Ep #15: Circumstance Resistance – Why You Aren’t Overcoming Objections

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

Hello my coach lovies. Welcome to the episode today. I’ve stopped saying the episode numbers. I feel like because iTunes doesn’t let you put them anymore in the episode title, so there’s no point I feel like to call them an episode 12 or 13 or 14 anymore. I don’t know, I should probably check with Pavel.

But welcome to the episode today. That’s what came to my brain. Welcome to the episode. We’re going to talk about circumstance resistance. Are you ready? Let’s do this.

So let’s dive in. We’re going to talk about circumstance resistance and I really think this is the number one reason coaches freeze in overcoming objections and fail to coach their client through their initial no into investigation and clarity.

Now, notice I did not say into a yes. A lot of times people think when I’m teaching this that I’m teaching that you overcoming objections is to get to a yes, but I really think it’s just coaching on objections to investigate and get super clear and make sure the client loves their decision. Because remember, selling is coaching. Not manipulating people to say yes because we believe coaching is the answer.

We just talked about belief bias. Just because we know it is the answer doesn’t mean we ignore our clients and what they want and if you’re paying attention to your client, you’re in their brain, you’re paying attention to their behavior and their body cues and their energy, you know they really want to be coached or they really don’t.

Sometimes the I just don’t have the money, if you hear it with the energy and with the language of the way they’re speaking, it’s just a no. But I just really like to teach all my clients in the beginning to always try to overcome the objection and always try to coach and investigate and get clear because a lot of times when you’re in your own brain because you’re new at this and you’re just starting out or you haven’t done a ton of them or you’re still trying to get clients and you’re still really struggling with not inserting your belief bias and you’re really struggling to sell in a clean way, I just think so many times you decide that they’re a no way before they really are or you believe their stories so easily and we’re going to talk about that today, like why that happens.

And I do think there is a very fine line. It’s thin. On pushing too far and not pushing enough and I think that line is created in your mind by how you’re thinking and you only learn not to cross it by doing. So I just want to say that as well when we’re talking about clean selling and belief bias and circumstance resistance and all of the things that have to do with overcoming objections and leading consults, I want you to just go out and do and be willing to fail at it.

We spend a lot of time in my 2K for 2K evaluating consults so that my clients can learn that line and how to stay right on the other side of it. I want you to just be on the other side looking over. I want you to push and not for you but for them. So good.

So if we go back to that moment – I went off on a little tangent there – the moment where the client tells you the objection, they don’t have any money, they just lost their job, they’re trying to buy a house, their kid is going to private school, their husband doesn’t believe in credit card debt, they’re saving for a mission trip. I threw that one in there to really get y’all. They’re going through a divorce, they’re behind in car payments, they already work 80 hours a week and have no downtime or lunches and they just can’t get an hour a week in with you.

Things are just so crazy with back to school; things are just so crazy while kids are on summer vacation. I love those two. I put them together because I always hear that. It’s so fascinating to see parents really truly hold on to this story. It’s like things are just so crazy with back to school and then you talk to another parent and they’re like, things are just so crazy with kids on summer vacation.

It’s like, not everybody can agree when it’s crazy because it’s a story in our mind. So good. And you’ll believe that, especially if you’re a parent. You’ll be like, what? I know, it’s so crazy. What if they’re about to take a month long trip to Europe and they won’t have reliable service? I’ve actually gotten that objection before. Or they just got a diagnosis and they’re going to be spending a lot of time and money on treatment.

Now, I think that one’s really tricky too. That one’s going to get a lot of you like totally wrapped up in their story like we don’t even know what the diagnosis is. It could be for gout. But also, genuinely, I just want to say it could be for cancer, and what’s so fascinating is everybody gets to decide how they handle things and whether they continue with their life or they don’t know matter their diagnosis.

I’m friends with someone on Facebook who had a stage four breast cancer diagnosis and I’m not friends with her personally. We happen to be Facebook friends and I have seen her post about how much she loves working with her life coach. Yeah, I don’t know where she’s working. I know she owns a business so maybe – and I know this coach is a business coach so maybe she’s coaching on her business and maybe her cancer diagnosis didn’t make her unable to live her life.

This is the point of not believing your client’s objections is for every objection they have, there’s somebody else out there doing it. What about they’re redoing their kitchen? I’ve actually gotten this one and you know, kitchen, house renovation, deck, whatever it is, some of y’all are going to believe this because you also are redoing your house instead of working your business.

Think about it right now. Some of you all are not working your business because you are wrapped up in a house renovation or you’re moving and you’re very wrapped up in moving. Listen, I have a million-dollar business and we moved in one weekend and completely unpacked in one weekend I didn’t skip a beat in my business. That’s how it’s done when you’re not believing the circumstance.

What about they’re finishing up another program with another coach? Y’all, I get this one all the time. So if you identify with their story, any of these examples I just gave or any of the other ones I missed, if you get stumped on what to say next, if you have a sinking feeling of discouragement come up for you that you cannot shake, if you have any reaction at all, you have that reaction or inability to reaction, inability coach them through it because of your beliefs and your limits and your own resistance to the situation they just presented with.

You have what I call circumstance resistance. Resistance to circumstances. So let’s rewind. So circumstances are neutral things in the world. They have no charge until we have an opinion about them. So there is debt for example, the amount of debt very specifically is a circumstance. So let’s just say $35,000. That number is actually neutral until you give it meaning in your brain.

Think about it right now like stop and think. What meaning would you give that? Now, it’s easy to think about somebody else’s debt, that not what I’m asking here. I want you to think about if you had $35,000 of debt all of a sudden. Let’s just say you went out on a limb and invested in some high-end coaching program that cost $35,000. Or your roof caves in and you have to spend $35,000 repairing it. You don’t have the cash, you put it on a credit card.

I want you to think about you having the credit card debt of $35,000. How would you feel if you had that amount of debt? Really put yourself in this situation and think about it. Depending on your reaction to that will depend on your subconscious reaction to a client presenting with that circumstance.

Now, you might be thinking, “But everybody would agree that debt is bad. It really is a circumstance that debt is bad,” but that isn’t true. Just watch Shark Tank. Most of those business owners have debt in their business or in their life and they talk about it really neutrally, and not everybody would agree. That’s something really interesting to think about.

Some would think $35,000 is astronomical. Others would think it’s not that big of a deal because they have 100K in debt or they’ve had 100K in debt. So we don’t have the same opinion, we don’t all have the same emotional reaction to it so it’s a circumstance. So when you have resistance to debt, to the circumstance of debt and your client tells you they’re a cash only family and they don’t have extra money to spend on coaching and they just can’t have debt, you’ll run smack into the inability to help the person in front of you.

And it’s not their resistance you can’t get past. It’s your own. I hear my clients say a lot, “I just couldn’t get them past their money objection,” but if they flipped that sentence, it would completely shift everything. I couldn’t get past their money situation in my brain. That’s actually what happened. It would allow my clients – seriously, if you did this, it would allow you to be totally responsible for everything on the call. It would allow you to look inward on where your work is, on where you are being held back as a coach.

It would seriously change everything to always take the responsibility, which gives you the power to change it. I talk a lot about going into the client’s brain, your client’s mind, especially in this situation. It’s what we talked about in clean selling and belief bias is going to their brain in these types of conversations is to coach and think on and kind of leave your brain out of it.

And so I don’t want you to misunderstand here. Your brain shouldn’t have any part of the conversation ever, but circumstance resistance is why it does. When your brain and emotions get all tied up, it’s because you have been triggered. This is literally all you need to remember is like, if you get triggered on a consult, the moment you get triggered, all you have to know is I’m believing their story, my emotions have gotten tied up, I’m in my brain and I’m agreeing with them because of something that’s going on with me.

And even then, if you could recognize it right then and there in the moment that that’s all that’s happened, then it will remove you from believing the circumstance. It’ll take you to this place of almost neutrality about it like oh, I see, I just had a really strong emotional response because I’m believing their same story. And the moment you realize you’re believing their same story, you see it as a story and you have so much more power when you see it as a story and you kind of disengage from the truth of what you believe about that circumstance, like believing that circumstance is true.

I think this is why I’m so good at overcoming objections. I have very little resistance to most circumstances that get presented on calls. I spent my first three years of coaching kind of like Tony Robbins style, really working on being more powerful than my situation and more powerful than anything that could come my way and definitely more powerful than my brain.

So working on every excuse I had, working on all of my objections, all the things I didn’t think I could do, pushing everything to the max, challenging every story I ever had about the world, about life, about my capability, about just everything. One time I was working in Michigan and I got invited to go to a coaching networking type event with Susan Hyatt.

She was hosting a masquerade ball and at the time, having made basically no money, the opportunity to go meet and hang out with a seven-figure coach felt like the opportunity of a lifetime, and to meet other people that she associated with, I knew other coaches would be there. It felt like such an amazing opportunity up-level my vibe, but it was seven hours away and I had to be in another town the next day and then go back to Michigan the day after that.

And I had my dog, so we’re talking about 15ish hours of driving over a weekend that I had off and then working two weeks back to back and I had my dog. So I had all of these opportunities to be resistant in my mind to the circumstance. But instead I figured it out, and from now on when people tell me it will be so challenging to travel to your retreat or it will be so challenging to go to a networking event 30 minutes down the street, it’s just like, I just don’t believe any of it. It’s all a story.

Or this past year was totally eye-opening for me. I used to have the belief that you should only do one program at a time and I still do to some extent that you should really focus. It depends on what I’m coaching and why I’m coaching it. There are people that like to do a million programs at once, they just want to throw money at the problem and buy everything they can, and so they bought six programs – how you know you’re this person is you have a ton of unused programs in your email box.

Like it’s literally sitting there and you never did anything with it. There’s some people that are like that. So I’ve always kind of coached to those people and been like, just choose one mentor and really focus on that person and just choose one program and give it all you got and go all in. I really do firmly stand behind that.

But this past year I was in a place in my business where I was so close to my next level, to my million-dollar level, to having a million-dollar business, and I was in a program called Million Dollar Mentoring with my coach Brooke Castillo, and I was getting tons of result, I was growing. I wasn’t achieving my goal, but one of the things that we uncovered towards the end of the year is that one of the biggest issue – we didn’t uncover it towards the end of the year.

It was always an issue, but my coach and I created a program called 100K mentoring for her people, and she was doing an entire week where she took 10 people and took them from the beginning stages of setting up a website, crafting their niche, crafting their message, everything like creating a value video, setting up their Facebook ad funnel. It was all this stuff, and it was all the stuff I was missing in my business because just like I teach you all, I did all of my business just through networking, through referral, through really working on my mindset and doing my 2K process.

Like, learning how to sell, learning how to close, and selling has always been my game, so going into the marketing game, having to grow a seven-figure business, that’s something I’d never done. And so I had an opportunity to go and do that while I’m also at the same time in master coach training.

So I’m in Million Dollar Mentoring, I’m in master coach training, which is four, five hours a week on top of running my business and trying to go for a million dollars, and then I get invited to be a part of this 100K mentoring, and I just do it. It was like, 15 hours a day just the week that we were there and I just figured it out and now I go to all their in-person meetings, so when I go in to Dallas to meet with Million Dollar Mentoring, I’m also meeting with 100K mentoring and I was meeting for master coach training.

And so I was doing all this stuff and then I hired a one-on-one coach for something else very specific that I needed help with in how to be a better leader and how to interview, how to hire and lead a team. And that was also something and all of these things, in order for me to have a successful million-dollar business to go to multiple millions of dollars, I had to have all these things at once.

I really did. We had to work on my timing and my scheduling and my productivity. We had to work on getting all my systems and structures and foundation set up and we had to work on me being a leader and knowing how to hire the right people and creating positions, and we needed it all done at once.

And so I just did it. I got all the help I needed. And so because of that, it’s even changed my mindset when people come to me and they’re like, well, but I’m working with this business coach and I really want to finish this but I really need help with selling and overcoming objections so I know I’ve got to work with you, I just want to honor that and as soon as I’m finished with that. That is the objection.

And by the way, if you’ve told me this, I’m not speaking directly to you, I promise. I literally get this probably 10 times a week. People will – either they’ll message me in response to an email I sent out and they’ll tell me why they can’t sign up for the 2K or they’ll message me and tell me just like, hey I just want to let you know I am joining you, I am doing your program at the end of the year when I finish with all the other things I’m doing.

And the thing that I tell them if they ask, if they don’t ask I just say great, join whenever you want. But if they do ask, here’s what I say. Do you need to learn how to sell your coaching right now? Is that something that you actually need to learn right now? Are you trying to make money actively now and are you selling and are you converting? Do you know how to do that? Do you know how to book consults? Are you getting people on the phone?

If you don’t, I’d probably join and get the help I needed now. I don’t ever wait. For me, there is no good reason, there is never a great reason to wait ever. The best time to start is always now. There is never a reason to wait that isn’t a lie in the brain, 100%. There is never a reason to wait that isn’t a lie you’re telling yourself.

So I just don’t ever do it. I’ve never found a great reason other than like, I’ll be split focused and I won’t get everything I want out of what I want, but I’m in charge of that. If the only reason is I want to stay committed and focused, what if I could be committed and focused to every single thing that I needed in order to get my business where it needed to go?

Even this past year, that whole line of thinking was just blown right open for me. Like oh wait, I really can give master coach training my all, I really can show up to that and I really can show up to working with my coach and do the things that she asks me to do and submit my homework and get my stuff in and do the work and I really can create my systems and structures and processes for my business and I really can really work on selling and getting to – now it’s more than a million but at the time it was getting to a million.

I can do all of those things and I can commit to them all and I can show up to them all and I can give them all 100%. 100% is totally available for everything you do. So there’s no good time to wait. Everything is just a story. So when clients come to me and they tell me they can’t start learning how to sell until they finish with their current business coach or their program or whatever they’re in, I’m like, do it now if it’s what you need now and the best transformation you’ll ever get is learning how to show up 100%.

There isn’t a good time to wait. You just need to figure out your mindset and your commitment level and just get it done. Who cares if you’re working with another coach? Who cares? I’m working with two coaches right now and I’m in three of the two coaches programs. Who cares? Get it done.

This is another one. I remember building my business with a negative bank account. I cashed in my savings, I cashed in my retirement. I got two payments behind on a car payment. My credit score went down. I had all those things happen to me that all of you are afraid of, that your clients are afraid of, but I found sufficiency in that experience. Like, true inner peace that couldn’t be taken away from me and I loved my life then.

I still look back on those moments fondly. I didn’t just bear through it to get to the part where I make money and I’m a seven-figure entrepreneur. There is nothing my clients can tell me that is going to make me have resistance for them because of my own story, my own beliefs. I’ve walked the walk. My own allowance of circumstances.

There is no resistance to situations that will cloud my ability to coach in that moment. I haven’t had that happen to me in so long. I just don’t – no matter what people email me, whatever story they give me, I don’t read it all and have any sort of resistance to it. Total allowance. Whatever they tell me I see it as a story, totally fine, and I have the ability to coach through it.

I was talking to a client the other day about this. It’s not about making money either. I want to be super clear. People think it’s easier for me to overcome objections because I’m a business coach. But I didn’t do all that stuff back then for money. Like go through the credit card debt, hire the coaches when I – all of that struggle and strife and all of that going through my own objections and all that stuff, I didn’t do that stuff for money.

I did it for a better life and I know the value of a better life now because of it. In fact, the first coaching I ever invested in was relationship coaching. So it doesn’t matter that your client has a money objection and weight to lose. It is about the value of a better life. There is nothing you can buy, invest in, spend your money on that will yield a better life than the investment of life coaching and emotional management.

And I know this so deeply. Some of you need to work on what you believe about the value of a better life, about what it creates, truly. Because many of you are not willing to go all in and risk it for a better life. But why do we want money so bad? Think about that. Because we think it will give us a better life. But we can have that without the money. That is why we coach.

When you truly understand the value of a better life, of having power within yourself, with being able to feel any emotion and have higher emotional intelligence, more emotional freedom to have better relationships because of that freedom, when you truly understand the value of that, no circumstance will keep you from going all in to get it.

And this, going all in to get it will make you a machine for selling coaching and overcoming objections. When you will risk any circumstance, you will lose your circumstance resistance. You will have so much clarity and emotional freedom to help your client. You won’t be triggered by their story, by their circumstances.

And that really is what they are. They are neutral. Their story about it is just a story. An opinion they have about it. If they didn’t have that opinion about it, if you help them change their opinion about their circumstance, they could have a way better life. I want you to think right now, this will be so eye-opening. What are you waiting on right now to have a better life?

Is it more time? More money? Support from your spouse? Clients? To figure out your niche? A cleaner house? I don’t know. What is it that you think you can’t get moving without? You need more clarity, more confidence? Whatever it is that you think you need for a better life, to take action towards a better life, it’s what your client thinks too.

They think they need more money; they need more time; they need other people to believe in them. And wherever you are now, whatever you’re waiting on to succeed, to even get started, they’re waiting too. Many of you think you just need to get clear on your niche or your target market or your ideal client and that you just need one more question answered before you take action.

But what’s really happening is you have resistance to uncertainty, to not knowing, to taking action without having all the answers first, without having the plan first. You have resistance to trial and error, to not knowing if the results going to be guaranteed. So will your client. It really always goes back. So fascinating, right? Always goes back to the integrity of the work we do as coaches on ourselves.

Being a product of your product. You can’t ask someone to go anywhere, even in their mind that you haven’t gone yourself. And I just want to say, as one last side note because I also see this with a lot of my clients that are really successful already in their life, you think the resistance is serving you. That is why you haven’t investigated it, why you haven’t worked on it as something holding you back is you think that it’s totally serving you.

For example, if you spend only in cash or you save for large purchases or you talk it over always with your spouse or you like to gather all the information before you get started or you’ve always said no to interest rates – what someone’s told me before – or you have a retirement fund or you like to just plan what you do and when you do it, whatever your MO is, it probably has served you for the life you have.

We are talking about what serves you for the life you want and there is no resistance that ever serves you. Even if you decide to keep the beliefs you have, the resistance to it doesn’t serve you. So let me give you an example. A belief that serves me and has served me well is I invest in my business like it is my baby and I believe coaches should always be investing in themselves and their own results and their own brain first and foremost.

That serves me. Makes me amazing at selling, it makes me amazing at getting the coaching I need. But if I were to keep that belief and have resistance to coaches who don’t believe that, so they come to me with their same excuses their clients are giving them about the inability to overcome it, that they don’t have the money and they can’t do it and it’s so hard, then my brain, if I have resistance, gets clouded in the conversation with my own resistance to not risking it.

Some people have the resistance to risking it. I would have the resistance to not risking it, which seems kind of funny to think about. But there are people who crave certainty and people who crave uncertainty. And whatever you crave, you usually resist the opposite. So savers will resist the spenders and spenders will resist the savers. Do you see what I’m saying?

People who are fast and loose with all the things they do will see someone and think they’re super uptight and someone who’s super rigid and has a plan like my fiancé is like that, super resistant to people like me who just fly by the seat of their pants.

So if I take resistance to the opposite of what I believe, if I take that resistance into the conversation, I cloud my own judgment and ability to coach on my own thought, my own ability to think. So allowance is the ultimate coaching tool. The ultimate selling tool, the ultimate dream creator.

I want you to spend the week thinking about this. What resistance do you need to work on letting go of? Make a list. What are all the circumstances that give you resistance? What are all the possibilities in the world, what are all your fears basically of things that could happen, things that are happening. Find all the circumstances that you’re super resistant to.

Make that list, and then make a list of what you need to work on allowing. They’re the same thing but two different things. And you want to focus on the allowance more than the resistance, but I think it’s important to see the resistance to the circumstances and then what circumstances do you need to work on allowing. And asking it two different ways might really open your brain to finding different things.

This is your work, my friend, to keep a clear head and go out and serve your client. Alright, have a beautiful week my friends. I will see you next week.

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program where you’re going to make your first $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.