#329: Productive Grief and Post-Traumatic Capacity

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 329. So today I want to share with you a post and a lesson that I made in my Facebook community of my Capacity Work course in the Entrepreneur Series. So we are wrapping that course up. And I typically do lessons. I think we had seven lessons for Capacity Work. And I ended up doing an extra lesson. And then sometimes I’ll do live streams or I’ll do posts in the group as we’re all in the work of it to answer questions, share thoughts. There’s a lot of different ways that I create value, we create value as a community in these courses.

And because this was a post and it ended up becoming so valuable for so many people that I wanted to have a place where the conversation lived that wouldn’t be erased by the group being gone. And so I decided to do it on the podcast so that this lesson, everybody can learn, everybody can have with them. If you were in Capacity Work now, you’ll have this episode to refer back to. And if you weren’t, you’ll get a little bit of a taste of some of the work that we were doing.

And part of the importance of this episode is going to be that one of the things, the questions that I answered a lot in Capacity Work, or the types of questions were nuanced questions. And I do think doing capacity work, increasing your capacity, there is a lot of nuance to it. A lot. And that is really what we spent the seven days, me teaching, answering questions, coaching, was really on the nuance of how to really implement and apply this work in a way that isn’t black and white and isn’t all or nothing, and can be extremely useful for you. There’s not hard and fast rules as much as using a framework, an idea, a concept to find the most capable version of ourselves with the highest level of capacity.

So let me give you a little context about this post. This post came after I had been on a week of bereavement in my company or from my company. And so the last call of Capacity Work was supposed to be on a Thursday. And when I was creating the content for the last day, I realized I was going to be teaching on increasing the capacity to fail and then increasing your capacity to celebrate and win.

And when I wrote out the outline, I realized that I needed a full 90 minutes to devote to each of those topics instead of having them be in one conversation. And so I added a call. And by the grace of God, I don’t know what possessed me to put that call, not immediately on the next Monday, but the Thursday after.

I think my thought was, if there’s going to be a last call and it’s going to be about increasing your capacity to celebrate, I want as many people as possible to be live on that call. And so anyone, people had been purchasing the course and starting the course up until that final Thursday call. And so I wanted there to be plenty of time for everyone to catch up and then be able to attend the last call together.

So the last call is on a Thursday, and then I give everybody a week. I surprise them on the last call, and I tell them there’s another call and it’s in one week. So, everyone catch up and we’ll end together.

And then on the following Monday, so Thursday, we have the second to last call. And then I don’t typically work Fridays, and then we have Saturday and Sunday. And then on Monday morning, I woke up and typically our routine at our house lately, now that I’m pregnant, has been my husband plays with my son for the first hour in our playroom, and then they typically say, let’s go get Mama.

And my son runs in, he jumps in bed with me and says, “Mama hold,” and then, “show.” And we lay in bed while my husband makes breakfast, and I snuggle my son so tight and kind of wake up, and then he brings us breakfast in bed. I mean, he’s literally just a king. I’m so spoiled.

But on this particular Monday morning, my husband came in after breakfast. We were still watching TV and snuggling, and he came in really heartbroken and distressed. And he told me that our dog, Bear, was unable to move, and he knew it was over. It was his last day.

And many of you may have already heard about this on social media, because I did… And then if you’re in my programs, you’ve heard this. And I might be talking about it a little more or less emotionally because I’m going to talk to you about my process of grieving, but I’ve had so much time to process.

But it was a really big shock. And he had been trying, my husband had been trying for hours. He had gotten up around 6 a.m. and discovered that he was basically paralyzed and couldn’t move, and was able to get him from our basement to our upstairs. But he was in so much pain that he tried to bite my husband, and you could just see it in his eyes. He was really done.

And so we had a beautiful day together as much as we could have. We got him… We had to go get a muzzle and get his mouth covered up, and then we were able to use a towel to bring his rear end onto his doggie bed and keep him comfortable. And I spent four hours… Now I will get emotional…

On the floor with him, saying my goodbyes, brushing him and feeding him all of the treats and playing music for him, and going through all of our best memories with him. And then we were able to say goodbye in our home, which was really powerful that he didn’t have to go to a vet and he didn’t have to be in an unfamiliar place or experience the pain of the travel to the vet.

We were able to just let him pass on his dog bed with his Mama rubbing his head and him licking peanut butter ice cream. So he passed with ice cream on his muzzle, which he would have loved and appreciated. That was his favorite thing. I have so many photos of that dog eating ice cream with me over the last 12 years.

So, my sweet Bear Bear passed on Monday afternoon, and I was absolutely shocked by the level of grief that I experienced. I knew it was going to be sad, and I knew I was going to have a hard time, but I’ve never lost a pet. This is the first… I’ve lost pets that were family pets, but not like… some of them ran away, we’ve had some pass on, but never my pet, like my dog that was my dog, like when the dog chooses you.

And he has been my shadow for 12 years. He’s gone everywhere with me. He was with me before I started my business. He was with me before I met my husband. He was with me when I was selling mops in Walmart. He traveled with me. We saw the world together. We took road trips together. He flew to Aspen with me. We took almost a 45-day road trip, me, my husband, and him before we got Bella. We just created the most incredible memories for the last 12 years.

And I knew it was going to be hard, but I was truly shocked at the level of grief I experienced. And I ended up not working pretty much the rest of that week. On Thursday, the day of our Capacity call, it was the one day where I woke up and I had energy and I had desire to show up, and I was really excited to do the Capacity Work call.

Ironically, it was a call about celebration. And it actually really ended up being the perfect message at the perfect time for where I was. And it really actually changed some of the things I taught them for the better. And I think it created a lot of value on how can you celebrate and win and hold hard things at the exact same time? And how can you grow your capacity to do both became the call.

And then after the call, I ended up being exhausted on Friday. Between being pregnant and grieving so hard, I’ve never also grieved while pregnant and realized what that does to the physical body. And so I was really exhausted and tired. And so I spent most of the day in bed Friday. And then Saturday and Sunday, I had the weekend to rest. And then Monday, I came back and had one of the most productive days that I’ve ever had.

And maybe not ever had, but an extraordinarily productive day where I got an entire week’s worth of work done in one day. Like, everything I had missed the week before, because all I did on the Thursday that I did work is I coached in the Capacity Work call for two and a half hours, taught and coached. And then I also had another call that day, I believe with my 2 Million Dollar Group. And I think I coached for like 90 minutes on that call too. And then I was done, like so tired and in a good way.

And so everything else, the emails that I was supposed to write, the team meetings, all the things I was supposed to do, didn’t happen that week before. And I remember having thought the Sunday before, I remember having thought like, I’m going to have a big week. Like, I want to come back and I don’t want to draw this out, so I want to catch up. And then I also want to get done what I had planned to get done this week, and I want to believe that’s possible.

And I spent a few hours that Sunday night kind of pre-planning for my day, and then I just went in on Monday and without having a lot of pressure, just had an incredibly high capacity day. And so at the end of that day, at 10 p.m., I made a post and shared my experience with my students in Capacity Work.

And one of the things I shared with them is my process for grieving. Because I do believe when you have really hard, heavy emotions, whether it’s grief or something else, the way that you process those emotions is incredibly important to the capacity you then have after.

So I called this episode, Productive Grief and Post-Traumatic Capacity. And I wanna tell you why. So I’m gonna share with you my productive process for grief where it felt like the grief was truly, I was grieving and just in it, and in a way that felt alive to the grief, and in a way that honored my relationship with my sweet puppy, and it just felt like it was a productive use of time spent with deep negative emotion. And so I want to share that process.

And then also, I first heard this idea of post-traumatic growth from my coach, Brooke Castillo. And the idea behind it is that…

I’m not going to do the concept justice maybe in this specific way, in this moment. But the idea is that when you go through something that feels very traumatic and you learn from it, then there is growth, massive growth available on the other side. So she called that post-traumatic growth. Something that is available and comes after something really difficult, and you navigate it and get value from it and learn from it, and grow from it. Like what’s available on the other side is actually really big.

And so what I experienced in this grieving experience and this productive grief, really, the aftermath of it wasn’t exhaustion that lingered. It wasn’t grief that lingered. There is some of that still lingers, obviously, when I talk about it. Even when I think I’m not going to cry, I might cry. And there’s still a sadness in our home in general. We feel his presence being gone in so many different ways. My husband and I talk about it still to this day, like what feels so different in the house. And there’s still the sadness, but it’s not the same level of grieving.

And so what’s happened after the grief has really been predominantly processed is this capacity that is bigger than it was before. And I know a lot of people struggle with deep emotions and really hard things and losing a pet or a loved one and depending on their process while they’re in the grief or in the difficult emotion, in the really hard thing, the process and how they approach it and how they go through it can prolong it or create a space for it to move through and to feel, I don’t know what the word is, but for me it just felt like appropriately processed, appropriately attended to, if that makes sense. Like it felt like I gave a good tending to it.

And I don’t think there’s a timeline for this. So if it was a really close relative, maybe it would have been longer. I mean, I’ve seen so many things that say now that I’ve really looked into it that people can grieve animals more than they actually grieve people, because they spend so much time in proximity with them. But your proximity and relationship to someone you lose, I don’t think there’s a specific timeframe, but I do think that there is a going all in and being alive to the hard thing, to the grief, like really owning it.

The way I thought about it is like this is my honoring of our relationship and of myself and the experience I’m having in this moment. It’s me not telling me that I should be doing it differently, or that is wrong, or I should be doing it quicker, or negating the experience I was feeling. I even got coaching on, like, I’m so shocked at how heavy the grief is. And I’m going to take another day off work, and I’m shocked by the exhaustion I feel, but I think it’s appropriate for me to rest another day.

So I just want to kind of run through my process that isn’t perfect in any way. If you’re not doing it this way, it’s not wrong. I just want to give you an example of this because so many of my students said that it was really powerful to see this process. So it’s really the only reason I want to share it is how many people said it was really impactful to hear it and to witness what it looked like and gave them permission to really go all-in on processing an emotion as well or processing grief as well or a difficult thing and what that could look like.

And then I want to give you what happened after. I want to give you, I had actually posted the schedule of my day on Monday. And people said it was so helpful to see the before and after, or the during and after. And it was also just so helpful for them to see what’s possible in a day. And they were like, seeing someone’s schedule is just incredible. And they were like, this just created such a visual representation of the work we’re doing here and helped me really anchor in maybe the more nuanced things that I taught and the concepts with actual tangible example.

And okay, so let’s just dive in. This was my process. So one of the things I told them is that nothing on my calendar other than two of my coaching calls happened that entire week. On Monday, I had a whole schedule and I canceled all of it immediately. As soon as my husband told me, I first was in shock, and I was like, this can’t be right. And I ran out to the living room. And when I saw him, it was like within a 20-minute period, I knew. And so I just texted my team, “Everything has to be moved today.”

And typically, I coach in my 2K for 2K program that day, I had a meeting with my podcast producers, I had a team meeting, I had things on my schedule, and I just said, “You’ve got to move all of them. You can either find… If you can get a guest instructor to come in, that would be great. If not, reschedule, but just figure it out and just let me know. I won’t be checking in the rest of the day. So just move everything and I’ll check back in when I check back in.”

And so everything got moved. And I’m going to talk about that in just a little bit because I got questions about that. But for me, it was like one Slack message, and I was off Slack the rest of the day. And I spent the whole day with my puppy.

And then from there on out, all of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, when it felt like I needed it, I grieved like it was my job. I snuggled with my son. I talked through my grief with my husband. Him and I had so many conversations. We were both so shocked at how sad we were. Both of us really struggled for an entire week.

I talked about it with my coach. I talked about it with one of my best friends and really just got it out, all of the hard stuff, all of the sadness, anything that felt like it was lingering. My husband and I had both felt really sad because that last weekend, we were potty training my son, and there wasn’t a lot of dog attention. I felt a lot of sadness around that.

And we both took on some regret that wasn’t even necessarily ours to take on. We felt sad that we didn’t walk him more the last year, but also he couldn’t walk the last year. So some of it wasn’t even rational, but we talked through all of these things. We talked through what we did do and how we did show up for him.

I mean, up until the end, we were literally giving him shots at home to help him with his… He had one really bad hip. And so we were giving him shots to help with the arthritis in that hip.

But it turns out, the vet said they think his actual spine went out, and that’s why he couldn’t move, because his other hip was completely fine and they had just checked it a couple of weeks before. So there’s no way it could have deteriorated that quickly. And so we just went through any of the, just regretful thoughts that came up, just everything got brought to the table. We had so many conversations.

One of the other things I did is, I wrote a goodbye letter to my dog. And that may not be for everyone, but it’s my thing. It’s how I process a lot of my emotions as I write letters to people that I never share with them. I write letters to myself. I write letters to my husband. I just write letters. And so I wrote a 10-page letter to my sweet Bear, just remembering every amazing memory, every thought that I had about him, the feelings I had about him, just everything that I might have wanted him to know and make sure he passed with, I got down on paper.

And then when we got his ashes back, I just cried some more. Endless tears. Just endless tears. I made him a little altar on my dresser with his ashes, and they had clipped some of his hair for me to keep. And so I have that there. And Jackson and I colored him a little page of dog paw prints and hearts. And so we just have that there. It just feels like he’s still sleeping in my room when I look at it.

And we walked our dog, Bella, who is still grieving. I didn’t realize that dogs also grieve, and for maybe longer than humans do, but they said it’s typical if she grieves for up to a month, like it would be normal. And she seems very sad. And so we’re really extra lovey with her.

And I made a beautiful tribute to him on my social media and just like thought of everything I would want to share about him. And I curated all of my favorite images. I just spent so much time, days, going through old videos and photos. And some of my family and friends sent me photos and videos that they had of him. I have a video of my niece when she was so small. I don’t even know how old she was, maybe five or six, and she’s walking him.

That’s how good he was, a small child could walk him. And Neil is walking Bella, I think, and she is walking Bear. And she says, “Bear, let’s go. Rock and roll!” And it is the cutest video on earth. And then I found a video of my sister had two dogs, Keyshawn, Collie mixes, and they were all white too with little patches on them. And I have a video of them three playing together, and her dogs have also passed. And so it was like a really sweet video to just remember, and I told her like, I hope they’re playing together over the Rainbow Bridge. I hope they’re all, they met up, and they’re still chasing each other. And I just spent that time doing that, thinking about that.

I really wanted to feel like I had honored him thoroughly. I wanted to just give all of my time to remembering him and to being in his memories. And so I did that. And I cried a lot of tears, like so many tears that my face was actually chapped. My skin was chapped like it was wind-burnt or sun-burnt. And I remember after the first day, Neil and I were like, God, our head hurts so bad from crying. And that’s really what it’s been like for the last week.

And then suddenly it felt like each day, I think on the third or the fourth day, it was like things started to feel easier, and then they would not feel easier, and then they would feel easier, and then they would not feel easier. And then on Monday or Sunday night, I felt like I want to work. I want to come back. I’m actually feeling a little bit excited to tap back in.

And I didn’t force that. I mean, I had planned on coming back to work. But if I had needed more time, I would have taken it. If I was still crying, was still processing, but I just did it so thoroughly that week that I felt like… I mean, morning till night. Thankfully, we actually both said, thankfully, we have Jackson, and when you have a toddler, they just keep going. And so there were moments throughout that whole week where we still giggled, and we still chased a toddler around, and we were potty training him at the same time. So we didn’t lose ourselves in the grief, but we let it really be there.

And so on Monday, Sunday night, Monday, I really wanted to tap back in. And that’s something that we talked about a lot in Capacity Work is the desire to do work that is, like letting desire increase your capacity. And so it’s such a big component of everything I teach when it comes to capacity is we don’t do things out of willpower, which is “have to” or “should” or “need to,” but “I desire to.” We turn everything into “I desire to”, and if we don’t desire to, then you don’t do it. But if you really do desire, you think about it, really think about what it is that you desire and why, or you don’t desire and why. And I really desired it. I processed the emotion. I treated myself like an asset.

It’s another concept from Capacity Work, I really do treat my emotional world, myself, my mental well-being, my emotional well-being as the asset. I am the asset. And so I treated myself like the asset through the grief, through processing the emotion. And then on Monday, after the desire to come back, I also desired to get caught up. I wanted that for me. I didn’t feel like I had to. That’s so important to know. I didn’t tell myself, because you were gone for a week grieving, you need to get this done. You owe this to people. I didn’t say that to myself. I didn’t beat myself up for taking a week. I didn’t beat myself up for taking a week. I didn’t beat myself up for not getting more done. I didn’t do any of those things.

It felt so clear to me. I take as long as I take. I had actually just coached a client in another room the Thursday before Bear passed on… We were coaching on something, and I just made a comment about like, yeah, if my dog passed, I would miss work too. For sure. It felt so certain in my body. And so there wasn’t any sort of like, I should have done better or worked more or anything. It just felt appropriate to me to grieve and to have that time. And then again, I desired to step back in. So from this place of having processed through and really been productive with my grief.

And again, my production isn’t going to necessarily be the same way that you productively grieve. And I think that the answer of productive grief really is just like letting it out and letting it be without judgment, allowing grief to flow through you, honoring it and being truly with it and allowing it to go all the way through you and not giving it a specific timeframe, but just being in the importance of the grief. I think grieving is important. I’m the asset, and to properly grieve what I need to grieve is important. That’s my biggest thought.

And then, so from that place and desire, this is what my day looked like. That morning on Monday, I woke up at 8 and from 8 to 11, I had breakfast with my family and snuggled my son with our routine and had more family time, and got ready for work.

So I had three hours in my morning where I treated myself like the asset, and met my highest priorities with my family and caring for myself. Then at 11am, from 11 to 11:30, I did a live stream to promote a new free course that I have coming out, How to Sell Life Coaching. I think we’ve already talked about it when this episode airs. I think we’ll actually be on day three of that training of training, that course. So I did a promotion for that course and announced that course.

And then from 11:30 to 12:30, I had my team meeting. And because I had prepped on Sunday night, it was one of the most productive meetings we’ve had in a long time. I had all the things written down that I needed from other people and projects that I wanted updated on. And I had written out the remainder of my schedule for this year, what I’m working on up until maternity leave, what I want to do pre-maternity leave, what I want to do post-maternity leave. I had really spent, I think, two hours on Sunday really prepping for this meeting, and so it was really productive.

Then from 12:30 to 1, I approved an email that was going out to my 2K for 2K students promoting my free course that they could attend as well. And then I downloaded a bunch of graphics that my marketing person had made for my social media from Slack so that I could be posting about our free course coming up throughout the week. I like to just have them already on my phone.

And then I also gave in this half-hour time period, I also chased my son around our living room for a little bit, and snuggled on him, and took a bathroom break. And then from 1 to 2, I taught in my 2K for 2K Live program and coached in there for an hour.

And then from 2 to 3 p.m., I spent time with Jackson. I tried to get him to take a nap. It was a no-go. And then I ate lunch. And while I ate lunch, I also got some really good coaching from my coach about some things in my business through a WhatsApp chat.

And then from 3 to 5 p.m., I wrote six marketing emails that were supposed to be done the week before for the free course that we had just announced. So I had… When I started on Monday, we only had the Monday announcement email done and nothing else. And so I wrote six emails. And then I also downloaded the live stream I did and submitted it to my podcast team to use as a podcast.

And then I… From 5 to 8:20, so another almost three and a half hour block, I had dinner with my family. We did our family walk. I did Jackson’s bath. He loves for me to play in the bubbles with him. We have a little routine with me sitting next to the bath and him in the bath. And so he just loves for me to do it. And then we did story time. Currently, we are reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, which he just calls Cookie. And something… Little Blue Truck something. It’s like the Little Blue Truck version, where it has sounds. And so we do those two books like three or four times each, and then it was finally bedtime.

And then at 8:20, I had a decision to make, which was typically, I go to bed. I lay in bed around 8:30 if he’s in bed, and I just watch TV for an hour or so and wind down and go to sleep. That’s my typical routine. But at 8:20, I decided that it would feel so much better to me to be completely caught up with the work from the week.

I just decided, what if I had the capacity to just get this done? I think I could just get it done. And that’s a big part of capacity is just believing you have the capacity to do it. And because I had grieved so well the week before and rested my body for so many days, it didn’t feel like I’m going to push myself to do it. It really just felt like I want to do this, and I can do this.

So from 8:20 to 8:30, so like a 10-minute window, I recorded an intro for my podcast and submitted it to our podcast team. And then from 8:30 to 9:30, I wrote the final four emails that needed to be written.

I typed up four specific content requests for my production team and created a timeline for them. I created a 10-week podcast content schedule. This one is a bonus one that I had not planned to do. So really, I have 11 weeks of podcast content. And then I dropped assets into my production folder for the requests that I asked of them to make sure they had all the assets that were ready to go and they wouldn’t be waiting on them.

And so that hour was… one of the things students commented on is like, “Holy crap, that hour that you used. Four emails, specific content requests from my production team, assets put in the folder, and a 10-week podcast content schedule. This is what I’m going to talk about all 10 weeks.”

And so that was probably my most productive hour of the day, other than my 3-5 hour was also highly productive. My team meeting was highly productive. Obviously coaching was really productive. But that 8:30 to 9:30 hour where it could have been so easy to just call it a day and be like, “Okay, at some point in the week, I want to catch up with these four emails.” I just got it done.

And then at 10 p.m., I typed up the post that walked my students through my productive grief and then the capacity that came afterwards. And I really looked at it as I was writing it, and I just was in awe at what we are truly capable of when we decide.

Like the day I came back from work, like I think sometimes we think there has to be, and even my brain does this sometimes, where it’s like, “Oh, it’s gonna take me a long time to catch up. It’s going to have to fit it in the nooks and crannies of the entire week, and it’s a lot of work now. It’s two weeks of work in one.” And we tell ourselves these thoughts that make us feel so exhausted going into the day or we tell ourselves we’re behind or there’s not enough time or that day that we have a lot, like we know we need to get a lot done, we actually overwork and we don’t give ourselves time.

But I look at my schedule for that day, and I had 7 hours almost, yeah, 7, no, 7 hours with my family and my child and myself, 7 hours of downtime. And then I also did a live stream, hosted a team meeting, coached a coaching call, wrote 10 emails, downloaded and submitted and recorded a podcast, interacted with my team on Slack, got content requests in that I needed to get in, and created a 10-week podcast schedule, and typed up a post that created an incredible amount of value for my students. Plus 7 hours of spaciousness.

This is what we’re capable of when you don’t ignore yourself, when you work with yourself. Not pushing, but from desire, right? This shows not hustle, not I have to hustle to get in an extra week of work in another, like fit 2 weeks in 1. But this calendar to me really shows work-life balance. Like you can increase your capacity and also have work-life balance.

Like the day that I was the most productive, I also felt like I spent so much time with myself and my family that I wasn’t rushed. It felt like there was flow throughout the day. I felt spaciousness throughout the day.

I even posted a video the next day of my husband was cooking dinner, and I was downloading the live stream and uploading it to my podcast team. And I had turned it on, and Jackson jumped in my lap, and I was sitting at our kitchen table, and he started saying something, and I didn’t catch what it was right away, even though now in the replay, it’s very obvious. But he was saying, “Mama show? That’s your Mama show.” And he kept saying, “The Mama show, the Mama show.” And I thought it was the sweetest, cutest thing ever is that’s the way he now kind of sees my business, and when he sees me teaching, or when he sees videos of me teaching.

And so I snapped a quick little video of it so that I can… I’m always trying to get the cute things he says on video. It’s one thing to write them in his little baby book, but it’s another to have the video. I also brought up photos of Bear. In that same time frame, I brought up photos of Bear, and I thought to also get him to say how he says Bear. So we have that on video, too.

It’s like, “Brr, Brr.” I can’t even say it right, but “Brr.” And it’s so sweet. And so now we have that on video too forever to be like, he probably won’t remember Bear, but I’ll be able to show him how he used to say his name, and I’ll always have that.

And so I just really think about how spacious that day was, how meaningful it was, and how productive it was. And it was really, like, the thing I said to my students that I think is so important is, days like this happen when they feel like they’re full of things you love. Not full of drudgery of things you have to do, but full of things you love.

There was nothing I didn’t love. I love my team, and I really enjoy doing team meetings with them now. I love to go live. I love to announce free things especially, but I love to announce new courses and new things that people can tap into. I love snuggling with my baby in bed in the morning and him saying, “Mama hold”. And I love teaching in my 2K for 2K live. I love writing emails. I know that some of you do not have these thoughts, but I have these thoughts. I desire to do these things. I love the family walk. I love Jackson’s bath time. I love story time. I love getting things done. I love being productive, and I love, most importantly, going to bed proud. And I think that’s what capacity does for us. It lets us be proud.

So the thing I want to leave you with and why I really wanted to do this episode is that… Oh, and I forgot actually one more thing that I wanted to tell you all. So I’ll say that first, and then I’ll leave you with the thing.

So one of my students, when I posted this, she said, “So what’s the difference between choosing to take time off when a hard thing comes up, and when to increase your capacity to work through it?”. And so here’s what I said to her. This was my answer. I said, “I think grief is very different than having a hard day.” So typically, if I’m having a challenging day, I always work through it. If I have a pregnancy issue, I’m for sure going to take off or pause things.

We’ve had a few weird things happen in this pregnancy, and we had several last time that ended up in ER visits and ended up being fine, but there are just some things that happen in pregnancy where if it happens, they just tell you to go in. And then when sweet Bear dies, like definitely taking off. I just feel so clear about it. So the grief was so big that it wasn’t even a contemplation. It was a solid no, I will not be working with no doubt behind it.

So here’s what I think happens. When we have a hard day and we think we need to give ourselves a break, we think we need to take time off, when there is doubt or uncertainty behind it. I believe this happens because we actually do have the energetic capacity, and then our brain is just giving reasons to stop, and then it doesn’t feel like a clean decision.

Like when you really could work through the hard day, when you really could change your mindset, tap into desire, expand your capacity, tell yourself you’re capable of going through having a hard day, capable of handling all the different things that go wrong that day, capable of handling the stress or the anxiety. When we tell ourselves we are capable or we know that we are capable, there’s some version of us that knows we are capable, and then our brain is offering to take a break, tap out, go do something else, take a day off. It doesn’t feel like a clean decision. That’s how you know whether you need to expand your capacity or not. It doesn’t feel like a clean decision.

The grief was grief. It felt like a clean decision. There was no doubt behind it. There wasn’t any hesitation. I didn’t need any coaching around it. I didn’t need to bring the idea by anyone. I didn’t need to talk through the idea. I didn’t need to, there was none of that. It was so clear and clean. The grief was a clean decision.

I do also think it gets easier the more you do the work of expanding capacity. The more you create the habit of confronting lack of capacity, of confronting challenges, of moving past restrictions, the more you do that, the easier it gets to tell whether or not it’s a moment to take a break and to take the day off versus increase your capacity. And there’s been so many things that have been really heavy. I’ve had family emergencies.

I’ve had really heavy things that I have actually expanded my capacity around. And so my measurement tends to be, is this thing a thing I really want to do, no matter what else, tragic or stressful or whatever is happening, right? Like a family crisis, that’s the word I was looking for, not tragic. Whatever crisis happens or whatever thing comes my way, if I want to do the thing, I’m going to increase my capacity.

I want to be the person who can move through challenges and restrictions and hard things and show up in my business no matter what chaos is happening around me. And then if it’s a clean, no doubt, absolute, easy decision to say, no, this I stop work for, the more I do the work, the easier that decision gets.

A lot of times, even when I’m sick, it doesn’t feel like a clean decision to just cancel. Sometimes it does. If I’m really sick, if I don’t have a voice, if my throat is so sore I can’t talk, if I can’t sit up straight. That’s an example I gave. If I can’t sit up straight, I know for sure it’s a clean decision.

But if I’m just uncomfortable and my brain is hyper focusing on how uncomfortable I am, I know that I can direct my brain to something I desire to give me purpose for that day, even if it’s only one thing I do or my coaching calls and then I don’t maybe do the other things and I rest. But I look for the clean decision and it typically is only clean.

There’s very few, there’s rare times where it’s super clean and you just know. Like, if your kid is really sick, if there’s an emergency at school, there are going to be things where you’re like, this feels very clean. I’m out.

If your kid’s having a hard day and they really need you and your priority is your family and you just sense it, there’s sometimes where they want you and you’re like, and I have to go to work. And there’s times where you’re like, no, this is where mom supersedes work mom, the Mama show. There are times where those things, you want to start paying attention in your body, when is it clean? And there’s no doubt.

And then if there is doubt and it doesn’t feel 100% certain and clear and clean, then what’s that about? And it’s probably the fact that I actually have more capacity than I’m telling myself right now, and I have desire to do this. I do have desire for this.

Okay, so that was the last thing I wanted to share with you. And then I will leave you with this. A lot of times, even as coaches, we think that the way to bigger energy is by shoving things down or being a perfect version of us that does not have a human emotional experience.

And I know that so many of us teach processing emotions and being with ourselves. But when we mix entrepreneurship into the coaching, you know, there’s the coach version of ourselves and the entrepreneur version of ourselves. And sometimes they conflict. The entrepreneur version of ourselves makes us forget what we believe is the coach version of ourselves.

And then also everybody has different coaching tools, concepts, and experiences that they live by and have. And so not everyone that comes to me comes from the school of processing emotions and or different levels of experience with it.

It’s very common for me for people to ask me about processing emotions. It’s very common for me to coach coaches even at the million-dollar level on being intimate with themselves in their hardest moments and not pushing that away, feeling like it’s wrong, judging it, shaming themselves for it, rejecting it, or pretending that it’s not there in order to be like a positive coach, a Positive Polly, and to be energetic and enthusiastic.

You know, all the things that we imagine coaches are, but I really believe coaches are also like, the thing is, we’re supposed to be alive to all of the emotions. And when we are, and when we accept them all, and we work with them all, and we engage with them all, and we’re willing to have them all, then on the other side of being willing to play with the really hard emotions and the really hard things, we do get more energy than we’ve ever had in our lives. And we feel more engaged with ourselves and our lives than we ever have. We go to bed proud.

And for me, this work is not about have to, and it’s not about… I don’t CEO from that place, “I have to do this thing.”

Especially now that when you get to a place where you’re making so much money, you’re not in that same place. Everything has to be from desire and from who I want to be and how I want to go to bed with myself. Something I brought up in Capacity Work a lot is, I want to go to bed with myself with the most proud version of myself, whatever that is. When I was grieving, I was so proud of myself for doing that. And when I expanded my capacity and just got my week done on Monday, I was so proud of myself. That’s the version of me.

And I’ve been telling clients a lot lately, and I’ll tell you, one of the things that has helped me increase my capacity the most is realizing that I love the most capable version of myself. I love the most capable version of myself the most. I enjoy that version of myself the most. The version of me who doesn’t think she can do things, that doesn’t think she has the energy, who’s tired, who’s physically exhausted, emotionally exhausted, mentally exhausted, like that version of myself, who doesn’t think she can learn the thing, who doesn’t think she can be the leader she needs to be, who doesn’t think that she has the capacity to take on the hard thing in front of her like that. I don’t like the incapable version of myself, not as much as the capable version. I’ve lived both lives.

And so I realized, when I meet the hard stuff head-on, I actually, no matter how hard it is in the moment, I love that version of myself the most. I enjoy being with myself as that version the most. Even when it takes time away from my family, even when it takes time away from my child, I also believe he gets to watch that version of me. Like the Mama Show, He’s growing up and he is going to see a version of me who always meets the world and life with capability. And imagine seeing your parents meet life, all things in life with capability every single day, what a childhood they will have or what experience they will have seeing even if they’re adults now and they’re watching you, they are watching you. And when they see that change, what it does for them, what they learn about life from you, I want him to grow up knowing the most capable version of his Mama.

I recently saw on Instagram that it said that… And who knows if this is true, it’s Instagram, but it was like something along the lines of the number one thing that matters the most for a child’s development and ultimate happiness in life is whether or not he grows up with a happy mother, or he or she. If they grow up with a happy mother, it impacts them dramatically. I’m not saying it right, but that stuck with me.

And I think to have a happy Mama, he’s got to have a capable Mama. And that’s what I know. And so I’m going to be capable of the grief. I’m going to be capable of the capacity. I’m going to be capable of the good stuff and the bad stuff, the hard stuff and the easy stuff. I’m going to be capable of it all.

I’m going to be proud of myself every day, and that version of me is going to change his life experience completely. And I will love that version of my life the most. And I want that for you.

All right. I hope that this episode was really helpful and not too sad to hear. And I just want to tell you all, I love you. And I’m so glad you’re here, and I’m so glad you’re listening. Alright, have a good one.

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.