Ep #44: Success Intolerance

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.

Hello lovies, welcome to episode 44. So first of all, I just came back from the most amazing wedding ever and I have to tell you about it. One of my clients turned best friend and now best friend couples with her husband and my fiancé just got married in Asheville, North Carolina at the Biltmore.

I’ve never been. It was amazing. And so we called – this is our friends that we call our Caymus friends because they love all the fancy things that we love and doing fancy things and so we get together and one of us always brings a bottle of Caymus special selection now.

And they’re our friends that we can just talk about money with and traveling, and we always have these deep relationship conversations. And they’re just right exactly on our vibration. Do you guys have friends like that? So anyway, so we love them very much and their wedding was such a testament to the love they have for each other and the love that they pour into their friends and family.

They’re just kind of a couple that make you so happy as just a byproduct of being around them. You’re just around them and everything is good in the world. And I got asked to officiate this wedding, which was such an honor and I’ve never done before. My first time. And I seriously have no other ambitions, just so y’all know. Nobody else asked me.

But doing it this one and only time was one of the greatest moments of my life. I love them both so much and I was such a big part of Lindsey’s growth when she met her now husband, so it was really full circle for me to have gotten to coach her when I was still coaching one-on-one four years ago and one of the things we coached about was finding the man of her dreams.

And then to get to watch her marry him but then also be the person marrying them, what? It was everything. And it rained and it was the most romantic moody atmosphere. It was amazing. Her photos are to die for. We danced all night. It was just magical.

So now I’m super mushy and totally ready for my own wedding. And just kind of the state of ridiculous excitement. And I’m actually having one of my friends and someone very important to Neil and I marry us so now I just know that that experience, how magical that is and how special it is. We didn’t want someone standing up that doesn’t know us and we’re having another coach marry us and she was such a big part of our growth in our relationship.

So it was so fun to experience that and then know someone was going to be doing that for us, and then so many of – we have the same friends. So many of them. And so, so many of the people that are going to be at my wedding were at her wedding. It was just so – it’s so sad that we only get to get married once. We should just have weddings – to the same people of course, but all of the time. It should not be a onetime thing.

Okay, so anyway, that’s what’s happening with me. I’m feeling very lovey and mushy and I’ve been showing everyone that doesn’t even know her all of her wedding photos and it feels like, it was just the best. Anyway, so we’re going to talk about success intolerance today.

Are you ready? I know it sounds like those two words don’t go together but it is what I see happening all of the time. I see it in my 2K for 2K clients after they sign a few clients, and I see it in my 200K students when they get close to or after they make their first six figures.

And it shows up in a lot of ways. My goal is that this podcast will help bring you awareness around what’s happening so that you can understand it. And once you understand it, you have awareness with it, you have power over it.

So it’s kind of like a bummer, sort of. And what I try to tell my 200K students is that this is what they think will happen. They think when they finally make 100K, they will find themselves in the land of amazing. It’s really not all rainbows and daisies and butterflies. That’s just what they think will be like.

Life is always 50/50. And this is one of the 50/50s of finally making money is that your brain – you aren’t used to it in your brain. And things you aren’t used to make you uncomfortable. And sometimes, so uncomfortable in your brain that you sort of have this intolerance to it, like this inability to feel it.

Now, you might be thinking, there is no way I am intolerant to success because I want it so bad. But let’s look at what intolerance means. So the definition of it is an unwillingness – and I would even say inability – to accept views, beliefs, or behavior that differ from one’s own.

So when something is basically off from your subconscious view of yourself or the world. So a great example of this is slow drivers. I think they should drive much faster. But for some of you, this shows up when someone gives you a compliment. Their view differs so much from your own that you don’t accept it and here’s what not accepting it look like.

You deflect it. You give them a compliment, or you discount the one they gave you. Women seem to be very good at this, at discounting and deflecting. And I know from even me, I had to work on this. I went to a seminar once where you had to walk around and give and be given real compliments and you couldn’t say anything back other than thank you.

And it was such a challenge. You couldn’t tell them that the scarf they complimented you on was on sale for $5.99, or that you get it, your hair, honestly from your mom, or you’re just having a great hair day. Or whatever it is that you say to take the limelight off yourself. You couldn’t do that. You had to just accept and allow the compliment.

And it was really powerful because it was very hard. Another way we deflect and discount is when we deflect or discount what someone believes about us. So for example, in a coaching situation, our coach or our peers might say that we’re capable of doing something or see something bigger for us than we see ourselves, and then we disagree with them.

And we think about all the reasons we can’t do it. I see this sometimes in my 200K students. I see them making so much more than even 200K. I see them making millions. I have a few students now who are making 200K who have niches that can be million-dollar niches, and I see their whole brand expanding in this big way and I know they can do it.

And they hear me tell them this and then they like, disagree a little bit in different ways in their brain. They feel like they aren’t there yet. They don’t see it because they’re still not quite living in their brain in their success. They still have days where it feels like a fluke and like it’s all going to fall apart and they’ll end up back at square one.

Their brain has a hard time tolerating their new success, so they go to self-sabotage, which we’re going to talk about a little bit later one, but they do it through their decision-making process, through shrinking back and discounting all the success they’ve had.

Now, the good news is they have me to show them they’re doing it and you have me to bring this into your awareness so you don’t do it. Okay, so sometimes this shows up with other people’s beliefs about you, and sometimes the intolerance shows up with your own opposing beliefs.

So you have things that you believe based on default, like in your subconscious brain of who you are. It’s your most practiced beliefs, the things you’ve thought about yourself for the longest. Then you have things you believe because you’re working on believing them or you’re choosing to believe them powerfully. You’re deciding to believe them.

And sometimes, the old you will have an unwillingness to accept the new you, or the results the new you creates, like money. And sometimes, you even downright reject yourself. Like, the new you that you want to be. So when you sign a client and you think it’s a fluke, you are really rejecting your belief that you’re a life coach that people pay. You are rejecting your success of being a paid coach. You are being intolerant to your success.

And I think we do this because success is so uncomfortable in the beginning of it because it’s uncomfortable and uncommon to believe amazing things about ourselves when we haven’t practiced that a lot. And I’m sure many of you have heard this Marianne Williamson quote but I think it really exemplifies what I’m saying here.

She says, “Our deepest fear is not that we’re inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we’re powerful beyond measure.” That is what makes us so uncomfortable. But I think not because we’re afraid of power, but just because we haven’t practiced being with our power.

Sure, we have moments of explosions of confidence when we’re on top of the world and we think we’re killing it, but when it comes to living in our highest standard of ourselves and who we want to be on a daily basis, it requires much more attention and focus, like a dedicated practice to it because most of us just haven’t done that.

I think society itself has never made thinking successful things about ourselves a common practice or habit. We’ve made the opposite of habit. It’s so normal to talk down to ourselves, berate ourselves, make excuses for ourselves, discount ourselves. It takes a lot of vulnerability and courage to really open up to ourselves and believe that we are great, that we are worthy of the results we have and are creating, and that success is just who we are.

So we have the success and then we freak out. And many of you are aware of this. I see posts all the time in 2K where you guys sign your first clients, what you have so badly wanted for so long, and you finally have it, and then you freak out about it. And your brain wants to just go back to who you were and you don’t necessarily – this is very important.

Consciously, you don’t want to go back to where you were. You’re not saying, I just want to go back to when I didn’t have clients, but your brain does. It wants to go back to your most known version. The unsuccessful version, the coach is confused and doesn’t know how and isn’t a good coach. It’s like you revert back in your mind because your mind thinks that that place is safer and more comfortable.

So how do you handle it now if you’re going through it and how do you prevent it? Because what happens when intolerance shows up is you self-sabotage on your success. That is the direct result of the intolerance showing up.

So if you’re looking at even – I always like to put things in the model. It’s like when you feel unsettled or intolerant or uncomfortable with your success, with the things that happen, so the circumstance might be signing a client and then you think it’s a fluke and you feel uncomfortable and unsettled, the action you will take will result in having sabotaged yourself and creating a result that is opposite of what you want.

So the answer, the solution is you have to build tolerance to it. Tolerance to success. And I love using the word tolerance because many of you have such an intolerance that you will have to learn to tolerate success, which feel – if you think about the way tolerating feels in your body, like I always imagine it like, we have a new puppy.

Her name is Bella. She’s an English cream golden retriever and she is in her terrible twos I feel like, and all she wants to do is bite and lick all over Bear’s face. My seven-year-old adult dog. And he just looks at me like, he tolerates it but it’s like, highly uncomfortable and his eyes are like, mom, stop this madness.

That’s the way it looks. And so I feel like his – this is when I thought about this. I’m looking at his face while she’s just licking and biting all over it and he wants nothing to do with it, but he’s tolerating it. He’s allowing it. He doesn’t bite her, he doesn’t move. He just looks highly uncomfortable.

And I was literally thinking like, yeah, that’s what you have to do with success too. The clients are coming, they’re licking all over your face, they’re telling you how amazing you are and how much you’ve helped them and you’ve changed their life and your brain is like, no, for sure it wasn’t me. I don’t know who had that conversation with you but definitely couldn’t be anything I’ve done. I’m terrible at coaching. And you have to just kind of sit there in it.

Okay, so that’s kind of the feeling of tolerate. We’ve cleared that up. And I think it just sounds so funny but I do think it’s exactly what you need because the intolerance is so strong. I think many of you struggle to jump from just being and having success, and that’s just who you are, I think it’s a big jump.

So you just kind of have to allow it and tolerate it. So that’s your first step. And you know how to do this. I don’t even need to teach you how to do this because listen, you have tolerated and allowed lack of success in your life for far too long, right? We’re not spending any time in this podcast talking about what success actually is and that you can be successful no matter what.

We’re just giving you success as what you define success is, making money as a life coach. For this episode, we’re not going to do down the rabbit hole of what success means and how you find it and that it’s a feeling and all that. We’re just going to stay with the assumption that success of what I’m defining here is you making money as a life coach.

Okay, so you’ve tolerated not making money as a life coach for so long in your life and however long it’s taken you to like, get over yourself and make money. You’ve done that, so you know how to do it. You know how to be with something that’s uncomfortable. You’ve been with not making money, so now you just have to be with making money.

So let’s look at the definition of what tolerance is. So tolerance – and this is very important – is to allow the existence of the occurrence without interference. Now, this is the point I really want you to take home is the inner fearing part. Because in my 200K mastermind, one of the things I see my clients do after they start creating success is they try to interfere with it.

I think this inner fearing part is how you identify if you aren’t tolerating and allowing success and it helps you catch it right before you self-sabotage. Because again, our subconscious beliefs are like this internal thermometer of who we believe ourselves to be and the results we tend to produce.

So the best examples are money and weight, and even really the level of stress and chaos we find ourselves in. We all have an internal thermometer of just who we are. So I’m going to give you a specific example. I’m going to walk you from beginning from intolerance to tolerance.

So if you’re always used to scraping by and not having money and you make money, and you don’t build up tolerance to the feeling of you having money, being a person in the world who has money, your brain will feel so uncomfortable that it will have you go out and spend the money you make or stop making it in order to get back to the comfort of who you’ve been. The knowingness of who you’ve been without the money.

Or you’ll go – again, spin out in some kind of drama or confusion and you’ll interfere with that success by deciding to change up your prices. I see this all the time in 2K for 2K. You’ll sign like, four or five clients back to back and then that’s when you’re like okay, I signed four clients this month and I’m thinking of changing my prices.

Or you’re like, I’m coaching these four new clients and I’ve decided I don’t like my niche. Or this even happens all the time around 50K to 60K. You’re so close to 100K and then you decide to change your niche or change your pricing or change something about it.

And I actually have a client in 200K because I’ve been thinking so much about her, you guys are benefiting from the result of me thinking so much about what she’s going through. But she’s constantly trying to change it up and because I know what’s happening with her, I’ve just never been able to put my finger on explaining it like a concept, but I was coaching her at the live event and I’m like, no, I want you to not raise your prices at all. I want you to just keep signing clients.

And she’s like, but you let this person over here raise their prices, but it’s because that person over there wasn’t experiencing success intolerance. And so I want her to just stay where she is before she starts changing things up. So this will happen to you. This is the self-sabotaging is the moment you’re having success and then you start changing things up.

Or if you’re used to being chaotic and you have this hot mess syndrome going on, I used to do this, like you’re always running late, you’re always putting out fires, even when you could have things go smoothly, and not overbook yourself, leave early, and have zero issues to report, when you arrive at that opportunity at that moment, without having done some work to tolerate this new level of who you’re going to be in the world, you will create fires for yourself and lateness and chaos and hot messness.

And it’s just your brain’s tricky little subconscious way to get you back to the normal internal temperature at which you rest within your belief systems. I had to do this work a lot with weight loss and I’m still doing this work with weight loss. I realized that my internal temperature or my belief system of weight is that I am someone who struggles with their weight and tends to always be a little bit bigger than I would like.

So I noticed it when I lost the weight and my belief was, well, as soon as you get pregnant, you’re going to gain it all back and probably not be able to lose it. And so I caught that. I was like, oh, that’s so interesting how my brain is already planning to revert back to this normalness of who I normally am, which is someone who struggles with my weight.

So it was like, I have this intolerance to being the skinny healthy version of myself. My brain believes who I am is less of the results I have now and more of the results I’ve had in the past. And it makes sense because I had those results longer.

So my new results, although they are what I want, are strange to my brain. Again, therefore uncomfortable. So we have to allow the new results we create without interfering and without that next step of self-sabotage.

And I really think that this is so challenging for many of my clients and even has been for myself for so long because you don’t see the decisions that you make in the moment that will sabotage you as interfering with your success. They will always present like they are good ideas.

For example, I’ll have a client that makes six figures and then they’re in this high of making their six figures and they spend a bunch of money on things they’re dying to have or whatever. They decide to do their website and they hire a photographer and they decide to do funnels, and they just start spending money as if it’s always going to come in.

And then they’re on this high and they think that they should change their niche or their program or their pricing. They change the things that are working. And then they make it complicated for themselves. They change something that’s working, so all of a sudden they’re in something that isn’t working when they change their niche or their pricing, or they’ll have a circumstance happen that normally happens – clients will quit.

That’s something that will happen to you when you start making money as a coach. So many – it’s fascinating how often I watch coaches not prepare for that. They’re like, what? Clients quit? I was counting on this money. And I’m like, what? Why? Something clients do. They just quit.

So this will happen and then they will put themselves into a spin out. Then in the drama and the spin out, they stop signing clients and making money. Now they’ve fallen in this tunnel of despair, right back where they were when they first started making money and even worse, I’ve seen this happen a handful of times over the years that I’ve been coaching coaches. It takes them years to get back on track or they never do.

They just stay at six figures for years and years. They stop investing in themselves because now they have all these bills and they’re not signing these new clients. And they’ll try to save and to hold on to what little money they have and instead of moving forward with their growth and getting out of their despair, they just never make it over the hump into multiple six figures and on to seven figures.

It’s like you go through the river of misery to make money. You’re on land, but then you aren’t prepared to be on land, you’re not prepared for the success, so it’s very uncomfortable so in your discomfort of being on the land in success, you make decisions from that uncomfortable place and they’re not good decisions because you may have made them from an uncomfortable place.

I almost said discomfortable. An uncomfortable place, which creates the self-sabotage, and then you put yourself right back into the river of misery and then you don’t expect to be there or you didn’t plan to be there because in your mind, you finally did it. You made the money so being in the river of misery means something has gone wrong because you’re supposed to be in rainbows and daisies and butterflies land.

All of it is just so compoundingly bad that you just stop swimming and you give up and you drown. This sucks. This is a terrible thing I’m depicting here but I see people do it all the time. And the only reason they do it is because sitting with the discomfort of your success, sitting on land is also uncomfortable. Allowing your success without giving into the urge to sabotage is hard.

If you could decide between the two, I would choose discomfort over self-sabotaging any day. So I think the hardest part here is identifying when you’re on land and you are uncomfortable and then you have a good idea to get you out of the discomfort.

When you have an urge that you want to satisfy that seems great, but if you look at your overall growth, would it interfere with your success? Your continued success. And I think you have to be able to identify what type of land you’re on. Are you on shaky land? Just never a good time to change anything up, or are you on solid ground where you feel rested and comfortable to get back in and swim? That’s when you can change things up.

So a great example is a client of mine who could have her first six-figure year. She’s doing very well, but two months before the end of the year, she has realized – and by the way, realizing is just finding a thought that you’ve always had. We sometimes think that it comes from above and is a download of truth. But she realized that she doesn’t like her niche. The kind of people she coaches.

And she also thinks that she likes these other people better. And I yelled at her a little bit because I know she’s on shaky land and I’m like no, don’t change anything until you hit 100K. At least give yourself that. And the reason why is because you want to settle into your success. You want it to be your predominant belief system about you before you go making changes.

Because when you make changes, you are going to inevitably send yourself back into the river of misery. You have to know that piece, that any time you make changes, any time you make decisions, you are putting yourself back into the river of misery. And who you go back into the river of misery as is very important.

When you haven’t built up your tolerance, when you haven’t moved through allowance into acceptance, into it’s just who you are, you’re going back into the river of misery with your predominant belief system of being someone who can’t swim. You hear what I’m saying here? Versus someone who can swim this river well.

So then it will end up being just as awful and miserable as the first time and you will handle it the same way as you did almost the first time. But if you work on becoming the successful person, as who you genuinely believe yourself to be, the person that has success and makes money as just who you are and you settle into that, and then you make changes, who enters that river is so important.

When you let yourself make decisions before you’ve truly arrived in your brain at that success, that is always a self-sabotage. It’s why in my 200K, we create in the beginning their simple offer. They choose it, to be clear, and then I spend the mastermind helping them make money in that simple offer and be the person who makes money in that offer, just as who they are and settle into that.

And so part of the simple offer is that it never changes. And it doesn’t change for this reason. I want them to get to the other side of the river first. I want them to rest. I want them to refocus. I want them to sit a bit in their success. And make sure that they have recharged and refueled and are ready and excited for their next river and their next swim.

So I’m going to give you an analogy. For those of you who are Game of Thrones fans, I’ll try not to give away main details for those of you who are like, I’m going to watch it one day, but in the last season – I think it’s the last. It could have been the second to last. It’s not going to give away too much but there is a huge, huge battle.

One of the characters, Daenerys – I always mispronounce her name. Daenerys Targaryen is leading one of the troops of people into the battle and they do this epic battle. And this battle takes everything of these people. Every last ounce of who they are to survive this battle.

And as soon as the battle’s over, her greed to win the overall war pushes her in to go into battle again before everyone’s rested up and it costs her two very important things. I’m trying to say it without ruining it. It is a pivotal mistake. It’s a massive self-sabotage in strategy and it costs her a lot.

And I was like, thinking about it, I’m like, oh yeah, this is what we do. We’re like, I just finished the last battle, I’m exhausted but let’s change some things up and go right back in. This is what happens. So the key here is resting up to feel yourself in the allowing of success. No matter how strange and uncomfortable it feels.

And notice the thoughts your brain has when it is not handling the success well. Notice when it delegates your success to your coach, or the right timing, or it was just the perfect client. Notice when it thinks it’s all a fluke. Notice when you want to change something that is working before you have really stayed in the experience of it working.

Notice when you are so close to the finish line and you want to give up because of what you will make it mean when you get there, that you are successful and that that will mean something completely different than you’ve always had in your mind about yourself. Notice when you feel the urge to take action, to offer something – especially if you’re in 200K, offer something outside of your simple offer, to change your niche, to change your pricing.

Notice all of that. Notice where your emotions are when you’re making your decisions. Notice if you feel well rested and ready for the battle. Notice if you think successful is who you are and that you do make money and you know how to make money. Notice if it’s who you think you aren’t and it’s all been this giant fluke.

Knowing where you are is going to help you make such better decisions for yourself and keep you out of the river of misery unnecessarily, without really, truly your conscious decision to go in there. When the coaching money comes in, notice if you feel so uncomfortable with it that you either want to hoard it or go spend it immediately.

Notice yourself if you’re never reinvesting or if you’re never allowing yourself to celebrate and spend it. Everybody presents in a different way so just pay attention to where you are. Notice when the praise comes in and you feel uncomfortable with it, or are you like, yes, this is who I am, this is me.

Start paying attention. Are you truly tolerating your success? Okay, have a beautiful week. I will see you next week.

Hey, if you are 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 $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.