to be identifying the true people that we want to be working with and the people that align with us. So it becomes a bigger issue. It also becomes an issue because if you're telling people they have to buy something.

And that's how they'll get to know you. What if they buy it and they're not happy with it? It happens all the time. It happens all the time with people who gate keep. You have to have a really delicate and [00:09:00] good balance of giving information and then also selling what's of value.

So I'll use myself as an example. So this podcast is free. It will always be free to listen to. I give information on a weekly basis for free. Why do I do that? Because I love what I do. It was really hard to build my event business. It's really difficult to build a tech startup, which is what I'm doing, and I wanna share that information with people.

Ultimately, I also wanna open the opportunity for more women to work with me to help them, but the only way they'll know if I'm a fit and you'll know if I'm a fit to help you, is if you can listen to something and identify with me. And I, of course, I have TikTok, and of course I have Instagram, but this is a really intimate way to get to know me on a weekly basis.[00:10:00] 

See if it's, if we're a fit on both sides, you know me. Now you have to decide, am I for you? I know who's a fit for me. You can tell from the show. But if I just chose not to put my information out there and just kept pumping out, Hey, come to my event, you know, 'cause I'm starting an annual event for women, so check that out.

But come to my event. Come here, buy a ticket, do this. You know, and you didn't know anything about me. In my opinion, that's gatekeeping. But there's gatekeeping in so many ways too where people just just want you to purchase something and you should be purchasing things. You should be patronizing the people that give you information and help you.

But again, it's a delicate dance. The only way to understand if that's the person you wanna invest in, to invest in yourself, whether it's a product, service, whatever it is. You have to know enough information. So it's a very, it's a delicate dance, but I have a real pet peeve about gatekeeping in [00:11:00] general because I think it's an ego thing.

I think it's an ego thing, and it's a scarcity mindset. So. What I mean by this is I think sometimes we think, okay, like should they be so lucky to work with me, they need to pay for it. Well, of course they need to pay for it if they're working with you or buying a product from you, but. With a scarcity mindset, you're thinking, oh my God, I better not give away any information because I don't want them going and doing this on their own or figuring it out.

You know what? If you can listen to my podcast and you can figure out how to start your consulting business, or if you can figure out how to leave your nine to five, that's amazing. That's amazing. That's awesome because that's how I did it, and it takes a lot longer to do it on your own, but more power to you.

That's incredible. I don't have a scarcity mindset where that comes from. Have I had that in the past when I first started out? Yes. But why did I have that mindset? Because there were so many people and so [00:12:00] much noise around me, especially in the Instagram, TikTok, social media space where women don't always give value away.

You're not giving it away. You're investing. You're investing in your audience. You're investing in the people who wanna listen to you and want to learn from you. So while it's a delicate balance, it's also really important that you understand that if someone really wants to work with you, they're going to work with you.

They're going to buy your product, they're going to buy your service, they're going to want to work with you, and they're gonna wanna spend the money and they're gonna feel good about it because you've already given them so much value. You're doing a podcast or you're creating tiktoks every day, or you're whatever that YouTube videos, whatever you're doing to create value by the time that person buys a product from you, or service from you, or whatever it is that you're, you're doing to generate revenue, they feel amazing about it because they're like, oh my gosh, Maya, I've listened to her show every week for a long [00:13:00] time.

I now follow her on Instagram TikTok. I love her content. It feels really good to now. Buy a ticket to her event, or it feels really good to, you know, book a couple of calls with her and learn more from her. There's an investment there. So I think it's something that you have to understand that there's room for everybody and that scarcity mindset doesn't work.

And I'm not asking you to give away the kitchen sink everything. I'm not asking you to give away, you know? The cow, right? So I think it's just really important that you understand you've gotta create value. People have to understand what you're about and who you are, and holding that back and not showing people and sitting it behind a paywall doesn't work.

It doesn't work. But what does work is creating value, creating content, creating resources, creating buy-in so people get to know you. Don't be afraid to give away value. Think [00:14:00] about some of your favorite creators, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, all these social platforms. YouTube, what do you love about them?

You love that you connect with them, that they teach you something that you learn. Maybe they just entertain you, but that's okay too because that's a value. Entertainment is a part of our life, so that's a value as well. So. I think you have to ask yourself a couple questions. You have to think about the fact that you've gotta create the value, right?

That's what we were talking about. But think, ask yourself a couple things. Am I protecting like ego with this because I think someone should be paying for this, or am I protecting peace? Right? So like, think about that. So the difference between the two is. You wanna be really balanced with what you, I'm not telling you to make 20,000 tiktoks every day or anything like that, but you've gotta create [00:15:00] value for your audience.

You can't gate keep, like if you're gonna, if you're gonna talk about gardening, talk about gardening, talk about it, talk about what's what works, what doesn't work, because no one's gonna buy your book on gardening unless people know that you can garden and you have tips and you have things to share so they can follow and get invested in you.

But I'm also not telling you to stream live your daily life or, you know, post a ton of pictures of your book and give away everything, right? So that's giving away, you know, your piece. But if you're thinking, oh, well I don't need to show them, they can see pictures of my garden. Like, that becomes your ego.

So, you know, it's balancing the two and th and thinking about that, right? Thinking about, you know, what self like, be self-aware and what gatekeeping habits have I had like. For me sometimes with my other show that I have about sibling loss, it is extremely emotionally taxing to do that show. It is, [00:16:00] um, because we also do an event, we do a support group, we do a workshop and the fault, we do a lot of things.

So I have to protect, when I talk about protecting my peace, I have to protect my peace. I have to take some breaks. I can't create grief content every single day. That's, that's not for me. It's a passion for me. So I protect my peace in that space, and I'm very aware of, okay, what value do I wanna give to the audience?

Like, how can I give them? And then also, what do I wanna charge for and what do I wanna put behind? And I just know that there's certain things that we, we do for free. And there's some things that we charge for because it's elevated. And, and that needs to be behind a paywall. So that's, I, I tap in a lot there because I have to check, you know.

On that because I'm a business woman doing something that is, you know, very empathetic and more in the grief space. So that one, I really have to check my ego on a lot because it's a totally different ball game than talking to you guys who are in the leadership space, entrepreneur entrepreneurial space, and that that area, it's just very different when you're dealing with [00:17:00] grief.

It's a deep emotion. So I think. A takeaway for this is gatekeeping is ineffective. It does not work. When you see these coaches out there and they're not giving you any information and they're saying things like, oh, I can help you make a million dollars in a year, and then they don't, they don't lay out how, like, how, how?

I'm not gonna spend 1500, $2,500 on your program when you don't explain how so. When we move away from gatekeeping, we're showing the who, what, when, where, why, all of that. How all of those things, right? And I think that's, that's what's really important for me too. Every event I do, everything I do, I'm always willing to be open and share, this is how we're gonna do it.

This is why we're gonna do it, this is when we're gonna do it. Share all of those things. Gatekeeping is ineffective because it won't help you grow an audience. It won't help you grow a following. It won't help you grow your business, your product reach, whatever you're trying to do. [00:18:00] People have to trust you.

They have to like you. They have to be invested in you. Not everybody needs to like you. That's not what I'm saying, but what I'm saying is they have to understand what you're about to decide if you are for them, because you already know who you are for. When you've identified that audience for yourself, but you need to let them to decide if they're for you, because then it's a mutual beneficial relationship and when you're gatekeeping, you're keeping information.

It doesn't work well at all when you're building a business, but as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, it also doesn't work in corporate America either. It's toxic for the culture, it's toxic for the environment, and it doesn't allow you to grow as a leader, and it doesn't allow you to grow up, and it doesn't allow you to grow your people up, has an even bigger impact in the entrepreneurial space because you are the one leading, you are the one setting the tone.

So it not only impacts your culture as a company, as you're growing your own company, but it also impacts. The folks you're selling to, whether, again, product service does not matter, it affects that as well. So [00:19:00] check your ego, make sure you understand. Giving value away for free is is not a problem. It's getting people invested in you.

The real meat and potatoes, the things that you're selling that can always sit behind a paywall. But you want your content, you want your messaging, you want whatever you're doing to market your business to speak for itself. Or you're gonna spend a lot of time trying to push sales. That's what gatekeeping does.

When you keep all the information behind. You're so focused on selling tickets, or you're so focused on selling your product, or you're so focused on selling your service or whatever it is that you're doing. You don't actually get to just show your value. Gatekeeping is ineffective because you're not showing your value, and value sells your product or service for you.

Thank you so much for listening to the MaYapinion podcast. Don't forget to follow us at MaYapinion Podcast and at Maya Roffler on all major social media [00:20:00] platforms. And don't forget to like and subscribe the MaYapinion Podcast. We'll see you back here next week.