Bonus: Employee Vs Entrepreneur Mindset with 100K Earner Kathryn Morrison

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. On today’s special bonus podcast, I am interviewing my client, Kathryn Morrison. She teaches employees how to become entrepreneurs. And this conversation is going to blow your mind wide open, especially if you’re working full-time.

We talk about the employee mindset that has been instilled in us since school and how that affects everything from our failure resilience, our productivity, the way we invest, the way we set and achieve goals, and the relationship we have with our business and ourselves as our own bosses.

And she shares the biggest areas her clients have to shift to become successful entrepreneurs and how to do that. She also shares her own journey of being a six-figure tech employee to growing a six-figure business, while also having two babies and a third one on the way.

She shares a major shift she had from our 200K mastermind that skyrocketed her business and her journey with my 25K in 30 days challenge. And I ask her at the end to share one last piece of wisdom that is so good. You want to make sure you don’t miss it, so make sure to listen to the very end for that bomb she drops. It’s so good. Your mind will be blown.

Again, this episode is going to change everything for you if you currently have a full-time job and you want to transition into running a coaching business full-time. You’re going to want to take notes, listen to it over and over, so let’s get started with Ms. Kathryn Morrison.

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Stacey: Alright coaches, we have Kathryn Morrison here today. You have heard her on Making Money with Kids at Home podcast and all of her brilliance. Kathryn teaches – you just tell them. I was going to say it and I was going to do it so well, and then I was like, wait. This is what I’m struggling with is the word to call people who work.

Kathryn: Employees?

Stacey: Yeah, that’s the word.

Kathryn: I love that it’s so outside of your realm. You’re like, I don’t even know. Your brain just deleted the word.

Stacey: My brain literally deleted the word. I was like, what do you call people who have jobs? For everyone listening who has a job, that is the most ridiculous thing and I want to apologize. I was like, what is it? I could see it in my brain.

So let me just start over. Kathryn coaches employees who want to be CEOs, who want to be self-employed because that is a completely different mindset than someone who works for themselves. We’re taught in society and so I’m so curious to hear all of your thoughts about this, but then also we’re going to talk about your journey as a CEO and how much money you’ve made and how you did it and all of the things.

So they’re going to get all the lessons and they’re going to get from you and what you coach, and then they’re also going to get the lessons of your own growth. So this is going to be such a fun episode. So why don’t you tell us instead of me saying it, what is the difference of going from being an employee – that’s the word that we’ve decided – from being an employee to being an entrepreneur?

Kathryn: Yeah. Well first, I want to start with a story of how I really – because I had decided I had been in two rounds of the mastermind and the first mastermind I was like, oh, I want to coach employees that are moving into entrepreneurship. But I hadn’t cracked the code on my philosophy around it, and it wasn’t until Atlanta, this last time, and it was the day that you taught us designing our own intellectual property, creating our own philosophy.

And my brain was telling me, it’s like, “I don’t know, you just kind of do what Stacey does but you do it with all kinds of employees.” And I was avoiding the assignment that night. And I actually literally got into the bed and then I was like, “Fuck this.” Oh I’m sorry, can I curse?

Stacey: Yes, you can.

Kathryn: But I was like, in the bed, I’m like, I’m not going to pay $25,000 and not make my brain answer this question. So I had gone to Trader Joe’s and I’d gotten cookies that night and I made myself get out of the bed and I was eating the cookies. I’m not going to lie, I was eating the cookies. But my brain cracked…

Stacey: But not on the couch.

Kathryn: Not on the couch. Not on the couch.

Stacey: For anyone that’s on my email list, I’m always – and I got this from Simone.

Kathryn: Yes, it was totally Simone in Atlanta.

Stacey: When she was thinking she’s a bad CEO, she was eating cookies on the couch and now I’m like, that is the best ever. So now I talk about coaches eating cookies on the couch and I’m getting to work all of the time. But eating cookies in bed is different.

Kathryn: Yes. So I was trying to avoid it by eating the cookies but I was like, no, I do have a unique philosophy. And it was like, my brain cracked open and the Da Vinci Code poured out. And I was like, wait a second, we go through a school system that’s not designed to teach us how to create for ourselves. We go through a school system that literally was set up in the industrial revolution to prepare people to be factory workers. It doesn’t…

Stacey: Yeah. I just got chills.

Kathryn: Yeah, it’s not there to teach us to love learning. It’s there to teach us to be obedient and to follow directions. And so of course, if you’re trying to create money for yourself, yeah, that’s not going to be easy. You’ve never learned that in a school system. You’ve never learned that as an employee. And there’s just so many other things. We learn to be externally motivated by deadlines, we don’t learn to be motivated by our own internal deadlines for ourselves.

Stacey: We also are taught to value other people’s opinions over our own and honor our word to other people over our own. We’re taught that there are bosses, there are people in charge and they’re more important and their rules, their ideas, their things that they expect from you, that’s more important than what you expect from you.

Kathryn: Yes, absolutely.

Stacey: So good. Okay, sorry. Keep going.

Kathryn: It’s like, everything around that. Another thing I was thinking about, even investing in coaching, for me to come into the mastermind the two times. I started thinking about it and I was just like, how much are we taught in society, like how many people have taken out crazy amounts of loans to go to college that just teaches you to be an employee generally? Like not even doing work you like.

But people will blindly shell out like, $100,000 for a university degree, for a piece of paper. Because that’s the thing, right? People are taught to value the piece of paper. Not for what it does for their brain, but I’m worthy because I have the certification. Literally every single angle, as I started to look at why, what is the problem, what’s going on, it’s like, it all came back to me to like, we’ve just been conditioned in a society that teaches us to think a certain way and we haven’t exercised the muscle of being our own CEO.

Like, I’m a mom of three. It’s the biggest transition I’ve ever made to go from being an employee to an entrepreneur. And the thing for me was like, I was a six-figure employee. I did business strategy and development. I thought I was kind of badass. And then I came into entrepreneurship and I was like, I have no idea. What is this?

Stacey: I love that. That’s so good. I think that that’s one of the biggest things and you’re in 2K too, so you probably see this as well that a lot of my students who are employees really struggle with the identity of their full-time job over their business. It’s like, it becomes their side hustle. But it’s really their ultimate dream. You can’t treat your business like a side hustle when it’s your ultimate dream.

So it’s like, the first thing – and you tell me what your clients experience, but I think that the first thing when you have a full-time employee who’s wanting to become an entrepreneur and make money on their own, when you look at the way they spend their time, the first thing that goes when they get overwhelmed is their business.

Kathryn: Yes, 100%.

Stacey: They’re so busy honoring all the stuff at work. And thinking of themselves as that person. We get people all the time in 2K that are like, “I’m out networking and I find myself introducing myself as what I do now instead of I’m a life coach.”

Kathryn: Yeah, totally. It’s interesting too I think that – it depends on the person, but oftentimes, when people come to me, they don’t want to be in their nine to five. And so they’re also spending their day in resistance to being there. And so the first thing we need to work on is we need to get you to the point – and they’re like, “No, I don’t want to stop resisting it. I hate it.”

I’m like, “That’s the problem.” For you to be able to come home and have the energy to work on your business, we have to simultaneously reduce the resistance to the nine to five and increase the desire. And that’s the thing, being willing to be like, I desire this so much and I’m going to value that over being scared about what my coworkers see when I post something on Instagram.

Stacey: Yes. Oh my god, that is everything. When I was pitching, I had this happen. Oh gosh, the resistance, especially when you find something you love, this is what happens. The desire for the thing you love also all of a sudden there’s this cognitive dissonance where you’re like, it magnifies the resistance to being where you are as you grow the desire to be somewhere else.

That was my experience where it was like, the more I fell in love with coaching, the more I hated being at work. And one of the things that my coach at the time helped me with is I had to constantly be telling myself why I was there, why I was showing up, and why it was my choice. So every day I would walk into Walmart and be like, “This is my choice. I choose to be here.”

And I think my choice was so hard and I see a lot of people be unwilling to make it, but for me, the choice to work until I made 100K was I never want to not be able to invest in myself. I don’t want to use this money to live off of. I want to invest all of it up until 100K, which people are like, how did you get so successful and make millions in the first couple of years?

It’s the amount of money I’ve invested in myself. My thought was literally, “I have to make more money so I can put it back into my business. I’ve got to sign a client so I can join this mastermind. I’ve got to sign a client so I can hire this coach. I’ve got to sign a client so I can do the certification.”

Whatever it was that was like, I just want to make money to pour it back into my business. I want to invest as much as I can early on so I’m going to keep working to pay my bills. And I see so many people struggle with this. They struggle with the resistance at work. They struggle with the desire to work after work because the resistance runs them down so much.

And then they want to leave early but they’re not thinking about toughing it out. And that is sometimes what you have to do. But like, they don’t think about staying there and creating that business so that they have a healthy baby, a healthy business. What are your thoughts about that?

Kathryn: Yeah. I mean, absolutely to all of that. And I think the other thing that in terms of looking at it like, reminding yourself why you’re in the nine to five, I find that a lot of the things, the patterns that they have had that have made them unhappy as an employee, I’m like, those are coming with you when you start a business.

Stacey: That’s so good, yeah.

Kathryn: Your inability – they’re like, “Well, no one ever gives me raises,” whatever. Yeah, if you’re waiting, if you’re not negotiating for yourself, good luck getting on a consult call and asking someone to give you money. If you think the job is the problem, it’s not.

And so it’s so interesting because so many of my clients end up getting promotions, they end up getting raises, they end up getting put on these committees to solve big things at their work because they realize that the person that they have to become to be totally self-motivated and show up that way is the person that makes them more successful in their job.

And then they can be neutral about it. They’re like, “Alright, I’m just going to be a badass at work and I’ll be neutral and I’m going to ramp up my income.” And it really is fun when you see that it is just a training ground. Your nine to five is just your training ground for the next chapter.

Stacey: That is so good. I also had that experience. When I started coaching myself really hard and taking my business really seriously, I got a promotion at work to run our entire Puerto Rico department. To go in and revamp it, unlimited resources to help me do it.

And then I got a promotion to be a national support specialist and implement coaching into the coaching field, which actually ended up getting taken away when our CEO got fired, which is what actually made me decide to go all in with my business. I was like, screw it. If you’re not going to give me this promotion and I can’t coach in the field, I’m going to go coach on my own. I’m taking this seriously, I’m getting this business off the ground, and I did, which is so fun.

That was the year, the year that I grew my coaching business is also the year I made $60,000, which was more than I’d ever made pitching. I was normally making $40,000 or $50,000. $60,000, but I also only worked every other week.

So I went part-time, made more money than I’d ever made, got a bigger promotion than I’d ever gotten promoted, and created a 100K business in the same year because of the person I became and the standard that I grew within myself and the resourcefulness that I created in myself through getting coached and growing my business.

Kathryn: Yes, so good. Yeah, I mean, I really do think it is the best way to do it because oftentimes people, they’re like, I just need to leave the job, I’ve met people, and then they’re totally freaking out. They don’t have the skill set to do it. And then because they don’t have money coming in, they’re scared to invest in themselves.

Stacey: Yeah. And people think, “Oh, if I just leave my job, I’ll have so much more time to grow my business.” Tell me why that is the biggest lie you could tell yourself.

Kathryn: It is just funny because so often, we just fill all the time we have, but it comes down to there’s resistance to something. I end up coaching with people and they’re like, “I think I just need a time management system.” I’m like, let’s look at what your thoughts are because we can talk about – it’ll take 10 minutes for you to put things on your calendar. It’s the whole Monday hour one thing.

It’s like, all the drama around your ability to honor that and your schedule. I actually have a client who just got furloughed and she started with me about a month ago and it’s like, she had been saying it was the nine to five, and then she was like, “Oh wait, it’s not.”

She’s just been very nervous about putting herself out there and I’m just like, it’s go time, the rubber is going to hit the road. And it’s so fun because she’s at a point now where she’s ready to go all in, but she’s identifying like, oh wait, it’s not the calendar, it’s my thoughts and my resistance to the things that I have to do because I’m scared I’m going to fail.

Stacey: Yeah, it’s the same thing like, whatever problems you have as an employee, you’re taking that with you as an entrepreneur, so you might as well clean it up at your job while you’re making money by investing in yourself and then clean that up so you don’t take it into your business because it’s coming with you for sure.

And I think when you don’t manage your time well and you get more time, it exacerbates the problem. You’re like, wait a minute, I don’t understand, I have all this time now, I’m being even less productive. There was a time where I was working full-time and I had about 12 clients. So think about working 40 hours and then also having an additional 10 to 12 clients on top of that, so 10 to 12 hours.

Plus, I was having to travel to work. So I’m driving six hours to Michigan, I have to pack up my car, my dog, take – I was doing coaching calls on the road, I was doing coaching calls on my lunch break, coaching calls – I remember we used to have to do this company call before every work session. We had this chain called Meijer. It was a grocery store.

And it was like, brand new and we were killing it, making so much money. So we had to do this team conference and make sure we’re like – I don’t even know. It was pointless. This is what I mean by you have to choose your business first.

I just told them I will not be on those calls. I have a business as well as this job and I have calls in the morning. It’s the only way I can make them both work. And I got to the point where I was so into my business that I was like, “Listen, my business is my priority, so you just have to decide, do you want me in the sales field selling and not on that conference call, or do you want to lose the sales I make because I can’t be on that conference call?”

They just stopped requiring me to be on it. They didn’t want to lose their best salesperson. I started realizing how much leverage I had. But that time where I was like, grinding. I mean, working, selling more than I’ve ever sold, traveling all over the country, working with my 12 clients, marketing my business in between. That time, I’ve never been more productive in my entire life. Never been more productive. So I think working full-time and building your business is the best container simulation ever to figure out your productivity.

Kathryn: We kind of talked about productivity and time management a couple weeks ago on the Making Money with Kids at Home. But I really have thought about it because Simone is like, “Oh, I take naps, I do these things,” and I’m like, yes. And you can make so much money, but you have a lot of time. When I’m coaching people who are working 40 hours a week, I’m just like, we don’t have time.

Stacey: Yeah. You just don’t get to nap. You don’t get to sleep. You’re going to sleep a lot less.

Kathryn: You’ve got to put your foundational stuff in first so that you can ensure that…

Stacey: It’s like having a baby. You have a baby and you’re breastfeeding – I mean, from what I hear, I don’t know yet. I’m about to find out in the next couple of months. I just imagine like, you don’t get any sleep but you figure it out. That has to be the – so I love that you say that you work with your clients on the desire because your desire really does have to be there.

And I think sometimes people think that desire is inherent. They either have it or they don’t. They don’t realize it’s something that you foster with the thoughts that you practice thinking daily.

Kathryn: Yes. There’s an exercise that I go through with my clients and it’s sort of like, when you’re a solopreneur in particular, you have three different roles. You’re the CEO, you’re the manager, and you’re the employee. And when we’re just coming into our business, we only have very strong muscles in the employee category. When you think about working on and in your business, that’s an employee mindset problem.

Stacey: I don’t mean to throw you off, but what’s the difference between working on your business and working in your business? When you’re talking about that what do you mean?

Kathryn: So working in your business – how many people do you know that are – they’ve got a to-do list and they’re like, I’m going to post on Instagram, I’m going to do these things, I’m going to do all these things, and you’re not being strategic. You’re not zooming out and being like, and for what? For what purpose?

And so I think of it as there’s the vision and then you have to have the strategy, and then it goes down to tactics. And the employee does the tactical work of checking the things off of the to-do list, but you’ve got to make sure it’s rolling up for something. But oftentimes…

Stacey: Creating a result.

Kathryn: Yes. And I think a lot of people – I actually have my list of five biggest lessons, but it’s learning how to create results, learning how to create goals for yourself and honor them and knowing how they’re working. But I think being a person that allows yourself to flex that desire, to own your dream fully, and to connect to that vision all of the time – because that’s the thing.

Oftentimes when you think about being an employee, it’s like, what kind of executive did you want to work for? Someone who would come in and have a meeting for everybody and reconnect them back to like, alright, I know you guys are in the trenches and you’re just doing a bunch of data entry, but it’s for this bigger vision, it’s for this thing.

And we don’t learn to do that for ourselves in our own lives, and it’s so important to do that in the business. And then it’s also retraining the manager, which is just like – it’s a coach podcast so I can use coach language. It’s like the inner critic.

And so if you’re not retraining your brain, you end up with a flighty inconsistent CEO, an asshole manager, and an employee that does one of three things. They either produce from pressure and stress, so they get the result but they feel miserable. Or they spin out in confusion and overwhelm and doubt and they hide, or – I coach a lot of renegades.

So it’s so funny because they get a little bit of F you but it’s to themselves, right? As an employee, they’ve been like, F you to the company but I’m just like…

Stacey: But it’s your company. Not a good strategy.

Kathryn: Who do you think you are to tell me what to do? I’m like, that’s you telling you what to do.

Stacey: Yeah, oh my god. That’s so good. Okay, I’m sure you’ve experienced that too. I have definitely experienced some F-you, don’t tell me what to do.

Kathryn: Totally.

Stacey: I’m going to use that from here on out. But wait, it’s my business. That’s so good. I love that. Okay, so tell me about – I love that you were a six-figure employee. I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time remembering that name.

Kathryn: It’s so out of your realm now.

Stacey: It’s so out of my realm. Can I just say as a side note, I think I’ve told this story on the podcast before. But Neil and I went to this place called the Italian Table in Louisville where they put you with strangers. There’s like 12 people and you eat dinner together. This four-hour dinner.

And it was there where we realized we can’t socialize with civilians anymore. There was nothing they could ask us that we couldn’t answer in the most elitist, ridiculous way without lying. It was like, “Where are you getting married?” “Napa.” “Where are you honeymooning?” “Bora Bora.” “You guys drive to work?” “No, he doesn’t work. I work from home.” The most – there’s no answers.

We’re like, oh, this is weird. Literally, I’m not even joking, we realized you run out of things to talk about – we’re at that point where we don’t have – unless you’re an entrepreneur and you’re like, out there in the field making money, we don’t have a lot to talk about other than the people that are already friends with us or are already family. Because strangers look at us like…

Kathryn: What is happening?

Stacey: Like the whole room gets uncomfortable. It’s like, so there’s no way for us to be honest and comfortable. Anyway, this is clearly why I’m struggling with the word – I almost said entrepreneur instead of employee. Okay, I want you to talk about this and speak to this for the people. I have a lot of those people in my 2K.

And one of the biggest things that holds them back in growing their business is they’re not motivated by anything less than 100K that would replace their income. But then it takes so long to do that and because they’re not motivated, they can’t create the 100K.

So they keep themselves in this place where it’s like, no money they make is good enough because it doesn’t replace their income. And then they have a hard time seeing themselves as being able to make more than that income. So talk about that. How did you get out of – did you experience that and then how did you get out of it?

Kathryn: Yeah. Well, you probably don’t remember this but you gave me some coaching. I guess it was in Chicago. It was the first mastermind. And I was invested obviously enough to join the mastermind. But it was still a little bit like – I think one of my biggest things – it was my ego. I work with a lot of people, they were also six-figure employees, and I thought that was really fancy.

I love that I thought that was a thing. And I was like, well, I don’t want to come out as – just start writing about myself on Facebook. What will the people think of me? And I just had to get over that and it really came down to I remember in Chicago, I think I said something about how I hated starting over.

And you basically gave me the coaching that it’s like, well, I am just a person that is a high-income earner, so of course I’ll figure it out. And that was one of my biggest takeaways in Chicago. Trusting myself that like, yeah, it’s not like I’m not going to do it. I’m for sure going to figure it out and if I just perceive it to be a really fun jigsaw puzzle where every single thing I do – I think that’s the other thing.

Employees perceive anything that doesn’t get a result as a failure, whereas to me now, it’s just like more information for me to understand what my best path to market is. And I’m for sure going to figure it out. I’m very tenacious and I’m going to get there.

And so I think it was just recognizing that I was committed. I wasn’t committed to trying. I was committed 100%. And that was, I think I told myself because I kept wondering like, should I even do it. And I was like, I’m just going to be all in until $100,000. And if I decide when I’ve made $100,000 that I’m not all in anymore, I can revisit that, which is so funny because I just passed that mile marker but I forgot I even made that decision because I’m so all in it now, it’s not even in my realm.

Stacey: Really, truly, you can use your high-income status as an employee, you can use that for or against yourself. You can use that to believe that you’ll be successful always, which is what I did with my selling. I was so good at selling I’m like, of course I’m going to be so good at selling life coaching. Obviously, I’m going to take that skill and apply it.

So you can use that for yourself or you can use it against yourself, and it’s status. That’s what Russell Brunson says. The three things that are always on the line for people that keep them from investing in themselves, keep them from going after their dreams, keeping them from doing the work is time, money, and status. Putting those three things on the line.

So I think the people who are really successful in their careers, that is what they’re almost most afraid of is putting their status on the line. They have the money to invest, they have the time. They’re usually very productive. They can create time and they’re high-achievers, but the status thing is really the biggest thing for them. Maybe even bigger than the fear that they won’t make the money.

Kathryn: Yeah. And it really kind of kills me because I have a lot of friends who they end up – this is another thing that you’ve given me coaching on, but success would take me away from my kids. So I have a lot of friends who are very successful as employees and then they ducked out because they wanted to be at home, they believed that they had to choose between the two, and they want to be creating something in the world. They really do have that desire but they can’t get over the status thing.

They value their status and the way that others perceive them more than they value their desire, which comes back to if you increase the desire to outweigh what others think of you, and you trust yourself that you’re for sure going to figure it out, it feels so good.

Sometimes people are like, “I don’t know if I want to start my own business because then I have to do everything and I kind of like being an employee where I just plug in and I do this one thing.” And I’m like, I mean, maybe. But when I look at what I’ve created in the past year doing literally everything on my own and knowing I’ve created over $100,000 for myself, oh my gosh, it’s so good.

Stacey: Yeah, that’s amazing. I love that so much. Okay, so I want to go back to this really quick. You mentioned about employee fails and this is what came up for me that I’ve never thought about before and I bet you have a lot of experience talking about. When you’re an employee and you fail, you risk losing your job. You risk losing a promotion. You risk being in trouble. So I think as an employee, and this is true in school too, right? If you’re not…

Kathryn: If you get a bad mark on a test. Everything comes down to employee mindset, I swear.

Stacey: Yeah. So we’re bred in society that you have to succeed and failure literally means putting everything on the line. And that is probably the hardest switch from employee to entrepreneur because entrepreneur, your goal is to fail as much as possible. And the more you fail, the more you succeed. It’s like that failure aversion. Talk about that a little bit.

Kathryn: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny because I think there’s a failure aversion, and then once I can creak people’s brain open to be like, okay wait no, failure can just be data, but there’s this one path up the mountain that’s the best path. It’s almost like a computer simulation. They run it in their head again and again and again and every time they try to figure out how to get up the mountain.

And then they identify one small thing and that’s why people end up buying so many courses and going down rabbit holes of trying to fill in all the information. But it’s like, when you identify…

Stacey: Hold on. We have to stop because that’s so good. That’s why they’re over-investing, buying all the things and consuming – let’s just define this very quickly because I’m all about aggressive investing. How you know the difference between aggressive investing and over-investing is if you’re applying the work and getting results.

So if you’re just consuming and you’re not actually taking action with it, I call this innovating in thought, but that’s what they’re doing is – I’ve never heard it said that way. They’re trying to fill in the information to get them up the mountain before they start taking steps up the mountain. Trying to fill in all the information. It is fucking brilliant.

Kathryn: I know. I’m kind of a genius.

Stacey: I love it. That’s the thought we fuel in 200K, by the way, is we’re all geniuses. And listen, I have to acknowledge you for a second. 100% you are a genius and I can tell the amount of work you’ve done between masterminds. I can tell that you have worked on your coaching philosophy and your intellectual property because your ideas are so fresh.

They’re so new, they’re so crisp and clear. You’re just laying it out on the podcast in such a beautiful way. I can tell you’ve done deep mastery of understanding your client’s problem and their solution. So I just want to acknowledge you like, damn.

Kathryn: Yeah, I mean, I feel like it all cracked open and since then I’ve just been going to work, and I really do – now I have that lens for the world, I genuinely believe like, why is no one else talking about this? It’s seriously why entrepreneurship is hard for people.

Stacey: Yeah, so good. I was telling Neil the other day like, school just teaches people who to be good readers and regurgitators of information. That’s what tests are. Read this textbook and then regurgitate this information. I think it’s sad that entrepreneurship is not taught in school. It should be taught.

He was like, “People should teach us how to invest, teach us about stocks, teach us about savings, teach us about those things.” And I was like, and I think people should teach the possibility of entrepreneurship. No one teaches that.

Kathryn: Yeah. But Stacey, it’s set up to make people employees. Why would they teach that? And you think about too going back to the personal finance. I’m a big personal finance nerd, and I’m just like, how convenient that we learned about the parts of a flower in school and what kind of clouds are in the sky, but we don’t learn about basic personal finance.

Stacey: That’s so crazy. Yeah. We could talk about this all day. Okay, so I want you to share your story a little bit because you are such an example of – you were the 100K employee. Then you became a mom. Then you decided to have a business and then you got pregnant again.

Kathryn: I’ve got three of them now.

Stacey: I love it. Three very young children, right? How old is your baby right now?

Kathryn: He is 10 months.

Stacey: 10 months. I love it. You were like, breast pumping in the 200K room. Can we just talk about that for a second?

Kathryn: Yeah. In Chicago and Atlanta.

Stacey: I love it so much. I was like, hell yeah. Do that. This is the room…

Kathryn: I decided, I was like, I’m going to build my desire up. I’m not going to let this be the thing. Because I was telling myself like, maybe I should wait until he’s older and I was like, why would I do that? I can create this business on my own terms.

I sent you a message last week like, my fear was success was going to take me away from my kids. And when I look at what I have created now, it’s like I have a life where I get to wake up in the morning and drink coffee and snuggle with them and – well, I’m not picking my daughter up at the bus stop right now because we’re all at home.

But prior to the pandemic, I would take off a couple days a week and go meet her at the bus stop. And I never imagined, because I’d been fed the societal story, which I think is holding all women back, that success would take me away and I had to choose one or the other.

And I was like, actually, as an entrepreneur, we get to decide exactly how we want to build it and I’m going to create a business in a way that allows me to nurse the baby between client calls, pick up my daughter at the bus stop, and I’m not going to tell myself this story because I think a lot of people are like, “I have to have a hobby business in order to have that balance.”

And it’s like, actually, that’s not true. Just like on our mastermind call yesterday, I think you were like, why do you think that about 18K or 12K but not – maybe it was 10K to 24K, right?

Stacey: Right. The difference of 10K and 24K. Why can’t you believe the same things?

Kathryn: It’s just your thoughts about it.

Stacey: It’s just your thoughts. That’s so good. And don’t you think, now that you’ve made the first 100K, don’t you think you work harder making less money than more money?

Kathryn: Yes, I do.

Stacey: It’s like, the thing that we can never wrap our brains around. Remember at the live event in Atlanta where I had you guys doing the three-year plan, and I did my own. I was like, if they’re going to take the time, I think I gave you guys 30 or 45 minutes to go through the whole thing. And I was like, I’m going to sit here and do it for me as well.

I do it multiple times throughout the year. And the thought that I came up with during that plan was I realized 10 million was going to be easier than 2.5 was. And that blew my mind. I’m like, wait a minute, hold on, how could that be true? It’s so much more money that I don’t know how I’m going to make, which by the way, today in the shower, where I have all of my best thoughts, I realized exactly how I was going to create 10 million dollars.

Like, the legit plan, this is exactly how we will do it, which now it feels fucking done. But it was like, that thought of, wait a minute, the more money you make, the easier it gets. How is that possible? So I want your fresh from the 100K – semi-fresh, since you just bypassed it completely. So talk about that. How is that true? How is that possible that the more money you make, the less you work?

Kathryn: Well, I mean I guess it was once you start to nail some things. You have to lay the foundation but then once you do that, it really is just these little tweaks. And I look at you have to have the courage when you first start to come out and do it and try a bunch of things and keep going.

But once you really nail – I like to think of it as like, I do this, I do this, I do this, I get a check. I do this, I do this, I do think, I get a check. And once you have that process, it’s like, okay, well, what could I tweak to make that happen more quickly? So…

Stacey: Yes, I love that. That’s so good. The way that I talk about it when I’m promoting 200K is like, the ability to feel like you turn the faucet on and off. I do this, I get a check. I do this, I get a check. I feel like so many people don’t feel like they have that power over their money. They don’t feel like they could just turn it on.

It’s just literally figuring out, okay, so if I did this and made 100K, how do I do less and make 200K? How do I do even less and make 300K, right? Solving for that equation is everything. And you just get faster and more productive and better every single time around.

Kathryn: Yeah. Because it’s just like, you have a foundational skill set and then you sort of keep up-leveling and it turns out like…

Stacey: But don’t you think though too that goes back to the societal employee mindset? Because in other corporations where you are not the owner and you are not taught how to use your thoughts to solve problems, you have to use your time to solve problems.

So when you get to become – if you were a CEO of a company or if you were a district manager or something, those people all ran into the ground. They are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. Arianna Huffington talks about – she told a story where she was literally working so hard and getting so little sleep as the CEO for The Huffington Post that she passed out, fell asleep at her desk and smacked her head on her desk, cut her skull open, and was bleeding out on the floor.

That’s the culture of corporate America and you just work, work, work, work, work, and you sacrifice. And I think Sheryl Sandberg talks about this, that the employee that works the most is the best. And there’s this culture where you’re shamed if you leave at four o clock to go catch your son’s soccer game, or you leave in time to make dinner at home.

That’s something that she decided early on, she’s like, “I’m not missing these things.” And I think that is what is taught in people’s minds. The only way I could ever make more money is if I work harder and longer hours.

Kathryn: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the – when people come and work with me, it’s like they tend to think that they need to create from this feeling of pressure and hustle and I have to have my butt in the chair for this period of time. And it’s like, that’s just because you were an employee. Really, it might be the best thing for you to go out hiking and journal and that is what works for you and that’s what makes you most productive.

But people have not ever taken the time to build that relationship with themselves where they’re like, wait, it turns out I’m a unique person and there’s a thing that works for me specifically this way. And I think working with you, that was one of the biggest things last year for me.

I was producing from that place of butt in chair, I can’t get up until I have the result. A lot of pressure, producing like an employee, to just being like, wait a second, I believe, I can see, I just create my own results and it’s just a few tweaks.

Stacey: So good. I love that. Okay, so talk to me about the 25K in 30 days challenge because you – we did that last mastermind and tell me your thoughts about that. We got to do a little before and after for everybody because I love that we did that podcast and we had the people on who did it the first time around.

And I loved that. I loved the people who did it the first time around, the first time I ever presented it. I just decided it’s possible to make 25K in 30 days in this mastermind, you can do it. So it was amazing that we had people do it, that we were able to have them on the podcast.

But what’s even more amazing is the people emerging now who didn’t do it the first time around but kept it in their brain and then fucking killed it and did it even better, even faster. I want to tell those stories as much as the people who did it the first time around because I don’t think that it’s like, more glory whether you do it the first time or – it’s like, it doesn’t matter. Everyone’s at their own pace.

There’s so many things – like I didn’t make a million the first time around that I tried, but it doesn’t diminish making it the second time and the fact that I didn’t give up on it. And that I did it in six months instead of a year. Those are the stories I want to tell too, so let’s talk about your 25K, your first 25K in 30 days experience.

Kathryn: It’s my number one thing on my biggest lessons from Stacey.

Stacey: Oh, I love it. Okay, let’s hear it. I love that you and Maggie prepared for the – you guys had lists of things to talk about on the podcast. I love it.

Kathryn: I may be an entrepreneur but I was also a very good student.

Stacey: I love it so much. Okay, so let’s hear it.

Kathryn: So the first time around, I hadn’t learned and that’s one of my biggest learnings is how to actually commit to your goals and be demanding of yourself but not shame and judge and beat the crap out of yourself.

Stacey: Yes. Everyone struggles with that. They think there are only two options.

Kathryn: And that was how I went about it. The first week, I was like, “Oh yeah, I totally got this.” And I think I was at like, maybe $6000 by the first 10 days or something. And then where my brain immediately went to was like, it wanted to as a defense mechanism, because it didn’t want to feel bad, it was like, “Well, she’s got a Facebook group. That’s why she can do it. She’s got a podcast, that’s why she can do it.”

It wanted to look for all the reasons why it was possible for other people but not for me. And then I spun out and I shamed and I judged and I beat myself up. And I completely failed. And it was…

Stacey: I think a lot of people did that.

Kathryn: Yeah. But it kicked up so much for me to look at because those patterns were always there.

Stacey: Yeah. That’s all the 25K in 30 days challenge really is. It’s a container. Let’s see how your brain reacts to this situation, which is like, I set these kinds of things up all the time. The live event is set up that way, the other call the other day when I was like, “What if you didn’t make your 25K in the first three months and you had to leave and I kept your money?”

To watch everybody’s brain just – I love setting up containers like this. Push you guys to your absolute fucking max. Let’s see what’s in your brain. It’s so good.

Kathryn: It’s interesting because I remember at the time talking to a girlfriend about the 25K challenge and the analogy that came to mind for me was like, I felt like we were all plants in these little pots and you ripped us out and you put us in a bigger container and you were like, “Grow.” And for me…

Stacey: Essentially.

Kathryn: I was a little bit too fragile at the time. But I remember what my friend said. She was like, “Yeah, I mean, that could kill a plant.” And my brain, I didn’t say anything out loud but in my brain, I was like, “Wait, but that doesn’t kill us. We don’t die.”

When we get put into a bigger container, it feels terrible and we have to work through all the things that were always holding us back from getting there anyway. So I spun out for – I don’t know. I was still making money, but it was like, the next couple of months, it was so much looking at, “Oh, I have a life-long pattern of doing this to myself.”

And I remember having this intense journaling session where I realized I was a chronic under-earner. Even though I’d been making $100,000 as an employee because I never set goals that weren’t easy, or maybe they were a squinch, just a little squinch, just a little stretch because I didn’t trust what my brain would do. It would just totally – I was scared.

Stacey: Let me just say that I think a lot of people who are making 100K, 200K have no idea that they are chronically under-earning. They don’t even set – I see 100K earners not consider joining 200K mastermind. They’re like, “25K, just too much money.” They don’t even see they’re leaving a million-dollar business on the table.

It doesn’t even occur to them that how much money they’re actually leaving on the table by thinking so small. It’s a chronic thing. I see it everywhere. I just like to think of it like this. When you think about how much money you’re capable of earning in a year, if that thought doesn’t make you want to vomit, you are probably under-earning.

Kathryn: Yeah. Well, I remember it’s funny too because I definitely learned the lesson from the 25K challenge, but I think what cracked that thought into my head was I remember Jody Moore said that Brooke told her early on in her business, Jody was like, “Well, I always hit my goals.” And Brooke was like, “Then they’re too small.”

And when I heard that, I was like, I think I see something about myself. But I didn’t really take the time to dig into it and challenge myself. I am so grateful for it because it allowed me to crack that open. And even though I didn’t hit it, that month or the next one or the next one, my brain just kept going to work like, how could I explain this better? How could I be more simple? How could I be more clear? How could I be more concrete? And it turns out…

Stacey: Isn’t it fascinating though to listen to you talk now and see the result of asking yourself those questions? How can I be more clear? How can I be more specific? Because you’re so articulate now with what you teach and the problem and the solution. I just can’t say it enough. You can tell that you’ve done that work.

That work is the most important work you can ever do. And if your goals don’t stretch you to make you do that work in a very uncomfortable way, then you’re never going to get this articulate because you’ll never have to make yourself be that clear. So good.

And you know, I’ve been thinking about this potted plant scenario, and don’t you think it’s the opposite? That the plant dies if you keep it in a container and it starts outgrowing the container?

Kathryn: Could be.

Stacey: I’m not a gardener.

Kathryn: I think a lot of people, their souls die.

Stacey: I really do think that like, you have to – I’m pretty sure. People who are gardeners are like, what is happening?

Kathryn: Gardeners, please let us know.

Stacey: But I’m pretty sure in order for a plant to survive, you do have to keep growing its pot. You can’t leave it in the pot. You always have to keep growing it. I’m pretty sure that’s a thing.

Kathryn: I think it depends on the plant. There are some plants that stay a certain size. We’ll just decide it. It’s great.

Stacey: We have no living plants really in my house other than this ugly one that my fiancé insists on keeping. Anyway, we don’t really have potted plants because I will kill them, but I’m pretty sure that’s the case. We’re just going to decide that it’s true. We’re going to decide that it’s true.

Kathryn: Sure.

Stacey: Your dreams definitely don’t grow when you keep the container the same size. You have to expand that. You have to grow that. Okay, so let’s talk about you didn’t do it, but then what happened in between?

Kathryn: I made my brain go to work and it just kept thinking and it was funny because it was always like, if I couldn’t do more, I just had to be better. It’s funny because a lot of clients, they’re like, Type A. And so saying be better, it’s like they’re tying it to their self-worth.

And so that’s another thing. It’s like, we’ve got to decouple that. And it’s like, no, just for you and your business, just for the joy of the mastery of your craft. And that has I think for me been so much fun to just be like, I want to be the best coach I can possibly be. I want to be the best person to understand these concepts and it turns out me going to work and not doing more but just being better, being more effective, in the last 30 days, I’ve created $36,000.

Stacey: Fucking amazing. So fun. I love that you posted about – when Maggie was saying that she was doing 10K clients and she was doing all these things and then you realized, wait a minute, that’s going to be me, that’s the trajectory I’m on. I love that we have a room like this.

You’re my third interview that I’ve done and I am just – my face could literally explode of smiles and just joy because I’ve gotten to work with you guys now for two, three rounds of this mastermind. And I’m watching this work sink in at a deep level with all of you and I’m watching you all become thought leaders and do these incredible, massive things.

And it’s just like, the best thing ever to watch you all just step into who you’re meant to be. And I’m realizing like, that is what 200K mastermind is about. I’m realizing the people that join, it’s not enough to make money. You guys want to be thought leaders. You want to change the industry and be leading the industry in thought, in new ideas, in making money and the possibility of what’s available.

You guys are – you have to have businesses that are mature, that give you lots of time for your life and give you lots of time to play and for your passions and your priorities. You have to be thought leaders, you have to make a lot of money, and it’s so fun to watch you all just step into this. Your ideas are so fantastic.

Everyone who is struggling with that employee-entrepreneurship shift has to come work with you. They have to do that 100%. I have no doubt that you won’t seamlessly walk them through that transition. So how do they work with you? How do they get a hold of you? Your website is fantastic. I absolutely love it. So give them the address so they can look you up.

Kathryn: Yeah. So you can head over to kathrynmorrisoncoaching.com. And they’re going to link it up in the show notes so you can just go do that.

Stacey: Yes. You know how we do.

Kathryn: And I’m also on Instagram as @karthrynmorrisoncoaching and I’m on Instagram stories like, every single day with a little quick tip. People love them.

Stacey: I love it. They’ve got to follow you. Absolutely. Before we jump off here, is there anything – I saw the list. Did we cover it all? Is there anything, any nuggets that you planned to share that we have no shared? I want to make sure we get them all.

Kathryn: I think the last thing that I want to just say is that being in the mastermind has really helped me deeply see that your thoughts create your results and the importance of belief. Before joining the mastermind I’m like, okay, I kind of see it, but it’s a little airy-fairy, this belief thing. I came from tech. I’m a pretty – my brain doesn’t naturally go there.

But just thinking of it in the perspective of like, you have no idea what’s coming. The analogy that really works for clients is I call it – it’s like you’re playing scrabble. And the brain always wants to assume that you’re just – if you’ve gotten the I’s and O’s and U’s you’re just going to keep getting those.

But it’s like, you have no idea. And I love this past March actually, I didn’t sign any clients until March 25th. All of my money came in after March 25th. And for me, what I learned from that 25K challenge, seeing Samantha go through it and her saying everything came in at the end, I was like, oh wait, I gave up 10 days in.

So this past March, I’m just like, I’m just going to keep showing up. I know and I trust myself that it’s working. I really do believe that it’s working. It turns out for me in March, my scrabble board had a Q and a J and an X. Just at the end of the month. But most people don’t assume that those letters are going to come out for them.

And so that’s an analogy that really helps people wrap their brains around it. You have no idea what letters are going to drop as long as you just keep showing up. The universe is going to meet you.

Stacey: Again, you’re my third interview so far, and I love that I’ve given you guys this opportunity to say like, what’s one thing that you haven’t talked about yet, and every time, you all have dropped massive knowledge. It’s so good. I’m like, they better listen to the end, otherwise they’re missing out. It’s always something so good.

I am so honored to be your coach and have you in the mastermind and have other people learn from you, have my students learn from you, the podcast listeners learn from you. You have done some brilliant work, my friend.

Kathryn: Thank you. I will just say for anyone thinking about joining, I was thinking, I was telling myself my husband the other day like, investing in the mastermind is the best investment I’ve ever made in my life. That includes my college degree, that includes – we have real estate properties. For sure, this is the best thing I’ve ever done.

Stacey: That’s awesome. I pay her to say that. I love it. Well, thank you so much for donating your precious time. Kiss your baby for me.

Kathryn: I will.

Stacey: And I will see you on our next mastermind call.

Kathryn: Sounds good.

Stacey: Alright. 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.