Ep #364: Lessons from 10 Years in Business: Identity Matters When Selling

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

Hey coaches. Welcome to Episode 364. Today, as promised, I am giving you my day 1 of how to sell life coaching training as today’s episode. But I want to prep you for it.

This is one of the most powerful trainings that I have done and one of the most realest conversations that I have had with coaches. In fact, I was nervous to have this be day 1 of a 5-day training because of the risking of the relationship that I did and the hard truths that I told on this episode.

I think if you don’t have this conversation early on, it could lead to unintentional disappointment, being sort of like feeling a little, I don’t know what the word is, but you know when you go into something and you just don’t realize the depths of the work required or how hard it could be or what it’s really going to take, and then you feel misled or frustrated or your relationship with the goal changes.

I think this can happen with entrepreneurship, especially. I don’t think it’s just for life coaches. I don’t think that’s the only group of people who experiences this. I think all entrepreneurs can experience this, like kind of being slapped in the face with the reality. And so I wanted to have a real conversation that doesn’t scare. It’s meant to be super productive, like really valuable.

Like if someone told you this ahead of time, it would save you so much failure, so much missed time, give you such purpose and clarity on what you need to do and how you need to move forward, and really show you what it’s going to take, but also help you believe you’re capable of doing it. This is the conversation. I’m so proud of this conversation.

I was actually listening to it to make sure that I wanted to release it on the podcast, and just reminding myself all of the things that I said in this hour training. And one of the things that I had to stop the video and rewind and write down verbatim what I said because I was like, oh my God, everyone needs to hear this. I’m going to share it with you now, but this is the kind of thing that I just think is so powerful to hear.

I’m talking about failure and having emotional tolerance for failure in entrepreneurship. And one of the things I say is the journey of entrepreneurship and learning to sell life coaching is meant to be an experience that creates mastery in your coaching tools. This is the time where you practice what you preach, where you find out what you really believe with coaching. So good. I had to literally hear that over and over. I do believe that is 100% the thing.

Entrepreneurship is the hardest thing that many of us will ever do, and it is meant to test us on what we believe to be true when it comes to the advice we offer people for how to get results, how to change their life, the coaching tools that we offer, the processes that we offer. We are meant to deeply hone those skills in this hard experience.

So, stuff like that is what you can expect over the next hour training, where we’re going to talk about identity. I talk about the three identities that you have to develop in order to get really good at selling life coaching.

The lesson, how this ties into my 10 lessons for and the wisdom that I’ve curated over 10 years in business, is I really believe that identity and self-concept, I talk about those as kind of the same thing, really matter when it comes to selling life coaching, growing your business, and in general, making money. Your identity is everything.

And there are three that you want to develop to get really good at selling coaching as an entrepreneur, as a coach. There are three that I break down in this hour-long training. I didn’t hold back. This wasn’t a training where you just, you know, perfectly curate what you offer to people in order to sell them this thing. That’s not what I did here.

I really wanted this conversation to be authentic, organic, highly valuable, purposeful. I wanted it to feel like we were having a real conversation, like the shit gets real moment of conversation of this training.

And if you love it and you want more of it, you can get more of it by going to staceyboehman.com/howtosell. And that will give you access to all 5 days of the training. So you’ll have day 1, and then if you’re curious about day 2 and day 3 and day 4 and day 5, you will get those when you go to staceyboehman.com/howtosell.

All right, enjoy this episode. Identity matters when selling life coaching, and I’m going to tell you which three identities matter the most right now.

If you’ve never taken one of my trainings before, here’s what you need to know. You’re in for a lot of value and a big over-deliver. This is how I roll. So if you are new or if you’ve been following for just a little bit, I am a Master Certified Life Coach and business coach with the Life Coach School for those of you that are maybe brand new to my world. And I have been helping life coaches make money since 2018, exclusively.

I think this is really important to know about this training. The last 7, 8 years, how long is that? 7 years, my brain has spent every moment in my career thinking of how to help you succeed, how to help you make money. It has spent every day in my work. All I do is think and coach on how to make money for coaches.

And I have multiple programs that are an extension program, meaning you come in and you learn how to make your first $2,000 with me, your first $20,000 with me in my first program, and then you learn you go to my next program and you learn how to make your first $200,000, and then you go to my next program and you learn how to make 2 million dollars.

And I say this because it’s really important to know that I coach thousands of coaches every single week, and I coach them at all income levels. I have a lot of experience watching coaches, what works, what doesn’t work, and what needs to be done differently to speed up success.

Okay, so I just want you to know that. And I also want you to know that I made my first $150,000 really simply, very essentially, doing the basics. And when I did that, and I did it in my first full year, people started knocking on my door and asking how, because they noticed that they weren’t growing as quickly.

And so I’ve created this training thinking about the person who might reach out to me, and I get these Instagram messages literally all the time. But I also have friends, like actual real-life friends who take me to coffee or to lunch and ask me these questions. And so they’ll always say if I wanted to start or I’m thinking of starting a coaching business, what would you tell me? And what could you tell me? I’m thinking of the person who maybe you work full-time. And if you’re like me, I worked full-time until I had $100,000 business. So I balanced a full-time job with $100,000 business before I left my career to become a full-time coach.

And so a lot of my students have full-time jobs. A lot of my students are moms and dads, and so they have, they’re parents, and they have children that they’re taking care of. And so you might have children that you’re taking care of and a full-time job, and you also have this insane dream to become a coach and to make money and to sell life coaching.

And so if you came to me and you said, “Listen, I don’t have a lot of free time, and this is going to be like a big leap, and I’m going to it’s already going to just take all of me to do this. So what would you recommend? Like, what would you tell me to do to help me succeed the fastest and help me not have a steep of a learning curve and to not waste time or spin my wheels or overwork and do things that aren’t necessary?” Like, what would you tell me? And that’s what this training is going to be.

And if you’ve done trainings with me before, maybe you’ve seen me at the flip chart. I tend to love to be at the flip chart and teach like very classroom style, but I want this training to be conversational. I want it to be like I am having a conversation with you.

We are at lunch, and you’ve asked me how can I sell life coaching quickly? How can I do it essentially? What’s the most important things I need to know to guard my time the best and have the most success the quickest? Like, what would you tell me?

And I always joke that do you have 5 days? That’s what it’s going to take if I’m thorough. I can always give really fast quippy answers, but if I want to be thorough and I want you to like, I want you at the end to feel like you read a book that changed your life or you had a conversation that was so in depth that you thought I’ll never be the same again. That’s the conversation we’re going to have.

Now, some of this is going to be intangible, and some of this is going to be tangible. So I’m going to talk a lot about I have a firm belief that if you teach people what to do and why to do it and how to do it, and then you tell them all the reasons why it works, it’s just really easy to take action.

So I’m going to tell you the thoughts. I’m going to tell you the mindset. I’m going to tell you the energy, but I’m also going to tell you the practical things that you have to do. And so some days we’ll be more practical and tangible, and some days will be more intangible, and it all matters. It all comes together as a big piece of the puzzle. Okay?

And then these trainings, just so you are prepared, will be anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes. And I know that’s kind of a big window, but I like to be in the groove of the training and the conversation. I like to read what’s happening in the chats. I like to think about your questions. I like to add things as we go on. And so I want the flexibility to be able to just speak to you and give you everything that comes from me. And so some of the classes might be shorter, and some of them might be longer. So just I would prepare for the full hour, and if you have extra time, then you can go put that into use.

And then I also want you to know that this training is going to be simple, but it’s not necessarily going to be easy. So don’t discount the things that you hear that feel simple. Don’t discount them that they seem too simple or too obvious, because I have helped 5,000 coaches make money in this industry, to break into the industry and sign their first clients, and I know what gets underrated as far as importance, and I know what gets overrated in importance. And so I’m going to be pointing these things out. Some of the simplest things are actually the hardest things. They’re not the easiest things, and they require the most hard work.

So this isn’t going to be that it’s not going to be hard work; it’s just some of these things will be simple. And they will be what matters most. They will be what’s most effective, and they will be from the perspective, this is what makes me different as a life coach or and a business coach for other coaches.

I used to sell mops in Walmart, slicers, dicers, infomercial products in department stores in Walmart. And so I would speak to live in person 1,000 people a day for 7 years straight. And I was taught in that industry to think about the buyer and to think about the person in the audience and to speak to them and to interact with them and to use their feedback to then adjust my own behavior.

And so a lot of what I’m going to teach you is going to be something that has been very thought out, thinking about our impact on the person thinking of buying coaching from us. And there’s not a lot of people doing that in the world. There’s not a lot of people thinking about the person on the other end of the conversation.

It’s why I don’t teach sales scripts. It’s why I don’t teach a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. If you get really good at understanding the buyer and how they think, the customer, the client who’s going to buy coaching, invest in coaching and do coaching for themselves, you will be a step ahead of every person they ever talk to. It will be one of the biggest legs up you have in competition is just the way that you think and then how you behave because you think like that.

So you’re going to hear me talk about that a lot throughout this training. All right. Are you all ready?

Okay. Module 1, today’s class. The first thing that I would tell you before we get into the how and before we get into the doing, there’s going to be some doing tomorrow. We’re going to talk about the doing, but what matters most to sell life coaching above all else is your identity. It’s your or your self-concept.

If you’re one of my students, you’ve heard me refer to identity as self-concept. It’s the way you think about yourself. When you’re starting a life coaching business, and I am going to be talking about this from the beginning.

I know there are lots of people here that are not beginners, but I’m going to talk about it from the beginning because if you are starting your business and you want to know how to sell life coaching, I don’t want to leave anything out. And for a lot of us, we can also make money and sell coaching without having all of the pieces. And so then we think we’re maybe further along, or we think we know a certain amount of things, and then sometimes we’ve missed things along the way that show up after we sign our first client or our second or our fifth or our tenth.

And so whether or not you’re actually a new beginner or you’ve sold, you know, $20,000, $30,000 of life coaching, $50,000 of life coaching, you’re going to hear things and in this training, you’re going to tell you like you’re going to have the thought, “Oh, this is why it hasn’t been working,” or “this would take it to the next level.” Or, “Oh, this makes so much sense. I never thought of it that way.” You’re going to hear a lot of things like that.

But starting from the beginning, if you’re starting a life coaching business and you want to sell coaching and you want to go out and work with clients, what makes or breaks your effectiveness in the actions you take, whatever they are, what makes or breaks the effectiveness is how you see yourself truly all the way through your body, like how you see yourself predominantly in your mind and the groundedness that it provides or the lack of groundedness that it provides.

And there are three main identities to develop to sell life coaching well: three. The coach identity, the leader identity, and the entrepreneur identity. So those three identities have to be developed in you immediately. It’s a very steep learning curve, but I’m going to tell you the basis of these identities and how you want to think in order to start embodying this right away.

And we’re going to start with the entrepreneur identity because here’s what I have found. The moment you decide to become a life coach and then get paid as a life coach, you become an entrepreneur. And a lot of coaches don’t consciously realize this or identify with this. They think of themselves, and I want you to think about this for you if you think of yourself this way, as a coach wanting clients to coach.

And I say life coach, but people don’t always identify with that. You could be a business coach, a nutrition coach, a marriage coach. I just say life coach. That’s all encompasses all personal development coaching in my opinion.

A lot of students come to me, and the way they think of themselves is I’m a life coach, and I want to just go get clients. I want to go get paid to be a coach. And that’s their predominant identity. And because they know coaching consciously is so valuable, they just know this was so valuable to me in my life. I know how important it is to me. I know how valuable coaching is for me, that they expect it to be easier than it is to actually sell life coaching.

They expect to be met with people understanding the value. They expect for people to be enrolled in the value as much as they are. They think that it will just be as easy as maybe as they felt it was for them to say yes to getting coaching, whether it was going hiring a life coach, or going to a certification or joining a membership or buying a program, or reading books, whatever it was that got you into the industry.

I seriously thought, this is not an exaggeration, this is a true story. I thought clients would just appear once I got certified. Seriously. I don’t know, I think back to that moment, and I’m like, what was I actually thinking? I really did think, I’m going to go get certified, and clients will just appear. I don’t know from where, but they will just appear. That’s what happens. And I really thought certification equals clients come to me, and then they didn’t. And I was shocked.

And so some of you might not might be shocked too, right? Because your thought is, how could they not? 100%, Adrian, right? How could they not? That’s the belief of I see the value, so obviously, other people will, because I’m in my coach identity only, thinking about how much I love coaching, the value of coaching, and other people wanting coaching.

But I see a lot of people, they fail, lose steam, because this isn’t what is the reality. It’s not what they’re actually met with. Their expectation isn’t met. So here’s what happens. Our lack of awareness of what entrepreneurship is and what to expect of the experience, that is actually what causes the fail. Not understanding I’m a coach who has also in the act of wanting to be paid as a coach, instead of being hired by someone else, because you could be a coach and get hired by someone else.

But if you want to be a coach who makes your own rules and has your own business and your own philosophies and your own values and you build your own audience and your own following and you make, you set your own pay and you set your own goals for income, if you want to do that route, you are an entrepreneur. You are becoming an entrepreneur. And the faster you could embody that, decide that intentionally, realize that, and learn what it means to be an entrepreneur, the faster you will grow. 

So here is how I think of entrepreneurship. When I think of entrepreneurship and the identity of an entrepreneur, I hold two things true. The first one is, I genuinely believe if you are a coach here on or want to be a coach here on this training, that selling things and even if you’re not a coach, selling things on the internet is one of the lower risk, simplest ways to become an entrepreneur in the world today.

Like, there’s no easier, simple, less startup-required venture in entrepreneurship than selling things to strangers on the internet. And that’s why you’ve seen it explode, whether it’s influencers and bloggers or they’re a multi-level marketer or you know, they’re selling anything from their Instagram, their TikTok, their Facebook. It’s just the lowest bar for entry to entrepreneurship.

And, in my opinion, coaching is the most fulfilling way to go. Very early on, I helped a classmate of mine, we had been classmates for, I mean, I don’t know, we hadn’t been classmates for 20 years. So we had been classmates at one point and hadn’t been for 20 years. But she looked me up on social. She saw what I was doing, and she started to work with me. And in our coaching engagement, I helped her save her marriage, save her home from foreclosure, and start a coaching business that then went on to bring in $100,000 a year.

I think about this all the time. I have so many stories like this. It doesn’t get better than that when you get paid to do that, when you get paid to help other people change their lives. It is the most purposeful thing every single day. This work matters. It literally changes lives. It changes generations. And I always tell my students, I believe coaching creates the opportunity to live more than one life in this lifetime because you can change identities. You can become someone new and have completely new results.

So I think it’s the best path for entrepreneurship. And I say it’s low risk. I’m going to put this in parentheses, lower risk because it isn’t brick and mortar or a franchise, and it doesn’t require venture capital. So I have self-funded and grown my business without ever taking on venture capital, without ever taking on loans, other than like minor credit card debt over the last 10 years, and created an 8-figure business and have sold over $40 million of coaching. And without ever having to sell a piece of it to get that funding. And I know a lot of us because we’re in the lower entry bar for

entrepreneurship, we don’t actually like expand our perspective and think about how many people have to go on a show like Shark Tank and bring on venture capital. How many people have to go fund and raise money, and the actual big risk that they take on. Like, I watched like 10 years of Shark Tank, and I would hear the stories of people saying, How much of your own money do you have in? They’re like $500,000, $800,000 of their own money in. We don’t have to do that. So I call it lower risk.

And it’s lower overhead because in the beginning, I ran my business with my phone and nothing else. Facebook posts, live streams, phone calls for coaching, no overhead. I didn’t even have Zoom at the time. No overhead. And if you ever had to get your business expenses down in the future of your business, you could always run your business just from your phone. You would just need a cell phone bill.

So, comparatively, it is a lower risk than opening a Subway franchise or starting your own restaurant, or launching a product-based business. Okay? So that’s one thing I hold to be true that really helps me appreciate this level of entrepreneurship.

But then the other thing I hold true is that entrepreneurship is by definition risky, and it requires risk tolerance. Okay? Now this is the part of the conversation where, throughout these identities, there is going to be some confronting things that I’m going to tell you, but I want you to know that I’m telling you from a place of deep love, and I wish someone had this conversation with me, and I wish someone had laid it all out for me.

Not, I’m sugarcoating everything and making it really simple. It’s this is what you need to know. It is risky. People who do really well in this industry, who learn how to sell life coaching and sell a lot of it. The successful people have a significant level of risk tolerance, meaning they can tolerate risk. And I’m going to tell you the types of risk that you will take on selling life coaching, but just know, if you want to develop the entrepreneur identity, being able to develop tolerance to risk is the bar for entry. It is what creates success. Your ability to tolerate risk.

And this really is the definition of entrepreneurship. If you go look it up after this training, you’re going to see the definition from the Googles of entrepreneurship is taking on considerable financial risk in hopes of big financial rewards. That’s the definition of being in business for yourself.

You’re going to take on a lot more risk than if you had a corporate job. You’re going to invest your own money. You’re going to risk money. You’re going to make money mistakes, and you’re also not going to be stuck building someone else’s dream, and the reward can be potentially much bigger than what you would get paid in the marketplace.

So the risk that you need to know that you will take on and develop tolerance around in your entrepreneur identity, the first one is financial. You will need to invest in yourself and there will be no guarantees. Nothing’s going to be done for you or handed to you. And the first time I realized that is when I got certified, and clients didn’t just show up. I didn’t just have a pool of people to sell life coaching to. It didn’t work that way. There was risk. I had paid money to get a certification, and then I had no idea how to build a business beyond that. And at the time, it didn’t offer help for that. So that was just on me. Right?

So that’s the financial risk. You will need to make investments in yourself. Even though you can just do this business from your phone, I’m going to talk to you about the different types of investments you’re going to need to make, but you will need to invest in yourselves. The people who succeed the most in this industry have invested the most. They get a return, but they have invested. They have put money on the line.

But the second risk you’re going to take on, and this is the one I really want you to hear, is emotional risk. Failure, rejection, things taking longer than you’d like, other people having thoughts about you and your business and your little new venture, and life coaching.

And you are going to care because it’s going to be people that you love. It’s going to be people that are your friends, your parents, your spouses, the people who are supposed to love you the most might have thoughts about you taking on this risk. As soon as you decide to become risk-tolerant, you find out all the people in your lives in your life who are not.

And they will bring it up. They will they will worry about you. They will make comments about you. They will, it’s like the idea of the crabs in a pot, right? If all the crabs or the lobsters, whatever it is, if they aren’t risk tolerant and you start to become risk tolerant and you start to climb up out of the pot, they’re going to be like, “No.” Not because they don’t believe in you, but because they love you. And they’re scared for you.

And so you’re going to be holding the emotional weight of financial risk potentially for a little bit until you really start making really good money. That’s a possibility. Some people make money right out the gate, but not everybody. Entrepreneurship has risk, and you just want to know that.

So the faster you can emotionally regulate yourself to those two realities, financial and emotional risk, the faster you’re going to grow. This is where you have to anchor in that you are moving towards a dream life. You are moving towards a business that is fulfilling and purposeful, that you actually want to do for the rest of your life, a work that you want to pour your energy into for the rest of your life.

Like I have a 3-year-old, almost 3-year-old son at home. I have a baby on the way, and the thing I think about all the time is what a profound difference it is that they will grow up with a parent who is immersed and loves their work. And every minute that I have to spend away from them, I’m not spending for someone else’s dream and for something I’m doing just for money. I’m spending it doing something that fulfills me, gives me life, and makes me a better mama for them when I come back to them.

It doesn’t get better than that. It’s worth every single dollar I ever invested, every risk I took. And so you have to have a really strong purpose, a really strong why, a really strong mission alongside this tolerance for risk.

Again, financial, but also emotional. And the emotional one is mostly the biggest one that I coach on for people because I also, I’m going to teach you my rules for investing, and that will be really helpful. But for the most part, the biggest risk you will take is the emotional toll. And so the faster you can regulate yourself to these realities and these tolerances, the faster you’re going to grow.

Here’s what you don’t want. You don’t want, and this is why I was thinking I almost didn’t have this conversation with you, but I wanted to have this conversation because here’s what I’ve seen people do year after year for the last 10 years, whether it’s a free training or something they’ve invested in. I’ve seen them, their brains, listening. So let’s say to this course, we don’t want your brain listening to this course or trying to learn how to sell life coaching, trying to figure out how to do it without the financial and emotional risk.

If you try to figure out how to make money in business without experiencing emotional and financial risk, you will miss all of the message. You will miss the task. You will miss what you’re supposed to be doing. You will do it wrong. You will do it in a way that doesn’t work.

So you can’t be thinking how can I make money? How can I sell life coaching without experiencing a negative emotion, without having any potential financial risk on the line. It’s a completely different type of problem-solving. There will be a big difference in how you try to problem solve in your business if that’s what you’re trying to do. And I see people try to do it. They’re like, they get really stuck on the how and perfection and doing it right so that they don’t have a fail, so that they don’t risk anything so that nothing they don’t feel anything bad.

Think about this if this is you. If I’m always trying to dissect the things I’m learning to try not to have any risk happen, to try to do it perfectly and right, so there is no fallback. There’s no fallout. So I want you to just notice that because I want you to instead tolerate risk and listen to the things I’m saying, and if you hear them and they sound risky, especially emotionally risky, that’s mostly what this is going to bring up for you all.

If it sounds emotionally risky, instead of trying to figure out, oh, how do I do it without doing that thing’s hard or it seems scary or it seems, I don’t know if it’s going to work. Instead of trying to figure out an out that you’re like, “Oh, I’m capable of doing this. I’m capable of tolerating this discomfort that’s going to come with learning a bunch of new skill sets.”

Because when you become a coach, you’re learning the skill set of coaching. When you become an entrepreneur, you have to learn the skill set of marketing, you have to learn the skill set of selling, you have to learn the skill set of delivering. There’s a lot of new skill sets that you’re learning all at the same time of also getting better at coaching.

So here are my rules for this because I do think there is a caveat that I don’t want to go down too far of a tangent, but there is a caveat when I talk about you’re going to have to take on financial risk. I do believe you can take risk on in a smart way, and so I just want to quickly share my smart rules around financial risk so that you don’t think I’m completely crazy and telling you you should go massively in debt to build your business. That’s not what I’m telling you.

So my first rule is I invest in what I need when I need it. And the resourcefulness that it requires for me to figure out how to do that, even if I don’t necessarily have the funds instantly, has always made me a better coach and an entrepreneur.

I remember one time, like a year into my business, I had a client who wanted to do a VIP weekend with me. She brought it up with me. I’d never done one. I didn’t even know what it was. And so I asked my coach if she knew what those were at the time, and she was like, “Yes, I do them for my clients.”

And I said, “Okay, so I should probably do one with you before I do one for my clients, so I know how to. I’ve experienced being a client on one.” I was like, “So how much would it be?” And she was like, “It’ll be $13,000.” And I was like, “Oh crap, I don’t have $13,000,” but she wanted, my client wanted to do it right away. And I wasn’t going to be charging her $13,000, and I think I’d even already told her that it would be like $2,000 or something. So I just knew that it wasn’t going to come from that. And so I had to come up with like $11,000 in a couple of days.

And I figured that out by making a really bold offer that was emotionally risky to someone else, that they ended up saying yes, paying me, and I was able to fund my education.

So I figure it out. Whatever it is. I’ve also taken money out of my IRA. I have worked extra shifts. I’ve sold furniture. I’ve sold clothes. I figured it out, and it always made me a better entrepreneur.

But I also honor what I sign up for. I do the things I sign up for. I get what I came for, what I signed up for. I never let myself tell myself, “Oh, the program wasn’t good, or I didn’t like this, or this method wasn’t for me. This doesn’t align.” I can’t tell you how many people have come to me to ask to buy my programs, telling me, “Oh, I did I spent this money, and I did this course, and it wasn’t aligned for me.” And I’m like, no, that’s not the way successful entrepreneurs think.

Successful entrepreneurs don’t spend a dime without walking away with value that they turn into cash in their businesses. So I get what I came for, and I’m essential in what I take on and give my time to. I don’t overinvest from a place of looking for ease and shortcuts and miracle money. I always have a goal to make my money back from my investments. That is an expectation I set of myself.

And I only, up until $100,000, invested in coaching for my identity and my entrepreneur and coaching skill sets. I didn’t put money into ads. I didn’t put money into websites. I didn’t put money into a VA. None of that. It was just my brain and my skill sets to get better at selling coaching, to produce more money in my business. Okay? So that’s the first rule.

And the second rule is I also learn from every emotional suffering that I take on. I refuse to suffer emotionally without getting a reward from it. I extract value from emotional pain. I released an episode recently called Failure Gold. And the main idea of this episode is that failure gold is the information on how to succeed that you can only get through trial and error, through experience, through doing and getting a fail.

So there’s actual information inside fails that you cannot learn, you cannot read in a book, you can’t get in theory, you can’t get in a course. It’s information that is personal to you that impacts your success that only comes after you evaluate a failure, after you learn from the failure, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s a tangible failure, you don’t sign the consult.

But we can only evaluate and learn when we are emotionally regulated, when we can handle failure, when we have decided in our entrepreneurial identity that we are actively taking on more fails in a day than maybe our relatives and our colleagues at work might in a month or even a year.

Like everybody else is going to seem like their life is easier than yours when you decide to become an entrepreneur. That’s the truth. It’s going to you’re going to watch everybody else, and you’re going to be like, “Their life seems so much easier than mine right now. I’m doing all this failing, and it’s so emotionally painful.”

Except I actually think it’s harder to not go after your dreams than to go after them. I think it’s harder to have a life where you’re just living the life that you’re on the track for. I actually think it’s much harder to do that, to not confront what you most want in life.

So you’ve got to have dedication to evaluation for everything you do and everything you spend money on, or you will experience a lot of unnecessary failure and financial and emotional pain. If you evaluate, you will experience a lot less. So those are my two rules. They increase my risk tolerance, both financially and emotionally. I always get a return. I always learn from my pain.

So I want you to think of the entrepreneur identity as I have an evaluating mindset. I evaluate everything. I learn from everything. I figure out what works, what doesn’t work, what I’m going to do differently. I find the failure gold, and I tolerate risk. That’s my entrepreneur identity.

And the final piece of it is that as a first priority, as an entrepreneur, above all else, my priority is to get revenue in the door. First and foremost, when I think about my business, when I think about being an entrepreneur, and I think about the things I need to do in my spare time to build this business, to sell life coaching, it’s to get money in the door.

You do not have a business without sales. So a business isn’t an email list. It’s not perfect client messaging. It’s not a funnel. It’s not a perfect IG thread with perfect little graphics. It’s not the perfect Reel, and it’s not a website. And you want to think about how much time you spend on things that aren’t actually direct activities interacting with another human to get cash in the door, cold hard cash in the door.

What I have found for people who come to me, a lot of coaches come in and they care more about looking professional and not having anyone think of them as not professional. They care more about that than actually making money. They care more about what it looks like than it actually is. And I’ve had marketers even tell me, like big-time marketers in the industry tell me, “I didn’t have a business until I had an email list.” I had someone tell me I don’t have a business until I have a LinkedIn account. Someone told me that at a networking event years and years ago.

An email list and a LinkedIn account are not businesses. That is not the indicator of a business. I had lots of colleagues with email lists and were not making any money, coming to me asking me how I was doing it. And I had no email list, but I was being paid $150,000 a year, and I had a full client list, and I launched my first several groups, and I had sold my first retreat and my first VIP weekends.

So you tell me who had the real business? The people who figured out how to work an Active Campaign to set up an email list and spent a week in their office doing that, and then inviting people to this list, or the people who went out and got clients and started getting paid and started coaching without any of it?

And it doesn’t mean you can’t have it, but if you want to succeed the fastest and be the most essential, you want to cut all of that noise out. You don’t want to care about what it looks like. You want to care about what it is, and what’s the fastest way that I could sell another human life coaching so that I can get cash in the door. You never want to lose sight of this. You want to get a bank account with money in it. You want to have revenue streams in the door, and you never want to lose sight of this day after day.

So, something I’m going to say over and over in this training, I want you to ask yourself every day, does this activity directly engage me with real people who can pay me real money to coach them? Does this activity directly bring in cash? If it doesn’t, beware, because you can be playing business and feeling very busy and working very hard without actually making money. It becomes a very fancy and expensive hobby, and I am not interested in teaching that. So your entrepreneur identity, risk tolerance, failure, and evaluation are gold, and prioritizing cash in the door. Those three things are the biggest aspects of the entrepreneur identity that you want to grow.

The second identity that you want to grow is your leadership identity. This is the identity of I go first, I go often, and I go with purpose. The journey of entrepreneurship and learning to sell life coaching is meant to be an experience that creates mastery in your coaching tools. This is the time where you practice what you preach. This is where you find out in entrepreneurship what you really believe about coaching.

You have to take on more risk, more action, have more guts than your clients will ever have by a mile. Like that’s the way you want to think. I go first. I go often. I go first to fail. I go often at fails. I go with purpose to lead my people through failure. You have to lead. You can’t be a theory advice hotline. My friend and I used to joke we would coach each other after coach training, and then we would be like, “Okay, that’ll be $999 from the coach hotline.”

You can’t be coaching from theory. You can’t be coaching from what your certification school taught you. You can’t be coaching from what you a concept you learned in a book. You have to be coaching from I have lived this. That is how people will know you’re the real deal. That will be the differentiator. Not your certification, not how your website looks, not how many clients you’ve worked with, or what your client testimonials are, or if this person can talk to another one of your clients. It’s none of that.

They’re going to hear what you say and know whether you’ve lived your experience or not. There is an energetic difference that is palpable to other people of those who are walking the talk and those who aren’t. And I promise you, because I have coached, I mean, I have done launch audits, I have done email audits, sales page audits. I have coached people extensively on their consults, on overcoming objections, things they said, things the client said. I have gone into the nitty-gritty with my clients, and you cannot and will not ever be able to say enough of the right things or make enough of the right perfect IG or TikTok reels to ever compensate from not coming from a place of leadership where you go first with everything you teach, where you go first to fail often towards your dreams.

You go many times towards your dream. You go many times towards failure, and you go with the purpose of learning from it so you can walk someone else through it. This really matters. I can’t say it enough. The energetic piece of this cannot be faked. There’s no marketing funnel you can create that’s going to change this. You won’t be able to move people to a yes to pay you if you are not living in this leadership identity.

So don’t let entrepreneurship and risk eat you alive. You’ve got to be tough so that you can fail so that you have material for your people. I’m going to talk to you like my second mama. I have a second mama.

She is a lifelong New Yorker, and I met her doing a show, a theater show in Spain, when I was in college. I played the ingénue, and she played the mother of the ingénue. And we hit it off instantly, and we have been friends ever since, and I’ve been visiting her every time I go to New York, her whole rest of my life since 2006. And so almost 20 years.

And I went to New York once when I, before I became an entrepreneur, and I was an actor, and I went to a studio called HB Studio in the West Village, and we took acting classes together, and I lived in the city for months during the summer to take these classes. And one time, I was supposed to meet her at her apartment in midtown, right by Columbus Circle. She had an apartment that was three buildings down from the Columbus Circle, like that it used to be the Time Warner building. I don’t remember what it’s called now.

But anyways, I’m going to meet her, and I’m staying in Jersey City, New Jersey, and I’m going to meet her at her apartment in Midtown, and I get lost. And actually, I might have just been out running around visiting the city, but I get lost, and I end up somewhere in Tribeca. And my phone dies, and I don’t know the subway systems, and I’m walking around the streets of New York trying to get someone to help me get to Midtown. And people are giving me directions, and they’re talking so fast like New Yorkers, and I’m from the Midwest, and I’m so overwhelmed, and I can’t figure out like no matter how many people I ask how to find the subway to get to Midtown.

And so I’m an hour and a half late to our rehearsal for our that we were going to practice one of our scenes for. And I’m crying. I mean, it felt traumatic to be lost in the city without a cell phone and without knowing where to go. And I thought at one point, I might just have to live on the streets of Tribeca. Like, I don’t know what to do. And I show up at her door finally, I get there, and I’m crying my eyes out, and she opens the door, and I tell her, “I’m so sorry, I was lost, and it was terrible, and it was awful.”

And she looks at me like only a New Yorker could look at you, and she says, “You’ve got to dry your tears and tough up, or this city is going to eat you alive.” There was no pity. There was no like, “Let me give you a big mama hug.” Dry your tears, tough up, or this city is going to eat you alive.

And I have thought about that forever. Now, maybe it was a dose of tough love, but I really want to say it to you from maybe my Midwest mentality, which is in this industry, you have to tough it up. You have to be emotionally resilient. You have to be able to take the fails. You have to be able to hear no. You have to be able to feel rejection. You have to be able to put yourself out there and feel uncomfortable. You have to be able to feel embarrassed. You have to be able to feel humiliated. You have to feel like I just made a post and I want to delete it, or I just went live, and I want to retract it.

There’s a level of vulnerability that you are going to have to feel. You have to go first because there are people looking to change their lives in the world, and they are terrified of taking action and not getting what they want.

I really believe the number one reason people don’t reach out for consults or they don’t say yes to coaching, especially on consults, they don’t just reach out for consults because they are terrified that you might tell them that they are broken and unfixable. They are terrified if they finally go for it and take it really seriously, they’ll find out they don’t have what it takes, and they’re not capable.

They’re the most terrified of that. They’re not actually terrified of spending $1,000 with you, $5,000 with you, $10,000 with you. They are terrified it may not work. They are terrified of the learning curve, of the failure, and you have to go first. You have to know, you have to be living in that and know that you’re surviving and that you’re okay and in fact that you’re thriving. You have to become alive to the challenge, to the hard work, to the obstacles, to the friction, to the setbacks. You have to be so strong in them that when they give that to you, you’re not scared for them. You can’t be scared for them. Right?

My friend, I call her Madre. My Madre was not scared for me. She’s like, “Toughen up, girlfriend. What are you doing? You’re in New York. This little like softness is not going to, you’re not going to survive. Toughen up.”

This is what we have to do. Right? I call this type of leadership being a product of your product. And I really believe that this is why entrepreneurship and coaching are so important. I believe that getting coaching when you’re an entrepreneur is so important because it keeps your head on straight, and it helps you see every struggle as an opportunity for leadership.

So just check yourself now. Is that the way that you’re currently thinking every, every challenge is an opportunity for leadership for me? So that I can have come from a place of compassion and truly have been there and been there 1,000 times, so that when my client comes to me with this type of fear and is thinking about coaching, I can hold space for that. I know exactly what they’re thinking. I know exactly how they’re feeling. I am so strong to it that I’m not afraid for them that they may not get results. I’m not afraid for them that it might be hard. I’m not afraid for them that they might have to sacrifice something that they you know, they’re thinking they don’t want to give up

 I’m thinking of how big of a life they’re giving up if they don’t do it. I’m thinking about how big of an emotional freedom they’re giving up if they don’t do it. I’m thinking about the resilience they’re giving up if they don’t do it. I’m not thinking about the thing they have to sacrifice temporarily in the moment. So it’s so much easier for me to talk to people because of how often I go first.

So you want to strengthen yourself with I go first, I go often, I go with purpose to help myself and then others, and to be in alignment and integrity with what I teach. And I promise you, integrity and alignment will sell coaching for you. You will have people reaching out to you when this is how you’re approaching entrepreneurship, when this is how you’re approaching your dreams, when this is how you’re approaching your life.

And this is the tangible thing I want to tell you. If you are not living in your leadership identity, if you aren’t living how you would coach people through failure and hard things and obstacles and friction, you will not be able to say the right things on consults to create tangible breakthroughs that then create value that make someone want to pay you. You will not be able to overcome objections. You will hear them, you will be stuck, you won’t know what to say. You will struggle every single time.

And I teach people step-by-step how to do the perfect consult, how to overcome objections, how to transition to things, exactly what to say, but if you, with a real person, if you are not living the truth of what you teach, you will not know what to say to them. You will not say the right thing in the right energy, the right way that lands for them. 

But alternatively, if you are embodying the leadership identity, embodying the entrepreneur identity, and really going for it, you are building your risk tolerance. You are growing your emotional regulation skills. You are going out there and doing the thing. You are in the work. You don’t have to do anything perfectly, and you will have you will be selling life coaching.

People will be reaching out to you. You know exactly what to say to them on a consult when you’re selling and they will close. They will feel your authenticity. They will feel your alignment. And this is one of the most intangible things that sometimes people think, “Oh, that’s not really true,” but it is. It 100% is. So integrity and alignment with your leadership identity will sell coaching for you.

And the last identity that you want to develop is your coach identity. And it’s as simple as believing I am a life coach. And how you know you believe I am a life coach is you take yourself and your business as seriously as you would at $100,000.

Like if you were at had $100,000 business, how seriously would you take yourself as a coach and your business? You cannot wait to think of yourself as your main identity as a life coach until someone pays you. Like, “Oh, once someone pays me, then I’ll feel like a life coach. Then I’ll be able to tell people I’m a life coach.” You have to see yourself as a life coach in your main identity, and then you will make money.

And I always tell my clients this. It’s the first barrier for entry. If you’re not taking yourself seriously, no one else will either. So you can’t be a new coach or a coach in training, or notice when you do this. I’m a lawyer, and I just started a coaching practice. No, you’re a life coach who has their own coaching practice, and you’re a lawyer, and you’re a doctor, and you’re a teacher, and you’re a mom.

This identity has to be in the forefront. It can’t be a part-time. You can’t think of it as part-time. You can’t think of it as a hobby. You can’t think of it as a dream. You can’t think of it as something that one day you’re going to try to have. You can’t think of I’m trying to build a business. You just are. The coach identity has to be your predominant identity. I’m a coach. I’m a leader. I’m an entrepreneur.

And then what will happen is you will treat your business like a business, and you will do what it takes to bring in cash. And when you are doing that, people again, they feel that from you because no one, this is again, I’m going to say the hard thing that maybe no one would say on a free course or our first time meeting each other, but I’m going to say it.

No one’s hiring a hobby coach. No one’s hiring a part-time coach. You could be part-time, but if your mindset is I’m a part-time coach, they’re not hiring you. They want an expert. They want someone that guarantees them results. I also think the only reason people hire you is for results. So you have to believe I can get you results. I’m that good of a coach. I believe in the coaching tools that much. I believe in myself as a coach that much. I believe in your resourcefulness and your ability to tolerate emotional risk, and I believe in you because I believe in me so much, and I’ve watched myself do it, and I know how hard it was for me. And so if it was hard for me and I was still able to do it, you’re going to be able to do it too.

That’s what it does. When you do really hard shit that’s like unbelievable to you, you’re like, “Oh, well, if I can do it, because we always believe the least in ourselves. If I can do it, you can for sure do it.” But this is what you have, this is what you have to be carrying with you. I am a coach. I am a leader. I am an entrepreneur. Yes, Lisa.

Then you have to take, you have to embody being a life coach and take yourself everywhere you go. You can’t turn it on and off. If you go to Target today, or you go to the grocery, or you’re in an Uber, you’re not trying to sell these people life coaching, but you take yourself everywhere.

I had a client once who sells, she helps students get into the Ivy Leagues. What? She was a Stanford student at the time, so she was in Stanford building a, and she built a $300,000 business while in being a student at an Ivy League, teaching other people how to get into the Ivy Leagues. And one of the things she said for that very specific niche, she said one of the things that made me the most money in my business early on is I just took myself everywhere I went as a coach.

And I did the same thing: parties, family get-togethers, conversations with relatives. It did not matter. I took myself everywhere. And when you are taking yourself everywhere as a life coach, the world starts to notice. It’s something energetically that happens that can’t be explained. It’s completely intangible and it’s 100% the truth. So you have to take yourself everywhere. You can’t pick your moments because you won’t learn enough about yourself as a coach if you’re picking your moments, and you’ll miss the moment that actually came that was the opportunity.

And the last piece of the coach identity is you have to love your life now. I’m going to say something else that’s going to feel really hard. Are you ready? No one is hiring a life coach who hates their life, or is bummed about their life, or is regretful about their life, or their life isn’t enough. No one’s hiring that.

So if that’s how you’re feeling, you got to fix it right away. You got to step into a different perspective of your life and your journey. The people that are hiring coaches right now are hiring examples of what’s possible. That is the truth. They are hiring people who they see are alive in their lives. They are activated. They are engaged. They are connected. They are triumphing. They are overcoming.

This is a big piece of what I teach. A big piece of stepping into the journey and being all in because when I started my journey, when I became a life coach and I started going out to get clients, I had two spoons, no money, no furniture, a tiny apartment, nothing to my name but a new car and only because my 20-year-old car had almost killed me on the interstate and so I finally invested in a new car and it was the only thing I had. I didn’t have anything that said I’m so successful, I’m going to teach you about life. I didn’t have any of the tangible things.

So I always tell people, you don’t have to be positive all the time to sell life coaching, but you need to be powerful. So I made $150,000 with that set of circumstances. I had a broken heart. I’d been humiliated, and my life was sort of falling apart around me, but I chose in that moment when it would have been perfectly good to say Woe is me. Everything is terrible. Everything’s falling apart. I chose to love my life. I chose to love and accept the journey that I was on.

Even when some of my friends and peers who had started coaching businesses were doing it faster, and it was easier for them, I chose to be with myself on my journey and own it all. And to truly engage with the hard parts for me. To find gratitude every day despite all of it. Despite not, having a negative bank account, I could live my day in gratitude and still go out and give value to other people. I didn’t need my life to change to feel happy.

And I was also actively fighting every single day for the life and the future I knew was possible. And that translated everywhere I showed up for myself, on and offline. It had people inspired, influenced, and compelled to follow me, to engage with me, to show up to my things, to reach out and ask for more.

It really made an impact on people. And I rallied a group of clients very quickly who who who were watching me, and they were like, “I want that. I want to feel how she feels. I want to approach her life the way she’s approaching her life. I want to turn things around the way she’s turning things around. I want to go on that journey because it looks like she’s pretty alive. She’s pretty engaged. She’s pretty connected to herself and her life.”

That’s what people are hiring. If they wanted just like someone to sit and write in a little notebook and give them some tools and concepts, they’d go hire a therapist. People are hiring coaching because it’s a different approach and you have to be living that approach, and that includes loving the journey of growing your business.

Where most people just, they resist the journey of building their business. They resist the failure, they resist the hard part, they resist the not being where they want to be yet, they resist all the time before they sign their first client, then they resist until they sign their second client, then they resist until, you know, they get a yes, but they resist until someone pays. There’s just like constant resistance, resistance, resistance. I don’t want to be in this experience

Instead of, I want this experience. This is the first, last, and only time you might ever get to start a coaching business and be in the grind of making your dreams come true. Like, that’s the way I think about it. I look back to the beginning of my business when I was working so hard and signing my first clients.

I remember like, I look at that fondly, the same way of eating cold pizza in college and having no money and, you know, living off of chicken burritos for weeks on end, like, or ramen noodles. I look at it that way. I look at it as like, that was one of the greatest times of my life, and I’ll never get it back. Don’t let it pass you by. The way you feel about being in the process of creating anything is what either attracts or repels people to you.

So we want to step into the leadership, into the power, into the coach, into the entrepreneur, and be with it all. And no matter what, I’m going to teach you for the rest of these trainings, this is going to matter the most. This is the who before the how. It influences all of the how. It doesn’t matter how much of the how you do and how perfectly you do it, if the who is not there, it will not happen.

So before you go out and think about what do I tangibly need to do to sell life coaching, you need to know who do I need to be to sell life coaching? And I want you all to answer that today. I want you to answer, who do I need to be to sell life coaching? Who do I need to be when I think of someone buying life coaching from me, considering buying coaching from me? Who do I need to be for them? What would inspire them?

Like, I think about this when I’m in the deepest depths of challenges for myself, or I have so much friction in my day, or I have so many challenges that come my way, I think who do I need to be for them? How would they want to see me approaching this thing? What is the story they want to hear from me about this experience? Think about that today.

And then tomorrow we’re going to talk about actually going out and building your audience and building it quickly. But this part is going to influence so much of it. I want you to really think about, who am I?

Imagine what would be different about what you’re doing now if you were completely embracing the entrepreneur identity, if you were completely allowing the risk financially and emotionally, if you were failing and going into the failure and evaluating, if you were considering cash in the door as the most important priority of your business, if you were leading first and often with purpose, being a product of your product, embodying being a coach, loving the life you currently have, working with vigor towards the life you want, being all in on an entrepreneur journey, imagine how infectious your energy will be and how many people will want to listen to what you have to say. 

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.