Ep #237: How to Move Forward When You’re Not on Track

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 237. Today we’re going to talk about how to move forward when you’re not on track. It’s halfway through the year. Some of you all, especially if you’re coaching with me, I’ve heard you’re killing it and you’re on track or you’ve already reached your goal. What? Seriously, you all are amazing. However, if you work with me, there’s another group of you who are not on track. And if you don’t work with me, I know these things could be happening to you as well.

So I just thought at some point you may have a time where you were not on track for your goal and this could be an extraordinarily useful episode. First of all, I have to tell you guys that before we dive in, a crazy story. Do you want to hear a crazy story? And maybe you have a similar story that you could share with me, just DM me on IG or drop it in, every Wednesday we post a little recap of the podcast and you could drop it there as well on the post and we can have a conversation about this craziness. Are you ready?

My house got struck by lightning. How does this even happen? So ironically you all know I have postpartum anxiety, it’s getting better, 13 months later. But I do tend to be a little bit more like all the things are going to hurt my baby. And we are in this horrible storm. We had just gotten back from a trip to Nashville, a family little weekend getaway. This horrible storm comes up. The worst one I think I’ve been in, in a long time. Hail, it was bad. And so my husband and I, it’s so bad that we’re watching the news and having a discussion.

We had just put our baby to bed 30 minutes prior. He’s in an exhausted deep sleep and his room is upstairs. And I’m like, I don’t know, there’s something about it, I’m really feeling is this the time we go wake him up and take him to the basement? We didn’t have even a tornado warning, nothing like that, but it was just a really crazy storm and there was lots of lightning. And I kept asking my husband and thinking can the lightning go through the house?

He’s in the top floor of the house, could he somehow get struck by lightning? My husband is the ultimate diffuser of all of my anxiety. He’s always like, “Oh my God, that would never happen and here are all the reasons why.” I said, “I’m searching online.” I’m on, what is the Quora, Q-U-O-R-A or something? It’s some kind of information’s site. I don’t even know what it is but I’m on there trying to Google answers for if we need to move our kid. And I’m asking my mom. And I’m just feeling very crazy about it. Just the first time I’ve really felt in danger, I guess in that way with lightning.

So I was supposed to take a shower that night before we went to bed. We had been swimming that day and so I had read, don’t get in the shower or the bath during a lightning storm. So I’m like, okay, check, check, check. So my husband goes off into our room which is on the main level. And he’s in our closet and then I am going into our basement to put a toy away of my son’s. And our basement door is right by our front door. And all of a sudden it feels, not just sounds, it feels like an actual bomb, wartime bomb has gone off in my house.

It was the craziest thing ever but the weirdest thing, it didn’t feel like electricity going through me. However, I felt instant pain shoot up my spine and my ears, they weren’t ringing but they hurt, they ached, they were sore from, I don’t know if it was the loud noise or something but I felt pain in my ears and pain all up my back. It was the craziest thing. I was barefoot on a wood floor but I thought this was the craziest thing ever. And then the next morning my husband said he heard our fence. We have a metal fence, he heard it shaking.

And then the next morning we’re looking for where could the lightning have struck and was everything okay? Was the fence messed up or was there a tree split or something? We couldn’t find anything but our garage door stopped working and none of the electricity in our garage worked. So we’re having to literally by hand pull up the garage door to get the cars out. And then two doors down, our neighbor said that her house got hit as well. She had shingles missing on her roof and she had a charred outlet in her house.

So we were just talking about the experience and she had said she had been YouTubing the experience like crazy. And I told her what I had experienced, that it felt like my back hurt and my ears hurt. And she said that so many people online had reported similar things when their house got struck by lightning. So then we have someone come out and fix our garage door. And he verifies that there was one outlet that has something on it, it’s some kind of surge protector where it’s meant to, if the house gets struck by lightning, that it takes the impact so that the rest of the house doesn’t and it was impacted.

So somehow somewhere we got struck by lightning. Craziest thing ever. We are all okay but what, so wild. I just can’t get over it. I’ve been telling everybody about it so I thought I would tell you all too. Wild. Okay, are you guys ready? But anyway, before we dive in, if you have stories about this sort of thing, I’m highly intrigued now and I want to know all of the things. So comment in the post for this podcast on IG @staceyboehman or DM me. I am very curious.

Okay, so let’s talk about how to move forward when you’re not on track. I’ve been coaching on this a lot. And I want to just stress this because there is this kind of, depending on what corners of the internet and who you are listening to and the people in your life, you might have in your ear, the economy is really bad and we’re in a semi recession. And this is why everybody’s sales are down, everybody’s sales are down. I’ve heard that from so many people. I think I’ve mentioned on this podcast before, I’ve been really vigilant about it because if sales are down, I’m the queen, let’s go, I can fix it. I can help.

However, I keep seeing in my 2K community and in my 200K and in my Two Million Dollar Group, some people’s sales are down but not everybody’s and there’s no rhyme or reason for it. So I don’t know if it’s people who really succumb to the mindset, if it’s certain offers, if it’s certain niches. I have not found in any way an inclination that there is any difference in this year than any other year. Maybe it is a little bit harder. I think that’s the only thing I’m experiencing is that no one feels like money is just being thrown around anywhere in the world.

And then if they ask themselves, even we aren’t just throwing money around in the world. Everyone’s just being maybe a little more cautious. But as far as actual are coaches not making money? I’m not seeing that that’s happening at least in my rooms. I try to bring it up on the 200K call and just see, “Hey, are any of you experiencing shame, like it shouldn’t be happening to you so you’re not bringing it up? Let’s just talk about it, do you think the economy’s affecting your sales?”

And then five people raised their hand for coaching and one of them was like, “I have been struggling for the past couple of years in a decline and I don’t know why.” And then the next four were like, “I’m making more money than ever before. Coach me on and what to do with my buckets of money.” Which was so interesting, I’m not making fun of it all, it was just like, oh, okay. So I say that to say this is not and the economy’s down and everyone is not making money and uses this as evidence to support your belief. And that’s not why I want to record this.

I want to record it because it’s midyear. And at this point in the year and especially in my 200K Mastermind because that’s where I’m revenue reporting all of the time. Whereas I feel like in my 2K community people are learning to sign clients for the first time. And we are still seeing so many posts every single day of I just made my 2K back. I just signed another client. I’ve made 10K in my business this month. I have had a bigger year than ever before. I have doubled my income from what I did last year. We are seeing all of those things every day.

I’m going to actually start reading, not really testimonials, but some of those experiences, what people are posting in 2K at the beginning of some of these podcasts. I used to do that and I’m like, “Why did I stop doing that? It was so fun, shouting people out, they loved it.” So I’m going to start doing some more of that. But in 200K, we revenue report every year and these are people who are, they’re not signing clients for the first time. They’re making their first 100K, they’re first 200K.

I just coached someone that has crossed the 500K mark. And I’m just spending a little bit more time with them, the conversation is a little more directed to their three year plans and whether they’re on track, not just for their entire three year plans, but for this year as well. And so again, I feel like it’s a really good mix of people who are on track, who have already hit their goal and then people who are not on track. And so this episode is just for that purpose forever and always.

Alright, so here’s how, what I’ve been asking them, this is how I’ve been coaching them. I’m actually going to take you through the process of what I ask my 200K students.

Alright, number one. This is a really interesting question to ask yourself. If you are not on track for the goal that you have set, and remember we make these up out of the sky, this is the goal, this is what I want to hit this year. Sometimes it’s a little more than last year, sometimes it’s the same and sometimes it’s double or triple. Remember, we created that. So I like to ask them, if they’re not on track for the goal that they have created for themselves, number one, what are you on track for? Figure it out.

And of course we can’t ever predict future money. I’m going to talk about that in a second. But if you just said, “We’re halfway through the year, I’ve made 100K, I’m on track for 200K without growing.” Just like if you just did the same as you’ve already done the first six months, what would you be on track for? What’s that number? Then what was your goal? That’s number two. Again, this is just if I’m coaching them. I’m asking them, “What are you on track for? And what was your goal?” I just want to know where you’re at.

I want to look at if your goal is 200K and you tell me, “I’m not on track.” But you’ve made 60K, I’m like, “Okay, I feel like you could probably still do 200K this year.” If you tell me your goal is 200K but where you’re at now is you’re on track for 60K total and you’re at 30K for the year, this is information that I want to know. So maybe the first question is what is your goal and the second one is what are you actually on track for?

And then this is an interesting question to ask yourself, question number three is, what do you believe you will make by the end of this year, truthfully that you feel like you could really guarantee yourself? Again we can’t predict the future but you could give a really good guesstimate of your own self-belief. So for example, let’s use the example of if your goal is 200K and you’re on track, you’ve made 30K. And when you ask yourself what you believe truthfully you could do by the end of the year, that you know you could guarantee yourself.

Your number might be 60K, which is what you might be on track for. It might be 100K, it might be 70K, whatever the number is. There’s no, just what do you really believe I could guarantee myself this. I’m at 30K now but I also know I took three months off and had a baby. And I also know I spent a lot of time rearranging things. And now I really feel like I’m on fire to go for the next six months and sell, sell, sell. And I really believe even though I’ve made 30K, I will definitely do 100K this year.

Or I believe for sure I could do 60, if I just double what I did, 100% 60’s in the bank. Once I get to 70, I start losing my belief. You just want to know what that number is, is what do you believe you will make truthfully? So what was your goal? What are you actually on track for? And what do you believe that you could truthfully guarantee yourself by the end of the year? What’s the bottom line I know I’m going to make this, this year?

This number is important because the fourth thing that you need to do after you have these three questions answered is you need to find okay-ness with that number. Find sufficiency, make peace. And really what I really want you to, if you’re feeling a little outraged at this advice right now.

The reason I want you to do this is because when you find sufficiency, when you find okay-ness, when you make peace with where you are currently, and if nothing magical changed along the way. Where your year is going to end out, when you think moving forward where your belief is of where your year will end out. Making peace with that will allow you to end resistance. Ending resistance matters. Doesn’t matter if you’re like, “Okay but this is what I believe I’ll do but that’s not acceptable.” This is what sometimes you guys tell me.

I believe I’m only going to do 70 this year but that’s not going to work. I have to make more. It doesn’t matter, whatever the number is that you truly believe that you could guarantee yourself to make this year, you’ve got to have a full stop there for a minute. It doesn’t mean you stay there, but you’ve got to stop there. There’s some work to do there. The work of finding okay-ness, finding sufficiency, allowing that possibility, making peace, ending the resistance because you can’t be moving forward hustling to make up for money.

If that becomes your action, the behavior you do fueled by the belief, it’s not enough, I have to make more money than that, that will never work, these are all the terrible things will happen if I don’t make this money. What you will do with all of that thinking and the way you feel, the scarcity, the insufficiency, the resistance, what your body and your brain will want to do is just get really, really quickly to hustle to make up for that money to feel better. So that you can believe in your ultimate goal, again to feel better.

So it’s going to just try to push you to get clients really, really fast. And what will happen is you will just recreate the same results you have now. This is what I told my students recently is your predominant, most honest, most truthful thought, most aware thought about your money will always end up in your result. Your thought line will always end up in your result line if you follow the model. You don’t have to, but our thoughts create our results. There are all the self-development world in some ways saying that message.

So if your predominant thought is this isn’t enough, this is not okay, I can’t make this work, what you will end up doing is not making it work. I’m not on track will create more of not being on track every time you repeat that to yourself. I think it’s okay and it’s good. I think it’s actually very smart to acknowledge when you are not on track because you might need to do things differently. You need to evaluate if you’re not on track. I’m not a proponent of just keep believing, do nothing different.

No, we might want to do something different. Also sometimes PS, you guys are like, “I just have to keep believing. I believed 100%.” I don’t think that’s a useful thought to think if you’re not on track. What I like to think is something didn’t line up there in my thinking and what was it? I never allow myself to just believe my belief was fully there and I didn’t hit my result. I just don’t allow myself to believe that.

Only one of two things can be happening, I think, if you’re like, “I fully believed and I didn’t hit my result.” There could be three things. You didn’t believe long enough. There’s still some areas of disbelief or misalignment in thinking. Or you didn’t land the actions the way you needed to. More actions need to be taken. More effort needs to be produced. I always say this, Grant Cardone said this in one of his books that we fail most of the time. I’m paraphrasing, but we fail most of the time based on underestimating the amount of effort something requires to achieve it.

So we’re either underestimating the amount of effort that it takes to achieve it or we didn’t take the right actions. For example we could be posting on Facebook every single day but what we needed to do was a webinar or we needed to run a workshop or in person, but we need to be posting more on social media. I don’t know. The actions aren’t aligning or the thoughts aren’t aligning. That’s what it has to be. So I just never, as a little side note to this, I never allow myself ever to be like, “Well, I just believe that it didn’t work or I took all the actions and it didn’t work.”

No, we’ve got to problem solve here. If it didn’t work, our equation, our original theory was wrong. Now, we’ve got to figure out what part of the theory was wrong. If your results are not on track then your theory was not on track. So we’ve got to figure out what’s not on track and how to get on track. So I like to be aware that I’m not on track so that I know to problem solve. But I don’t want to keep repeating that to myself in a resistant way so that I create more of it.

I like to acknowledge it, make peace with it and be like, “Okay, I’m taking a different way. I’m on a different track than I expected.” I want you to imagine. I feel like I’m a 90s kid, a kind of stereotypical 90s kid like Nirvana and Nintendo and oh my God, my sister and I, our favorite movie of all time ever, Empire Records. Have you all seen it? If not, you’ve got to watch it. I can quote that movie, beginning to end. I shouldn’t be so proud of that but people will not watch this movie with me at this point because I do that. I can’t help myself.

It’s Rex Manning day, gosh, you’ve got to watch Empire Records. Okay, so I feel like I’m a pretty stereotypical 90s kids. So I want you to imagine you’re a 90s kid and you were into video games like Mario Brothers. I want you to imagine that when you want to conquer a different level, we used to play the original one and then Mario 3. Those were our two favorites, the original and then Mario 3.  But you know how you go through and sometimes you die on the level and you have to start over multiple times?

Sometimes it’s like that level you could be on it for months trying to figure out how to get to the next level. But typically as you do this and if you don’t play video games this is not going to make sense at all. But typically as you do this you get more skilled. So the things that were killing you on the level before, stop killing you and you stay alive a little bit longer in that level. But you still don’t make it to the end with that box that you get to just smash and it turns into coins or something or I don’t know, maybe you jump on top of it. It’s been a while since I’ve played it.

Maybe you jump on top and it just tells you, congratulations you’ve passed the round or whatever. It may take you 12 tries to get to that end box. Some of the levels are that hard and you die a lot. And the obstacles in that level might make you feel like it’s impossible to beat that level but you’ve got to keep trying. And I remember I’d get so frustrated and mad that I would start dying earlier because I was trying to speed through the parts that I was good at and rush.

And so what I want you to think about, if this analogy works for you is you’ve got to keep yourself from doing that. Sometimes I get into a goal and I realize that it’s going to take me double what I thought or more. And so I want to give you maybe the example of 2K when I first started selling 2K for 2K. So I did I think six launches that year. So if you imagine six attempts at achieving the next level and I died every single time, meaning I failed every single time and I wasn’t even close. I wasn’t even remotely on track.

But every time I got up and I went again one of the things I worked really hard at was number one, to make the entire process, knowing what I was on track for and what my actual goal was and what I believed I would actually achieve. And then finding sufficiency there so that the next launch I could go back and give it my all and learn a little bit more. And so each launch I was getting better and better.

And I remember specifically one launch I did because I just coached someone on this where she did a webinar and it was so amazing, and she loved it, she thought it was the best thing ever and then one person bought. And I responded back to her and I said, “Listen, do you remember when I sold mattresses?” Some of you have been following me long enough to know that I did a webinar once, I had just bought a new mattress. So I used that analogy and I sold mattresses on the webinar. And I went through my five step sales process that I teach in 2K.

And everyone said it was the best webinar they had ever been on. I’ve never gotten feedback greater than that webinar that I did. I sold nothing on the webinar. I went off the webinar and laid on my bed and cried for an hour. I was so disappointed. And then my mastermind watched my webinar and told me what I did wrong. They’re like, “You talked too much. You got too far into the how. You didn’t spend enough time on your offer, it looked very sloppy like you just kind of threw it out at the end.”

You could tell you had spent so much time on the content and none of the time preparing people for the offer which I know was a rookie mistake because I used to sell mops in Walmart. And half of the show was laying out the sales portion and you had to do it completely different than you had to do the selling portion. So I remember from that webinar I did three additional ones and failed on those two. But each time I got a little bit better. The second time I think the technology failed, I was so pissed.

People got locked out, including my coach who had slated time in her schedule to watch my next one. I was so embarrassed. And then the next one, something else went wrong and the next one, something, but I was learning a little bit every single time. So I was progressing and I’ve talked about this, that you have to create a track record for progress and success. If you’re not hitting your monetary goals, you have to find the non-monetary things.

But you have to be able to each time, say, “Okay, I’m going all in with this and I still may not hit my goal but I’ve got to go all in with it.” And the only way I can do that and be really present and learn and theorize and then take action again and evaluate. The only way I can do that do of all that is if I’ve ended resistance and I’m not trying to hurry myself up to believe that I’m going to make 200K by the end of the year or to believe I’m going to make a million by the end of the year, or to get back on track.

Speeding up and resisting not being on track is only going to create more of that because you can’t be present enough to attack every single aspect of going out and making offers and whatever your method is to get clients, to bring leads in and sell to them. You’re not going to be able to stay focused and go all in and present and do it. It’s the first, last and only time you ever get an opportunity to talk to the people you’re speaking to and make an offer to them if you’re resisting where you are.

So I just like to tell myself, I’m taking a different way. I’m on a different track than I expected. Something wasn’t aligned with the original result that I wanted to create. And regardless of whether or not I actually end the year, I get back on track regardless, those things will need to be fixed. So for example now, our goal, we started the year out with a $30 million goal and I brought someone in just to spend three months evaluating everything happening in our business. I spent a lot of time going through my three year plan to 30 million because I didn’t commit to that goal until the beginning of the year.

And six months in we found all of the things that would need to be reconfigured and reimagined to grow bigger. And then on top of that, I love doing this exercise for myself. It’s part of my three year plan that you learn in 200K is I like to figure out the top three things in my business, the top three problems or the top three things that cause me any sort of unhappiness or discourse. And then if I doubled those things with my revenue, would I want to take them with me? Do I feel prepared to take them with me? And sometimes the answer is no.

And I found some things in my business that regardless, if I stayed at 10 million or I went to 30 million, no matter what, for me to feel happier and be working with the type of people I want to be working with. There are some things that I have to change. And then there are some overall structure changes I want to be making in my business, maybe some program changes I want to make in my business. And I want to do those things before growing bigger. And until I got into this goal I don’t think I would have even seen those things.

It wasn’t until I was really questioning everything that we’re doing in our business along with all of the problem solving and reconfiguring we’re doing. The setting of the goal is what led me to some new decisions in my business, whether we ever get to the goal or not, which we will get there. But all of our operations are undergoing major tech upgrades. Something I did not remotely see coming at the beginning of this year. We’re automating things like crazy that we didn’t even know could be automated to reduce what my CTO calls forced errors, which is just human errors.

I’ve been creating content like crazy behind the scenes, so much content, especially for my Two Million Dollar Group. And again, I’m just rethinking my entire business model and plan and how I want to feel in my business and what I want it to look like moving forward. I really genuinely, when I did the podcast, The $30 Million Reinvention, it’s just now in this moment that I’m realizing how much I’m reinventing right now. And it’s taking longer than I thought, longer than I estimated.

It’s a lot more work than I thought. I definitely underestimated the amount of effort that will require to go beyond an eight figure business. And I estimate if I’m looking at what do I think I can truthfully guarantee myself, I estimate we’ll end up doing about what we did last year, maybe even less. And maybe to make you all feel better, I will have worked four times harder this year than last year. I’m doing way different things this year than last year but sometimes that happens. So it’s so important to make peace with your expectations not being met.

And I think this is so important to hear is unfortunately or fortunately, I think ultimately for the human race this is a good thing. But I agree with you, in the moment if you feel like it sucks, ask, and you’re just like this is miserable, I agree with you. So I will say, unfortunately we aren’t entitled to just an easy failure free road. I know that sometimes we think we should be, that it should be easier. These are the statements we say to ourselves over and over and over, that it should be easier.

But you do have to decide if you’re not on track how you want to move forward. I think that could be the next step, how do I want to move forward if I’m not on track? And I think it’s very important to ask yourself this is how hard are you willing to work to get there and why? Because there are levels that you get in your business where you really have to be sold on your reasoning for working as hard as you’re going to work. Sometimes money will get you all there. Sometimes your client success will get you all there.

But there will be a time where you have both, money and your client success and then you’re going to have other reasons. And for me I painted a very clear picture of what it will look like to be at 30 million and what my business will look and feel like and what it will be creating and who it will be employing and the impact it will be having. I’m very clear on the picture I’m working to and who I will become as an entrepreneur. I think it’s going to really sharpen me as an entrepreneur.

And I’m looking forward to the new person I’m going to become. So you have to just decide, how am I going to move forward? I’m going to evaluate. And what’s my theory of what was misaligned? And what’s my plan of action? What worked, what didn’t work? What am I going to do differently? What’s my plan of action to move forward? And I need to be honest about how hard I am willing to work to get there.

Listen, here’s what I want to tell you. I know sometimes I get misunderstood in the world. And people think that I’m all about just hustle, hustle, make more money, make more money. And I’m really not. I think it could be just as worthy to be honest with yourself and say, “You know what, this year I’ve got other things going on and I’m not willing to tackle it.” If I’m honest with myself, I don’t have the energy to tackle this next level of growth. I’d rather have a year where I just for many reasons I don’t grow in my revenue.

This is a kind of side note but I just talked to my mastermind about this too is I feel like my corner of the coaching world, it’s kind of gotten just, I don’t even want to say it’s normalized because I don’t know how normal it is. But there’s so many people out there doubling their income every single year and having this massive growth that we think that that’s what should be happening in order for things to be going right. And in my mastermind we’re always having conversations about how opposite that is of all of the entire business world unless you’re in a hyper growth type company.

Most businesses who have been around for years and years and years and years and years, they’re not having growth years every year. They’re not doubling and tripling their revenue every single year. That’s literally considered hyper growth in all of the other industries. And sometimes they have down years. Sometimes they have multiple down years in a row. In fact you see some businesses that are about to go out of business. And then they have a giant comeback.

So I think being honest with yourself about adjusting, first of all, adjusting just the idea that every year should just be this massive growth. But also being very aware and having that intimate conversation with yourself to know, okay, this could potentially, if I’ve underestimated what it’s going to take to achieve this, am I up for the actual estimation of the work that it might take to get here? For me I had to have this conversation with myself. So my CTO was a fractional vice president for three months going in, kind of just seeing.

He’s led so many tech companies and hyper growth. And so he was just going and kind of seeing what’s going on. And he can see failures or things that aren’t set up for hyper growth, that we can’t see because we’ve never done it and he has so many times. So when he came back with the report card, I had to spend some time. We have to really burn our entire backend infrastructure down and rebuild, which is already not my favorite thing. It takes me out of getting to sell and deliver which are my two favorite things. I want to just do some webinars or do some challenge weeks with you guys.

And then coach you in my programs, that’s what I’d rather do or create podcasts like this. I don’t want to have the meetings. I don’t want to create new things and build everything basically from scratch. So I had to really have a conversation with that because it’s also, I have a baby here, well, I have a toddler now. But I want to also have another baby. So I had to be really honest with myself about the amount of work that it now looks like it will require and am I up for that? And I am, to be clear, the answer is I am. But if I wasn’t, that would be an okay answer too.

I just think you have to know. You have to be like, “Okay, this year is not going to be as easy as I expected for me, for whatever reason.” It doesn’t matter. And now that I know that, am I willing to buckle down and keep going or do I want to just end the year with what I’m going to be on track for and is that okay? And do I love my reasons for that? But you really have to know, I think the answer to that.

I recently coached a 200Ker and I told her she was in a launch and she was not on track. Once we started investigating, I told her she’s got to get her clients talking to her. She had 36 people that clicked on her application but didn’t fill it out. And I said, “You’ve got to figure out why that is.” And I asked her, “How many things were you willing to try to get that answer?” Especially if you just didn’t anticipate having to try anything. She might have anticipated and I’m not saying she did.

But she might have anticipated that she was just going to sell it out with her exact laid out perfect plan that she created for her launch. And all the work that she did ahead of time before her launch. Sometimes especially if you’re in the launching game, you write all your sales emails, you do all your social media posts. You create the webinar. You deliver it on, you’re like, “I’m done. I did the work.” But what if that wasn’t enough, are you willing to do an equal amount of work during the launch to bring the clients in?

This is such an important question to ask yourself. Are you willing to get on a group call with people and start talking to them and find out what the stop is for them? Are you willing to do individual calls with everyone, open up consult times? We brainstormed so many ways to get her people talking. And it got me thinking after the call that sometimes I think our fails, no matter how painful they are, are meant to happen to snap us out of expectancy and entitlement and remind us of hard work and to realign our desire.

Adn mostly, this is what I told my 200K room the next week is I really think what happens in failure and mis-expectations and not being on track is we re-engage our critical thinking. It sucks so bad and it’s the best thing ever for us. Who you become as an entrepreneur, and your success comes directly from how you exercised your critical thinking and your failure. What? Your critical thinking and your critical failures, the crucial ones, the really bad ones.

That critical thinking sharpens your brain and sharpens you as a coach and an entrepreneur and makes you who you’ll become, all those solutions you come up with in that critical thinking, in that creative thinking. It re-engages our creative thinking. I think can’t always be engaged in our successes. You learn the most about yourself and entrepreneurship in your failures, not your successes. Your successes are simply a result of what you’ve learned from all those failures, stacking up.

So one of our biggest, I guess you could say, ‘fails’, or mis-expectations operationally over the last I would say 18 months has been our hiring, our expenses and in general how we have operated within our systems and processes. And I am actually going to bring my Chief Technology Officer on to do a podcast to talk about some of these things, so stay tuned. But we’re going back and we’re realigning. We’re getting super lean and we’re automating a lot of things that were all human led activities and just automating those.

And reorganizing our company, I’m like, “What are the most important positions we need and why?” It’s been really frustrating and I’ve also been kind of geeking out a little bit because it’s making me rethink everything. I saw so many ways that I took my $1 million business model and forced it to $10 million. And I’m really truly, I keep telling myself I’m not on track but also I am literally learning in real time what it requires to have a $10 million infrastructure that’s ready to go to 20, 30, 40, 50. I’m learning a whole new area, a whole new corner of business operations that I’m getting a PhD in it.

And I had no knowledge of it beforehand while I have a baby. It sort of feels like when I edited my entire house before my baby came. I knew how much stuff was coming into our house based on my registry. And I used to get kind of panicked because we live in a home that everything has a place. And if it’s not in its place or it doesn’t have a place, it’s very stressful for me because I just see it as disorganization and my mind likes to be clutter free. So I knew all this stuff was coming in our house. And so I spent, and I think they call this, what is the word, when you’re nesting?

But I went through the house and I got rid of what I believed was an equal or greater amount of stuff than what was going to be coming in. And I reorganized everything and it took a long time. I spent at least three months doing that. But now our house doesn’t feel like it’s overflowing even with a baby. Because I mean let’s be real, there are some baby stuff laying around but it’s not like a baby exploded in our home.

And I think with my company we’re going to end up with the same result in the end. We’re going to be able to bring in say, 15, 20, 30 million, 40 million dollars of sales and it won’t feel like we’re just bursting at the seams and everything’s falling apart. So I think that this is just important to tell you and for you to think about is you might have, I don’t know if this analogy will work but you might have created a giant registry of sales that you are hoping to bring in.

And you might get in there and find out that you need an edit first or that it’s going to be harder to get the things that you want, they’re sold out and you’ve got to hunt them down or maybe they’re on back order and they’re going to take longer. Whatever analogy works for you, but I just want to keep painting this picture for you. Sometimes we get into it and we just don’t realize the amount of work that it requires.

The other thing that I think is really important and I told my 200K students, because we talked about this over several calls. And so I’m trying to kind of summarize several calls for you in one podcast here. But you want to decide who you’re going to be in your recovery. I think this is so important. How do you want to feel about yourself? How do you want to feel about your business? What will make you proud a year from now, two years from now? What will make you proud now?

Who do I want to be when I’m not on track? Because if you have a business for life, there will be many years where you will not be on track for your goal and it could be for many different reasons. So you have to decide who am I going to be when I’m not on track? I think this could be an interesting sports analogy is to think about like the golfers. I watch a ton of golf with my husband just because he loves it, not because I do.

And I think it’s interesting, the golfers that can go from being in 15th place, in 9th place. Three days you’re basically golfing the same 18 holes or whatever, three days straight. And the golfers that can leave day one and day two behind, that can make peace with it and come back on day two or day three and move up the leader board and come back and win the entire thing. I’m like, “Oh, golf’s a mental game, so is entrepreneurship.” The people who can make peace with being in 15th place, then figure out why they got in 15th place.

Then make a plan for moving forward from a place of peace and allowance, not resistance. Look at the amount of work it would require, how good they would have to be to still achieve what they want to achieve in the timeframe they set. And to stay focused to go out and do that. That is to me coaching mastery, entrepreneurship mastery. And I think we should all be working towards that. It’s so brilliant. And then can you, let’s say you do all of this work that I’ve suggested and you give it your all. You’re in 15th, you move up the board and you get to spot two or three and you still lose.

You do all of this work and you still don’t hit your goal, are you willing to keep going for it? We study this extensively into 200K, with the 25K in 30 Day Challenge. The day is 25K in 30 days but are you willing to keep going on day 42? What people want to do is they want to just burn that whole 30 days down and just forget about it and move on. But could you at day 30 be like, “Okay, I thought it was going to take 30 days but it looks like really what it will take is 60 days so I’m going to keep going in my challenge.”

And I’ve had people who do this who are willing to keep going. They’re like, “I achieved it on day 42, I achieved it on day 60, I achieved it on day 55.” And then they go again and then they keep achieving it faster and faster and faster until what will happen, especially if they’re in multiple rounds with us is they’ll be like, “Oh my God, I just did it in 30 days. Oh my God, I just did it in a week.” Someone just did it in a week. I was like, “What?” That is so fun to me.

So I think about the golfers, one of them that we like as a golfer, I don’t know how I feel about him as a human. He broke up with his fiancée over text, but as a golfer we love Roy Mcilroy. And he has had so many years of not winning anything, any majors. And he keeps showing up and he keeps getting in first place and then choke and end in second or third but he keeps trying. He keeps going back out there. And most of his career is going to be the fails, not the wins and he’s still one of the greatest golfers ever. He’ll still make the top x amount of golfers in the world.

So can you do that? Can you fight for the number one slot the entire time from a focused place? And if you lose, can you get back up and go again just as hard and just as committed for the next tournament? Maybe this is why I love watching golf is I just feel like I’m watching mindset in action. It’s so interesting, spend time with the hubby at the same time. Good questions to ask yourself. So who do you want to be in the recovery? Who do you want to be when you’re not on track?

So finally I want to leave you with a thought that I’ve thought about a lot lately. And this has come up over the years but I really started seeing it happen now. I feel like it could be a whole another episode but I’m going to add it here in a short version of it, which is this thought. We are not entitled to any money ever, including the money we have made in the past. So I’ve noticed a sneaky thought again with my clients coming up even more lately and even with myself.

We think once we have made a certain amount, let’s say 150,000 in a year, maybe you made 150K last year. You think 150K is guaranteed this year plus some, many of you might be. Now, some of you on the other camp, some of you think it’s a fluke and you’re scared to death that you won’t make 150K again on the other end. It’s all or nothing thinking. I have guaranteed it plus some or I may not make it and I’m scared to death because it was a fluke and I shouldn’t have made it the first time.

And so I want to speak to the people because I have an episode on money being a fluke, but I want to talk to the people who think it’s guaranteed. It isn’t. And it’s so important that you snap yourself out of that entitlement. There are so many businesses that make less the following year than they did the previous for many reasons. If you watch Shark Tank, it happens all the time.

People are talking about it, “Well, we had this explosive year and then the next year we only did half.” And they always have a really good reason for it. It doesn’t even mean something’s gone wrong. But they have many reasons for why that happens. And I’m just seeing this happen to more and more coaches for various reasons. Again, I could do a whole podcast about it. But I just thought it should be mentioned in this episode.

Essentially here’s what I think happens. We feel entitled to last year’s revenue as a given with the thought of it being ‘a given’, you do less work. Because you feel entitled you also recover slower from the fails. Because you did less work you expected more from less work and then you didn’t get it and then you failed. Because you expected it so strongly you spend more time in the woe is me, the pity and the victim mentality. And you do less to troubleshoot because you feel like it should have just happened easier than it did.

You already did less work because you expected it and then you definitely don’t want to do more work to troubleshoot. And then what happens is you think, oh, well, it’s fine. I’ll just expect to make it up or to make up for it in the future at some point. You just expect, well, it’ll all even out, iron out in the end, second half of the year, it’ll fall into place. And you don’t deeply course correct immediately. So then you make less money the next time. And then your brain has a really big freakout.

And then you start, “What’s the point, I’m doing more and more work and I’m making less and less money.” And then you start to spiral out past the point of being in control about it. Now, I will also say for those of you who think money is a fluke, this is really the same pattern. You just insert doubt instead of entitlement but you end up in the exact same place. You feel doubtful about last year’s revenue and don’t think it should have happened and it was a fluke.

And then because of that you’re like, the work that you do, do is laced in doubt and then you have more fails because of that. And then you spiral in those fails because you’re like, “See, told you, it was a fluke.” And then you spend more time in that drama about it being a fluke and then you expect in the future instead of making up for it, you expect more flukes. You expect it to be less. And then you don’t just course correct and be like, “It wasn’t a fluke but I’ve got to figure out what happened.”

And so each time you make less and less money then you spiral out past the point of being in control about it. Listen, I’m not laughing at you. This has happened to me. I am laughing a little bit just at our brains. Oh, brains. So doubt and entitlement I want you to know are normal. I think they’re just how the brain processes having made money or the desire to make money but neither are valuable emotions and neither are emotions that lead you to creating value.

There is a humbleness required, a humbleness to get back to hard work without expectation and figure it the eff out. No matter how many tries and how long it takes and how easy it used to be and how much money you made last year, it doesn’t matter. This year is a new year, it’s a different year. I’m telling you, I have so many students that are coming into 200K, they’re finding me because they had really huge businesses and then each year got less and less and less. And I want to figure that out for them so bad and coach them on that because I know it’s solvable.

And of course, I want them to make a ton of money, I want them to keep making lots and lots of money. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that. But I want you to know because I’ve been thinking so much about it, it is a thing. You’re not entitled to the money you made even in the past six months, even in the past three months, last week, you’re not entitled to it. It doesn’t always mean you’re going to have to work just as hard for it either. But when it gets easy, you just want to make sure entitlement doesn’t slip in.

For me, when it gets easy, that’s when I really want to put on the gas and work even harder instead of pulling back. That’s also what happens sometimes, you experience a lot of success so you just let off the gas. Sometimes you guys even put on the brake. You don’t feel ready for it so mentally you guys just brake and you pause. And then you’re like, “Oh, crap, I forgot to make money for six months or I didn’t make money for six months, I hid because I was scared of the success.”

Whatever reason, you’re not entitled to the money you’ve made. You always have to say, “Today’s the day essentially I’m going to go out and make money.” Or this year is a new year and I’ve got to work. For the money I made last year I’ve got to work for that same amount this year. And if there is an economic climate that makes everybody a little more, less throwing extra money around, they don’t have as much extra money to throw around. It makes them question what are their most important priorities.

And if that’s happening, if that’s in the water of the world, you might have to work harder and that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with it. There will also be times where it’s super, super easy. I’ve been talking to a lot of my colleagues and friends about the pandemic and how everybody was online and everybody was jumping to have coaches. So there might have been even this boom that happened because of that. We just had the whole world watching us online and now they’ve gone back to work.

And it doesn’t mean that that success isn’t available. It just means that you might have artificially had a lot more ease making money then in that time period, where everybody was online because no one was working and everyone was at home. And now they’re at work so now we have to figure out how do we get their attention when they’re at work. Their desire is still the same, our desire is still the same, we’ve just got to figure it out. So just find that humbleness, if you are not on track.

No matter if you’re making less than you were this year or you’ve made a lot less this year than the year before or you’re just really far off track from what you thought you would. Got to get out of the doubt and out of the entitlement and into just the humble work and make the decision, what you’re willing to do to get on track and how long you’re willing to take.

This is the last thing I’ll say. For me, I was just telling another client recently, this is why I love the three year plan and why I love teaching it so much. And you can go back and listen to episodes about the three year plan. I’ve reinvented it a lot. I just filmed a course for it for 200K with all my new and up to date ideas. But one of the things I love about it is if I’m not even remotely on track for something, I just give myself extra time. I never want to use a goal against myself.

So if it starts feeling like this heightened, like anything we’ve talked about in this episode, this heightened sense of failure that has you freaking out and spinning. I would much rather make peace with where I’m actually going to be. And sometimes that means, I just coached another client in 200K on she isn’t making money for the next three months because of various reasons. And she was trying to decide, should I just throw out some offers, should I wait until I know when there is money coming in, should I wait?

And we went through it and I was like, “Okay, well, tell me the worst case scenario if you don’t make money for three months? If you end up off track, what’s the worst case scenario?” And as we investigated through it and I was like, “What would you do here? What would you do here?” She actually didn’t need to make money for three months. But then she was like, “But even if I did, I would take out a loan or I would do whatever.”

Finding the answer to what you would do in the worst case scenario if you end up on track and you’re telling yourself, I can’t, there’s no possibility, I just can’t afford it. You’ve got to go to figure out because it may happen regardless. Sometimes we like to say something can’t happen and we can’t have it, can’t go through this, I can’t have this happen, it’s not possible. But we don’t have control over it, sometimes it’s going to happen no matter what.

And so then just make your plan and figure out what you’re going to do about it so that you know the plan and it stops overwhelming you. You have the plan in place so you can go back to focusing on just not needing the plan. But you’ve got to be willing to do that work. You’ve got to let go of anything that keeps you from being resistant to where you are now because it literally sucks your power to move forward. And that’s what I’m interested in is how can I give you your power back to move forward regardless of where you end.

And so again, for myself, what gives me back my power always is just giving myself a little more time. I just love to do that. I love the luxury of that. I thought it was going to take a year. I’m going to give myself 18 months or 18 to 24 months instead. I’ll be so extraordinarily happy if we get to 20 or 30 million in the next 18 to 24 months.

Having feels like the most important caveat to me, is having not taken $1 million infrastructure and operations and pushed them to the point of 20 or 30, but actually having created a structure that allows us to get to those next levels with ease and maintain, taking care of our clients. And having a great delivery and customer service experience. And I believe that the scaling definition should always be your clients getting better faster results.

So we’re using all of the infrastructure that we’re creating, we’re guiding all of that through the filter of our north star metric being all of our clients making their money back in the first 30 days. And we’re like, “How do we make that happen?” That’s a really cool result. And can we build an entire operational system and an entire employee infrastructure with that in place? And so if I can do that and accomplish that in the next 18 to 24 months and have it working cohesively in this way that allows us to bring in that many more clients and that many more sales.

I’m going to be so freaking proud of myself, but of course I would give myself extra time to create that extraordinary result. So maybe you need to think about your result you’re creating as an extraordinary result and would you give yourself more time to do it right and to figure it out. And to critically think and creatively think and become someone different because of that process of not being on track.

Okay, I hope this episode was helpful, was like three or four different 200K calls mixed together. But I thought that this could be a really powerful thing to talk about mid-year. Alright, have an amazing week and I will talk to you next week. Bye bye.

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.