Ep #349: MVP: Finding Connection On Consults

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, I have a really good podcast episode planned for you all. I found someone on Instagram. Actually, I think this was on Facebook, where the reels show up. And there was this reel, and I watched i,t and then it took me to Instagram, and I found someone’s profile that I spent 90 minutes binging. And I will tell you the profile so you can look it up and also binge. I was like, I have to do a podcast about this because there was something that I noticed about this content creator that really blew me away and reminded me of a conversation that we could have about consults. And so that conversation is connection, creating connection on consults, and why it’s so important and how impactful it is.

I’ve got some questions to ask you and some emotions to offer you when you’re on consults that will make you a lot of money and help you really connect with the client in a way that will have you serving them at the highest level possible and giving them the biggest transformation and really showing them what’s possible for their life. And without connection, I think it’s very difficult to do that. And I just recently coached a client on this, and so I’m going to give you some examples.

So, first I just want to tell you the Instagram to look up. Her name is Kara Lewis. It’s K-A-R-A L-E-W-I-S. She is a photographer in Nashville, which is so interesting because we’re moving to Nashville, so it’s interesting that we found her, but I don’t think you can hire her. So this was something that was also very interesting to me is her business model. I think she gets paid as a content creator. She has, I don’t know, 100,000 followers or maybe it was more than that. But a lot of followers. Her videos get like hundreds of thousands of views.

So what her content is that she creates is she goes and she approaches strangers in parks, at McDonald’s, like everywhere, all over the place, on the street. She approaches them and she says, “Hey, I’ve been watching you and would you mind if I did a photo shoot with you?” So it’s either an individual or an entire family. She’s like, “I’d love to do a photo shoot like right here, right now.” So they’re total candid photo shoots, however they’re dressed. She did one of Girl Scouts. It was so cute. But she did several that made me bawl my eyes out. Like literally, if you go and you watch her videos, you’re going to need a box of tissues for some of the stories that she does.

And watching her and who she approaches, it’s like such a wide variety of humans. And watching her talk to them, I was telling my husband, I was like, “She really loves humans.” You can just tell she loves all humans. There’s no barrier, there’s nothing in between her and another human, no thoughts of judgment, no preconceived notions, just pure, she finds the humanity in literally everyone. And it’s really wild how many people she stops. And who knows how many she stops and they don’t end up on her Instagram or on her social media, but it’s wild how many people she feels called to stop, and then the stories, she interviews them.

So the little mini reel, it might be a couple of minutes is her interviewing the people, her asking to do the photos. Someone is videoing her doing the photos, and then she shows the photos at the end. And she captures their story, their humanity, so beautifully. She captures the moment. You would never believe some of the photos she’s taking, is like a family in a parking lot of a medical complex. It’s so crazy. But she really connects to them, and a lot of them say that.

There was this family that was in one of the videos that she approached at a Walmart, or she approached them at, I think it was a McDonald’s. And they told this story about how they just had returned a hammer to Lowe’s or Home Depot that was $24 just to pay for their kids to eat at McDonald’s. And she ended up paying for their food, but they were so grateful, and their story was so incredible. And at the end, the woman that was being interviewed said, “I looked in your eyes when you approached me and I just believed instantly God sent you.”

And there was just something about it. The way she connects to these humans that she’s never met, and they’re from literally all walks of life. The way she connects to people is truly incredible. Some guy approached her on the street and they started talking. He was asking for help with an app. And they started talking, and he said, “I just got out of prison.” And it was hard for him to even say that. And just to see her reaction, they go to Chick-fil-A, and she buys him dinner. Just the way she gets him to pour his story out of himself. And oh my God, it was the most tragic. If you’re a boy mom, it will be so hard to watch that one.

But the way she pulls their story out of them, the way she connects with them, the love that she has for all of them, the complete lack of bias that she brings to every conversation, I just think it’s a masterclass in connection and love and humanity.

So I really encourage you to watch it because the thing that I was thinking when I was watching this is this is what you have to do on consults. You have to leave all of your manual for how people should be. You have to leave your biases to the side. You have to leave your snap judgments and your immediate thoughts. So many of you come to me and you tell me you’re getting on a consult, and immediately your thought is they can’t afford this, they can’t buy this. Or they’re too much of a mess, or there’s just too successful for you, and there’s no way that you could ever.

Like, I have a couple of clients I recently coached on this, like, “Why would they come to me for coaching?” So it’s like whatever your preconceived notions are that keep you from just deeply connecting with this other human and finding your shared humanity and being 100% engaged and just all in, present, in love with them and their story and where they are and where they want to be. And truly being so engaged and connected to them that you can see the path, and you are enrolled in the vision that they want for themselves more than they are. Being enrolled in that vision for them is so strong and compelling for you that it’s easy for you to fight through objections they might have or concerns they might have. You’re just holding a different level of belief for them.

I remember being on consults, when I went to the Life Coach School, I’ve told this story before, but I just remember being blown away at the belief that Brooke Castillo held for me while she knew I was in a Walmart parking lot on break from selling mops in Walmart, telling her I don’t have the money to pay for coach training and I’m going to have to figure it out. And the way she spoke to me changed my life. The way that she connected with me, the way that she believed in me, the future she saw for me. There are people that do this, and that is the transformation on a consult. It’s everything.

And this is what I used to do when I was pitching in stores and selling products. The reason I was so good at it, the reason they called me the queen of military bases because I was so good at connecting with military families and officers and I was able to get them to come on their breaks and at the end of their very long days and they loved coming to my shows and I always had huge crowds and so sold so much. And I could go into a rural area in Kentucky, or I could go into Burbank, California, or the Bronx, New York, in the Kmart. I don’t know if it’s still there, but there used to be a Kmart in the Bronx, New York, a multi-level Kmart.

And I could go anywhere and I could find shared humanity and connection and I could engage with humans and find friendship, even if it’s for 20 minutes, really find that commonality that had me connect to pieces of me that I saw in them or things I saw in them that I recognized in myself where we could connect on a human level. I could find how they needed to be spoken to, the way that they needed the show to go. I could really read them deeply and love them. And that connection, that presence, that engagement is what created the sale. That’s what created them to engage back with me in the show. It’s what made me so good.

And so when I went to sell coaching, I innately knew this was the art. This is what you have to do, is no matter what your first impression is, you have to be able to get past that, especially if it’s a negative one for either on them or for you. I’m not good enough for them because I signed lots of clients that made a lot more money and had a lot nicer things, and were more successful than me at the time. Being able to set aside all of that to be able to focus on them and show them the value that you can bring to their life, that is everything. Whether you follow my consult process or not, whether you do a consult process at all, whether you do it perfectly.

There were so many times where I didn’t do the show “perfectly,” but I nailed the connection, and I made the sale. We spend a lot of time on that in 2k for 2k is building this connection. We have lots of different ways to do it. So when you join the program, you’ll get very specific activities to take you through all the different parts of the process, whether it’s marketing or making offers or with your, on actual consult or your walking through making a decision, connection is the thread that holds it all together.

So I really highly recommend that you watch this video because to me, when I watched her videos, when I looked her up, I could just see, that’s it, and anything that isn’t it, that’s the reason you’re not selling. It’s so clear. It’s such a perfect example of connection. It’s so genuine. It’s so authentic. Whatever the word is to describe it, you really just have to look her up. Again, it’s @karalewis, and she’s a photographer, so you’ll know if you’re on her page.

But if you are not seeing the relationship that she has with these people, these strangers she meets on a street, if you are not having that, if you are not feeling that with people, it is the reason people are not signing up for consults. It’s the reason people aren’t buying. It has nothing to do with your messaging. It has nothing to do with your offer. It has nothing to do with your pricing. It has nothing to do with the economy. It has nothing to do with any of the other things.

At the end of the day, people want to feel seen. They want to feel connected. They want to believe that someone cares deeply, cares maybe even more about their future, and believes more in their future than maybe they do in that moment.

I was recently talking to a client about this, and I found a commonality with her. She gets lots and lots of consults. So consults are not her issue, but when she gets too many of them, she starts to sometimes lose focus and presence. And she was saying how she had recently lowered her price for her group program, and she had believed in her mind it was a hell yes price. And because of that, she didn’t think she would have to work very hard to sell people. And so then when they had objections, she would just be like, “Okay, bye.” She wouldn’t work very hard or at all to talk to them about that.

And one of the things I told her is I said, “What happened is in your expectation that the sale would be easy, you actually lost the engagement and the connection and the presence to that human. And you didn’t give them the same level of effort that you would be giving them if you were engaged and connected and present with them.” There’s a level of energy that you give to someone when you are feeling those emotions.

And I said, “That used to happen to me.” What would happen is I would go up and I would get 100 people to my show and I would sell 30 sets, which was crazy. And immediately something would happen in my brain, not even consciously, just what would happen in my brain very quickly, is my brain would assume that was going to happen again. And so I would get on the phone, and I would do an announcement. I would see all the people, and I would come in, and my brain would very subtly switch to autopilot. And then I would be kind of doing the motions, but not engaged, connected, and present. And I would sell zero. And I’d be like, “Oh my God.” I always knew right away as soon as it happened.

And I called it entitlement. I felt entitled to the sale. I felt I’ve skipped ahead to the end, and I missed being in all of the middle piece of the beginning, the middle, the end. I missed the moments in the in between. And sometimes we do that because we’re anticipating a sale. Sometimes we do that because we’re anticipating there won’t be a sale.

But either way, the only thing that actually creates the sale is going through that call, that process, whether it’s a consult or for me it was the show and then it was consults and then for now for me it’s webinars or whether it’s on a coaching call, whatever it is, it’s going through that entire process completely engaged in your body, completely connected to this other person, finding their humanness, finding love for them, finding compassion for them, falling in love with them, feeling extraordinary desire to help them, knowing they can do it, finding belief in them.

So many of you struggle with you just don’t believe that they could do it. And you feel almost bad to sell to them or to take their money. If you have a problem taking their money, you probably also have a problem believing they’re going to get results.

For me, I don’t have as much problem taking people’s money. I don’t get caught up in if someone uses credit card debt. I don’t ask them how they’re paying for me. I don’t care. What I care about is my belief that I can help them and their end result, and I feel so confident that I can do that, that I’m not thinking about, “Oh, should I take their money or not?”

Some people who have expressed to me extraordinary financial distress, I sometimes will send them away. Or I will make sure they understand what they have to do, what it entails, what’s on the line if they share that with me. But what I find is you guys get caught up without them sharing that with you. You just get very into, “I shouldn’t be charging for this, I can’t take someone’s money. What if they don’t get the result?” And what I find that is coming from is you not believing in them, you not believing in their capability, their resourcefulness, you not believing that they are going to do the work, that they are hard workers, that they will show up, that even if they aren’t someone who shows up now that you could teach them that and they want to be and they will work towards that.

That is the extraordinary luck of the coaches that connected with me early on. My first one-on-one coach, when I went to the Life Coach School, and there have been coaches in between as well. I’ve hired lots of people. The people that have impacted me the most are the people who didn’t decide because I was flaky back then, because I was a hot mess, because I didn’t have any money or I wasn’t paying my bills on time, because I lived in an apartment and didn’t own a house or because I didn’t drive a fancy car or because I didn’t get along with people at work. They didn’t take any of my rough edges at the time, and make that mean anything about my future and what was possible for me.

They saw what I wanted, they saw who I could be, they saw the desires I expressed, and they connected to whatever was inside of them that also used to have that and has used coaching to create it, and they decided to believe in me. No matter what, that is everything, finding that humanity, falling in love with that person, loving humans deeply.

So many of you tell me, and I started out this way too, so I get it, “I hate other humans, I just don’t like people.” You got to be a people person in this industry. You got to figure out what thoughts do I need to think to be a people person? How do I need to think about other people? How do I need to feel about humans to be excited, to be compelled to engage with them, to want to know their story, to not judge them on their story, to love them for their story, to see the pieces that you all share in their story, to find that commonality. And how you know you’re connected is your body is fully engaged. Your brain is fully engaged. You are firing on all cylinders with your entire presence. The entire presence of your being is focused on them, believing in them, loving them, and looking for how you can serve them. Serve them. Not sell them, serve them.

So this is my message for you today. Are you going on autopilot? Are you disconnecting? Are you judging? Are you coming with biases? Are you deciding ahead of time that they aren’t good enough or they’re too good? Are you engaged? Are you connected? Are you finding that commonality, their humanness, your humanness, falling in love with them, finding deep sense of compassion for them? Are you engaged and present the entire time? The moment you get on the call, the entire call, all the way through the call? Are you thinking about them after the call and loving them so deeply and wanting to help them so much? Are you holding space for them, for their future self? Are you believing they can do it, and their capability and their resourcefulness?

This, you have to find this, this almost unconditional love for your people. When you find this and you give them this, this will be a life-altering transformation for them. It won’t matter what you discuss on the call. It won’t matter how you perform as a coach. What they will remember is how you left them feeling, how they felt in your presence, and they will want more of that because we don’t get that from other humans, and it’s only getting worse, not better. It’s actually getting worse, the connection that we experience with people is actually getting worse.

How people afford us humanity and grace. Think about the average person. The average person is going through their life getting the opposite of grace, the opposite of understanding, the opposite of people believing in their good intention, the opposite of people believing they could do something incredible with their lives, because other people aren’t doing incredible things with their lives. So they want to say the lobster pulling the other lobsters down, or the crab pulling the crab down, whatever that saying is, that they’re getting hate, they’re getting vitriol, they’re getting told they’re wrong all the time. They’re getting corrected for their behavior all the time. Their friends don’t talk to them anymore. It’s just a text conversation.

Think about how people are living life now. What we deeply crave and desire is other people to be this way with us, to offer us love, connection, engagement, compassion, presence. That literally is a transformation. This is truly if you go through my 2k process, it is layered into every single part of the process. It is layered into my 200k process, it is layered into my 2 Million Dollar Group process. I believe this at my core. When we are not in this place, marketing is hard, selling is hard, delivering is hard. I am constantly pointing out to my people when they are judging their clients, when I can feel it in their voice, your people can feel this too.

So if you want to make money and you’re like, “What’s the fastest way to making money, Stacey? I’ve got to be making money right now.” This is it. This doesn’t require any skill. It requires opening up your heart, giving someone your full attention, engaging and caring about their life, seeing their future, believing in them and their capability and resourcefulness and resilience, finding them stronger than they see themselves, and staying with that in every moment that they are engaged with you. That’s it. That’s the game.

Okay, go see Kara Lewis on Instagram. I think she’s also on TikTok. Find her. Look at how she is with other humans. I just seriously could not stop watching all of her videos. She inspired me so deeply. She helped me reconnect. Sometimes we just need that reconnection. We need to find that because we get busy in our lives.

There’s no judgment when you fall out of it. Like I was telling my client, I never judge myself when I went up entitled because it happened so fast. I didn’t even notice it. It takes active participation in your conscious mind to come back to connection on a daily basis, on a moment-by-moment basis. Our brains are not trained to do that. They’re trained to be self-focused, to worry, to have anxiety, to focus on lack and what we don’t have. It takes active engagement with your conscious mind to come back to connection.

So I never judged myself, and I never judged my clients when we lose it, but this is it. Selling is the art of coming back to connection to other people and connecting that product, whatever you’re offering, how that will improve their life. You have something that can improve their life. You have to believe that yourself. You have to believe that they can make that improvement, and you have to find the commonalities, the things that you share together, and deeply love the people you are speaking with. That’s it. That’s the game.

I hope you all have the best, most amazing week, and I will talk to you next week.

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.