Ep #112: Building the Skill of Self-Coaching to Make 100K with Jennifer Dent Brown

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. In honor of Black History Month, I have invited my first four Black students who have crossed $100,000 in revenue to guest host each episode this month. They are history-makers right now. They have used the 2K and the 200K process to create incredible results. They have come from the medical field, corporate America, they have doctorates, kids at home, and kids in college.

What I love is that none of these coaches are business coaches. So their success is not that of a unicorn or because they sell coaching that offers a financial return. They did the work to start and grow a business. They did the work of creating value, learning how to sell, and becoming influential with the people they meet and within their communities and the entire coaching industry.

They are leading the way. Not just for Black coaches in our industry, but for all BIPOCs who feel underrepresented in the coaching industry and all coaches wanting to make 100K as a life coach. I am so honored to have their knowledge and experience to share with you today. Let’s dive in.

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Well, hello coaches. My name is Jennifer Dent Brown. I am a full-time life and weight loss coach. I am a Black American woman and I am a student of Stacey Boehman and secretly her biggest fan.

And today, I have the honor of sharing with you the one tool that took me from making 25K in 2019 as a life coach to 110K in 2020. And I’m going to share what that tool is and how I use it to overcome hidden beliefs that I had as a Black American woman, working to build a business in a predominantly non-Black industry.

Now, I am the daughter of a Baptist minister, before we jump into it. And if you know anything about the Black church, when a guest preacher gets up to preach, he or she always takes the time to acknowledge the good shepherd of the flock, the leader of the people, and the pastor of the church.

So before I jump into how I went from 25K to 110K during this tumultuous crazy year of 2020, I have to stop and acknowledge the good shepherd of the flock, the leader of the people, and the visionary for the life coach industry, Stacey Boehman. Stacey, thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for being an example of what a true anti-racist ally is. Thank you for opening up your platform in this unprecedented way so I could share my experience with your listeners. And thank you for being curious about the experience of your Black students. You didn’t have to do that.

Thank you for listening to us intently and thank you for doing this thing, being an anti-racist ally, and doing it in your own powerful and unique Stacey way, which is why I love you so much. So thank you for inviting me back to the Make Money as a Life Coach podcast.

Alright, if you’re a new listener to the podcast, welcome. It is no coincidence that you’ve tuned in at this time. If you’ve been rocking with this podcast for a while and rocking with Stacey for a while, shout-out to all my peeps who loved and listened since the Diva Business School podcast days.

You know that Stacey did a bonus week of episodes back in June of 2020 with her BIPOC students. And so I was one of the interviews and I shared with Stacey very openly about how my self-coaching practice grew from what I call surface self-coaching to real self-coaching. And how I was able to tap into using this tool when literally it seemed like the world was falling apart.

And it almost seems like a distant memory now. We’ve crossed the bridge. We’re over in 2021 now. But back in May of 2020, when we were dealing with all of the uncertainties of COVID, my family and I were dealing with my cousin, who is mentally disabled. She’s a couple years older than me and she was in the hospital on a ventilator with COVID for 20 days.

We couldn’t see her, we could not talk to her, we had to make decisions about her life. And then George Floyd was murdered, Ahmaud Arbery was murdered, and Breonna Taylor was murdered, and we were in lockdown as a country and the protest in my city and in cities all around the country were turning into riots and looting.

And it was like the unthinkable was happening. Oh, and let me mention also during this time that COVID left me without a corporate income. So suddenly, April 1st, I became a full-time coach. Now, I had been working towards becoming a full-time coach for months, but I never thought it was going to be under circumstances like this.

So in short, shit was crazy. And I have to say, the practice of self-coaching literally saved me from god knows what. And that’s what I’m going to dive into today. Building the skill of self-coaching to make 100K and why it was so hard for me in the beginning as a Black woman.

So now you’re all caught up, you have the backstory of who I am and how I got here, so let’s get into it. So if you’re not familiar with the tool of self-coaching using the model, it quite possibly could be the biggest piece that you’re missing in your business.

So when you join 2K for 2K, Stacey has an entire module where she explains in detail what the model is and exactly how to use it to make money as a life coach. I personally like to think of the model as a way of organizing all of your thoughts and organizing all of your emotions so you can decide which ones you want to use to help you achieve whatever goal you’re working towards and which ones you want to toss because clearly, they’re not useful and they’re not helping you.

And this is literally the most genius way to coach yourself. And when I first learned how to use the model in the context of weight loss because I used it to lose 20 pounds, it literally changed my life. For the first time, I could clearly see that my thinking really did create my weight loss result.

It wasn’t how many Fitbit steps I got in every day and it wasn’t how many macros I counted and any of that stuff. It was literally my thinking. And because of learning this tool, I was able to pinpoint the thoughts that were helping me to get to my goal and I could also see the ones that were clearly slowing me down.

And then when I was able to do that, I had the opportunity to change them. But when I tried to apply the same concept to growing my business, it was extremely difficult. First of all, self-coaching is best done when you manually take a pen to paper and you write.

The simple act of writing things down literally slows your brain down and you’re able to see all of your thoughts on paper one by one. Because I don’t know about you, but my brain is on high speed all the time and the thoughts are just rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, spinning, spinning, spinning in my head.

And so being able to write those thoughts down on paper really, really helped me build the skill of self-coaching. However, in the beginning, I was very resistant to writing anything down. I had eight million thoughts on why I couldn’t do it.

Some of my thoughts included, “I don’t have time to sit down and write. My handwriting is atrocious. I type faster than I write. I don’t even know if I’m doing this right. And my ADD won’t let me.” Now, I am totally self-diagnosed with ADD. I don’t have an official diagnosis, but I believe because my brain was always on high speed that my ADD wouldn’t let me sit down and write.

So when I would sit down to do my self-coaching and I’m using air quotes at that time because I had all of those thoughts plus more running through my head. And what would happen is I would sit down in my chair in my office, have my notebook, have my pen, and I would end up picking up my phone, spending like, the next 30 minutes mindlessly scrolling on social media, or at the very least, I would do what I call the surface self-coaching, which I talked about in my last interview with Stacey.

Just kind of the high-level coaching, but not really enough to feel a shift. Just enough to be like, done, okay, finished my self-coaching for the day, let me move on with my day. And because I’m very action oriented, I always had the action of the time scheduled on my calendar, just on the weekdays because I didn’t do it on weekends.

But just on the weekdays, Monday through Friday, I had time on my calendar in the morning to do my self-coaching. But because at the time, when I was trying to figure this thing out, I didn’t really see the value in it, and so it was much easier to not do it.

Although, because I sat there and I said I was doing the work, it was easier for me to be like, “Oh yeah, I did my self-coaching today,” and then I would go on about my day. Now, this went on every weekday morning for all of 2019. When I was a student of Stacey’s in the 200K mastermind, I did everything else Stacey taught me, but I had so much mind drama about everything that I did.

And looking back now, I can clearly see that I was stuck in the onslaught of my own limited thinking. And some of those thoughts were conscious and some of those thoughts were completely subconscious and just deeply, deeply hidden. And I remember being in the group and being on the coaching calls and I remember the other 200K students talk about their self-coaching and talking about their brains in the third person.

And I remember thinking like, “What are they talking about?” And I remember actually using that against myself and telling myself that I didn’t really know what I was doing and clearly that I was doing it wrong because I didn’t understand what the other coaches were talking about.

And I almost have to chuckle when I think back to those thoughts because what I tell my clients now about self-coaching is that you can’t get it wrong. There is no wrong way to self-coach. The only wrong way to do your self-coaching is not to do it at all. But I had to learn that lesson for myself.

So right now you may be like, wait a second Jennifer, you just said you were able to lose weight, create a 20-pound weight loss for yourself by doing self-coaching. And you seem to have done that with no problem, so what was the problem with you doing self-coaching in 200K?

I’m so glad you asked that question. I thought about that myself for a long time and here’s what I came up with. I believe that my brain took to self-coaching so well to create weight loss because my weight loss brain was so much more developed than my business-building brain.

I mean, I struggled with my weight for decades before I became certified as a health coach in 2014. And I had been coaching clients on weight loss since 2014, and so I have already spent plenty of time focusing on habits that create weight loss, I had already spent time and years understanding emotional eating.

So learning how to self-coach just allowed me to put everything that I already knew into a very simple doable process. Now, my business-building brain on the other hand was like, an infant. It was a baby. It was way underdeveloped.

And ironically, I remember Stacey coaching me during a 200K call and she referred to my thoughts and what I was experiencing as entrepreneurial immaturity. Now, I don’t even remember what I was getting coached on and Stacey never pointed me out and said, “You are immature.” But she used my example to always say some of y’all are experiencing entrepreneurial immaturity.

So if I had to guess, probably I was not taking responsibility for my results because I was so bad at self-coaching. And I had a really hard time seeing how it was possible that I could be responsible for all of my results, even the failures.

Now, if you had asked me back then, I would have never admitted to you, but I also had thoughts about my race and my results. I quietly had thoughts that it was going to be harder for me to build my business than my non-Black colleagues.

I quietly wondered why all the Black coaches in the first round of 200K were the lowest earners. But I didn’t want to discuss it because that would mean that I had to acknowledge the fact that I was a “low earner.” And at that time, my brain perceived that to be a big problem.

I quietly believed because I was Black, I was supposed to struggle to get my seat at the 100K table. Now, I never would have said those thoughts out loud because I didn’t want to believe them. And I didn’t even want to admit them to myself because I disliked them so much. It made me icky to even think about it.

But because of the programming that I had received since I was a little girl, this is what I was raised to believe. I mean, my dad participated in sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s when he was in college. I grew up hearing the stories.

And because my parents sacrificed to send my brother and I to predominantly white private schools, I was acutely aware of racial disparity ever since I was in elementary school. I carried those beliefs with me into corporate America. And trust, I had plenty of evidence to support my belief.

So there was no reason for me to believe otherwise. I had to fight for promotions. I found out that my white male counterpart was getting paid twice as much as me. I was thrown under the bus by senior white management at one project. I was ignored countless times.

And how often, I can’t even remember, there were so many times where I was seen as the token Black person on a project. So I got really good at accepting the disparity as reality. And in my acceptance of that, that accepting disparity as reality, I suppressed the emotions that come along with those beliefs, until the summer of 2020 where it seemed like the world was falling apart.

It was a shit storm. Perfect storm of all these crazy circumstances. It was the catalyst, literally, to bring all of those emotions that I had been unknowingly suppressing to the surface. I literally got emotional when I started to think about it, and then I went back to read what I wrote.

On June 1st, 2020, it all came out. When I took pen to paper and I did my self-coaching. But it wasn’t the surface self-coaching that I had been doing. Just writing down lots of intentional thoughts, lots of intentional feel-good thinking. On June 1st, 2020, I woke up that morning crying with tears in my eyes, unbelievably sad.

My mind hurt, my head hurt, and I wrote down ironically, in my 200K mastermind notebook, I wrote on June 1st, 2020, “My heart is so heavy. Why?” And in answering that question, I was able to write down all of those hidden thoughts that I was afraid to acknowledge.

I was able to open myself up in a way that I have never been able to do before. And I think that was probably the longest thought download I have ever done up until that point. Now, here’s what I want you to take away from my experience.

If you’re struggling with your self-coaching, doing this one thing could literally change your self-coaching game for good. Looking back, I realize that that surface self-coaching that I did all of 2019, it was the best I could do at that time because you know what, I simply did not feel safe with my own thinking.

I didn’t feel safe with my own thoughts. I was afraid to think them, let alone write them down on paper. But because I was in so much internal pain because of the shit storm of circumstances that were happening back in June, it only took one question to open myself up to those emotions.

But listen, I don’t want you to wait until you’re in such a place where you’re feeling as much emotional pain as I was in. I want you to start practicing it now. And you’re like, what is it? I’m going to tell you. It’s a self-coaching concept that I now teach my weight loss clients and it was born out of this experience.

I call it A-squared. A with a little four next to it. Acknowledge and accept all of the emotions. So if you write four As down the side of your paper, acknowledge and accept all the emotions. Got it? With the surface self-coaching, I was unwilling to put all of my thoughts out there. Why? Because I was totally judging myself. Totally judging myself.

I was judging myself for my thoughts, which when I say that, it sounds ridiculous. But listen, if it goes unchecked, if you’re judging yourself and you’re not checking yourself for judging yourself, it can literally hold you back from achieving your goals. And it certainly was holding me back from achieving my 100K goal in 2019.

So you’re wondering, what changed for me? How did I go from suppressing thoughts and emotions to being able to all of a sudden unleash them on paper? Well, like I said before, I was in so much emotional turmoil that day that self-coaching was the best thing I could do.

But what that experience showed me is that my thoughts will not kill me. Even the deepest darkest ugliest ones. My thoughts are really just sentences in my mind. I’ve heard that before, but now I really understand that to be true.

And the thing is I didn’t have to judge myself for having sentences in my mind. If you find yourself judging your thoughts and judging yourself because of your thoughts, I want you to know that you do not have to judge yourself for having sentences in your mind. You have a human brain. We all do the same thing.

So in fact, after that day, June 1st, 2020, I was able to really begin to focus on loving and accepting myself fully because I was no longer in judgment of what I was thinking. And to do that, that included accepting all of my emotions. Every single one of them.

When I could do that, accept all the emotions, the good, the bad, the ugly ones, the negative, the positive, whatever you want to call it, when I was able to accept every single emotion that I was generating by my thoughts, I was able to generate the feeling of safety.

And from that place, I learned that I can create any result that I want. And for me, that was creating 100K in 2020. Now, you’re going to find this fascinating. $86,000 of that 100K was made in the months of June through December.

So after I had my breakthrough on June 1st, 2020, I went on to make $86,000 for the rest of the year. Crazy, right? So when you pull out your self-coaching notebook, I want you to write down A squared. I want you to write down four As down the side of your page because I want you to begin to remember and remind your brain when you do your self-coaching to acknowledge and accept all of the emotions.

No judgment. To all of my fellow Black coaches, don’t be afraid to go there. Our dark history of being Black Americans can be just that. History. Change will come when we can acknowledge and accept what has been, but we can decide to move forward with intention.

This is truly important work for us to do. When we can do this as Black coaches, we can support our community in such a bigger way. So you’ve got to get this. A squared. Acknowledge and accept all of the emotions.

Now, to all the coaches, all you life coaches out there, I want you to know that you can acknowledge all of your thoughts, the good, the bad, the ugly. You can acknowledge all of your emotions and accept them for what they are. And when you can do that, you can literally achieve anything, any goal you put in the R line.

Alright, I love you, I appreciate you for spending time listening to my experience. Now let’s go make some money, life coaches.

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program, where you’re going to make your first $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.