Ep #351: MVP: Identity Urges

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, today I want to talk to you all about identity urges. This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot because I’ve been coaching on this a lot. And I do see it as something that has been a game-changer for me. As I think back to who I was before I started coaching and even found life coaching or personal development, that person I was, and then when I think about who I am now, and when I think about who I want to be at the thirty-million-dollar business level, I have seen so many identity shifts in me. And I’m going to talk about a couple of those key ones today. There have been so many, but there are a couple that have really stuck out to me. And so I’ll talk about those.

But when I think about that, and I coach my students, one of the things that I see often that holds us back in achieving what we want to achieve and becoming who we want to become is the urge to reinforce our current or a past identity.

So oftentimes, we have things about ourselves that have never changed, things that have been cemented, what we consider is like in our DNA or unchangeable things about our personality. It’s just who we are. We see these things as impossible things to change or to move, bend, grow from, evolve. Like they’re just who we are. And these are the things that most often really hold us back and keep us from being able to take actions that produce different results.

We could be taking the right actions all day long, and when we have these identities that we have reinforced over and over and over, it doesn’t even matter if we’re taking the right action because our identity sabotages us every step of the way, we don’t create the result that we want.

And one of the things that I think makes it challenging to change these identities is our belief that they’re not changeable, that they’re just who we are. They’re ingrained in our DNA, they’re part of our personality. When we think of it that way, and I want you to really listen to this episode and take a second to think about what are these unchangeable things that you think about yourself, and how does it impact your attempt at personal growth when you think they’re unchangeable? Like I often think there are pieces of our personality that we look at as like imprisonment. There’s no way out. We’re never getting out. We are stuck inside this box.

And when I think about this concept, this idea of an identity urge, what this does for me, it allows me to consider the idea that there are pieces of my personal identity, that I identify, and that all they are instead of being this prison that I’m locked inside, this unmovable, unchangeable aspect of myself, instead, it’s simply an urge that I keep giving in to. An urge that’s very similar to an urge to eat sugar, an urge to drink wine, an urge to eat bread, an urge to overeat, an urge to maybe scream or yell. Like these urges that we have that we want to break ourselves of, piece, all of our identity, all of our personality, are these things that we have just said to ourselves over and over and over. And I want to offer that from a place of it’s an urge, an urge to say this about ourselves.

Once I started thinking about this in my own journey, I like lately really been able to identify these urges I have to reinforce things about myself that are holding me back. Like my brain offers it to me, urges it to me from many different places. But one of them is when I’m uncomfortable, physically or mentally, my brain offers me this urge to say something to myself that’s super unhelpful so that I will stop doing the thing I’m doing.

Or when I want to move forward in a different way than I ever have before, my brain will again, it just like wants to pull me back. If you’ve ever heard the story of, I think it’s like lobsters or crabs or something, and they’ll try to like crawl out of a net and one of them will make it to the top, but the others will pull it down. It’s like that’s what our brain’s job is to do. It’s to keep us comfortable. Anytime we try to stray too far from the norm, it’s like, no, no, no, I’ve got to pull back.

Our norm is the identity that we and the personality, the way that we identify ourselves as humans in operating in the world. And so our brain is like, wait, wait, you’re trying to come outside of that. And I think the urge gets the strongest when you’re at the top of the net. Your brain’s like, no, no, no, we got to pull it back, pull it back, pull it back. And so it offers these intense urges to repeat something to ourselves about ourselves and reinforce who we are instead of who we want to be.

What I have found so powerful is when I see it as an urge, then I identify it as an uncomfortable emotion that I need to sit with, versus this limiting prison that I can never get out of because it’s this unfixable, unmovable thing of being just who I am, right? There’s this unmovable thing versus there’s this uncomfortable emotion that I just need to sit with. And just knowing that it’s my brain urging me to stay the same, to adopt this belief about myself, and then reinforce that belief instead of creating something new and going out to reinforce that. Like our brain will never offer us an urge, I don’t think, an urge to reinforce something positive that’s different that would move us forward, right? Because that is unknown. And our brain doesn’t want us moving into unknown.

So I want to give you a couple examples of this. When I first found personal development, I was at a place in my life, it was really an all-time low in some capacities. I had really been a great student, not a super great student, not like the super, super, super smart people, but like a good enough student who was always in extracurricular activities, always shining in extracurricular activities, getting a really solid grade point average like all through high school. I don’t think I ever dipped below a 3.5. I was always in honors classes. And even in college, I double majored in four years at Indiana University and maintained that 3.5 even while doing shows. I was in theater, so I was always doing shows in some capacity and working full-time to pay my way through college.

And so I always like have considered myself to be a smart person. And I was always really successful in school, and then I was successful in my jobs, whether I was serving, I was always one of the best servers, or I sold cell phones for a really long time for AT&T for like seven years. I was one of the best at that. And then I hit this awkward stage where I had graduated and was like kind of doing the theater thing, like trying to make my way as an actor, actress in some capacity. But like ten years went by or eight years went by, and nothing had really happened, and I wasn’t really that motivated. I wasn’t taking enough solid, consistent action to believe myself that anything was going to happen.

I’m now pitching in selling mops in Walmart. I’ve done that for seven years, and I had hit the top of that industry and realized that it wasn’t a sustainable industry if I wanted to have babies because it was 100% travel. You were on the road 100% of the time. I was basically a nomad. I had realized I couldn’t really make any more money doing it. Like I had one year after I found personal development, where I used that to make more money in less time, and that was really impactful, but even that had a cap. I had been promoted almost as far as I could be promoted. And I was in a dead-end relationship and really kind of feeling like I was living a dead-end life. And I had a really, really unmanaged mind.

But at the core of the two biggest things I would say about my identity at that time that really kept me stuck were two things. Number one, I felt like everything was the world’s fault. It was always someone else’s fault. Someone was always the reason I didn’t have what I wanted, or I wasn’t getting where I wanted to go. It was either a universal thing or a circumstantial thing, but it was just never my fault. It was always everybody else’s fault, and I was always the constant victim. Like 100% I can own that now. That is the way I viewed the world is I’m this victim of the world, of other people living in the world. Everything is just so unfair.

That was the big one. But then on top of that, it was from the time I was born, really, like my grandma will even say this, that I was born tired. My whole entire life, I had reinforced the identity that I was a tired person. I was just always tired. So if you look at like being a victim, first of all, like every thought you have that makes you feel like a victim is exhausting because it’s a state of powerlessness. So I’m living a life where I am completely powerless and everything is happening to me. And then on top of that, I’m a tired person.

Thank God I found personal development and life coaching because I would still be exactly where I was, 100%, living paycheck to paycheck, always behind, always feeling sorry for myself, always being very exhausted.

So there were two identity shifts that changed in me, but there was one that had to be changed first, which was so interesting. I would never, in all the people I’ve coached or all the things I’ve seen, like you would just rarely say the thing you need to work on first is being tired. But for me, that was it. I had to work on like really rearranging the identity that I am a tired person. And when I mean I’m a tired person, like I would sleep twelve hours a day and like get up at noon, and then be like, “Oh my God, I’m so tired,” all day. And I would repeat that to myself, “I’m so tired. I’m so tired.”

And one of the things I realized when I brought awareness on this was that I started using it just as like the most repeated statement I would say. So if I were like hanging out with friends and I didn’t have anything else to say, I would just say out loud, “Oh, I’m so tired.” Like I would just offer that in conversation. It was really wild when I brought awareness on it, which really is the first step is like, you’ve got to see what is the identity that I am reinforcing? What are the components of my identity or my personality that I’m reinforcing that aren’t helpful?

And I’ll go through like a step-by-step process at the end to kind of give you some questions to guide you. But it’s finding those pieces that are really holding you back. And the more you bring awareness on them, the less power they have over you. The awareness takes it out of it being this automatic subconscious thing that just kind of does happen to you because your brain fires on it before you even realize it, and you’re already in it, and you’re not realizing it, right? Like, there’s no power in that. Our brain can hide lots of things from us.

So bringing it into our awareness, that’s the first step of having power over it. Like, you don’t even have to really do much after that. The more awareness you have over it, like this is what happened to me, is I started bringing awareness to how often I told myself I was tired, how often it came out of my mouth. There’s like the amount of times I repeated it to myself, and there’s the amount of times it came out of my mouth to other people.

And then there were the decisions or the actions I took from that state, from that place. So I would notice it like it was just coming out in conversation because I had nothing else to say when I was bored, I would say it. “Oh, I’m so tired.” I would say it, like I caught myself at one point in bringing awareness around it, I noticed I was saying it even when it wasn’t true, which was really freaky for me.

I was like, “Wait a minute.” Like, I started questioning it when I would bring it up. Am I actually tired? Wait a minute. I don’t think I am actually tired. That’s weird. Like the first time that happened, it really broke my brain where I realized, oh, I’m just repeating this as a habit. This is just a habit of doing something.

So that’s another way I want you to think about it. There’s the habit of repeating it to yourself, and then there’s the urge to repeat that habit. If you can bring awareness to what it is and then see it as purely a habit, and then identify when the urge happens to repeat the habit, you will break free of it. I promise. That’s all you have to do. Like that is really, really, really extraordinarily simple. It’s very difficult to do this in real time, but so, so worth it.

So I would see this habit of just saying it even when I’m not tired. And then the urge to say it, like I would be in a conversation, and I’ve talked about this openly on the podcast many times, that I have a lot of social anxiety. And so I would be in a social situation where my brain is uncomfortable, and my brain would be like, “What do I say?” And so it would offer me a habit. Oh, you’ve said this a bunch. Say this again to people, “I’m so tired.” And I would notice that more and more and more. And I would see how I’m like saying it to myself, and I’m saying it to other people even when it’s not true, out of this habit. So that was the first one I really broke. And it was truly, I broke it simply by disproving it, not continuing the habit, and sitting with the urge not to say it.

I would stop consciously saying it to myself. I would notice when I wanted to do it out of habit, not because it was true. And then even if it was true, I would sit with the urge to say it and not say it. Like, “Oh, I’m feeling the urge to say out loud that I’m tired. And I actually am tired.” So the urge feels very strong to bring people in on my negative experience of this moment.

That’s really what it was. I’ll talk about that in a second, right? That goes back to my victim mentality is I’m like pitying myself from what a victim I am and how awful my life and circumstances are and how uncomfortable I am, and I need to bring everybody along with me because it’s not fair that I experience this alone. Lots of people need to know about it.

So that’s what would happen, is I would notice the habit or when it was actually true, that strong urge to bring people along with me, and then I wouldn’t. I would just stop it. It’s so simple, yet we really struggle to do this is just to stop repeating it to yourself. Sit with the urge. Not resist the urge, allow the urge. Like I have the urge to repeat, “I’m tired,” and I’m not going to.

Once I started doing that, here’s what I found. I want you to just take a second and guess what you think happened when I stopped repeating to myself and to other people whether it was true or not true, right? I stopped the habit, and then I allowed the urge even when it was true. What do you think happened? What do you think was the result?

Spoiler alert, I had more energy. I started having more vitality. I had more of me available to now tackle the everything is happening to me and it’s so unfair and everyone should know about this. It’s unfair for me to have to experience this terrible victimhood by myself, so everyone needs to have pain and experience some degree of the pain that I’m experiencing.

So my coach at the time had given me this really simple saying that ended up changing my life, which is, and I’m sure you’ve heard it, “Life happens for me.” And I never used that sentence against myself. No matter what the circumstance, I used it. I used it in every single thing, grief. I learned how to be better at grief. I learned how to like really experience grief.

Crises in my family. I learned how to approach this terrible crisis in my family with, “Oh, how could this actually be happening for me?” Like what’s available here for me? Maybe that’s another way to say it that doesn’t feel like we’re using coaching against ourselves is in this terrible circumstance that just has happened, what’s available for me here?

One of the things I remember happening to me, and it really feels like something that did happen to me. Like it was something that I didn’t cause it. I had bought this brand new car, and I don’t know, a week old, and I’m driving down the interstate to a job selling my mops in Walmart. And a piece of a tractor-trailer, like a semi, a piece of the tire, if you’ve ever seen them blow off, like their rubber blows off, that rubber blew off, flew up in the air, and hit my hood and scratched my hood from the top to the bottom. And this is the first brand new car I’ve ever bought or had in my entire life. And I’m so proud of it, and now it is completely damaged.

And I remember calling my coach, crying in the Walmart parking lot about how unfair it was. And then us exploring the question together, like what was available for me here in this moment. And there were so many things available, like not having attachment to material things. Like, they get damaged, that happens, being able to react. Like for me, the biggest one was being able to react to something like that happening and not let it reinforce the identity that life is just happening to me. Oh, these things just happen to me.

And I did that a lot, where there were like a lot of circumstances as I grew my business and made my first $100k. The way I got the energy to be able to show up in my business in bigger and bigger ways and the way that I attracted so many clients is I really started breaking free from this belief that life happens to me and all of these circumstances that were making it impossible for me to live a different life, which is why I wasn’t living a different life, right? Like, the only reason we would all not have more of what we want is because we don’t think we have the time or the resources to have it. And then we have all of these reasons why that’s true.

And so that was what was happening to me. It’s like, “Oh, well, every time I try to go do this positive thing, this negative thing happens, and I have to go solve for it.” For example, I wanted to learn to pay my bills on time, and I wanted to learn to pay all of them, and I wanted to learn how to be ahead and be really good in finances. And so the first thing that happens when I want to do that is like some unexpected bill would come on me that I would be like, “Oh, great. I have this beautiful plan, and now there’s this unexpected thing that would happen.”

And so I created the energy for me to handle these things. And then I created a really positive way to engage with them. How it resulted or how it ended up is that I stopped fearing all these circumstances happening to me because now I had all these tools of all these things I had learned from just asking, “What’s available for me to learn here?”

And then all of a sudden, I started seeing all these like victim circumstances that I would normally say are just like being impressed upon me as this victim of the world. I started seeing them as opportunities to problem solve and to be a better life coach, and to teach my students and my audience. And so then that’s what I started doing. I started using all of these circumstances that had been making me a victim. I started using them as teachable moments to my audience. I started doing Facebook lives, all the posts, all of these things, sharing all of these lessons with people. And it turns out there are a lot of people in the world who are also living like this, who were also profoundly changed by my ability to start learning from these and gaining power over them.

And then what happens, of course, is the more power you gain over these things, the less these things feel like they happen to you. They’re still all happening because life happens and life is 50-50, but they’re no longer part of the story of you, right? It stopped being the story of me is these things happen to me. And then what ended up happening is I developed the story, the identity of I happen to things, right?

So I went from things happen to me to I happen to things. And then I went to reinforce that as a habit, and then urge myself to respond that way. And then anytime that I felt the, “I’m tired or I’m a victim or this is happening to me and it’s not fair,” come up, I would notice that habit that my brain wanted to present to me as the solution to handling this unforeseen circumstance, and I would allow the urge or just not give in to the habit, right? Just not give into the habit or allow the urge, whatever I needed to do in that moment.

And then slowly but surely, I became this person that has complete control and power over my life. I also did this with the belief that I’m a hot mess. Like, I encountered that because in the beginning, like up until my first $100k, I really ran my business and became kind of an example of what’s possible, I’m laughing now, with my audience and my students because I would show up like the way I got myself to show up all the time was to just make peace with showing up messy and sloppy. It was like just showing up was better than not showing up.

So if I would show up to a coaching call having just gotten out of the shower and not taken enough time to like actually get ready, or if I showed up a little late, or if I showed up, you know, messy on a Facebook live or on a park with no makeup. Like, it was just like not completely like a mess, but like, you know, just you got to getting it in where I could, basically.

Like that was the vibe of my 100k business is you can show up in your yoga pants, no makeup, not having showered, and still deliver results. And that’s better than not showing up at all. That was basically the example of my 100k business. And then, really, I would say that was me all the way up until the year I made $860,000. I went through Master Coach training. Actually, it was either that year or the year after.

At some point, I went through Master Coach training, and my coach said to me, in not these exact words, but essentially, “You’ve got to get your act together.” If you want to make millions of dollars, your students are owed a better experience of you. They are owed you showing up put together and prepared. They are owed you not being last-minute. They are owed your full focus and attention. And it’s really when I shifted from running my business anywhere and everywhere to getting up, getting ready in the morning and sitting down in my office, and going to work and taking myself more seriously

And I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with how I did it before, but I do think it was a fair statement to say your clients, if you want to attract hundreds and thousands of people and you want to help them at the highest level, they deserve your most prepared, organized self. And I think that is true.

And I did Master Coach training, my whole reasoning was I want to be able to hold space for more people to come into my containers. And that really felt like the work for me. I had to confront the identity of “I’m a hot mess,” because that was the identity that fueled showing up late, showing up however I could, showing up not prepared. It was just always like, “Well, I’m such a hot mess.”

And so I really had to do the same thing, where I had to notice, am I saying this as kind of a joke to myself and to other people? Like putting myself down out of habit and just reinforcing this habit? Or in this moment where I feel like a hot mess, do I need to allow the urge? And most of the time, this was just saying it to myself. This wasn’t necessarily saying it to other people. But I have to allow the urge to want to tell myself I’m a hot mess and say something different instead.

And I remember this one key moment, I was in Master Coach training. I was also in this 100k coaching group, and then I was also in my million-dollar mentoring. And I remember everyone was working so hard. This like live, in-person week where we would literally work from like 8:00 AM until midnight. And we would work through lunch, and we were doing so many things. And I had to leave at lunch one time because my shoulder spasmed, and I had to go find a chiropractor. And I felt so embarrassed and less than because this was happening. And my brain wanted to associate this with “I’m a hot mess.”

Like that was available in that moment. I saw it. I remember I was like waiting for an elevator and going through this in my brain where like, “This is happening because you’re a hot mess.” And then I noticed that, I brought awareness on it. And I said, “How would someone handle this that wasn’t a hot mess? How would my coach handle this?” Like if she had a spasm in her back that left her in extreme physical pain and unable to focus, how would she handle this?

And I answered myself with she would just take care of herself. Hot messes don’t take care of themselves, and people who are not hot messes care for themselves. She would care for herself, and she would do it without drama. And I thought about, like, if she had been leading this meeting and had a spasm and needed to leave the meeting while she was leading it to go to a chiropractor to care for herself, what would I think about her? And I’d be like, “Oh, wow, I’m so impressed that she cares for herself at such a high level.”

And I changed in that moment, waiting for that elevator, thinking about my identity of I’m a hot mess and allowing that urge and not giving into it and not repeating the habit. In that moment, I allowed myself, instead of repeating it, the energy I had was to look at a different identity that I could embody, in which I am a coach who takes care of herself.

Which to me is a very purposeful, organized, powerful thing to do. Like someone who is purposeful and organized always cares for themselves. And that became what I decided to believe about myself. I am an organized, purposeful person. I am a serious coach who takes care of herself. Like my body is an asset. Like, if you listen to the podcast where I talk about protecting the asset, and you and your brain, your physical body, and your brain are the asset, that’s where that emerged.

Wait, I’m an asset. I have to care for myself. And the energy around how I started handling things shifted in a really big way. And from that moment on, I never called myself a hot mess again. And then what’s really interesting is because we teach people how to treat us, and I had repeated to myself that I’m a hot mess so many times, people would say that to me. I would get that reflected back in my coaching, in my peer coaching, in my coaching from my coaches. Like it was always coming up about some version of this hot mess-ness that I was putting out into the world. And I stopped entertaining that.

In fact, I remember a story where my family always used to give me a hard time because I would always be late. And I was late everywhere by hours. It was just like anytime I said I was coming up to visit, I would give them a timeframe, and then I would always be really late. And when I was working on this identity, at this point, I was with my husband.

And I decided, “Wait a minute. I am always driving up to them. They are never coming to visit me. Why don’t I just stop giving them timeframes? I don’t know what time I will leave.” Whenever I decide to, I have to pack myself up, my animals, bring the whole house, and drive up there for however long I’m going to be visiting. Like it’s a whole thing. And it’s a three-hour drive, and then sometimes there’s traffic. It’s like, “Why am I stressing myself out about this? I don’t have to give them an explanation of what time I’ll be there.”

And so I just stopped giving them the time. I was like, “No, I’ll just be there when I get there. Just whenever.” And that started shifting things. And then I started telling people, “No, I’ll be there by this time,” and then I would get there by that time. I created this identity of I honor my word. I give people expectations, and I honor my word with those expectations.

And so I remember this one time, we had said when we would be there, and we arrived early, like much earlier than when we had said we would be there. And my brother-in-law, he was outside when we arrived, and he like made a joke like, “Oh my God, Stacey’s on time.” And my husband still remembers to this moment, I didn’t engage with it at all. And I just kept walking in the house. And he was like, “I really saw you in real time decide to not engage with that version of I’m a hot mess.” Like, you just didn’t engage with the lateness and the making fun of the lateness, and then the making fun of being early because you’re always late, right?

Every version of my family loves to make fun of me. And it’s like every version of any which way that my family would use that storyline to make fun of me, I just stopped engaging with it because I’m a serious person now who cares for herself and honors her word and sets expectations and then honors those for me, not for them, for me. Like, I just like to feel like a person who gives someone an expectation and then honors that. And that’s how I shifted that.

And I did this with money. I’ve done this with so many different aspects of my identity. Figuring out what’s the identity that’s holding me back from growing into someone different, becoming aware of that identity more and more, and how I’m repeating it and all the different ways, the ways that it’s just a habit that’s being repeated, or the ways I’m reinforcing it by giving into the urge even if it might be true. I did this with hustle. I’ve done this with so many different areas. And I want to give you one last way that it’s shown up for me, and then I’m going to give you some questions to ask.

But recently, I went back to the trainer, so I used to go to the trainer three times a week, prior to having a baby, for several years. And then I would run in between, so I was very physically fit. But my past experience of going to the trainer is that I go to the trainer because she pushes me much, much harder than I’m able to push myself, and also creates workouts I wouldn’t even know how to do.

But I would go there and complain the entire session. I would moan and groan and make faces, and just like everything was like, “Oh, I’m so tired. So awful. I’m exhausted.” Right? I would just complain the whole session for like many years. Then I took a break when I was pregnant. I was too sick to work out, and then I was scared to work out after that.

So I recently went back a few months ago, and one of the things I didn’t even make this conscious decision necessarily, but I’ve been working on who I am at thirty million dollars. And who I am at thirty million dollars is I really take myself seriously. I honor the things I sign up to do, and I do them really well. And I get to work because I utilize my time very, very well. And I’ve just been working on that in the background, like how I work hard, I get things done, I don’t play around. Like, I am very serious with my time in a way that leaves me very free with lots of time when I’m not working. And so I go back to the trainer, and I just noticed, right, awareness is really that like first step, I noticed my desire to complain the whole session.

And so I leave the first session, and I make a decision. I have reinforced this habit of complaining when I’m in physical distress and saying it out loud to people so that they know I’m in physical distress. But why? Why am I doing that with my trainer when I pay her to push me past my physical comfort zone?

And I thought about like, what is her experience of training me when that’s what it’s like? And if I want the best of her, I want to give her the best of me. So I just decided I don’t want to be anymore the person who complains through her training session. It’s miserable for me, it’s miserable for my trainer. I want us to both show up and get the most out of the time we have with both of our highest selves.

So I just stopped. And I’ve noticed the urge come up each session. I go two to three times a week. And I noticed the urge come up to want to make a face or complain. And I’ve been working on just not giving into it. Like, “Oh, wait, that’s just an urge that my brain has offered me because I’m out of my comfort zone. It wants to complain.” It’s part of the pity story, really, of like, “I want you to pity me with how hard this is for me.” And I’m just going to stop.

And what’s been so interesting is I’ve enjoyed my workouts more. I’ve gotten more out of them. But it was much simpler this time around than I thought. It took much less energy to break this identity in myself. And now I just get to work because I’ve knocked down all these other things, and I’ve gotten so good at getting aware, finding when it’s habitual, and then noticing the urge to repeat that habit and just stopping it.

And now I’m starting to really see this in my clients. I’ve been coaching people on 2k and 200k on repeating this identity. I just coached someone in a 200k breakout session where she was repeating her money story over and over and over and over. The scarcity she feels around money, and I had asked her some version of this, I’ve coached a lot of people now on this, but some version of I said, “Have you just really allowed yourself to freak out about money and then, like process all the way through it, and then notice how often it’s just an urge to repeat that story to yourself?” And what if you saw it as an urge that you just no longer give in to? Just like if you want to lose weight, you just stifle the urge, or sit with the urge, you allow the urge, you just don’t give in to the urge.

Like yesterday we were at the we were at the pharmacy after a doctor’s appointment with Jackson. And I like felt the urge to buy a Reese’s cup. And I was like, “I don’t really enjoy candy like that.” Like, I don’t enjoy over-the-counter candy, like not as much as like a French pot ice cream or something like that. And I was like, “I see this urge.” And it was so simple to just not give into it. Like, “Oh, I won’t really enjoy that.”

Right? And so I asked her this in the same way, could you not give in to the urge to reinforce the story about yourself with money? And if you didn’t give in to this urge to reinforce the story about money, what story could emerge? What would be available to fill in the energetic space of that? Okay?

So I want to give you some questions to answer. A couple different ways to enter this work. So one way is you can ask yourself, what are the identities that don’t serve me that I reinforce with repeated sentences that I say to myself and out loud? Like, what are those identities that don’t serve me? Things I repeat to myself and out loud? What stories do I have about myself, and how do I reinforce those? Like, how does it show up that I reinforce them over and over and over? What’s the action that reinforces them?

What urges to reinforce do I need to allow? Like what would that be like? You may have never, ever noticed that reinforcing an identity is an urge and how that feels in your body and what that experience is like in that moment, right?

Just like I wanted the Reese’s cup, I saw the urge, and then I talked myself out of the urge. Like you won’t actually enjoy this. It’ll taste good for about five seconds, then it’ll leave a weird taste in your mouth. And then you’ll wish that if you had consumed sugar calories, that had been something like my favorite ice cream store or a favorite dessert of mine. I even like offered myself an exchange there. I was like, “Oh, if you really want it later, why don’t you just get something that you would enjoy more?” And I didn’t want it later. Right?

So could you do that? Could you notice how you could talk to yourself through that moment of that urge? Like, what would you need to say to yourself? What might you need to offer yourself? I can offer the fact that I’m a hot mess, or I can offer, I can care for myself well. I can change that feeling of that story. Okay?

So what is the urge that I have? How does that feel in my body? Can I find the moment my brain urges me to reinforce this habit of this identity or this personality? And do I need to just allow it? If you have social anxiety like me, your urge might come up to do something that you’ve always done, the way you’ve interacted with people, and you could allow that urge but not give into it and stop it. And then decide, what do I want to do in this situation?

Can you find the moment where you want to say the thing and then decide not to, actively tell yourself, “I’m not giving in to the urge to complain.” I coached someone else in 200k about her pity story, or she had like brought up her pity story. Like, I have this urge to constantly pity myself. And like what if you didn’t? What if you didn’t give in to the urge to pity yourself?

What if you didn’t give in to the urge to not believe? I’ve noticed that a lot on my journey to thirty million. There’s been a lot of urges to come up to tell me all the reasons why it won’t work and all the reasons why I shouldn’t believe. And I’m really working on not giving into those urges anymore and not reinforcing the habit, like the way we’ve been doing things in my company, to not reinforce those and to do something different. So what would it be like to not give into the urge to complain, pity, not believe, say why it won’t work, say, “I don’t know.” That was another one when I went through coach training. We weren’t allowed to say, “I don’t know.” And I broke the urge to say, “I don’t know,” anymore.

And now I say, “What do I know?” And that’s part of how I started developing intentional thought creation is it’s a way, if I have the urge to say, “I don’t know,” or, “I need more information,” or, “It won’t work,” and reinforce all the reasons why it won’t work. Instead, become aware of how often I want to do that. I’m going to notice that as a habit. I’m going to notice when my brain urges me to do it. And instead, I’m going to offer myself an intentional thought creation of what do I know? Why will it work? Where are all the areas where I’m already on board, or why do I think this would work? Why would this be a good idea? Instead of this is a bad idea. How could this coaching be for me, not against me, right? And I offer my brain instead an intentional thought creation.

And then again, it could be things like you’re not going to give into the urge to talk about how tired you are. You’re not going to give in to the urge to hustle. I’ve worked a lot on that, like not giving in to the urge when my brain wants me to hustle to solve an issue. And then offer my brain an alternative of solving the issue. Or maybe it’s the hot mess story, maybe it’s a money story. But you want to say the thing out loud. Either you want to say it to yourself or out loud to other people, and finding that moment of the decision not to, of not giving into the urge.

And then you can ask yourself the story in place of this urge to repeat this sentence and reinforce this identity, who would I be without it? That’s one of Byron Katie’s questions. I love so much. Who would I be without this thought?

I had one when I was going through personal development before I wanted to become a coach. I had a lot of blame for how I show up in the world. Like, “Oh, I show up this way because my mom shows up this way and she taught me to show up this way.” And I was like, “Who would I be if I no longer attached my behavior and blamed my mom for it?” Like who would I be? If I just took full ownership of it, what would that look like? Changed my life so much with that one thing. Who would I be without the story that it’s my mom’s fault?

Who would I be without the money story? Without the self-pity story? Who would I be without this identity? What would be available to me if I didn’t have this identity? And I want to just reinforce that there can be factual, measurable circumstances to prove your self-identification. And even if it’s true, why do you want to keep talking about it and focusing on it? How does that benefit you? Right?

For me, I wanted people to feel sorry for me. And when I questioned why, what benefit is there? There wasn’t any great positive answers to go with it. I realized, “Oh, so that they would pity me and treat me with pity.” “Well, what does that get me?” “And what would it get me if I didn’t let people treat me with pity if they didn’t feel sorry for me?”

Right? For those of you with the hustle story, at one point, seeing yourself as scrappy might have been useful to get you to scrap together what you need to survive, but you don’t need that anymore. Or maybe you don’t want to need that. That could actually still be the story where you are hustling to survive. If you want to change that identity of I hustle to survive, right? Maybe you just want to not repeat that cycle, keep repeating it. You don’t want to need the hustle. So you stop identifying as that. And you create new behaviors from the lack of that identity.

Like so much of our focus in personal development, I think, goes towards creating new beliefs. Especially in business, it’s like, “Oh, I need to believe I can make 100k. I need to believe I can make 2k today,” right? I need to grow my belief towards something. And so little of it is spent really being aware of what we already believe and knocking those beliefs down.

I want you to imagine if you had this like, I don’t know, this is going to be a terrible analogy, but imagine a landfill. And I remember when I was growing up, we had soccer fields right next to a landfill, and they were trying to rehabilitate the landfill and like create land that could be used for other things. So it was like imagine if you were just like plucking out all of the trash in the landfill and you were like getting rid of all of the nastiness in the soil, all of the things that didn’t serve the soil. And then what would be available then is soil that could be replanted with grass.

I want you to think about that as like that’s really a lot of the work you really need to do is take out the aspects of your identity that aren’t serving you. What will be left is wide open space to then create. And it’s so much easier to create space from open space instead of bogged-down space. It was so much easier for me to see how life was happening for me or what was available for me from a lesson when I wasn’t so tired. And then it was so much easier for me to not engage with being a hot mess and with hustle when I was no longer feeling tired and no longer feeling like a victim to my life. Right?

So it’s just like stacking one thing up at a time. And now it’s so much easier for me to deal with, like just complaining, right? In general, and pitying, because I also don’t consider myself a hot mess anymore. I believe I have tons of energy. I believe in my capacity for more energy. I take myself seriously, and I believe I have a really powerful effect over my own life.

So each little thing just stacks up and makes me more and more available for another identity, which is why I get so excited to think about making more and more money, is it makes me examine my actions and get more out of my time and more out of my actions in order to create a higher income level. And I have to start looking at the identities that are then creating that chain reaction of how I show up and how I use my time.

So it’s like the goal of thirty million to me, when I think about it is it is the money that I will have. For sure, that’s a piece of it and the like lifestyle upgrade that we will have. But there’s such a big piece of the thing I spend the most time thinking about when I think about thirty million is who I will be and the benefits to my life that I will create because of the identities I will have to shift.

I want to call you into that, to call you into who would you be as the person who made your first $2k, who made your first $25k, who made your first $200k, who made your first two million? What’s the identity available waiting on the other side for you? Because that truly is what will enable you to feel like I always talk about this. I’ve been talking about this since my Diva Business School podcast days, is like the power of life coaching and the power of personal development is the ability to live different lives as your same self in this one lifetime. To get to be a completely different person over and over and over.

I’m a completely different person than when I was feeling like I was just lost in life and a complete victim to it with no prospects of a better future to a 100k business owner that was a little messy, to a million dollar business owner who was organized and taking care of herself, to a ten million dollar business owner who’s a thought leader who works three days a week and has a really great work life balance on most days to a thirty million dollar business owner who gets work done and uses her time extraordinarily well on and off work.

Who will you be on the other side of not giving in to your current identity urges and your current identity habits? Such a good question to ask yourself. Find those pieces of identity and work one at a time. Don’t try to do them all. Overestimate what we can get done in a year and underestimate what we can get done in ten. This is why I love the three-year plan. We always overestimate what we can get done in one year, but we underestimate what we can do in three.

For those of you that are in 200k, I recommend doing a three-year plan on your identities. That could be really fun. There’s a lot of exercises already in there that work on your mindset as a CEO, but just seeing it from this lens might be really effective to take this podcast episode and then go relook at your three-year plan and re-answer some of those questions or add some things in there that could be like, what is my identity going to be? Like, what am I going to work on over the next year, the next two years, and in three years, what do I want to be completely changed about my personality and my identity, and who I see myself as in this world?

I hope this was super helpful. I’ve been coaching a lot of people on this in all of my programs across the board because I’ve been coaching myself on it so much at the thirty-million-dollar level. I was so excited to share this episode with you, so I hope it was super, super valuable. And I will see 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.