Ep #36: Underselling

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach podcast, where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey coaches. Welcome to episode 36. We’re going to talk about underselling today. But first, I just have to tell you, I got puppies. Puppies. Two of them. Okay, one of them is the one we get to keep. Her name is Bella. One of them we are – from the same litter we got for my fiancé’s parents. His name is Blaize. They are English cream golden retrievers. So they’re the while golden retrievers and they are the cutest things I’ve ever seen, other than you all know, my beloved Bear.

Other than my beloved Bear, they are the cutest things I’ve ever seen and I did not get the experience of having Bear as a puppy. I adopted him as a grown dog. I rescued him. And my fiancé’s had goldens his whole life. His 13-and-a-half-year-old golden retriever Molly passed away about six months ago and so after he did the whole grieving process and felt like it was time for him to have a new pup, I let him research them and decide.

But I have a thing for white dogs. Bear is all white. If you’re following me on Instagram, you’ve seen all the white photos of Bear. He is a white dog. So I love the white dogs. I think the English creams are so beautiful. And so we decided to get English creams.

And so we just got them. They’re a week old. We have not slept. And all we do with our time is stare at them or play with them, or take them out to pee. It’s the best time ever. So for the last week, that is all we’ve done. I told my assistant like, we’ve got to move everything from my schedule that we possibly can.

I didn’t have a lot on. I knew they were coming, but I had some things on my schedule to do and I’m like, we got to get rid of everything that we can because all I want to do is stare at them when they sleep. Literally, we play with them like, hardcore, and we have to watch them because they’re two of them and they’re running everywhere. They are insane together.

They have so much energy. It’s like, on hardcore. We’re like, what is happening? Calm down. And then they die and they’re like, sleeping for hours. And so you would think that we would be productive in the hours that they’re sleeping, but instead we just stare at them and take photos and ooh and aah at them. They’re just the cutest.

I had them in here with me in my office. I’ve been showing people all day when I have calls like look at the puppies. So we had a little mini photo shoot in the office right before I recorded this podcast. We will upload the photos for you in the podcast show notes if you would like to see them. So you just go to my website.

An easy way to find them is staceyboehman.com/podcasts I think. Just go to staceyboehman.com. You’ll see the podcast tab. You can find this episode and you’ll find the link with all the show notes and the photos and all the things. So if you haven’t been to the podcast page on my website, you should definitely check it out. But we will put some photos of the puppies.

They’re so cute. Blaize and Bella. They’re nine weeks old. And they’re husses. They’re going to be giant dogs. The vet said oh my gosh, based on their size they are now and their paw size, he was like, these are going to be really big dogs. At least 80 to 90 pounds. Like, big dogs. And we’re so excited. We wanted the fat ones.

What we were specifically looking for were the fatties. So we got them and they’re so much fun. I just love them and I think they might be the secret to healing all of humanity.

Alright, so now you know about the puppies, I also want to shout-out my client Tanessa. She’s killing it. So she posted in our 2K semi recently. She said, “I fully connected with the experience Stacey described in the objections module about coaching the hell out of your client’s objections on a consult, despite feeling unbelievably uncomfortable doing it.”

Yeah, girlfriend. She said, “I had two back to back consults last night. Both came at me hard with the money objection. Followed by the spouse objection. And when I handled those, finally the belief in their self objection. Holy moly, was that a learning experience.”

She said, “I wasn’t able to coach them to a yes on the call but scheduled follow ups within 12 hours for both of them and they both paid in full this morning. If I had stayed in my head about how awful it felt to coach their objections, those two women would be stuck in their own story still. Fascinating to see in action. They both had transformations on the consult call that made them into a yes. So I’ve closed seven out of eight consults since I started two months ago. I barely recognize myself as this new coach. I’ve welcomed in three clients in the last five days. What is this sorcery?”

Tanessa, it’s 2K for 2K sorcery. And if y’all want in on this sorcery, y’all got to join 2K for 2K. See you inside.

So last week, we talked about overselling and this week, we’re going to talk about underselling. And they actually come from the same place. So overselling is like overcompensating, trying to make up for what you don’t have. Confidence and certainty and high demand. When you don’t have those things, you try to make up for them and it comes off as overcompensating or overselling.

And underselling is like under-performing. So I want you to think of it like performing less well or with less success than what you’re capable. Now, this also comes from lack of confidence and there are several ways that it shows up.

So I’ll give you an example. So many of you are amazing coaches. I know this because I watch the coaching that happens in our 2K community. And when I watch the coaching that – specifically, I’m speaking to those of you that are in 2K. When I watch your coaching on each other’s posts, I’m amazed at the level of coaching that you all give.

So then I think why aren’t you all making the exact amount of money you want to make? I even see coaches in there who are new coaches who haven’t made any money. And they’re great coaches, so it has nothing to do with not being a great coach.

But here’s what it does have to do with. You get on a consult and the client says no, and then you make it mean something about you in that moment, when they give their objection, and you let it take a hit to your confidence. You make it mean something about you and you lose your confidence. And the moment you lose your confidence, you don’t coach to your highest capability. You stop thinking at your highest level.

So you don’t know what to coach them on or what questions to ask to help them make a decision. You literally block your genius, you block your flow to a higher knowledge. We all know we’re in coaching and we’re just in the flow and we know exactly what to say and we know exactly how to coach our clients. You lose access to that when you lose your confidence.

So you don’t sell what you’re capable of selling because you weren’t able to coach your client to your highest capability to help them a decision. This is an example of underselling. So when you’re under-thinking because your skill of thinking is clouded by your lack of confidence, you undersell.

Remember, coaching is selling and selling is coaching. So when you’re underselling, you’re effectively under-coaching as well. Your client and yourself really. Because you can coach yourself in that moment to not give into the thoughts that appear in your brain. You don’t have to. Someone gives you an objection, that is optional.

You can see that thought come across your brain and not choose it. So in that moment, you can coach yourself to not latch on to that thought and you can coach your client at a really high level. And when you don’t do that, you’re under-coaching and you’re underselling.

So have you ever heard of the phrase – I know you have. I know all of you have. Selling yourself short. I want you to think of all the ways you are selling yourself short by letting your default thinking run the show, by letting your sales calls get away from you because truly, you’re using them – when your confidence gets compromised, this is what’s happening and this is how I know that it’s happening when your confidence gets compromised is you’re using your consults to try to feel confident about yourself.

So you’re hoping to feel confident if the person says yes. It’s a dead giveaway. If that’s what you’re doing, your confidence will take a hit the moment they say no. Versus when I think about myself or some of my seasoned clients in 2K and 200K who have been doing this a while, when someone tells them no, their confidence doesn’t take a hit. But because that confidence is in them whether someone signs or not.

It means nothing about their capability. They make it mean something about the client. They make it mean something about – they look at their model and they’re like, they’re just in a model that isn’t serving them. So it’s a dead giveaway that you’re using your consults to try to be confident when they say no or give you an objection and you lose your confidence. That is effectively selling yourself short.

Selling yourself short also happens when you don’t think of yourself in a confident way or when you under-think of yourself in a confident way. You just don’t even think of yourself in a confident way at all, or under-think of yourself a little bit or a lot in a confident way.

So an example of this is when you think of yourself as a newbie coach. So you might be super confident and excited about coaching, but you still refer to yourself as a newbie coach and you kind of identify that. That’s how you’re like, under-thinking of yourself in a confident way. Or when you tell yourself you’re still learning. You kind of let yourself off the hook like oh yeah, of course I’m not making money, I’m still learning.

Or when you say you’re not good at sales and marketing, or when you say things – you kind of discount yourself and call yourself a hot mess. Or another way you might discount yourself is saying I always do this, and using your past against yourself or when you put yourself down, when you say you can’t do something. When you say you don’t know or you don’t know how, and you kind of give into this confusion and you think the answer is outside of you.

When you under-commit to your goals and you under-deliver to yourself or your clients. This is all selling yourself short. And when you are selling yourself short to yourself, you will chronically under-promote yourself. You will chronically undersell. You’ll feel sales-y and graspy and pushy. You will feel uncomfortable promoting yourself and your services in every way, shape, or form.

So this is how you know it’s you. If you feel uncomfortable promoting yourself. And this is what’s really important. Many of you think the reason you feel uncomfortable is because you have to do this thing that you think you have to do that you don’t want to do, like sell people on something they don’t want. But the discomfort really comes from the fact that you don’t think of yourself and your offer in a compelling way.

You’re underselling yourself and your offer to yourself. Think about this. If you’re selling something you think people don’t want, what is that saying about you and what you think of your own judgment? I would never sell something that I judged to not be of value. So I would never feel sales-y. But the way that I think of my own judgment, the way I sell my product, I think is very telling for what I think about my own judgment.

I sell my 2K program and my 200K mastermind in a really powerful way because I think it’s the most amazing thing ever and I feel really great about my judgment about that. But what you imagine other people think is always a reflection of what you actually believe.

So that is the first type of underselling that comes from under-thinking about yourself or your product and under-coaching your client, as in getting all tied up in your emotions and not being clean in your coaching and your selling. It’s just overall not using the powerful tool that is your brain as effective as you’re really capable of doing.

The other type of underselling is under-producing. It’s under-producing massive action. So this shows up in the only three steps you ever need to do. Meet people, tell them you’re a life coach, and make offers to help them. When you are underselling here, you don’t do these with the quality and the frequency that you’re truly capable of.

When you’re doubting yourself or your coaching, or fearing your clients won’t get results or thinking people don’t want to buy coaching and you don’t get out there and do enough of all of these three things. That’s also underselling, under-producing.

Instead, you sit at home consumed by your doubt and your fear and your insecurity and you spend your time coaching yourself into believing yourself. So how you know this is you is you spend way more time self-coaching than taking action. So you’re self-coaching on how much coaching you have to get. That ratio is much bigger than the ratio of offers you’ve made and people you’ve met and people you’ve told who you are and what you do.

And I think it’s interesting to note, when I was thinking about this podcast and I was thinking of all the ways that we under-coach and how it happens, not only with under-coaching your clients but with yourself, I was thinking about how you can self-coach yourself for a lot of hours and still be under-coaching yourself.

It’s really fascinating. It doesn’t have to do with the hours. It has to do with what happens in the hours. How hard you push yourself past your current limited thinking, how responsible you hold yourself for your results, and how committed you are to change.

Like I always say you know when you’re coaching yourself well because you get up a different person. You shift your thinking and how you feel, and then you maintain it. It’s funny to think about it this way, but if you spend the majority of your day self-coaching yourself, you’re probably under-coaching. The more coaching you do for your clients, you’re most likely under-coaching them.

So fascinating. Quantity of coaching doesn’t necessarily guarantee quality of coaching, and I think a lot of you self-coach yourself a lot and you think of that in such a proud way. You’re like, I self-coach myself all the time, I’m a master at self-coaching. If you’re doing more self-coaching than taking action, you’re probably under-coaching yourself in your self-coaching session.

When I was thinking about that, it kind of blew my mind. I’m just going to assume it blows yours too. Okay, so you either under-coach yourself or you buffer. So you do something to avoid dealing with the emotions you have about your business, like eat or watch TV, and you avoid showing up. Or you take a bunch of action to avoid feeling bad.

And how you’ll know this is you is if you take a ton of action but you never produce the result that you want. It probably means there’s something going on. When I say probably, I mean like 100% of the time, so basically not probably but definitely. Definitely, your thoughts and your feelings are not aligned with the actions you are taking.

A lot of people will work really hard to cover up the insecurities that they have, but either way, no matter what is causing it, you aren’t making enough offers. You aren’t meeting enough people, you haven’t expressed who you are, and how you help people enough times. And it’s important to know this is happening.

So the conversation I typically have with my clients, they’ll say it’s not working. I’m trying to believe clients are coming and that I can make 2K, but I’m not making enough money. Imagine how different the conversation would be if you always accurately defined the problem.

Clients aren’t coming and I’m not making 2K because I’m not meeting enough people, I’m not telling enough people I’m a life coach, and I’m not making enough offers to help them because I’m not in massive enough action because I’m under-thinking, because I’m under-coaching, and because I’m underselling.

This is such a different conversation and it will direct you to a different place. One is the conversation of I don’t know what the problem is and what the solution could be at all because it’s all outside of my control. And the other is I am responsible for this result, I know exactly the problem and what the problem was and how I am the solution. So I know exactly what to do about it.

When you see that you haven’t made any money because you’re underselling yourself and under-delivering yourself, you can change it. When you are the problem, you are the solution. Now, I also have this conversation with my clients. They will tell me I was committed to my goal of 10K but I fell short. My consults this month didn’t convert.

Here they think their potential clients not buying is why they didn’t hit their goal. And they have no control over that, so it feels kind of helpless. Like, what if this was the conversation and they said it to me. I didn’t hit my goal of 10K because I undersold consults this month. I did get some, but I didn’t go out and create enough consults to close enough clients to make my 10K.

You see the difference there? One gives you complete power because you have identified the correct problem and now you have the solution. You are the solution, versus the problem seems outside of me and so the solution is outside of me and it’s all very complicated and confusing and I don’t know why I’m not making money.

If you’re not making the money you want to make, hear me. The very first thing I would look at is you are underselling. And if you look for it, you will be able to find it, I promise. I want you to just assume you are. Like seriously, what if you just assumed you were always underselling, that is always the problem?

You’re always not making enough offers and meeting enough people and telling them who you are and what you do. You’re always not doing enough of that, or you’re always not coaching yourself to your highest level, or you’re always not using your brain at your highest capability on a consult. Then you’re always your solution. You always know exactly what to work on. You’d always know exactly why you’re not making money and exactly what you need to do to make money.

There is power here, y’all. Grant Cardone once said that most people fail because they underestimate the amount of effort required to achieve their goal. Not because they can’t do it, but because they think it won’t take as much effort as it does and then they give up before they get what they want.

And I think people do underestimate constantly the amount of selling you need to do in the beginning to make money as a coach. For sure this is what’s happening. I hear people say like, I just coached someone in Making Money with the Model in 2K and she said, I’m not making money and she wanted to be making money. She wants 10 clients, but she’s posting one Instagram story a week. It’s not enough.

You have to be selling way more than that. And it’s not just the quantity of selling, my friends. It’s also the quality of selling. Again, you can be there in body and physically go meet people and tell them you’re a coach and you can make offers every day, but this is the question. If you’re doing that, if you’re that person who’s taking a ton of action but not getting the result that you want, did you make that offer like it was the first, last, and only time you will ever make that offer?

Was it embodied with belief and confidence just over-pouring with it? Were you compelled to make it? Were you in the zone? There’s such a difference. And I actually think you can make fewer better offers and achieve a greater result than more half-hearted offers.

So some of you need to be making way more offers, like selling harder, more directly, more frequently, with more confidence. And some of you need to slow down and make better offers. I’ve been teaching my 200K mastermind the idea of paradoxes. I think that’s the correct word for it, but I will say one thing to someone and the complete opposite thing to someone else and they’ll be like wait, but you told so-and-so to do the opposite thing.

And I’m like, that is because it depends on how the lack of confidence shows up for you and where your growth is. Some of y’all need to be making 10 times the offers and some of y’all need to slow your roll and make better offers. You know which one you are.

Go towards the growth like it’s the light from heaven. You’ve got this. Some of you need to just get out there and make more offers and some of you need to make fewer but better offers, but here’s what I will say. Most of you need to do a version of both and that starts with confidence in what you’re selling.

So just don’t be confused about which one you are. I seriously feel like I hear y’all being confused. Just answer it for yourself right now. Don’t let yourself spend any time thinking about which one you are. And if you’re in 2K, definitely don’t ask me which one you are, or 200K. Just answer it for yourself right now. Which one are you? Do you need to make less offers that are better? Do you need to make way more offers? Most of you are in the boat where you need to do both.

You need to 10X what you think the effort is that’s going to take to make your goal and then you also need to make all of that 10X way higher quality. You need to sell at a higher quality with all of that 10 times the effort that you’re going to do.

And if you just pick one, either one, even if you’re not really sure, you will get better results no matter which one you choose. That’s the best part. You can’t lose on this. Choose one, work on it, you will get better results. And then you can work on the other. We have a lifetime of coaching we’re going to do here, y’all.

I said y’all a lot in this episode. But it’s true. We have a lifetime of coaching we’re going to do so you don’t need to fix everything all at once right now. You just need to pick one thing. Pick one of the things. You’re either not producing enough effort in your making offers and meeting people and telling them you’re a coach, or you need to have a higher quality offer and you need to be thinking at a higher level, coaching yourself at a higher level, coaching your clients at a higher level, or both.

But choose one to begin with and listen, if you’re thinking but I just want to be amazing right now, instantly, isn’t that what we all want? Everything perfectly now? It’s the human condition. But really, you just have to pick one and get started.

So simple, confident offers all of the time. But I promise you, if you haven’t made money, it is because you are underselling. If you aren’t making the money you want to make, it is because you are underselling. So sell. Sell. Sell some more. The future of humanity depends on it. We are life coaches. Let’s get to making money. Alright, I’ll see you next week.

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2k for 2k program where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.