#322: Failure Gold

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, today we’re going to talk about failure gold. So I am in the middle currently of teaching my newest entrepreneur series course, Alive. And so many of you who are enrolled are telling me that you are afraid to fail. That’s the biggest thing that holds you back is that fear of failure. That’s where you’re stuck. That’s where you’re trapped. That’s where you don’t feel alive. That’s what keeps you from your aliveness.

So I want to do an episode about this today. I want you to really think about why we fear failure. This is something you could really spend some time thinking about yourself and contemplate. This is something that you can create your own definition for yourself why you think you fail. But ultimately, my answer to this, why we fear failure, is because we fear how we will imagine it will feel. We’re afraid of the feeling that will come with failure. We’re afraid of what we will make it mean about ourselves and how we will react to it, what we will do next.

For example, if you really want to go for it in your business and you’re afraid of failure, the thing you might actually be afraid of is if you try and you fail, you will tell yourself it didn’t work and you will quit. Some of you are afraid of failure because if you fail, like if you go do something and you try it really big and you fail, and you don’t make money right away, then you’re going to have to go back to work. You’re going to tell yourself I have to go back to work.

And you could actually end up creating a scenario where you don’t make any money because you’re afraid of failing so you don’t have to go back to work and then you make no money because you didn’t fail and so you have to go back to work. But it’s always the fear of like what we’re gonna feel, what we’re gonna make it mean about ourselves, how we’re gonna react to it, what we’re gonna do next.

We have an unhealthy, uninspiring relationship with failure. I want to offer you a new relationship with failure today, a new definition, a new way of looking at failure. And here’s why this matters. I have found in this Alive training, I’ve offered my students a lot of different definitions of things, ways that I define things that help me be the best version of myself and achieve the biggest things and feel the most alive.

And what I have found is that if you can change the definition of something, the way you look at it, and then you’re willing to go test that definition and do it more than once and work to solidify your new beliefs and definition about it, then your relationship will change around it. So if you change your definition and your beliefs around failure, and then you go out and you fail, and you decide, you choose those new beliefs, you choose that new definition, in the failure, your relationship will completely change around it.

Now, it’s really important before I give you my definition, it’s really important to know that it may never feel great, and I actually don’t think it’s meant to. I talk to my Alive students about this. By design, I do think it’s meant for us to feel pain. It’s meant to be painful, which is an interesting take that because I do know a lot of people might be teaching and I don’t think this is a problem anyway, that failure is meaningless except the meaning that you give it and that you can have a lot of fun in failure and you can really go after failure in a big way. And I agree with all of that, honestly.

But some failure, a lot of failure, I think the whole purpose of it is for us to feel pain because sometimes feeling pain is the only way that we can awaken and and aliven to something that needs attention. Some of my deepest lessons that changed my life for the absolute better were my most painful ones. In fact, the pain was so great, I did something about it. I was forced to pay attention. I couldn’t ignore it. It was loud and clear and screaming for my attention.

So it really isn’t supposed to feel lovely. It’s not supposed to feel great. But I think people misinterpret that pain and then they use failure wrong because of misinterpreting that pain, and then they end up getting the lowest value use of it. If you use it to validate quitting, that’s probably the lowest form of value you could ever get from failure, is to let it validate quitting because of that pain. To use it to validate being less than you can imagine you can be. To let it validate playing small, staying small, not being seen, to use it to underearn and to underlive.

That’s not what the pain is meant to show you. It’s not meant to show you that you’re not good enough. It’s not meant to show you that you’re a fraud. It’s not meant to show you that you’re not capable. It’s not meant to show you that you just don’t have the capacity. It’s not meant to show you that you weren’t meant to be an entrepreneur, that it’s not for you. It’s not meant to show you that you’re not a good coach. It’s not meant to show you that you’re not good at selling. It’s not meant to show you any of those things that would validate giving up. It’s really not, it’s meant to push you to learn.

Okay, so let me share with you my philosophy around failure, which I call the failure gold philosophy. So what is failure gold? Failure gold is value, information, success clues that you can only get from failing. It’s such an important thing to hear. It’s value, information, and success clues that you can only get from failing. There’s no other way to extract the value and the information and the experience that ultimately leads to success. There’s no way to ignite the change required to become someone new without failing, without the gold that comes from failure.

Now, alternatively, we can get value in learning from books and courses and coaches and podcasts, but I want you to think of when you’re consuming information and learning that this is theory work. You’re learning new theories, you’re learning new information, you’re learning new thoughts. But unless you test the theory yourself, by going out and doing something, no inherent value is created.

So it can be perceived value and perceived value is when you think, wow, that felt valuable to me. I felt a shift in that. This thought feels significant to me. It feels important that I just heard this thought versus, wow, I used that and got information about myself and my journey from it. I used that information and I went out and did something and then used the information to inform me of what to do next.

So failure gold isn’t, I tried it and it didn’t work for me and now I know I need to move on from it. That’s not what failure gold is, right? I have people tell me that all the time. Over the last 10 years, I’ve probably heard it at least 100 times. They’ll join my 2K for 2K and they’ll say, well, I tried it and this just didn’t work for me. That’s not failure gold.

There’s just nothing that I’ve ever bought, tried, that I said that just didn’t work for me. Because extracting value is about learning to work for it. This thing that isn’t working because it doesn’t inherently work, there’s too many thousands of people that have tested that it does work. That’s what always fascinates me when people tell me something didn’t work for them, no matter what it is. And I’m like, oh, but what about the thousands and thousands of people that it did work for?

We aren’t the unicorns, my friends. We like to think that we are, but we’re not. Everything works. Every diet on the planet works. Every marketing method in the world works. I think there are some that work better. They feel more inherently connected or aligned for us, but I don’t want to be the person that only can ever make something work if it feels aligned because I want to become a new version of myself, and I don’t know what feels aligned as the new version of myself.

This is where the idea of intentional thought creation came in for me. I literally created this concept realizing that something could feel unaligned now because it’s not my future self, it’s who I am now. And so I have to go to total alignment with everything I learn before I decide if I’m actually not in alignment with it. I can’t know until I actually know what it’s like for it to work for me that it’s not for me.

Otherwise I’m discrediting it and deciding against it and failing ahead of time because I didn’t want to do the work to extract the gold. And I’m going to talk about this in a second. But for me, this is so important because I want to be the person who extracts gold from everything. I feel very strongly about being a woman in business who always gets high returns for every investment she makes. I never make excuses for myself. I never say things just didn’t work for me. I make them work for me because it’s who I am.

So I never have to fear making investments. I never have to fear utilizing money in my business. I never have to fear that I won’t be successful. So I go all in with things like it really is in my entire self-concept is built because I have a good relationship with failure. On most days, again, it’s still very painful, but doesn’t it? I’m not even exempt from the pain. And sometimes it requires time to get past the fight or flight that comes with some of the pain depending on how deep the failure is. But I am a very resilient person. I always pick myself back up. And typically I do it pretty quickly.

So failure gold isn’t I tried it and it didn’t work for me and now I need to move on from it to find the thing that does work. Failure gold is not about finding the perfect strategy. It’s not about finding the aligned strategy. It’s not about doing it the way that’s perfect for you. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m just saying that’s not what it is. There’s no gold there in trying something once and then deciding that you know about this thing that you just tried.

Failure gold is I made a decision, I went for it, I experienced it, I felt it, I failed at it, and now I’m going to learn from that failure so that I can go again and do it better next time because I want to learn and master everything I try before I decide against it, is my like second piece to this philosophy. You don’t have to adopt that one in this podcast. But I do think it’s an important one that helps me stay in the failure much longer than other people. Like I wanna master this before I discredit it.

So I make a decision, I go for it, I experience it, I feel it, I fail at it, and then I learn from it so that I can go again. Failure gold is strengthening yourself in failure. I know this seems counterintuitive. A lot of you, what you do is you fail and you use that to believe less. I use it to believe deeper, to believe more, to be more convicted, more committed. And I think the only way this happens is when you pick yourself back up and go again with more enthusiasm. And the only way you can do that is if you learn from it.

I always tell my people, like I teach a concept in 2K for 2K on evaluating. And I think I’ve talked about it on this podcast before. It’s a really simple evaluation, but the way you actually do it and use it for yourself, I teach very intricately in my 2K program. But it’s a simple three-part question. What worked? What didn’t work? What am I going to do differently? And I have a lot of frameworks for extracting the highest value from that. But that’s the essence. And so how I tell people that they did a good evaluation, how they know they did a great evaluation is if they feel excited to go again. That’s the indicator you actually learned so much from something.

I remember, I’ve told this story many times. It’s a short one. I failed at something. I don’t even remember what now. That’s what’s so crazy. It was years ago, at some point in the last eight years because I was in my house that I’m currently in. And I’m backing out of my driveway and I am in a panic response from something that did not go the way I expected, like some big failure I had in a launch.

And we had closed the launch and just not gotten anywhere close to what I imagined we were going to do for that launch. It probably was a $200K launch. I feel like it was maybe the time I was at 85 people in the room and then I was planning to go, I don’t know, to some other bigger number and then we did 85 again. And I think that round was the first round I didn’t have a 50% return rate. If I remember correctly, it doesn’t really matter, but I’m backing out of my driveway and I go on a rampage of responsibility, a rampage of extracting like, I have to take responsibility. I have to own this. This was on me. And if that’s true, what are all the reasons why this failed? And I said, I’m not allowed to stop this rampage of value extraction until I feel light, excited, compelled and ready to go again.

And I don’t even remember where I was driving, but I did this the entire drive until I was so excited I just wanted to get back home and go to work. Because I had found all the things that I could control, all the things I could be responsible for, all the ways, reasons I failed, things I could do better, things I would try differently. And so suddenly, I had a concrete plan of how to move forward. That’s failure gold.

And then the act of picking myself back up, the act of transforming a fight or flight response where I am feeling like I’m just underwater in negative emotion, and I can’t see a way out of it and everything’s gloom and doom to I’m excited to get back to work. That’s resilience. That is actually what strengthens your belief, makes you believe more in yourself. You don’t even need to necessarily believe in the result if you believe in yourself. I will figure this out. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I will figure this out. And I did. The very next round, we doubled our numbers. It’s crazy. And I was so proud of myself, but I extracted so much value to get there.

If I had just sank in and been sad and done the whole round feeling sad and feeling like a failure and drowning and not believing that I could do it again, I get in these places too. But if I had stayed there, if I had done that, I probably would have made less the next round and then less the round after. But instead, I got to work and I figured it out. I figured out what I could have controlled to do better.

Failure gold is letting the failure shape you into a better version of yourself. If you’re more convicted, if you’re more committed, if you’re more resilient, if you believe deeper in yourself, suddenly you are becoming a better version of yourself. And that’s not the only way that you can shape yourself into a better version of yourself with failure. I think it’s the first step.

In fact, actually, no, I think the first step is how you react to the failure. How you talk to yourself and treat yourself in the failure. Maybe it’s sometimes that’s the first step and sometimes it’s being willing to just take responsibility and go in there and figure it out because sometimes that’s how this positive self-talk starts to happen.

So really, I don’t even care. Whatever way that you can approach it. I want to react to this failure as a better version of myself. I want to be able to take responsibility and extract value. And if I’m underwater, maybe that’s the way I get to the place where I can treat myself and talk to myself differently. But maybe I need to immediately learn how to talk to myself and treat myself differently. And that’s what allows me to get into the extracting of the value.

Whatever it is, you do both of those things and then you learn from it. You extract the value. There are always parts that worked, but then you figure out what didn’t work, you pose theories as to why, and those theories become what you’re going to do differently.

And I have my students in all of my containers, 2K, 200K, $2 million group, I have them always tell me their theory of what they think went wrong or their top three, and they’re always spot on. No one needs to tell you what you did wrong. No one needs to show you how you failed. You’re so intuitive. You can figure this out. You can extract the value on your own. 

Now you can get better and more skilled, especially if, for example, when I teach my students this three-step evaluation process, I tell them what goes in the evaluation, what doesn’t, to make it the highest form of evaluation. I do think you can get more skilled at evaluating itself, and you can learn that from someone else. But the value you actually extract, the theories you create, those are always the best coming from you.

Someone else can also tell you. Sometimes it’s just helpful to hear someone else’s outside view. But typically, every time I ask this question of tell me what went wrong, tell me what your top three theories are, they’re correct, or at least they’re going down good lanes to explore. There’s never something that I’m like, oh no, that wouldn’t be worth your time to explore. The theories that you create will always be worth your time to explore.

So the way that I think about failure is that in the failure, I get the opportunity to be who I want to be. It’s my chance to decide to show the world I’m ready. Like, oh, I want to be this, I want to be a $20 million earner, $30 million earner. Okay, how does the $30 million earner react to this challenge, react to this failure, react to the circumstance? And the more I show the world, I’m ready for that based on my reaction, the closer I get to creating that. I get the opportunity to react and respond as who I want to be with the results I want to have.

This is something you could repeat to yourself every time you fail. This is an opportunity for me to react and respond as who I want to be with the results I want to have. It truly is an opportunity. I get to show up as if this will be a piece of the whole puzzle, a part of the infinite game where I ultimately succeed. I get to show up as if I’m getting closer, not further away.

And for me, this is really important. Failure is an opportunity to reinforce who I am at my core, how I show up to everything. Either who I am now or who I want to be and how I want to show up to everything. For me now, I’ve really solidified this. I think there are lots of opportunities for me to expand even more, but I really do love how I have found that I show up to everything. I only learned this in the failure, that what I give out energetically to the world is 100% about me, my experience, and my self-concept. It’s about how I want to live and see myself and be with myself.

So I’m going to give you an example of this. I once sold, and this has happened many times, like I’ve been in business 10 years, I can’t even count the amount of times this has happened, and especially because I have very big expectations and I know what I’m capable of.

So I remember doing an offer selling something that I thought was going to hit. I just knew in my bones, everyone wants this. Everyone is going to sign up for this. And it was like a really low-cost offer, like a $97 offer. And I just knew it was what everyone needed. It was perfect. It was going to create so much value. I was certain it was going to do so well. And then it didn’t. In fact, I think it performed like a third of what I expected it to perform. I was so disappointed. So disappointed.

But then I decided, who am I going to be delivering this? Who am I going to be in the work of this? Because you can go deliver something that you sold or that you even offered for free, maybe a challenge week, and you expected a hundred people to show up, and ten people signed up. And you can decide to cancel. You can decide to not give it so much energy and time because you already decided it’s not going to yield what you think.

Or you can decide to show up as if a hundred people signed up for that challenge week. And I think I had wanted like a thousand people to sign up for this thing, and it was like a few hundred. And I decided to show up as if a thousand people had signed up because it’s how I love to coach, it’s how I love to give value, it’s how I love to show up.

So the gold that I received from the pain of creating a training for at least a week, then selling it for a week, and then delivering it for a week, so that’s three weeks of my life and work, for one-third of what I expected it to do, the gold I received is becoming the version of myself where, and this is who I am now, I give everything, all of me. I over-deliver always. Everything gets lots of thought and attention. The quality of my work and my selling is not going to be compromised because of lack of sales.

And the same is true when I did consults, and I have a whole episode on the podcast about that, that I show up on consults for me and I give 100% as if it’s my best perfect client who’s going to buy, because that’s how I want to feel on a consult. That’s who I want to be when I sell. It has nothing to do with the other person and whether they buy or not.

And then I became someone in that, in these little decisions along the way for the last 10 years of selling things and delivering things that some didn’t meet my expectation, the amount of money I thought I deserved for the amount of effort I put in, I became someone who delivers everything, who just does everything exceptionally. I became an exceptional person, an exceptional entrepreneur. It’s easy to be that person when business and life is meeting your expectation. It’s another thing to be that person always.

And the person who is always this person who does exceptional things always has more success because everything they touch is exceptional. And let’s imagine that you have 100 ideas and 50 of them are going to underperform and 50 of them are going to at least match your performance expectation or maybe overperform, but you do everything exceptional because you don’t know which is going to be which.

I was certain that this training was going to be meeting all of my expectations. I had no doubt. I never do. I sell myself so hard that there’s nothing I would ever sell that I’m like, well, this could be mediocre. I’m not 100% sure. This may or may not hit. No, I psych myself up so much and sell myself so hard on everything that I believe everything is going to hit. Everything is going to be beyond expectation. I do a three-tiered expectation of based on what I put into this and based on what I would really like. For me, this is the base number of what we should do. And then there’s this number would make me really happy. And then this number would blow my mind. And there are many times where I perform at a third of what that base expectation was. But I don’t know what’s going to do that and what isn’t ahead of time. So I take my exceptionalism everywhere.

And if that word doesn’t work for you, find a different one. But for me, that works. I love to do things exceptionally. So I go all in with all of those things. And even if they do fail, or they don’t meet my expectation, I also do them exceptionally. I don’t step out of who I want to be because then I’m only exceptional part of the time. And then my exceptional isn’t exercised as much as it could be. And I will tell you, this actually started. This has just been part of my self-concept, but it started when I was pitching.

I remember auditioning in Atlanta. I lived in Atlanta at the time. And I auditioned with like 50 of the most beautiful, talented people that I’d ever seen. And they had like four spots. I ended up getting it, by the way, which is so crazy.

But in the interview, they told us that if you were a top earner and you maintained a store average of revenue, $1,000 a day for the whole year, you would win a trip for you and someone else, all expenses paid and get $1,000 because you’d be off work that week and get $1,000 every single year. And I remember thinking, I’m going to be that person. I will be at that next trip.

And what it required is on the days where it was rainy and there was no one in the store, it required me to still make that $1,000 happen as a bare minimum, no matter what. And there were many days that I only did $300 in revenue on a rainy or snowy, cold day where no one was in the store and really slow traffic, or I wasn’t selling well. There were days where I only did $500 revenue, $600 revenue.

But because I shot for that thousand every single day as like this is who I am, I just walk into the store and I sell $1,000 of revenue, what happened is the days where if I showed up as the person who’s creating $1,000 of revenue and only created the $300, that version of me also went to the next store who maybe was really busy and it was beautiful weather and people were pouring in the store and instead of $1,000, I did $2,000. Because I just never decided which day I’m going to become exceptional. I was exceptional every day.

And so then the average of my year came out to be $1,000 a day. And I made it every single year without exception. Every year. I went to some of the coolest places. I’m obsessed with Cabo San Lucas. I’d never been to Cabo San Lucas until I went with my company and I got to take my boyfriend at the time. And I got to go to Riviera Maya and swim in cenotes. Is that how you say them? The really cold caves. And I got to do really incredible things. I got to see whales in Cabo and I don’t even remember all the trips we went to, but I think we went to Riviera Maya twice and Cabo once. And I can’t remember the other place, but every year they offered it, I won it. Every year. Full expense paid trip for four days for me and my partner and $1,000 because every day I showed up exceptionally. That’s why it matters. I’m going to take the gold from every opportunity every day. And at the end of the day, if I show up who I want to be, regardless of if my IAD hit or not, if it was a success or a failure, I become the version of me I want to be.

The other thing to think about is when you walk yourself through failure willingly from your own decision, like you decide, I’m walking through myself through this failure, when you do it willingly and quickly, or even if you seek help, it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to do it on your own, but just deciding to overcome the failure, willingly and quickly , and then evaluating and learning, again, to the degree that you feel excited to go again, this is what gets you back into the current.

People have been asking me this a lot. How do you stay in the current? How do you get back in the current? The place of creating high value, like in 200K Mastermind, we call it a high value cycle. But how do you get back to that place where everything is clicking, you’re in full belief, your inspiration is pouring out of you, you’re like nailing everything you do?

That’s how. If you fall out of it, you willingly and quickly evaluate, learn, and get yourself excited to go again. And suddenly, when you learn, that’s what catapults you into the high value cycle. The gold that you get from the fail is what creates the current that then goes on to create the success. Literally, the gold from failure creates high value. It creates gold.

The final thing I want to offer is that failure gold, if you are looking at it from the infinite game as an integral part of helping you become who you are meant to be and learn what you are meant to learn, if you see it as a sequence towards a new identity of yourself, then you also must be willing to extract a lot of gold, create reserves of gold before the payout. Sometimes it takes 100 fails before you extract the full scope of the gold and turn that into success. I don’t know if this is a great example, but it’s not quid pro quo. It’s not one failure equals one success. Sometimes it’s five or six big fails equals big success.

Whenever people are selling their programs or courses in my $2 million group for the first time, I remind them. My goal when I started 2K for 2K, I did five or six launches the first year. My goal was 50 people each time. And the first time I think I sold 12. And then it was like 14 and then 16 and then 24 and then 30. And it was always much, much less than I had wanted. But after a year of those five or six big fails, the next year, I think that program went to a million dollars.

In fact, I’m certain that it made even more than that. And then it went on to become a $10 million offer, an eight-figure offer of mine. I’ve made more than $10 million from that program. We get lost in the five or six big fails, and we’re certain that’s going to be our reality forever. But because you’re not getting the failure gold from each one, because you’re not connected to the infinite game, because you’re not seeing it as an integral part of who you’re meant to be and what you’re meant to learn as part of the sequence towards your new identity and then the new results you want to create.

Sometimes it’s two years of failing for a decade of success. I have said this so many times and I’m going to say it again. The last two years of my business, it was a lot of failure. And also, I now see that everything I learned has set me up for the next decade in business.

The next decade in my business will be higher revenue, higher profit, better use of my time and my money, happier, more aligned, everything because of the last two years. I will reap a lot of benefits for years to come because of the last two years.

Because the last thing that I will share with you that I ultimately believe is that gold compounds if you keep going. You always get more success on the back end. It doesn’t always feel even on the front end. And that’s what causes people to give up. But it is also not even on the back end in the best way. But you have to keep going and you have to learn from the gold. You have to get the gold. You have to extract the gold from the failure. You can’t miss out on it. Otherwise, you’re just in painful, unuseful failure where you’re doing the same thing over and over again and not learning from it. That’s a very low value cycle, right? You’re just not extracting the value.

So you want to create a definition that makes you excited and desiring. Is that a word? Desiring of extracting the gold all of the time as who you are as a person. I just am a person who always extracts gold from every failure. I am a person who is resilient. I always pick myself up from every failure and not just pick myself up and convince myself to go again and convince myself it will be better, but I pick myself up, I deeply learn from it, I become someone new, and then I go again.

And so each failure feels very different. It teaches me something different. I’m more open to them. I see myself collecting the gold and becoming better along the way. I develop a track record of value that I’ve created, and I see the success happening as it’s unfolding because I see myself getting better every time. That’s the gold, my friends.

I really hope this helps you change your relationship with failure, the way you experience it, the fear you have around it. Like this is the big leagues. I’ve been saying that for years for 200K Mastermind. Entrepreneurship is the big leagues. It’s big stuff. We’re asking big things of yourself and you are capable. You wouldn’t have the calling if you weren’t capable. You can do this.

All right, have an amazing week and I will talk to you next week. Bye bye.

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 five-step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to StaceyBoehman.com/2Kfor2K. We’ll see you inside.