Ep #308: Self-Concept Blocks at or Before 100K

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 308. Today, I am playing a Facebook live, Instagram live that I did earlier this week on the self-concept blocks that happen at or around $100,000 of revenue. But I think this could actually be happening at 50K. It can be happening at 150K. So, I really thought this was important enough to make sure it had its place on the podcast. So, without further ado, I just want to get you in and have you listening.

But I will say if you’re listening to this on the day that it airs, 200K Mastermind is open for enrollment. And I am looking for the absolute best people to join me and have a very intense mentorship with me in the best way possible, a close proximity mentorship with me all the way from now until next July. The class starts in January, but you get access to all of the process right away. We’ll start mastermind week in January and then we’ll be coaching for six months of the year, the very beginning of 2025 together, which will be the perfect time.

So, if you are one of those people who have been waiting for a 200K enrollment and you have been wondering when you can get in, especially now that we have the new Unbundle and the mastermind price is just $10,000. You can go apply and find out all the information at staceyboehman.com/200kmastermind. And this is what I teach inside the mastermind, this idea of growing your self-concept, not just in your marketing, your selling and your delivering, but in how you view yourself as a coach, as someone in demand, as someone who makes big jumps and does really big things in their business. Alright, let’s dive in.

Hello, how are you all today? Welcome. So, this is a live stream that I am doing for both my Facebook audience and my Instagram audience. And I’m going to be talking to you all today about some very specific ways that your self-concept, the way that you think about yourself, the way you see yourself, the thoughts that you have of yourself. So typically, we consider that our personality or our self-belief, but our concept of ourselves, how it holds us back, going to 100K. Or the way I see it, where people, they’re at 100K, the things that they struggle with that they wouldn’t necessarily identify as a self-concept issue.

So, if you are new to my world, if this is the first time you’re seeing me and you’re like, “Who is this girl popping up on Instagram or popping up on Facebook?” My name is Stacey Boehman, and I am a Master Certified Life Coach with The Life Coach School. And I have been helping life coaches make money since 2018. And I help them in a couple of ways. I help them make their first dollars in my 2K for 2K program, their first $200,000 in my 200K Mastermind, and then their first $2 million in my Two Million Dollar Group.

And I have coached over 700 students through my 200K Mastermind. And I have worked with a lot of six figure earners and students going to six figures. And I have seen a lot of the same things come up as themes that are just constant and recurring that I thought that I could share with you all today. So, I’m going to speak on this topic as if we’re talking about, you’re already at 100K. But then also this happens at different levels because not everybody has the same things happening at certain income levels.

So, an example is, you might be at 100K, but your practice might not be full yet or you might be completely full, you don’t have any room for any clients, but you’ve only made $50,000. So, it’s not necessarily that it happens right at 100K and sometimes it’s even 200K. So, it’s not necessarily the revenue, but the things that you’re going to hear me speak on, you’re going to say, “Okay, this makes sense,” because they’re going to be really specific examples.”

But I’ve coached on this a lot and there are themes of things that I see that, again, you wouldn’t necessarily attribute to self-concept. But they really show up and can be the difference of it taking six months longer, a year longer, two years long, a lot of time. Because we can only create what our self-concept can hold. So, if your self-concept can’t hold a certain result that you’re wanting to create or multiple results that you’re wanting to create, if it doesn’t feel like that is who you are, that you could do something, and I’ll give you some examples.

But if you couldn’t see that right now, I could do that, that is a self-concept issue. And so, the examples I’m going to give are going to seem like sales issues. They’re going to seem like marketing issues, but they are really actually self-concept issues. And the better you get at solving for these and the more that you work on these things, the faster you actually grow. And I actually think the jump from six figures specifically to multiple six figures, and that’s not just from 100K to 200K or 100K to 300K, can be 100 times more simple than people make it.

And that the complication, the effort, the energy, the way it feels, the hardness of it is not actually in the audience size. It’s not in conversion rates necessarily. It’s not in any of the traditional things that you might think what it’s going to take to go from 100K to 300K is, I’m going to have to triple my audience size. And I’m going to have to start launching. I’m going to have to start running ads. I’m going to have to start doing all these things and it’s really not that.

And how I know that is because I took my business, and I’m going to tell you how I did this specifically because I’m not saying that you can do this. I’m just saying this is how I did it, it’s an example of it. But I took my business that was at $150,000 in a rolling 12-month period to 325,000 in one month and it did not involve lots of launching. It didn’t involve ads. It didn’t involve going viral and tripling my leads. It didn’t involve any of those things.

What it did involve is a mindset shift, is me becoming someone that dared to make that level of jump that quickly. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you all about today. So here are the ways that I see the self-concept holding people back at 100K. These are the tangible, measurable things. When I have a client who is filling their coaching practice, and they’re almost full and they’re thinking about their future, and we start having the conversation about, are they going to keep doing one on one? Are they going to sell group?

Then how are they going to do an income jump if they’re going to keep one on one or if they’re going to do group? So here are the things that come up around this period. So again, it’s not necessarily at 100K. This could be happening at 50K, or this could happen at 150K. It’s not necessarily, this is the only way it happens is at 100K. But around this time of when you start filling your practice or when you start getting closer to the 100K mark, where the self-concept holds you back is believing that you couldn’t raise your prices dramatically.

What I see people go to do is they’re going to raise their price from 5K to 6K and then from 6K to 7K and then from 7K to 8K and then from 8K to 9K, little by little versus just going from 5K to 10K. My spots are almost full. I want to be really selective. I want to grow my revenue. I’m going to another level. At this point, I’m carrying the client load, the way I use my time is more valuable than it was when I wasn’t carrying a client load, when I didn’t have 20 clients at a time. When I only had five clients, my coaching was not as valuable as when I now have 20.

And so, there’s a thing that happens where I almost exclusively, when this comes up, I am coaching my coaches on not believing that they could command a higher price. They don’t believe that people would pay for it. They don’t believe they could sell it. It doesn’t feel natural to them. It doesn’t feel like an easy sell for them. It feels like it would be really hard, lots of things would have to change. They would have to be better in their delivery. They would have to be better in their marketing. They’d have to be better in their selling.

It feels like it’s a world apart, but really, it’s just that they don’t see themselves as a 10K coach. They don’t see themselves as someone making $10,000 a client or whatever it is. I’m just giving examples. But because they can’t see themselves doing it, they don’t even try to solve for it in that way, let alone see it as a self-concept issue. Alternatively, if we start talking about group, they’ll start telling me that they’re not ready for a group.

We think there is an actual circumstantial readiness for a group offer when really, it’s a self-concept shift. I am someone capable of selling, bringing together a group of people and delivering my offer in a group setting. I am someone who can be launching and selling groups. I can get one off the ground. What my clients tell me is they think it’s a selling skill or a marketing skill. Again, I think it’s a self-concept issue. If you don’t see yourself as someone who leads groups, you will never do the work to go create them.

Another way that it shows up is when I have clients who are full, but they want to keep selling. Maybe they’re in my revenue challenge or they want to hit their 100K goal, but their practice is full. And a coach who’s in high demand, who has the self-concept of being in high demand, that coach would pre-sell those spots. They wouldn’t start a waitlist. I don’t believe in waitlists where you just have people sign up for interest for one-on-one coaching.

Maybe for programs and groups, I do that to segment my list and so I can send people directly the offerings that they want to hear about. So, for example, I have a 200K waitlist and the only reason I create that is just so that I know these people want to hear from me about 200K topics. Or I have a Two Million Dollar Group waitlist and I have that just so if someone wants to hear about million-dollar topics, they can hear about that from me. But not so that I can be like, “Oh, I have this many people on my waitlist. This means something about my ability to sell them.” It really doesn’t.

It actually means nothing about the future business. So, the only type of one-on-one waitlist that I would do is one that’s paid. I would either be taking deposits or I would charge in full. You pay for the spot. You have the consultation now. You pay for the spot now. It opens up in two months and we get started. And I have had coaches successfully do this, I have successfully done this.

In fact, I used to sell my 200K Masterminds six months in advance and sometimes even a year in advance from when it opened so this is possible. Lots of people are doing it, but you don’t do it if you don’t believe you’re the type of person whose clients, you have so much demand, you’re so desirable. People want you to have to offer so much that they would pay you months in advance for a spot.

Except, I actually remember this one time I had a consult, this was years ago, I had a consult with a therapist, and I wanted to work on something very specific from my past. And so, I sought out a therapist that one of my life coaches had actually sent me a referral. And I did this beautiful consult and then she was like, “Well, I don’t have a spot for around six months.” And then she said, “I’ll contact you again when I have a spot open.” Except, she never did, and it’s been years.

And every once in a while, I have a thought about it, I’m like, “She never followed up with me.” But what she could have done is say, “I have a spot, it’s coming open in six months. I do these calls frequently with people. So, the only way to actually get a spot is that you would need to go ahead and pay now and then in six months when the spot comes open, we start.” And I would have done that. Now, you might have the self-concept that your people would not do that, but it’s still a self-concept issue.

The way that you think about yourself as a business owner, the way you think about the clients you attract, the way that you think about the prices you command are all self-concept issues. Now, they show up in your marketing. They show up in your selling. They show up in your delivering, but they are actually self-concept issues.

Then another way that I see this happen is students will come into my 200K Mastermind, and they will learn through advanced marketing and advanced selling and advanced delivering and what I teach as the 200K simple offer. They will come in and they will learn how to get so many consults. I’m not making this up. This is true where they will have 50/60 consults on the books. So many that they’re booked out for months and months and months.

This isn’t always, but for people, there are some clients that come in and then getting consults is not their problem. They can get loads of high volume of consults. Their conversion rates are what their problem is. They will always tell me, “It’s too many consults.” And they want to go and sell directly to a sales page, but they don’t believe that they’re capable of doing that. They don’t think their people will buy directly from a sales page. They don’t think that they’re good enough to get sales from a sales page.

They don’t think they’re good enough in their marketing. They don’t think they’re good enough in their selling and they have this giant fear about making this jump. But again, it could be easy to think about it as a selling issue, a marketing issue, but really, it’s a self-concept issue that I could make sales without getting on a consult.

Another way that this shows up is not believing you can handle all of the business or the client load if you were to sign a bunch of clients. That’s probably the number one thing going to 100K or even going to 200K that holds people back is they don’t think that they could handle a client load. So, they have circumstances in their life now that kind of take them out of the game. And they think that those circumstances will have to be cleaned up or cleared away before they could ever have a bunch more clients.

For example, one that I have struggled with, but I’ve really overcome this year, is my toddler’s always getting sick. And I’m like, “Oh my gosh, if I had bigger and bigger audiences and he’s always getting sick and then I’m always getting sick because he’s getting sick, he’s a petri dish of germs right now.” That was a fear of, oh, my gosh, what if I bring in all these clients and then I can’t serve them? But the difference is, I noticed a year ago or some time ago, that was part of my self-concept that needed to be worked on.

I saw it as a self-concept problem and not a circumstantial issue in the way. Being ready for a large volume of clients, being ready for a group, being ready to have tons and tons of consults, being ready to serve a bunch of people all at once, that is a self-concept issue. Growing your capacity to take on more clients inside of yourself to believe that you could serve that many clients, that you have enough energy to have that many clients, that you would get all those clients’ results, that you could manage it all. That you would be responsible, that you would show up for the calls, that your people would get what they came for.

There are so many versions of that where people just tell me, “I don’t think I can handle it. I don’t think I could take on this many people. I don’t think I could handle a full client load right now.” I can’t tell you because right now I have four groups running and I have hundreds of people, if not thousands of people in those groups. I have 6,000 in one of them and then a couple hundred in the other ones.

And I hear all of the time, the fear of not being able to handle the success in some way, shape or form, “I can’t handle the success. I won’t be able to handle it. I don’t see myself as someone who manages that many clients.” But you have to change that, that has nothing to do with your ability to market, it has nothing to do with your ability to sell. And it really doesn’t even have anything to do with your ability to deliver. It has to do with the way that you view yourself.

Other ways that it shows up that are really sneaky is, if you hit a snag in your business around $100,000 and your expenses are more than you maybe anticipated, you have an unexpected thing come up. Maybe you hit a bump, and you go back in revenue or if you have a family crisis. I will see people revert back to their most concrete self-concept.

So, let’s just say there’s a crisis in the family and their most used self-concept is that they’re a stay-at-home mom. Then they’ll just leave their business in the lurch. They’ll disappear for six months, even if it’s a $100,000 business, even if it’s a $60,000 business, they’ll disappear. And they’ll be like, “I had to put my business on pause for a minute because there was a crisis.”

And I always ask my clients this and not from a totally loving, compassionate, deeply empathetic place where I get how life can be, I’ve been through so many life things on my own in my journey. I’ve been in business almost a decade now but the one thing I always ask them is, “What would you do if you were running a $10 million company that you built from scratch? What would you do if you were running a $1 million company that you built from scratch and the same thing happened?”

Let’s say you’d been in the business for a decade, and you’d been running this business, you likely wouldn’t just pause it, close it down, run away from it, come back when it’s convenient. We do that and it’s not even a hobbyist mentality. It’s literally just when we see ourselves as more of the person we used to be instead of the person who is a business owner right now, who owns a business and runs a business.

What I can tell you is all of the obstacles, circumstances, friction, hard things that have happened in the decade of my business. Because I built my business quickly and got it off the ground quickly and got it to be a business that other people relied on pretty quickly, I solidified my self-concept very quickly that this is what I do. And I run a company where people are waiting for me and they’re expecting me, and they use me to help grow their business so I would never just abandon it because life got hard.

I would never say, “I’m going to put it on pause because life has gotten hard.” I wouldn’t disappear from it because there’s always things. I have a podcast every week called the Make Money as a Life Coach podcast. And every week, if it’s not up at a certain time, people are like, “Wait, where is the podcast? I’ve been waiting on it. It didn’t show up at 6:00am on the dot.” Or we send an email out every week or I have clients, I have 6,000 clients that I’d led a call today where I know people are there. They’re waiting on me.

Or if it’s not disappear completely, if there’s a financial hardship, it could be that at 100K or sometimes even 200K or even way before that, I’ll see coaches go back to work. They’ll think the solution, if my business is having a financial struggle, then the answer is to go create income from the last place that maybe I felt safe and steady in creating it. So, my past job or a job in general, instead of solving the income issue through the business.

Because in order to solve the income issues through the business, you have to see yourself as someone who runs a business, who is a business owner, who is a CEO first and foremost in charge of the company. And that all solutions, when you’re thinking about a CEO, they’re all running it through, how do we get the business making money, not what are other side gigs that we can do. So, this is again a self-concept issue.

And then a couple of others that I see come up a lot are just general, I’m a hot mess. It’s hard for me or anything that goes along with, I’m not… or I can’t. So, I’m not this type of person or I could never do this type of thing. These are all self-concept issues that you can try to do a bunch of strategies to make up for it and to not have to change your self-concept, but really, the work is changing the self-concept. So, then you might be thinking, well, how do I do that? If these are the things that are happening, how do I do that?

And I want to offer, I want to recommend to you a couple of things. So, the first thing is, this is one of the most powerful things for me and I’m going to come back to the story that I told you I would tell you about going from 150 to 325 in a one-month period. I’m going to tell you how I did that, circumstantially how I did that. But the big thing is, you have to start thinking further ahead. I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

One of the courses that I teach in my 200K Mastermind is called the three-year plan. And in that three-year plan, one of the big things that we do is focus really far out to what you want to achieve at the end of three years. And then who do you need to become today to get started on that work? So, if you know you want to go to group, 12 months from now, you have to start becoming the person today that can lead a group. And you have to find all of the thoughts inside of you, all of the thoughts that you would need to be able to do that.

If you’re halfway full in your practice, you want to go all the way out way beyond you’re full and go to, I’m already the person that’s made the 200K and I’ve already launched the group and I’ve done all these things. What am I thinking about myself? And how can I start thinking those things today so that I can get this group filled? And also, I can start growing my self-concept about the next thing that I’m going to do. Or if I know I’m going to want to raise my prices, I always tell people, “You have to challenge your self-concept six to twelve months out from when you actually need the self-concept.”

So, if you’re going to want to raise your prices six months from now, twelve months from now, you have to start thinking about that jump right now. You have to start integrating that into who you are in your belief system now because it can take that long. I remember I raised my prices once from 10K to 25K and it took me four months to become that person that felt like that was a no-brainer and it was a hell yes and I’m totally excited to do it.

And I remember coaching in a different program, and someone said, “It took you four months to do that?” It was so outrageous. They couldn’t believe that I would spend four months working on my self-concept on a price increase. But I jumped from my launches from 300,000 to 750,000 in four months. I think it was worth it. So, what I did when I went from 100K to 325,000, so I had a full coaching practice of one-on-one clients. And when I went to my first 150,000, the way that actually happened is, I signed 16 clients back-to-back in an eight-week period.

So, I went from 25K to 150K in an eight-week period. It was a very small time, and it wasn’t cash in hand. I had receivables. So, it was a rolling 150K, around $10,000/12,000 a month or something like that on payment plans. And then all of those 12-month contracts came up and I did general life coaching at the time. So, all of my clients were coaching with me on every area of their life. And when I looked at, okay, my contracts are coming up and everybody’s up for renewal or I’m getting a whole bunch of new clients, there’s two things I did.

Number one, I had kept selling the whole time because my self-concept, my vision for where I was going, which was much bigger than just I’m going to keep coaching these same 20 people the whole time. So that was one thing is, I was already, I’d been selling the whole time. I felt I had created an audience in that time, the year that I had delivered to people. I didn’t just disappear from my audience. I’d been nurturing. What had happened is, any time anyone quit from my 12-month package, I had someone else to fill their spot within a day or two.

As I thought about, okay, people are coming up for renewal and I’m going to be potentially coaching these people for another year. So, if I look at three years from now, I look at next year, what do I want to be getting paid? What do I want to be charging? What’s the value that I feel my work has now gotten to? When I first signed all those people, I had only coached five or six people. Now I coached 30 or 40 people. So, I literally looked at, what do I want to be charging a year from now?

And when I looked at what I wanted to be charging a year from now, when I thought, okay, a year from now, I want to be charging 10K. I was charging 5K, knowing that I had renewals coming up in the next few months. I said, “I’d better start working on becoming the 10K coach now.” And I’ll give you an example of what that can look like. But one of the things that I did is, I started thinking about if I had charged these clients $10,000, what would I be doing differently? How would I be showing up to them? How would I be showing up in my own business? What would be the commitment level?

What would be the energy level? What would be the way that I spoke to myself? What would be the way that I started the calls? How would I be on the calls? How would I end the calls? What would I be doing in between the calls? I just always thought about, if they were paying me double what they paid me, how would I be showing up? What would I be doing? What would I be bringing to the table? How would I be speaking in the world? How would I be handling obstacles? How would I be overcoming objections?

And then I did that for long enough and showed up that way that by the time my renewals did come up, it felt like it’s either 10K or I’m willing to let them walk. I’m willing to lose a sale because I wanted this person, I love being this person. I’ve become this person. And so now it’s the only price I could possibly charge is this price.

The same thing when I went from 10K to 25K. I remember this was for a mastermind and I had the same clients renewing over and over. And I thought about, I want to be the person that who I am is someone who charges $25,000 so much so that I’m willing to let all of my clients not renew or have four people instead of 20 people because this is the price I want to be at. And I want to feel good about and I want to command, this is where I’m going. I want to get to the place where I have no regrets. There’s no other option on the table, it’s just who I am.

And so, I thought of that, four months ahead. I remember I had sold a mastermind for 10K, and I knew I was going to charge 25,000 almost right after I made the decision. So, I spent the entire round saying, “How would I have delivered this if they had paid $25,000? What would be different about my delivery if they had paid $25,000?” And then I started thinking about, I’m selling this next round at $25,000. And I started building up my belief system and my self-concepts. And so, by the time I went to sell it, it was a no brainer.

And so, at that point, I went from my groups bringing in $300,000 over revenue to $750,000 of revenue in a six-month period. And the time that I jumped from $150,000 to $325,000, I doubled my prices. And I also had gotten so good at coaching, challenging myself to be the 10K coach that I didn’t need an hour anymore to coach my clients. I only needed half an hour. We were getting wrapped up within a half an hour and they’re like, “Well, what do we do now? I’m excited to just go out and apply this.”

So, then it became a no-brainer that I was charging $10,000 and the calls were going from 60 minutes to 30 minutes because that’s all I needed. And almost all of my clients renewed at that price because they had been getting the value for so long. They had been getting the value for months and months and months and it not just made sense to me, it made sense to them. Now, that doesn’t always happen. I was also prepared to go out and sell it to new people.

But the time that I spent on my self-concept, that wasn’t me going out and learning Facebook ads or going out and mastering some strategy. It was all the inner work of believing myself to be that person so much so that not only did I take it seriously, but other people took it seriously as well. And so, in one month, I went from making $150,000 a year to $325,000, one month. In fact, I think I had half my consults becoming available in that month and half the next month, but I just talked to all of them.

And I was like, “Listen, I’m going to have these spots coming up. I have people that are doing consults with me and are looking to work with me. So, I know that you have a month before renewal, but I’m going to need to have that conversation now because I want to save the spot for you. I want to make sure you have the spot if you want it. But if not, I’m going to have to give it up.” And they were like, “Oh my God, don’t give up my spot. I definitely want it.”

But because I had been giving them the value of a $10,000 coach in the months leading up to it, so it made sense to them, it made sense to me. And then it just happened really effortlessly, it felt like the simplest jump I’ve ever made ever in my entire business. But I see people make this so complicated because they tell themselves, I could never have people paying me ahead of time or this many months ahead of time. My people won’t do that. I can’t sell straight to a sales page. I can’t fill a group on the first one. It’s all going to be hard. I’m not ready.

I can’t close at a higher rate than I’ve closed before so I’m going to need all these consults because most of them are going to say no. Those types of things, those are self-concept issues. So, you want to look further ahead. You want to challenge your self-concept six to twelve months out. And ultimately, you want to always be working to see yourself a lot bigger than you are and committing to that person in everything you do and how you show up right now. That is how you do it. Make a simple, simple shift, whether it’s getting over the hump of 100K or getting past 100K and going to 200K or 300K, that’s how you do it.

Alright, I am so happy to have you all on. And if you’re interested in doing this work with me, if you’re interested in learning how to make that first 100K or 200K with me or you want to get past the 100K hump and go to the $200,000 or $300,000. We are currently in an opening for my 200K Mastermind, but this is the work. Yes, there’s a lot of sales techniques that we can do and many of you probably know me as a sales coach and I love selling. I love my advanced selling concepts that I teach in this mastermind.

I love my advanced marketing techniques. I think I think about marketing in a way that nobody else thinks about and in a way that’s super effective, especially if you have a small network and a really small audience. That has never held me back from making lots and lots of money, but the self-concept is a big piece of it. If you’re ready and you want to be making 200K or you want to have a different level of a 200K business. For some of you that are already at 200K, you just want to have a better 200K business, a calmer, more sustainable 200K business. There’s no better room to be in. This is where my expertise is at, this is where it’s at.

I’ve coached hundreds and hundreds of coaches through this process, and I’ve got you. Alright, thanks so much for joining the live and I will talk to you all soon. Bye.

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 www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.