Ep #372: Lessons from 10 Years in Business: Balance is Possible

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.

Hi, coaches. Welcome to episode 372. Today, I am sharing with you another lesson from 10 years in business. I have been thinking about this episode for so long. I have been obsessing about this topic in my mind and really going back and forth about it. So I can’t wait to dive in. We’re going to talk about balance.

But first, I want to give you a little update. I feel like it’s been a minute since I’ve recorded an episode. I recorded the last one quite a while ago, so it feels like it’s been a while. So, I just launched a brand new offer called the Entrepreneur Coach Membership, and it is my first new body of work in eight years. It is a continuation or a play off of my Entrepreneur Series. I went in, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted, I could really commit myself to the work of a membership. And I also had this body of work wanting to come out of me that I was so different, it felt like than all of my other work. There’s so many layers that are so similar, but it really felt different than my revenue-specific containers.

And I wanted to test that out. And so I spent a year delivering the Entrepreneur Series as limited courses, and I found myself after every course feeling like, “I wish we could do more coaching on this. I wish we could have deeper conversations about this. I wish there was a community that we could have ongoing conversations with people. I wish I could watch them grow through this and deepen into this.”

And so I just decided to listen to my whisper and go for it and launch it as a permanent offer and an ongoing membership. And I’m so excited. We will be diving deeper into the topics that we coached on last year and the courses that I released last year. Those will come back around at some point.

And also, I have a lot of new bodies of work that want to come out of me. And one of them is this work of balance. So I am officially announcing on this episode, that is our first deep dive course as part of the Entrepreneur Coach Membership, Balance. And I’m going to talk a lot about why this is has been noodling in my brain and why it’s been such a big part of my 10 years in business, and why it needed to be a lesson in this series as well on this episode.

But before I dive in, I also have to just say, people have asked me, like, what was your goal? And how’s it going on the launch? Because they know this is like a big deal for me to launch something so permanent and so new after having the same three offers for so long. And I didn’t really have a huge, like, there, this didn’t feel like a revenue challenge to me. This wasn’t like, oh, we have, we’re doing whatever it takes to create this amount of sales. I’ve never sold a membership before, so I wanted to go in and care more about connecting with the people and figuring out the messaging and getting the communications right.

And the result of that is the sales, but I wanted to be more focused on that than, like, I’m going to really do the work of expanding what I believe is possible of sales. I think there’s learning how to sell something for the first time, and then there’s learning how to shatter a glass ceiling of what you think is possible for sales. I never recommend to my clients doing both of those necessarily at the same time, especially if it’s for something big. So I’m doing one at a time. I think it’s okay to do that.

But I will say that one of my big goals was like, if we could come out and make a million dollars and have this be another seven-figure offer and have every offer that I’ve released basically since 2k for 2k be a seven or eight-figure offer, like that would blow my mind. And then, because I’m going to be launching 2 Million Dollar Group after this one, if we could do $2 million right out of the gate for just the founders for this membership, that feels like it would be like the most beautiful synchronicity in the world or serendipity, whatever it is. It’s like that it feels like that would be some version of magic. And also, like those things don’t have to happen for there still to be magic there. So, I am very excited.

We are very close at the time of this recording to 300-ish people, which would make us right around that seven-figure mark. And I know people are going to ask about this, and because it’s a monthly membership, we did sell annually as well, that would be projected seven figures if all of the monthly people come along with us annually. I have no doubt about that people will come with us, but also I know I’m going to be picking up people along the way. So like, if we are in seven figures of projected sales, I have zero doubt that we’re not going to double or triple that by the end of the year. My goal would be to triple that by the end of the year.

So, I have a big mission. I want to bring as many people with me as possible. I really believe this is going to be a revolution in the industry and the level of entrepreneurial maturity that is going to come out of this membership. Like that is, I am excited about that contribution to the industry that has been a little bit wrecked with cancel culture and been in a little bit of a trust recession.

And I think that this is my part of saying, like I came into the industry when there was like another kind of like trust recession happening and I did not let that be like, oh, I’m not going to be able to make money or, oh, this industry is, you know, I had I was in groups of where people were saying the industry is dying. And then my coach made a million dollars, and then $5 million, and then $15 million, and then $25 million, and then $50 million. And then I made a million dollars, and $6 million, and $10 million.

So like, I’m like, I don’t think that has to hold us back, but I do think that we can always be actively be thinking, like what is the contribution I want to make to the profession and the future that I want to see? And this one to me feels like just deep in my heart.

So, people were asking me, like the first call, they were like, this is so fire. Like, how did you get your energy in that place? And I just think I’ve been thinking about this contribution and what it means not just to me, but to the profession that I am a part of, which is then my entire experience, right? Like, if I am coaching coaches in the coaching profession, my entire interest is in making sure it’s a really classy, high-level, high-value, well-paid profession, right?

Like that’s my common interest. And so I’m just very excited about this membership being such a contribution to the value and the trust and the results that will come for everyone that gets coached by a coach that touches this type of work.

Okay, enough about that. I’m really excited to talk to you all about balance. Are you ready?

So, I have been thinking a lot about this. I have been in business, this will be now my 11th year in business, and I have spent more of my 11 years in business working three days a week and making millions of dollars than not. My first, so I started in 2015, and that half a year, I think I made around $20,000, and then the next year $150,000, the next year $325,000, the next year $860,000. And then from then on, I’ve been at millions, seven figures, eight figures, millions of dollars. Most of that, $45 million of coaching, came after the first three years. So, there was three years at six figures and then the rest of it at seven.

I worked five days a week, I think the first four years. So out of 11, I have worked three days a week. I should have done this math before the episode, but I’ve worked seven of those years have been three days a week. If you know anything about human design, I am a projector, so I’m very good at working productively to begin with, but the innate, like from what I understand about projectors, the thing that is true for us is that we have to live in balance or being out of balance is like quite painful and we can’t operate in that way.

And so much more deeper than that. I’ve been thinking about all the different variations of balance that we desire in our lives. And I’m going to talk about a lot of it on this episode. But you know, I have to have a pretty good balance of, I’m an introvert, so home, like rest, home life, like where I have nothing on my calendar, balanced with exciting travel. Like I love to travel. I love to be out in the world. And so I have to balance that. And also, I’m an introvert with a very public platform. And I’ve been balancing millions of dollars of net worth and having that type of money, with also a great love of using and spending my money to delight myself and delight my life now. 

And so it’s a really important part of my business growth has been figuring out the equation of how do I live my big life within this need, like what this feels like a life need to be balanced. I need to be in this balanced energy.

And so I have lived this way for seven years, the last seven years, and people ask me about it all the time. They’re very curious about my three-day work week, which comes out to be typically anywhere from 12 to, no, I would say at least four hours a day, at least. So 12 hours to, I would say 12 to 20 hours a week. Sometimes I work six or eight hours in a day, depending on what we have going on. And it’s not that it’s like a requirement. People ask me of this all the time. I’m down to work five days a week if I didn’t get the work done that I needed to get done. I’m down to work five days a week if we’re in a launch and something doesn’t go right. I’m down to work five days a week.

I’ve been just transitioning my schedule a lot recently because I’m fitting my kids now into my business and my business into my kids. And so my schedule changes a little bit now that Jackson’s gone to school. I’m more apt to work less hours spread out over five days so that I can be done when he’s out of school.

And so it’s been ever-changing, but it feels like it’s around 12 to 20 hours a week. And I’ve been doing that for seven years, and I feel like I have mastered being able to grow to millions and millions of dollars within that constraint.

And yet, I have seen no messages in the world, not the industry, in the world that communicate that it is possible to be a very successful woman and have young children and have a robust life and be well-cared for and healthy, all of the things. I don’t think this is like a mompreneur conversation. It can be, 100%. Like, ever since I became a mom, people have been so inspired by that. But I was doing the three-day work week and just traveling like a crazy person before I had kids. And you know, you could find me on a Tuesday afternoon drinking hot tea and reading a novel.

So, it was never about like, I have to create this balance because I became a mom. It was always I want to, I became a life coach, and I want to live my life, love my life, and do my life in a way that feels very intentional at the same time as meet myself in my ambition. And I want to believe that is possible.

And yet, again, the world is very set on saying that it’s not. Like, just, and what I don’t know if the algorithm has just been listening to me talk to my husband and then showing me things. It’s really freaky how that happens because I’m not like Googling things about balance. I have it. I’m not looking to learn about it. I created it through experience and through like years and years of investing in coaching my brain to be in balance and to solve imbalance.

But I’ll talk to my husband about it, and then I will get all these messages of like, I recently saw two very powerful women who have created extraordinary success, telling people, stop trying to get balance. You’re trying to solve the wrong problem. It’s not possible. You’re going to have to sacrifice. It’s true that you can’t have it all, and it’s making you miserable to think that you can’t have it all. And it started to make me feel a little crazy. Like, am I wrong for saying that you can’t have balance? Like, is this dangerous? Am I leading people astray? Am I telling them something is possible when it’s not? And so I have been noodling on this for months.

And I want to kind of walk you through the questions that I’ve been asking myself and some of the answers that I’ve come up with, but I’m the course that I’m going to teach in the Entrepreneur Coach Membership is really going to be a deep dive how-to that is going to help you really live this, not just think about it in theory.

But I’ve been questioning if it’s possible, why haven’t people found it? Why are all the examples of very successful people saying that it’s not possible? And I do think that there is a beauty of being, like this is the beauty, this is the reward of being an entrepreneur coach, because you get to use both experiences to carve the path that you desire.

If you’re just an entrepreneur and you’re not a coaching expert, an expert in using your mind and your brain, your emotions, strategic thinking, coaching tools to create the result you want, intention to create the result you want, if you’re not an expert in that, then you’re going to be creating unintentional results and intentional results through pure action.

And some people, especially if they’re like very successful, obviously, they have gotten mentorship, they’ve done personal development, they have thoughts that naturally align them with success. So some of that is their doing it on their own. And so I think that some of it is that entrepreneurs don’t have it because they don’t have the coaching tools, right? And they don’t have them as strategically and intentionally.

But then I think that there’s another piece where if you are very successful, but you work for another company and you’re not an entrepreneur, it’s very hard to carve out balance when someone is telling you have to be here and you are upholding company revenue goals that are impossible to not like you’re going to be working extraordinary hours and you’re reporting to shareholders.

Like I just read the, I think her name is Indra Nooyi, but she was the CEO of PepsiCo, and I’m I’ve been reading her memoir, and she talks a lot about like not being able to balance it all. And I’ve been thinking about that, and she’s such an extraordinary woman, so this is not like a negative at all, but it’s like she worked for PepsiCo.

So she can’t be like, “Hey, PepsiCo, I have children at home. I would like to work three days a week, and I desire to only bring this company to the amount of revenue that can fit into this during this stage of my life,” right? Like if you’re not an entrepreneur working for yourself, you can’t carve out, necessarily, boundaries that allow you to operate in balance because you’re heading something that is not your own.

So this is my biggest theory, is that in order to really be able to carve out and create intentional balance, you have to be able to control the parameters, and then you have to be able to control the mindset, solving for the parameters and the growth at the same time, like growth with parameters. This is my biggest theory.

And I’m actually very excited about this container because this is the one where I feel very open to people challenging me on this. Now, I don’t think you should come in trying to argue for the reason why you can’t have balance, but I do think the more people that bring circumstances to the coaching calls, I think like the more defined it will be, the more we will challenge all of my ideas. And you know, I’m just going to hold true for what I’ve been able to coach myself on and what I’ve coached other people to up until this moment. And I think that the process gets stronger, the more we stress test it. But this is my theory. This is what it is. I think you have to have, you have to be able to set your parameters and then you have to have a strategic mindset that can grow and also maintain those parameters.

Like, how do I make $15 million of revenue in three days a week? And I’m willing to take time to figure that out because how you get there is how you will be there. So it’s not what people often think is, like, oh, I’ll be balanced once I finally get there. Oh, I’ll get to $15 million, and then I’ll worry about three days a week. But really, there is, once you’re at millions, if you want to be at three days a week at $15 million, you’re going to need to figure that out at $5 million. You’re going to need to figure that out at $2 million.

Now, there’s a little bit of a caveat here where like in the beginning, some people will be able to grow very quickly and maybe be able to grow in three days a week, but in the beginning, there is a lot of like the only way I can think to describe this is if you decided to buy 100 acres of land and turn it into a working farm. Once the farm is a working farm, I believe you could create systems and processes and parameters and solutions if you wanted to manage that farm in only three days a week.

Now, that may mean you have to have people working for you. Like I have people working for me, but it may mean that you could oversee the farm and you could say the farm is going to grow and we’re going to set this intention to grow this revenue and I’m going to be the CEO of the farm and I’m going to give it three days a week and then I’m going to strategically put in place things to help this business grow to this revenue and we’re up and going.

But in the beginning, you’re going to have to sow the land, plant the seeds. You’re going to have to build the farm, the barn, you’re going to have to go get the animals and bring them in. You’re going, like, there’s going to be so much work that you’re going to have to decide, do I want to only build this farm in three days a week? And in that case, it might take me a lot longer to grow initially because I’m laying the foundation of the farm. But once the foundation is laid, then I’m only building upon the foundation, and then it becomes just boundaries with my growth.

So that’s also how I’ve been thinking about it when people ask me about my three days a week is because I didn’t, I worked five days a week for the first several years while I built the foundation. I tilled the land, I planted the seeds, I built the barn, I watered the plants. Like I did those things in the beginning. I became an expert farmer, and then I used my expert farmer brain to decide, okay, from here, I’m going to set boundaries around my growth that really work for me.

And really, that was like the other thing I will say around that is, I think in the beginning, your brain is stretched to solve so many different problems all at the same time that you don’t always have the capacity to solve the specific three-day work week problem in the beginning. And I’m going to tell you the equation to which I started solving this problem, like the first inkling that got me to solving this problem. I’m going to share what that was in a little bit, and started getting me on this like, okay, I’m going to start testing this everywhere. I’ll share that with you. But I do also think it’s like a capacity issue.

Now, having said that, I think there’s a lot of other types of imbalance that happen when you’re growing your business from the very beginning, from zero all the way up to millions of dollars that have nothing to do with the three-day work week, right? This isn’t a three-day work week program or course, or even podcast. I’m just saying that’s one of the examples. But being able to have balance. So let’s talk about this next. That’s why I think people don’t have it, is they don’t have the parameters and the strategic mindset to build within the parameters, and maybe they also don’t have they haven’t built the foundation yet.

But I was also thinking about what does it actually mean to have balance? Like, what is balance? What are we talking about? What are all the different facets of it? And this is what I think is very interesting and why I think it’s so important, and why I believe entrepreneur coaches can have it. Like, why it’s so possible for us is because I believe balance is a feeling. I believe it’s a mindset. I believe it’s an experience of your life, a perspective of your life, and I believe it is also an intentional lifestyle.

And it’s one that I feel proud of. Like if you engage with other entrepreneurs outside of the coaching industry, maybe even marketers or influencers or like sales people, like that are just aren’t entrepreneur coaches, there are many entrepreneurs and many corporate people who feel a lot of pride for their busyness and there’s a lot of hustle culture that comes with like some sort of like badassery to be like hustling so hard. And I do think there’s another, like a revolt happening, of like, no, like there is a lifestyle that people desire of balance.

And so I think it’s a bunch of things. And this is why I think it’s attainable for even someone who is trying to balance working full-time, having kids, and starting a business. Like that is possible. You can balance all three of those because it’s a feeling, because it’s a mindset, because it’s a perspective and experience, and because it’s an intentional creation of a lifestyle. I think that’s important to consider.

And then what does it actually look and feel like? Like, how do you know if you have it? Like, what are we working towards? What’s the standard? What, how do we know we’re there? And for me, the answer is, I actually don’t think it’s black and white. It feels very much like capacity work for me. So those of you that did Capacity Work with me, or those of you that are dying to do Capacity Work with me, we will do that probably this year again because I’m so obsessed with it. And I’ve it’s just been such a big part of my current growth. And it was such a big part of my early growth. So I imagine we will do that again. But this feels like another piece of it.

Like it could be the intro to the conversation, or it could be the outro to the conversation. Like I think it could be the, I don’t know what the opposite of endcap is, but it could be the front load or the backload. But it feels like a part of the conversation where it’s not black or white. I believe balance lives in the individual moments of our day and our life. And I believe it’s available to completely change in an hour.

I have had so much experience with this lately in my life. I have had a challenging time recently. That’s what I will say. A challenging time in postpartum. I am almost six months into nursing exclusively. I have a baby that won’t sleep. I have a toddler that won’t sleep. And we’ve had a lot of illness in the house now that Jackson is in school, and I’ve been managing that while running my company, selling and delivering my three mainstay offers, and also preparing for this big, extraordinary Entrepreneur Coach Membership launch.

And the other day, so we had like five days where my husband had his shoulder like pop out of socket. It’s an old baseball injury, and it hasn’t happened for 20 years, but it’s happened five times in his life. And this time it was like the worst it’s ever happened, and he’s now going to have surgery. But for there’s been like a six-day period since this happened where he cannot pick up either of our kids. And we don’t have family that lives around us.

We do have a nanny now, which is so amazing, but she works a certain amount of hours. And we’ve been through a lot of night nannies to help us with the sleeping and I’ve had to fire several of them because we don’t have, you know, it’s challenging when you have a certain way that you treat your children and a certain way that you like things done and then people maybe that don’t live into that or the baby doesn’t connect with them or whatever. So, you know, we are in a challenging state.

And I had this moment where my mom had come down, and between my mother, my husband, and me, my baby was not sleeping that we were all so exhausted, we were like at the level of like, we want to puke. Like so little sleep, three adults in the house. And I had this moment of feeling so overwhelmed and so like far from what feels like balance for me. And in just an hour, I completely shifted my entire mindset, my entire perspective, how I felt, the energy radiating through my body, and I found it again. 

And to me, that was such a powerful example. And people have been saying like, “Oh my God, how are you still showing up with so much energy?” And it’s been the level to which I’m managing my brain and the level to which I’m managing how I feel and what I’m what I’m choosing to direct my mind and my emotions and the strategic, empowered mindset that I’m coming with and the parameters to which I’m working towards, which is I want to feel balanced and I want to experience balance and we’re going to have a deep conversation about this. But I’ve learned that I can feel imbalanced in one moment and then I can feel balanced in another.

So it doesn’t feel all or nothing to me. It doesn’t feel like you either have it or you don’t. And I think when you believe that you either have it or you don’t, then you don’t see it’s possible when you don’t have it because it feels like so much would have to change in order for you to touch it. Versus when you see it as something that lives in the individual moments, it feels like you could touch it right now.

Like, if you could just land on it, you could have it. And the moment you touch it, and you land on it, and you could have it, you’re like, oh my God, this could be possible in the next moment too. And then the more little moments where you reach for it and find it, the more it starts to accumulate, and then the more your life becomes the results of compounded accumulated moments of balance.

And so that’s what I believe. I believe that it looks and feels like a moment, like the wave of emotions that come and go. You can have a day that’s really hard and also like laugh so hard at the end of the day that you’re like, “Oh my God, I’m so glad I had this moment in this day.” Like it can ebb and flow. It looks like an ebb and flow.

Another question that I’ve been thinking about is, like, what’s the tangible how and the execution? And I do believe that is also in the day-by-day, moment-by-moment work, and that is what I’m going to show people in this first deep dive course inside the membership. I am going to show them what it looks like to manage imbalance. I think you can’t have a conversation about balance without having a conversation about imbalance. That’s the natural order of things in the world. Life is 50/50. You create balance somewhere and an imbalance somewhere else.

And so knowing how to manage imbalance is a really powerful first start. And there are two types of imbalance, and I’m going to teach you what those are and how to use them very effectively to get. Like, there’s one that’s a lot more powerful than the other. And so we’re going to move towards the one that’s very powerful. I also think it’s day-to-day in the energy, in managing the energy leaks. This is why it feels so much like capacity work to me, is that what creates balance is powerful energy. And so everywhere where your energy is being leaked, and you’re not being powerful, that’s where an imbalance is going to show up.

So we’re going to talk a lot about that. And then I also think it’s in the learning to live and learning to create in a world where it’s and instead of or. So I told you I was going to tell you a story. When I first touched on the idea of a three-day work week, the idea that you could set a parameter of time and reverse engineer an amount of money or growth that you desire within a parameter. And it was the year that I made $2.5 million. My goal was actually a million. And I went to a life coach school event, I don’t even remember what it was, like maybe a coachathon or something, or a business event, I don’t know.

But I raised my hand, and I stood up for coaching, and I said, “I really want to create a million dollars this year. But I know it’s going to be a lot of work. And what I also really desire is I’m about to get married, I’m engaged, and I would really love, before I start a family, to take this road trip with my fiancé and my dog,” which is so funny, Bear. Oh my God, Bear.

Bear was my baby at the time. So I wanted to, like I knew, like I knew we were getting I think at the time we knew we were getting a second dog, and so I knew that it was going to be impossible to, I just, it wasn’t going to work out to be traveling with two dogs on a cross-country road trip. I knew we were going to want to have kids right away. And so I wanted to take this, like, I have taken extraordinary life-changing cross-country road trips by mysel,f and I wanted to take my husband on one, and I wanted to do an extraordinary road trip. And so I wanted to go for 45 days.

And I, but I also wanted to make a million dollars. So I had this desire to live this beautiful dream goal in my life to take this 45-day road trip with my fiancé and my dog, and I also had this extraordinary desire to make a million dollars.

And my coach, Brooke, coached me on this idea of put it in the R line, which means, decide that the result is I’m going to make a million dollars, and I’m going to do it in 10 months instead of 12. And I set out to think about how I would need to think, how I would need to feel, what I would need to do in order to create that result. Like, who would I need to be in order to create that result? And that was ever-present in my day-to-day work, in my own self-coaching, and the coaching I got from my coaches, ever-present. And that year, I took my 45-day road trip, and I made $2.5 million.

And from that moment, I decided, “Wait a minute. Okay. So the ‘and’ is very important here.” So then I decided to try making $10 million and taking three months maternity leave. There were so many other, like working three days a week and creating $10 million. Like whatever it is, like there’s so many, a recent one was being the breadwinner and handling the pressure, right? Like the “and” felt so important to me. And so all of my results have been very focused on this and that. Like, can’t we have both?

And I’ve been coaching my students for like this for years. There is a famous coaching segment that I did at a 200k Live Mastermind in 20, oh my God, what year was it? 2020, the year of the pandemic, because we had to do it virtual. But I coached one of my students on making $200,000 and taking a maternity leave, and having a baby. And she was able to do it.

And it just sort of lit this fire in the 200k room of we can do big things and have big life moments. Like we can do these things. We just put it as an intentional result that we’re creating, and we reverse engineer how to do that for every “and” that we want in our lives. And so we have to learn how to reverse engineer results with boundaries, with the “and,” right? With the parameters. And I think that is how we create balance.

Now, why this matters so much for an entrepreneur coach? Why I wanted to do this as the first deep dive because believe me, I have thought about what is the first course that we release once we do the Entrepreneur Coach Membership. There are so many that are competing for my desire to get them out into the world. Why this one first? Here’s why I believe this matters. I believe it is the entire reason we get into business. And I know for a fact it’s the reason women to get women get into business.

I’ve just read this Forbes article that like deeply moved me. I read it and sobbed for like an hour. If you were in the behind-the-scenes experience, I recorded my reaction to reading that article. But one of the things it said is that women are starting to outpace men in entrepreneurship. We are growing businesses faster than men right now. And they studied why women get into business, and the reasons are so that they can set the parameters, so that they can make the decision, so that they can be their own boss and so that they can still caretake, whether it’s parents, whether it’s children, like they want to have freedom and flexibility and they want to be ambitious.

And then the reason I got so emotional is because they also said they found that 47% of women who quit their businesses quit citing personal reasons. To me, that means I got into business for freedom and flexibility and to exercise my ambition, and I got out of it because I couldn’t figure out how to do that. And that, I’m going to try not to cry now, makes me very emotional because I have been there. I have been a new postpartum mama who felt like a deer in headlights and completely out of balance and completely out of like the ground has fallen out from underneath me, and I’m in a free fall, and I don’t know how to figure things out.

I have had the feeling of drowning since I had children more times than I can tell you. I have been met with extraordinary business problems. I’ve been met with rising costs in my business that make profit margins tiny and unsustainable. I have been met with cancel culture. I have been met with my reputation being trashed all over the internet.

I have been met with exhaustion beyond belief, and having to figure out how to get myself up for the day. I have been met with so many extraordinary obstacles since becoming a mother, trauma, PTSD, like I’ve been diagnosed somewhat with PTSD from my nervous system response when I had Brooklyn.

I don’t think I’ve told this story on the podcast, and I won’t go into it here, but I had to have an emergency C-section. I had to go under, and I had like this very strong nervous system response that has stayed with me since that moment. I’m going to have to like get therapy, deep coaching on it because it only shows up when the needles come out, but it’s like a really aggressive, like my blood pressure drops like crazy, and I go white and pass out. Like they can’t draw my blood. It’s like crazy thing.

So I have been met with a lot of extraordinary obstacles, and I have had my brain tell me that we should like close things down, find the easier path. And I have also deeply investigated why closing down is not the easier path. And I have been able to find my way out of the weeds. I have been able to get my head above water, take a breath, and teach myself to swim to the shore in the what feels like the craziest stormy waters that I’ve ever faced.

And my heart weeps for women who don’t have that type of mentorship. My heart weeps for the dreams these women have that are leaving their businesses. I feel actual physical pain in my body when I think of these women and their desires and their ambition, and no one to help them and support them. I have felt so dehumanized at times from people as a pregnant person and as a postpartum mama. I have felt unseen, unheard, uncared for. I have had those experiences. I have had the feeling of no one getting it, like all of those things.

And I have found my way out of it, but it doesn’t feel like this thing where I’m like, you know, othering myself or like better than other people for it. I feel like it’s a fucking miracle that I was able to do it. It feels like, yes, I intentionally did that, and I own that. And also, the fact that I have the support system, the fact that I’ve had the mentorship, the fact that I have the tools, the fact that my something inside of my body keeps fighting and doesn’t let me quit. Like all of that, there’s a part of it that feels miraculous.

And I weep for the women who do not come into spaces, or like that don’t find that. I weep for the women who are not able to make it work. And I want to empower as many coaches as possible that can figure this out so that you can go coach them and so that this stops happening. And I just, I could, I mean, I’ll stop. I could keep going, but to me, it is the entire reason we get into the business, and it’s the reason women get into business.

And I believe that for so many of us as coaches, it’s the only way to be in integrity with what most of us teach at some level. At some level, if you’re a burnout coach, if you’re a health coach, if you’re a marriage coach, if you’re a business coach, if you are a career coach, like whatever it is, at some point, your clients are coming to you and they want they are feeling out of balance and they want some form of balance. And if you are not in integrity with having that in your life and understanding how to manage imbalance and be and feel balanced and fight for balance, then it’s very hard to help other people come into that current with you.

And I also believe it matters because it makes us a more well-rounded coach. I believe the more experience you can have with finding balance in the hardest times of your life, the more powerful coach you will be, the bigger perspectives you will have and the less often you will leave your clients also feeling unseen and unheard and diminished and dehumanized. And that can happen in coaching.

If you do not have the deep experience of having lived some really hard shit and pulled yourself out of it, if you don’t have the perspective of someone’s deep struggle and you cannot be with them in that and also empower them into a more, a state where they can create the balance they need, it just makes you a little less rounded, a little less equipped. And so I want all of us to be very equipped to handle, like this is not about being a trauma-informed coach. It’s about being a human-informed coach. It’s about understanding the deep facets of what your clients go through, especially your women clients who might be balancing caretaking, motherhood.

Like I have a client whose husband is very ill and is fighting for his life, and she is building a business while he is fighting for his life, and while she is also helping him fight for his life. Like these are the types of things that you have to be able to hold space for and know how to coach on.

And the more you can do this in your own life and pull your head above water, the more you’re going to be able to do this with like the utmost grace and authority and tenderness and care and also empowerment. It’s the and, the and. So that’s why I think this matters so much. It’s big. It’s big for me.

Now, I also have been thinking about why is the conversation so triggering to people? Because I do think introducing this topic is going to maybe have people a little bit like, who does she think she is? And why have I seen so much hate about my three-day work week or, you know, my lifestyle and the type of business I have? It’s like, why is it so triggering? Why do people have to so profoundly say it’s not possible? Why do people have to profoundly smack people in the face with, you can’t have it all and that’s your mistake is trying to have it all, and you’ve got to let that go. It’s the wrong problem to solve. Why is it so triggering for people?

And I think the truth is, if you haven’t figured out how to have it and you believe you can’t have it, then you can’t see other people having it and feel good about yourself. So then you have to make them wrong in order to feel good about yourself again. Like if someone else is saying they have it and you’ve been telling yourself you can’t have it, then either you have to feel bad or you have to be mad at they have to be wrong. It’s like you’re wrong or they’re wrong. So you have to make them wrong in order for you to feel good. It’s the easier path than saying, “Maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe I can have it.”

So if, like, even if you’re a burnout coach and or you know, a coach that deals in this kind of conversation, and you’ve been telling people that they can’t have it all and that it has to be boundaries and priorities, and maybe come in and just be open to this conversation.

I do also think this is where the sales shaming comes in. I’ve thought a lot about this. There’s been lots of sales shaming over the years, and I have a podcast about that, where literal terms are created in order to diminish the power that people have in selling and being good at what they do, because people can’t imagine how it’s possible that you could sell millions of dollars and get people results, that you could sell millions of dollars and get people extraordinary results and only work three days a week. That can’t be possible.

So you must be a grifter. You must be a cult leader. You must be scamming people. It’s the only way it’s possible, right? This is where the wild theories happen. This is where the mistrust is sown because if I can’t have it, surely you can’t have it either. It’s not possible for me, therefore it’s not possible for you, so you’re lying about it. You don’t have it, or you’ve gotten it in a way that is terrible and bad and harms other people.

And this is what happens versus, wait, maybe I could have this. Is it possible that you could make millions of dollars and get your clients extraordinary results, and live a really like fun, amazing life, and love your life? Like, why can’t we think I could have that too, instead of it’s not possible for me, therefore it couldn’t be possible for you, so you must be lying about it or doing something terrible to get it.

So that’s why I think it’s so triggering. But I’m moving towards it anyway. We’re going for it. I’m going to pose some theories. I’m going to go against the grain. I’m going to stand firm for this is possible. I’m going to introduce a rub from the mainstream narrative. I’m going to be brave. I’m going to go first. I’m going to go often. I’m going to go with the purpose of leading all of you to do it too.

Okay, so the last thing I will say is I think to be have massive success, to feel massive success as an entrepreneur coach, like you’ve actually made it, I believe that you have to be able to balance your life and living it, like truly living it with your business and feeling amazing about it. I believe you have to learn how to balance growth with sufficiency and enough. I believe you have to balance good with hard. I think you have to learn how to balance a positive emotion with negative emotion. Working hard with living hard. For me, that is the only way I have energy is if I’m balancing both. Work ethic with purpose and clarity, otherwise you’re in a cycle of overworking and overproducing.

There’s so many different facets of balance that I can’t imagine there won’t be a single human that can’t come into this course and have a profound impact on their life from using it in any of the ways that I’ve mentioned and probably many ways that didn’t make it into this one short podcast episode.

So I want to invite you to come join me and study this for the next two months, the entire month of February and the entire month of March. The way I’m not saying that this is how we’re going to do every deep dive course inside the membership, or that this is how the membership will always be laid out. I’m going to think of the topic and what I think is the best way to deliver each transformation for each conversation we’re having.

But because balance, I believe, is so deeply embedded in the day-to-day, moment by moment, I believe the best way to do it is to introduce one idea, one teaching, one module, and then coach on it. And then introduce another, and then coach on it. And so I have set up five lessons that I will teach in one call. And then if there’s time, we may do some coaching to have some immediate anchoring of here are some examples. But then I want to have a completely separate just coaching call to dive in and really integrate the work. And so we’re going to do 10 total calls over the next two months and deeply study this work.

And the way that you can think about the result that you’re working towards is either finding that feeling, that mindset, that experience, that perspective, that lifestyle of balance, and what that looks like for you right now at your income level and in your business, and also maybe it’s coming in to exercise that and statement for yourself. This year, I want to make $300,000, and I want to take the summer off with my kids. This year, I want to, I’m going to be working full-time, and I want to make my first $100k. And how do I do that without feeling like I’m dying and I’m drowning?

And so whichever angle it is, anything that spoke to you on this episode, I would love to have two months to deep dive with you and create an actual lifetime transformation on this. I know the exact moment this work changed my life, standing in that coaching space in that room, asking about a million dollars and a 45-day road trip. That’s where it began for me. I want this to be a moment that you remember for the rest of your career. I took this course in this membership called Balance, and it changed everything for me.

So if you want to come along with me on this journey, go to staceyboehman.com/ec-membership/. I think you have to have that second one to make the link work. So I’ll say it again, staceyboehman.com/ec-membership/.

And you can come in and, you know, just do the two months with us, or you can stay. I’ll be releasing another course after that as well. And you’ll also get access if you join by February 2nd, you will get access to some founding members’ bonuses that you can also investigate on the sales page. And then if you join even after February 2nd, you’ll also get access to ROI, Return on Investment.

Everybody gets that when they join, to make sure you get what you came for if you sign up annually, or you decide to do monthly and come with us for as long as you do. I want to make sure you feel like you got your money’s worth and you know how to extract value and get returns. So come with us. I would love to have you, whether it’s for two months or forever. I’ll take you.

Have an amazing rest of your week. I hope you enjoyed this lesson from 10 years, 11 years now in business. Balance, my friends. I really believe it’s possible. Have a beautiful week, and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2k for 2k program; where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple five-step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to StaceyBoehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.