Ep #199: Digging Yourself Out of a Hole

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, so today I’m actually right now walking my dog and myself and thinking. And I wanted to record this audio so the audio will not be fantastic. And you might hear some background noise today. And it’s going to be a little bit of stream of thought but I want you just to imagine if you’re listening to this in your car, or in the shower, I sometimes listen to podcasts, or wherever you are, if you’re making dinner.

I want you just to imagine that you and I are on a walk, it’s a beautiful fall evening. The sun is going to set soon but the sunshine is still out. It’s so warm. We have our little sweatshirts on and our little leggings. Do people call them leggings still, leggings? Leggings is very Kentucky. And we are walking and we’re just chatting and I want to share my thoughts with you about digging out of a hole. I have been recently digging out of a hole in my business. And I’ve been thinking a lot about holes and how we respond to them however they show up and however they are created.

So sometimes these holes are self-created. At the beginning of my business, I had lots of self-created a holes. I was living in victim mentality, was overspending, I had no personal development tools whatsoever. And I had a very just like life happens to me mentality. And a lot of the results that I had in my life were just with lots of holes. When I hired my first coach it literally felt like I was at the bottom of a very, very long tunnel, just relationship in disappear, money in despair, my job in despair.

That’s what I mean by digging yourself out of a hole is you are just in a place in your life where you feel some form of despair or you recognize that you’ve fall far and you have a long way to go to get back to where you were, just to baseline, or to get where you’re going. So sometimes they’re self-created. And sometimes they’re circumstantially created which is the hole that I have been digging out of currently in my internally, in my business, so necessarily aren’t reflections at all of you but we play in a world where circumstances happen.

So, I’m going to give you an example that’s not business related. We just had family over today. And Neil’s uncle and his wife retired, they were frugal their entire lives, retired early, sold their house, moved to Florida and bought a house a quarter of a mile from the beach. And were driving down to live in Florida during the winter months, the retirement of their dreams. I can’t remember the city but whatever city was hit by the hurricane, the eye of the storm, that’s where they lived.

And insurance doesn’t, either they don’t have insurance or it doesn’t cover it. I’m not sure. But they are out $155,000 gone in one day, gone. Nothing’s repairable, the whole house has to be ripped apart. And they have to start over at retirement age. And I was actually really impressed. His aunt was telling me their plan. They’re going to buy a condo and then they’re going to rent that condo out when they’re not living there to help create money to pay for the house to eventually be rebuilt.

They’re working, they’re in the beginning of the working themselves out of the hole. So that is an example of a hole that is a circumstantial hole. They did nothing wrong. This wasn’t the product of negative thoughts, it was a hurricane. So sometimes it happens as we start coaching businesses. We start a coaching business, we invest lots of money, we get started. Or we have a business that’s making lots of money, we’re doing really well and then something happens.

It could be a marketplace issue, it could be a client issue, it could be an employee issue, it could be going through divorce, it could be death in the family. There could be a lot of things that create the hole. But you find yourself in what feels like a massive hole and you have to take the action to start digging your way back out. So, this is what I’ve been thinking about. I was just coaching someone in 2K on this. And so, I want to just kind of give you guys my thoughts about this.

And I want to speak to the coaches, I think everyone can glean from this conversation but specifically the people I want to talk to are the coaches who have never made money in their business or you have made money but something happened. I have heard these stories so many times I can’t think of examples. But if I sat down I could probably come up with 20 as to you were making money and then something happened and you stopped making money.

And for some of you, you’ve invested a lot of money into your business. You’ve invested a lot of time. I see coaches who come to me in 2K, they have been marketing their business for four or five years, even longer. I’ve seen up to 10 years without any traction and not making any money. And especially if they’ve invested a lot of money and a lot of time it feels like a really big hole.

And I was just coaching someone in 2K who had left, I think had left their six figure job and had been working on just their business. Now they’re going through a divorce. Now they have not made any money in their business. And now they have to come up with money to support themselves and their family. And they were going to go back into the workforce and go back to corporate. But they got on many interviews and they haven’t found a job yet.

And so, they’re in this place of what feel, I mean it’s a very desperate place to be. I have been in a similar place. And so, I’m going to just tell you some of the coaching that I gave them and then I’ll circle it back to the way I’m working through the hole that I’m and the thought process that I’ve been working through. And I also want to say that I’ve coached on this topic for many, many, many years with hundreds of coaches. And the hole is perspective completely.

Because if you guys had my perspective and my circumstances of the hole you’d be like, “Okay, okay.” But for me it feels like one. And that’s always true. I was thinking about my aunt and uncle who just lost everything right as I was reading this post, and coaching the student in 2K. So, everybody has different holes. And how big it feels it has to do with your mind and the way that you think about it. So, I just want to say, there is no – I don’t know, I guess there’s no scale for whether your hole is validly really bad or not.

I’m just going to go from the perspective of you think it’s really bad and maybe you even have seen that is not great. We’re just going to assume that you’re in the hole. So, I just want to say that because sometimes as coaches we want to coach it out of you, you’re not really in a hole. But sometimes that’s not useful or effective. Sometimes you just need to agree, I’m in a hole and now what am I going to do? And you don’t need to change your thoughts about that particular thing, where you are and your perspective on it.

Okay, so now that we’ve said that, here is the conversation I want to have. So, number one, the most important thing when you’re in a hole, I want you to actually imagine being a hole, an actual dirt hole, bottom of a well. You have to make peace with the fact that you’re there. It doesn’t matter how you got there. It doesn’t matter if you were walking, and you weren’t looking, and you were careless, and you fell into the hole. It doesn’t matter if someone pushed you into the hole. It doesn’t matter if the ground opened up and swallowed you into the hole.

The reason you’re there is not important to an extent. What I mean by that is don’t argue with being there. The number one thing that I see people do when they’re in this space is waste a lot of time feeling like they shouldn’t, I’m using that word carefully, shouldn’t be in the hole. You’re there, it doesn’t matter how you got there you’ve got to make peace with the fact that you’re there. Then you have to find okay-ness being there.

She’s like I want to go home. She doesn’t want to keep walking. She doesn’t want to keep talking to you all. She will just stop and be like, “No, that’s not where I’m going.” Okay, so we’re going back home. Okay, so you have to find okay-ness in the hole. Okay-ness is the term I use, it could also be sufficiency but you have to find a place where you’re not resisting being in the hole and that you can actually be okay in the hole. And what I told this student is, “You have to decide an extended period of time of okay-ness.”

So, I told them, “I want you to be okay with the fact that you may be in this hole and you may be digging your way out of this hole for a year. It might take a lot of time, that happens.” Again, a big part of where our brain space gets wasted is thinking that we need to get out of the hole immediately. And then every time we take action what happens is we’re expecting that one action to get us out of the hole. So, we put a ton of weight and a lot of heaviness on the action to get us out of the hole. There is a lot of weight on that action.

So, every action becomes life or death. I’m in this hole and I’m going to die, and I’m not okay. So, I have this one attempt to get myself out of here. I’ve got to get out of here quickly. That type of mentality will keep you there longer. So, when I was growing my business and living basically in Super 8 hotel rooms and it was me and my dog, and I had no money in my bank account. I had no idea where I was going to pay for my next meal, and my car payments. And all the payments I had to make were multiple payments behind.

And I had invested all this money into my business and hadn’t seen a payoff. I’d been working for many, many months, all of that. There is the story of that, and then there’s the fact that you’re there, and then there’s the actions you’re going to take to get out and the actions and how powerful they are. And how much they move the needle has to do with the mindset fueling them when you’re doing them. And if you’re doing them from a place of I’m not okay and I’ve got to get out of the hole and I’m really desperate, this is really terrible, I’m going to die.

I literally imagine my hand sinking into mud to try to pull my way up, when that becomes, each placement of your hand become extraordinarily important then it has the opposite effect, instead of and taking crucial actions that produce crucial results. You take very desperate actions that produce results that make it even more crucial for you to keep taking action. You fuel your results being in that same place. You actually fall and sometimes you fall even further.

So, for example one of the things I was telling my husband is I see a lot of this where we’re in this desperation and we try to buy our way out of the hole. We feel so desperate to get out of it quickly that we want to just make an investment really quick. And so, we think we can just spend more money to alleviate the time that we’ll be in the hole. And it’s the worst place to ever make investments from. I want to encourage you all, if you are in this hole, you do not want to invest in your business from this place of this investment is going to be the rope that falls and lets me pull myself out.

What will happen is you will be from that space, you’re brain will be in that, it’s critical, it’s crucial, I am desperate place trying to grab the rope. And I’m just trying to create this visual for your all. But I just want you to imagine your arms flailing and every time they flail they hit the rope and the rope starts swinging and it makes it harder to grasp. This is what happens when you’re trying to learn something, when you’re trying to market, when you’re trying to do things, your hands are flailing, your mind is flailing. It makes it really hard to get a firm grip on whatever it is that you’re trying to learn or do.

So, this is the next thing that people try to do is either they try to buy their way out and/or they try to take massive action to get out. If I just hustle as fast as possible that will help me get out. If I take as much action as possible that will help me get out. I’ve got to just do, do, do. So, I’ve either got to buy, or I’ve got to do, or I’ve got to do both. And again, I want you to imagine if you’re flailing and your brain is flailing, your body’s flailing. And then you’re trying to make a marketing post to tell someone else how to live their life. It’s never going to work.

No matter what type of coaching that you do, whether you actually tell people how to live their life or you just help them manage their brain to live their life, doesn’t matter how you help people. I always just say the assumption of a life coach is that you have your life together. If you’re going to help me with my life, you’ve got to have your life together. And it doesn’t always have to be circumstantial things with your life together. You at least have to have your brain and your emotions together.

This is the only time someone’s ever going to buy from you is your brain and your emotional body is in the right place, is in a place of sufficiency, is in a place of intention, is in a place where you believe you are where you want to be. So, again if you’re in the hole and you’re like, “I’m in a bad place. I shouldn’t be here. This is bad.”

Everyone always asks me, “How did you market and make money when you were literally in Super 8 hotel rooms and had no money? And were going through this terrible break up, how did you get clients?” I just didn’t make the Super 8 a problem. In fact, I remember one that had this decent photo behind the bed. And I recorded an entire six week program from that bed in the Super 8. And I’m going to talk about this in a second.

But I was focused on critical useful actions to move myself forward, not my story and not why I was there and the fact that I shouldn’t be there, and the fact that I’ve got to get out of there quick. I was settled in to the Super 8, settled in. I found okay-ness in the super 8, or wherever I was and whatever I was experiencing, whatever was happening in my life I found okay-ness there.

So even though the circumstances weren’t lavish by any means, my brain and my body, my emotional world was operating from the sufficiency and the okay-ness, not the story of where I was and why I was there. Because I could have told a whole story about how this guy led me on, and I left my partner and I left all my physical belongings. And I thought we were going to move in together and I thought we were building a life together. And then he cheated on me and then he left me.

And now I have nothing, I don’t have my dog, and no furniture and I’m working in a state that now I’m not living with them. And so now I have to stay in hotels. And they’re terrible, and I have no money. And I could have been in that story in my brain. And I was just like, “Yeah, this is where I’m at and now what am I doing about it to get out of it? So, in my okay-ness, so you can’t be marketing with your arms flailing and your mind flailing. You can write a 1,000 posts over 10 years.

And if you’ve been flailing the whole time no one is going to think that you have the energy or the space, no matter what you’re saying, they’re not going to connect to it, for them to believe yes she can help me or he can help me. There is zero chance. And this is something that I was thinking about, that I need to say to the students. So hopefully they hear this podcast. But there is zero chance if you don’t believe that you can help you, that someone else is going to see you and think he or she can help me.

I hope, if you take anything from this podcast and our little walk together, I hope that you take this which is if I don’t believe I can help me I’ll never get someone to believe that I can help them ever. So, the first thought you that have to believe, you’re at the bottom of the hole is I can help myself, I can dig myself out of this. I may not even know how yet but I will dig myself out of this, I have got this. And until I do I’m okay here. I’m going to find okay-ness here until I get somewhere else. I’m just going to be okay with every place that I’m at every stage.

Then you have to find okay-ness with the hard work. It’s going to be hard. And this is really frustrating, I get it, I’m human, I get it. It is very frustrating when someone pushed you in the hole. If that’s the experience of you being in the hole is that you were pushed in, if your husband left you.

I remember being at coaching training once. And one of the coaches was dealing with her husband had spent all of their retirement and all of their money. I think he had maybe a drug addiction, or a gambling addiction, or something. But she had no money. If I’m remembering correctly, she felt like they were doing really, really well with their finances. And then found out that he had this – I don’t remember what the addiction was but that he had spent all their money.

So, it’s going to be hard work if you’ve spent years, and years, and years, 20, 30, 40 years financially preparing for retirement and it’s all gone. That’s going to be hard work. It doesn’t make it even easier if you’re resisting the fact that it’s going to be hard work. If you’ve got to drive for Uber while you build your business, resisting the hard work is not going to help the situation.

I remember being in Walmart trying to build my business, listening to Tony Robbins every second I got and when I was in that place of just this is what it is, this is what I’m willing to do to grow my business, it’s such a different place than when I’m like this is hard work I don’t want to do. If you’re at the bottom of a mountain, I’m going to give you so many analogies in this little walk together. But it’s like if you were at the bottom of a mountain and you were looking at the top and you were like, “Oh my God, it’s going to be so much work.”

Or you can just save that energy and get walking. And listen, I fell for all of the circumstances out there. I fell for all of the desperation out there. For those of you going through it, I truly do feel it, but feeling pity or sorry for you, or letting you stay in that it is the absolute most  awful thing I could ever do for you. The most loving thing I could do to tell you, you’ve got to look up at the mountain and you’ve just got to get walking. There is no point in ruminating on why you’re there, the fact that you’re there, how long you’re going to be there or how hard the climb out is going to be. You have to make peace with all of those things.

Once you do that and that it’s simple, it’s not easy, but once you do that and you get out of the victim story of this terrible awful place that I’m in and how awful and terrible it is for me, and how other people aren’t in it, and I’m sad and I’m pitiful. And this isn’t fair and it shouldn’t be happening. Once you get past all of that then it’s time to take steps forward. When you’re taking steps forward to dig yourself out of the hole, the number one thing you could do for yourself is not let yourself be focused on all the work you’ve done, it doesn’t matter.

If you’ve done a ton of work, let’s say 10 years, you’ve done 10 years of work, it does not matter if that work has not produced the results you want. You did it wrong, my guess is with the wrong mindset. I’m going to talk about that in a second. But whatever you did it didn’t produce the results that you wanted so you’ve got to look at what have I done that hasn’t worked and why? And what do I need to do differently to move forward?

So, I have coached hundreds of coaches on this and every time they come to me with, “Here are all the things I’ve done, none of it’s working and it’s all terrible.” But they rarely tell me, “What do I think that I’m doing or contributing, how am I contributing to this result? Here is my theory and here’s what I’m going to do to change that.” And we think the amount of time that we’ve been trying to do something is what validates us being in that place of I’ve tried so many things and for so many years and it’s not working.

We think, well, if I’ve tried for 10 years and it hasn’t worked, then that time period and that not working indicates something that you should know about my story, but it doesn’t. All it tells me is whatever set of actions you’ve been doing for 10 years haven’t been working. We have to do something different. What we have to do different that I have found, we do evaluations in 2K for 2K all day long, what worked, what didn’t work, what we’re going to do differently.

And I just coached someone on this in 200K even, every single time of all of these evaluations, almost always people tell me the actions of what worked, and what didn’t work, and what they’re going to do differently. Very rarely do they tell me the thoughts they were thinking that worked and the thoughts that they were thinking that didn’t work, and the thoughts that they’re going to think differently next time.

And as coaches we sell the idea that our mindset is what creates our life. Yet when we are trying to dig out of a massive hole it’s always the first thing we leave behind, or we say, “I’ve done it. I’ve change my mindset and it still isn’t working.” How we know always of whether or not our thoughts, that we have thought the thoughts that we need to think, and we’re going to create the results we want, how we know we’ve done that is if we have the results.

Any argument that you have with yourself or the world that is against that is just un-useful, that is what it is, the thoughts that you think, some of the thoughts that you think are the results that you create. It doesn’t matter if you think you’ve been thinking them, you either have or you haven’t based on the results you have. So again, it’s about making peace with that.

So, when I was digging my way out my life hole and my financial hole in the beginning of my business that was something that I was always working on is what results do I have? What thoughts created that? And learning to take responsibility for them. And I do remember that being extraordinarily difficult, extraordinarily difficult but it is the path. It’s like climbing Mount Everest is the level of difficulty of changing your thoughts that have created your life up until this point, but that is the work.

And when you can start doing that, no matter what your life circumstances are, you are going to pull yourself out of that hole and people are going to watch you doing it and they’re going to want some. They’re going to want a part of it because it’s a miraculous transformation to witness, to watch someone literally change the way that they’ve been thinking and then see their world shift around them slowly but surely, it takes a while, slowly but surely to do that.

It doesn’t always take a while but I want you in this episode – I’m usually like, “You can make 2K in 30 days.” But for this specific episode I’m talking of the  people that are in a really bad place and I don’t think it’s useful to tell you, knowing where your mind is that you’re going to be able to dig yourself out of this in 30 days. I don’t know if that’s going to be useful for you. You’ve got to think about the place that the person’s in when you’re coaching them.

And if you are in a desperate bottom of the barrel, bottom of the tunnel deep dark place, finding okay-ness and allowing it to take time, that’s the coaching I want to give you. You’ve got to be willing to do that. So, the thought work is where it’s at. So, when you are in this place you have to find the awareness of where is your brain. Every single part of the day it matters. Your brain has to be in a useful place making critical choices with where you put your time and your attention.

So, one of the things I told the student is, “Music, TV, you’ve got to turn it all off, every single thing that lets your mind drift to other places other than taking control of your life and creating the results you want, it’s got to go. This has to be total immersion of literally brainwashing your brain. Every day something useful, every chance you can get.” I would be in the store, in the Walmart walking up and down the aisles with Tony Robbins in my ear. I’d be listening to him on the way home.

I would be doing my LCS certification homework in the hotel room at night. I’d be waking up early to do my thought downloads. I’d be coaching myself in the shower. I’d be back at it on the way to the store. And I would do that day in and day out, it’s a grind. But I slowly but surely put better thoughts into my brain than what were there every day. This was, I’m talking about over a year and a half period, or two year period. Because the first year I was just coaching for me to change my life. I wasn’t trying to become a coach. So, I had a year ahead.

Somebody of you guys, get coached and decide to become a coach in a relatively small period of time. And if you do that in a time where you’re also in lots of desperation, and lack, and in the bottom of a hole, it could take some time to dig your way out. So, I had a year of just getting coached on my own. And then I still had another year of coaching and signing clients here and there, then they would quit.

I went through the whole thing that you guys go. I talk about this in 2K, the eight phases of a coaching business where you finally think you got traction, and you sign some clients, and then they quit. And then they want refunds. And then you feel like you’re back to square one which may happen, which brings me to, if you get yourself halfway out of the hole and you’re like, “Hell, yeah, I’m halfway there.” And then something happens and you fall and you end up right back at the beginning.

It’s like when you’re playing a video game. And you get so far and the level, and then you die and you have to start all the way over. That happens and sometimes that happens over, and over, and over, and over. Your thoughts about that, your thoughts about the experience of crawling your way out of the hole, and doing what it takes. Or climbing the mountain, whatever is more useful for you. Your thoughts about that experience and your thoughts moving you forward are the difference of getting out or not.

You have got to make peace with that. It is not how many marketing posts you’ve done, and it’s not how much money you’ve made. And I can always tell where someone’s mindset is when they talk about those things in their post, when they reach out and they’re like, “Help me, I’m drowning.” It’s always this is what I’ve done and this is what I’ve spent.” It’s never this is what I’ve been thinking. You have to take full ownership of that, full ownership of every single thought and every single result that is created from it.

And then you have to work your way out, what’s the next best thought I can think? What’s the next thought that feels even one vibration higher than the thought that I am currently thinking? I have an episode on this where I talk about the emotional scale. And I think I remember, I recorded it years ago. But if I remember correctly I think I talked about this idea of don’t try to take giant leaps from desperation to joy and abundance. Find one step above desperation in the vibrational scale, just one emotion higher than desperation.

And then find one emotion higher than that and then one emotion higher than that. You’ve got to be willing to do the tedious work. This is tedious work. I’m going back to you’ve got to find okay-ness in that, and insufficiency in that. Finding thoughts of being okay that you are in the tedious work, that you’re going to be there for a while, that it may not get better any time soon. This is the space I’m in, and I’m getting out of it but it’s going to take some time, being okay with that.

What I find when you guys are not okay with that is you try to take really big leaps. And we talked about also the heaviness of each action, every action feels so life altering, and life or death, and critical, that they’re so heavy that there is no way you’re going to get positive results from taking actions that feel that heavy. Well, the same is true here where you can’t take giant leaps. It’s like the get rich quick mentality. But it’s like dig my way out of the tunnel in a couple actions or less. That’s not going to happen.

This is a really good analogy. If you’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption. I want you to imagine that you are Andy and you are digging with a rock against concrete to tunnel your way out of prison. That is what you’re doing. You have to be okay with that’s what you’re doing. You’re literally digging a concrete tunnel out, miles, and miles, and miles of a concrete tunnel with a little rock. That’s what you’re doing in your mind.

So, you want to stay out of trying to take these big quick actions to fix things quickly. Any type of quickly mentality is going to make you take longer. And then you have to start looking at your thoughts every day, you start fueling your brain with useful thinking as much as possible. You’re literally trying to just increase the proportion of time that your brain is in – I’m not even saying positive, I’m just saying more useful places. The most useful place you can be is self-responsibility and awareness, this is what’s creating my results. I’m owning this, I’m owning the journey to get myself out of it.

This is all on me. I’ll accept every ounce of help I can get, every ounce, the current hole that I’m in, in my brain. I have gotten coached from so many people and from everyone around me, not even coaches, just my family, my nanny, my husband, literally everyone. I will take anyone’s more useful thoughts than mine. I will take their support. I will take their love. I will take all of it.

And for me, I remember when I was trying to get pregnant and I posted in this group and I asked for help. I had 250 comments on this thread. I went through and read every single one, responded to every single one and dd every single thing they suggested. I find that that does not happen. I find that what a lot of times people do is they post in the group for help, they get 50 or a 100 really useful comments, they respond to none of them. Take the time to take all the help you can get to get into a more useful place.

So, you’re working on your thinking. You’re actively taking self-responsibility of where you are and where you’re moving forward to and what you’re doing about it. You’re accepting all of the help you can do. But just knowing that at the end of the day you’re the one that has to do it. No one else can dig you out of the hole for you. No one’s coming to save you. Do not wait on the magical client that’s going to pay you 10K or whatever to dig you out of that hole.

You’ve got to just be doing it. You can’t be sitting around waiting. You’ve got to be taking all of the actions you can take. And so next when you’re in that place and you’re going to start taking the actions you’ve got to just do a full stock evaluation. One of our Ask a Coach coaches, Olivia posted and she gave the most intense evaluation for this person to follow but it was so brilliant because it was a lot of work, a lot, but in the best way. I was thinking about it and I was like, “Every single one of these things could pull this person out of the hole, every single one of them.”

But this person doesn’t have to be willing to do that work, to be digging themselves out. So, you’ve got to take one action at a time and the action has to be, are you ready? Because I’m going to sum it up with this, focused on serving someone else. This is the ultimate, is impossible to have truly serving actions that you’re going to take. It is impossible to have truly serving actions when you are still focused on your suffering. When you’re self-focused on your suffering, cannot help alleviate someone else’s.

So that’s why the okay-ness and the sufficiency in this. When I told this person, I’m like, “I’m going to give you a really simple answer and it’s probably not going to feel like enough but it’s the answer which is the sufficiency and the okay-ness. When you can get there, and then you start owning every ounce of your life intentionally, having more useful thoughts generating, creating a space around you and everything that enters your brain, every chance you get is useful thinking, useful words.

Every bit of positive information to move yourself forward. That’s what you’re fueling your brain. When you get to that place where you suddenly, even though you’re at the bottom of the hole and you haven’t dug yourself out, even though you’re at the bottom. You have enough energy at the bottom because you’ve made peace with it that you’re there, it’s okay. You have enough energy to then find someone else who happens to be in that tunnel and say. “Hey, I’m going to get us out, here’s how we’re going to do it. Here’s the plan.”

And they’re scared as hell too, but they’re so scared, they’re many steps behind you and you’re the one leading the way. And you’re like, “Listen, this is what we’re going to do.” That’s the energy that you have to be in. That’s the place in your brain that you have to be. And then every day you’re like, “Follow me, I’ve got this. I’m leading us. I’m moving us forward.” And every day you focus on doing that. Once you find your okay-ness, once you find your sufficiency, once you are in full responsibility.

And here’s how you know you’re in full responsibility of your life and you’re really seeing that your results, some of your thoughts would have created your results and some of your emotions would have created your results. When you are in that place and you have looked at the math of why you are where you are, and what it’s going to take to get where you’re going, when you’ve really done that work, and you’re in that place, this is when you start your – I don’t even want to say the energy around you. But the energy around you is going to start shifting and changing.

Again, people see that, they feel that, your words start sounding differently. When people have dug themselves out of holes in my community and I’ve seen it, they say that people start to notice. People have really been noticing, they’re telling me that something’s different about me. They’re telling me that something’s different about my marketing. They’re telling me that I seem different. You will start to have that response in the world when you’re doing this, every day doing this work.

You have to be willing for this to take time but this is how you dig yourself out of this hole. So, I’ve been thinking about this a lot for my 2K students, my 200K students. And I’ve been thinking a lot about this for myself. So, I said I was going to bring it back to myself in the beginning of this conversation. The hole that I have been in, in my brain has not felt self-created. And I spent a lot of time in resistance about that. And then when I let go of that and I was like, “You know what?”

I got a lot of business advice from a venture capitalist, my coach, my mentor, friends, my colleagues. I’ve talked to literally everyone. And one of the spaces I’ve come to is that in business you will be in these holes, and you will always have to dig yourself out. And this will be cyclical, so it will come and go through the life of your business. This is the risk of being an entrepreneur is that these will constantly occur and you will constantly be in them.

Now, I don’t mean all the time. I will say, the last several years have been quite fucking lovely. And I think, I was telling my coach, I was like, “I think I’ve gotten so used to things just being lovely that I forgot that sometimes they aren’t.” I forgot what being in a hole feels like. I feel like I haven’t experienced that in a really long time. And so, the sum of the advice that I’ve gotten from all the people I’ve talked to is that this is business. You might have a few really amazing years. And then you might have some hard years.

You might have a really difficult year with staffing. A lot of people are going through that with COVID. And you might have a difficult year where – I have a podcast, I don’t know when this will play in association. But there’s lots of people who are afraid of a recession. And we might have one. I don’t really know. We might. It could make selling harder. I don’t know. It could and we’re going to go through that because we’re entrepreneurs and we’re just going to take that risk.

I was thinking about this with Peloton when they had a child that died on the tread and they had to recall all of them. And I’m sure they lost – I don’t even know, hundreds of millions of dollars. I’m sure that was a hole for them. And I was just talking to one of my in-laws and they were talking about, I was like, “Are they making the Pelotons yet again?” And they were like, “Yeah, they’ve just released the new ones.” And I remember thinking, they dug themselves out of that hole, good for them.

So, this is the work I’ve been doing in my mind is normalizing that the holes happen and whether they have been self-created, or whether they are circumstantially created, just the world, or sometimes it’s both, whatever that may be. This is part of being an entrepreneur. And there’s not really more safety if you’re an employee.

I have a friend whose partner was just laid off very unexpectedly. So, it’s not like the holes are only for entrepreneurs. But I like to think that as a businessowner I’m opening myself up to more holes I think than maybe corporate America. I think that serves me to think that. And when I’m in them I’ve just got to sink into this might be a rough year, or this might be a rough quarter, or this could be a rough couple of years, whatever it is.

My coach always says, and I always say, “Life is 50/50. We aren’t entitled to the good 50 all the time.” We’re just not, we’re in the hole. We’ve got to dig ourselves out, that’s what we’re doing. It’s the first thing we’ve got to do is find okay-ness here and then really be okay here. I don’t need to be –  how you know you’re okay by the way, is if you don’t need to be out of the hole. You’re like, “I stopped feeling the need to get out the hole.”

If I stop feeling the need to get out of the hole then I won’t want to do the work to get out of the hole, it’s the complete opposite. That’s when all of a sudden you feel rested, your muscles are tough and you have the energy to make the climb. And then the climb, every single placement of your hand and your foot doesn’t feel life or death. Because if you’re like, “Well, if I fall I’m okay with being in the hole, I’ll just try again.” That’s the energy, it feels so different.

So that’s the main thing I want you guys to take from this. But then when you’re in that place, you’ve got to just look at the data. Be like, “Okay, well, if I’ve been marketing for 10 years and what I’ve done hasn’t worked, I’ve got to do something different and I’ve got to figure out what that is.” What is working about what I’m doing, what’s not working and what am I going to try to do differently? And I’m going to keep doing that until I get out of the hole every day.

And if your time is not being spent from okay-ness and sufficiency and then from that place evaluating your actions every single day until you get out of that hole, it’s the reason you’re still in it. That’s the only thing, that’s the summation of my thesis. That’s what we’ll say. You’ve got to be in full evaluation. This is the thought I want you to take, this is what I’m going to leave you with. This is the thought I want you to have.

It doesn’t matter if I have to do 1,000 evaluations, 1,000 evaluations. I have to go take action 1,000 times and after every single one, what worked, what didn’t work, what am I going to do differently that is 100% within my control. That’s the only answers I can give myself are things that are within my control. I’m willing to do that 1,000 times for a full year straight. And if I’m not doing that a 100% of the time, if I’m spending 80% of my time in pity, and desperation, and freakout, and flailing, and wallowing, that time doesn’t count.

This is how people go 10 years is that a lot of the time they’re trying, a lot of that time, 80% of that is they’re actually flailing, even if they are marketing, they’re flailing while they’re marketing. I was thinking about network marketers and how some of them will be in their business for ’10 or 20 years’ and never make a dollar. It’s because either the whole time they were flailing, and/or they never changed their thoughts. They just kept taking the action.

They just kept going out there and meeting people and telling them what business they’re in. And asking them to join them in business but they never changed who they were. They never became someone whose influential. They never became someone that believed so deeply they could help themselves, that other people believed them too, not only can that person help me, but they can help me too. If you haven’t created that space, that safety around you from inside out.

I have the safety in me, it’s radiating out of me so now there’s a bubble around me where everyone around me now feels safe. That’s why you haven’t made the money. You have to create enough safety in yourself that it exudes out of you and other people feel safe to follow you where you’re going. And you pull yourself out of the hole, and how you pull yourself out is by everybody else coming with you. You guys help each other out. That is how I did it in the beginning of my business.

I talk about this in The Value Bank, Value Bank 2.0, if you listen, when I’m in a place where it’s like if I’m in the hole, I’m head down and focused on value. I’m focused on service.

Alright, so I hope this was really helpful. I hope that you loved taking this walk with me. I hope this was helpful. I love you. I will talk to you all 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.