Ep #262: Marketing and Self-Acceptance

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 262. Today we’re going to talk about self-acceptance and marketing. What, how do they go together? What. Why are we talking about this? So I’ve been coaching a lot on this recently. I just coached two students back to back in 2K for 2K this week, the week that I’m recording this. And it didn’t come up directly but we ended up coaching on how much energy it was taking from the students to be struggling within themselves and judging themselves and feeling bad about their situation, feeling shameful about themselves.

And how it was really just holding them back from taking action in their business showing up to get more clients and making money. It was really keeping them from allowing themselves to be visible. So I want you to just think about marketing is truly at its core what you are doing when you’re meeting people and telling them who you are and what you do and offering to help them and giving value ahead of time. What you are doing is you’re making yourself visible as a business person to the world or as a personality to the world.

You’re putting yourself out there as the face of your company, as the spokesperson for your company. You’re creating a new level of visibility in your life, in the world, online, but also in person in your personal interactions. And if you’re going out and networking, whatever you’re doing, the moment you decide to be a service based entrepreneur and you are the main deliverable or your product is the main deliverable, you make yourself, you create a higher level of visibility.

So marketing is really increasing your imprint on other humans, the number of eyeballs that see you. And whenever we are around other humans or putting ourselves up to be seen by more humans than the normal human to human interaction. People who just have normal jobs, they interact with their employees and friends in their life and people on the street but they’re not out there trying to amass a following of people to interact with.

So when we are doing that, when we are putting content out in the world and making connections for the purpose of business, what happens when we’re interacting with lots of people and meeting so many other people and maybe even joining groups, programs, masterminds, interacting with other people in our field. We’re just growing our awareness of other humans. And then what happens is it starts to show us things about ourself. When we see someone else, we see things in them that we see in ourselves and we see things in them that we don’t see in ourselves.

We see things that we don’t like about ourselves, that we wish, we compare ourselves. This person has this. I don’t have that. I wish I had that. I wish I was like this. And we start to resist ourselves or be shameful about ourselves. Everything just sort of bubbles up to the surface that we don’t like about ourselves or that we see as less than or unworthy about ourselves. And the negative emotion around that experience can be exhausting. It’s constant self-criticism or self-examination.

And then after the self-examination and the self-criticism it’s followed by self-moderation, to hide things that we don’t like about ourselves. Let me moderate my being and my behavior, the things I say, how I show up, how I look, let me try to modify all of these things that I don’t like about myself. And I’m not even going to get into the more humans we interact with.

There’s just never been an environment on social media, especially ever before like the one we’re in now where people spend a considerable amount of time also trying to moderate other people’s behavior and other people’s beliefs and being, how they look. There’s constant, just trolls on the Internet. We like to think trolls are these bots, but they’re real humans.

People just trolling on the internet to tell us how we should moderate ourselves to be better humans, to be more likable by them or to let us know all the things that aren’t likable about us and how we are. So I’m not even talking about that. That, being able to deal with that requires a very deep self-conviction in yourself, a very deep self-acceptance to be able to deal with that.

What I’m talking about is the layer that comes before that, the stuff you do to yourself, the trolling that you do on yourself. So I want you to think about when you have lots of self-criticism and shame and you’re out there just comparing and despairing yourself. And seeing all the things about yourself that you don’t think are good enough. And that it’s really heightened when you go to make yourself more visible to the world. You make yourself more visible, not just to other people, but to yourself.

And then you see the things you don’t like about yourself and then you start criticizing and examining and moderating. Going to make one marketing post, what ends up happening is it becomes subjecting yourself to intense shame and ridicule from yourself. Because in the beginning you don’t really have enough visibility typically to get trolled by other people online. That’s stuff I deal with, $10 million level stuff, multimillion dollar level stuff. I didn’t get a lot of online trolling before that.

It was like right after I crossed the $10 million stage, lots of people had lots of things to say about myself. So before that the entry point to being able to even get to that level where other people have lots of deep care about what you say and how you are, it’s yourself, it’s you. And so you go to make this post or go to make an offer. You subject yourself to this intense shame and ridicule from yourself and then if you can even make yourself do it because it feels so terrible, you need lots of time to recover from it. It’s exhausting.

And then if no one responds or engages, then our brains like to tell us that we have proof of our unworthiness. It’s now factual proof that we don’t measure up to others, proof that no one wants us, proof that we are flawed. So then it feels like we have been ridiculed by other people. Now, of course we have not. Other people are just busy. They saw your post. They took it in. They loved it. They forgot to like it. This happens to me all the time.

I just forget to like something or I forget to comment on something and someone will ask maybe if I’ve seen it or they’ll refer to it and be like, “Oh, my God, I love that post.” And then I realize I didn’t comment on it. So people are just busy. They meant to comment, they got distracted. How many times does that happen to you on a text? You’re like, “Oh my God.” I just told my coach this week, “I saw your message. I deeply took it in. I had many, many lovely thoughts about it, and then I got distracted and never responded.”

And that happens a lot. It happens to my husband. It happens with my friends. They’re like, “Stacey, just never responds.” So they’re either distracted, forgot, busy, or they aren’t the type of people who engage. I’m not typically a high engager so if you do see me comment on someone’s post, it really got me. There’s just some people who are scrollers, they’re lurkers. They’re not ridiculers. They’re not ridiculing you because they didn’t engage. They just are busy or they’re not the type of people who engage.

And in the beginning you don’t get a lot of engagement. I just want to offer that as a circumstance. You’re not going to get a lot of people commenting on your posts. You’re not going to get a lot of traction, of shares. You’re not going to get a lot of people reaching out just in the beginning. You’re going to build that up as you build your visibility. So if you want to build your visibility, you have to find a way to manage the energetic output that allows you to be consistent, to expand your visibility and the eyeballs that you have on your work.

And so there are two options to do this. You can number one, coach on your worthiness and self-acceptance, and finding okay-ness. And you can fix everything you don’t like about yourself before you take action or a second option, the one that I prefer personally for you to do. The one that I think as your mentor, as someone you listen to, the one I’m going to highly suggest is that you take action and you learn self-acceptance along the way.

Because I recently sent an email out and everyone in my program was like, “Oh my God, I needed to hear this.” And it’s one I wrote a long, long time ago but we send it out every once in a while because it’s just so good. But it talks about how we as coaches, a lot of what we do is as our entry point into the industry is really going down rabbit holes of endless fixing ourselves and creating worthiness in order to feel ready to put ourselves out into the world. And what I always say is, “Listen, you’re fixed, done, improved, ready to go.”

Don’t do that. You’re never going to find the client obsessing on your worthiness. You’re never going to find a client fixing yourself constantly. But what you can do is use, every time you feel bad and you see something and you compare and despair and you reject something about yourself. You can use that as an opportunity to work on your self-acceptance, knowing that the more you put yourself out there, the more you’ll have to face the things you don’t like about yourself. And then the more opportunities you’ll have to find okay-ness and acceptance about those things.

If you don’t put yourself out there you don’t have as much opportunity to do that. You can sit in your office and think all day long about the things that make you self-conscious, but really putting yourself out there, that’s going to be the thing that brings it all up. And it doesn’t have to be a reason to just hide or to feel terrible or to beat yourself up or to moderate yourself constantly and twist yourself into this pretzel of what you think other people want or need to see from you in order to buy.

You just have to find a way to see yourself, the good, the bad and the ugly and find okay-ness there, find love there. Fall in love with all of yourself to really find a way to be okay with all of it. To stop the intense criticism and examination and resistance and shame. And I’m going to give you some real life questions and scenarios that I have worked on within myself. But I’ve done this a lot from the very beginning, all the way up to the top and all the way now. I don’t feel to the top anymore, but some of you might imagine I’m at the top. I don’t feel that.

But there’s just a lot at every level that has come up, that has given me an opportunity to find deeper love for myself and deeper acceptance into myself. Now, sometimes you all think if you do this that you’ll never change anything and you won’t improve. And I want to offer that that’s not true. It will actually be easier to improve, but you’ll improve things for you, not for other people.

For example, one of the things I worked on early on in my business was honoring my word as law. If I say I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it. It develops such a deep trust in myself and then eventually it also created a deep trust in other people. They believed me when I said I was going to do things as well. But that was for me, I did that for me because I didn’t enjoy being the person who said I was going to do things and then made an excuse not to do them and didn’t show up.

Before I found coaching I was the type of person who was really a victim of her life and her circumstances. It felt very factual, very true and provable, all the reasons why I couldn’t do the things I said I was going to do. And it was always somebody else’s fault or the world’s fault.

And I was always telling people, for example, every time I was late, it was just all the reasons why my life was just so hard and it was just so hard. Oh, my gosh, you wouldn’t believe the traffic and you wouldn’t believe all of these things that happened to me today. And you wouldn’t believe how difficult it is for me to get somewhere on time or for me to get something done when I said I was going to get something done or whatever it was. So that felt, yes, it was not great for other people but it felt terrible inside of me.

I was always so stressed every time I was late to something, so, so, so, so stressed. And then beating myself up and feeling so much shame, having to create so many excuses. And then feeling exhausted by all the excuses I created. And then feeling that intense ridicule of myself that I imagined other people having. I hated it. I hated the entire experience.

So my first coach really helped me learn how to be someone that trusted myself and honored my word for me. I didn’t need to hate myself or shame myself in order to get there. And in fact one of the things that we worked on is the more I shamed myself about it, the later I would be, the worse it got, which was really interesting. But I want to offer that, the less you accept yourself, the less acceptance you give to yourself for certain things, the worse you’re actually going to make those things.

Even if you deeply want to change them, you will make it harder for yourself to change the things that you don’t like when you are really resisting them. But also there are so many things that if you accepted them, you wouldn’t have any desire to change them. Or you might even have a desire for it to be different, but your whole okay-ness would not hinge on it.

So I’ll give you some examples of myself, but there’s many times where I’m vulnerable on this podcast and I tell you things I struggle with. And then I’ll always inevitably have people reach out and try to fix me and I really hate that. Just so you all know. So if you’re listening in the future and you hear something, you’re like, “Oh my God, I could totally solve that for Stacey.” If I don’t ask for help, don’t send the message, probably not interested.

There’s so many things that I recognize as problems or I recognize as things I struggle with and I have help and I am working on them. But there’s an interesting thing that happens where there’s this level of intensity that other people display with me to fix me. And from a place of they genuinely want me to just be so happy and so perfect. And I just accept my life as 50/50 and there will always be things to work on and there will always be messiness.

And there will always be things that will be struggles and things to work on, which is why I coach all the time. I always have a coach. I don’t know the last time I haven’t not had a coach. I’m always coaching because I always believe in improvement. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I don’t have this edge of urgency and necessity that other people bring. And they’re like, “You must fix this now, you’re not okay.”

Even, for example, my postpartum anxiety, I’ve talked a lot about this, lots of people have reached out, or being sick my first year of having a baby. I’ve been sick a lot and lots of people want to reach out and tell me how they’re going to solve me. I’m just mostly okay with it. I have a doctor. He takes blood work regularly, all my hormones, everything about me is okay. I do lots of self-care. I have a whole team of people that surround me to make me the asset and take care of me. I get to sleep as much as I want.

My husband does all the cooking. The house cleaner does all the cleaning. My husband does all the shopping. I don’t have a lot of massive stressors in my life, other than running my company. I have a hard working team behind me. I have coaches and masterminds to support me. So I’m just not feeling this massive urgency to fix myself. I’m always working on improvement, but not from the place that I think other people think I need to be, not from this place of I won’t be okay if I don’t.

Even with my postpartum anxiety I’ve really, it’s gone away a lot, so much. I only feel tiny remnants of it at this point. And that, I wonder if it’s ever going to go away and it’s just part of being a mom, you worry about your kid or you fear the worst, but it doesn’t come up very often anymore. It’s not really inhibiting my joy of being a mom or inhibiting me from sleeping or occupying lots of my thoughts like it was early on. And I’m just kind of like, “Yeah, that’s a part of me, that was a part of my experience, I’m okay.”

So it’s just an interesting thing to think about is could you know that even the things you want to fix, could you find okay-ness with not having fixed them right this second or having to solve for it right this moment? And can you be resourceful and also being open and willing to work on things and bring things for help and improve things for yourself, not because other people think you need fixed? And can you find the things that maybe don’t need to be fixed?

So I want to give you some questions and then some examples. I want you to just think about, after you listen to this episode, maybe stop and just jot some things down. What are things you constantly are feeling self-conscious about? That’s probably the best start. What makes you feel incredibly self-conscious when you put yourself out there to the world? And then you don’t have to come up with such an exhaustive list that it spins you out into stress and anxiety. Come up with a couple of things that you’re like, this makes me feel very self-conscious about myself.

And then I want you to ask yourself, why is this your superpower? Your superpower, how could it be your superpower? Who are your people? This will help you answer the first question? Who are your people? Have you sat to think about who your people are? Because I want to give you a hint or a little piece of advice or something to mull over that might be really powerful for you. Your people are people who see you, you being you, the real you and in seeing you being the real you, your people find self-acceptance by watching you and being in your world.

You help them find self-acceptance for themselves by you being you. If you have something or you feel like you lack something. So let’s, for example, say one of the things I coached my client on is, she doesn’t feel, and I might not get her words correct. I’m just trying to remember the conversation. But we were talking about what she sees in other people. And maybe it was the it factor, this personality that’s super attracting. And I don’t remember exactly how she said it. I’m remembering just two different conversations, and maybe they’re even getting mixed together.

But let’s just say the it factor, the energy, the pizzazz. And I was telling her that there are lots of people who would say, for example, find me, and I’m super energetic and I’m really loud and I talk really fast. I remember one networking event that I went to and it was really early in the morning. And this person went to approach my booth and I was like, “Hi, how are you? How’s it going?” And they go. “Oh, no, absolutely not.” And turned around and walked off. And I was like, “Not my person.”

There are people who would be really energetically turned off by that energy. They want someone calm and soothing and who is going to talk slower and they listen and they’re like, “I feel calm.” Versus some people might listen and feel, oh, my gosh, I feel anxiety. Or some of my people, they’ll say, “All the other podcasts I listen on one and a half speed, except for you. You talk fast enough that I don’t need to do that.” So think about who your people are.

And think about you living bravely and putting yourself out there for your people, it helps them do it too, no matter what you coach on. You are their example of what could be possible for them. So you really need to know who they are. Whoever you are, and however you imagine yourself, the whole person, all of you, the good, bad and ugly. I want you to imagine there are millions of people just like you who also have the same thoughts about themselves, the same not enough-ness circling inside of them.

And the more you step into this is who I am, and it’s enough, you invite them to do the same. They get an example of themselves out in the world being someone, they see themselves in you and they’re like, “This is someone that I can connect with. This is someone that makes sense to me.”

This is why representation in the industry is so important to see lots of different examples. Energetic examples, just lots of different examples in the world of different types of coaches succeeding. I try really hard to do that on my podcast. I have lots of different types of people coming onto the podcast to talk about their success and what’s helped them. And then I do that in my communities. I like to have more than just myself coaching all of the time, whether it’s in 2K for 2K, we all take turns hosting the weekly calls or in 200K we have breakout instructors.

So I choose people that are different than me. And sometimes they even will host a live call. I do most of those, but sometimes they’ll host a live call. And I like to just show lots of different niches, lots of different types of people, lots of different races, religions, energies, just lots of different people. Because I think it’s so important for someone to be able to say. Lots of people from different countries with different accents. That’s a really good example.

I was in a coaching room years ago and someone was feeling very self-conscious about their accent and their ability to speak English. It wasn’t me coaching, it was my coach, Brooke coaching. But I just remember her coaching this person on finding total acceptance and how many people would be like, “This is my person.” And this was years ago, so I’m probably not remembering it perfectly. But how that was their superpower. How them not speaking perfectly in English would help so many other people.

Imagine how many people also have that self-consciousness if they’re living in America, or if they’re selling to English speaking people, and English isn’t their first language. Imagine how many people have that level of self-consciousness about them. And so if that’s yours and you stand proudly in that, you give the opportunity for other people to be like, “This is my guy or this is my girl.” It’s such a powerful thing. So what is the thing that you’re most self-conscious about and how could it actually be your superpower?

Who are your people and how is your thing that you’re currently self-conscious about that could actually be your superpower? How is you showing up in it, perfect for your people? How are you perfect for your people? One of the things I think constantly, my people, and not all of them now, I have so many different types of people, I get the people who are super tech savvy. Now I feel like more than ever in 200K and Two Million Dollar Group, there’s so many conversations happening about ads and funnels.

And not that I’m teaching that, but because I’m getting more and more tech savvy people coming into my world, whereas in the beginning none of those conversations were happening because I wasn’t fueling them. And my people for sure were not fueling them. As I’ve gotten to 10 million, a way bigger breadth of different types of people. But I used to think my superpower is the fact that I didn’t build my business with paid marketing. And I didn’t build my business with websites and funnels and email lists.

I have a colleague who her superpower is list building. My superpower is being able to build a multiple six figure business without that. My superpower is selling and I can help anybody sell, list builders, non-list builders, people with websites, not people with websites, high end coaching, low end coaching. I can help everybody learn how to sell. But my superpower used to be that I was the example of if you can’t figure out the tech, it’s okay, come to Stacey. She’s got you.

And so instead of feeling embarrassed about that, that I’m just not tech savvy, I get to own it. I get to really, really be proud of it and own it and be like, “These are my other traits that make me super, super successful.” So how are you perfect for your people? And then this is the most important question, are you ready? What can you accept about yourself today or ongoing, what can you accept about yourself that will make you more powerful and have more energy?

Because remember, the whole point of this podcast, this is what I was telling my clients. I coached two of them in a row this week. I said, “Every ounce of energy that you take from yourself because you’re busy shaming yourself and believing you’re not enough. All of that, shaming and believing you’re not enough and criticizing yourself, all of that energy is what’s keeping you from making money. It’s keeping you from putting yourself out there more, making more offers, signing more clients, making more money.

Every thought or lie that you’re telling yourself about yourself, that makes you less than who you think you need to be to ake money as a life coach, all of that. You’re just wasting your own time. You’re taking your own time. You’re taking your own power. So what is it that you could accept about yourself today that would make you more powerful and have more energy?”

One of the coaches I was coaching was having a lot of shame about her living situation. She was between homes, living in an Airbnb. And she said to me, “Well, Stacey, it’s your living situation, of course, this would affect my confidence, it’s your living situation.” And I was like, “Yeah, you know I used to be a nomad.” I had my stuff in storage for two years. Me and my boyfriend would just go visit our storage unit when the weather changed. I was just traveling the country, being a nomad, selling mops, slicers and dicers and knives living my best life.

And then I was telling her, I recorded my first mini program, six week program. I recorded the modules for it in bed at a Super 8 motel, in bed at a Super 8 motel. What? Imagine if I had held that against myself, if I had said, “You know what? I have no business being a coach. I’m in a Super 8 motel right now. What do I have to teach anyone?” And some people, some of you might be like, “Well, but what about integrity, being in integrity? Maybe you don’t, or maybe I don’t have any business if my life isn’t perfectly fixed.”

And that’s what I told the client. I said, “I had clients, when I first started my business, most of my clients had a lot more money than me. They had homes. They had investment accounts. They had families. They took vacations and flew first class, maybe they even had second homes. They had nice things, nice cars, new cars.” They had everything that I didn’t have except self-awareness, the ability to coach myself, to feel any feeling, to create my life with intention.

They didn’t have the coaching tools so it was a perfect value exchange. They had more money than they could spend. I had coaching tools that helped them live their life better and more powerfully and happier. I had coaching emotional tools that helped them feel better inside. And many of them knew that I didn’t have a lot. I told the story of my first client, who’s now my bestie, Lindsay Dotzlaf.

I tell the story of how, she recently actually told the story, how I would invite her to my house, my apartment. And this is, I know that if you live in New York, this means nothing and it sounds huge. But in Kentucky a 600 square foot one bedroom apartment, a very, very old one bedroom apartment with barely any insulation, old. I would invite her over and she would be like, “What’s happening here? This girl has no shame. She’s inviting me to this apartment that doesn’t really have any furniture and there’s no shame about it.”

If you’re in 2K, I have an interrupt training that I did years and years and years ago that is talking about interrupting your self-concept to create a new one. And I have my Christmas tree up in April, my hair’s wet, I had just gotten out of the shower, it’s in a bun. I told the girl that my first video I ever did, I did in a park, no makeup, workout clothes on, walking my dog. And I called my test program, Take Your Power Back and I did a video talking about how I was going to help women take their power back. And I signed 12 free clients from that.

I had no shame, part of the people that I brought with me early on in my business were people who find self-acceptance in themselves, walking around the day without having makeup on and their workout clothes. That’s how they were walking around and then they were shaming themselves for it. And then here I was just owning it. And they were like, “Oh, who’s this chick? I need to know her. She’s an example. She’s showing me the things I’m self-conscious about myself, but she’s owning it so maybe I can own it, maybe I don’t have to be self-conscious.”

I had another friend in college, my best friend in college, Chantelle used to always make fun of me because I drove a 1991 Dodge Dynasty, so it was 20 years old. It was what we called a super old lady car, my grandma used to drive, my great grandma used to drive one. And for a while, I had hit a deer driving one night and l had a bungee cord kind of holding the hood on. And she would pass me because we lived near each other and she’d be like, “Girl, you drive that Dodge Dynasty like it’s a Mercedes.” And she was like, “Get it, girl, drive it like a Mercedes.”

And we would laugh hysterically, I would. She would be like, “You would wear your big sunglasses like you were literally a celebrity driving a Mercedes except it’s a Dodge Dynasty.” That is powerful for people. People want to be around people who are accepting themselves. They want to be around people who they’re just owning themselves. It’s so contagious this idea of complete self-acceptance.

I had my heart broken and built my entire 150,000 first full year in business, $150,000. My heart got ripped out of my chest embarrassingly in front of lots of people and I felt humiliated. And I was drowning in negative emotion and living in Super 8 hotel rooms and Microtel’s and Red Roof Inns and going live from the parking lot of Walmart. And what people loved and I would talk about it, I would talk about my pain.

And what people loved is that I was embracing it. And people thought, you know what? She’s embracing her pain and allowing people in, maybe I could do that too. A lot of my first clients were in a lot of dark pain and I helped them through it. You are the perfect person for your people. And I want to offer that when you stop resisting these things about you or judging yourself, maybe you don’t drive the perfect car. Maybe you don’t live in the perfect house. Maybe you don’t have the perfect clothes. Maybe you don’t have lots of jewelry.

Maybe you don’t have high energy. Whatever it is that you think you’re lacking, if you decided I’m not lacking that at all, I have these other things. And these things I have other people have and they want to see me show up with what I have as an example of what’s possible for me. That’s actually the key to my success, it’s really the key to me having more energy so that I can get out there and get my message out to the world more often.

And the thing that’s keeping you from getting more eyeballs and more visibility is the constant self-criticism and finding all the things to be unworthy about. What would you have time for if you stopped resisting whatever it is about yourself? Insert whatever it is for you in the blank. What would you have time for if you stopped resisting blank about yourself? How would you show up if you never worried about or judge yourself for it again? What? How are you genuinely perfect exactly as you are?

I love that I was a nomad. I love telling my Super 8 stories. I love that I used to sell mops in Walmart. I love that I took my consult for going to Life Coach School’s coach training from the Walmart parking lot. What? So freaking good. I love that I built a business with a negative bank account. I saw a post the other day on social media that was kind of a jab at people who had to hustle early on in their business and people who went into debt early on in their business and people who had financial insecurity early on in their business. And maybe it wasn’t meant to be a jab. It felt like a job.

It felt like it was kind of those people had that circumstance because they did business wrong. And I am so proud that I have that story. I could not be more proud that I built a business with a negative bank account, that I had to cash in my IRA to pay for coach training, that I had to sell furniture and clothes in order to pay for my coach. I love that about myself.

I love that I am socially awkward. I talk about that a lot. My husband and I laugh about it all the time. I’m just not going to coach on that. I have no time for that. I am totally fine that I say awkward things or act awkwardly around other people. My husband makes fun of me endlessly and I just take it. I love it. We just think it’s hysterical. I love that I have anxiety. What? I don’t know, you guys are going to be like, “Stacey’s crazy now, she’s lost me.”

Listen, I am a survivor of a lot of intense things and I think that my anxiety serves me in a lot of ways. I’m not like I don’t ever work on it or I don’t try to get coaching on it or feel into it. It’s not that. I just think my anxiety, I think about this a lot, my anxiety has me paying attention. Have you ever been around people who have no anxiety and they get themselves in lots of trouble or get hurt a lot or they miss lots of fails ahead of time? Because they just don’t think that something could go wrong or they just don’t think they could get hurt.

Sometimes I’m like, yeah, I think my anxiety has pulled me out of a lot of dangerous situations, a lot. I have some crazy stories I could tell you all, some crazy stories, you would never believe. I’ve walked an interesting life prior to coaching. But my anxiety a lot of times has keyed me up to things. This is a great example.

I had a reporter reach out to me recently. I think I have said this on the podcast. And she was trying to pitch that she was going to do a podcast on the coaching industry. No, what she’s trying to do is a hit piece on the coaching industry. And I think my husband said this. He was like, “Stacey, when has a journalist ever written something positive? This isn’t The Ellen Show.” And I was like, “Oh my God, that’s so true.”

Even recently, I don’t know, in the last year or two, I read an article from The Atlantic on Masterclass and it was a hit piece on Masterclass. I couldn’t believe it. And it was all about how Masterclass is telling people that they’re not enough and selling them endless learning or something. And I was like, “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” It couldn’t have been a greater conspiracy theory.

My husband and I love Masterclass. He learned to cook omelets like Thomas Keller. Thomas Keller, our favorite chef, arguably one of the best chefs in the entire world, creator of French Laundry, Bouchon, Bouchon Bakery, Ad Hoc. We love Thomas Keller and he has a Masterclass and my husband took his class. He also learned how to do a bunch of things from Gordon Ramsay and his famous barbecuer that’s on there. We love Masterclass. I couldn’t believe it.

Anyways, journalism, I have rarely seen anyone not trying to make a hit piece on something. And my anxiety cued me up about it. And I was like, “I’ve seen them go after other people and do hit pieces. This is either an industry wide hit piece or one on me. Either way, I don’t think this is going to be a good idea.” Just my flags went up and I was like, “Listen, I don’t know. This doesn’t feel like a good idea.” And I actually believe that I would be really good if someone tried to do a hit piece on me and they did get me on the phone.

I just have nothing to hide and I’m really proud of everything about my business and just a great debater. So I feel like I would be, whether it was an industry wide thing or a me thing. I feel like I would handle it really well, but my brain just told me, you’re in a sensitive place in your life right now, a sensitive place in your brain, in your emotions. Let’s not take anything else on. And I said no.

And then someone told me just the other day that they had gotten reached out to. They did some researching. It was definitely going to be a hit piece. And she was like, “Your spidey senses were right.” And I was thinking that’s my anxiety. It doesn’t serve me in a lot of places, but sometimes it does. So I’ve just decided to embrace it. I have an anxious brain. I understand that it came from a lot of things I dealt with as a child. And I think it developed to protect me.

I’ve also done this with my body. I spent six months getting coached about thinking my body was against me. And this coach helped me develop a belief system that my body is working for me and my body is always working for me.

And I think I talked about this on the podcast that I have had an esophagus issue where food gets stuck in my esophagus. And sometime earlier this year it got stuck and I couldn’t breathe and then I almost suffocated and I had to go by ambulance to the hospital. And then I had to go on medicine and all of this stuff. I had all these tests and procedures done. It’s changed a lot inside of me, it really was life altering.

But I was getting a coaching session recently and I was really processing some really deep emotion. And my coach always asks me, “Where is it in your body? Where is this emotion feeling stored in your body?” And it went from my shoulder, which is where I always keep my stress. And then it went to my esophagus and then it went to my stomach. And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this has just been my body telling me that there’s emotions that need to be processed.” So I worked to believe that my body is always on my side.

And so I’ve worked to believe that my anxiety is always on my side and my postpartum anxiety, it’s on my side. This mama is keeping her baby alive. If I were a lion in the wild, I’d be the top of the pride, you all. I am built for survival. This is what I tell myself. Think about how much self-acceptance I have for myself. I can talk about postpartum anxiety so much because I have self-acceptance from me having it. I have decided it does not make me less than.

I read this one book, oh. my God, what was it called? Because I suggested it to someone recently. But in the book, I can’t think of it, but we will link it up in the show notes if I can think of it. I think I let someone else borrow it, so I don’t even know if I have it anymore. But anyways, the premise of the book is talking about how actually women with postpartum anxiety, especially when they get really bad or postpartum depression, it can actually come from your brain firing too many neurons and too fast or something, creating too many connections into motherhood.

And so it’s actually, I’m explaining it horribly, but it’s actually a symptom or a function of an over-functioning brain. Your brain is just really highly functioning and now it’s crossed the line of highly functioning into not serving. I thought about that and I was like, “Yeah, my brain is really highly functioning. It is very active.” I can see it being overactive in a not great way. That doesn’t mean I’m less than, it doesn’t mean that I can’t coach my people.

One of our clients in 2K for 2K a few months back posted that she was having a lot of anxiety issues and she was like, “Should I stop coaching my clients? Should I fire them all or tell them all that I can’t coach them anymore?” And she’s like, “Am I out of integrity because I’m having anxiety?” And we were all like, “No. How could this be the perfect way for you to lead your people? How could you accepting this about yourself and getting help on this, how could that make you a better coach for your clients?”

I think the more we go through in life and the more we work on ourselves, the more meat we have. My Cinderella story, if that’s what you want to call it, is so empowering to so many people because I can reach them when they’re struggling. My clients who are feeling unworthy, my clients who are in between houses and don’t have a solid living situation, my clients who are in debt themselves. They can all feel empowered to keep going and help people with the tools they have, even if they don’t have the house and the new car and the money and the fancy clothes.

They can help people with the emotional even if they don’t have the material. You can help people with their emotions even if yours are struggling a little bit. That’s the whole reason why we do coaching and therapy is we believe in the work, we believe in the importance of it. So how can that actually be your superpower? I love that I used to have a messy business and be a hustler, I love that.

I just coached Two Million Dollar Group this morning and one of my clients said she’s going to close the year out at 800K. She’s like, “I know you used to have a messy business, but I love that I don’t have that experience.” And she’s like, “And I love that I put myself in 200K, in Two Million Dollar Group to learn that so that I don’t have that experience.” And I was like, “Seriously, I’m so happy for you.”

I was like, “I literally created 200K to be the answer to set people up for $200,000 businesses that could then be really simple and ready to grow rapidly to the $1 million level after that instead of what I had to do, which was clean up a bunch of crap because I had hustled so hard.” So I love teaching people everything I learned along the way ahead of time before they made the mistake.

So many mistakes I’ve made in my business that other people might criticize me for, are experiences that I learned so deeply from that I constantly in Two Million Dollar Group I’m like, “Can I just coach you on this? Because I want to just offer this is what’s ahead.” And they’re like, “Oh my gosh.” But the only reason I can see that it’s ahead is because I went through it and so I can identify it much quicker and I can steer people away from it.

My mistakes serve my community. I’m able to learn from them and then catch them before other people repeat them or make them. So I loved that. I help save so many students from messy businesses because I had one. I’m not embarrassed by that at all. I love my transformation story. And I don’t spend a lot of time trying to fix me. I am fixed. Instead, I spend my time helping other people see this and helping them get out and do things big in the world. I spend my time serving instead of judging myself.

And also I will tell you, the less you judge yourself, if the marketing piece doesn’t make you want to embrace yourself and love yourself and accept yourself, I’m going to give you this. The less you judge yourself, the less you will judge your clients and other people for real. The more self-acceptance I have, when I see the good, bad and ugly, that is in me, when I see that in other people, I don’t judge it.

I’ll give you a last quick example. I have had a lot of operational issues over the last year. I’m actually going to do a podcast where I talk about it because I think I’ve talked about it in a way that makes it very salacious. And it’s actually quite mundane and boring if I gave you the examples that I’m talking about. And the fix has been quite mundane and boring, to be quite honest. So it’s been a rough year of doing things I’m not super inclined to want to do. I want to be out talking to my clients. I want to be out coaching my clients. I want to be out selling.

I don’t want to be doing some of the stuff we’ve had to do. But I’ve had people quit and we’ve been understaffed before, my team make mistakes. I just feel for managers and CEOs at a level that I never did before. I used to be quite the entitled consumer and I have embraced that about myself as well.

But I was talking to my good friend the other day. And she was like, “You could really think about when people are really upset with you, how you used to get really, really, really upset with people who had bad customer service or didn’t operate in their business or have business values or business policies, terms. If you didn’t agree with them, you would get so angry.” And I’m like, “You’re so right, I did.” I don’t do that anymore though.

Just something in the things I’ve gone through as a CEO in the last two years have really calmed me down to where when someone underserves or underperforms or I don’t understand their business terms or rules. I just have so much compassion for it. Even if I don’t agree with it, I have so much compassion for it, I totally get it. So this is a silly example but it’s just so good to give a visual with it.

We went out to eat the other night. We have this new restaurant and we love it and we go there a lot. Because I wasn’t eating chewy foods for a while I had to be on a soft food diet. They have this raw tuna tartar and the sea bass that’s in this miso broth that I love so much. And so we would go once a week so that I could just have a stress free dinner because everything is very soft and just I don’t have to chew it a lot and it’s perfect and it goes straight down but we have an 18 month old.

It’s a really fancy restaurant and so we try to go there and order right away and you only have a certain amount of time. And we were there recently and I got a tough piece of fish, first time ever, but it had just happened to us recently. My husband had made cod and there was a really tough piece of fish. And we were complaining about it sucks when you don’t know it before you buy it, you only know once you cook it and it just sucks to get the tough piece.

Well, I got a tough piece of sea bass and so I said, “Hey, do you think that they could get me a new piece?” And I showed them, you can’t cut into it. And they were like, “Absolutely, we’ll get it taken care of really quick.” But it took a while to re-cook it. They moved very quickly, we saw them. But it just takes a while to re-cook sea bass. And I told my husband, I was like, “I’m going to start picking at your food because I have a feeling.” And I don’t eat fish, cold or reheated either. So I have a feeling I’m not eating this meal. I have a feeling we’re not going to have time. I’m not going to take it home.

“So I should probably just start eating some of yours because I just think we’re going to lose Jackson.” And so I started eating his and the manager comes over and the manager’s like, “I don’t see you with food. Either you ate very fast or we’re re-cooking something for you.” And I was like, “You’re re-cooking something for me?” And he was like, “Oh, I should have known that before I got to this table. I should have already been informed before I got to this table. That’s frustrating that I wasn’t.”

I looked at him and I was like, so many times where I should have been informed of this and way sooner before it made it to the client reaching out or something. I had so much compassion and I said, “Listen, it’s totally fine. I’m not worried at all. It’s not a problem. You’re good.” And I ended up getting to eat my food and they took it off the bill, which was unnecessary and very nice. But before I might have been furious. I might have been mad. I might have been, like, “You all know I have an 18 month old, right? You all know this is not okay.”

And now I’m like, “I get you.” No matter what it is, it doesn’t matter what it is, I’m just now so much more calm because I’ve found that good, bad and ugly in me and I have so much acceptance for it because I know how hard it is to make a fix like that or I know how frustrating it can be to not be informed. I get it. So I will tell you, I coach so many people, especially in 2K because you’re new and you’re interacting with clients for the first time.

We coach on people being judging of their clients so often. And I want to offer, if you stop judging yourself, if you would have self-acceptance for yourself, the times that you are late, the times that you cancel things. I was coaching someone recently on a client backing out of a payment or something. She was saying, “It makes me feel like a bank, if they back out of their payments.” But where do you do that? And when you can find that and accept it within yourself, you’re going to have so much compassion for when other people do it.

It doesn’t mean you don’t have boundaries, it just means you’re not angry, you’re not judging them. And the best part is you will have energy. And when I have energy, I give energy. That’s what I want you to repeat to yourself over and over and over. When I have energy, I give energy. And the way I get my energy is by accepting myself, having self-acceptance, not shaming myself, not resisting myself, not critiquing myself and criticizing, not trying to moderate, modify.

I keep saying moderate, oh my God, I knew that wasn’t the right word, you all, that’s mom brain, modify. I love that I realized that at the end of the podcast. Listen, I accept myself. I’m keeping it in. When we self-modify our behavior, when we try to change our behavior in order to be better, to change ourselves.

One of the things actually I do love about myself is I often do this, I will say the wrong words or I will get sayings mixed up. My clients just think it’s the most hysterical thing. And they’ll usually just shout out, “The word you’re looking for is this or the saying you’re trying to reach is this.” It’s fine, all love, all good times.

Alright, that’s the podcast for you all today. I love you all. Go out and make yourself visible in the world. And if you’re not doing it, check if it’s because you’re criticizing yourself. Much love to you, find much love for yourself. You are worthy, infinitely fixed, done. Now go out and make some offers.

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 2,000 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.