Ep #211: Hustle Shame

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 211. So today, we’re going to talk about hustle shame. I think this is an important topic as it’s typical this time of year, the beginning of the year. And at the end of the year, we do this too, we tend to hustle the most. And we do this because we try to believe at the beginning of the year that we’re going to accomplish our end-of-year goal by getting out of the gate and working really hard and making a lot of money right away so that we can try to believe that we’re going to make the money. And what ends up happening is we burn ourselves out by the middle of the year and then we take too much time off or slow down really far and stop working and then we finally get ourselves energized to do it all over again and then we hustle through the end of the year to try to make up for the time and then hit our goal. Sound about right? And I don’t want you to do that this year. So I want to talk about it for this reason. Now, I do want you to do hard work so I’m going to record a separate episode on the difference between hustle and hard work, okay, because I think you guys get those confused and you make hustle mean that you can’t work at all or that you can’t work hard and you are constantly pulling back okay. So I’m going to do an episode on that, but this episode I wanted to be dedicated to hustle shame, right? Because it’s really, for a couple of reasons, it’s really hard to work on hustle if you have so much shame around it. But really, the main reason I wanted to talk about it is what I’ve noticed is that hustle shame, its biggest negative impact and I mean bigger impact than what it actually creates in your business – that cycle of hustling and then breaking and then hustling and then breaking and then never hitting your goal – its actual biggest negative impact is how it affects the relationship between the business coach and the client. And especially with my higher revenue clients, but it really happens at all levels of revenue, is that I try to coach my students out of hustle because I’ve been there and I’ve done that and I’m on the other side and I know how much freedom is on the other side. But when I do it, it sometimes backfires on me and makes me the bad guy and you know, I find myself constantly having to apologize before I give the coaching on hustle because I just know it’s not going to be received well and how sensitive people are around it and what it brings up for people. Especially after the coaching, they’ll get really amazing coaching from me and then they ghost and it will come back like how angry they’ve been at me and they’ve been stewing for months, right? So I’ve just seen this in the 2k room. I’ve seen this in the 200k room. I’ve seen this in the $2 million group room. I’ve seen this at every level. I’ve noticed I’ve given me a complex – I’m not going to have that anymore once we do this episode – but I really have noticed it’s made me kind of tiptoe around coaching around this. I just don’t want to do that anymore. And I believe that the reaction my clients have, I’ve just been thinking a lot about what is that reaction about and I believe it’s the shame we have around hustle. So we’re really going to spend some time on that. But I first want to just define a few things. So hustle shame is shame that we create around hustling either because we’ve been told as life coaches that hustling is bad, and we’re not using our brains properly or because it creates negative results in our businesses and our lives or both of those things, right? We’ve heard it’s bad and we know it’s creating negative results in our lives, right? So we’re like, “I’m doing it wrong” and that we have so much shame around it. Okay, so that’s what hustle shame is. And now let’s define hustle because I do think that a lot of you don’t think you’re hustling and would never even have this problem because you sell yourself – again because there’s so much shame around it – so hard that what you’re doing is actually just great customer service and just serving your clients at the highest level rather than hustling and not having boundaries between your life and your business. Okay, so number one, when you’re thinking about hustle, hustle has to do with how it feels overall. If you were being super, super honest and aware and it comes from feelings of urgency and insufficiency, lack, unworthiness, inadequacy, right there, it just always comes along with a side of fear, right? So a negative emotion happens from a thought or thoughts in your brain and then hustle is what you do to solve. So for example, if you have the thought, “The leads might dry up” right? If that’s your thought, the feeling is urgency and lack and then you hustle to sell more to scoop the leads up before they do dry up as if that is the truth of what is going to happen. Okay, now, the second way the hustle shows up or that shows us what hustle is, is we also hustle when we don’t believe something, so we try and take action quickly to get the results to try and believe, right, which is what we do at the beginning of the year. So I’m going to work, like go out of the gate, and just work myself into the ground to try to make money as fast as possible so that I can believe that I can get to my goal at the end of the year. And listen, I have lots of experience in both. So this happens, I think, because of how our brains are wired and also just how society has taught us to be. But what I’ve noticed is that I have a thought that when we change hustle in our life and we get control over it, that we are just being exceptional, like it’s an exceptional thing to change how your brains are wired and how society has taught you to be, we’re overriding our brain’s way of wanting to do things or even just like reprogramming our entire system to operate differently. And I think it’s really hard work, I think it’s, again, exceptional work. So anyone who is willing to try and work on it, who works on it, who gets to the other side, I just think it’s an exceptional thing to do. And so when people are in the hustle, I also recognize that difficulty in dealing with it and having the results that come with it and how you are really just in how your brain is wired and how society has taught you to be. There’s nothing wrong with you, you’re just operating the way everybody does. And so I have so much compassion around it for myself and for other people. So I have a lot of hustle compassion now, where I am now, and I really want to spread that around to you, my listener, to my clients, to the industry, because I think this way of looking at it is important. And it keeps me out of having shame around my hustle. And because of that, it has benefited me greatly in my own coachability and in my coaching and in my business and in working through the times where I’m in it, right? So I said that this has shown up a lot with my clients and I’ve really thought about every program I’ve offered, in all the situations that’s shown up and I’ve really boiled them down to five really big ways that this shows up in your coaching or when you’re being coached or when you’re coaching yourself. If you have a lot of intense shame around hustling, number one, you will discredit the money you made while hustling. Discredit your accomplishments. And really, what you’re doing is discrediting you, right? I had a client once that made a lot of money, but she hustled to get it. And she didn’t even realize she was hustling until I pointed it out to her and until she realized she wanted to do something super dramatic in her life just to give her permission to rest and not make money. And when we uncovered it in my container, her first thought was that knowing she hustled to create the money made her feel like she couldn’t be proud of that money. And I also think that a big part of it was – in not being willing to even look at it or uncover it in our container – is she also, I think, thought that I wouldn’t be proud of her or that her peers wouldn’t be proud of her and in general, I think this is a thought error. I want to offer to all of you, you can be proud of all the money you make, you can even be proud of yourself if you don’t make money, it’s always a choice when we make a lot of money at our company, like in my company, and it creates a negative impact or it’s messy. We just say, “Okay, let’s do it again cleaner.” It’s what a non-growth year is. We’re going to make the same amount of money. Like, we’re going to still sell, say, $10 million of coaching but we’re going to do it again cleaner, right? So I just let it get – it gets to be messy. It gets to be hustle-y. It gets to be harder than it should be the first time around or even the third time around. And then you get to be proud no matter what and then you get to decide simply if you just want to clean it up, that’s it. But if you hustled to make the money you’ve made, no one’s not going to be proud of you. Your coach is not going to not be proud of you. Your peers are not going to be not proud of you, so you don’t need to hide from it for that reason. If you uncover and you come to, let’s say, “I made 500k last year, but I hustled myself into the ground to get it. I didn’t like it here, all the negative impacts.” We’re going to be like, great. Well, first of all, congratulations, you made $500,000, fucking amazing. And now, let me help you do it again cleaner because you want to do that cleaner, right? That’s it. Everyone is still going to be proud of you and you get to be proud of you too. It’s still an accomplishment, even if it came from hustle. Okay, so that’s a big way that I’ve seen it show up. The second way is if your coach is the one who helps you uncover the hustle and then offers to coach you in unwinding it. If you’re experiencing intense shame around the hustle, your brain will offer that your coach is wrong about your hustle and that your coach is trying to get you to underearn and that your coach is jealous of you and your success and that your coach wants you to slow down and make you smaller than you really are. And your coach doesn’t like you and your coach doesn’t want you to succeed as much as other people. That last is how it showed up for me. I was like, my coach doesn’t like me, she doesn’t want me to succeed as much as Jody Moore. That was my first round of mastermind. I’m like, there are other people who are calmer than me and she likes them more than me and I’m not calm and I’m not as good as these people, right? It’s stuff like that. Our brains do really weird things. Listen, I love you, Jody. I’m not comparing. It’s really easy to love people when you’re not comparing yourself to them anymore, by the way. Alright, just a little show up like that and you’ll take the coaching like really like as an attack on you, which is very fascinating to me. It’s not an attack on you. And then the third way that it will show up is – this is another interesting way – you guys are going to, some of you, are going to be like, “Oh my God, it really does.” And some of you like really – it’s really wild. I’ve used lots of examples of true things – not making this up. Okay, so number three is, if your coach coaches you to increase your goal and go for something big and you can’t figure out how to do it without hustle and then you resist or feel shame around that, again, in order to relieve that feeling of shame, your brain will offer that your coach wants you to hustle, teaches you unhealthy business practices, must be hustling herself, expects an unhealthy level of work or operating, or just doesn’t get you in your life. And then if you don’t hit your goal after all of this, then your coach is trying to get you to underearn because they want you to fail at your really big goals. Now, see how it makes the business coach in a lose-lose situation? If I coach you to slow down, I want you to underearn. If I coach you to speed up, and you fail, it’s because I want you to underearn. What? What’s happening, right? Our brains do crazy things. These are actual scenarios over the years of my business and all of my programs, right? And that’s all. And I will also say I have gotten coaching from friends on coaching, I’ve been given – so I get coaching and then I go talk to my friends about it and they will also be like, “Oh, I don’t know, that feels really hustle-y. You don’t need to hustle the same way your coach is hustling.” And I’m like, wait, what? I don’t know, I don’t think that they are hustling, right? If the answer is you’ve been given coaching to hustle, you’ve likely just misunderstood the coaching, that’s always my thought. If I think I’m being instructed to hustle, I’m like, oh, I’ve misunderstood this. But I’ve seen a lot of people interpret being asked to do something that you don’t know how to do without overworking, to accomplish something that you don’t know how to do without overworking, or pointing out the overworking that both of those are because the coach has an intention for you to underearn. It just doesn’t benefit any business coach ever in the entire industry for you to underearn, ever. Okay, alright, so the fourth way it’ll show up is you make people better than you who don’t hustle. If you know they don’t hustle, then you make them better. You put them on a pedestal, you decide they’re just better than you, that people think they’re better than you. That’s typically how it shows up, right? And you suddenly decide – this is very, hear me when I say this because it’s very toxic for yourself. I hate the word toxic, but it’s not a great way to go about self-coaching. Let’s just say that is what happens is, when you make people better than you who don’t hustle, you decide you will be a more worthy human being once you stop hustling. Which will just fuel the shame and the cycle of how you react to the shame because there’s so much intensity around it. You put your worthiness as a human being on the line of figuring out how to not hustle or on hustling or not. It’s a lot. If your worthiness as a human being is on the line, people who are not hustling are not better people than you listen. I know coaches who are making a lot more money than me, or who could make a lot more money than me because they work more than me and I’m not even saying they’re hustling, I’m just saying they actually work more hours, right? I work three days a week, they work five days a week. I’ve thought a lot about this as, when I look back on how much money I’ve made in the last three years and what I probably could have made if I wanted to be in a different league, and I always take it back to, yes, I really do want to make that money and I also didn’t want to work more than three days a week. So there are people who actually did put out more value and do more work than me. I just didn’t want to work more than three days a week. That doesn’t mean that I’m better than them and it doesn’t mean they’re better than me, right? I just know that for me, I don’t want to do that, and so whatever everybody else is doing, just doesn’t even matter to me, it’s what I’m doing, right? And I also want to offer that if you work five days a week, there’s just no experience that you have in your business that like, lines us up in order as coaches of who’s better than who, alright? So just notice if your brain takes you there, if your brain is like making you less than your coach because you don’t operate the same way yet. Okay. The fifth way that it shows up and this one is like, an interesting one. I almost didn’t include it, but because it’s come up so many times, I’m going to include it. Okay. This one’s not really like hustle shame per se, it’s like more like it’s a reaction to the resentment you feel when your coach won’t hustle for you, but you are hustling for your clients, right? So you’re hustling, it feels bad; your coach won’t reciprocate in treating you the way you treat your clients and you get really angry at them. You want them to behave how you behave, but you don’t even love how you behave. But it only feels fair. And when they don’t behave the way you behave, it’s like that’s when the shame comes up and then I don’t even know if it’s, I feel like it happens so fast, likely what happens is these coaches don’t even see it and then they just go straight towards the resentment instead of being with their work, they go into like what somebody else needs to change and how somebody else is wrong, right? It’s so much easier to point out how someone else is wrong than to point out how we’re wrong or what’s wrong with us, right? And so I have to point out, I’m feeling shame about my hustle because I just realized that my coach doesn’t do something I do. Now I’m going to just turn it around on them and they’re just not treating me at the same level of excellence that I treat my clients. This has really shown up with actually the strongest emotions I have found. I tend to evoke this response with my clients who hustled the most. They tend to be the ones who get mad at me the most for not hustling for them. I’ve just seen it all the time many, many, many, many times because I know what hustle has done for me personally, the negative impact it’s had for me in the past. I won’t do it even if it costs me money and clients. I’m willing to lose money rather than create a business built on hustle. So when I don’t respond to every post in our communities, when I don’t work sick, if I cancel something big, if I don’t celebrate every single thing my clients do when I take vacations or time off, that tends to evoke anger in my clients that hustle because they’re expecting the hustle back and instead, again, of thinking about what could be going on with them, they want to make it about me. I’ve just become this great mirror to show them all the ways that they’re hustling and they don’t like it. So then they stop liking me, right? So I had a situation once. This was, I mean, I don’t know how many years ago it’s been now, whenever I got married, I had a client who asked me, “So how will I get coaching from you when you’re at your wedding or your honeymoon? When you’re gone, how do I reach you to get coaching?” And I responded, “You won’t.” Just that. I didn’t explain myself, I didn’t over – make this person try to be like – I also believe in, when you have a business boundary, not trying to sell someone on your business boundary. You just have whatever it is – your rule or the things you do and don’t do –  and then you let your clients have their emotions about it. But this person got really angry that I didn’t give her more. That I didn’t give her apologies or offer that I’d still be on the Facebook page if she had any questions. I think that’s what she was looking for is, “Oh, no, no, if you have any questions, I’ll be on the page” or I didn’t give certain times where I’d be available for emergencies. But when you aren’t hustling for sales or approval or results for your clients, like you just don’t need to do any of that. People will still pay you if you’re not on call, especially during special moments of your life or just vacation in general, right? You don’t have to be on call for your best clients when you are willing to lose money over not being on call. I just make less I guess because I’m not on call. I actually think I make more because of that. But I’m just willing to make less, right? You can actually go on vacations and take care of yourself. But when you are not taking time off? When you’re taking time out of your vacations and out of your life events for your clients because you’re afraid they will quit or they won’t pay you, and that you think you have to like hustle for them, you expect other people to do that. And the reaction really comes from resenting that you can’t do that, right? From seeing that mirror being put up for you. No one else should get to do it if you don’t. So those are the five ways I’ve seen it come up the most and my goal with this podcast is really, number one, to educate you and make you aware of that. I want you to be aware of these things that happen in the coaching relationship, why they’re happening, and signal to you to look at the shame you might have around your hustle. And also to help you relieve the shame around the hustle just in general, right? To stop shaming your hustle, right? Because that’s the only way to work on it. It’s the only way to be coachable around it. And if you have a coach that doesn’t hustle or won’t hustle for you, it’s the only way to maintain the relationship and you keep getting what you need. The shame for you has to go. The hustle for you has to go. When you don’t hustle and your coach doesn’t hustle her. He or she’s, they’s, non-hustle-y decisions will make you feel more powerful, not less. They will make you feel excited, not scared, happy or unhappy or angry. They will make you feel like you have gotten a transformation and the breakthrough from just watching them interact versus you’ve gotten less from them than you should have, right? So the first thing I want you to understand about hustle that I think helps me not have so much shame around it is, it’s primal, its goal’s survival, self-protection, and it’s a result of how the mind operates most efficiently in protecting you. Your brain is not wired to create the life you want intentionally. It’s wired to protect you. And hustle is a result of how the world, how humans, have been taught to operate in society. So I think I mentioned that earlier, but society has been taught if you want something, take action to get it. If you want more of something, take more action to get it. And that has created a hustle society along with our primal instincts to do it in the first place and the way our brain is wired. Okay, just knowing that, I feel like if you really believe that, understood that, and recognize that in you, you could automatically already have more compassion for it now. When coaches recognize that they’re hustling and they’re not doing the five things that I’ve listed already and they actually want to work on it, what often happens is they think the answer to breaking the hustle is to stop working and it’s not. It’s to clean up your brain, your thoughts that create scarcity, insufficiency, impermanence of success and money inadequacy. All of those things that lead you to overworking, to hustling. Stopping can never fix the problem because then you only learn how to solve for overworking with the action of not working. You have to solve for it in your brain while you are working. This will also mean you will be aware of hustling and still hustling while you figure it out, especially if you are unwinding primal survival hustle which runs a little bit deeper than simply overworking to try to ensure you hit a goal because you don’t believe you can hit a goal without working more and harder. But either way, lots of coaches when they uncover this, how they will show up, whether it’s 200k or $2 million group, especially with the higher income earners is they’re going to want to quit a lot of times. They’re going to want to quit the mastermind, quit their business, coaching, cancel their goals, and just like stop working. It’s so fascinating. It’s like very all or nothing. That’s not how you fix it. It’s one decision at a time, one thought at a time while you work and press forward. One decision to do the thing that’s the most beneficial in the long term. If you’re in 200k, the one decision to do the thing that’s most beneficial in your three year plan versus the thing that gives you the short-term benefit, that’s one way. Okay. And I want to actually give you an example of this. We’re doing the 25k and 30-day challenge in 200k. And I just coached someone who is really great at creating goals in the long-term, but really has a hard time with it in the short-term. And one of the things that happens is, as this person tends to get into and I don’t even know if it’s like hustle energy as much as just like trying energy, energy that doesn’t feel like calm and assured, and it’s done. And one of the things that I told them is in their three-year plan, in the long-term of their business, when they’re looking at them being an industry titan, what benefits them the most? Because they were worried about, “I don’t even have a 25k and 30-day goal. I don’t have the intention of making money this month.” But I told them, one of the things that would make them an industry titan in the type of coaching they do is that they figured out how to teach what they teach and they figured out how to teach it in the short-term, which is really interesting. Their long term plan is to figure out how to do something in the short term. But that’s how, when you do the thing that’s best for your business in the long-term, I don’t think you could ever be in hustle, right? So you just do that one decision at a time. And then the other way that you overcome hustle is by addressing the thoughts that you have to create hustling for you that have you hustling, right? So, “It’s going to dry up.” But in order to do this, bringing this back to the topic at hand, you have to embrace the hustle shame. You have to be intimate with that truth. “I’m hustling and I’m working on it.” “I feel inadequate and it has me overworking to prove something.” “I’m comparing and competing and hustling to stay ahead because I’m afraid that I’m not as good as this other person or other people.” “I’m aware, I see it.” And then bringing understanding and compassion that will allow you to be with it long enough to actually release it permanently or for a long time until it rears its head again right. Not hiding it, projecting it onto your coach, making the coaching wrong, making the coach wrong, making your peers wrong, which is how I look. I see a lot of people try to get past it. This happened to one of our students in $2 million dollar group once and it was so fascinating for me to watch. Often it’s happening with me, but in this instance, it was like really watching someone shut down so hard and be completely unwilling to let their peers who saw it all help. Right at the million dollar level, peer after peer after peer was trying so hard and they wanted none of it. And this particular time, the flavor of hustle that it was, of competing and comparing, and they were comparing themselves to me and listen, let me just say not because I’m special. I’m just the person their brain latched onto from a belief of not being enough. I was the particular vehicle. Their brain chose. It really had nothing to do with me. But my student posted all these thoughts that led them to hustling so hard and wasn’t open to coaching on any of them. And then immediately moved on and then ultimately quit and I wanted to help so bad but they had already reached the point of making me wrong and their peers wrong and the coaching wrong. And what I saw as the coach was them not being able to sit for long periods of time with those thoughts and really be with them long enough to actually release them. That’s really what I was watching happen because the shame was just so much, so great. Especially for those of you who are business coaches. I think it really triggers you all the most. You are trying to be an example of what’s possible in business so if you do shame, if you do hustle, you shame yourself a lot for it and then you hide from it a lot and then you project it a lot and I’ve seen this, listen, at every level. I’ve seen it in 200k… and I want to offer this one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about, which is that we often want to blame the container for our big feelings. But really, we have big feelings because we are ignoring a part of ourselves, being unwilling to sit with ourselves and the emotions that come up when other people see parts of us that we don’t like. Don’t you just want to hug someone thinking of them being in this place? If this happens to you, please hear me. No one is thinking less of you when you are feeling hustle shame when you are in the hustle cycle. We love you. We feel you, we have been there. We understand the toll it takes and the negative impact it has on your business and your life, the suffering it causes. We love you even when you are in this place. But we also love you enough to fight to show you that you are in this place and to try to help you out. It’s like you’re drowning and you get mad at us for trying to help you and pull you out. You think we’re trying to push you under further but we’re not. I promise that is the truth. But listen, no matter how you spin it, we can’t lie to you. We can’t pretend that you’re not hustling. We can’t not say it to keep you happy at us. That is Coaching 101. So we stand for you and with you and no matter how long it takes and how messy it looks for you to work your way out of it. As long as you will allow us. At least in my programs. I had this happen for me my first year in my million dollar mentoring, I was the only one, I have to emphasize that because that was my story, that was how dramatic the story was for me. I was the only one of eight people that my coach was telling to slow down. Everyone else was getting to speed up and go to millions and she was telling me, “This is not your million dollar year,” but my goal was a million dollars. And she kept telling me, “This is not your million dollar year.” And I had so many thoughts. She always says that this was the year that I spent being mad at her, I don’t actually remember that, but I believe that could be true because I also spent the year thinking she didn’t like me and thought – I don’t even know – I thought so much about how to describe how it was feeling for me because I think our brains just like the way they interact. And they interpret – it’s like the attack that they interpret the way we make the coaching mean. It’s really crazy. I can’t even describe mine but it was like she thought I was a hustler and I don’t know somehow that like translated into, she thought maybe I was trashy or from the bad part of town. That doesn’t even really describe it, but it was like I was dirty or less than right. It brought up my scrappiness and, basically, feelings of being less than the fancy rich people who didn’t need to hustle. That’s the best way I could describe it. It’s like, I’m not a good enough human because I didn’t come from fancy money and my hustle is about my poor nous and my lack of class, that’s what it is. It’s like hustle meant I wasn’t classy and I wasn’t classy like everyone else, that’s what it was. Oh my God, I just needed to say it to you guys on the podcast, that’s what it was. Okay. So, seriously, this is what I mean by our brains are crazy, “This isn’t your million dollar year.” I made that mean I’m not classy. Like what is going on with our brains? But this is really how it shows up. Now, I will also say that was also the year I realized my coach didn’t need – I released the need for her to like me and I realized that she didn’t need to like me for me to get what I came for and that I didn’t need to like her. Apparently, now listen, I love her endlessly, but sometimes when someone is showing you the parts of yourself that you have shame around, It’s hard to like them and that’s okay. I’m going to say that again, just so you can like feel it in all of your body. When someone is showing you the parts of yourself that you have shame around, it can be hard to like them in that moment, in that time period and that’s okay, but don’t make that mean more than it is and be okay with that. It’s okay that I’m not happy with my coach right now. I seriously credit my success, seriously, just me evolving as a human period the first year that I hired my first life coach. I think I’ve told this on the podcast before. I used to literally get so angry, I would like scream at her and say the meanest things to her on the phone. I’m not proud of that. But also, I like looking back. I would be, whoa, right? That’s not my most proud moment. But also I’ve released shame around it, which is why I can tell you about it. But I got hung up on a couple of times because of my behavior and that’s what I mean. And when I think back, I’m so grateful I didn’t give up on myself. I would always call back, I would or write back and be like, I’m so sorry, I would always apologize, I would always sit with what she was trying to tell me and get the transformation, I wouldn’t shy away from it and I didn’t allow myself to quit because of it. But because I’ve been there, I do know how hard it is, it’s just not the reason to quit. And at the end of my first year of million dollar mentoring, I got through that first year and my overall feeling about myself was inadequate. I made $860,000 and I felt inadequate. That was my predominant feeling. Everyone else was going around the room saying like, these lovely, fuzzy feelings, they made a million dollars. I made $140,000 less than them and I was like, “I feel inadequate.” And I was crying, like I really genuinely was suffering, but this is what’s so important. I was willing to get to know myself there and have compassion for myself and love for myself and acceptance of myself. It was very difficult, especially when everyone was seeing me in that space. People who I looked up to, people who I felt were better than me at the time. People who I wanted to be like right then, seeing me a crying, snot-coming-out-of-my-nose mess. And it’s also the year, I have to tell you, the year that I sat with myself and had compassion with myself and love for myself and acceptance of myself was also – that next year, and you guys might remember this now, but that next year, 2019, was the year I started telling people that I sold mops in Walmart, and I started saying it proudly as my selling point. I started using the pieces of myself that I hid away from people as my biggest marketing points, right? Which is so crazy if you knew how I felt about these things before. I really used to jazz up the selling mops in Walmart to my early clients. This is what I would say to them, I was like, “I do live infomercials and I’m the best in the industry and they are begging me to stay, and I really love it, and it’s not so much work so this is why I still work for them and coach you all.” That was just putting a really pretty bow on some shame, right? About me not being classy. Oh my God, that’s totally what it’s like. It all goes back to that, right? Like selling mops at Walmart’s not classy right? Now, I’m like, yeah, I used to sell mops in Walmart, you know, ShamWow, used to sell that too. And knives, you know, the ones they cut through the tin can, and then they cut through the tomato, you’ve seen the show, I used to do that in Walmart. That’s what I was doing, and now I make millions. That comes from total acceptance, right? That’s what I got out of it, of being willing to be with myself when I was hustling when everyone was telling me to slow down when I was making it mean I’m not classy, that she doesn’t like me, that other people are better than me, that I’m not good enough, that I’m inadequate. Being willing to be with myself there instead of break the mirror, which is what I see so many people do. You get so much more value for yourself. Being willing to not like the person showing you the parts of yourself that you don’t love and being willing to sit long enough to emerge proud of those things. Now, one of the other things I see is a lot of coaches who have made it to the other side of hustle, right, you finally make it onto the other side of hustle. You fear going back and sort of always have one foot on the brake just in case. Making sure constantly that you’re not hustling. And I want to offer that I think that this can be hustle shame as well. Sometimes it’s fear of ever going back to the results and the negative impact that hustling created for you in the past. But sometimes, behind that, can also be a layer of going back to the person I was when I hustled and the thoughts I had about myself when I was doing that, right? Going back to a person who wasn’t classy. And I want to offer when you let that go and you recognize that as being less of a different person than you used to be and more of just a behavior you exhibited. The hustle was not a different person you used to be. It was a different behavior you exhibited when you were feeling unsafe and you love and have compassion and understanding for that part of you who tries to solve for your safety that way, the less afraid you are of becoming that version of you again. I love that I have a part of me who, in my sense of safety, is threatened in my mind, in the world, will hustle for me to create safety. It’s the fighter in me. Some of us fight, some of us shut down and freeze, or run away. And I have really loved to have come to love the fighter in me. And listen, the fighter in me has also gotten me in a lot of trouble and has escalated situations that didn’t need to be escalated because my first instinct was to fight… and I still love that person in me. I love that I am a fighter because it’s also created a lot of positive impact in my life. It’s taken me from I think at one point I literally asked my 16-year-old brother to borrow money to pay rent and now I make – $12 million a year was what we did last year. I love that fighter in me, she helped me create 100k. And an 800k business. It wasn’t sustainable the way I wanted to keep growing. But it got me here. I love that I’m a survivor. My hustle is strong in me and my wisdom and my sufficiency and my adequacy is now also strong and I love that I am both. I understand why I am both. I get me, I get how I operate. I know that when and if I ever create negative impact in my life or business from hustling trying to get to 30 million or 50 million or 200 million, I trust my wise, adequate self to get the coaching I need to solve for and fix it so I’m not at war with myself or the people who show me my hustle because I’m not afraid of the hustle. It’s not a permanent state. It’s an impermanent behavior caused by a passing thought that I latched onto or a passing lack of belief in a current goal I’m trying to achieve and it will pass because I always work on my awareness, my acceptance, and my intention to change. That’s it. My friends, hustle is not a dirty little secret you have. It’s a simple business problem to solve for that all business owners face and the obstacle is the way. And please listen, don’t shoot the messenger. Love the messenger, they are on your side. They see you as complete, even if you never work on it. And they don’t want you to unnecessarily hustle. I don’t want you to unnecessarily hustle and suffer. And I don’t want you to get to millions of dollars and still be hustling. Your life will be very difficult. You will have to do a lot of work to make it seem really amazing. But it won’t be on the inside. It will be a little hollow. And I don’t want that for you. I want you to make millions and it be like nothing you ever imagined in the greatest experience of your life, even when and especially when you are alone with yourself and your own mind. Okay, listen, I never want to stop fighting for you, all of you, to have a business without hustle. A business that is extremely healthy. I am on your side. I promise I want you to make lots of money. It only makes me look good, right? But it doesn’t make me look good if you all are always burning out and graspy and miserable. I want you guys to have it all to be examples of what’s possible. Of $12 million in three days a week and super calm if that’s what you want or $20 million in five days a week. Whatever you want. I want you to be an example of that and be so calm and so adequate and so sufficient and not afraid at all of those leads drying up so that you can actually take a maternity leave and leave your business for three months and be with your family. So you can actually take that road trip or that trip across Europe you’ve always wanted to do so that you can be present with the people that are visiting you at your house. I want you to have it all. And I know I’m not a special snowflake and anyone can have it. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again – you can have the three day work week, you can have vacations that don’t involve bringing a laptop, you can take a month off, two months off, three months off. Not from being overworked but because you wanted to do something that you’ve dreamed about your whole life and you’ve created a company and a mind that allows you to do it. You can take time off and your clients will still be taken care of. You cannot take calls past your business hours, you cannot interrupt your dinner, not interrupt your evening routine, not interrupt you watching tv even. You can teach your clients to be guided by you without being dependent on you. You can sell out launches without being exhausted but you’re going to have to meet your hustle. Know it well. Make friends with it and learn from it. It’s the only way you have to let go of the hustle shame. Alright, have an amazing week. I love you all. Happy New Year again. 2023. Let’s go. 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.