How Long Will It Take To Be A Sex Educator?
Find out more with Reid Mihalko from http://www.ReidAboutSex.com and Cathy Vartuli from http://www.TheIntimacyDojo.com.
Cathy: Someone wrote in and said, “I attended a workshop by Reid and Allison and they inspired me for further my education and experiences as a growing sex educator. I’m so excited about going to camp. I’ve been wanting to go for a number of years and with the new location I can easily attend. How long should I expect to have…to work at this until I have a business?”
I’m here with Reid Mihalko from https://reidaboutsex.com/ and http://www.sexgeeksummercamp.com/.
Reid: And I’m sitting next to Cathy Vartuli of the http://www.theintimacydojo.com/.
Cathy: So the person wanted to know…
Reid: How long it’s gonna take?
Cathy: Yeah.
Reid: I don’t know. We can’t answer that. Everyone is different.
Cathy: Well going to camp is a really good start.
Reid: Less…less than 60 years probably
Cathy: It’s not encouraging
Reid: I can’t make promises like that
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: That’s against the law
Cathy: It is
Reid: but you learn at camp. Guarantees and promises certain kinds of things you it’s like unethical for you to promise those things.
Cathy: Yeah. So there’s a number of things you can consider as factors in this and there’s no promises on the number of amount of time. Going to camp does an amazing way to jumpstart and you’ll meet a lot of people in network and you’ll get a lot of really good savvy business experience, right advice right away. Part of it depends on how… how confident and comfortable you are in front of people, how well networked you are, how much computer skills and…and or ability to outsource you have. There’s a number of factors that can influence it and having good connections in the community can really help.
Reid: Mmmmm…Keep, keep going on. I’m…I’m just I’m curious what Cathy has to say about this.
Cathy: Well I grew slowly but I started just helping out. I have full-time engineering job and I started helping a friend out with some things and learning about it and just like I had no idea, I had never…I have programmed in Pascal but never like HTML and I didn’t know anything about this internet business or marketing at all. So over the last 10 years I’ve taken a bunch of classes and I’ve grown a lot but again it’s a part-time and it’s not…I really care about helping people but it’s not like I needed to pay the mortgage or the rent and I think that different people grow, I think I found…I work, I do a lot of work with people…that were…are held back by fears and self-sabotage and I see a lot of people struggling with that too like you start growing and then all of the sudden you’re like “Oh my god, this is too big or people are noticing me” and their fears come up and procrastination and…and resistance starts being the factor. And it really depends; everybody’s different on where they hit resistance. So that can slow things down even if you’re on a really good trajectory and working through those and having community support to do that is really powerful.
Reid: The…the big answer is gonna be your mileage may vary. There are…luck is involved in some of these and how hard you hassle isn’t the only guarantee for success. There are lot of people out there putting in a lot of work and effort on the wrong things. I think we do a good job at Camp at pointing out the things that seem to be working for other people especially in other industries. For me as a geek going out Cathy and I go to lot of business seminars and stuff nerding out in other areas and seeing what’s working and bringing those best practices into the sex Ed world or sex positive entrepreneur world and a lot of those a lot of things I recommend at Camp are around building an online business which is tricky depending on how explicit your services or your media is because there’s like the sex ghetto, the porn ghetto in terms of service and people can get their Facebook accounts taken down or no one wants to approve my vibrator add so what…..
Cathy: Or yeah or PayPal gets taken away or
Reid: Yeah. So there’s a lot of things that traditionally we could totally not have a problem with, if we are selling hair product but because we’re selling lube and dildos or hand job workshops, things get weird and tricky once you acknowledge the weirdness and the trickiness there are best practices for building a career and staring to build a brand and recognition and how to position charging for your services and your products so that you can receive money in exchange for adding value to people’s lives.
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: How that scales and when you can quit your day job and then you have your 401k fully paid and you know all your kids are in private school like I can’t make promises about if when that part will ever happen, what I can do is show you what I’ve been doing…best practices from other places. I’ll always be transparent about my numbers and what I make a year and where and how because I think it…that conversation it is a useful conversation in our field. I don’t expect anybody else to ever share any of their personal business information, I can because I’m wired in this way for that and I think it’s useful for people to see somebody who’s “successful” and really look what that means. And if I will say this, if you’re looking to get into sex education to get rich whatever “rich” means to you if it has numbers, money attached to rich this may not be the “career space.” You can pay your bills if you know… if you know things work out in your favor but at the same time you know I was a bartender and an actor and a film producer and all these other things that allowed me to pay the bills when Cuddle Party started when I started getting into Sex Ed and all the other stuff. So it took me six to eight years before I could let all that go because I had enough income coming in. I’m hoping camp helps everyone else
Cathy: Get there faster
Reid: get…get into that place in a short time. I’ve done…I will feel really good if people get into those areas for themselves in three years or four years or something like that but plan… plan for the best, plan for the worst and then hopefully do the things that that that you love and help people.
Cathy: Yeah and I think you’ll love camp, that’s gonna help you so much.
Reid: So for those of you who want to check out camp go to https://reidaboutsex.com/campFAQ or go to http://www.sexgeeksummercamp.com/ and you’ll get some free videos and stuff. Hope this helped!
Cathy: Yeah. See you there!