Almost every time I launch something, at least one person shows up to tell me that yoga shouldn’t be a business, or that you shouldn’t sell yoga at all. I used to get pulled into those conversations. These days I mostly let them be. But the belief underneath them is worth taking seriously, because so many of the yoga teachers I work with carry a quieter version of it themselves.

That belief is exactly what I sat down to talk about with George Kao. George has been an authentic business coach since 2009, working with heart-led people who want to earn a living from meaningful work without becoming someone they don’t recognise. We came at all of this from very different places. My background is in advertising and digital marketing, and George’s is rooted in spirituality and what he calls authentic business. And yet we landed in almost the same spot. Here’s what came out of the conversation.

Authentic marketing is really just telling the truth

George started out learning from the big names in marketing, the people who teach that it’s all about targeting and getting someone to buy, and then buy again. He was good at it. But somewhere around 2012 something shifted for him, and he realised that when he was trying to get someone to do something, it was hard for him to stay in an honest, of-service place. It felt like he was manipulating his own thoughts in order to manipulate theirs.

So he started asking a different question. What if marketing was simply sharing his real thoughts and his real, grounded experiences? What if marketing was telling the truth? People responded to that, because it felt so different from what they were used to. But George noticed a trap in it too. If marketing is only ever saying whatever you feel like saying, that’s not really marketing, that’s a hobby. So he added the second half. Authentic marketing is telling the truth in service of the person reading, watching or listening. He describes it as making friends at scale, and as the golden rule applied to business. Notice the marketing that has felt manipulative to you, and don’t do that to other people. Notice what has felt genuinely good and helpful, and do more of that.

I loved this because it matches what I’ve found from the completely opposite direction. I spent years in advertising before I ever taught a yoga class, and the marketing that actually works over time is the marketing that makes people feel something real and tells them the truth about what you do.

Where “yoga shouldn’t be a business” actually comes from

We spent a while on the money question, because it comes up for almost everyone in this world. George made a point I keep thinking about. For most of human history, spiritual and wellness work was supported by the tribe. In the Eastern traditions there’s the practice of dana, of giving freely to the spiritual teacher, and in a small village it was completely natural to make sure the person holding that role could keep doing it.

The thing is, we don’t live in small tribes anymore. Your future clients don’t know who you are, and they don’t feel any natural pull to support you. But a part of us, especially those of us drawn to spiritual work, is still running on thousands of years of dana, still quietly expecting that if the work is good, people will simply give. George’s point is that this no longer matches the world we’re in, and that we have to be willing to adapt.

I added my own piece here, which is that a lot of this is tangled up with the way caring work has been treated. Nursing and teaching, the professions built on being of service, have been underpaid for a very long time, and they’re mostly done by women. Nobody tells the doctor that it shouldn’t be about the money. He gets to serve people and earn well. Yoga teachers deserve the same.

George’s practical suggestion was lovely and simple. Find another yoga teacher who runs their business and charges in a way that feels wholesome to you, and study how they do it. Let them show you that it’s possible.

AI can make you more human, not less

I knew we had to get into AI, and George has one of the freshest takes on it I’ve heard. A friend of his had used a Wendell Berry idea to argue against it, the idea that humanity is splitting into people who want to live as creatures and people who want to live as machines. His friend was worried AI would turn us into the machines.

George sees it the other way around. He’s a solopreneur with no team, and over the past few months he’s handed most of his admin over to AI, which has freed up around fifteen hours a week. His point is that by letting the machine do the machine work, he’s more free to do the human work, to live more like a creature, not less.

And because AI has made it so easy for everyone to produce content, he doesn’t think we can compete on quantity anymore. What sets you apart now is being human. He said he no longer wants to edit out the ums and the little mistakes, because those are the signals that a real person is behind the work. When he spots a typo online now, he actually relaxes, because it tells him a human wrote it. Being a free-flowing, honest human in your content is becoming the advantage.

The trust recession, and how you earn trust now

The last thread we followed was what George calls the trust recession. So many people bought online courses over the past few years that disappointed them, and there’s far more noise now than there used to be, so people are much more careful about who they trust. That’s not a reason to despair, it’s just the season we’re in.

The way through it is the same set of unglamorous things it always was. You show up consistently. When you tell people the doors will close on a certain day, you let them actually close. You own your mistakes, and you own it openly when you change your mind, because that’s part of how you grow. And you share the real journeys of the people you’ve helped. George is a big believer in what he calls a case study mindset, seeing each client as someone on their own hero’s journey that you get to be part of. I do a simpler version of this by sharing screenshots of the wins people post inside my membership and my challenges. They’re real, they’re specific, and they build trust in a way that polished claims never could.

CONNECT WITH GEORGE KAO

🌐 Website: https://www.georgekao.com/

🤖 George’s free guide to working with AI: https://www.georgekao.com/ai