Ep #54: How to Set and Achieve Goals

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 my lovies. Welcome to episode 54. How to set and achieve goals. Before we dive in, first, can I ask you a favor? Will you go leave me a review on iTunes? I would be so grateful. If you’re listening on iTunes, I love reading your reviews. I would love to have more to read. If you’re loving the podcast, head over and leave me one.

And I want to give a shout-out to one of the listeners. She didn’t leave her name. He or she, but I want to read the review. It says, “Stacey is a sales ninja for life coaches. Seriously, if you’re a life coach who just discovered this podcast, you’re in for some kickass concepts, very pragmatic approach, simplified learning, and some good laughs along the way. Stacey, if you’re reading this, I love you.”

Listen, I don’t even know who wrote this to shout you out by name, but I love you too. I love all of you. And I love reading the reviews. It just helps me feel connected to you. So I want to read some more. Go on iTunes, leave me a review.

Can I also take a minute to celebrate 2019? 2.5 million dollars. That’s how much we brought in this year. Are you kidding me? I’m like, freaking out. And not in like – I knew this was coming, like I knew 100%, believed 100%. Not kind of. I did believe that all year long. But when you’re sitting in it having happened… I was thinking about this the other day.

One of my clients saw someone pitching in a Walmart, making the announcement that they’re going to give out free gifts in two minutes from right now. And I was just thinking that was me four years ago and now I have a multiple seven-figure business. Like, just this year, 2.5 million dollars. So amazing. Anything is possible.

And what’s even better I think than that is I had six clients cross the 200K mark this year. Some of them like, 250K, 300K. And 10 make 100K or more. And another dozen that are so close, at like, 70K and 80K, which is so frustrating. I have a client that’s at $84,000 this year and she’s not selling anything else for the rest of the year and it’s like, painful. I get it. We’ve been coaching a lot on like, who cares? Just going to make 150K or 200K next year. It’s totally fine.

She’ll look back on this year and like, that $14,000, not going to make a difference. But seriously, it’s crazy. How amazing is all of that money? I’m going to ask my mastermind this week. We’re going to add up all the money we made for the year and find out as a group of 30 coaches, how much money was created helping other people through coaching. Blows my mind. So excited to figure out that number. I’ll share it with you on the next podcast.

So I love this time of year. It’s lots of endings and then the new beginnings. The New Year. There’s a debate on whether it’s technically the new decade. Whatever. We’re going to celebrate it anyway. It’s a fresh start. A brand new you. Do you feel that? I do. I feel it. I feel like, bring it on, 2020.

Now, it’s also just another day, so really whatever serves you the most to think. Alright, so let’s dive into how to set and achieve goals. This is important to you as a client and you as a coach. Because this is the job of a life coach. At the heart of everything, this is what we help other people do. We help clients set and achieve goals.

So if you don’t have a record for doing this yourself, it will be hard to sell life coaching. And it will be hard to coach your clients. Now, you can still do it. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just harder. It’s the difference between selling with your mind and what you know to be true in theory, and selling with your heart and your entire being, and knowing in the depths of your soul the truth of your theories because they’ve been tested and proved.

So for me and how I teach my clients, we take setting and achieving goals seriously. So before you set your goal for the year, I think it’s important that you understand the job of a goal. A goal is arbitrary. It’s literally something that you make up. And its job is to create a container for the decisions that you make. It gives your actions a parameter.

It creates measurement for who you are being and whether that is working or not. The definition of a goal is the end towards which effort is directed. Now, I like to give that end point very specific parameters. What and when. So I will make five million dollars by December 31st 2020 at midnight.

For my coaches who haven’t made any money, I like them to set the parameters of 2K in 30 days. Now, this is important. Your goal’s job is to give you something to aim for, an end point to direct your thoughts, feelings, and actions. A container for your growth and evolution. Your goal’s job is not to excite you.

I know so many of you are like, what? I have to be excited about my goal. This is what my clients tell me. You almost feel like, entitled to be really jazzed up about your goal. Like its job is to get you motivated to want to take action and work towards your goal. Like it has to be really big to get you out of bed or just isn’t exciting.

But I’m going to say it again. Your goal’s job is not to excite you. It’s your job to get excited about your goal, to decide why it is exciting. I get a lot of people who tell me 2K isn’t exciting. I always ask them why. It’s not because $2000 isn’t exciting. We think that’s kind of a circumstance like, oh, that’s just the truth of it, $2000 isn’t exciting.

But that’s never true. It’s because of how they are thinking about $2000, which is usually that it’s not enough. It’s not big enough. But if you have never done it, it’s bigger than you think. Let me say that again. If you have never done it, it’s bigger than you think. And our brains like to underestimate. They like to underestimate how much time and effort and practice and how much action that we will have to take to achieve something.

Your brain will for sure do that with every goal, but I think it really happens a lot with the first money you ever make in your business. The hardest part is going from nothing to something. The amount of energy that takes is profound. It’s the energy that it takes to start building momentum.

And before you have ever built momentum, it’s impossible to understand how much energy that really is. Like, I remember getting certified in July and thinking I would replace my coaching income by September and be gone. I ended up leaving June of the following year.

I underestimated how much time and effort it would take to get enough clients to replace my income and leave. That’s really the first fail we often have with goals is setting goals too big and then underestimating the energy and skill and effort it requires to accomplish them.

So a lot of your goals, especially in the beginning, need to be smaller than you think. Because you have not learned how to properly estimate the amount of energy a goal will take. How we know this is because you don’t have what I call a track record of achievement yet. That’s really what the idea of 2K at a time is. It helps you create a track record of achievement.

A proven record of you achieving things over and over and over, you have repeated a goal of achievement many times, which will build your awareness on the amount of energy something will take. It also builds your self-trust that you are a person who sets and achieves goals.

So when setting a goal, it’s important to consider the energy, the effort, and the skill required to achieve the goal. It’s basically what you will have to do, the action steps you’ll have to take to achieve that goal. For this podcast, we’re going to call that the goal’s energy cost.

Then you have to consider your track record of achievement. So this is the percentage of time that you do what you say you’re going to do, so those set of actions that you decide and you write down that you have to do to accomplish your goal. What is the percentage of time that you actually do those things that you say you’re going to do that you’ve done that in the past and the percentage of goals you have set and accomplished?

Let’s call this your energetic reserve. So the equation to set goals that will be highly achievable is your energetic reserve divided by the goal’s energy cost. That’s going to equal the goal achievement probability. Now, I just made up all of these words for this podcast. But I’m going to give you a very good example of this.

So if you love a dress that’s $4000 and you have $4000 to spend easily on that dress, you will 100% buy that dress, versus if you have $400 to spend on that dress and the one that you love is $4000, it isn’t a match no matter how much you love it. The probability is very low that you will be able to buy that dress. It’s like a 10% chance.

Maybe you want it so bad that you go get a credit card and you put yourself in debt to get it. But we don’t want to create energy debt here. That’s when you hustle and run yourself into the ground and your entire experience is terrible, by the way. So the purpose of this equation really, your energetic reserve divided by your goal’s energy cost to create the goal achievement probability, the point of that is to help you see, are you setting goals that give you 100% chance of achievement? Or setting goals that give you 10% chance of achievement?

In the beginning, the percentage of achievement will be low even with 2K, which I sort of hate saying because I also equally believe that it’s way easier to do than we think. I just posted on Instagram a quote of my ski instructor said, “A bigger dummy has done it,” and I think that that’s so true of making money as a life coach. A bigger dummy has done it than you.

It’s usually easier than we think, but I also think it also requires sometimes way more than we think. If you go into it underestimating, you set yourself up for failure. And sometimes you set it up with overestimating and spinning into drama about it too, but for this podcast, we’re talking about the drama and the failure that we set ourselves up for when we underestimate.

So when we underestimate and we aren’t prepared for the work that we have to do, our chances of achieving it are just so much lower. Now, I’m not saying that you have to set goals where you 100% will achieve them and you only set goals for things that you’ve achieved. But the higher that percentage, if you’re someone who’s never set and achieved goals and you feel like you don’t even know how to do that, you want to start with something where your percentage is very high.

That way, you can create that track record. You can achieve it and then you can set another goal where your percentage is really high, and then you can achieve it, and you can start building your belief that you can achieve it. I’m going to give you two examples for me.

In 2018 – and I’m going to use the equation. In 2018, I tried to go from 300K to a million. It was tripling my goal. I underestimated how much effort and energy, I underestimated the energy cost of this goal. And I didn’t do the math of what I had done the previous year. So I have a 30% probability of achieving it.

This past year, I went from $860,000 to a million. The million was the original goal. Now know that I ended up doing 2.5. But that was the goal that I had and I had an 80% chance of achieving it going into the year. When the person you are is just someone who achieves that goal, the probability of you achieving it is so high and that is the secret to accomplishing goals.

How you set them and achieve them, you set goals that are easy to achieve and then you achieve them. Because how do you show up when you feel there is a high probability of achieving your goal? Stop and think about that for a second. Who are you when you feel like your goal is done?

When I was trying to triple my goal in 2018 and I really did not believe it was done, like in the bank, I’ve got this, I was a hot mess. Like really. I would wake up at night with anxiety and sweat. My brain was constantly trying to figure it out. I was failing all year. I had so much drama about everything and I was just kind of reacting to my business all the time, even my clients felt that.

Structurally, my business was a mess. I didn’t have time to think about a client experience or setting up systems and processes to make it easier each time because there was just like, my business was a train and I was literally running after a speeding train, which obviously is just like, you’ll never catch up.

This year, I had that 86% probability and I spent the entire year creating incredible assets for my business. I wrote a book for my program. The Consultation Code. I wrote a workbook for my program called Making Money with the Model. I ended up winning the best content award with my coaching school for this podcast, creating concepts and brand-new ideas into the world. I created the most incredible program with 2K for 2K and the most incredible mastermind with 200K mastermind.

And that mastermind, I created to have a 97% success rate. That’s unheard of. Like, 97% of the clients that join that get what they came for. People don’t talk about their success rates in the industry but that’s really high. I also only worked three days a week and I took three months off. 12 weeks of vacation.

And I learned to be a leader, and I also lost 25 pounds and I planned a wedding and I got a puppy. The person you are when you stretch yourself, sometimes it’s too far and it does more harm than good. You have to be the judge. You know, I always feel like I walk a very fine line with this concept. If a client comes to me in my mastermind for example, and they’re making 30K and they want to make 300K, I don’t want to tell them that they can’t do that.

But in the back of my mind, I do know that the likelihood of them not being able to do it is high. Because their results show that they haven’t built a track record for making hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you do the equation, which by the way, you should not. The purpose of this podcast is not that you start doing math with your goals. I’m terrible. I should never do math.

But for the purpose of this concept, we’re going to do math. So if you do the math of 30K divided by 300K, it gives you a 10% probability. Now, if someone comes in having made 100K and wants to go to 300K, that’s at least a 30% probability. Now, I like the probability to be 30% or higher. Like, 50%, even better. Doubling your income every year is no small thing.

And when you double or even less, sometimes we keep – in my million dollar mentoring, sometimes we keep our goals the same. I did that for this year. It doesn’t mean you won’t make more. But where your mind is when you’re keeping your goal the same and your goal is to do that even better and clean your shit up, it contains your growth and you enjoy your business so much more and you grow your business so much smarter.

Remember, setting a goal that allows you to take action and believe you can do it is the biggest step to achieving it, but it also helps you be a person that you enjoy more when you’re achieving it. Now, some of you might be thinking, “But that’s just changing the C.” Changing the circumstance.

It’s just creating a goal that’s easier for you to believe, and it is. I’m not negating that. But you can do that sometimes. You can move towards circumstances that make it easier for you to be who you want to be. That’s okay. Remember, we’re just starting out. You want to create a track record for achievement. That is the main goal. And it isn’t cheating.

Actually, you know what, even if it is, it’s okay. I want you to be okay with that idea. It’s just giving you easy wins to build your confidence for bigger wins. You aren’t more honorable because you set huge goals and go spend a long period of time failing and trying to accomplish them. You aren’t more honorable for having huge leaps of growth versus setting small goals and achieving them little by little.

In one year, someone can set a huge goal and go for it all year, and another person can set a series of small goals, and they might end up in a year with the exact same results, except the person who sets the goals that they know they can achieve and achieves them gets more wins, and enjoys the ride more along the way.

Think about this. The person who sets 100K to be their goal and all year, only thinks about 100K and experiences not having 100K all year is less likely to make money because of how they feel and how they show up all of the time when they’re not making their 100K. Versus the person who focuses on 2K at a time towards 100K, and that person gets a win every time they make 2K, they believe in their capability to make money more than the person trying to achieve a chunk of 100K all at once, that keeps failing because they’re trying to make too big of a jump.

I always say the easiest way to believe you can make money is to make money. You can sit there and work on your belief about making money all day, you can work on believing you will make 100K week after week, but what will bring you closer to that belief in reality is every $2000 you make or $5000. Doesn’t even matter. I just use $2000, that’s my schtick. But whatever number works for you that will get you closer to that belief.

It’s also why I tell you all not to focus on what you think you need to have done and all that setting up shop to make 100K and just focus on making the dollars. The fastest, easiest, simplest way to dollars. If it doesn’t produce dollars, easy, immediate dollars, forget about it. That’s what you want to focus on.

You don’t want to focus on the actions to 100K. You want to focus on the actions to 2K. It will get you to 100K faster. When you are growing your self-belief, growing your record of achievement, growing your self-trust, when you do actually have a huge crazy goal, you will then have all of that to lean on.

Again, 2K might not seem exciting compared to 100K or 200K, but it literally takes you from I am not a person who sets and achieves goals, to I achieve every goal I set, I do what I say always. And that is a huge shift. I really recommend sitting down and thinking about who you are, how you think and feel, and how do you show up exactly.

Like, what do you do when you believe that you are not the kind of person who sets and achieves goals versus who you are, how you feel, how you show up, and exactly what you do, even when you fail? And how you problem solve when you believe you do set and achieve goals and have the results to prove it?

When you are a person who achieves what you set out to do. A person who experiences failure but believes they are a person who sets and achieves goals will get back up faster and try again than a person who believes they are not a person who sets and achieves goals. That’s really the difference.

You have a different failure tolerance based on what you believe about yourself, based on your track record that you intentionally create. Your track record of achievement that you intentionally create based on your self-trust in all the smaller goals you set and achieve.

I suggest you set goals in the beginning that help you believe things about yourself that serve you and propel you forward. Cheat with circumstances as much as you need to. Make money to believe that you can make money. Just do it.

Okay, so let’s talk about a way to check your awareness for the amount of effort your goal will take. Like, how do you know if you’re choosing a goal that sets you up for success? The best way is to outline your plan. Write out exactly how you will achieve something. Break it down into markers.

So for example, if you want to make 100K this year, that’s 25K a quarter. That’s $8300 a month. Break that down. That’s 2K a week. How will you do that? Is that one client? Four clients? How many consults will you need to get that many clients? How many people are currently reaching out to you? How many consults are you currently setting up?

Do you have a plan to bridge that gap? How will you go from one consult a month to 10? Lay out the plan exactly. Write out all the actions you think if you took specifically you will guarantee yourself that result. It can’t be like, generic things either. Like work on my belief, coach myself every day, go to networking events. It needs to be specific.

Like the specificity – is that a word? Specificity? I think it is but I’m not saying it well. The specificity – if I say it 100 times I’ll get it – in your action list will be what tells you if you really understand it or not. So for example, let’s say you want to have a New York Times best-selling book. What does it actually take to make that happen?

How do you get an agent? What will you call your book? What will it be about? What is your current audience size? What audience size do you need to get a book out there like that? What will be your step-by-step plan to get it written, published, and for you to promote it? What have past NYC best-sellers done? Will you look up any how-tos? Are there any?

The belief is in the details. If you get stuck and your energy dips significantly, it dips because you have underestimated the amount of energy and actions it will take. If you were spot on with your goal, with a track record of achievement to back it, you will be able to line up a plan without any drama, or very little drama.

Now, this is what’s so fun. When people tell me that 2K isn’t exciting, when they’re making their goal responsible for how they feel, I’m like, make a plan. How will you do it? Have you done it before? Do you do it consistently? Could you tell me right now from your experience exactly? Like from a place of mastery, how you’re going to do it step-by-step?

Will that knowledge that you tell me yield that result today? Now by the way, when you join 2K for 2K, you do get the exact steps to do it. There are five and I break those down for you very specifically. Because I’m so experienced at making 2K, I can tell you in an instant, and then what I tell you is provable because I’ve done it and other people have done it over and over and over and over.

So just make sure you can back your goal with a plan that doesn’t create massive drama for you. That is why I tell you in 2K to focus on your first 2K. That’s it. The plan is meeting people, telling them you’re a life coach, making offers to help them, and then there is a simple plan when you get them on the phone. There are just five steps you do there too.

You want to keep it simple and small. You want to stay out of the need to do 1000 things before you sign a client. And that’s what happens when you think about making 100K. You’re like, when you’re focusing on that being your goal, you’re like, here are the 1000 things that need to happen. And then you end up creating a website as a goal.

You’re like, oh, this is my goal is create a website, finish a website, write a blog. No. The goal needs to be making money. That’s your end game. That’s your end result you’re looking for and you want to have very simple things that are very clear that help you do that.

Sometimes the drama is good and it forces you to change who you’re being and how you’re thinking and problem solving, but if you don’t have a track record of achievement yet, I don’t want you to put yourself into a ton of drama. I want you to focus on that first because that first 2K, the first few goals you will set and achieve, they’re going to give you drama enough.

Although here’s what I will also say. I’m working with my 200K students on this idea that no matter what stage you’re in, is there any amount of accomplishment and money worth massive spinout? I don’t think that there is. No goal is worth stepping out of who you want to be, who you are aiming to be.

All goals are worth stepping out of who you are now for evolvement, of course, but I just asked my students this the other day like, what does it prove? What does it prove about you to do $100,000 instead of $86,000? What does it prove about you to go from 100K to 300K instead of 100K to 200K?

Whatever the answer is is only your thoughts, and you’re free to think those now if you’d like. Okay, so let’s just say – we’re going to finish this up with let’s just say that you’re like, but I just want to do something giant and impossible this year. Something huge and massive and beyond myself. Like, I want to stretch myself, I want the challenge, I want to think about 100K or 300K or a million, or I really think I can do that much. Like, I can go to 300K or I can go to a million. I have a plan. Like, I’ve planned it all out.

In the beginning, sometimes there are unicorns that that is possible. You might be that unicorn that can do that. And then sometimes, in the beginning, the work is just finding out where we underestimate. So either you’re underestimating, or you’re a unicorn and you can totally do it. There’s probably a large amount of unicorns in the world.

Like, percentage wise, even if it’s like, 1% of coaches are unicorns and can do huge crazy leaps, that’s still a large number of people. So you could be that person. And I don’t want to tell you not to do that. Go do it. Get all excited about it. But I just want to offer for you to break that goal down because no matter how much you believe you can do it, it doesn’t happen overnight. You want to still focus on small goals, even if you’re dead set on achieving the big ones and make sure that you have small ones that align with the big goals that meet markers along the way that make it inevitable to achieve that goal.

And then make yourself a promise. Be aware at least of this. If you really genuinely believe that you can make a million dollars and you have a plan to execute it, and you’re like, yeah, that’s $83,000 a month, give yourself X number of tries at that smaller goal. Give yourself maybe five tries at that. And if you haven’t made any money, like let those tries, let those efforts tell you whether you actually believe it or not.

If you’re like, I can make a million dollars, it’s $83,000 a month, I know exactly how I’m going to do that, and then you go make $40,000 the first month, keep on with your bad self. Have the results to back up your big giant leaps. Great. But if you fail significantly and don’t even come close five times in a row, be willing to recalculate.

Some of y’all have a lot of drama about lowering a goal, but sometimes especially in the beginning, you aren’t proficient in setting goals that you can achieve so you don’t know how to estimate the effort involved and you overshoot. And sometimes we coaches can’t talk you out of it. I mean personally, as a client, I’ve never ever been in that situation.

So you get into a goal and in working the goal, you do realize the amount of effort and energy and change it will require. And with that new awareness, you realize it may not be feasible. That is okay. You are actually still further along than you were before. You didn’t have a setback. You just learned the value of awareness of the energy cost of a result.

It’s like that dress. You have $400, you find out that the one you want is $4000. The cost is not something you can afford at this time, but at this time is so important. It doesn’t mean forever. It just means for the moment. So then you go to work to be able to afford that.

If you want to make a million dollars and you’re at zero, do the work to afford that goal. Go make 2K and then 10K and then 25K and then 100K and then 250K and then 500K and then a million. And when you don’t want to do the work, you have to question why.

So outline your plan for achievement, set a timeline, test its markers, like is it 2K a week? Is it $83,000 a month? What’s the markers? Take action and then evaluate those results and see if you need to re-evaluate the goal or not. Don’t just take my word on it. Take your results on it. Alright, I’ll 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.