Ep #343: Investing Shame, Blame, and Regret

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 343. Today, we’re going to talk about investment shame, blame, and regret. So this was one of the topics in the ROI, Return on Investment, Entrepreneur Series course that we just finished up. And it was one of the most powerful calls that we had. We actually talked about this over our final two calls. And I wanted to share some of the things I taught the students and some of the coaching that I gave the students that I wanted to really just pass on to everyone, even if you, you know, didn’t join the course. I think everyone needs to hear this message.

And I delivered it very differently in the ROI training, the energy, the way I was able to build up and lay out the foundation was really beautiful, and it was a very loving, compassionate message. And this one, I want it to be a little more empowered and a little stronger, also for the students that were in that course, to have like another take at this.

So, this is what we’re going to dive into today. So here’s one of the things that I shared with my students that I think you need to know. Shame, when it comes to anything, but we’re going to have this conversation around investing, shame keeps us from wisdom. We trade wisdom for shame. We don’t realize we’re doing that, but that is what happens when we allow ourselves to feel shame, then we aren’t open to the wisdom that we could learn and the value that we could extract from the thing that’s creating the shame.

And blame keeps us from responsibility and empowerment. And one of the things I always say when it comes to responsibility is the definition that I love to think about is the ability to respond to any situation or the ability to respond in any situation. So it’s not, “it’s my fault.” It’s, “if I take responsibility, then I have the ability to respond in any situation with what I’m going to do, how I’m going to react, how I’m going to move forward, the value I’m going to extract from something, the empowerment I’m going to choose to step up into.”

And blame keeps us from that. It keeps us disempowered and not responsible. So we also miss the wisdom from blame. And regret really keeps us stuck in the past, wishing to change it, but without the energy to actually make the change because regret feels so heavy that we don’t have any energy to even do anything about it. We just spin in our head, thinking about wishing we could change the past, and why did we do that, and shoulding ourselves and shaming ourselves on top of the regret. And really, it has us very past-focused and in our emotional world. Like our emotions get stuck in that past experience that we created regret with.

Instead of getting the wisdom by taking the responsibility and the empowerment and then gaining energy to be able to actually utilize the value that you learn from every situation that goes unexpected to make a change, including every investment that you make. So, having investment shame blocks your wisdom from learning anything from that investment. The blame keeps you from being responsible and empowered and learning for you how to be a better investor and how to respond to any situation as an investor, and regret keeps you fearing bad investments and in the emotion of not getting what you wanted from the investment, and then not really having the energy to be able to learn and grow as an investor and then go create bigger returns in the future with new investments.

So the biggest ones that we coached on were shame and regret. Those are the ones as people came up to be coached, those are the two emotions that typically my students presented with. They presented with shame for money spent without a return, shame for leaving a full-time job, and expecting to make money or replace their income faster. Shame for not being able to support their family with their business. Shame for lifestyles having to be simplified because they aren’t making as much money as they expected or that they didn’t make enough money back from investments, enough profit on top of investments to also live the lifestyle they want to live and invest in their business.

Shame for being stuck on the same issue in investing for a long time, like buying coaching over and over and over to solve a thing that never gets solved. Shame for failure, for not getting returns, for not learning the lessons, for not implementing things that you purchased. Regret for investment decisions with coaches, regret for over investing, buying too many things, and regret for expecting the investment to do the work, and realizing that after the fact, and not getting the return.

They also presented with regret for not stewarding their money wiser, for not showing up to investments, for not using their time wisely in investments, for not doing the work. But remember, shame and regret keep you stuck in the emotion of what happened without the power to learn from it and do something about it. They let us indulge in self-loathing rather than self-compassion, and again, responsibility and empowerment. They keep us hidden instead of visible.

Shame and regret also leave you trying to change the past in your mind or feeling so bad about what happened so that you don’t repeat it in the future. It’s like, let me make myself feel so terrible because that I need to feel this terrible to learn not to repeat it. But then we get stuck in the feeling that terrible, and it doesn’t have you focused on creating for the future. You can literally drown yourself in shame until you become invisible.

Or you can extract value from the lesson that the shame and the regret is here to teach you. And you can move forward empowered and wiser than before. Questions you can ask yourself are, what’s here for me to learn? What’s the wisdom that I can gain here? How can I extract value from this experience? Good or bad, how can I extract value as an investor from this experience? What can I learn about myself as an investor here?

And really dive in. There’s a lot that can be learned here that can empower you to move forward instead of having you feel stuck in the shame and in the regret. And there’s a lot of possible lessons that you can learn from these questions and from this shame and this regret and all the different ways that it shows up. But a few of them that I offered to my students through our Facebook community and coaching on the posts, and through the coaching that happened on the calls, and through the teaching.

One of them is that the lesson sometimes that we need to learn is that we have growth entitlement. So we make our best guess, our best theory for how long it will take to create a business and make steady money or replace income, and we decide that’s how it should be. That’s the right answer. And then we feel entitled to that result in that time frame. And how we know we feel entitled is that we think something has gone wrong when it doesn’t work out that way.

We shame ourselves for not doing it in our arbitrary timeline that we chose that is often missing the wisdom of what it really takes to make it. Like, I thought I was going to leave my job. I got certified in March of 2015 and I thought I would leave my job by June. That was my expectation. That was my entitlement. I didn’t leave until the following September. That was the real wisdom of what it took to make my business work and to create $100,000.

And then in our upset and shame, we take ourselves out of learning and responsibility, and doing the hard work. And we spend time instead being defeated instead of triumphing. Right? You spend your time worrying instead of theorizing and evaluating. This is the biggest one. Of everybody I spoke to, they’re spending their time in the shame and the regret and the blame and the worry instead of their time spent theorizing and evaluating and going again. And that is what it takes to be successful.

I don’t care how you get there. You’ve got to get there. If you want to be successful, you have to be in the cycle of theorizing. What are my top three theories as to why this didn’t work? That doesn’t include somebody else, that doesn’t include blame, that allows me to be responsible and empowered. What are my top three theories of what I did, how I showed up, why I didn’t get what I came for? What worked? What didn’t work? What am I going to do differently? And then going again, and again, and again, and learning from each and every single thing we do and every single investment we make.

But instead, you spend time fighting against what is right now in this moment, instead of creating what could be from the lessons, from the wisdom, from the empowerment, from the responsibility. And you really do need 100% of your energy going to figure out what is working and what isn’t working and what you need to do differently. You need 100% of your energy in creating new beliefs and new skill sets in marketing and selling your offer, in getting results for yourself and then for your clients.

So all of the shame and the regret is just it’s sucking all of your time and your energy and making you think the business doesn’t work when really the emotions aren’t working to create the business. And the truth is, your biggest source of shame may be coming from a thought error. I saw this one a lot. My students believe their business should be supporting their family, paying their bills. And before $100,000, it absolutely should not be. And I know that’s a truth that maybe you don’t want to hear.

And really, even before $200k, I wouldn’t be expecting too much of it. I think it takes $200k to live well now in this current world, in this current economy, and invest in your business to grow it, pay your taxes. That’s what it takes. So I would have the goal of $200k or go home. Like, honestly. If you had someone else, you know, working and you didn’t require of your business, if it was like a side business, of course, you could make $40k, $60k, $100k and be very, very happy. But to actually like pay your family’s bills, and especially depending on where you live, you want to get to $200k as fast as possible because that’s where it can really start doing that.

Maybe even $300k. Again, can you live off of it beforehand? Yes. You can live off your business at $100k, before $100k, but will it be at the expense of not growing as fast and making more money in the future? Likely. Which is why I kept my full-time job until I made $100k. And even then, after I left my job at $100k, it was dicey between $100k and $300k to invest in my business in the way that I wanted to, to grow it as fast as I wanted to grow, to go where I was going and also pay my own bills. And it was just me. I didn’t have kids, I didn’t have a family. It was just me.

So if you try to live off of it beforehand, and I understand some people do end up in situations where they have to. And if you are that person, then you can’t feel regret about it should be different. You’ve got to just move forward with this is what it is. And I’ve got to figure out how to stay in a cycle that keeps me moving forward and growing as fast as I can and I don’t have room for the shame and the blame and the regret.

But watch Shark Tank. Like, if you haven’t, I’ve seen so many seasons of that. The people who pay themselves big salaries and use the business’s profit to live off of and don’t work like a full-time job or even a part-time job while building the business, those people almost never get the deal because the Sharks don’t see them as like really wanting to grow aggressively and they’re only looking to invest in people wanting to grow aggressively.

Entrepreneurship is a huge lesson in delayed gratification. And I know delayed gratification does not feel good, but on the other side is a multiple six-figure business that could be paying for lots of things, lots of dream vacations, dream, you know, mortgages, like private schools, extracurricular activities, college educations. Like, there’s a lot on the line to be able to build a business that eventually can pay the bills.

Right? So if you want to succeed massively to where one day your business does provide solely for your family, it’s got to have time, money, and energy to grow. It needs to be treated like an asset for your future. No differently than your stock portfolio. Like, you wouldn’t put $100,000 into stocks and expect the dividends to start paying for your lifestyle each month immediately. But we do this with entrepreneurship from a thought error that it should be that way.

So the reality check might be the lesson in the wisdom. Oh, it’s harder than I thought. It’s going to take longer than I thought to pay the bills. I’m going to have to build it bigger than I thought. I didn’t realize this ahead of time. I’m going have to invest more than I anticipated so that I can grow my belief and my skill sets and become the person who can make that type of money quicker.

And I’ve said this many times to my students over the years and I know how painful it feels, but you may need to go back to work. If you left early and you thought it was going to grow faster, and it didn’t, and your family needs your income, you might have to go back to work, even if you don’t want to, for a little bit. Maybe a few years. In the scheme of things, if it you have to work for three more years in your full-time job in order to then have a business that can pay your family for the next 20 or 30 years, think of it relatively.

And it isn’t a sign of failure to have to go back to work. Right? So we don’t need to have shame about it. So many people have shame about it. I’m going back to work or I’m getting a part-time job, so I’m going to feel shame because I failed. No, it’s a sign of entrepreneurial and life maturity. And this is what I try to call people into. It’s really coming from the emotional capacity to handle setbacks. Like I can handle a setback. I can handle when things don’t go my way.

I’ve been so, like in my business in 10 years, there have been times where I’ve had to scale back my lifestyle. I’ve had to stop buying things, stop taking trips, stop doing things in order to invest in my business, or pay an unexpected tax bill, or hire more employees, or restructure the business. Like, there have been times like I just spent 18 months not taking a profit. I pay myself like a very minuscule salary. We ended up having to raise it based on our profit this year, but it was like not enough to pay our bills.

So for 18 months, we lived off of savings so that I could restructure my business and have freedom as a new mom in my business. And I believed like, I just treated my business as an asset. Like I’m doing this for 18 months and it’s going to be painful, but also at the same time, I’m going to create an asset that now works for my mom life and me for the next 10, 20, 30 years. I don’t know, however long I work.

We bought land to build a dream house, like a gigantic dream house, expecting my business before I had a baby to grow at the rate that it had for years prior, not expecting being a mom to impact my business and my revenue at all. And now we’re going to sell it. In the beginning, it felt like a setback initially, but because the wisdom came through of the business I really want to have and what it really requires at this level and that revenue isn’t guaranteed. Like that wisdom had me move in a completely different direction with no regrets.

In fact, I feel grateful for all the lessons I learned in the last three years that didn’t have me building a house that might have ended up creating extreme financial pressure for me that would have had me taken away from how much I want to spend with my kids because I’d always be worried about that mortgage. And instead, the wisdom has me aggressively investing my money into passive income streams and our stock portfolio, and places where our money can grow without me having to do the work, versus on real estate that I’m not even planning on using as an investment. I want to live there forever.

So if you find yourself in a scenario where you’ve had a lofty expectation of what could be and it isn’t, that is life. That is entrepreneurship. And it’s your time to get tough, not weak, to handle a setback, to find sufficiency, to create a new plan from wisdom. We’re still going to buy the dream house, but now that I know what kind of lifestyle that I want and what is my priority now financially for the future now with children and having the from desire of wanting my business to be highly profitable and for me to be highly happy and not stressed at all, we’re going to move that back a few years. It’s not a problem. I love the house we live in now.

It’s so crazy. I wanted to I remember I wanted a pool so bad. We almost had one put here, but our yard is just not quite big enough to like, our dogs wouldn’t have had anywhere to run around in, and so we decided not to. But I was feeling so sad that I didn’t have a pool, and I just wanted a pool so bad, and I imagined all the pool time I would spend with my kids. And now I’ve heard of like so many kids drowning recently. Like just my heart can’t handle it. And I told my husband the other day, I’m like, I’m so glad we don’t have a pool with young children.

Whether there would be a fence or a thing or anything, like I just don’t think I could handle the anxiety now that I’m a parent. Like, I’m glad we didn’t do that. I don’t need that until they’re they’re much older and they’re very proficient in swimming. So things happen. You postpone things, you change things, your wisdom shapes you differently.

Right? I have a new goal that my investments can pay the mortgage if they had to, permanently, or that I can easily pay cash for the house, or pay off the house in a few years, which is what we did with this house. But coming from the priority of I always put my business first, and sometimes this is the lesson. This is the wisdom that the shame and the regret and the blame need to teach you. Is did you put your business first in an investment you made? Did you protect your profit? I’ve had so many people come into investments, even with me, that I tell them, make sure you protect your profit, which means you keep selling what has been working and what has been selling while you think about building this other thing. Like, especially 2 Million Dollar Group students.

They’re so obsessed with scaling that they want to leave behind their previous business and just go straight to their scalable offer. And it’s like, no, no, no, the first year, you’ve got to protect your revenue and your profit with so if you made $200,000 or $300,000 last year with one-on-one in group, you do that while creating the scalable offer and then you set a goal that includes that income plus the money from the scalable offer. And then once that money matches the money from the previous offers, then you skyrocket that scalable offer.

And when you don’t put the business first like that, when you make a rash decision and you just jump into a new offer and you stop doing what’s working and you stop selling because you’re so excited to learn new things, that’s sometimes the lesson. You got to put your business, your profit, your revenue first. You’ve got to go into your investments deciding to make your money back right away so that you profit the rest of the time. You’ve got to, like I taught my students an ROI plan that helps them make sure that they don’t end up in a situation where their business isn’t put first.

And an ROI method to help them keep the business first and keep themselves as the responsible, empowered steward of the business. This may be the lesson. I treat my business like an asset that is going to be an asset for the rest of my life, not just today, and I treat myself as the CEO and the sole person responsible for its revenue, always. That might be the lesson. The lessons and the wisdom waiting for you could also be that you stewarded money before in a way that you didn’t love, and you learned. And it helped you become the version of you who will steward it better from here on out.

I coached someone on this, and it was so powerful. She kept telling herself she was irresponsible with money. And it’s like, no, it sounds like where you’re at now with the regret that you have, you’ve become very responsible. You’ve seen how you spent your money, and you didn’t like it. And you learned, and now you want to do it differently. And so for every dollar you make moving forward, you will. But only if you can get out of the regret. If you can see that you needed that to happen to become the person that doesn’t want to spend money that way and wants to spend it differently and is stewarding it in a very different capacity and is paying attention to it in a very different way.

But you’ve got to be future-focused from here on out. Right? Sometimes we can’t get to financial responsibility without going through a little irresponsibility. But you can’t get stuck there. You’ve got to learn. You can’t decide past mistakes mean you are incapable of learning and involving and becoming more savvy. If you haven’t used investments well, if you haven’t showed up the way that you wanted, if you haven’t done the work, and you know it, you know it’s on you, then why? What are your top three theories? Let’s grow from this, not wilt.

I know it’s painful to look, but it’s more painful not to look and to stay stuck. It’s more painful to never become the person with all the wisdom, to let the shame and the regret steal your dreams and your capacity and your capability to achieve them. And if you’re stressed about the time it’s taking, well, it takes more time to stress about it than to just get it done. So let’s do it. Like, let’s just do it with focus, 100% of it. Sit with the shame, look at it in the mirror, process it, and then let it go. Let the wisdom come through.

Now, the final thing I want to touch on is blame. Blame shields us from shame and regret. We don’t have to feel the shame and the regret, so it feels a little bit better when we can put it on someone else, then we don’t have to feel it ourselves. But the problem is, it eats you alive in the exact same way as shame and regret. Instead of making yourself the villain, which is what we do in shame and regret, you make someone else or something else the villain, but then you spend your time in a fight between good and evil.

You lead with either weakness as a victim or righteousness as the hero fighting the villain, and instead of wisdom and vulnerability as a leader. And it’s a very different energetic exchange there, a different energetic output that you’re putting into the world. And what it causes you to do is leave your lane to try to change the someone or the something, instead of staying in your lane, changing you. And you lose personal empowerment every single day that you blame someone or something else for your investments not going right or your results that you’ve created.

You start to subtly believe that other people and things control your outcomes, and you stop being the coach your clients need because now you’re wounded by coaching that you’ve bought. And it’s very hard to sell coaching powerfully from a wound, from disconnection, from righteousness. And if you do sell it, look out for the clients who respond to this. If they’re responding to your victim and not your empowerment, having a client base full of victims who also blame when they don’t get what they expected or desired, eventually, you become their villain.

Trade the blame for empowerment. Whether it’s your kids, your coach, your husband, your job, your colleagues, a program that you bought, the process that you were taught that you didn’t think worked, it’s all keeping you from learning something about you. That could be why you ignored red flags in yourself before you invested in something, why you didn’t trust yourself, why you believed gossip, and took yourself out of an investment that you needed and could have really benefited from.

You could learn from what was inside of you that was attracted to a coach who has wounds and villains. Were you waiting and expecting for the coach to do the work rather than implementing and owning your decisions and being the CEO? Like I told my students, I want you to think about this. I told them, I showed them, actually. I had them do an exercise. I showed them how it feels. But it feels like crap to truly be responsible and empowered, if you really think about it.

Because you have to give up the story keeping yourself disempowered, and look at yourself. And it feels confronting and hard and frustrating and isolating and triggering. But the result is feeling alive, triumphant, empowered, invincible, confident, equipped, energized, intelligent, free, grounded, connected, whole. Like the list goes on. That’s the result, the way you feel after empowerment and responsibility. But getting into empowerment and responsibility feels terrible.

But you’ve got to be willing to do it because on the other side truly is power and freedom. It’s a future that you want that you figure out how to create. And it’s you helping other people get out of their shame and regret and blame in their lives. Because if, think about it, if everybody walking around the world stopped indulging in shame and regret and blame, if they were able to process it and move through it, no matter, and I coached some people who are dealing with some really heavy shame. Really heavy shame for many years of their lives, like painful suffering.

But when you can let that go, holy smokes, the energy that you have, the power that you have to move your life forward to what you want is going to be incredible. It’s totally worth it.

Okay. That’s my message, folks. I love you. I believe in you. I am here to support you. Try letting this go. Try working through this. Try not letting this eat you alive. You deserve to have the business and the entrepreneur experience that you want and that you’ve dreamed of. But it just can’t include these three things.

And if you missed ROI or any of the Entrepreneur Series courses to date, stay tuned. People have been asking. There were students in ROI asking about Capacity Work and Served. There were people emailing in trying to get in ROI after we closed the doors. And we really meant it, so we did, we did keep the doors closed. But stay tuned. Keep your eyes open. Make sure you’re getting my emails and they’re not going to your promotions tab.

Make sure that you’re following the correct @StaceyBoehman on Instagram and Facebook. There’s a lot of fake accounts rolling around right now. We try to get them shut down quickly, but mine is the blue check mark. That’s how you know. I have the blue check mark. But there is an opportunity coming, so I want you to be prepared for it. All right. Have a beautiful week. I love you all. Talk to you next week.

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.