Ep #59: Selling When You Are Feeling Negative

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 59. Are y’all ready? We’re going to talk about selling when you’re feeling negative. And I just feel like I need to give y’all a disclaimer. I’m feeling a little feisty today. So if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re driving in the car with your kids, just beware. Might be some F bombs. I feel them coming.

Sometimes you guys tell me that you’re like, listening to me and then all of a sudden one pops in and you’re like, oh, the kids are around. Listen, this is sometimes a rated R podcast. This is where we go sometimes. Y’all ready? Let’s do it. Who knows? Maybe I won’t, but I’m feeling pretty feisty.

I feel really passionately about this topic, y’all. Like, really passionate. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I get a ton of questions around this, and I think that I might have a perspective that’s very different than anything you have been exposed to previously, and it may debunk a lot of things that you have been told, that you believe, that you’ve been coached to do or act like.

And so we’re just going to cover it all. But the question that I get the most from my coaches in 2K for 2K, in 200K is, what do I do when I’m feeling negative and trying to make money? So I’m going to give you some practical things that you can apply. We’re going to dive all the way through it.

So first, I think it is important that you have to know why you are feeling negative. There is a big difference between I don’t believe anyone is ever going to buy, like when you’re going to post on social media or write an email and you’re thinking, this doesn’t even matter that I’m even typing this because no one’s ever going to buy, it’s very different than I am having a really bad day.

So the first thing you want to ask yourself about this is, is the negative emotion directed at your business, at selling, in your belief in yourself, or your belief in your clients or your belief in your offer, or are you having a fight with a family member, PMS-ing, didn’t get a lot of sleep, having a hard time with your kid, maybe you have a baby that’s colicky?

Whatever it is, is it a life problem? Like a life issue that you have a lot of emotions around, or is it your confidence in yourself and in your business? Is it your thoughts about that? Here is why I think it’s so helpful to know which is which.

When you’re feeling negative, regardless of which way you feel, you have the option to direct your mind. Where you direct your mind depends on where it currently is. So a lot of you think that your mind is the one running the show, but your mind is not in control of the show. You are the director.

Now, in the beginning, you might just be figuring this out, but it is true. You are the director. Your mind isn’t just feeding you thoughts that you are forced to think. You get to decide. So if you’re going to work on your business and you’re feeling negative, ask yourself why. And then direct your brain based on that answer.

I’m going to tell you how to direct your brain, whether it’s about life or it’s about your business. So let’s start with life. If it’s about life, focus on other people. Don’t wait for the negative emotion of life to change before you make an offer. So many of y’all are doing that.

You’re like, “Well, life, life has to get better. More positive before I can be a life coach.” That shit ain’t ever going to happen. Let’s just say that right now. I’ll give you an example of when I first started out of like, what I would consider a pretty dramatic example.

When I was first starting out, I had a lot of circumstances. That’s what we’ll call them. I left my partner after seven years and I was so in love with someone else that I let him take everything. All of our furniture and our cats and all the things. And then this new love lasted a few intense months before I went through a pretty public, humiliating breakup.

My company lost our Walmart contract and now I was trying to make my first 2K, just like y’all, and I had nowhere to work anywhere close to where I lived. So while I’m building my business and I have no money and no furniture, just me and Bear, I had to start driving every other week six hours to Michigan in the winter to work.

I mean, it was like, 14 inches of snow every day. I’m like, what is happening in Michigan? For all of you that live there, I don’t know how you do it. What is this? Stop snowing. But I had to drive there. And I had to stay in like, the crappiest hotels. I was recording videos for my business, marketing my business in a Super 8 Motel.

I still have those videos. I watch myself, I’m literally on the bed in a Super 8 Motel recording a video about some mini training I was offering. I had no money. I was massively in debt. And I’m just out there in snowing Michigan, slinging slicers in a grocery store, in a mire. That’s what we used to call it. Slinging slicers. Y’all, my life.

But I was making money. This is what I want y’all to take from this. I was making money. I was signing clients. I wasn’t making massive amounts of money, I was like, had 900 payment plans. They were paying me $100 a week. I had to sign a lot of clients before it started really making a difference, but I was signing them.

Looking back at the time, when I was in it, there was no part of the experience that felt in the moment like a great growth opportunity. I was like, in it. But here’s the way I directed my brain. If I can help one person today, the pain will be worth it. There is – and I used to seriously tell myself this like, probably every day, especially in the worst days is there is no way, zero chance I’m going through all this pain without it being meaningful, without it having a purpose.

Like, I refuse to feel like this and it be unpurposeful. I’m going to use this to help other people. I just refused for the circumstances I was faced with, I refused to have those be in vain. I was going to grow and I was going to bring people with me. And focusing on other people really helped me get out of my brain.

Tony Robbins always says that we only suffer when we are self-focused, and this is the one thing that I have always kept from him, from my early – he used to be the person, I would listen to all his YouTube videos when I couldn’t even afford a coach. And that always stuck with me and I really believe it’s true.

I really found a safe outlet to be away from my pain when I was helping others through theirs, and it really helped me gain perspective in the suffering everybody was experiencing on some level. Now to this day, I always say the pain to people is all relevant, and not up for judgment or merit awards.

The way someone feels about Starbucks when they run out of their favorite drink and that’s the thing that brings joy to their day, and someone else who loses their job, who cares? It’s the same amount of pain to those people. They are both pain – for them people, they might experience it at the same level and that’s okay.

So many of my clients were judging their pain, and I got to be that person that had no judgment because I was dealing with so much of it on my own, in my own life, and I was really able to meet them where they were and every day that I grew stronger and learned how to manage my mind, that was creating all the pain, not those circumstances, I got better at helping them.

And I just learned so much about pain, about coaching through pain, coaching when I was in pain, coaching my clients when they were in pain, coaching my clients when I was in pain when they were in pain. I learned so much about it. But the biggest thing I learned is that you can do it.

There were days when I was a mess and focusing on someone else’s problems was the highlight of my day. And my few clients I had gave me so much purpose and moved me forward, and you can use this for yourself, even if you have no clients because everyone on Facebook and Instagram is your client. That’s the way I think about it.

You can help all of those people who are scrolling on Facebook, feeling alone too, you can help them. You just have to have a bit of honesty with it. Don’t try to be positive if you aren’t truly feeling that way. It works against you. It comes off as inauthentic.

And if you’re in 2K for 2K, you know, I teach you in the very beginning that great marketing is honest marketing. It’s authentic marketing. That doesn’t mean you lay out all your dirty laundry on social media either. I wasn’t talking about staying in Super 8s and being broke and heartbroken. But what I was talking about was pain and how to manage it and handle it and letting people feel safe.

Like you would read my post and feel safer and less scared about your life and less alone. And you don’t have to talk about pain at all. If you just think about selling, I wasn’t talking about pain and coaching on pain when I was slinging slicers, but I wasn’t selling to them being positive Polly either. Nobody likes that shit. At least I think that.

In fact, in my experience, and I have a lot of experience, let me just say, the best energy to be in when you are selling is neutral. I always let myself be a reflection of the energy of the crowd. So I would go in neutral. This kind of blank space in my own body and mind, totally just scanning the audience and the people in front of me, reading their energy a little bit.

If you are open for it, you can feel people’s energy. You can see where they’re at. And I would adjust mine to match theirs. Like it doesn’t even matter how I felt. I just find their energy and then I bring myself to that level. And again, when I was focusing on the show, I got to escape focusing on my. That’s how I found the neutral.

I just didn’t even have to focus on me. For 20 minutes of every hour, I could just stop thinking about my problems and I get to live in neutral. Working your business when you’re really struggling, that networking event, that 30 minutes that you spend on a post or that hour you spend coaching a client or being on a consult can be your chance to leave your shit behind, set it aside, you can pick it up right after, but that’s your chance to just be in neutral for a little bit and take a rest from your own mind and your own problems.

You just have to learn how to do that and just practice it. You will find it. Now that I’ve even presented it to you as a possibility. Now, if it’s negative emotion because of what you’re thinking about your business, the kind that takes you out of showing up, that kind of emotion is like, unproductive failure, if you remember that podcast. Productive versus unproductive failure.

It’s unproductive emotion, it produces no action. It’s unproductive. Negative emotion like envy, pity, resentment, jealousy, entitlement, desperation, like when you’re in that needy, graspy energy, that will push clients away. You do need to be aware when you’re feeling this type of negative emotion. It just doesn’t produce anything. That’s the only reason to be aware of it.

If you are in that energy, you don’t need to coach yourself into positive emotion. That’s what most of you think the solution is. I’m not believing in myself so I have to go from not believing in myself to believing in myself. That’s what you think you need to do, and it’s too big of a jump, so you just like, put yourself into more and more failure and more and more shame that you can’t pull yourself out of it.

And it’s this horrible cycle that really takes you out of the game, sometimes for six months, sometimes a year. It’s insane how we shame ourselves about our negative emotion. All you really need to do is shift that emotion just a little, not to positive emotion, but to productive negative emotion, which might be courage, discipline, vulnerability, in which you just have to change your thinking slightly.

So you go from no one’s going to reach out to me from this post to, I’m going to post this even if no one reaches out from it. You go from I’m a failure to I’m willing to fail. I can experience failure. I’m capable of handling this failure. I’m capable of people not engaging on my post and being okay. I can do that.

It’s the smallest switch, but dropping into courage and vulnerability will be the difference in the energy of your message. People can feel it. No one wants to buy coaching from a coach who is posting pitying herself, but everyone is drawn to courage and showing up in the face of adversity, even if that adversity is created in your mind.

Okay, but ultimately, I want y’all to really listen here. There are a few things you really need to know. Number one, we have like, 60,000 thoughts a day. Worrying that some of those thoughts, even if they’re your predominant emotion, will keep you from making money, does not serve you. It’s layering negative emotion on top of negative emotion. You can’t put so much weight on your moment-to-moment feeling.

I know a lot of coaches are telling you that bullshit, that your vibe attracts your tribe and you better get out of negative emotion if anyone’s ever going to buy from you, but it’s not true. You aren’t the walking Ebola because you’re struggling to believe people will ever buy coaching from you.

It’s really like yes, you will push people away a little bit with unproductive negative emotion, but that is a small percentage of the scale of negative emotion and you are completely in charge of that. What serves you more than worrying about negative emotion and having Ebola is to ask yourself, even when you are feeling negative is why do you want to take action?

Why do you want to sell coaching in that moment? Why do you want to work on your business? Do you know that taking action is a choice? That working on your business is a choice? That selling is a choice that you don’t have to make? You don’t have to do anything.

That might be a thought that really helps you. You could watch Netflix, seriously. You could curl up under a blanket with some hot tea and watch your favorite feel-good show and avoid the world. You could do that. You can also serve people, but don’t tell yourself you have to.

Tell yourself you choose to or not. And then did you know why you choose to do something is your choice too? You can sit there and think, “I have to make money, so I have to work my business,” or that could be 100% your truth, like you really need the money coming in to pay your bills, but you could also choose to think in that moment, “and I really want to help people and I have something to offer.”

It could even be, “Damn it, I want to make some money. I want to be a paid life coach.” It doesn’t even have to be about other people. I’m over here working on my funnel and I’m not saying I want to get through this and finish this funnel to serve more people. I’m like, I want to make some more money. Let’s get this shit done.

It really is your choice. But if you’re going to work your business when you’re feeling negative, I would make sure you realize it’s your choice and make sure you love your reason why. You know what? Scratch that. Not even love your reason why. Just make sure the reason why is slightly useful. Let’s go there.

Let’s not even go to love your reason. Just slightly useful. Is it a productive reason or an unproductive reason? And you can have the unproductive reason, the unproductive emotion, the unproductive thought, I have to make money, have to market my business because I have to make money, you can have that at the same time as you have a productive negative emotion like courage and a productive thought that even though this is true, what’s also true is I really want to help people and I have something to offer, and I really want to make this happen and I know I can help people.

Those can be in your body at the same time. You have 60,000 thoughts a day, most of them are contradictory. That’s why we’re all crazy. But it really is your choice to work your business. And it’s your choice why you want to work your business. And anything beyond that is just indulging in unproductive negative emotion, and that is your choice too.

You just have to own that. Not owning it is what sucks all your power away. I just coached a client recently who didn’t actually want coaching. She thought she did. But she wasn’t open to anything I had to say. Her mind wasn’t. Not her as a person, but her brain was very closed off.

And she was telling me and herself that she had no choices and that she had to make money, and she wasn’t interested in any other version of that story. But she could have taken her power back immediately, just by saying I’m choosing to indulge here and believe that I don’t have a choice right now, and I don’t want to find a solution.

That level of honesty with yourself is a really big first step. Huge. It gives all your power back. Life isn’t happening to you anymore. And listen, some of y’all try and tell me, “But Stacey, I do want to get out of it,” and here is how you check the truth of that.

If someone tells you how to get out of it and you want to get out of it, you grab that lifeline. If you don’t want to get out of it, you argue with it instead, and that’s okay. You don’t have to get out of it, you can stay there for as long as you want. Getting out of it will just make making money easier and more possible if you do. But it’s your human right to indulge. Indulge away.

Sometimes I’m angry and I just want to be, and I don’t want anyone talking me out of it, but I want to make sure to know that that is where I’m at and to really get out of it happening to me. I’m not angry because I have no control because someone did something or something happened that forced me to by angry. I am angry because of a thought or a way that I’m choosing to look at something and I don’t feel like letting that go yet. That’s okay, but own it.

Okay, so everybody wants to know the secret to how I made money in my business when I was like, broke. And the secret is I just directed my mind. When it fed me unuseful thoughts that created scarcity and overwhelm, I directed my brain to, okay, what are we going to do about it? Go create money. How do we create money? Through value and service.

Let me go add to my value bank and serve others, instead of indulging in myself because indulging in myself isn’t going to pay my bills. I knew that. Scarcity doesn’t create money. So I changed the direction of my thinking intentionally to more useful places. How can I create value right now? How can I serve? Who can I serve?

From a place of knowing and authority. Not from like, oh, woe is me, I don’t have any money. It’s such a difference. Okay, so the second thing that is really important that you have to take away from this that you may have never thought of before is your clients don’t care what you’re feeling.

Think about this. How often – if you’re in 2K for 2K, how often have you asked me how my day is going or how I’m feeling? You don’t care. You know what you’re thinking the moment I come on the screen? Call on me, can you help me? And that’s okay.

That is what you should be thinking. That is what your clients are thinking. They don’t care about anything happening in your life, or your mind, or your body. They care if you can help them. They will let you help them, even if you feel like shit, I promise.

And then going off on that point, number three, that you may never have heard this before but I’m here to tell you, positivity doesn’t sell. Can I say that again? You may be misunderstanding up until this moment. Positivity is not what sells. Value is what sells. We have to be very clear about that. Value is what you need to sell when your positivity runs out.

When you run out of the ability to willpower your way to feeling good, you need value there. In fact, when you’re too positive, you are often too much for people, especially if it’s inauthentic. From a selling perspective, you always want to be one level of energy above or below your audience.

So when I was pitching, if my crowd was really low energy, like unimpressed with the world, grumpy, all the things, I had to match that and raise mine just enough to keep the show moving. But any more than that, one little notch above theirs, I would lose them.

Actually, one time I sponsored a networking event and I had a booth set up and a gentleman walked up to me. It was like, 8am, coffee in his hand, to see what I was promoting. And I hit him with, “Good morning. How are you?” Some version of that. And he actually looked at me and said, “Absolutely not. Too much this early,” and walked away.

I died laughing in the moment. It was comical. I realized immediately what happened but it was so – I mean, he was like, I almost watched my positivity smack him in the face. Sometimes that’s what happens. Even if it’s authentic positivity, sometimes when you’re marketing, especially on social media, you got to know who your audience is because sometimes that positivity smacks them in the face and it turns them off, not on.

Now, if they’re millennials and maybe they’re pumped about life and they’ve never had a bad day, you might need your energy to be one notch below their energy to keep it grounded and focused. So if I had crowds that were like, hoofing and hollering during my show, I always put my energy one level below theirs not to let it get out of hand.

And I want to be really clear. This isn’t about manipulation. This isn’t like, using your energy to sell them. It’s meeting them where they are to create comfort to buy. We have all had that positive Polly experience when we’ve been out shopping when literally, we want to escape the store.

I was recently shopping at Club Monaco in Aspen and I made Neil pay the bill and left because I could not handle another second of the store clerk. It was awful. Like fake, forced positivity, asking me the dumbest questions that I don’t want to answer when I’m trying on clothes.

Like, “Oh, you’re from Kentucky? I can’t believe you made it all the way out here.” I’m like, “Yeah, we drive cars there too. We got rid of the horse and buckies.” Fuck that. Don’t talk to me when I’m shopping. That’s who I am. I cannot. She came at me with that, I looked at Neil like, it’s a no. Here’s this shirt, go buy it, I’m leaving.

Most of us do not like this when we shop, yet we think that we have to do it when we sell. No. Please, god, don’t. And another thing to consider is that like does attract like. So if you are naturally positive and outgoing, great. Your people will love that. But if you are naturally a little bitchy, your people will love that too because they are your people.

I always laugh because my best friend Lindsey and I will go shopping and she is so friendly and she’s such a people person. She’s the kind of person that you make sit in the front of the Uber because she’ll just sit there and talk to them and she loves to have conversations with strangers. I’m like, I’m the one that’s selecting silence please.

So we’re like shopping in Malibu once and she kept making conversations with the store clerks and I literally looked at her at one point and was like, “What are you doing? Stop. I do not want them to talk to us.” I’m like that leave me alone, don’t help unless I ask person. And that’s okay.

We laughed that we just attract very different people. It’s fine to be who you are naturally in your vibe. Your energy, whatever you want to call it. Positivity isn’t what sells. Value sells. This is so good for those of us who run just a little more negative.

The thought I use is people don’t buy smiles. They buy my brain. I think of myself as an expert with advanced knowledge and that is why people pay me. Not to rah-rah them with pompoms. And you know, I do want to just say, and this is really I think what makes me feel a little bit riled up is I used to be in a coaching situation where I was kind of shamed for not being more positive and grateful and my vibe not being higher.

And at the time, it really affected me because this was my coach, my mentor, and I was just learning how to manage my mind and own that I create my feelings. And so I really took that to heart and really believed I was failing and doing it wrong and that my energy was bad. Like I needed an energy overhaul or something.

It really fucked with me head for years of my business. And then I got out of that situation and I decided I was okay where I was and who I was and my energy wasn’t bad. And then I started making a fuck ton of money. Our brains sell. That is the truth. So if you’re using your energy to sell, meaning you’re raising your vibe and pulling people into your vibe, I think that is a little manipulative.

It’s okay to meet your clients where their vibe is, but for you to purposely get your vibe really, really, really high to influence people, I see a lot of coaches that do that in the industry. I’m not for it. I think it’s sneaky. I think it breeds an unhealthy perspective of you’re not enough unless you’re this positive too and you’re doing life wrong if you aren’t on like this all the time.

Especially when we’re teaching this, negative emotion isn’t bad. It’s life. Life is 50/50 and I think the reason social media is causing us all to go so crazy is because we’re being fed every day that it isn’t. That it’s perfect and wonderful and positivity all day long. And then we think negativity is the plague and it’s contagious and our audience is going to get it, so we should just stay away.

50% of your life isn’t going to keep you from making money. Life isn’t a fight like that. We make it a fight when we believe that 50% of negative emotion is bad and because that’s all we see through social media and then we have coaches who are showing up that way.

I seriously had a coach who told me she didn’t believe life was 50/50 and I ended that coaching relationship immediately. The same one that was shaming me for my negative vibes, like nope. I do not subscribe to that. I am not less worthy or effective as a coach because I’m not fucking shitting rainbows and daisies and butterflies every day that I go to work.

Sometimes y’all get on my nerves. Sometimes I don’t want to do anything. My best friend says I’m a little bit of a curmudgeon. I’m okay with it. I found so much peace when I decided to love that side of me too. When I decided that my 50/50 was okay, that I didn’t need to improve my energy to make money.

I really want to encourage that if this is useful for you to think too, use it. And if it’s not, that’s okay too. Those positive Pollys, they’re out there. Go hire my friends, the Lindseys. I have two. They’re both nicer than me. Okay, I love you all deeply on most days. I’ll see you next week.

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2k for 2k program where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.