Ep #260: Finding Resilience and Saving Yourself

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

Hey, coaches, welcome to episode 260. Today we’re going to talk about finding resilience and saving yourself. This is going to be an unscripted, unplanned, totally off the cuff episode. If you love these, great, but no promises that I won’t go on tangents and get off topic and go down rabbit holes.

I have a new coach and one of the things that we’re working on is me showing up in a different way, not differently as in the way I was showing up was wrong. But just peeling back layers and letting you all see sides of me that maybe you don’t see in my marketing. And one of the things that came up is my super polished podcast episodes. And we were talking about how I do this because of my anxiety. And I don’t find that my podcast anxiety is useful anxiety, anxiety that creeps up that causes me to take seven hours to record an episode, not super useful.

So I found a hack for myself, which is that I write them all out word for word. Sometimes I go off script a little. I’ve gotten better now where I just have bullet points, especially for topics that I feel really confident in teaching. And I also had a thought for a long time, I want this to be, it’s going to be used for so long and relistened to for so many years. I really want it to be fluid and articulate and all of those things. It was coming from a good place.

But also there’s so many times where I start recording these episodes off the cuff and what happens in my mind is if I get lost and I can’t remember where I was. Sometimes the shouting in my head is so loud that I’m literally unable to continue and I have to just stop it and restart. And then that stress of the time it’s taking and restarting and fear that it happens again, keeps happening. And so it can be hours and hours and then I can get so frustrated that I just have to release a most valuable podcast episode.

So I don’t find it super useful. So I want to say if you struggle with that too, it’s fine, write them out. It’s not a big deal. But I have been recording these for long enough and I’m working on peeling back some layers and letting you all see pieces of me that you would really just love to know about me or love to see about me or just it would be useful for you to know. Seeing a leader open up and be more vulnerable, and this is one that feels easy because it’s not in any way this thing I’m trying to do to seem more professional or anything like that. I’m just managing my own anxiety.

People don’t know this about me, I’ve said this many times, but I pitched for seven years, I would do 10 shows a day, whatever infomercial product we were selling. And on the last day of my career, as the top salesperson in the industry, I still had to talk myself into starting the announcement. Once I got in front of the people, I was totally fine. I’m so great in front of an audience because I can feel people’s emotions. Some people don’t like that and that freaks them out but I can feel the energy of the crowd.

I can feel if it’s good energy or bad energy and it makes sense to my brain and my body. there’s just that connection to another human being that I really, really get. And I’m actually pretty good on video too, which is weird. But when you introduce this podcast where it’s just me staring at a recording screen, something weird happens in my brain. The same as when I was picking up a telephone to make a store announcement, it was the same thing. If I could just get through the minute announcement and get in front of people, I was great.

But I would really have to talk myself, and the anxiety was so high to just get on the phone. So that happens for me. I typically write these out. It helps me stay on track, but we’re going. We’re flying solo. So here’s what was happening as I was getting ready for my day and I had this epiphany in my own brain about my own transformation. That I then thought, I bet a lot of my students go through this as well. And so I wanted to share that with you today. It has to do with resilience, finding your resilience and really learning to save yourself. So let me just tell you the back story.

So I’ve had a really hard 18 months for many reasons. And I am going to share more of that in the future. I’m working on creating a safety inside of me to be able to share public failures, criticisms, things I’ve really been working on behind the scenes and mostly really painful operational issues that don’t feel like the execution is matching the level of coaching I do and how I show up in the world. And so it’s just been a really hard 18 months for me.

And I’ve noticed throughout the 18 months my resistance to doing the work, being the one to do the work. As the CEO at the $10 million level, I have a lot of executives and people on my team that I’ve really wanted to delegate that work out to and then been very frustrated when I don’t get the result that I want. I’ve also thought about coaches who I thought could help me and I have always not pulled the trigger. And then it’s felt like just the most incredibly hard 18 months.

And I’ve found myself saying a lot, “I don’t have the energy for this. I can’t put the time into this. I have a new baby.” There were just so many circumstantial reasons that made it hard and made me not want to do the work and made me want to delegate it out. And the last 18 months have really been me piece by piece showing up a little more each day to be the one to do that work. So that’s kind of a back story.

And then where I’m at now, which is kind of the after point. I’ve been spending a lot of money on investments in my business and I just re-up with a coach, hired a new coach. But I also have just invested in a couple of programs. And I also have another coach that I’m also thinking of hiring.

And it’s really come after a long period of, I’ve always been paying for coaching and I always get coaching but not coaching on the exact things that have been the pain points, more just my regular standard business coaching, my regular standard life coaching. Not the very specific things that I’m like, “I could really use help on this.”

So I’ve been pulling the trigger and I realized I was thinking about why, why has it been easy for me to pull the trigger in a period of time where I have felt so frozen. And I realized that the entire time I’ve been thinking of the different things that I could invest in as I really think this could save me or could this be the thing that saves me or could this be the thing that saves me from having to do all this work that I don’t want to do?

And there’s this inherent kind of behind that, will the program do the work for me, will the coach do the work for me? I’m just looking for this way out of having to do the work. And then what I noticed is when that’s the place, the energy that I’m coming from with a big investment, when the power of saving of this, who’s going to be the savior is not myself.

When it’s someone else, when the program or the mastermind or the coach is going to be the thing that’s ‘saving me’, the person, the other thing outside of me. When it’s anything outside of me then there’s no way to know if that’s going to work because it’s so dependent on outside factors and outside people. It’s so up in the air, out of my hands, out of my control and intangible. And so it makes sense to me why then all of a sudden the investment felt really high and really scary.

And for me, it’s mostly just how much time I have to do another coaching call or I have to show up for another thing. But there was even some money, I had for 18 months kind of thrown money at hiring people and bringing experts in to try to again, solve this problem. And I was seeing that it wasn’t working out. And there’s the money, the time, the energy, just in general how you start feeling when you do a bunch of things and don’t get the result you want. There’s all of that tied into it.

And it’s all coming from this idea that I don’t want to be the one to do the work. I don’t even know how to describe this because I feel I do so much work. I don’t want you to think what I might be telling you is you could be doing this too or you’re just not doing the work. It’s not that. You’re doing so much work already that you feel at capacity for anything else you can take on. And so it would just be really nice if you could delegate out what’s beyond what you feel is your current capacity. So that’s the best way for me to describe it.

And because of that, it’s made it very, very, very hard to move forward because I don’t want to invest time, money or effort. And I don’t really want to do the work. So I need to find that perfect thing or that perfect person that will either be able to do the work for me or be able to laser in on the perfect solution so that I can just go execute it and it works the very first time. So it’s very un-useful thinking, all of it.

And I’ve really worked on just being willing to say, “Okay, let’s get honest. You love this business. You love your clients. You have so much money.” I could literally just not work next year. And I don’t say that to brag. I say that to say I’ve had to really get clear and so many of you, you have savings, you have retirement accounts, you have a full-time job. You don’t have to show up to sign a client. So I’ve had to get really clear on why do I keep fighting myself then.

I keep trying to move forward but then there’s something in the back of my head that’s like, I don’t really want to do the work. And so I’ve had to resolve that in me. And every day I’ve had to get very clear on my reasons why to move forward and really grow my belief and my capacity to take on more. Can we just talk about the Starbucks book again? I feel like you guys are going to read this book. I’ve mentioned it several times on the podcast, but so many times in my communities that I’m not sure where I’ve talked about it now and who I’ve talked about it with.

I’ve read this book, Onward, by Howard Schultz, the owner of Starbucks, bringing back the company that started to fail in 2007, and dip below profitability and really suffer in their operations and then the recession hit of 2008. And it was just a book about his two years of climbing back up. You might read it and not have the same level of transformation that I’ve had but it’s really been transformative for me.

And one of the main things, there’s been so many reasons that it’s been transformative and maybe I’ll do a whole separate episode on the key takeaways for me that I think could be useful for you in case you don’t want to read the book. But one of the key major things has been almost in him walking through him showing up. He came back. He wasn’t even the CEO. And I don’t remember the title, but he was just sitting on the board or a chairman or something. It was just he wasn’t running the company and he had a very cush role, almost advisory.

And so to come back and take on CEO was a lot. It was a big, big, big, big takeaway in the amount of travel and the amount of just work that it required. And the book is really him walking through his own thoughts and his own why really of deciding to pick up this heavy load and do something with it. And it’s really inched me into my willingness to do it.

And it’s also helped me find my own transformation agenda in the key areas in my business that I think are the biggest payoffs for what we can do moving forward to grow as a company and grow in a way that matches my values. And really helps me align with my mission of getting millions and millions of people coaching through helping coaches learn how to sell. And so it’s been really transformative.

But it’s really walked me into the capacity to take the project on and really spearhead it and lead it and not delegate it out and put it back in my hands. So some of the things just to give you an idea that I’m taking back on from my team is money and budget management, Facebook ad management and liaising with our Facebook ads team. I am going to be taking on working with our HR and our legal side of things and the big things. I’m going to be stepping back in, in a big way and even overseeing a lot of project management, being involved in it.

These are things that I have not been involved in, in a couple of years. And I think that the people who have been with me from the beginning, if you ask them they could probably tell that. And I don’t think that that’s a bad thing. You can’t be the one to do everything and grow and get your message out.

But one of the things that the Starbucks book taught me is also when it gets far beyond, he would walk into stores, for example, and see stores that looked nothing like he wanted them to look. And he talks about, this is so funny, how much he ruminated on the smell of cheese, burnt cheese from the breakfast sandwiches. And he went to war with Starbucks over removing the breakfast sandwiches. And in a moment of losing control of himself really, he removed them. And then customers were like, “Where are the breakfast sandwiches?” And he’s like, “But the store is supposed to smell like coffee.”

And then he eventually finds his way back to sanity and they actually solved the solution of the burnt cheese. And they come out with better tasting breakfast sandwiches, which made me so happy because all the time I was like, “Oh my God, I love your breakfast sandwiches.” We get that smoked bacon and gouda or whatever it is. It’s the most popular one on the menu. It’s on this buttery croissant roll or something, we get it every time. If we go there that’s the sandwich we’re getting.

And I also love their wrap, the feta spinach wrap. And so I was like, “No, don’t get rid of the breakfast sandwiches.” But it’s something like that where he would walk into the store and see the design and the layout looking terrible, smelling like burnt cheese, selling sandwiches. And he’s like, “This is supposed to be a boutique coffee shop. It’s supposed to smell like coffee.” And so when it gets that far out of hand, it is really helpful to step back in and realign everything. And you can’t do that always, unless you’re the one doing the work.

Now, I know a lot of you might not be at that level where that’s your main thing. But I do see this a lot in my 2K for 2K and my 200K Mastermind. I see you guys wanting to delegate out, “Hey, do you guys have someone who handles all your social media? Did you know AI can write your emails for you now? Do you guys have a system for doing this?” I can just see all of the delegation. You would love to hire someone to do your sales calls for you.

You would love to have a coach make all of the decisions for you about your pricing, about your offer, your niche, what your program should be called, what your webinar title should be. You just would really love someone else to do that work. And I have said this on the podcast before. Listen, I am a big proponent, I love for people to tell me what to do, who have more success and more experience than me to help guide me.

And I don’t care how I get to the finish line of helping millions of people get coaching by helping hundreds of thousands of coaches sign clients and go help them. As long as it matches my values, as long as it still feels like my dream and my vision. But the little details don’t matter as much to me. I’m just so bought in to the end result.

I really got to that place after reading Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game. And he talks a lot about really being more anchored to your long term vision than your short term one. I don’t care as much about how you get there in the long term as long as it matches those specific things. But one of the things that I love is to have someone point me in faster directions. I’m not going to argue a lot. I’m not going to resist, even if it’s uncomfortable.

If you tell me this is a faster direction to helping millions of people get coaching, by helping coaches learn to sell and this matches your values or if you just change some thinking it would align with your values. Then I’m all in. I’m open to expanding my thinking about my values. I’m open to a lot of things that get me to that end result. And I still want it to have that flavor of me. So that’s really what I mean by stepping in.

And I do think that you guys can use what I’m talking about here to just notice when you want a silver bullet quick fix to get you out of having to do something you really don’t want to learn how to do or you don’t want to be the one doing. Because you think you’re at your capacity, because you don’t think you have the time. If you have a full-time job and kids and you’re like, “Listen, I can’t do all these consults, so I’m going to hire a salesperson”, or whatever version of it is.

I’m going to hire a social media person to manage my social media, whatever it is. Just notice if the energy behind it is, I just don’t want to do this, I want to abdicate it out. That has been happening with me, I think unconsciously a lot over the last 18 months of I just don’t want to deal with it. I have so much already on my plate. And I also mentioned we’re going to talk about resilience. Is there something about picking yourself back up, having the energy to do that, especially after many fails.

So there’s delegating out. And wanting someone else to save you from having to do something you don’t really want to do. And then sometimes you have to do that at the same time as picking yourself up after major fails. And when you have those two happening together it can lead to a situation where you really, really, really, really want to freeze and not move forward and not do the work. And so that’s really been I feel like the last 12 months of what I’ve been doing is finding the resilience after major fails, some of them publicly.

Again, I may start opening up and kind of talking about more of those later, but really hearing people’s criticism, fixing things. Identifying where in my messaging, that people are misunderstanding me, misunderstanding what I’m conveying. And making it means something dramatically different than what I mean, those kinds of things. To pick yourself back up after that, it takes so much energy. And when you are really thinking, the only way to do this, to find my resilience again, get going again is outside of me, it will just be a very, very painful time. Ask me how I know.

So I have realized that I’m stepping into I’m going to save myself. I have the resilience inside of me, it’s there. I know the first steps to take in moving forward. And I am going to fully own the responsibility of taking that action and moving forward. And what it’s done is it’s created inside of me, such a belief in my own responsibility, resourcefulness, resilience, my own capacity to deliver for myself. I’m investing more and I’m taking more action than ever before and I’m learning more.

I’ve had so many business books that I’ve been wanting to read over the last 18 months, just sitting, sitting, didn’t even want to look at them. And now I’m blowing through them. I was reading three different ones at the same time as I was reading the Starbucks one, and I’m just finishing them one after the other. And I’m so excited to dive into the next one and then the next one.

And I just think when you know in your brain, you trust yourself, I’m going to make use of this, whether it’s the book, the program, the coaching, whatever it is, I’m going to make use of this. It’s not just going to be an energetic waste of time. It’s not going to just be something I consume, but I’m actually going to go after it. I have the ability to pick myself up again. I have the ability to recover from any past fails, and no one’s coming to save me but me. You will actually feel more confident to take action for yourself, more confident to invest in yourself, more confident to just show up even for the free stuff.

I just signed up for something free. It’s a five day training. And normally I’d be like, “I don’t have time for that.” But I believe I have time for it now because I know I’m going to show up for it and I’m going to do something with it. I’ve just seen a lot of people this year alongside myself in kind of freeze mode for various different reasons. There’s lots of circumstances in their life. They’re like, “Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen with this and it feels really heavy, so I don’t think I can move forward. I don’t trust myself to move forward in this area over here.”

I don’t want to give examples because there’s just so many. But I want you to just think about where you’re doing that in so many different ways. But the thought has to be, no matter what the circumstances are, no matter what happens over here, this is how I’m going to show up to it. And this is what I’m going to do for myself. This is how I’m going to move forward. This is my plan and I’m going to create 100 more if I have to over the years as I move forward or five more for this very specific situation. I’m going to give myself many attempts.

I’m going to keep going and the only person that is going to save me is me. That doesn’t mean I can’t engage and invest and get help, whatever it is, show up to free things, read the books. I’m going to do those things because I trust that my time will be well spent. I trust that I’m not looking for things outside of me. I’m coming to the table to collect and create more things inside of me, to move myself forward.

I hope that I’ve explained this in a way that really resonates. If you’ve been looking at investments that you can make in your business or if you’ve been sitting on books on your shelves, if you’ve not been showing up to trainings. If you’ve not been seeking help, listening to podcasts, if you’ve not been formulating plans, if you’ve not been evaluating, if you’ve not been looking at what’s in your control. If you’ve not been working on growing your capacity to believe that you can be the one to fix it.

If you haven’t found the resilience to pick yourself back up. That’s what you’ve got to do. That will make you capable of moving forward. I promise, no matter how big and hard and deep the problem feels, your ability to get the energy to get back up and try again and learn more things and grow is all dependent on your belief, in your decision to save yourself and not put it in the hands of anyone else, not abdicate, not delegate.

But say, “I’m taking this on. It’s a bigger challenge than I anticipated. It’s a bigger challenge than I ever saw or that I’ve ever done before. It’s a bigger ask of myself than I’ve ever asked before, and I’m going to work on believing that’s inside of me.” And I think all of you know that, so many of you know, not all of you, so many of you know that’s true because you’ve had children.

My husband I sit around and joke all the time about the shit we used to do before we had kids, we’re like, “What?” I mean how much time did we have? You don’t think you have capacity for more. And even now we talk about it with wanting to have another baby in the future. And we’re like, “Can you imagine if there’s two of them. It’s not easy. Where are we going to get the time?” But you’ll find it.

So something I’ve been practicing thinking in my business and my personal life is that I have an unlimited internal capacity. Breathe into that. Say that out loud if you need to. Say it in your mind in a way that you really pause, not as an affirmation or a mantra, but you actually pause to feel that in your body and believe yourself when you say it. Or if you can’t get there. Try on it’s possible that I have an unlimited internal capacity, I do, it’s inside of me. I’m not always tapped into it. I don’t always have to be tapped into it.

I don’t have to be upset with myself if I’m not able to be tapped into it. I’m struggling to get tapped into it in the moment. For 18 months where I’m not able to find it, it’s always there. And any time I decide to pick it back up, tap into it, lean into it, be with it, it’s there. It’s waiting for me. My unlimited internal capacity is there. Let’s go, you all, come with me. Come with me to save yourself, find your resilience. It doesn’t matter how hard this year has been and for why, for all the different things.

I want to call you in to say, have an unlimited capacity, you can do this. You can be the one to take charge. What is the saying, to take the bull by the horns. You can do this. You can use people, coaches, programs, peers, books, podcasts, free trainings. You can use all of that to support you and for you, but you’re going to be the one to do the work. And when you believe that, you will feel more confident than ever to make big decisions and get started.

Have an amazing week. I love you all so much. I’ll talk to you later, bye bye.

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program where you’re going to make your first 2,000 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.