#324: Self Discipline vs Desire

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.

Hi coaches, welcome to episode 324. Today we’re going to talk about self-discipline versus desire.

But first, I want to make an announcement, on the podcast. You may have heard already because I posted on social media many days ago, but I, my husband and I are expecting our second baby, a little baby girl at the end of the summer.

We are so, so excited. We tried to grow our family for almost a year and I really just know with all of my heart that I needed to make all the changes in my business that I made and get my business to a place where it really felt supportive of me and how I want to create and deliver value and the new priorities I have as a mom and the desire to expand my family and that I needed to just get my mojo back. And as soon as I did, like the moment I did, we got pregnant, which is so, so exciting.

And I’m through the first trimester, which is really great, into my second. I was so sick, just like I was with Jackson. But everyone’s been asking me this, and are you as sick as when you had Jackson? And I had hyperemesis with Jackson, so I was really, really sick the whole pregnancy. I don’t feel that way now. I do think this one is getting better. I feel better already in my second trimester. I’m not as sick when we drive in the car, and I still get car sick, but I’m not as sick. I just feel like everything was just way extra with Jackson.

My husband, however, he thinks I was sicker, at least in my first trimester that I was sicker with baby girl, but I don’t think so. But it’s hard to tell because I feel mentally stronger and I just want to celebrate that here on the podcast. I know so many of you have been listening along and you’ve seen and been a part of my journey, and you’ve probably seen that too.

I had a few hard years in my business and the purpose of those years was to make me who I am today and I am just so much stronger. so much calmer, so much happier, so much more wise, so much more at peace in myself and in my business and just like the best creative flow. So I am just deciding, I already had decided this was my celebration year. I’ve been in business 10 years now, but this now feels like a whole nother level to my celebration year and I am just deciding to live in joy and soak it all up and I’m just feeling really good.

So, that is what’s happening with me. We’re having a baby girl. We’re so excited. Jackson is so excited. I knew it was a baby girl. I do have to tell this really quick. I’m very proud of myself. I knew Jackson was a boy the moment I got pregnant. Like, almost right away, I just felt he was a boy, and then that feeling never left me.

And I remember at our gender reveal, I told my husband, like, I’m gonna be in trouble because it’s not that I want a boy more than a girl, but I just have felt like it’s a boy for so long that I might experience loss if it’s not. And then it was, and then when my husband and I were trying, I told him before we even conceived, I am certain a girl wants to come. And I told him the exact month we conceived, the exact week we conceived, I said, she wants to come now.

She’s coming, she wants to come now. It’s happening, like she’s coming. And she did, so crazy. Like this mama intuition that comes through me with my babies. So I feel really excited. I feel like I’ve known her since before she even got here. And then Jackson also knew, every time we would ask him, which, you know, I don’t know how much he knows of what’s going on and how much he understands. But every time I would ask him, you know, we got our sonogram and we got like a 4D image the very first time we went, which was so exciting, at week – I think I was at week 11.

And so I would show him the photo and be like, baby, and point to my belly. And so he’s kissed my belly and held my belly and said, baby, baby. And I asked him, you know, do you think baby is a girl or a boy? And every time he said girl. And then I would say, are you going to have a brother or a sister? What do you think? And every time he would say sister. So I would test him with both ways. And every time he just – the whole time he also knew that she was a girl, which feels really wild. I don’t know. Maybe they knew each other in another lifetime. Just feels really exciting. Okay. So that is my update. I’m very excited. Thank you all for being a part of my celebration.

So I want to talk about self-discipline and desire, because I am coming… By the time you hear this, I think we will have already delivered the live portion of Alive, my entrepreneur series course. And I’ve done a lot of coaching in there on the page. I’ve done a lot of talking people through the process of finding and coming into aliveness.

And someone asked me on the page about… I had given the very first call of Alive, I had given them five or six definitions of things that I think are really important to contemplate and explore what you believe are the definitions of these things, in order to, like, depending on your definition, it can create more aliveness or not.

And so one of the girls asked after this exercise, tell me what your definition of, like, tell me what you think, what your thoughts are about self-discipline and what’s your definition and that sort of question. And it was one that kind of stumped me because it didn’t immediately feel like something that I engage with, yet I know myself to be a disciplined person. So I started really thinking about that and immediately every time I think about how something applies to me, I want to look at the original definition and compare it to maybe the way I think about it or how I experience it.

So I looked up self-discipline and being disciplined. Those two things. And so self-discipline, the Googles say that it’s, “the ability to control one’s feelings and overcome one’s weaknesses, the ability to pursue what one thinks is right despite temptations to abandon it.” And then being disciplined means “behaving in a controlled way or following rules and orders.” It can mean being trained mentally or physically to follow these rules and these orders.

And when I read them, the answer felt so clear to me why I didn’t have an immediate answer. And it’s because these definitions don’t resonate for me. And maybe they don’t for you either. And I was thinking about why. And mainly, I believe that these definitions and what’s happening within these definitions, it’s relying on willpower, right? Control, rules. I think to have a lot of like to follow control, to follow rules, there is a lot of willpower that a lot of people have to exert in order to do that. Not everyone. There are a lot of things that I do, rules that I follow. There’s actually a lot of like, they’re not even really rules, but like frameworks that I teach my students and I also have really good reasons for them.

So I do think the rules that we follow, it’s because we believe we have really good reasons for them, right? If we don’t want our kids running in the street and we tell them no and that’s a rule, our really good reason is they could get hit by a car, right? And so the rules that are easy to follow, we do because we have a good reason behind it.

And so I was thinking about that too and that led me down another rabbit hole to really explore this idea that if you have the right aligned thoughts fueling you, you don’t need this. You don’t need control. You don’t need rules. You don’t need order. You don’t need to be able to overcome yourself and follow a path despite temptations to abandon it if you have a really strong reason to follow it, if you love your reasons.

This is why I teach the way I teach. I think you can’t tell someone, like, you should just follow and sell one simple offer if they don’t understand why. I think it’s hard to explain to someone and just have someone follow a rule of start with one-on-one coaching, then go to group, then go to a program or a membership or, you know, a higher level like one-to-many course if you don’t know the why. Or to explain to someone what they should do when they’re ready for niching and how to niche, right, if they don’t understand the thoughts behind it.

So everything I teach that has a protocol or a quote-unquote “rule” or a framework with it has an explanation as to why, because I think it’s easier for the brain to adapt. And when your brain understands, it doesn’t even really need the rule, it just does the thing because it seems like the next logical thing to make sense, or the desire follows it.

And so I’ve been thinking about this a lot. If you have the right explanation, if you love the reasons, if you have aligned thoughts fueling you, then you just don’t really ever have to rely on self-discipline.

My husband always tells me how blown away he is at my work ethic. He says this often. He’s like, it just blows me away. No one tells you that you have to do this work and that you have to work this hard, but you just do. 

Sometimes I’ll be in my office working on a weekend and he’s like, no one told you to do that. You just decided to? And there are many days where I don’t want to do something and I do, right? There’s not everything in my business that is just always rainbows and daisies and butterflies. A and I do them. But I’m not using self-discipline. I’m not telling myself you have to do this. This is the rule. This is the order. You’ve got to do this despite wanting to do something else. It’s just not quite the conversation that I have with myself.

Instead of using discipline, I use desire. So instead of telling myself I have to, I tell myself I want to, and why. And the why part I think is the most important part because sometimes you don’t actually think you want to do it. But if you explore why would I want to do this thing that I don’t really want to do right now in this given moment, that would require self-discipline, require me to overcome temptations to abandon it, why would I not want to do that? It’s a really powerful question. So I want to do this and here’s why, and then I explore that.

Instead of saying “I have to,” I say “I get to.” That for me also conjures up gratitude, personal power, choice. I learned that when I was starting my business and I worked full time until I made $100,000. I balanced full-time work, travel, 100% travel all the time. I was never working at home. And so being on the road and then also building my business.

And every day before I would walk in the doors of Walmart, I would tell myself I choose to walk into Walmart today. I choose to come to work. Why? Because I want to have money that pays my bills. I don’t want to require my business to do that until it’s at 100K. I want to be able to invest in my business. I don’t want to just be able to pay my bills. I want to be able to invest because I know the more money I invest, like I had heard early on that your first $100K, you should try to invest all of that back into your brain and your skill sets and your marketing for your business. So if you can make $100K and then invest that $100K, the faster you could do that, the more successful you will be.

And I bought into that. I agree with that. I still agree with that. So I would tell myself, I choose this. I’m choosing this job that supports my business and supports me while I become a 100K earner and then a 200K earner and then beyond. I’m choosing this every day.

I’m so grateful for this. I’m grateful that I have a flexible job. I’m grateful that I don’t have a boss looking at me every second. I’m grateful I can listen to Tony Robbins videos in between shows. I’m grateful that I can take coaching calls in my car in between shows. I’m grateful I can do these things. Whatever it was. This is my choice, this is my gratitude, this is my personal power here. That kept me out of having to just do it, just get it done, right? That’s the willpower. I have to just do what I’ve said I’m going to do.

Sometimes if you have to get there, I don’t think it’s a problem. I don’t think that, oh, if you have to use willpower, you shouldn’t. I just think there is a more, I want to say feminine, but it feels masculine to me to like push and do, no matter what. But it feels just more like there’s a greater flow, a greater congruence of tapping into desire instead.

I think that you could equally do either in any given moment. In any given moment, you could say I’m doing this because I said I’m going to, despite temptations to abandon it. I’m doing it no matter what. I’m following the rules and the order. I’m behaving in a controlled way because I just decided ahead of time and that’s what I do. Or you could say I decided this ahead of time and here’s why I wanted to do it then and here’s why I want to do it now even if it doesn’t feel like that in this moment.

So here’s what I really mean by using desire, because inherently I do think as you hear me say this it could seem if you don’t want to do something that desire is lacking, right? Obviously if it were there you would just do it, right? So wait, I’m supposed to desire to do something that I don’t desire to do like I can feel that that could be like a hang up for you. And so here’s what I want to say. I don’t think it’s that you actually don’t want to do the things that self-discipline would be required in order to do, if you need it. I just think that desire can get misplaced in our brain. It can get focused wrong.

So our brain tells us it desires some other thing instead of the thing that we wanted to do. So maybe it’s watching Netflix, running an errand, working on something more fun that requires less brain power than maybe writing a sales sequence or a funnel. Maybe it wants to scroll on your phone because that feels like it would take less energy than doing the thing that you had wanted to do or planned to do. Or maybe it wants to nap because it tells you you’re tired and so your desire is more now to nap than to do the work that you wanted to do.

This recently happened to me, actually. I will tell you. The week that I’m recording this, I was scheduled to coach in 2K and Alive and I was coaching in 2K first, and then Alive. And that night, my son woke up in the middle of the night and wanted me. And then he woke up at 4 a.m. and wanted me. And he ended up sleeping in our bed from like 4 to 6-ish. And when he sleeps in our bed, I get no sleep because he’s just like laying on me, kicking me, like doing all the things if you’ve ever had a toddler in your bed.

And so I got no sleep and I was so exhausted. And now, because I’m pregnant, when I get really tired, the nausea gets worse. And so I was so nauseous, I almost couldn’t sit up straight. And my body was like, go take a nap. Get someone to coach for you in 2K, take a nap, be ready for a live. And I almost did that. I almost followed that desire because my body was like asking for it. I was so tired. It was like, I felt like it was hard to think straight. I did my team meeting and I was like, oh my God, I look horrible, like I’m so tired.

And then I told myself, you have the choice, right? Personal power, you have the choice. You could have someone do this call. It would be very easy. But then I remembered why I wanted to do the call. I wanted to do that call. I’m going on vacation the next week, and so I’ll be gone that week, and I didn’t want to be gone two weeks in a row. I wanted to be there for my people. I wanted to coach my people. I wanted them to have the opportunity to be in 2K with me and then Alive with me. I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it for so many reasons, and that pulled me through.

That was the exciting thing is I actually want to do this more than I want to actually nap. Even though napping would feel physically better in the moment and maybe even mentally better in the moment, I wanted to do this call, I do want to do this call. And so I’m going to focus there, right? It’s just misplaced focus. I’m going to focus on the want that I did have that I do currently still have.

Sometimes we want to just get, we think we want to just go grab a coffee or make another coffee real quick. It’s not really what we want to do. What we really want to do is the thing that we decided to do ahead of time. It might feel good to take a walk, especially if the day is sunny and it’s beautiful, and the desire might creep up to want to take a walk, but you have to look at what else did I desire to do that day? If it was raining, what would I have desired to do? What was I excited about before something else distracted me, another desire distracted me?

And one of the things that I used to think about is this idea of immediate desire versus long-term desire. So, there’s the immediate desire to go take a walk, it’s beautiful outside, I want to feel the sunshine on my face, and then there’s the long-term desire of I had planned to record this module for this thing, as an example. But here’s what I’ve realized is that when I plan to do something and my brain tells me it doesn’t want to do that thing. Like if it’s this specific, it doesn’t want to do that thing or this other thing would be better and it offers up the other thing, what’s actually happening is most of the time, it’s a false desire.

And I use the example of taking a walk in the sunshine and getting sun on your face because we would all agree like that’s always a great desire. But in that moment, it’s a false desire if you hadn’t planned to do it and you can’t do it without the sacrifice of, you didn’t get something else done that you were wanting to do.

And here’s why I call it a false desire because when I don’t get what I planned done, I don’t feel good. Like, if I can’t do both and I don’t do the thing that I was excited to do originally or wanted to do and had really good reasons to do, then I don’t feel good. I don’t go to bed feeling the feelings I want to feel about myself at the end of a work day, a planned work day.

This is also how I have work-life balance. I plan time to be off and I plan time to work and I take those very seriously. I create desire for being off and desire for working. And I have amazing reasons for I want to work the amount of work that I put on my calendar.

I also know the person who I want to be isn’t someone who doesn’t do what she wants to do or says she’s going to do. Like at the end of the day, I want to be someone who is self-disciplined. I don’t want to have to use discipline, but I do want to be someone who does what she says she’s going to do because I love that person for myself. I love being the dependable person who’s going to do what she says she’s going to do, who delivers everything she promises, who shows up to dinner because we had dinner plans, who doesn’t cancel the trip, who does the thing. I love being that person. I love being reliable to myself. And then that trickles into all of my relationships because I’m also reliable in all of my relationships.

But the caveat is I see anything that goes on my calendar, like anything I put on my calendar, it has to be a want because I’m the boss. It’s not useful to call anything a need or a have to. So another example of this is, I want to do a team meeting every Monday morning. We do one every Monday morning. And I used to not do them. My COO used to do them. I never used to go to them. But as I took over operations and management and started stewarding the business more and being more involved, I wanted to be there on the team meetings on Monday.I don’t have to be. I have a fractional COO that could run it. I want to be there.

But every Monday, my brain tells me that I don’t want to. But I do. I don’t love, inherently love meetings. This is something I actually have to coach myself around. I’m not a meeting person. I don’t love them. I think they could easily be a waste of time. It feels forced to ask everybody how their weekends were. It feels forced to, you know, what’s the word of the day or the question? Like anything that people do on meetings to kind of like create morale feels very forced to me. I’m a very like A to B person. What are you working on this week? Here’s what I’m doing this week. Let’s go get to work because I’m so excited about the work. And the meeting always feels like the thing in front of the work and I just want to get to the work.

But why do I want to be on the team meeting then, right? If I entertain, I just want to get to the work and I don’t really want to be on the meeting and I don’t like meetings and then I’m like that could be a way that I focus my brain. But why do I want to be there in the first place? This is such a useful exercise to do for yourself. When you tell yourself I don’t want to go market, I don’t want to be on social media, I don’t want to do this thing, but why do you even consider it? Have you explored the desire behind that?

So the desire behind why I would want to be on the team meeting when I don’t really have to, I wouldn’t have to be, is I want to be connected with my team. I want to know what’s going on day to day and week to week. I want to make myself available for questions and discussions because I know that helps my team serve my people better, and I want them to be served.

I do think it helps morale for people to have access to me as the COO, or well, the CEO, but also part COO. I think it does. I think it helps morale for them to have access to me and be able to ask questions instead of just being on Slack all the time. I think it does create a working team environment and a job that can be really isolated. I do think it creates connection, not just for me, but for them to be connected to me.

And I believe that we many times catch things in conversations that maybe we wouldn’t on Slack when we’re planning things, and sometimes it’s just easier to hear things communicated. I have a lot of reasons. My brain doesn’t want to focus on those on Monday morning when it wants to get to the work and it’s excited about the work, and that feels more fun than getting on a meeting and talking about problems that we have to solve or the technical things or the operations side of things. And I remind myself all the reasons I want to be there. So when my brain offers me that I don’t want to do it, I tell it why I do. I take ownership of that. I direct my brain.

I think I’ve been coaching so many of you in all of my programs, but really a lot in 2K, this has come up a lot, is you’re just not directing your brain enough. It’s like, oh, this is what my brain offers me and then I just follow it. Whatever it tells me to do, I do. Whatever it tells me I believe. Whatever feeling comes in my body, I just decide is the experience of the truth. I feel this feeling and it’s because I’m experiencing this truth that is this thought that I’m having versus my brain is offering me a thought and it doesn’t feel good and I can choose otherwise. I could tell it what to do and you do have to direct it when it comes to desire, or you’ll have to use self-discipline.

But using desire is just so much more fun. There’s so much less friction. There’s so much, flow is the only word I can think of, but it’s like, right? If you think about being in the current, I’ve talked about that a lot on these podcasts and on my social media, is I wanna be in the current. I wanna be in the inspiration where everything is clicking, everything’s just working, you feel on fire.

So if you think about it, you’ve gotta be making decisions and choosing thoughts that bring you and allow you to be flowing in the current versus working up against it. And to me, self-discipline feels a little bit like working up against the current. It’s a lot of like doing no matter what. And I think that sometimes you might need to use that if you can’t find the desire, but I wouldn’t want to be using that all the time. I think that’s what creates burnout. One of the things. It’s like ignoring yourself, ignoring the desires, ignoring what’s not aligned and just do, do, do.

And this isn’t just for the everyday things. You can use it for the minute things, but also I tie my desires a lot to the infinite game. Like I bring up every day, my desires for my long-term goals, the things I want to accomplish, not just in a year, but my life. But I’ll think about my whole, I think about my entire year and what I wanna accomplish every single day. There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not thinking about all the things I wanna do in a year and thinking about my year as a whole.

And I think about not just like what I wanna accomplish but what it means for my people, for me, for all of us. I bring up strong desire every day for my purpose and my mission. I’m thinking about it when I put my makeup on, when I do my hair, thinking about it when I eat breakfast, whatever activity I do alone, because my husband and my son usually, they get up so much earlier, so they’re usually done with breakfast by the time that I eat mine. It’s the only meal we typically don’t eat together together.

But I bring up a strong desire in all of those times. If I’m by myself, I’m bringing up desire for my purpose and my mission. And when I’m connected to that desire, I feel purposeful in everything I do. Everything feels important. I have desire for all of it.

When I think of my full year plan, last year I talked about this, that I had curated a path that I wanted to take everyone on to get them in the current and help keep them in the current. So every single thing I did felt purposeful, and my years don’t just start and end. To me, everything’s just on this infinite timeline. So I’m still doing that.

Every single thing I do is meant for my students to partake in so that they can get further ahead, get into the current, stay in the current, and then experience those exponential results of being in there more than they’re not. Being in high-value cycles much longer than low-value cycles.

Every single thing I have planned, every entrepreneur series is highly purposeful. The way I have them laid out is purposeful. They can be done, just you do the one that you feel called to, but they’re also a collection of coaching and thoughts and experiences that if you do them all, they add up over time to be something that is extraordinarily valuable and quantum leaps you into a whole new person a whole new universe of results. It’s all very purposeful.

So there’s not one thing that I feel like, oh, we could just not do this because I’d rather do this other thing. Like, I’m not even traveling as much as I normally do this year. Part of that is because I’m pregnant, but part of it is I just have too many things I want to do in my business.

I’m too lit up from the desire that I have to help push my clients along in this current and to keep them engaged and activated and alive and to be serving their people at the absolute highest, and bringing in the best clients, and really enjoying what they do, and loving what they do, and being at the top of their game, and getting the most out of all of their results, getting the most out of all of their investments.

And there’s just so many things that I want for my people that when I think of that, I’m like, I can’t afford to not do this thing I had scheduled today. Otherwise, I miss out on these other long-term desires that I have.

Now there are a few additional things that I told my client that I want to tell you as well that make it easier for me to have these desires. Number one, I’m not coming from hustle towards my goals, right? That frantic energy of lack and insufficiency until I achieve something. I’m coming from sufficiency. When you have lack and hustle in marketing, it feels terrible to go out and market. You have to go out and do it because you need something from it, versus I am filled up and I am feeling so amazing that I want to go out and share it with the world. I want to go serve because I feel sufficient and so I’m so full that I’m overflowing and I want to go give that to other people.

That’s a very different feeling of marketing. So I’m not coming from hustle when I do things or that everything is urgent and important, and there are a million things that have to be done in order to achieve my highest purpose and mission. Like so many of my clients, coaches that come to me, if they are thinking about making 200K, like there are one billion things in the way. They’re like, oh, I’ve got to create this, and I’ve got to create this, and I’ve got to create this, and there’s like, the list is so long it feels overwhelming. And so they go into overwhelm instead of desire.

But I don’t operate from that place. There aren’t a million things that have to happen to serve my highest purpose and mission. I practice anti-hustle, but I also practice essentialism, choosing the most essential things that I want to focus on. I use constraint. I don’t have a million offers. I have more now with the Entrepreneur Series. It’s definitely pushing my capacity in a great way.

I’ve never had to expand it quite this much to offer all of these and to do them so well and offer so much value in each one of them, while also offering so much value in all of my core containers. But for a long time, for many years, for six years, I had just my two offers and then a third offer, but I was constrained.

So I didn’t have to add a million things. I operate on three essentials where I work on three things at a time per quarter, and I don’t stuff my to-do list full of things. I play a longer-term game, so it gives me more time. It slows me down. It allows me to have fun and be in the moment. I’m not rushing to get somewhere. And I stay active in the things I do, active with my mind and my heart. So I don’t just record a podcast because there’s a podcast due every single week. I am activated by what I want to share. I don’t just post to post. I post when I’m engaged and activated, and I desire to post.

I think we lose desire when we go on autopilot and then suddenly there are more active things in life when you’re on autopilot in your business that feel like a far better choice. They seem like a far better choice, right? If you’re in autopilot, being very passive in your business, then anything active in your life will feel like, why wouldn’t we go do this thing? It’s gonna make me feel more alive. And even in passive activities, like watching Netflix, sometimes a passive activity in your life still seems better than passively writing an email because you quote unquote “have to” or because you do it every week.

Y’all, this is our business. We have to be activated by it. We get to be activated by it. We want to be activated by it. It’s our business. We can’t show up like maybe you would at a regular job. I had to be very activated in my past job too because I was on 100% commission, which probably helped. I couldn’t be on autopilot and phone it in. But if I worked at a call center or a corporate job, I don’t know. I had other jobs that I probably could have phoned in.

So even if you have that experience of knowing what it’s like to be at a job and kind of like passively working at that job, for your business, you have to show up with all of your heart and soul. And if that is missing, that is what is worth working on. Getting to that place where you are all in in your heart and soul in your business. That’s what we’ve been working on in Alive, but there will be a lot of opportunities to engage.

Served was the same way. You don’t have to discipline yourself or be disciplined to show up to your dreams. Think about that. Why would you need to be self-disciplined to show up to your dreams? This is an honor, a privilege, a miracle, a gift, a desire, something that can give us purpose in life for the rest of our lives, a purpose that feels amazing, way better than in any distraction or buffering or alternative activity that you could be doing, no matter how amazing it is. Like this is the great work of your life. Let’s live into it.

All right, I hope that was really helpful to hear my definition of what could be more in the flow than utilizing the have-tos and the doing no matter what, in a really controlled way. I think you can access your desire. I think you can bring it up way more than maybe you are, and you’ll enjoy yourself so much more if you do. I’ll talk to you next week. Have a beautiful 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.