Ep #272: Selling Exercise 1: The Everyday Value of Life Coaching

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 272. Today, I’m going to start a series that’s not going to be consecutive. So it’s not going to be next week will be this episode. But I’ve decided throughout the year I want to give you guys some selling exercises. And some of them will be mindset focused and some of them might be doing focused, but things that I have found made me really good at selling early on in my business, but also make me really good at selling now.

And especially makes me really good at selling for my clients. One of the things that when we’re in 2K for 2K or 200K Mastermind or Two Million Dollar Group I’m always, if I’m directly coaching someone, they’ll tell me what their business is. And I’m always able in seconds to turn around and sell it better than they can. And the reason for this, I was thinking about what’s the reason.

And number one part of it is, I teach this a lot where once you understand how to sell and it becomes your language, you understand what you’re doing. When you learn how to bridge the gap which is what happens in 2K for 2K. And then when you take that to an advanced level and learn PSPR, you just can plug it in for literally anything. You just see it as that’s the way it breaks down, that I need to understand and be able to communicate where someone is now, where they want to be and the steps in between.

Or eventually I need to be able to communicate the problem in a very succinct way, the solution simply, a step by step process and then what the results will look like on the other side. So once you plug it into that process, it becomes very easy to do it with anything. But the other thing that I think the reason I’m so good at this is because I have had so many life coaching transformations in my life and not just with general life coaching. I have invested in so many different types of coaching for so many different types of things.

I invested in losing the last 10 pounds and figuring out why I could never lose just that last 10. I invested in a coach that helped me believe in my body and my body being on my side and having a healthy body and a pain free body. I have invested in relationship coaching. I have invested in just so many different types of coaching, business coaching. Pretty much I feel anything out there, money coaching, that you could possibly pay for in every area of your life I have actually done and I got results from.

So I have a very strong belief about the value of life coaching. But specifically I had a couple of things happened recently that I want to give you some examples of where I had these aha moments of, this is the power of life coaching. This right here, every day, just intangible thing or this everyday tiny moment, this right here I accredit this good moment to life coaching. And I’m always looking for those moments.

Every time it brings me back to my purpose. It brings me back and makes me connected to coaching. But today one of the things that happened and I’ll tell you what it was, but I really started thinking, how often are new coaches doing this? How often are you every day reaffirming the value of life coaching to you in your life and really looking for the little moments that it’s changed and then sharing with the world that? Because really that’s what it takes is, people seeing how it applies to your life and how it would apply to them on a consistent basis.

You become someone that deeply inspires them that they could have it, and then they go out and they want to do it. And if they decide to do it, they want to do it with you. Doesn’t matter, all the more successful coaches than you, that have the fancier marketing than you and the more experience than you, doesn’t matter. Whoever has inspired them is going to be the one that they want to do the work with.

So your selling exercise for this episode is really to sit down every single day. You can do it on paper or you can create just an active practice in your life of just doing this. This is just what you look for and what you do is all the different ways that your life is different and the everyday value that you receive from life coaching. I’m going give you some examples of that because I used everyday value very specifically.

In 2K for 2K, I refer to this a lot as selling intangibles which are kind of the things that are hard to explain that aren’t tangible. That can be hard and difficult to communicate to someone else if they haven’t experienced it. So, for example, it would be hard to explain the intangible value of becoming a parent and the value of a child in your life if you’ve never had a child.

My husband and I did not get the true value of being a parent until we were a parent and the joy that a child brings you and all of the things. The joy of being a parent. It’s very hard to explain what that will be like or what it would just in general be like to be a parent until you actually are one. And the same thing with falling in love. It’s hard to explain to someone what it’s like to fall in love until you’ve fallen in love.

And in the beginning, I think it can feel hard to explain to someone what it’s like to have a coaching transformation until they’ve had it. And so you want to just get really good at being able to explain that. So I’m going to give you some examples. I was at the toddler gym, it’s called My Gym. It’s a little toddler gym. We go, it’s a class of all kids that are about his age and there’s all these jungle gym type things and they have activities that they do and he basically just gets to run around and slide down slides and jump in ball pits and do crazy things.

And notoriously, there’s a couple of kids, to be fair, we go three times a week, so we see hundreds of kids. There are a couple that also do what Jackson does, but they have a circle time in the beginning, at the beginning of class and at the end of class and Jackson refuses to participate. He’s always jumping on the trampoline while everyone else is doing circle time. And I don’t make him because he screams so hard and cries if we try to get him to sit still, but it’s not enjoyable for the other parents.

So we just let him do whatever he wants and he sometimes watches from afar. And maybe one day he’ll decide to join people. So anyways, today they did two activities. So they did one that was they made this tent and then they just dropped a ton of these Mr. Potato Heads. And so they got to go in and play with the Mr. Potato Heads. And when it came to clean them up, Jackson didn’t want to let go of his. And he was the last one and we had to kind of pry it out of his hands a little bit.

And when I’ve gone by myself, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had to have other dads help me when they have swings because Jackson won’t get out of the swings. And he’ll wrap his legs under the swing so hard that I can’t get him out unless someone’s helping me pull on his legs. It’s a whole thing. It’s a scene. And at the end of the session they had these orange cones and they were putting the orange cones back in the circle, we had played with them.

And Jackson goes up to the middle of the circle and he puts his hand on the top of the cone so no one else can stack their cones and he’s trying to take all the cones. And the lead instructor at the My Gym said something along the lines of, “Jackson doesn’t like to let things go. He wants to hold onto things.” But just walking the line of throwing shade at my kid, just like, we love him. He’s amazing. But it was a theory subtle line of, you could tell maybe he was tired and there was just a twinge of that was a negative thing.

And I just had an instant moment where I was like, “Yeah, me too. I don’t like to let go of things either. I want to hold onto them.” And I had this thought, we just came back from a trip to Disney World, and this is almost every trip. My poor husband, bless his heart, every trip I try to convince him on the last day to rebook our flights and stay an extra day, essentially. This behavior is almost every trip we take from Italy to Miami to Disney World, every time I do this.

And many times I’m very, very serious and sometimes I win and sometimes I don’t. But this Disney trip I was really, really serious and I’ll tell you why in a second because this is the second part of the story. But I really was like, “Babe, we’ve got to say another day. We need one more day.” And I was like, “I’m having the time of my life. I want to be here. This is the best trip I’ve had in a long time”. And we did not. We both had things scheduled that he had to convince me and walk me down out of, but I had a hard time letting go.

And so I’m in this moment where this critique or criticism, that’s very subtle anyways, but has been offered about my son, that he doesn’t like to let things go, and he wants to hold onto things. First of all, he’s 21 months. He’s not even two. And I’m like, “Yeah, he doesn’t have the logic to understand letting things go, number one. But number two, I have the logic and it’s hard for me to let go too.” And then the rest of the toddler gym, I was like, “Thank God I have coaching.”

I read once that all of the things that you don’t like about yourself, you’ll see in your children and it’ll be the most frustrating thing. But I have spent in coaching so much time loving the pieces of me that maybe other people don’t love or that I might want to criticize. And being really intimate with my shame and negative emotion and places where I feel like I fall short, mistakes I make. I call it my humanness, really being there for all of me.

I don’t have my back just when I’m winning and doing things amazing and making lots of money and at my thinnest. I want to have my back always. And I had a childhood that was a perfect example of when your child triggers everything about you that you don’t like and then you take it out on them. And I have no thoughts about my parents right now and have really let that go.

But I’ve really seen the difference in my parenting with Jackson specifically in this space where things that I could see other parents being embarrassed about or even mad at their kid about or reprimand their children about. That would trigger them and bring up the shame and the resistance for them, which would create the reaction of an overreaction for their child that I experienced in my childhood. I’m seeing that generational thing be over.

And I’m seeing the level of compassion and care and patience I have for my child, the understanding I have for his brain, for his behavior, and how to address it. Some things now I’m like, “Guys, he doesn’t have the ability, he doesn’t have the logic to know to let something go.” It’s okay, we just redirect him and then he’s fine somewhere else. But I could see how just that moment could have gone a different way.

And I’ve seen this over and over and over where Jackson will do something that I know I struggle with or that I see him doing something that someone would say is not good behavior, whatever. That was the perfect example but there’s a bunch of little ones like that where I’m like, “Yeah, that’s hard for me too. I get it. I have compassion for it.” Instead of, you’re triggering me and I don’t want to see this part of me so I’m going to be mad at you for bringing it up.

To me, that right there, and for the moms and dads and parents that are listening that have had this similar experience because so many of you have told me that. If this isn’t your area where you’ve had the most transformation, that’s okay too. But if it is an area, you’ll really understand that. What is the value of breaking that generational pattern of the way you interact with children, breaking the generational pattern of resistance to your humanness or not liking all of yourself.

I really think that every dollar I’ve spent on life coaching came to this moment and was worth it for just this. If I never made money in my business, to be fair, I wouldn’t have been able to invest all the money I’ve invested in my business because at this point it’s been hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I wouldn’t have been able to invest that much in my brain if I also hadn’t made money along the way. Let’s just say the first couple of years of investing in just my own life coaching, every single dollar would have been worth it just for this.

My question for you is, are you selling the value in that way, that if you just learned in the moment where someone tells you your kid doesn’t want to let things go and likes to hold onto things? If you just learned from a $10,000 coaching package to be like, “Yeah, me neither, it sucks.” This is the other thing I was thinking. He hates hearing the word no. He’s not a tantrummy kid. We’ve only had a couple so far, knock on wood. But he’s actually a really good kid.

And typically if he’s upset, it’s for a reason. But he’s really starting to have a hard time with no. And he gets really upset and really mad and every time I’m like, “Dude, I get it.” We’re like, “You can’t throw that food.” And he’s like, waahhh. And I’m like, “I know, it sucks. I don’t like to be told what to do either.” I don’t like to be told what to do. I don’t like to be told no. I’m the worst. Even as an adult I do not always react well when someone tells me no. I’m that person that’s like, “But why? Let’s talk about it.”

I was always that child that investigated the reasons behind the no’s, so deeply that everyone would be exasperated at the end of the conversation. So I get it. Every time my son is upset about hearing no, I feel that. I’m like, “Yes, me too.” This is a human experience. We don’t like to hear no. the value of that, how many times, if I hadn’t had coaching would I have been so exasperated by him freaking out about no and wanting him to submit and just no and deal with no?

And I imagine as he gets older and he does have logic and reason and we can talk through emotions and we can talk through thought processes, how much value coaching is going to bring there. To be able to say, “Yes, I do understand what happens in your body when you feel like you’re being told no and you want to do something. I understand that emotion in your body.” I’m going to be able to talk to him about things like that. To me again, every dollar spent, worth just that.

So what are the everyday values that you are getting that you could literally, that is a perfect thing to explain to someone when they’re like, “Well, what am I going to get out of coaching?” Well, what would it be like if every time your child acted out, how, whatever you want to call it, and you were not triggered, but you had deep compassion, deep understanding. You used it as a moment to bond. You used it as a moment to feel closer, to understand your child deeper, to understand yourself deeper.

And you just created so much more love versus creating separation and upset and anger and resentment. And then trying to control and stamp down and all those things. And being able to walk through those specific things.

So another example, I’ll give you all. So we just got back from Disney. And I am going to tell you all, I’ll stay on at the end of this episode. So many of you have asked about sending my luggage and what that was like and then the Disney tours. Ao I’ll give you a brief explanation of that at the very end of this episode. But for the people who don’t want to hear it, they can just log off. But for those of you that want to hear it, stay to the end, I’ll talk about it.

But there was another huge moment where it felt like an everyday moment or an everyday thing inside a moment or a thing that just happens in life that I think I wouldn’t have handled well if I didn’t have coaching. So this is kind of a little bit about our trip to Disney but our first day at the parks, we spent a lot of money on a VIP tour guide. So you can pay for a Disney VIP tour guide. It’s extraordinarily expensive. And I had done it with my team in the past. It was the most incredible thing. You wait for no lines. Sometimes they have back door entrances, craziness, you just walk right on the ride.

And you can go to different parks, they can get you front row to the firework show, to the parade. They even have some pull at the restaurants actually, I will say. But it’s just Disney on steroids times 100. And we had so much fun, it felt like a drug. I had a hard time coming home from that trip. I was on such a high. It was so incredible. It was so much joy and so much fun and so action-packed in such a concentrated period. My brain, it literally was like, I haven’t done drugs, but I imagine it would be like if I had taken ecstasy. I was on such a high.

And so the second time we went to the parks, the first day we did Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios for Toy Story Land, we started there. So we did in one day, we did Hollywood Studios, then Magic Kingdom. We did 12 total rides. We did a lunch break, a full sit down dinner at the Beauty and the Beast restaurant, Be Our Guest. And we watched the parade and the firework show all in one day and shop.

While Jackson napped in his stroller, I shop all over Hollywood Studios, buying Jackson all the Toy Story fun stuff. We loved our tour guide. It was just the most amazing time of our entire lives. And what made it so much ecstasy is that we weren’t sure how Jackson was going to handle the rides, but he loved every ride. We took him on all of the ones he could go on, never was scared once. The ones that went fast or spun a lot, he would literally start signing and saying, “Mo, mo, mo.” That’s how he says it, it sounds like mo, but it’s more.

And so he’d be like, “Mo, mo.” And he would start crying. He just wanted to go back on them over and over and over. And then he would giggle and screech. And, oh, my God, watching your kid experience Disney when they’re not freaking out. Literally it was a drug for us. We were intoxicated by his reaction to the rides. And then we rode Tron and that was a whole intoxicating experience for me. I had the best time. I just wanted to get back on it over and over and over.

So we were supposed to do the Text Tour our second day at the park, which was a couple of days later for Epcot and Animal Kingdom. And the Text Tour was where the guy, it’s not a Disney person and it’s a lot cheaper. It’s $500 for a day, but it’s this Disney expert and he, I guess, has access to all these lightning passes. I don’t really know how it works, but he just signs you up for a bajillion rides and then sends you directions of exactly where to go in the park. And then you just scan your thing and go.

And so our friend had done it and so we were like, “Let’s do it.” But then we had had so much fun on day one that I decided to book a second day of the VIP, which was, again, extraordinarily expensive. But my husband and I had only originally booked one day because we weren’t sure how Jackson was going to do with the rides. But then now that we knew, we were like, “We want to do all of them that we can.” Maybe even three parks on the last day. And so we sign up, it’s non-refundable and it’s five figures.

It’s a lot of money, non-refundable, literally no matter what, I have now found out, which we knew that. We knew it was not refundable when we signed up. So the night before we go, my son starts having, I don’t even want to get too into the detail, but it turns out he was having intestinal spasms. But he was screeching in pain, throwing himself on the floor, arching his back.

We determined that it was likely gas and needing to go to the bathroom, but we didn’t really know what to do about it, and if it really was that. And after giving him Mylicon, stomach meds, he went to sleep. And it happened so late at night that we were like, “Okay, we’ll see how he feels in the morning.” We woke up in the middle of the night freaking out, and then we’re like, “Okay, we might have to cancel this, this sucks real bad.” But then he wakes up and he feels fine and he’s acting fine, totally a normal kid. And so we’re like, “Okay. we’re starting our day a little late, but we’re going.”

So we do the Text Tour for the first part of the day because you can only book the Disney tour people for 10 hours and we wanted to be there for 13. So we’re so crazy. And so then the tour guide picks us up, we head over to Epcot, we ride, I think, two rides, three rides. We’re on the ratatouille ride in Paris, which, by the way, is so much fun. That’s one of my favorite Disney movies. We would have had so much fun. My husband and I had a good time.

Jackson starts screaming on the ride and it’s this pain scream and he started saying this word that I’ve never even heard before. It was awful. We get off the ride and he’s throwing himself on the ground and we’re looking at this guide who does not know what to do. And we’re like, “What do we do?” We paid so much money for this day. It’s not refundable. We’d just started. We were literally two hours in and we’re like, “Our kid is in pain. And what if it’s not this? What if it’s not gas? What if it’s not constipation? What if it’s something else?”

And so we finally were like, “Okay, we’ve got to go to urgent care.” Was really lovely, they actually took us to urgent care from Disney. Because we were VIP, we had to leave out the side of the door right at Paris. He’s like, “Normally you wouldn’t even as a VIP person, have access to this, but because it seems like a medical emergency.” They had the car waiting for us. We just walked out of a side door and out of Paris and we’re in the car on the way to urgent care.

He drove us to urgent care, waited for us at urgent care, drove us to the pharmacy, drove us back to the hotel. And so we’re in the hotel room and we decide, we have the opportunity to maybe go back to the park for a few hours, but we just decide, the medicine was working. And we just didn’t feel like he was ready. I think he just needs to get a good night’s sleep. We flew out the next morning. So we’re like, “It’s so disappointing, so disappointing. But I think we’ve just got to get him a bath, put him to bed, get a good night’s sleep and then see how he feels in the morning.” And then we left.

So we forfeited an extraordinary amount of money and my husband and I talked extensively about it in the hotel room because I had a lot of emotion around it. It was like, this is a coaching course that we spent on one day and got nothing for it, other than the VIP, which I will say it’s not nothing. We got VIP treatment at a time that was really high stress and really scary and just could have been really, really awful. 

And the ease that we got to deal with that, the frictionless experience we had with that probably was worth that amount of money, but it was a sting. It was a really big letdown. If you’re expecting 12 rides, the most amazing day, dinner, the light show. We were hoping to go back to Magic Kingdom and finish a couple of the rides that we didn’t make it to. We were hoping to ride Tron at night because that looked so cool. We had lots of things on our list to do. That none of those things were happening and we didn’t get the memories that we experienced and so there was a huge letdown.

And I was telling my husband, “Pre coaching, I don’t know that I could have taken this loss so well.” There was disappointment. It was a lot of money to just lose for nothing. But we felt the disappointment and we’re over it before we even went to bed. I want to just say this so that you hear it, not because we just have extraordinary amounts of money. We value the money we spend. I don’t just throw money away in any scenarios. And I am very selective with how we spend our money.

So there’s just not a habit of just not caring about money. And this felt like a lot of money for a thing, typically I can sell myself on a lot of things and find the value. But this was hard for me to wrap around how much it was and is it really worth it? So then to have been wrapping my mind around is it really worth it, sold myself that it was and then not get it and it not happen, it felt really, really awful. And I got over it so quickly, not because the amount of money didn’t matter, but because I have coaching.

Then I started thinking about another situation where we invested some of our personal money two years ago in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it was not a good investment for us. And there were a lot of red flags, but I ignored them, being very naive about investing money in this way. And I’ve thought a lot this year about it because my husband has really struggled with it. And I haven’t thought about it hardly at all.

The only times I’ve thought about it is when I have thought about lessons that I’ve learned and mistakes I’ve made and how I’ve learned from them. But it’s not in a way where he’s really mad at the people and gets worked up for, he’ll be in anger for over an hour at them, which is a lot for him. But we talk about it a lot. He’s like, “I’m just so mad about that. I’m so mad that they advised us to do this. I’m so mad that they didn’t factor in this or that”, or whatever.

And I am just like, “We made the decision. We made the decision. It didn’t work out. I learned a lot about ignoring my own red flags and I learned a lot about trusting my gut and the questions that I didn’t think I got answered. I learned a lot about what we think we’re supposed to do versus stewarding our money the way that feels the best to us.” And mostly I just don’t spend time in regret, I think it’s part of the game.

I was coaching my husband lightly the other day on, “Honey, we became extraordinarily wealthy in a very small amount of time. We’re going to have mistakes with money, we’re going to not steward 100% of it perfectly well. If we were perfect stewards of money before we got it, we would have already had it. We would have known enough about money to make ourselves rich before this.” I know enough about coaching to make myself rich. Now I have to learn about money.

So I just see it as this is part of the journey and I’m actually glad I learned the lesson now and it was just a couple of thousand or a lot of hundreds of thousands, but not into the millions yet. And I was like, “It could have been 10 times what it was. It could have been this amount of money times the millions.” And so at least we learned it at this level. And I was like, “You know what? We’re probably going to make a couple multimillion mistakes too.”

Depending on how much money we end up stewarding over our lifetime, it’s possible we’re going to make a couple of million dollar mistakes too. And so we’ve got to be prepared for that along the way. That’s something else where I’m like, “Gosh, can you imagine if I had been so angry at them and that was my experience.” And just the way that I was able to just move on, it felt like another tangible. Moving on from the Disney experience, moving on from that experience, I didn’t used to be able to do that.

I used to hold things and be angry about things for a very long time. And hold that in my body, that would manifest physically as illnesses, as chronic pain. A lot of the women in my family hold trauma in their body and it shows up as chronic pain and weight and other things. So I’m giving you several examples. But these are moments just even recently where I’m catching these things and I’m seeing how I react to them in a different way than I would have pre coaching. And it’s increased the quality of my life astronomically, just an insane amount.

The relationship I have with my child, the relationship I have with money, the relationship I have with the negative parts of me or my humanness, the relationship I have with my mistakes. All of that is the everyday value of coaching, the way that my life feels now.

Here’s another one. I was recently talking to someone, and they were telling me they were really in a lot of pain about how chaotic their life is. And I remember feeling that way and because of coaching I’ve learned, and I’ve just coached a client on this. She was like, “Stacey, you’re like the self-care queen. Tell me how you do this.” And I’m like, “I have the thought, I’m the asset.” For her we created, you’re the quarterback.

But I’m the one that we have to protect as the mother of the family and the leader of the family, as the leader in the business, we have to protect me. I was telling her how I schedule all of my stuff ahead of time. All of my self-care stuff goes in my calendar first. And so I know I have breaks. I know I have walks. I know I have time with my child. I know that I have time to go to the toddler gym.

And when I was talking to this person about the chaotic life, I didn’t tell them this, I was just listening. But I was telling my husband, I was like, “I used to have a little bit of that and I don’t have that anymore because I say no to a lot of things that other people want me to do that I don’t want to do.” I say no to a lot of things that aren’t my top priorities. I’ve learned how to be essential with my time, with the things that bring me the most joy.

Instead of living based on trying to please everybody else and trying to be everything for everyone. I get to just be me for my family and myself and get the most out of my life. My husband and I hate having plans, it’s very stressful, unless we’re on vacation like Disney and we have tons of plans. Typically the weekends we have nothing planned and we love it. We love to do nothing on the weekends, unless we’re traveling, it’s nothing. It’s one extreme or the other.

I used to have a friend that every weekend it would be 12 activities every day and she would be so stressed but she wouldn’t say no to things. And we love that. We love having luxurious amounts of time to just hang out with each other and see what the day brings and decide to do this or that or decide to do nothing. We love it. These are everyday values of life coaching. So I’ve given you lots of examples.

My goal though really for you for this episode is that you start finding them every day in your life and being able to talk about them in a way that other people could understand it. And I could see how some of these would feel a little maybe out of touch or not relatable. But I think the parenting one was an example where it could be very relatable. And you want to find those.

You want to find what are the things, the changes in my life that someone could see this is the difference, the before and after of having invested and learned the tools of life coaching, having invested in a life coach. And the difference in your life after you learn how to manage your brain and your emotions and you learn these coaching tools and philosophies. So do this every day as a selling exercise. What is the everyday value of life coaching that I have received? How do I see it every day and every little moment?

What is the value it gives me in my life? What’s the time it gives back, the joy it gives back, the less stress that it has for me? What are all the benefits of the fact that I invested in my brain, however many times you’ve done it? Alright, that’s my selling exercise for you all today.

Now, the episode is over but for those of you who want to hear about my luggage experience, I have advice. And if you want to hear about my Disney experience I have advice. For the luggage, it was amazing. This is the first time we’ve ever done it. We used Luggage Away, I think is the company. We’ll link it in the show notes, and they use UPS. You can do it almost last minute. We did it, I don’t know, a week before, it wasn’t very much time before.

We loved being forced to pack a week ahead of time. We loved having sent it off and knowing we were packed. We loved that we weren’t up late packing before we left. We loved that we got to get up and just go. We loved that there was no check-in at the airport. And we loved that there was no wait to go to baggage claim, because my husband had flown to Orlando two weeks before to golf and had to wait an hour for his bags because five planes came in at the same time. And so we loved all of that.

The luggage was already there the day before, so we knew that it was in Orlando before we even left our house, and it was already in our room when we arrived. It was wild. And then we just left it in our room and told them, “Hey, our luggage is in our room.” They send you a piece of paper that you hand to the concierge and the concierge takes care of it. And then it just came to our house two days later. It was just here. So we loved it.

Here’s my review. It was expensive, but it could have been less expensive. I recommend packing if you can do it ahead of time enough that you could pack and really know exactly how many bags you are going to take. Because we paid for three large bags and we probably only needed one. We have the RIMOWA trunks and we could have probably just gotten away with one trunk. We had three bags that had tons of space.

Now, in retrospect, we also brought home tons of toys from the park and extra diapers, so we filled those bags. But honestly, we probably only needed to pay for one and not three. And the other thing I think is if you select a large suitcase, but you end up using an extra-large one, they just upcharge you once you’ve actually done it. So just knowing how many bags you’re going to need, you could actually save some money.

I also think we won’t do this unless we’re flying with Jackson because it is expensive. We paid, I think, 1,000 for there and back for three large bags. But I also chose shipping that gets it in a couple of days versus it’s cheaper if you’re willing to let it go for longer. And I spent a lot of money on insurance because we have expensive things, and I’ve had my luggage stolen before. So that added up a little bit too.

But I don’t think we’ll do it, I don’t know, maybe we will, but I see us doing this typically just when we travel with Jackson, because it’s just one less thing that we have to think about, which is really, really nice. So that’s the Luggage Away. People have been asking. That’s my take on it.

And then the VIP tour versus the Text Tour and we can link up both of these in the show notes as well. I really think for even us, the Text Tour would have been sufficient, amazing and perfect. What I loved about it is obviously it was astronomically cheaper and there wasn’t a person with us. So that’s something you have to think about. The VIP feels so cool because you’re so VIP, but you have another human.

And if you’re there to spend time with your family, you lose a little bit of that because Neil and I are both so social that we talked to the guy the whole time. We just made friends with him and there was just a little bit of not being completely just with your family. And so the time we went to Animal Kingdom and that’s when we did the Text Tour and we really loved that. We went at a slower pace because we weren’t on that, we could ride anything as many times as we want and running to one ride after the other just because we could. We weren’t on that ecstasy in that moment.

So we were leisurely walking and stopping to get a Starbucks and stopping to look in a store. I only shopped for the VIP when Jackson was sleeping because there’s no way I would spend money to buy touristy things while we’re doing the VIP tour. I enjoy going through the shops and so we went through some of the shops and looking then. We went on a couple of trails that were just more like hikes almost. And it was just a little bit more leisure. We didn’t have someone else with us all day. And we felt like we were spending more family time.

So honestly, that’s probably what I would do, going back, I could see me doing that. However, there was also a high and an excitement from feeling like we were getting the keys to Disney World. That’s what you’re really paying for with the VIP experience. They come and get you at your hotel. They drop you off at your hotel. He carried our bags for us when we shopped and then took them to the car.

We stayed after the tour was over and this guy was so great. Oh, my God, his name is Jimmy. If you ever do a VIP tour, you have to sign up with Jimmy. Every review that you read of the VIP tour says if you want to see the fireworks from the VIP section, you’ve got to make sure your tour ends as the fireworks begin. Well, we had to start the day early. With a toddler, you want to just start the day early rather than expected to stay late. And so our tour ended at six and then we went to dinner.

And he said, “Let me go see who’s running the VIP area. If I know them, I might be able to get you in without me being there.” And he was able to get us in without him being there. So we had dinner at Be Our Guest and then went to the VIP spot where there’s a lawn and you can sit down and you’re just not fighting people, to see over people. And they just were, “Oh, hey, you’re Jimmy’s people.” And they just let us in. It was so nice.

And then so that we didn’t have to carry our bags when the tour was over. He drove all of our souvenirs to The Four Seasons, dropped it off with a concierge before going home. It was just little things like that. He carried our diaper bag around. He tried to even put our food trays up and that’s where I drew the line. I was like, “No, I will throw away our food trays.” That felt weird to me. It was extraordinary how nice he was, how knowledgeable he was.

I rode the Avatar Flight of Passage ride with him. My husband didn’t want to do it. Oh, my God, I literally thought I was going to die and that I don’t even know what happened. I rode Guardians of the Galaxy. I rode Tron. I’ve done Soarin, which is another kind of 3D experience. I’ve been on that thing. I could not open my eyes one time. I had to breathe deep and just grip it and be like, “When is this over? How do I get through this? How do I get off?” It was awful.

And he knew it was happening and he was like, “Okay, this is what’s happening, you’re okay.” And then when we got to one part where you weren’t flying on a banshee in the air, he was like, “Okay, open your eyes here.” We were in some kind of dark tunnel or something. He’s like, “You can open your eyes here.” So he would tell me when I could open my eyes. It was just really sweet. He rode Star Wars with me because my husband didn’t want to ride the Star Wars ride but I grew up watching Star Wars. So I thought that was really cool.

And then he also, I didn’t know this and maybe this is dependent on the tour guide, but our guy was totally willing to stay with Jackson. So we would give Jackson, Toy Story, on one of our phones and that’s how we got to ride Tron, or if he was napping. So we got to ride some rides because he was willing to sit with Jackson, which I didn’t think they were allowed to do. So he was also a babysitter/nanny while we were there, so he was a lot of things for us.

I think they’re different experiences. One is extraordinarily more expensive than the other. I think they’re both wonderful and just 10 out of 10 recommend at least doing a Text Tour. I can post the company’s name. If you go to the show notes, we’ll put it in there and his name is Steve and he is a veteran. So that’s really fun to support our veterans.

So yeah, that’s my review of Luggage Away, the VIP experience and the Text Tour, recommend all of them. But just be careful, the VIP tour is non-refundable if you have a medical emergency. So be prepared if something happens, to lose that money. That’s the only way I would spend it is if you would be okay with losing it. Alright. I love you all. Have an amazing week. I’ll talk to you next week.

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