Morgan Friedman: Good morning, everyone—or good evening, depending on where in the world you are. I’m very excited for this new episode of Client Horror Stories and the long-awaited one. We’ve been trying to schedule this for a while with the one and only Angela Thomas. How are you doing this early this evening—or morning?

Angela Thomas: Morning, Whitney. Good morning, and good evening to the time zone of Argentina.

Morgan Friedman: I’m very happy to finally have you here.

Angela Thomas: Yes, indeed. We had tried to schedule this for a while due to the time zones and the difference for us to understand. It took a bit, but now here we are, and I’m very happy. Thank you for having me.

Morgan Friedman: Great. So, I have my coffee all ready this evening, and I got my tea.

Angela Thomas: Your tea. Perfect for the Dubai morning.

Morgan Friedman: And I am excited to hear about your craziest, most challenging client horror story. Take it away. The stage is yours.

Angela Thomas: Indeed. It is a very horror story, and with so much learning. I’m trying to get this along on both levels.

But, you know, I’m 30 years in business, so I have so many client horror stories to tell. Some of them more horrific than the others.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I just want to point out that sometimes I talk to people and they’re like, “Yeah, I’ve been in business 30 years and I’ve never had a horror story.”

And I’m like, when people tell it to me, I’m like, either you’re lying to me or you’re lying to yourself.

Angela Thomas: Or maybe they have never faced the real customer journey, isn’t it?

Morgan Friedman: Maybe that too.

Angela Thomas: But I think both of the first points that you mentioned come most likely more in the place.

So, with me it was like that. I just wanted to line out the little journey that I took to lead even to be available for such a client horror story.

I had most of my entrepreneurship in Europe, and three years ago I realized I wanted to leave Europe and enter Dubai. The journey of me going from Germany to Dubai and the shift was not well received by the people around me. My family didn’t want me to go, and the entrepreneurs around me were just like, “Angela, what are you doing? You have such a good business. Why are you just leaving this out?”

I really wanted to work my Dubai business, and because of the COVID situation, the economy in Europe, especially in Germany, was really downhill. A lot of people left me with unpaid bills, and that was also a reason why I thought I wanted to change the economic situation for myself and enter another target market.

Because I wanted it to work so much in Dubai, I started to work with clients. I quickly got business and some bookings in my training courses. I’m in the field of sales training.

Morgan Friedman: So, you’re a sales trainer?

Angela Thomas: Yes. And one day somebody came to me and said, “Angela, I have a real estate company, and I need somebody to train my people.”

I thought, okay, this could be an interesting opportunity.

Morgan Friedman: And where does this person come from? Like, was this someone you knew?

Angela Thomas: Yes. He was part of a network here, and I knew him. He came to me with a small training request first.

Morgan Friedman: Okay.

Angela Thomas: And I did the training. Everything went fine. He paid me.

Then the second time he came around and said, “Angela, I have more people. I have sales agents and they need to be trained. This time there are many more, and we have to find a special condition.”

Morgan Friedman: So, the first time he came to you with a small thing that was completely legitimate, he paid you, and then the second time he came back with something much bigger.

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I remember reading a book a long time ago about how scammers operate, and something I learned from it is that scammers often start by doing something small and honest just so you’ll believe them and gain trust.

Angela Thomas: Exactly. That’s what happened here.

I went into it because I had this need. I wanted to prove also to all the people back in Europe that my Dubai journey was really working.

So, I went with the second offer, and we negotiated back and forth. It was ten people that I trained, and he said, “Well, I can give you some little amount for this, like a basic amount. But if you are so good, like you say you would be, then why don’t you work for a commission?”

And that’s when I agreed.

Morgan Friedman: So, you were going to train these real estate agents, and instead of getting paid normally, you would get a commission when they closed deals?

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

And I built them up. These people were very good. I had so much fun with them.

They were predominantly Indian and Pakistani, which also was not in such a good place financially. I knew their need to make a deal because their only journey was gaining money when they closed, because they had this commission model.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I also want to point out that the yellow flags are starting to pile up here. And I also want to call attention to the yellow flag of being paid on commission.

This is something I didn’t realize when I was younger. If someone is not willing to invest hard cash money in you, that’s a sign that they’re not really serious about you.

Saying, “Oh, no, I’ll pay you a percentage of something in the future, some sort of commission,” means they don’t want to give you hard cash now, which means they’re not serious about you.

In my experience, when commissions are part of a compensation package and they’re a small portion of your compensation package, that’s fine. You get some upside.

But when your compensation package is largely commission, that means they’re putting up very little. The higher the commission as a percentage of your compensation package, the higher the risk it is for you.

Angela Thomas: Yes, that is indeed the case.

But I was so convinced. I am still convinced about what I am able to do. But the need for me to showcase it to others—my ego totally kicked in.

I really wanted to have somebody out of a different industry because I used to be in the beauty industry. There was this idea that, “Okay, you’re just doing nails and stuff,” although I had already achieved a lot in my life and had a good career.

However, I went with these people and I trained them, and they were so cute. They were so grateful. Basically, those agents said, “We really learned so much with you.”

Then it came to the situation where they had no structure in their business. So, I set up a structure just for me to track how they could make deals, because I knew it was also my money in the end.

Morgan Friedman: Another yellow flag: they didn’t have any structure at all. How can a company not have that set up?

Angela Thomas: Yeah. And I must be honest, subconsciously I already knew something was fishy, but my ego was so loud, my logical mind was so loud. I couldn’t opt out.

He was in that network. Everybody would talk about it and so on. So, I went ahead.

It came to the point where I had my regular trainings with these agents, and it was close to having a deal. We had acquired these people for real estate. Real estate is so big in Dubai.

They set the appointment. I observed the calls. They were very good. And now it came to the point where they had to meet the client to actually make the deal close.

And here it comes: I was never allowed to go with the client because of the license and so on.

Morgan Friedman: Wait. To be clear, what you’re saying is they were selling real estate, and because you don’t have a real estate license in Dubai, they said you couldn’t attend the actual real-life sales meeting. Is that right?

Angela Thomas: Yes. Exactly.

Morgan Friedman: Oh, that’s another yellow flag. The yellow flags are piling up here.

Angela Thomas: I know.

Morgan Friedman: You were too excited.

Angela Thomas: Yeah, I was so excited. I was even, from remote, supporting them and writing them messages: “Hey, you’re going to make it. Think about objection handling. Think about that.”

I was really into it for them.

Morgan Friedman: And then what happened?

Angela Thomas: We were not allowed to go ourselves. Mr. XYZ, the boss, said he had to take the deal because we would not be good enough yet.

And I was like, “How is that going on?”

So, I was following up on those deals that had been closed by the actual CEO of the company.

He said there was no closing because the agents that were trained by me were not trained well enough, and therefore the client was not prepared enough to close. That’s why he didn’t close the deal.

And I was, in the beginning, all right. Let’s train a little more. I’m motivating my students, telling them to dig deeper.

Morgan Friedman: Dig deeper.

Angela Thomas: Yeah, dig deeper.

However, we did that three or four times. It kept happening.

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I want to explain my joke for the viewers, because I’m assuming our viewers can’t read my mind, which is one of my favorite sayings about life in general. I use it all the time in business, but I think it applies more broadly than business.

It’s an old, forgotten piece of wisdom, but I think it’s fantastic:

When you’re stuck at the bottom of a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging.

Angela Thomas: I love this saying.

Morgan Friedman: It’s really powerful because what happens all the time is you’re in the middle of a terrible problem, but you’re actually causing the problem. Because you don’t realize it, your natural human instinct is to think, “Oh, I should train them more.”

You keep digging. The problem is something else.

You’re stuck at the bottom of a hole. Stop digging as the first thing so you can think clearly about how to get out of the hole.

Angela Thomas: And that’s what I did not do.

Instead of taking on the load and searching inside me for where we could go and be a bit better, one day I felt my students were very unmotivated and not really attentive. They didn’t have the attention or enthusiasm.

And I was like, “What is actually going on?”

They were holding back something.

We were in this office, and I said, “Okay, let’s go for a coffee.” I wanted to get them out of the environment. I sincerely felt there was something wrong that I could not get out of them in that environment.

So, I took them. I wanted to take them to coffee, and they said, “Miss Thomas, unfortunately we cannot go with you to coffee because we literally do not have any money for a coffee.”

And I said, “Out of here. I’m paying the coffee.”

Those poor Indian and Pakistani people were left out totally. I was already sensing that they were totally out of everything.

They didn’t even have a dime in their pocket for a coffee.

So, I sat them down, had the coffee with them, and paid for it myself.

However, then they just spit out what was on their mind.

They said to me, “All of our deals that we prepared were taken away by Mr. XYZ.”

He was saying, “We’re not preparing it good enough for him to close, and all the time he comes back without closing.”

And one of them said, “But we discovered he lately opened up another company.”

And I was like, “Yeah. What does that have to do with it?”

They said, “It’s also a real estate company, but it’s in the name of his wife. And for that, he closed all the deals in the company of the wife.”

So, he had to pay none of them any commission.

Not me. Not these real estate agents.

Morgan Friedman: I see. So, by him closing the deals under a different company name, since it’s technically not the same company that the Indian and Pakistani guys and girls sent the leads to, he could say, “Oh, therefore, I don’t need to pay the commission.”

And so he could wiggle out of paying the commissions.

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

And what happened then?

I was jumping for all my—

Morgan Friedman: What an—

Angela Thomas: Sorry.

Morgan Friedman: What an—

Angela Thomas: Yeah, but here it comes.

Morgan Friedman: Here it comes.

Angela Thomas: We just tapped our hands, and I was like, “Hey, because when something happens with that and Angela Thomas is involved, I’m mutating to John Duck and I’m jumping behind all of my students in the water to save them.”

Nobody really knew about what I had done a year before.

I was actually in an organization from the government. It’s an organization for labor law, and I was in a jury situation to assess—

Morgan Friedman: Is this in Dubai or in Germany?

Angela Thomas: In Dubai.

I was called into this committee to assess how good of a job people do with their labor and their employees and so on. And I got my connections there.

I brought all these real estate agents to this organization, and I said, “You are claiming a case here.”

I made them claim a case.

Labor law here in Dubai is very tough, and it can come to deportation if it’s actually mistaken.

So, they filed a case, and they had to get money for three months of work—the basic salary they had not gotten, and also the commission they had to file for.

Morgan Friedman: How many people filed?

Angela Thomas: It was ten people who filed a case.

Morgan Friedman: So, this guy was actually quite challenged financially.

Angela Thomas: Yes.

Morgan Friedman: Oh my goodness. I did not see this twist coming. This is so exciting. So, what happened?

Angela Thomas: They went to the labor department and filed their case.

When this happens, they investigate very quickly. They are very much on the case of an employee, so they summed up everything. They reviewed the contracts, and they claimed that this CEO had to pay every one of these people their money.

It was not the full commission, but they had to have some compensation.

With ten people in line, it really piled up to a point where he actually even got his real estate license taken away.

He could not pay the money all in full at once.

But in the end, I know all of these real estate agents got the money.

But Miss Angela Thomas, she was just a third party. She was just left out.

Morgan Friedman: And this is such a typical Angela Thomas story. You’re always helping everyone else, but you’re not the one making the money yourself.

It’s one of the challenges of being Angela Thomas, I predict.

Angela Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. This is indeed like that.

But if I can enlarge the story a little bit, just to make the story round, I got actually very doubtful with my own entrepreneurship.

What subconsciously actually happened with me—and that is a very good learning for everybody who’s dealing with scamming—is that I was actually only looking for the money that was not there.

So, I was permanently in contraction for my whole entire business here. I just dropped down the energy.

It’s about reflection and frequency. You know, you get what you pour in.

And I only poured in, “This person owes me something.”

Then I attracted another person who owes me something.

So, I had major payment failures from Germany and major payment failures in Dubai.

And you know what an expensive city Dubai is.

For the first time in my whole 30 years of entrepreneurial life, I doubted myself as an entrepreneur.

However, I even had to change my apartment. I used to live on a beautiful Palm with a nice beach. I really had to change location because of my financial situation.

And I was in this first-time doubtful situation thinking, “I have to look for a job.”

And here, Morgan, is something really hard to learn for everybody.

Because I had such a low frequency, I had this doubt in me about being an entrepreneur.

I applied for 187 jobs. I sent 187 job applications, and I got only three responses.

Two were denials, and one said, “Yes, we’ll take you, but we want you to make something online, at home.”

So, I thought it was something kind of okay that could somehow be done.

But, to make a long story short, it was also a job scam.

So, on top of all of the loss, I sent out all this frequency that—

Morgan Friedman: So, you got scammed by someone who was offering you a job?

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

Morgan Friedman: Oh my God.

Angela Thomas: So, on top of all of the loss, I had another scam.

Morgan Friedman: So, let’s go back to the idea of frequency, because this is interesting.

I grew up a math-and-science nerd, and while I do believe in the power of karma one thousand percent, I’ve never explored my own spiritual side to really understand at a deep level what being on a lower frequency or lowering frequency means.

I’m curious to understand what that actually means, also applied to yourself, because I think you’re saying that one of the reasons why this happened to you is because you yourself were on a lower frequency, and now you’ve moved to a higher frequency.

I think I understand, but I may not really understand what that means.

So, please teach me and all of our math-and-science-nerdy viewers about that.

Angela Thomas: You will love it as a math-and-science person.

I’m bringing on the stage all the time in my training courses the scale of consciousness.

Do you know this? There’s a scale of consciousness, and it comes with frequencies.

Basically, the emotion of love has another frequency than the emotion of anger, fear, or angst. And this is all—

Morgan Friedman: I just have a very naive question. When you say love has a higher frequency than angst, for example, I understand that some emotions are more positive. Love is a positive emotion, and angst or anger are negative emotions.

But what does it mean that it’s at a higher frequency?

I’m very naive about these spiritual words.

Angela Thomas: No problem. I’m very grateful for you asking these questions because it gives me so much opportunity to explain deeper.

So, the scale of consciousness is actually a scale in which you can measure the frequency of your emotions, and frequency is measured in hertz.

Every one of our emotions sends out a frequency.

The frequency of angst has something different—a frequency very low. I think, if I’m right, it’s about 170. I don’t have the chart in front of me.

But the frequency of love and gratitude is about 750, around this.

Morgan Friedman: So, I want to interrupt just to be clear, to make sure I understand, because I’m really new to these things.

I find it very interesting, and I want to learn, and it seems central to the key teaching.

When you say emotions emit a frequency at a particular band of hertz, is that what you’re saying?

Right now, there are all these signals coming into the room that are like Wi-Fi signals at a particular hertz level.

But you’re saying that just like there are Wi-Fi signals coming in, my body is letting out a love signal—but it’s not at the Wi-Fi band. It’s at some other hertz band.

And my body’s letting out an anger frequency at the same time.

And you can measure the frequencies just like you can measure the Wi-Fi frequency.

Angela Thomas: Exactly. You can do this.

A lot of people do this nowadays with water. They frequency their water with music, binaural beats, and things like that.

Morgan Friedman: Binaural beats.

Angela Thomas: Yes. These are some sounds, like the Schumann frequency. This is actually a sound to get concentrated.

I often hear music like that in the background, just the frequency of this specific music that you can concentrate with, gather your thoughts, and all of this.

And the same frequency our emotions have—

Morgan Friedman: So, this is one of those things where the story itself becomes a lot more interesting than just the scam.

Because you had this experience where you were looking for the money that wasn’t there, and you were thinking about people owing you money. Then you started attracting more situations where people owed you money.

And then you realized you had to change the way you were thinking.

Angela Thomas: Yes.

Morgan Friedman: And I think there’s an interesting lesson there, whether or not someone believes in the literal frequency part.

If you are constantly looking for evidence that people are going to screw you over, you are going to notice every example of it.

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

Morgan Friedman: And then you can get trapped in that cycle.

Angela Thomas: Yes. And that’s exactly what happened.

Morgan Friedman: So, how did you get out of it?

Angela Thomas: I had to shift myself completely.

I had to stop thinking from this position of need and contraction.

And I had to start looking at what I actually wanted to create, rather than what other people had failed to give me.

That was a very big learning for me.

Morgan Friedman: And that’s a useful distinction. Instead of saying, “This person owes me money,” you’re saying, “What can I create that produces money?”

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

Morgan Friedman: That’s a much more empowering way to think about it.

Angela Thomas: Yes.

Morgan Friedman: One of the things I find interesting about your story is that you were doing everything you could to help other people, even though you were the one who was financially suffering.

Angela Thomas: Yes. And that’s something I had to learn.

I was always jumping into the water for everybody else.

Morgan Friedman: Which is admirable, but also dangerous.

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

Morgan Friedman: Because if you’re always saving everyone else, eventually somebody needs to save you.

Angela Thomas: Yes.

Morgan Friedman: And in this case, nobody was coming to save you.

Angela Thomas: No.

Morgan Friedman: So, what happened after all of this? Where are you now?

Angela Thomas: I’m in a completely different place.

I learned that I have to protect myself as much as I protect other people.

And I learned that I need to be much more careful about who I work with, what I agree to, and what I allow people to promise me.

Morgan Friedman: That’s an important lesson.

Because one of the things I think is particularly dangerous about scams is that the people who get scammed are often not stupid.

Sometimes they’re actually very intelligent, very experienced people.

The scam works because it finds the part of you that wants to believe.

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

Morgan Friedman: And in your case, it found your desire to prove that your Dubai business was working.

Angela Thomas: Yes. That was definitely part of it.

Morgan Friedman: And that’s one of the most interesting parts of the story to me.

The red flags were there.

You saw some of them.

But your ego was saying, “No, this is going to work. I need this to work.”

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

Morgan Friedman: And that’s when you stop listening to the warning signs.

Angela Thomas: Yes.

Morgan Friedman: So, I want to go back to something you said earlier about being on a lower frequency.

One way I think about it, even as a math-and-science person, is that whatever you focus on changes the way you interpret the world.

If you’re constantly looking for opportunities, you notice opportunities.

If you’re constantly looking for people who owe you money, you notice people who owe you money.

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

Morgan Friedman: So, maybe the practical lesson is that you have to be careful about what you’re training your brain to notice.

Angela Thomas: Yes. And gratitude is a huge part of that.

Morgan Friedman: Okay. Is this person happy or not?

I actually think that how grateful they are is a very good and objective test.

Like, of all the words that they say, what percentage of all the words they say out loud are words of gratitude toward others?

In a way, you can kind of measure these things.

“Oh yeah, he’s always expressing this deep gratitude to everyone and everything, but that person over there never is.”

I know which one I think is happier.

Angela Thomas: Yeah. Of course, the person with gratitude will also spread more happiness around.

Here in Dubai there is even a real estate project—looking at the real estate market now, very different—and they have actually built a project in a setup where the frequency is so high.

They built music pipelines around the water system, so the water is having a frequency.

They even shield some specific areas in the real estate away from Wi-Fi and all kinds of these electric smogs and stuff like that.

Morgan Friedman: Wow.

Angela Thomas: I think it’s very underrated to have this frequency.

And a lot of people do affirmations and manifestation, but they do it out of a position of need and contraction, and that’s when it never happens.

Then people say, “Manifesting? It’s just something cookie.”

Morgan Friedman: By the way, I think it’s incredible. I’ve never heard this before—that Dubai is piping music with healthy frequencies into water and shielding buildings from Wi-Fi.

That’s taking this good-energy thing to another level.

Angela Thomas: This is a way of beautifying a city and making a place attractive. People never imagined this would exist.

Morgan Friedman: That’s fascinating.

Angela Thomas: And in this house they even have a library with over a thousand books.

The architect actually asked renowned entrepreneurs all over the world: if they had the last day on Earth and had to enter the moon, and they had to leave, what book would they take with them if they were only allowed to take one book?

Their suggestions actually brought the books into this library.

So, a thousand people’s last and only book that they would take are in this library.

Morgan Friedman: That’s really cool.

Angela Thomas: Yes.

Morgan Friedman: And I think that connects to something else we’ve been talking about, which is what you surround yourself with.

The people you surround yourself with, the things you read, the ideas you consume—they all affect what you notice and how you think.

Angela Thomas: Absolutely.

Morgan Friedman: And I think that’s a good place to end.

Angela, this was a fascinating story because it started as a fairly straightforward sales-training opportunity and turned into a story about hidden companies, unpaid commissions, labor law, scams, entrepreneurship, and even the psychology of how we interpret the world.

Angela Thomas: Yes. It was a lot.

Morgan Friedman: And I think the big lesson is that sometimes the warning signs are there, but we’re too excited to see them.

Angela Thomas: Exactly.

Morgan Friedman: And sometimes when you’re stuck at the bottom of a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.

Thank you so much for joining me, Angela.

Angela Thomas: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Morgan Friedman: And thank you to everyone who made it all the way to the end. We hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have. Until next time.