Ep #23: Bad Program PTSD

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 lovies, welcome to episode 23. I am so pumped. I have the most incredible episode ever planned for you. I’m pretty sure it’s legitimately going to change the coaching industry and also trigger many of you a lot. Are you ready?But before we dive in, I just want to give a shout-out to my client Tanessa. She said on our 2K for 2K page, “#celebrate. Today was a really, really cool day. I signed my fifth client out of six consultations since starting 2K in mid-March. I generated $10,885 since January so far this year and I only made 12K in all of last year. I had five client sessions today. Biggest day yet. This is so cool. It’s working.”

Tanessa, I’m so happy for you. Yes, it is working and that is the best feeling ever. This has been like a trend. I’ve had a ton of my clients at this point in the year they started working with me, whether it was in January or even a little later where they’re already at this point in the year where they were all of last year, especially my 200K mastermind, this is just in my awareness. I know it’s happening with my 2K people too.

But in my 200K mastermind, that has been the story of every person. Like, oh my gosh, I did 46K in the first four months of the year and that was what I did all last year. That same story over and over and over, and it’s so fun to just for me, to just remember and be reminded of what is possible in any given moment. There is capacity for change and growth.

And even for me in my business, I’m about to take two months off of my business and I have already hit – I’ve actually exceeded this year what I did in all of last year. We’re either at a million or we’re very close to a million in revenue, and we didn’t even do that all of last year. So that’s so fun and exciting and just a pure example of what’s possible.

So thank you Tanessa for being an example of what’s possible, and for all of my students, you guys freaking rock – knock my socks off. Rock my socks off, whatever you want to call it. Alright, so let’s dive in. Are y’all ready? We’re going to talk about bad program PTSD, or bad coach PTSD, however you want to think about it.

So this happens when you think you have bought a program that didn’t work or tried some method out that wasn’t for you, or worked with a coach who wasn’t any good. Because I work with coaches and coaches tend to buy a lot of programs, I see this with my clients a lot. They come to me and they tell me that they are so grateful that I’m not like all the other coaches and they love my program and they love that it actually works, and I don’t take any of this on because I know that them liking my program is all about their thoughts.

I actually used to teach this in pitching. I used to tell my trainees like, if a crowd loves you, it’s about their thoughts, and if a crowd hates you, it’s about their thoughts. Don’t take credit for any of it. I also know that them not liking – and this is super important – them not liking the program or the coaching that they got from a previous coach is also their thoughts.

What? And I want to talk about it today because I really think believing a coach or a program is inherently good or not does not serve you at all. And it’s important to work on this as a client, on a client level. Like, you as the client because you will have clients that come to you with this and you will believe them if you haven’t done this work yourself.

So here’s what bad program PTSD is and its affect that it has on you. Bad program PTSD is basically post-traumatic stress disorder from previous attempts to make a change using a coach or a program. Now listen, this isn’t actually a thing. Let me be clear. You do not have a disorder and I’m not actually trying to say that this is a real disorder. I’m just using a play on the words.

But it does I think feel very much when you are in this mindset, like you did have a very specific stress response to spending money and time and not receiving a result. It’s like PTSD from dieting. Again, I’m not actually talking about diagnosed PTSD as a thing here, so if you’ve had PTSD, we’re not actually talking about that. I’m just talking about how you, the client, might have experienced it and how your client will experience it.

It creates for you fear to ever invest again, to ever try again, and a ton of regret for the money you spent and the time you spent and a lot of anger and grief and frustration and a lot of pent up negative emotion from feeling victimized because that’s the worst part about it. It makes you a victim of the coach, the program, or the method that you tried.

You have a result, an outcome you didn’t like, and you think it was attributed to someone or something else. This is the important thing. What’s really happening is you think a circumstance caused your result. Another person caused your results, your feelings, your thinking and your experience when in fact, you created your result and experience with your thinking.

Now, I know that many of you are going to be really mad at me at this point and you’re going to be very triggered and you’re going to want to send me all the emails about it. Send them away. Just know my assistant reads them for me so it won’t get anywhere.

But I do know that many of you are going to want to argue with me on this, but here’s what I want to say. What if for the next few minutes you just laid down your swords, your guns, whatever, and you just allowed yourself to be wrong and you allowed yourself to explore this. Because the alternative is that you got screwed and you have no power over it and it could happen again.

If you allow yourself to just lean into what I’m saying, you might leave feeling more empowered than you ever have before, but you got to hang with me and not shut off the podcast and think I’m a jerk and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Let’s just set that aside for just a little second.

And listen, before we go any further, here’s what I want to tell you. I have been there. I delegated a lot of my power to a coach once before and when things started going wrong in my business, I blamed her and I felt very powerless in my business. And then I let my business kind of spiral out of control and lost a lot of my clients, and I carried around a very painful story for quite a while.

And from that experience – let me be clear that I created in my mind – I created this belief that there were bad coaches out there that I had to save people from. Coaches with bad intentions, coaches who wanted to steal your audience, coaches who are manipulating and gaslighting you. And I had to go out there and save them all. That’s really how I felt.

I saw something that was wrong in the universe and I had to right it. And then my marketing became very fear-based and it made it difficult for me to coach and to be coached and had me constantly trying to please the coaching world and trying to control other people, and I didn’t have a lot of money during that period of time because it was very exhausting trying to please the coaching world, and I gained 30 pounds.

And what set me free was taking responsibility for everything. So this is what happens to you. As a client, when you think your coach or your program or mastermind or method caused you harm, you have belief then that outside things can cause you harm. You lose your own belief in yourself to create all of your results. You question everything. You fear trying again and investing more money.

And if there is a line of either good or bad coaches, which do you fall on? It’s like believing there are bad people or good people. When you believe someone is a bad person, you judge them and then you in fact become the bad person. When you hate someone for hating, you become the person who hates. So if you think there are bad coaches, you in fact become a bad coach.

You believe your client’s story and you don’t coach them into empowerment. You believe something outside of them caused them to get a result other than themselves. You believe your own story. You don’t coach yourself into empowerment and you believe something outside of you caused you to get a result other than yourself. Either way, you become a bad coach.

Our beliefs always create our results. Y’all, this is so important to hear. Remember when I talked about circumstance resistance? Whenever you resist something, you can’t coach on it effectively. So when you believe there are bad coaches, you can’t coach your client on bad coaches. And when you believe diets don’t work and your client comes to you and they tell you all about this method that they tried and you hear their side of the story and you agree with them and it sounds like a horrible plan to you and you feel outraged with them and you agree that in their moment their pain was caused by something outside of them, here is what will happen.

When they bump up against adversity with you, when they aren’t getting results with you, what do you think is going to happen? You’ve taught them how to react. They will blame you. I actually had this client once when I was offering one-on-one coaching, and she came to me with the worst bad coach PTSD. She was terrified to invest. She told me horror stories of her coaching with past coaches.

I was sold. Hook, line, and sinker. I was outraged. I was convinced I was convicted to make her experience of life coaching with me completely different. I told her I was the opposite of all those coaches. I had the thought like, in my brain just wait until she experiences real coaching. I judged her past coaches. I victimized her in my head without even realizing it.

And then after our first session, she emailed me to tell me that I had stressed her out so bad that she was bedridden for an entire day. And she went on to tell me everything I did wrong in the session and what I needed to do better next time and all her concerns now about coaching with me. It hit me like a ton of bricks.

Like, oh, wait a minute. I had missed her thoughts creating her results. She had abdicated all of her results to her coaches and made them all, including me, responsible for her feelings, and then she quit coaching with me with no notice. And it was in that moment I decided to let go of my own story about bad coaches. Obviously that’s the reason I attracted that situation, and I never let that slip by me as a client or as a coach ever again.

It doesn’t serve you or your client to ever believe that your lack of results were caused by your coach. Now, some of y’all are going to say, “But Stacey, there are exceptions to every rule.” And you’re going to have evidence to tell me, but listen to me, this client had horror stories. Like, legitimate ones. I’m not even going to repeat them here. They were that bad, but they were just that. Stories that didn’t serve her.

We think that the way we see the world is truth. It’s not. It’s our opinion filtered through our beliefs. We aren’t looking objectively at the truth. Whatever we believe our brains can find evidence for every single time and we see what we want to see based on what we’re thinking.

Recently, I had a client come to me and apply for my 200K mastermind. She told me she was in another program but mine was working so much better for her. She’s in my 2K for 2K. So she was comparing my 2K and her result she was getting with me to another program she’s in. And she said she was actually seeing results with mine.

Now listen, if you aren’t clean selling, if you aren’t in your coach brain and if you’re thinking about dollars and significance, you’re going to miss this. She was believing that my program was creating her results. Not that her thoughts were creating her results. This is a problem. Because what if I go to coach her on something she doesn’t understand or agree with, or something doesn’t work for her, then my mastermind will become the thing that didn’t work either.

So instead of selling her on my mastermind, I sold her on the program she was already in. I asked her what it would be like to show up to that program like she was its best student. Like the one that they talk about, like the best transformation, the poster child for this program. It blew her mind a little bit. But that is what I decide. I will be the best student of every program I’m in. I will be the most improved. I will work the hardest.

I decide to be the best student and you know what happens? I end up with the best teachers. Here’s my model for that. I’m going to walk you through this. The program I join is actually neutral. So people will take it and not get results, and people will get it and get results. That’s always true.

I guarantee if you think of a program or a coach you have self-inflicted PTSD with, I guarantee you there are clients singing their praise. I actually remember doing this program that I thought was not for me. The clients to me, my thoughts were that they were negative and out of integrity. Never mind that I sat there judging them the whole time being negative, now looking back on it.

So I stopped participating and I didn’t get what I came for. There were people in that program that would have said it was the best thing they ever purchased. That is why the program is always neutral and our experience of it is always from our thoughts. So truly, the program or the coach is neutral.

Not everyone on the planet would agree, period. So I’m in this program and I believe it’s the best program. By the way also, I decide this ahead of time. I decide it no matter what. I feel confident in the program and teacher because I think that it’s the best program. And I’m going to be the best student. I feel 100% certain in the work and the method and I follow it 100%, even when I don’t get it or I don’t agree.

I spend time trying to get it, thinking what it would be like if I did agree. Like literally in my million dollar mentoring, I get coached sometimes and where she’s – my mentor is coaching me from and where I am is so far apart that I have to sit on it for a couple weeks and self-coach myself like crazy and I take walks and I try to wrap my mind around it and I step into it. And I just stay with it until I get it, no matter how long it takes me.

I just assume she’s right and I’m wrong, so I can learn something. And so what happens is I allow new thoughts and ideas into my brain and I learn outside my comfort zone. And then because I always assume it’s me that’s wrong, I always self-correct. I never say it didn’t work, I assume I did it wrong, and I go to work to figure out how to do it right. I take full responsibility always.

I am always using myself as the constant. Therefore, if I’m always self-correcting, I’m always improving. I gain more and more self-awareness for what worked and what didn’t work only from what I can control, which is me. And then I always have a very direct and specific plan for what I will do differently. I’m never losing my power and abdicating it to something else.

I am never a victim for long. I always have authority and power to change my results, and I get massive transformation and massive results. The program and the coach is the best ever because I am the best ever. I had a colleague once in a mastermind that was talking about her business coach and she was saying how she wasn’t showing up and delivering what she promised.

And she told me all the promises that she broke and how she wasn’t showing up, that she had this 24-hour response time rule but she wasn’t ever getting back to her within 24 hours. And later in the conversation, she revealed that she had paused her payments in coaching for a while. And I pointed out to her that she was in fact the one not showing up, not fulfilling her promise.

And I said, you know, from a coach’s perspective, I was a business coach at the time, I said, “I’m going to give all of my time and attention to my students that are showing up. If you pause your payments or you pause your coaching or you constantly reschedule, of course you’re not going to get my full attention either. You aren’t giving it to me.”

It’s really hard to be the best coach to the worst student and it’s easy to get results with the worst coach when you’re the best students. Y’all see what I did there? That’s right. So I once did a mastermind and in hindsight, I’ll tell you a very, very vulnerable story. In hindsight, I should have cancelled it. I truly hated doing it towards the end. I gave a few of my students my power.

I was a victim to them, my clients. And they are salty to this day, so I hear. They’ve never talked to me again. I hear it through the grapevine. But what’s interesting and what I love so much is that throughout this mastermind, they used to always complain to me about one of the participants and how annoying she was and how they had all these negative judgments about her.

And I tried to coach them on it. I really did at the time, but looking back, I should have been way harsher with them. I wasn’t as bitchy of a coach as I am now. I wouldn’t tolerate that shit now at all. Like, zero tolerance. But guess what? The girl they spent the entire mastermind judging, instead of taking action in their business like she was, she was a star student and she’s going to make $100,000 this year.

And those students aren’t making any money at all and still probably blame me and her. So what if it were true? What if there were no bad coaches and no bad programs but only bad students? And what if being a bad student was just your thinking at the time? You can step out of it any time you want.

If you looked for it, I really bet you could find it and it would change everything for you. I love Byron Katie’s work here. She always asks you to do a turnaround so if you have the thought she was a terrible coach, the turnaround is I was a terrible student. Can you find it? Let’s find it together. Let’s do another model.

Let’s do the model of the client who feels victimized. So the coach or the program or the method, remember is neutral. We know this because somewhere somehow someone is praising the program like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. You guys love me but there are people out there who probably think I’m a terrible coach. That’s just the way it is. You can’t please everybody.

Let’s just say that you think the coach isn’t giving you enough attention. You think that the materials are okay and it isn’t what you need to succeed. Let’s just even use this example. I’ve heard this from a client is he promised me something and then he didn’t deliver.

When you think that, you feel made and slighted and resentful and victimized. You avoid showing up to calls. You do the materials but it’s laced with this wasn’t what I was promised. You approach everything, if you even show up at all, with a closed, really guarded mind. He coaches you on something and you argue with him, either in your brain or out loud and you don’t try and understand.

You don’t ask for coaching, you talk about him to the other students, you don’t get any results from the program. You think it is because he went back on his word. That’s why you stopped showing up. Obviously, this is a bad thing, going back on your word. You shouldn’t do that. And you think he doesn’t care about his clients.

So you don’t get results as his client. But what really happens is you don’t care about yourself as the client. You don’t care about you and the results you promised yourself. You go back on your word when signing up for the program and don’t give it your all. You don’t get the results you committed to yourself to get.

Really hear me on that. Listen, if you can find where you created the result through your thinking and feeling and showing up, do you know what that means? You could have all of your power back. You can let go of all of the post-traumatic stress. You can stop trying to please the coaching world like I was. You can forgive yourself and the coach, and you can never ever fear again making a bad investment and not getting what you came for.

That is something I just commit to myself. I am getting what I came for no matter who shows up how. I really want you to think about if you made that commitment to yourself. I show up and I get what I came for no matter what. So if someone promises me something and then doesn’t deliver, I don’t use that as an excuse to harm myself because that’s what you’re doing when you check out and you decide someone was wrong and you’re right and the punishment is that you don’t show up, you’re the only one that lives in that result.

I recently had this happen to me in a completely different scenario. I went shopping for my wedding venue and I fell in love with this venue over just the online photos in Napa and we flew out there. I may have even told this story on the podcast before. But we flew out there and in my thoughts, it was the worst customer service I’d ever experienced.

It felt like this elitist secret party that I didn’t get invited to. They didn’t even try to make me feel special as a potential bride that would be spending a lot of money with them and it was just the worst experience. Like, horrible in my opinion, in my thoughts. And I coached myself like crazy, and this is where I got. This was the end result I got to is if I don’t book my venue with them out of spite, giving me “terrible customer service,” the only person that suffers is me.

I don’t get to have my dream wedding at my dream event. They will go sell it to someone else. I’m the only one that pays. I’m the only one who experiences the bad result that I didn’t want. So it seriously does not ever serve you or your clients to ever think that someone didn’t show up other than you.

That is the real truth, and I really hope you receive that. And listen, one final note I want to leave you with. When you believe there are bad programs and bad coaches, you sell that way. You sell by comparing, by talking about what others are doing wrong and what you’re doing right. You sell based on your client victimhood. Telling them it isn’t their fault, they worked with crappy coaches, or out of touch coaches.

You further their story that it isn’t them. They don’t grow, even if they buy from you, they missed the opportunity for growth and expansion and then we put a little bit of a damper and stain and we further the idea in the world that there are good and bad coaches. I want you to think about this for a second.

How does that ever serve our industry to think there are good and bad coaches? I promise you, I have this come up as a coach, that there are bad coaches. And then I just coach myself on it. I coach myself on my own judgment and being a bad coach in that moment. But here’s what I really – I’m super careful with is I don’t ever sell putting other coaches down.

Have you noticed that? If you’re on my email list, I don’t ever make my work look good by making someone else’s work look bad. And I see that on social media all the time. And I think it’s a bad look for the industry. I think it harms our industry. It continues the story of victimization and it disempowers.

I want to empower my clients to think at a higher level than we have ever thought before as an industry, to coach at a higher level, to sell at a higher level because the better clients we are, the better results we get, the better clients we attract as coaches, the better results they get, the better the reputation of the entire industry, the better the reputation, the more people that hear about life coaching, the more people that buy life coaching, the more people that get help and the cycle continues.

I want to be a part of that. What do you want to be a part of? Alright, have an amazing week. I’ll see you next time.

Hey, if you’re 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 $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.