Ep #222: Feeling Pressure

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

Hey coaches, welcome to episode 222, 2 2 2. Today we’re going to talk about pressure but before we do I want to give you a little business update. What’s happening so far with me and my business in 2023. So I have an upcoming episode in the next few months planned where I’m going to share with you my $30 million business model and plan our strategy, what we have done to prepare for a $30 million business. And our new north star metric and what that means and how we’re using it to guide our decisions.

But today I just wanted to give you two exciting things that are happening, two brand new things that are happening. Number one, we brought on a fractional VP vice president for a three month contract in January. And he came in from the tech industry very much on a three month contract basis of just coming in and helping us triage and finding what he calls opportunities where we can improve our systems and processes with technology and where we can use data analytics to really support our growth.

He actually came from his last company where he helped them scale from 50 to 250 million in two and a half years using data analytics to support growth. And he has been working with us on improving customer acquisition and then delivery of our products and services. And I’ve been very, very committed to learning from him. I knew we had very limited time with him, three months is not a long time. So I really dedicated the first quarter of the year to doing this triage, going in and looking at what worked, what’s working, what’s not working and how we want to move forward.

And not just towards 30 million but towards a 100 million. And I really gave him over the last couple of months unlimited access to me, whatever he felt like he needed from me I made myself available and really made the team available to support him. And about halfway through I asked him what it would take if he could ever imagine himself being a yes, a firm yes to staying with our company and helping our company over the next few years grow to 30 million and a 100 million.

And so if it was ever possible, if it could be a yes, what would it take for him to be a yes. And really not just creating the plan but executing it through the finish line with us. And I told him to make me an offer. And after 60 days he was so compelled by our 200K live event and in his words, the power and magnitude of seeing all the coaches that we help and then all of the people that they are helping and the impact of that in the world. That he wanted to do his part in contributing to that mission and to bettering humanity.

So I have to say, you my 200K students inspired him to help me to help you to help all the people. That is how powerful the 200K room is. What? That really blew me away, how I’m just so proud. If you were at that 200K event in Cabo, how all of you showed up to create an outsider to be so compelled to join us in all of our missions. That’s not an easy feat. There are a lot of rooms that aren’t packing that kind of punch. And so I just want to acknowledge the 200K room.

So he made me an offer that he never anticipated making, never anticipated in his wildest dreams that he would be staying. And I said yes to that offer. So welcome to the team and the coaching industry, Patrick. He’s not staying on as our Vice President. He’s coming in as our Chief Technology Officer which is what he wants to do is bring technology to industries. And really help leverage technology to create the best customer experience, the best sales experience and to scale. And he’s very brilliant and very skilled.

I feel like I have won the lottery but one of the things that we’re talking about is how we are becoming a tech company and thinking like a tech company in a way that will highly support our clients in getting better results, higher return on their investments and having a better overall experience. So there’s going to be more of that that I’ll talk about in the coming months on the podcast and ways that we’re doing that and the way that we’re thinking about our setup and how we run things.

I’m going to talk more about that but just for now I have to tell you how just unbelievably excited I am and really truly in a way that Patrick didn’t see coming and staying with us, I never saw us being a tech company and thinking about tech and leveraging tech to support our clients, never in my wildest dreams. So we’re both here in unexpected territory and it’s so fun. So that’s the first thing.

And number two, I am taking the next two weeks to create my next big thing. If you have listened to my Creating Big Things. I have two episodes on Creating Big Things. I am on my third creating big thing project. I’ve done lots of little ones along the way but this is the next really big one that’s created a lot of thoughts to work through, to overcome in order to get to this place but I am creating and recording the Two Million Dollar Group process.

I have already begun a huge part of that journey. I believe really strongly in certain circumstances delivering something like a mastermind over and over allowing the process to emerge from the delivery. And getting in there and I call it getting your hands dirty but doing a lot of coaching, a lot of support. And seeing what emerges as consistent themes for students. So if you deliver it enough times you’re going to be able to say, “This is historically what all of these clients as a group, as a theme, struggle with. These are their common problems.” Here’s the commonality and the things in there before and in there after.

And then here is the process, the things that I keep teaching, the tools I keep using over and over and over. The mindset that I keep sharing over and over. And that becomes an obvious or semi obvious process. And it does require a lot of mining your own brain and getting it out. It’s always in our brain but getting it out onto paper in a way that is simple and doable and in the context of teaching, that is the big thing. That’s the hard thing and allowing yourself to just deliver for so long until it becomes that obvious and not kind of pushing it and putting pressure on it.

I feel really strongly about that and I feel like I’m here with the Two Million Dollar Group. I’ve already been delivering this for several years now and documenting really everything we’ve been coaching on during our meetings and our weekly calls. And then recently I filmed some teaser content that made it even more clear exactly what the process is to helping students get to the million dollar level. And I really feel just ready to get that out of me.

And so I’ve booked the most extraordinary house to film in for five days straight and get the process or as much out of the process, out of me as possible. I had wanted to film in my own house and we did that for the teasers. But between having a baby and two dogs and all the people in my house every day I just decided to get away and have total quiet and focus to get this process and my philosophy out of my head and into the hands of coaches ready to make their first two million or 10 million dollars. So I’m really excited about that.

I am going to bring not only my own experience of having sold almost $35 million of coaching, my experience of running a company this size and being an entrepreneur. And also all of my experience coaching students at this level and at multiple different points at this level, at 300K, at 500K, at a million, at two million, at five million. What challenges those students have experienced. And so I feel the combination of all those things is really going to make this program industry disrupting.

I also think that one of my edges I’ve realized recently, my VP and my COO recently told me, “Stacey, I don’t think you’re a coaching business.” Patrick said, “I watched you on this 200K stage and that wasn’t coaching. You were teaching them how to be entrepreneurs. You were guiding them on how to think like a business owner. And I really thought about that and I’m like, “You know what, you’re right.” From the 2K process to the 200K process to now the Two Million Dollar Group process, I really feel like what my edge is, is that I think like the customer.

I think in the client and the buyer’s perspective. I think like a salesperson. I think like a business owner. And also I just happen to have mastery level skill at coaching my brain and other people’s brains. And so when you combine all of that along with my constraint for the last four or five years being business only. I only think about growing my business, growing other people’s businesses, how to interpret that process through a coaching lens.

All of that I think is what makes, there’s so many million dollar masterminds in the industry but so many of them are either full email environments and they’re heavily focused on strategy. And they’re less focused on mindset which we all know is what creates our results. So having that combination of these are the business strategies that I’ve seen work with my clients over and over and over combined with here is the mindset to look out for at this level.

Here is the mindset to create the one, two, these are the thoughts that create the model, the results of multimillion dollar businesses especially that can operate with the CEO working less and less. I work three days a week and take at least six weeks of vacation every single year. And so that combination I really think is going to be industry disrupting. That’s the only word I keep coming back to when it comes to the Two Million Dollar Group.

So I’m really, really, really excited not only for those of you who are already at that level where you are ready to go into that space but also for those of you who are coming. There is going to be a really simple doable path laid out for you. So my goal is that in me starting to talk more and more about the Two Million Dollar Group process, that what I do is I help you know that millions of dollars is inevitable for you.

And not just inevitable but is not going to create for you a business you don’t love and a business that is complicated and difficult and stressful and really different than what you want to be doing. And I think I just have my finger on the pulse of whatever that saying is. I have it there to really understand that journey for you. And so when you are ready just know millions of dollars is inevitable for you, it is possible, it is probable, it is inevitable. And I’m going to make that happen by creating a very simple doable process for you to follow.

Okay, so that’s what’s happening with me and my business. I’m really excited. So I want to talk today about pressure because many of you have been having a really rough relationship with this feeling, with this emotion. That’s how I want you to think about it in this context. There is an emotion or a sensation that happens in your body of feeling pressure and then there’s also something we do typically when we’re feeling that which is we add this layer of pressuring ourself as what we do, as the action we take when we’re feeling pressure is just pressure ourselves or put a lot of pressure onto something.

And so I want to talk about this. And what I see with a lot of my students is the belief that this pressure indicates that something is being done wrong or is wrong, that the first state of action, the first thing you should do when you’re feeling this is lift the pressure in order to move forward. I think there’s a thought error that happens where we think that the amount of pressure is what needs to be managed. So the amount of circumstances that create pressure like goals for example.

So we think the amount of pressure is what needs to be managed rather than our thoughts and emotions around it. So this is the key that I want all of you to consider is, what if you don’t need to manage the things that create pressure as much as your thoughts and your emotions when it comes up for you? Because I want to offer that pressure is part of the entrepreneurial experience. It’s part of owning a business, being a CEO and the boss, helping other people get results.

If you take that on, that’s going to be a lot of pressure. Setting goals, working to achieve something that you’ve never achieved. When you decide to be bigger and to achieve bigger than you ever have before, I want to argue that pressure is a natural experience in taking that on. And what if it wasn’t something to be solved? What if nothing had gone wrong? What if instead of spending time and energy trying to relieve or fix pressure the first thing you did is created a better relationship with it, what if you allowed it?

Because there will be times when you need to make money right now, whether it’s to invest in your business, pay your bills, pay your employees. These are just an example but there will be reasons that you need to make money right now. And then there will be fear that you won’t, that you’ll fail or you’re going to need it in a timeframe that you’ve never done it in before. And what if that was just the job? So what if when this happens you thought to yourself, I’ve signed up for this. This is the job. This is the experience that I am signing up on. This is part of that experience.

What we like to think is we’ve signed up for the experience of making money only. We have signed up for the experience of coaching our clients only. We have signed up for the experience where they always say yes and then they get results. That’s the way we think. We’re like, “I signed up for the good part of this experience.”

But the other part of the experience, this is the way I think about it is as an entrepreneur I have signed up too often as part of this job, have to come up with solutions financially for my clients to get results for my business on the spot in a timeframe I never have before with no proof that it will work. That’s what being an entrepreneur is. I’ve signed up for the experience of pressure. What would be different if that were true? I think about pressure sometimes in a way that other people will use the statement, nothing has gone wrong.

Sometimes coming back to the idea that we have everything we need, nothing has gone wrong, it’s working. Sometimes those thoughts are highly useful. We refer to that in the coaching industry often as stepping back into truth. I’ve found the truth that nothing has gone wrong. I’ve found the truth that I have everything I need. I’ve stepped back into the truth that it’s always working. And I think what can be equally useful is to realize that stepping back in the truth can also be there is always pressure.

Sometimes we’re not privy to it in our mind and sometimes we are acutely aware of it but it’s always there. The possibility for it is always alive. And if this were true, we could stop making it wrong. We can just decide it’s a circumstance that comes with owning a business. My husband and I often talk about the tradeoff of working for someone else versus ourselves. When I was serving tables or selling mops in Walmart I left the store, I left work in my mind and didn’t pick up anything, any thinking about it until the next day.

I didn’t have to be responsible for anything other than my work while I was there. And at the end of the day I tried my best, was always good enough to say to the company. But we also all know the downside to working for someone else and doing something else that we don’t love. Here in the coaching industry, as an entrepreneur we get to do what we love and work for ourselves but we also think about all those things that we never had to think about, managing other people possibly or hitting goals and it meaning a lot to ourselves.

So I just think it’s fighting against reality to think that there will not be pressure and if there is, something has gone wrong and needs to be fixed. And it’s entrepreneurial maturity to have a good relationship with it, what if that were true? That I mature up as an entrepreneur as I improve my relationship and my capacity to deal with pressure. And a good relationship starts with two things. Number one, willingness to feel it without trying to make it go away.

I always say, you’re driving, you’re in the car and it gets to be the passenger. It’s not driving but it just gets to come along for the ride much like fear. We feel the fear, we do in anyways. So it’s in the passenger seat. It’s allowed to be there, it’s okay. I don’t need to kick it out of the car in order to feel like I’m not going to wreck. I don’t need to kick it out of the car to have a good experience. I don’t need to kick it out of the car to be okay. That’s number one is just willingness to feel it without needing to make it go away. Having the capacity to experience it and still be okay.

And then number two is our self-concept around ourselves dealing with it, changes. When we have a self-concept that allows ourselves to believe we are good at dealing with pressure our relationship with it improves. So if you spend lots of time trying to make it go away you will lose out on time to get the things done that need to be done in order to relieve it circumstantially.

If you need to come up with $60,000 in 48 hours for example, this happened to me once. And you allow pressure and with the allowance of it and not spending any energy trying to make it go away, not getting any coaching to make it go away, just being with it and then with it in your body allowing it, you start thinking of solving the problem and directing your energy towards solving the problem. So you think of an irresistible offer, you get out there and you make it to the right people and you get that money in the bank.

It’s a very different experience than if you freak out at the pressure and spin out and hide and have to get lots of coaching to make it go away. I want to just almost interrupt my own train of thought here and say, what I’m not saying is never get coaching on things. But it’s very different if you’re feeling pressure and you go to your call and you say, “I’m allowing the feeling of pressure and here is why, here’s the circumstance of the result that I need to create. Let’s think of how we create this. Let’s just make the plan and work on executing it.”

Instead of going to the call and saying, “I’m feeling a lot of pressure, let’s coach me out of it.” So if you freak out at the pressure and you spin out and you hide and you throw things at the wall and then you give up or burn out, that’s not going to move the needle overall in your business ever. And it’s not what I would consider to be entrepreneurial maturity. This isn’t a judgment either. I’m just saying, feeling mature in your business, feeling mature around money, feeling mature around business decisions and goals and operating.

Just in general operating in your business you will feel so much calmer and have so much effect on your business when you’re willing to mature yourself up by being willing to feel the pressure. If you believe you are not capable or willing to feel pressure and it’s wrong or you’re weak because you’re experiencing it or you’re weak because you don’t know how to operate within it, that you will burn out and you can’t handle it and it’s bad for you. If you believe that, you’re going to have a different set of results than if you believe you are excellent under pressure.

I always wonder what the chefs on those competition shows think of themselves. We watch, my husband and I love the show, Beat Bobby Flay and it’s so funny. He always cheers for Bobby and wants Bobby to win. He’s like, “Bobby’s the best, he needs to prove it every time. I like to cheer on winners.” And I’m the opposite, I’m like, “I’m here for the underdog, I hope he loses.” And we watch the show cheering against each other. So Beat Bobby Flay or Top Chef or the Great British Bake Off.

They have to accomplish something completely unplanned in a very small window of time to beat out other participants or are great like Bobby Flay. That’s a lot of pressure. And then there is just what they believe about themselves and their abilities that bring it home. And it’s always so fascinating. We just watch a lot of Beat Bobby Flay, to watch them come in and know they’re competing against a great.

And to know about the pressure and to not cave to it and to be like, “This is what I’m making”, instantly came up with an idea and it’s going to be better than Bobby’s and here’s why.” Even engages in some trash talk and have fun under pressure, to have fun under pressure. What? That to me is the testament to someone who has a great relationship with pressure. And here are the things that I think about myself that you’re more than welcome to borrow or work towards.

I believe I work great under pressure, I thrive under it. It was my favorite part of pitching. When I sold so much product that I was demoing, whatever it was, mops, slicers, whatever, that I was ripping boxes out from underneath my stage, backup stock. And at the end of the show I had massive empty boxes of stock, no produce left. People standing waiting for me to clean up and get to my next show because it’s Black Friday and there are thousands of people in the store and it’s the biggest money making opportunity of the day.

And I’ve got 10 minutes to get my stage cleaned up, get to the produce department, buy new produce, get it prepped, run to the back, throw out the boxes, grab new stock, replenish it and literally run sweating to the phone to make another announcement and get another show started. I never felt more alive in those moments. That’s my relationship with it. My husband always says, this is another one, another story of my self-concept around pressure.

But my husband always says that I’m a savage because there are so many times that my dog when we’re walking has snatched a chicken bone from the grass when construction workers, we live in a construction neighborhood and they’ll just eat wings on their lunch break, throw the chicken bones in the grass. It’s an actual thing. We’ve had neighborhood meetings about it. All of our dogs have almost swallowed chicken bones. And I don’t know if you know but swallowing it can kill them.

And our dog is 90 pounds. Her brother has also been here and this has happened to him. And he’s 127 pounds, ridiculously big dogs. This has happened so many times and Neil always says, “Within seconds I’m ripping their mouths open like a crocodile and sticking my hand down there. And I pull it out before he’s even realized what’s happened.” And whenever that happens with him and she’s got something in her mouth that she’s not supposed to he’s always trying to coax her mouth open. And it’s like a steel trap. You just can’t get it open.

But I just get in there and rip it open like a croc. And I always laugh and I say, “That’s a mom for you.” But I also have this belief that my mind gets very focused, clear and direct when there is an emergency. I like to think of myself as a survivalist. I will always be that person that is immediately just focusing on what are the next steps from A to B to survive or to help someone else survive.

We also once had our house alarm go off in the middle of the night which typically would only happen if someone broke in. And I just remember us both jumping up out of bed, I mean it’s so alarming. And I really shocked myself with how quickly and purposely I moved into action for organizing those most important steps. And it was really, really scary but it really made me think about how on point I was with handling it. And PS it ended up being one of our sensors, fell off of a window in our basement and they had to come and replace all of our sensors because that’s not supposed to happen.

But we had Louisville PD in our house at 3:00am. This was a year or two ago but it was so crazy. My self-concept though is I don’t mentally collapse under pressure. So what if you believed you got sharper with pressure? What if you believed that pressure helps you sort what’s most urgent and important, that it cuts the bullshit, it lasers in on the most efficient way from point A to point B? Now, do we want to operate like this all the time? No. There is a certain amount of fight or flight that comes with it.

We’re not at war so we don’t want to be at war with the world all the time but can we, are we capable? Yes. So think about this, is it a really good idea to allow it to mold us and shape us into not being someone who can only grow in its absence. I think that’s my biggest argument here when I think about people who might think that this is a reckless argument. It’s a good idea to become the type of entrepreneur who can grow with pressure and doesn’t need the absence of it to keep going.

What if we let it shape us, this is the term I like to use, but shape us into someone who is clutch, who thinks laser under pressure, who always delivers no matter what the emotional environment. So just take a second to consider that. What if I became the person who delivers no matter what the emotional environment? This is something to consider just before you say, “I have to step back, I’m feeling really pressured. Or I have to let go of my goal, I’m feeling too pressured.”

And to consider instead, I’m feeling pressured, who do I want to be in this moment? I’m feeling pressured to succeed and it’s okay. If you allow pressure, what happens by the way is it goes away. Have you heard the saying, ‘what you resist persists’? Pressure my friends is not something to resist or shy away from. It will persist. Welcome it to the party, offer it a drink, get to know it, get to know you around it and see if you can create a solid working relationship with it.

It starts with your willingness to feel it and your self-concept about yourself in it. Now, some of you might hear this and you might misinterpret this message. And I want to give you a few ways you might interpret it. You might be thinking that I am telling you to be perfect and that I’m selling perfectionism here. And you might feel the need to tell me perfectionism is really unhealthy. You might feel the need to tell me that pressure itself is unhealthy. And you might think I’m teaching you to pressure yourself to make money all the time.

And these are not things I’m saying. Perfectionism is not the same as feeling pressure. Maybe you create pressure trying to be perfect and you should for sure look at why you are doing that and what you hope the outcome will be if you manage to achieve perfection. This is not what I’m saying. I am saying that even if you do, do that, if you just happen to be pressuring yourself, trying to be perfect, all of those things, pressuring yourself for big goals that you think could be unhealthy.

I just want to say it doesn’t have to be unhealthy. It’s just an emotion you’re feeling and possibly not a useful strategy but you’re going to encounter yourself in un-useful strategies to try to win at entrepreneurship all of the time coming from un-useful thoughts. I live by a belief that no emotions are unhealthy, they just are. They’re vibrations in our body. And the more successful you want to be the more width and depth we have to create in our ability to feel all emotions.

In fact, what I would argue is what is actually unhealthy is our unwillingness to feel normal human emotions and are fighting against them, resisting them. It takes a lot of energy and of course, I want to say there are exceptions to everything. And I’m not covering all the ground here on this episode but I just want to offer that no matter what the type of pressure is, no matter what it is, what if you did experiment with starting here, with the idea that you are capable of feeling pressure, exploring the idea of it just being a circumstance of something that happens in the world.

And what do you want your relationship to be with this emotion that happens or the circumstance that happens? And the final note that I will make is that allowing pressure does not create overworking and burning out, it does the opposite. It pulls you back from those things because you only do those things to try to relieve pressure that you’re resisting. It may however if you allow pressure, it may however pull you into focus and constraint and commitment to the hard work needed to get something done if you allow it.

So I hope this is super helpful for those of you that are feeling pressure currently right now in your business. There are two simple steps. Willingness to allow it to go away and changing your self-concept about your ability to deal with it, to allow it, to have it as part of your entrepreneurial experience. Alright, have an amazing week my friends, I will talk to 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.