Ep #43: Investing Series Part 3: Your Craft with Brooke Castillo

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.

Hello lovies, welcome to episode 43. Today I have a very special guest. My coach, Brooke Castillo, founder of The Life Coach School and Self-Coaching Scholars. A 25-million-dollar company. Did you hear me? Saying it louder for those of you in the back. You can make 25 million dollars as a life coach. What? So amazing.

Brooke is leading the industry in thought leadership and training for coaches. I like to think of her coach training as the Tesla of coaching certifications on the cutting edge, improving the world, and so refined. I get so many emails and comments on my Facebook ads asking me how to get started as a coach, if you need training, and what kind of training to get.

And the truth is there are a lot of options. There are a lot of great options even. It’s just like buying a car. But I think – and we discuss this on the episode – my complete bias on the subject, but I really do think my education with The Life Coach School was the best investment I ever made.

And the opportunity for ongoing training and support and access to the community of coaches to mastermind with for the rest of your life as a coach is what I think sets apart the school from every other school, and not including all the tools you learn that are on the cutting edge of life coaching.

So if you’re asking me and many of you are, my answer is always going to be go to The Life Coach School. I wanted to spend three episodes talking about the best investments you can make as a life coach and I knew from the very beginning that for me, one of those three investments was in a certification program and for me, that certification was with The Life Coach School, aligning myself with their mentorship and their tools and learning how to coach Brooke’s method and the model.

So I basically Slacked Brooke one day and said hey, I want to have you on the podcast and sell life coach training, and she was like, I’m in. But now what we actually did instead is just give you tons of value, like we do, and really decided to sell you on you. And whether you are already certified, will ever get certified and take that path, this podcast is still one to listen to so that you can also hear the truth about certifications and being a life coach so you are prepared to answer these types of questions with other people when they ask you.

So on this episode, we also dive into aggressive investing and aggressive results and what you need to have in order to do both. And at the end, you’re going to want to sign up for coach training for sure. You’re going to hear the way Brooke explains it and you’re going to be all in. So you can do that at www.thelifecoachschool.com/certification. We will also link that up in the show notes.

But certification is now open for enrollment. So if you are interested, if you’re one of the people emailing me actively looking for a coach certification to join, to learn how to be a coach and to learn those tools, get moving on it. Their classes fill up very quickly. They always sell out. They are in super high demand and for such good reason.

Now, she also talks about her program, Self-Coaching Scholars. She mentions that a few times in the interview. I am also a part of that program and I teach for that program. And you can also learn more about Self-Coaching Scholars at thelifecoachschool.com/join.

And if you listen to this podcast and you love Brooke and I together, make sure you get on her list and mine because we have a live event coming up in 2020 at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas called How to Sell Expensive Things. So jump on your list to be the first to know about that. It will also sell out very quickly.

I know you’re going to enjoy this episode and if you stay tuned, I’ve got a funny little story about signing up for The Life Coach School that I thought about right after we recorded and I wanted to share it with you so you can have a good laugh. So after the interview, you can keep listening if you want for just pure amusement. Alright, so let’s bring on Brooke already.

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Stacey: Hey Brooke. Welcome to the podcast.

Brooke: Hey, thank you for having me.

Stacey: I’m so excited. I feel like I didn’t tell my audience at all that I was having you on. No one knows, so…

Brooke: Surprise.

Stacey: I feel like this episode is going to break the internet a little bit.

Brooke: Let’s do it. They’re like, who?

Stacey: Alright, so we’re going to dive in. So I have had them thinking about the three biggest investments that they can make as coaches, specifically as they’re growing their business in the beginning up to 200K. The biggest coaching investments they can make because there’s a lot of different coaching offers out there.

And so we’ve talked about them investing in getting coached themselves, being the student, we’ve talked about investing in their business, in being an entrepreneur and learning how to sell and market. And now I want to talk about investing in the tools of being a coach. How to actually coach your clients and I think you’re the best person to have on this because obviously I am biased because I’ve been certified with you and master certified with you, but I coach so many clients and I really do think your tools are outstanding and the way that you talk about them is so clear and direct.

So I’m excited to have you on. But before we dive into that, I also think that you and I have a very similar belief in aggressive investing. So I want to just spend a little time talking about that because I sold them a lot on that, but I think you could also sell them on aggressive investing and why they should – when you make money, you just want to keep all of it, but why should they invest instead?

Brooke: Well, I think that it’s really interesting. I am huge on aggressive investing in something that gives you a compounding return. I don’t just like aggressively investing and losing money. I like aggressively investing in things that can give me a positive return.

And so I think one of the things that’s really important for all business people to do is to ask themselves where can I invest money and get the most return for my money? So when you meet with like – and I’ve done this where I’ve met with financial advisors and they talk about investing in the stock market. And they use these terms conservative investing, growth investing, aggressive investing.

And usually, they’re like, you don’t need to be aggressively investing. When you’re saving and investing for the long term, it’s better to get consistent results over the long term. But I always ask, but what is aggressive investing? It sounds interesting. It sounds a little bit like my style.

And what they say is you’re basically investing in companies that are high risk, so if they do well, you’re going to get a huge return and if they don’t, you probably won’t get paid anything. These are these startup companies. And so I remember when they were talking about that, thinking about that in terms of my own business, like well, I’m a startup company. Maybe I should aggressively invest in myself.

And it was like this huge light bulb because the way I felt about it was like, that is the one investment that I have 100% control over how much energy I put into it, how much time I put into planning. And so I started studying what my current return on investment was as if my company was a stock, and if someone had invested, what would be their rate of return?

And it was significant, and so I started questioning, what if we invested more money? Would the return scale with the investment? So for example, if we put in $100 and we make $10, if we put in $1000, would we make $100? And what I found out and what I researched and what I understood is that yes, I could make that happen.

And so for me, it became this way of thinking about my business where I want to have a business where the more money I put into it, the more money I get out of it. And if you’re willing to aggressively invest in yourself, what it does and when I say yourself I mean your business, what it does is it just makes your rate of growth so much faster.

So if you’re growing – like people will say in most businesses, you can grow 10% a year. Why? Because you’re investing that much. What if you 10 times your investment in your business? Could you grow 10 times more? And what I have found is that the answer is yes.

Stacey: Yeah. So I think it’s interesting because – and I would love for you to speak on this – you invest a lot in ads. I invest a lot in ads. And I do find there’s always an opposite of everything, but a lot of times I find people are willing to invest in something like an ad because it’s so tangible, growing my marketing and my client base.

But what’s so interesting is I find a lot of coaches who are life coaches or mindset coaches struggle to feel like they could make that kind of return and invest a lot of money in coaching for themselves. So will you speak to that a little bit? Because they’ll say but that’s not guaranteed, there’s no return that I can quantify if I’m just investing in coaching. I need to be investing in very specific, very serious business things. And I’m just curious your take on that.

Brooke: Well, so I’ll just give you an example of when I invested in coaching for myself and I invest in training for myself, I invest in coaches that will help me grow. And yeah, there’s no specific guarantee. I think people want a guarantee. And for me, I invested with a coach, I invested $38,000 with a coach and for me, to learn all the stuff that he was teaching me, that’s pretty aggressive investment. But it wasn’t just financially. It was I guaranteed my own rate of return. And that’s what I do with all of my investments.

So what I told myself was I will invest in this but I promise that I will do every single thing that they say so I can pay for this and more. And I think that I watch people come through The Life Coach School and they’re investing money in their tuition to go through the school, and they’re afraid that they’re not going to get their money back. They’re afraid they’re not going to earn their money back, which is laughable to me because compared to what you can make as a life coach versus the investment.

But they want some external guarantee, which of course no one can give you. I think it’s laughable. Like if you can’t make your money back on your tuition, you’re doing it wrong. Period. The opportunity is so huge. You have to guarantee it to yourself. You have to commit that you will do whatever it takes to make that money back and more.

And the students that I have that come through that do that always do it. They guarantee it to themselves. And that’s one thing that I did for myself. I said no matter what, that I will do it, no matter what.

Stacey: I always have people messaging me about 2K and they’re like, well but tell me about the guarantee. But what if I can’t make the money back? And I’m like, what? $2000. That is not your biggest issue, that you won’t be able to make $2000 back. And then I tell them like, I want you to think about what are you going to do to make sure you get that money back because I don’t have that experience.

I have never – and I don’t remember at this point if someone taught me this or if it was just something – I think maybe because when I came to you I was so broke I didn’t have a choice but to make my money back. So I came to it with that mindset of I will do everything I have to do to make my money back. Not making it back isn’t an option. But then also, I want to make so much more than that.

Brooke: Well, and I think that it’s a subtle difference but all of you who are doing this work, make sure you pay attention to that. So if I sign up for 2K and I hold on to you guaranteeing me that, then I’m screwed. So if I come to you and I’m like, okay Stacey, what are you going to do to make sure I make $2000? I’m already done. I might as well give up.

But if I go in there, I’m like, listen, you can be dang sure that I’m going to make that 2K and I’m going to do it faster than anyone else has ever done it, I’m going to make 10 times that, you have to think in a way where you take responsibility for it and you own it.

I was just talking about this today where I did my 100K group and I had people invest $25,000 and I guaranteed them that they would make 100K or I’d give them their money back. And I realized I set that up completely wrong because I took on all the responsibility for them.

Now listen, I don’t have a problem taking on responsibility. I love to take on responsibility. That’s why I’m so successful. But by putting them in an environment where they didn’t have to take responsibility, I did that wrong. I should have, and if I ever do it again, this is how I’m going to sell it. I’m going to say don’t pay me anything but if you don’t make 100K, then you pay me $25,000. You see the difference? So then the responsibility is on them to take full responsibility. It’s such a big shift. So listen…

Stacey: Yeah, because every time we talk about people say they believe 100% that they’re going to – I love when you’re like, will you pay me $50,000 if you don’t?

Brooke: Yes, and they’re like, no. Clears it right up. It clears it right up. So I would shift that responsibility back to them not because the money matters at all to me, but for them it’s so much more powerful for them to have the full responsibility of it.

You know, when you think about aggressively investing, you have to think about are you willing to bet on you? Are you willing to go all in on you? People are like, well, I’m going to put money in my 401K or I’m going to put money over here, or I’m going to be safe with my money, as if investing in another company, like a 401K, investing in IBM and Apple and Coke, whatever it is, is a much better bet than investing in yourself.

And so I think aggressive investing is really you just putting your money where your mouth is. How committed are you really? How much do you really believe in yourself? Because then aggressive investing in easy.

Stacey: I like to think about in those boardrooms of those companies that they would suggest to you to invest in, you don’t have any idea what’s going on in that boardroom but what you do have control over is what’s happening in your boardroom. Now, many people who fear investing, it’s because of what’s happening in their boardroom.

Brooke: They’re like, listen, I know what’s going on here, I’m not putting any money in.

Stacey: Yes. Like so let’s take a look at that first. But yeah, that’s so huge. For me, I was talking to my 200K mastermind just before we got on this call and I was telling them like, one of the things I love is I have never and will never have a conversation with, say Mark, my CFO, about an investment and talk about well, what if we don’t make it back? And I would also never say we didn’t budget for this.

We would never have that conversation where we’re like, hey, I really want to do this thing, it’s going to be $30,000. We would never say oh, but we haven’t budgeted for that. We would just be like, let’s figure this out. How are we going to make it happen? It’s never an option for me to not invest in myself, whatever I need.

And sometimes what we need is something that we never budgeted for that specific year, but I’m never going to say that it wasn’t in the budget and I’m never going to say well, what if we don’t make that money back or we can’t do it right now. We’re always going into the solution-focused how can I make that happen and then what’s the massive return I’m going to create on this.

Brooke: Well, and I think that’s what most opportunities that become available, when there’s an opportunity to invest in a training or invest with a coach or invest in Facebook ads or whatever, you have to recognize that that’s – even though you may be paying money to Facebook or paying money to Stacey or paying money to me, it’s always an investment in you.

And you have to look at it that way. It’s like when I invest money in stock for Apple, it’s not like well oh, I’m investing my money in Apple and I’m just going to sit around and wait to see what Apple does for me. That is the wrong way to approach anything in your life, especially your money.

So if I’m investing with your program, really what I’m doing is investing in myself to learn how to make 2K or to make 200K, whatever. And when you see it as an investment in yourself, and you love yourself and you trust yourself, aggressive investing is so fun because you’re like, let’s go, let’s see what we can do with this.

You’ll be amazed what you can do when you have your own back. But when I want you to have my back instead of me, it never can work because I can have your back all day long. If you’re not doing the work, if you don’t believe in yourself, it doesn’t matter.

Stacey: Yeah, and I really want my clients to be – for everyone that’s listening, that’s one of my biggest goals, and you know I do this with my programs is I do the money back guarantee because I want to teach not only do I want them to always – like I’m going to take the responsibility but also I want them to grow that trust in themselves of if I make an investment, I get that investment back.

I think it slows down your investing when you have to make your investment back, when that’s your deal with yourself before going out and just throwing more money and investing and never keeping track of that and just like, well I bought this, I have 10 programs sitting in my email right now that I haven’t done. It’s like, really…

Brooke: So let’s talk about that for a minute because that’s huge and I think people misinterpret aggressive investing for reckless investing, and that is a huge difference. Aggressive means I’m going to invest in this and make my money back aggressively. Not I’m going to put my money in 17 different classes and take none of them. That’s reckless. That’s not helpful, that’s not useful.

Aggressive means listen, I’m going all in on me and the money I’m betting on me, and then I’m going to prove that that was a great investment for me. And so that’s like, a lot of people sign up for The Life Coach School training and we always say, you got to make that money back that you put in your tuition. You want to make that back as soon as possible because that’s what gets that momentum going.

Stacey: Yes, I did that recently with my 200K mastermind. They came to the live event, it’s how we started out, and on day three, I set them up like, the whole first two days were all about getting them into the mindset for day three. And I’m like, so you’re all going to make your money back in 30 days.

Non-negotiable, you’re making your money back because so many of them will come in and then where their mind is is they’re thinking of making it back within six months. And I’m like, no. Make it back in 30 days, and then we spend five more months making you more money.

It’s so fun to watch them. They’ve never even thought of it like that so it made their brain explode a little bit. They had so much drama but then they went out and did it, and now we get to spend so much time focusing on the return.

Brooke: Yes. And just expecting your brain to think bigger and to take responsibility for it. I think a lot of times people think that’s going to be scary and painful. It’s the opposite. It makes you feel so powerful because you realize how much you really genuinely have control over what you create.

Stacey: Yeah, so good. And I think the more control you feel over what you are investing and creating, I have so many of my clients who are married and then their spouse’s thoughts are also being brought in to their decision to invest or they’ll be like, well, my husband is wondering when am I going to get the return, it’s been this long.

And I just think the more you can build your own beliefs and trust and commitment to aggressively investing in yourself and getting that aggressive return, the easier it is to hold space for when they’re not believing too and still stay in your power and still stay committed to what you decided ahead of time.

Brooke: Oh yeah. I mean, my husband didn’t know what the heck was happening when we first started this coaching business. We both had worked for Hewlett-Packard. And you know, he came to me and was kind of like, what’s going on? I was like, listen, have a seat, take notes, watch this.

And so that made him believe in me even more. It’s like when people say to me, oh, my husband doesn’t believe in me, I’m like, I wonder why that is. You’re not very believable right now. You’re like, I don’t know if I’m going to make it. Of course, he doesn’t believe in you because you’re running around worried or you’re talking – this is the other thing.

If I said Stacey said I could do it and he doesn’t know Stacey, or Brooke said that I could make this much money and your husband doesn’t know me, then you’re the one that has to believe. You’re the one that has to show up. I’m very believable, but for me. Don’t you wish we could believe enough for our clients? Sometimes I’m just like…

Stacey: I do.

Brooke: Yeah. But I believe in them way more than they believe in themselves and it doesn’t help until they agree.

Stacey: Yeah. I love watching – this is the last thing I’ll say and then we’ll move on. But I love watching the evolution of Neil’s belief in me. It really – the evolution of my belief in me reflected back in him. But it’s so fun because I remember when we first started dating, he had no idea what was going on and what I actually did.

He thought it was the weirdest thing ever. And then I would tell him, I’m going to make 100K in one launch. And he would be like, that’s great honey, but you know, I mean, that’s a lot of money. That’s not what people…

Brooke: Don’t get your hopes up.

Stacey: He would say stuff like that. And I never took it personally. I was like, just watch me. And then I would go do it, and then I’m like, I’m going to make a million dollars. And he’s like, that’s great, honey, but that’s like, pro athlete money. Don’t be ridiculous. And now I’m like, honey, I’m going to make 10 million dollars. He’s like, you’re going to do that. It’s so fun.

Brooke: Chris is the same way. He’s like, wait, what are we going to do? Let me write it down. It’s so good. And he talked about this a little bit. I know it’s not the topic here, but one of the things that I think is important for your listeners, especially your 2K people to hear is like, that first money is the hardest money.

It is the hardest money because the difference between someone who has made money in their business and the difference between someone who hasn’t made any money is night and day. That is just zero to one dollar. Then you get to 50K, then it’s huge. But after about 100K, the difference between someone at 100K versus a million, five million, 10 million, very little.

And that is the truth. Honest to god truth. I work with people that make money on all different scales. So if I have someone that’s making a million dollars, getting them to five million dollars is so much easier for me than getting someone from zero to $50,000.

Stacey: Yes, I 100% agree.

Brooke: And it’s one of the reasons why is people who have made a lot of money understand aggressive investment. They understand it. And they’re willing to do it. And people think well, it’s easy to aggressively invest in yourself when you have more money. That is not true, my friends. That is not true because once you start making all that money, your whole perspective changes because you don’t have to aggressively invest to get anywhere.

I think in the beginning, you could be more desperate and feel like you have to do it, but once you’ve made it, you’re like, why do I need to do that? I’m already making whatever it is.

Stacey: Yes, so good. Yeah, I love that. Okay, so now let’s talk about the difference – because this is what I wanted to have you on for is to talk about the difference between learning how to coach someone else’s brain and being coached. I get this question a lot from people in my 2K for 2K and people who are on my Facebook ads or following me on Instagram.

They want to know if they need to learn how to coach. They want to become a coach, they want to get started, they’re not really sure where, and a lot of them think – and not in a way that – they have great intentions, but they are thinking I give such great advice, I can just become a coach, or I’ve been coaching and working with my coach for years and I really want to talk about the difference between being a client and learning specific tools to coach someone’s brain.

And I was thinking about this a lot. I’m going to give you my analogy and then you can tell me your thoughts, and I would love for you to tell my audience the specific tools you teach at the school. But I work with a personal trainer. I’ve been working with her for now, I think a little over a year.

And I was thinking about this the other day, that she tailors her workouts specifically for me and my goals. Specifically, my wedding dress goals. And so we have very specific things. She’ll show me, we’re doing this move because – that’s not what they call it. This lift, whatever it is, for this specific part of your arm or whatever.

And so she knows my body weight, she knows my type, she knows what I struggle with, she knows exactly what to prescribe to me because she has a Bachelor of Science in physical training, whatever. And I can go to the gym afterwards and workout, taking what she’s taught me, I can go workout.

I can even tell other people – I was with my sister once and she was doing this thing and it was really hard for her and I saw like, oh, it’s just because she isn’t digging her heel in, and I told her to dig her heel in and she’s like, oh my gosh, it’s so much easier. So I can share those little things that I know, I can teach someone all the things I’m doing that work for me, but that’s a far difference from my trainer who knows the science behind everything and can help any body type do anything and any goal because she understands that science.

And so I could go start a physical training business and I can tell them to do all the things I’m doing, but they may not get the same results I get because their body is different and they may not even want the same results I have because they want something slightly different. And I would struggle then to help my clients because I will be limited by my knowledge of only my results and what works for me.

And so for me, this is the analogy. That’s why it’s so important to learn the tools of how to coach someone’s brain so that you can be completely unlimited in how you help people. But I would love for you to talk about the difference between that, of being the student versus learning how to actually be the coach and how important that difference is.

Brooke: No, I mean, I think that’s the perfect analogy. And here’s the truth; there is no regulation in our industry. Anyone can call themselves a life coach. Anyone. Even if you’ve never been coached before, even if you just think you have some good ideas, you can call yourself a coach.

And here’s the honest to god truth; I think that holding a call with someone where they talk to you about their life for an hour would be helpful. Even if you have no training. I mean, the lack of awareness on ourselves and just being able to be on a call and listen to someone talk about themselves and have them increase their awareness, yes.

So I don’t want to say you should get training or you have to have training in order to coach someone because you don’t. And you can give someone advice and call that caching. But the type of coaching that I have found to be the most effective and where I coach from is what I call causal coaching. It’s finding the cause of people’s problems.

Now, the issue that a lot of my students have that are just clients that go through my Self-Coaching Scholars program and they’re like, I’ve been in Scholars for a year, I can coach now, is they don’t understand what I’m doing in terms of finding the cause with someone. They just hear me treating the symptom or talking to them about the effect of what’s going on.

And so what I would tell to you may be very different than what I would tell to someone else, but they’ve heard me tell you this one thing, so then they go and tell everyone that same thing, which is not what I would tell to a different person because I’m understanding their cause.

So I think that’s huge. Being able to identify and understand the cause of problems and not just treating symptoms is what will make you much more effective as a coach in the long term. A lot of the coaching that I’ve seen done treats symptoms in the way that that is is it creates a dependent relationship where you have to keep coming back to me for me to solve your symptoms.

So it’s kind of like let’s say you break your arm but I just keep treating the pain. So I just keep giving you drugs for the pain and I tell you how to hold your arm and I tell you just to be careful with it. Instead of saying oh, your arm’s broken, that’s kind of the approach that I think is really important in coaching.

The other piece I think that comes with training, especially the training that we do in the methodology that I teach at The Life Coach School is learning how to hold space. And this is something that you do not learn by being a client, you do not learn by watching someone coach. You do not learn as well as you need to coaching yourself.

Holding space is being able to be with someone else in a coaching environment and not actively judge them. And that sounds easy because when people hear me say that, they think oh, negatively judge them. But I’m talking about judge them positively, and I’m talking about judge them negatively, I’m talking about agreeing with them, I’m talking about disagreeing with them.

That is not something that comes naturally to humans. When you sit down and talk to someone, you’re either aligning with them or not. And when you sit down with someone as a coach, that has to be completely eliminated from the conversation. Your opinion becomes irrelevant in a coaching situation and that is something that you have to be trained and learn how to do.

That’s the most effective way to coach anyone on any topic, to having that baseline. And then you may give some direction or some advice, but it’s always coming from first having held space and knowing what the cause of the problem is.

Stacey: Yeah, that’s so good. In 2K, I teach a concept called clean selling, which I think is modeled totally after holding the space in consults, being in the consult, and I tell my clients like, there’s your thoughts and your models that are happening, then there’s your client’s. And where you are your most powerful is when you learn how to only think in theirs and not have yours playing in at all.

And I think this is the hardest thing for people to learn how to do and the thing that makes you the most powerful coach, the most powerful seller, and it is the thing that you can only learn by doing and through experience. You can’t learn it by watching someone else. I think it also – from the different coaching I’ve received over the years and the different coaches I’ve worked with, I do think your concept of holding the space is the cleanest coaching I’ve ever seen.

And when I mean the cleanest without any judgment, without inputting your values and your belief systems on someone else and just reflecting back to them their mind. I think that is the most powerful place to be as a coach.

Brooke: Well, it’s also I think the most – I mean, we’re talking about kind of being aggressive, which is interesting. When you’re holding space for someone and you’re not judging them, you will call them out on all the things.

Stacey: You can be so much more aggressive.

Brooke: Exactly. Whereas if I’m in a situation where I’m judging you positively and I like you and I want to be connected with you and I want to give you good advice, I may not point out what I can see in terms of what’s holding you back because it may be offensive to you or I may be worried, or I may be scared. And so I think that it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or what you’re selling.

If you have the skills of coaching, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to be coaching all your clients. Some of them won’t need to be coached through the sale. But you will understand everything that’s going on. You will understand all the underlying thinking, all the underlying motivation, all the underlying feeling because you understand why people are coming from where they’re coming.

So for example, if someone comes in and they’re being a total jerk and you’re judging them for being a total jerk, you’ve just disconnected yourself from any possibility there. But if someone’s coming in and being a jerk and you understand the model, you understand how the brain works, you understand how to hold space, you know that it’s just a person with a thought.

And you don’t have to be offended, you don’t have to be upset. You can actually be curious and understanding. And it just opens up so many more opportunities as well.

Stacey: Yes. I think it helps you really be – especially when clients come to you and they want to be coached about you, it’s so powerful to be able to disconnect yourself, and not disconnect in a way – that’s probably the wrong wording. But not to close yourself down, but to…

Brooke: It’s the opposite. You’re opening yourself up.

Stacey: Yes, but to put this buffer between maybe even your judgments and thoughts because I know I used to, especially early on, I used to encounter that where I would have a lot of judgments or a lot of fears, especially if a client wanted to quit, for example.

I see this a lot with coaches where they’re still in that money is life phase and then a client wants to quit and then that – their own fear of losing the client and the money clouds all of their coaching. And I used to use – you guys taught this at coach training when I got certified where I would just write down – I’d be like, okay, we’re going to write it down verbatim and I would break down all of their thoughts, and then we would be able to just put all of those in the model and look at them in that causal way and show them their brain and take myself just completely out of it.

Brooke: Yeah. I mean, I had a client of mine that came – so the program that we have, we ship physical materials to everyone in the United States but not internationally. And so I had one of my clients signed up for my program but wasn’t getting the materials and was kind of furious about it and sent me an email, was basically like well hey, if you don’t send me these materials for this thing then I’m going to quit.

And because I was in a space of my thoughts and feelings about this person, about myself were not relevant to this situation, and being able to hold space for where they were coming from made me able to coach them. I said absolutely not. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. You’re not going to quit on yourself because you’re not getting the physical material and you don’t want to print it out.

That’s ridiculous. So I was able to stay present for my client and see what my client was doing to themselves, versus being like, oh, I’m so sorry that I’m not sending you that, or defending myself, or making it anything about that. I just looked at my client trying to sabotage themselves and took myself completely out of the picture.

Stacey: I love – sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. I love that also, when you’re staying out of your thoughts and being in this clean space, you also say it just like that. You let it come out. Whereas when we are attaching our own thoughts and we’re getting in our own feelings about whether they’re going to like us or not, we’re inserting our own stuff, we water down the coaching.

We’re like, how can I say this in a polite – I used to do that. I’d think is my head, okay, I know what I want to say but how do I say it and not let this person mad at me or severely trigger them? And then I learned such a deep lesson at the end of those coaching sessions where they hadn’t had a transformation that they could have had if I would have just been bold and…

Brooke: Because they’re sabotaging themselves and you’re participating in it when you do that.

Stacey: It’s so good. Learn that. It’s invaluable.

Brooke: Yeah, so I think understanding all of the tools of coaching for any industry and for your life. But I just want to swing back to kind of conclude this part like, coaching yourself and being able to get into your own mind and understand yourself is a very different type of relationship and having someone coach you, very different type of relationship than you coaching someone else.

Those are three very distinct skill sets, and yes, there is some crossover, but I feel like coaching someone else is such an honor and such a privilege that having the correct training where you can always be coming from love and non-judgment is a requirement. That’s what we teach at the school. It’s super important.

I see sometimes coaches that haven’t had proper training or haven’t had any training at all coming from a really well-intended place but also getting way too involved and being controlling because they’re not separating and holding space. So they’re trying to control their client without even realizing it because they want to feel good about the work they’re doing with the client. And so I think that’s where you can get into trouble.

Stacey: Yeah. And I love the distinction you made earlier of one of the things I want to make sure this isn’t the message, it’s almost like there are two contradictory things. And we are saying both of them, which is I love when Steven Pressfield says you could literally walk out of work and talk to a lamp post and get transformation.

You just walk out of work, talk to a lamp post every day. And I tell my clients, don’t get in your brain of you’re not good enough. Just serve exactly how you are now because you will help people. So that is something I love that you said is that you can help people just by being the outlet that listens to them every week.

Brooke: You’re certainly not going to cause any harm.

Stacey: Right. But then, there’s this next level, especially if you want to take your business to hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, when you want to hold space for – in 2K for 2K, we have 800 people in there and holding space for all of that, it just serves you to work on your coaching tool.

This series of podcasts about investing, I really love not selling people on things and that’s what I’m totally doing. The last three podcasts, I’m just selling them on investing in themselves. And I don’t want to sell from that place of there’s something wrong with you or you’re not good enough so you have to do this to be good enough, but from the place of if you really believed this business of yours that you’re starting is going to be a multi-million dollar business, these are the best things that you could give your business is the ability – one of them is this ability to hold the space to coach your clients from the causal place to be able to use tools on them instead of your own opinions and judgments.

Brooke: And just your clients’ results will be so much faster. I mean, I think that’s the big difference. I don’t think – when you’re trying to control your client and give your client advice, it’s just not effective. It’s just not going to work for them for the long term because they’re going to keep struggling.

But when you have these tools where you can really understand the human experience for a client and provide that knowledge to them, it’s unbelievable how fast their lives can change. And when you have lots of clients whose lives are changing fast, there’s no limit to your business and how fast you can grow too. It just compounds.

Stacey: Yeah, 100%. And I think there are people out there who – there are many clients who will love the coaching experience and they’re not in a place yet where they’re like, I have to get this result and I want to make this result work. But they will still feel like they’re getting value, even if they aren’t getting results. They will still love the coaching relationship. But when you can help them get the result too, that is when they skyrocket, you skyrocket, and then it’s just quantum leaps of success from there.

Brooke: So what do you say to people who don’t want to aggressively invest in themselves? When they’re like, I don’t want to have to know how to coach. I don’t want to have people coaching me. I don’t want – what do you say to them? What do you think that’s coming from?

Stacey: I would just be curious as to why. To me, I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about what it’s coming from, but I would be curious why because I think for me, my answer for why I would want to do it is because I just want to – I love the best. I want to be the best.

Some point after I got certified where I realized the power of being able to solve any problem with the model, and then I thought I’m literally the strongest energy in every single room and I have the secret to the universe, and once I believed I had the secret to the universe, I just wanted more of that indefinitely.

Like just give me all of that because it’s such a powerful place to be in life and, I don’t know. I wonder if people wouldn’t want that because – either of what they imagined it would be or the discomfort that it brings up for them.

Brooke: I think one of the main reasons and it’s interesting hearing us talk about this. I can see how it could be interpreted that we’re teaching you about aggressive investment so you’ll invest with us. It’s all this underlying scam that we’re teaching it. And I think that that’s a super important point for us to bring us because I think a lot of times, people won’t invest because they’ll say it’s not worth it.

And what I hear them saying is that they’re not worth it. They don’t believe that they are worth it. And so I always tell people if they’re going to invest with me, I say don’t invest with me in this program unless you are committed. I don’t want you to invest in this and fail. That doesn’t do anyone any good. Me included.

That’s not the kind of business I’m running. I’m running a successful business where the more success my students have, the more success I have or I’m out. And so I think that’s the thing you have to consider. If you’re someone that’s like, I don’t know about this, like a lot of people are like, I’m just nervous about this, and they project it onto the program, I just want you to all consider like, what if your nervousness is just about you and what you’re capable of?

Because if that’s the case, that’s normal. That’s very normal and do the work on that. And don’t ever invest until you’re 100% all in. Take as required of you, or don’t invest at all. I think that’s a really important thing. I think the worst thing you could do, and this is for any of our students, is to invest reluctantly.

Stacey: That’s so good. Yeah. That’s why I don’t sell on urgency because I don’t want people coming in with reluctancy.

Brooke: It’s like okay, well I’ll give you $2000 but I’m not sure what’s going to happen, or I just want to see inside the program, like how it’s designed and what she’s done, or I’m going to see if I think this will work. I’m going to sign up for this thing reluctantly is not good for anyone.

It’s not good for your classmates that you’re in class – no one wants to be around you when you’re reluctant. And you’re worried now about that money that you just paid that you gave reluctantly. So I would say all in or nothing in so many ways and…

Stacey: I’ve gotten that so much in my business of not – I try to sift out those people and I really feel, especially my 200K mastermind, it’s so important that everybody is all in because this is what makes the energy of the group and fuels the growth for everyone.

Brooke: It’s so good. And here’s the other thing I want to say about that; it doesn’t mean that every single thing you invest in will always be a win. I just recently invested – I was going to build a building. So you know this. I was going to build a building and we invested like 200K into this program and we were all in, 100% until we weren’t.

And then we decided we didn’t want to do it. And so we literally lost the 200K. The 200K is gone, it’s not investment, we don’t get it back, it’s not building a building or anything, but I still feel like it was an amazing investment that I learned from instead of – I would much rather do that than be like, well l don’t know about this, or to follow through just because I had done it and kind of be half in, half out.

All in or the money’s gone and it’s fine I think is a really important part of considering your aggressive investment because any kind of reluctance, you have work to do.

Stacey: That’s so good. I agree. I have had some investments where I’ve made them and then I was like, you know what, this wasn’t – I was all out. I was all in, I was all out. And I was like, you know what, that was a great lesson for me. I was all out on that and here’s why and I’m so glad I had that experience and now I know what to be all in and all out of and I have that now for life, so yeah, I love that.

Brooke: Let me just say, so I’m just saying to bring it home for people, I think it’s kind of like if someone invested in your program but then didn’t really watch the videos, didn’t do the calls, just kind of halfway did it. And then made – this is the worst thing they can do. And so they invested reluctantly, they showed up reluctantly, and then they made some big conclusion about themselves based on that half-assed effort. Do not do that. I’d much rather you don’t invest any money than do it like that.

Stacey: Yes, I agree with you 100%. Okay, so I have one last thing for you. I want to talk about certification as a concept because I think a lot of people have misinformation about this. I think you have amazing clean thinking about this, and so I would love for you to talk about certification as a concept.

Brooke: So what do you mean? So getting certified or not getting certified?

Stacey: Because there are people who think that there are companies that regulate the coaching industry and you have to be certified with them, otherwise you’re not a legit coach. I get that a lot on my Facebook ads. I’m like, that’s not true.

Brooke: Let’s bring it home. So the truth is that every certification in the life coaching industry is made up, including The Life Coach School’s, including all the federations that claim to regulate the industry. They don’t. There is no certification required. There is no federation that qualifies you to be a coach or not be a coach.

There’s lots of us attempting to do that because we feel like it’s important to have some structure around it so people can decipher between people that have been trained and people that haven’t, but the truth is if you think about industries that even have regulation, the reason why they do that is to create some sense of authority that still is just made up.

So think about this. If someone says to you, I have a college degree. So? What does that mean? People think oh, if you have a college degree then you’re somehow better than if you don’t have a college degree or if you have this certain accreditation, then you’re somehow better if you don’t.

So I just want everyone first of all, to step back and evaluate your beliefs about degrees and accreditations and certifications. So that’s kind of the baseline that I want to say about that. And then you always have to look into who is doing the certification and what does it mean.

So for example, a lot of people will come to me at The Life Coach School and say well, are you ICF certified? Which is kind of like, this organization that started way back in the day that attempted to regulate the coaching industry, which I’m all in. Okay, I’ll be part of this organization if that’s what the deal is.

And so I went and checked it out. Their whole philosophy was almost the exact opposite of what I teach. So it just didn’t work for me. It’s actually funny because I was on their board. You can join the ICF’s board by just paying money and then you’re featured as a coach on there.

You know, it’s all money-making organizations. And so I did actually get a client off of that board, which I think is kind of interesting. But the question that you have to ask yourself is does certification matter to you in terms of being certified and why?

Because if you think that other people care whether you’re certified, I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. I have made millions of dollars, millions of dollars and I would say maybe five people have worried about where my certificate came from. You know what’s hilarious to me is a lot of them said well, you had that psychology degree so that’s what made me hire you.

And I laugh hysterically about that because what I learned in psychology, as a coach, I do the exact opposite. But they wanted me to have that degree, and people will ask me, do you have this certification? Have you gone to this kind of college? And I’m like no, but I can help you stop drinking.

Stacey: That’s what people care about.

Brooke: Right. I can help you stop drinking, or I can help you stop overeating, or I can help you with this tool. So I believe that certification matters if it matters to you. But I do want us to talk about the flip side of that.

Some people think if they just go get certified, through me or through any other organization, that then somehow they’ll be better than before they were certified. I just want to tell you, I think training is important, I think understanding how to coach and getting feedback on it is super important.

But what changes once you get certified is your thought and you believe oh, now that I’m certified, now I’m legit, and that’s just all made up in your head too. So I think everyone should get certified through The Life Coach School obviously.

Stacey: I agree.

Brooke: And the reason why I think that is because I think I have studied all the tools that are available in the world and I think we have the best tools. But do I think that you are better as a person or as a business person because you’re certified? Only if you believe that will that be true because I’ve watched people do it.

They get certified and they still think they’re terrible and they get certified and they think that now they’re never going to have another problem again, which of course, neither of those is true.

Stacey: Yeah, that’s so good. I do really love your certification. I’m totally biased obviously. But I would love for you, if you have some time, to just tell them about your certification because I do get emails probably 10 a week asking if they can learn how to coach through 2K.

And I will help you self-coach so much better when it comes to your business, but I don’t teach that. And I think you teach it so beautifully and I really do think your clients are – and your students are the best trained coaches in the industry. And of course again, I’m very biased, but I would love for you to tell them about the certification program if they were interested because so many of them are.

Brooke: Yeah, I mean I think that’s a really important point that you make. It’s kind of like your 2K program, you can’t teach people how to coach in there because learning how to coach is much more complicated. It’s just like I can’t teach people how to coach in Self-Coaching Scholars, a program that I offer.

So that’s for my clients to learn how to coach themselves, and I think that’s a really great first step for everyone. But our program puts you through the paces for you to be able to coach other people and here’s why. I think it’s a privilege to coach other people. I think it’s an honor, and I think you have to go through the process of learning how to hold space, what we talked about earlier.

And learning how to hold space is something that is very difficult to learn on your own. So we teach you the concepts of it, but then we have you practice it and you really suck at it in the beginning.

Stacey: Yeah, you have to be willing to be very bad at it.

Brooke: And we have to point out, look at that. So we’re giving you live coaching opportunities for you to learn how to hold space and then we have a master coach in there who’s telling you where you’re messing up, which of course, you’ll be messing up in the beginning. And we teach you all these different concepts that you can use in your coaching but all the concepts that we teach you to practice on all come back to holding space.

So you spend six months learning all of our tools, while at the same time learning how to hold space, learning how to teach, learning how to communicate, learning how to identify problems easily with clients. I mean, one of the things that if you’re not trained as a coach, you will get overwhelmed very quickly because your client will come to you and have 7000 problems in one call.

And you’ll be overwhelmed by their problems is you don’t have the training to be able to sift through how to coach through some of these things and how to focus and how to hold space there. So we set up our training in a way where you get the concepts and then you apply them and practice them and get feedback, which I have to say is not the most comfortable way to learn.

It’s much easier just to sit in a classroom, take notes, and take a test. But I feel like coaching organizations that don’t watch you coach and give you direct feedback miss the opportunity to really help you improve because we learn by doing. It’s just like you can’t learn how to sell something by reading a book about selling. You sell something by making 3000 offers.

Stacey: Yeah. I remember being in coach training. This was still when you did it live. And like, we had to sit across the room from each other and jump in and coach and I just remember it being like, frozen in my chest like, what do I ask? What do I say? Oh my god. Literally getting it out of your mouth was so difficult in the beginning, and now people are like, how do you ask such great questions?

And I’m like, because I was trained how to hold space and how to think like that and sift through what the client is saying and laser into the heart of something and to do it all quickly, but it was hard at first and I was bad at it, but I did have that feedback.

Brooke: I love that you made that point because I think a lot of people that don’t get trained properly may be in that position where they’re starting to coach people and they do freeze and they don’t know what to say and they don’t think they’re any good at it. So it’s actually like, the process that they’re going through practicing coaching is being done with their actual clients when they think they should already be good.

And so I think a lot of people end up giving up if they don’t have kind of that arena to practice in. So I think that’s another huge piece of it. And then we really like to, at The Life Coach School, we take you through the training and we get you certified, and then we also offer ongoing updated trainings.

Because here’s the thing; for me, I’m always learning and growing. My material is always evolving, and so I want to make sure that all the coaches that come through my training constantly are getting those updates to all of the latest and greatest stuff that we’re doing.

Because the brain science, the psychology, the psychiatry, the coaching, all of it is growing so fast right now that you need a school that can keep up with it and is teaching you all the latest and greatest stuff. So I think that’s another point on why everyone should get certified.

Stacey: Well, and I love that once they go through the certification, they also get to choose between becoming an entrepreneur and learning how to be an entrepreneur with The Life Coach School, or to get to go through learning how to be a better coach to go work for somebody else like The Life Coach School, like me, like other million-dollar earners that are hiring coaches.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t the only one way to make money as a life coach. You can make money, great money as a life coach working for other people. And I love that you support that side of it as well. You give them such great training after the coaching to go out then and make money.

Brooke: And I think a lot of people think that selling, you only need to learn the skills of selling if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, and I think that’s so funny because it’s like…

Stacey: It’s so much more.

Brooke: As an employee, even if you’re going to go work for someone else, you have to be able to sell yourself to your employer. Your employer is now your customer. So people will be like, well they – it’s so interesting to me when someone’s like, well I work for a corporation and they pay me this much and that’s all that’s available.

I’m like, that is not true because if you’ve ever run a business, you’re willing to pay for value. So if you come to me and you can offer me more value, I will pay you for it. And so knowing how to sell from that place too. So yeah, I love – not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur but everybody can benefit from learning how to coach and everybody can benefit from learning how to sell. So we’re like, the perfect combination for people.

Stacey: We are the perfect combination. So okay, I hope that we sufficiently sold them on doing coach training with The Life Coach School.

Brooke: I would love them to of course, but not reluctantly. Only if you’re 100% in.

Stacey: Only if you’re 100% committed. I love it. Thank you so much for being on.

Brooke: Oh my gosh, any time. You know I love talking to you all day every day.

Stacey: I love it. Well thank you so much. It was amazing.

Brooke: Alright. You’re welcome.

Stacey: Alright, I’ll talk to you soon.

Brooke: Okay, bye.

Stacey: Bye.

—

As promised, I have a very funny story about my journey to becoming a certified life coach. So if you stuck around, get ready for a good laugh. Okay, from the beginning when my best friend introduced me to The Life Coach School Podcast, we were all in. When the first certification class was offered on the podcast, we jumped on the opportunity. We had to be a part of it.

We had no money to pay for it but we were committed to figuring it out. After we got accepted, we got our intro paperwork in the mail with some pre-work to get started on before certification started. One of them was a test. Like a quiz to test our knowledge from the podcast and from Brooke’s website materials.

And one of the questions or so we thought was, what is the definition of casual coaching? Now, we were in a hotel room. I remember this like it was yesterday. Traveling for hours, sales career, trying to put our brains together to come up with a definition for casual coaching.

Here is what we decided it was. Coaching soccer moms who drive mini vans about their life. That’s casual coaching. We decided that we should probably Google it to see if we could find Brooke talking about it somewhere. We found a video where she explained said casual coaching.

As it turns out, we had misread the word. The word was causal coaching. Coaching, finding the root cause of the problem. We signed up and were all in to pay more money than we had ever even had to learn how to be like Brooke who we thought coached soccer moms who drive mini vans casually.

So there you go and here we are. Four years and millions of dollars later, I’m very glad I was down to coach some soccer moms. Alright, I figured you would enjoy that story. I get a good kick out of it every time I tell it. It’s absolutely fabulous. Have an amazing week and I will see you next time.

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.