#325: Shifting Identities

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 325. Today we’re going to talk about shifting identities and I’m actually going to play a Facebook live that I did on this topic. I realized after a two hour coaching call with my 200K Mastermind in which every business problem for that particular call, it’s not always, but for that particular call, person after person that I coached, it all came down to they were in between two identities.

The person that they’ve been that’s created the results that they’ve created, in some cases inconsistent results, in some cases results that they feel beyond now and they have a different version of themselves and where they want to be and how much money they want to be making and how they want to be making that money.

And after the call, I really sat and I started thinking about the hard part when you’re really in between two versions of yourself. And I had a really big epiphany, a breakthrough on why it’s so difficult for us to transition and to really shift into a new identity, and what we misunderstand about this shift, how we do it wrong, the thought errors that we have that contribute. 

And I explain it in this Facebook Live. And so many of you have told me that you love listening to my live streams, you love the fact that I’m live streaming again now, and it’s so much fun to see me live, and it’s a different version of me because I’m live, because I’m unprepared. I don’t have notes in front of me and I’m really just off-the-cuff talking about something that I’ve been thinking about. And so I think it’s fun to get to hear that version as well as the very outlined, prepared version on this podcast, and it gives you permission to do similar things for your podcast.

So I hope you enjoy this episode, and right before we dive in, I do want to say, if you haven’t joined us in Capacity Work yet, please do. You can go to staceyboehman.com/capacitywork. As this episode airs live, it will air on a Wednesday, we will be on call two of a two-week series of classes, so you will not be behind. You can catch up very quickly, but if you find this episode really powerful and you know that this is a piece of the work, that you see yourself in that in-between, and it calls to you, I would really love to have you in the class. We have over 500 students already signed up, so excited, and these opportunities, these classes, these containers just don’t come along very often.

I get asked all the time when I’m going to do another version of whichever class we’re we’re doing in the moment, and it’s going to be a long time before I’m able to swing back around because I have so many awesome things planned. So if this calls to you, make sure you join us at staceyboehman.com/capacitywork. All right. Let’s dive in.

Hello, hello, hello. Hi, Facebook audience. I am coming live unannounced to share something that has been on my mind that I’ve been thinking about and I wanted to just talk about it here with you. I also think I’m going to put this on the podcast because I’ve been thinking about kind of sharing what message I want to share for my podcast listeners this week and it just felt like everyone needs to hear this message.

I have been coaching on this so much. I just did a 200K Mastermind call yesterday and I coached for two hours straight, which is not typical. They’re usually hour calls, but sometimes I stay over and they go an hour and 15 or an hour and 30. Yesterday, my baby was napping and I didn’t have anything after my call. I was just feeling the vibe of coaching and so we kept going for two hours. But I coached person after person on a lot of business things.

My 200K Mastermind is a very business-focused mastermind, so we are masterminding on making $200K and everything in between, launching webinars, creating intellectual property, and a lot of things that are in the in-between. I have women in there who just had babies and so they’re coming back from maternity leave and learning to integrate a new business or I have moms that are getting ready to take a maternity leave.

There are just so many things that we coach on in that room that all kind of roads lead back to building their business to a 200K business. And yesterday, person after person, we coached on their identity and that the work they needed to do was shift their identity into a new version of themselves who has the result that they’re trying to create, or who has the life that they’re trying to create.

So for example, with one of my clients, her brain kept trying to go back to the person she was running her business before she had her baby. And I was telling her that what we do after having babies a lot of times is we try to like bring back the person who was just so focused on the business. And we’re like, if we could just have her back and if we could borrow her brain. And I told her like, that person has to die and is never coming back. And the reason is because that person never had a baby. And so that person can’t help you create a business and a life that really works together with being a mom because that person wasn’t a mom.

So this version of you has to be the one that creates a new identity moving forward and then you have to really step into that new identity. But one of the things I was thinking about after that call, so person after person after person, we ended up coaching on some version of I could see their current identity that they were stuck in.

I had another client who, her trend is to make a lot of money in one month and then she will tell herself that she gets to take a break or she doesn’t have to work as hard the next month and then she’ll make no money the next month. She kind of has told herself and played into this reality where depending on her mood cycles, she will either make a lot of money or make no money. And then there were several other things that contributed. And I said, so this is your current identity that has money being very up and down. Lots of money one month, not a lot of money the next month. And especially in that mastermind, we’re very focused on always being able to turn the money faucet on and off no matter how you feel. So like no need for inspiration, need to always be on just however you feel you have value inside of you and we can make money with it

And so I was showing her her current identity that has been reinforced over and over, and then what it will take for a new identity to emerge. And so those are a couple of examples, but it came up in a lot of different ways, person after person for two hours. I could just see this past identity, this current identity, and then this potential future identity.

And one of the things I was thinking about after I got off the call is that I think a lot of us do shifting identity work wrong. And I called it shifting identity because or the way I think about it is shifting identities because if you think about it, a lot of times whenever we’re coaching, what we’re trying to do is shift focus.

So we’re focused one place and we want to be focused the other place. And so you could be one thought away from shifting your entire focus in a launch or shifting your entire focus of how you see your business. And so shifting your brain and the way you see something, the way you think about something, the way that you approach something, the way you react to something or respond to something can dramatically change your results. 

So the same is true with identity work. If we want to have new results, you want to shift your identity from how you react, respond, make decisions, how you think, how you feel. Everything has to change into the person who’s achieved what you want to achieve. But this is what I realized last night that I think people do wrong, and it’s such an important distinction. 

When we’re thinking of the new version of ourselves that we want to be, who has all the things. So I’m getting ready to start another entrepreneur series called Capacity Work, and I’m going to tell you how this plays into it. But I asked everybody, we just opened the Facebook page yesterday, and I asked everybody, what do you personally want to increase your capacity around? How does capacity show up for you? What will be a really big win to leave this container with?

I got all of these different responses from people, but the number one thing that I heard from people is they want to be able to have this and that. So whether it’s, “I want to be a great mom and a great wife, and then I also want to build my business,” or, “I want to have a really great business, and I also don’t want it to take from my full-time job. I love my career, so I really want both of them to be successful until I leave my career.”

So it was a lot of answers like that. And so one of the things I was thinking about is when you imagine this new life that you have or that you could have that you want, when you imagine being the mom and also running the business and you have work-life balance. When you are imagining working full-time but also you’re signing clients and you’re making really good money and they’re getting results and you’re building your business and it’s all starting to work, and money is pouring in from all places.

Or one of my students said, you know, I really want to be able to manage my business and my team better, like I want to be able to grow my business and I want my team to grow with me and I want to be able to move as fast as I want to move.

And so when you think of that version of you who has the things that you want and it typically is a this-and-that situation. So I want to make more money but I also want to have this too. I want to be able to, someone said, I want to be able to maintain doing the things that light my soul on fire, like personal things.

So whenever we think of this new identity who has it all, we’re just going to say has it all. I know that’s kind of a blanket term, but let’s just say has it all, that you could dream up this new version of you. When you start shifting your identity, the way that I think we often imagine that is we imagine what our life will be like, and who we will be, and how we will react and respond as that person who has those results. And the problem with that that’s really sneaky is that the person who has those results doesn’t typically have the problems that we are facing right now.

So someone who has lots of money and is really successful in their business isn’t struggling to pay their bills. Someone whose business has really taken off is super confident and isn’t struggling with constant life circumstances getting in the way of building the business.

So where we struggle the most is we’re trying to be this version of ourselves and we’re trying to shift into this identity of someone we want to be and we wanna react as this person, we wanna see the world as this person, we wanna feel the way we imagine this person would feel, but we have no life circumstances that match up with that person’s life and we typically don’t have any of the problems that, all of our problems still remain that would have been solved once we have these results and we’ll have new problems. And I think people are aware that you might have new problems, but it’s not the same problems.

So where I see people get stuck is, how do I deal with the situation that I have now when I’m trying my best to become this next version of me who has this next level result? I’m trying to become the 100K version of me. I’m trying to become the 200K version of me. I’m trying to become the million-dollar version of me, but the current version of me is getting trolled right now and is really triggered by it.

The current version of me isn’t selling my program and it’s not working, and so I’m not bringing in any sales, and I don’t have anyone to coach, and I’m struggling to create my intellectual property, right? There’s so many things that we have happen. We would love to be this person. I would love to shift my focus and shift the way I react and shift my response and become this new version of myself, but also how do I respond to the very real things that are happening in my life now and the very real skill sets I have not yet developed to become this person?

Like, this person, when I think of myself at $30 million, she has a lot of skill sets that I don’t have right now. And I’m aware of that. I know that. I have an idea of how she thinks and how she reacts to things, but if I already currently thought and reacted to the things the way that she does, then I would be making a lot more money, right?

And the same is true for you and for all of us. That is the rub. That’s the challenge, is you have the current life challenges and problems. You don’t have the skill sets yet, but you’re trying to think as if this new person, but that new person has all the skill sets, so they just are more confident. They know how to do the things.

So many of my clients, one of the things that we’re working on is when they are doing their launches and when they’re selling something, maintaining their belief throughout the whole sales cycle so that they show up and actually are visible enough for their message to be seen by people, for people to actually purchase from them, and to keep that up and to go all the way through the launch as if they were selling all the things that they wanted to be selling except they’re not.

No one’s bought maybe, right? Or two people have bought, especially if it’s like their first group launch. if you’ve ever had a first group launch, whatever it is, it’s like, I want to be this person, but there’s this really hard thing that I haven’t developed a skill set yet in front of me. And there’s all this conflict and resistance in front of me and this dissonance because I also, not only do I want to think like this person, but I’m also battling my own brain because I don’t quite think like this person. And I see all the areas where I’m not thinking like this person. And then sometimes we pile shame and frustration and resentment on top of that or entitlement or pity or judgment. Lots of emotions that will pile on top of this experience.

So here’s what I’ve been thinking that matters so much that I haven’t quite maybe ever said this before, but I’m gonna be talking about it a lot in my Capacity Work training.

This is what has to happen. You have to develop a new capacity along with the new identity. and why this matters is the new capacity inside of you is someone who is so, the thing you’re doing is you’re so connected to the person you’re becoming, you are holding that vision of that, the results that you’re creating and the life that you wanna have so strongly that you then use that purpose and that desire and that will to start expanding your capacity to be in hardship, to be in discomfort, to be in a life that is not yet what you want it to be.

You see all the things that could be and then you see what is. And the what is is usually very frustrating and painful and difficult. It’s not easy to learn brand-new skill sets, learning how to do webinars, learning how to do launches, or learning how to make your first offer, or learning how to run a consult call. There are things that you have to do, real-life things in entrepreneurship that get you to the next level. It’s not just like imagine something and you can create it. It’s not believe it and it appears.

It’s believe it, but then also learn all the skill sets required. This has been like the number one thing with my 2K for 2K program that I’ve told people for years and years and years. It’s not enough to just believe that you’re good at sales. And it’s not enough to believe that you are gonna make money. It’s not enough to believe in yourself. It’s not enough to believe in the results. It’s not enough to believe you can make $100K or you can sign your first client.

You have to have the skill of selling. And this I think is where we get really tripped up is we have an ability to believe that this is possible for us, but then it’s very painful to go learn the new skillset. It’s very painful to be in the middle part. The middle part is the really, really hard part where you’re met with all the dissonance, all the obstacles, all the challenges, all the hardships, all the life things that come at you over and over and over it feels like they never end.

You’re met with the disappointing team members that don’t move as fast as you want them to, you know, thinking about my client. You have all these things that keep coming to you. And you’re like, I want to be this new version of myself. And also, like, when? When do I have time to do that? Because I’m swamped by these other things. And so this is where expanding your capacity matters more than anything.

How you react to the middle part, how you react to learning the new skill set, how you react to the growth, how you react to all the opportunities to overcome something to become that next version of you. All of that matters. And what happens is people get tired in the middle and they give up. They slow down, they take a break, they retreat.

Instead of going full force and staying in the energy of the person you’re becoming in the results you’re creating and the impact that you desire. Instead of maintaining that, like I’ve been coaching people so much on this, but really imagine for yourself if you didn’t have moments where you checked out or buffered or distracted, if you didn’t have full days or even full weeks of distress about your business. If you were going full capacity to creating full capacity, full belief, full energy towards what you want, and no obstacle, no challenge, no skill set that you’re learning stops you from being in the energy of what you’re creating, and you just keep moving forward with that level of energy, what you create is so much bigger and so much faster than you can possibly imagine.

But you have to have the capacity, you have to tell yourself you have the capability. You have to believe in your capacity to keep going when it’s really hard, you have to have the capacity to feel the hard things. You have to have the capacity to track your success and your progress and celebrate it and live in celebration.

I just did an entrepreneur series called Alive and you have to have the capacity to really step into aliveness and be in aliveness because that’s what magnifies other people to life coaches because they’re looking for someone who is alive in their life. That’s why they hire a coach, specifically a life coach, right? Or they’re looking for someone who’s alive with, you know, whatever type of coaching you do. It’s like they’re looking for someone who is highly activated and highly engaged. And you have to stay in that energy more than you’re in the energy where you’re disengaged and disconnected.

And that is a capacity issue. A capacity to feel emotions, capacity to believe in yourself and to believe in your intellect and your capabilities and your ability to grow skill sets and your ability to win, and your ability for good things to happen. The desire of other people to pay you, it’s like that is holding an emotional thing as a capacity.

And then there’s a physical capacity because so many people who try to build their businesses, they get illness, they get chronic pain, they get all these things that come up and then it takes them. They’re like, I don’t have the energy or I’ve been sick or I’ve been tired or I’ve been going through something or I’ve been suffering from depression or anxiety. There’s all these things that come up and they don’t know how to have the capacity to have that happen and be an entrepreneur.

Yet if you think about it, every employee in the world has that capacity because they have to. You have to go to work, right? You can call out sick and maybe some employees call out more often than others, but if you want to be a well-paid, highly paid, successful employee, you have to go to work, you have to show up, regardless of what’s happening in the world and how scared you might feel with politics or things that are happening in the newsfeed and things you’re hearing about in the world. You have to show up. But for entrepreneurship, we don’t.

We actually don’t have to show up. We can just believe our own bullshit. We can be scared. We can be tired. We can tell ourselves all the excuses. We can have all the frictions and all the reasons why we can’t show up, and then we just don’t because no one’s making us, and no one will tell on us and no one will say anything to us except ourselves, we feel terrible about it when we don’t do it.

All my clients tell me that if they don’t show up, and one of the things I’ve been telling them is the biggest thing for me to expand my capacity and go for it when no one’s telling me to do it is because I want to, it’s who I go to bed with every night and who I wake up with every morning, like myself, how I feel about myself. I want to give it my all for everything I do and I never want to have something that’s holding me back telling me, oh, well, you could have made this much money or you could have achieved this thing that you wanted to achieve, but you didn’t give it your all, and here are all the reasons why you know you didn’t give it your all.

I want to know that everything I did, I gave my all, and every area where I find that I’m not giving it my all, I increase my capacity to do that. That is the secret to massive growth, is just being willing to really grow your capacity, your intellectual capacity, your emotional capacity, your physical capacity, to show up when no one’s going to tell you you have to. When you can believe your own reasons for not, when you can sell yourself on how hard life is for you, when you can explain circumstances that feel so hard and everyone would agree. When you’ve been through hell and back, it will always make sense in your brain and even in the brain of other people to not show up.

But the people who succeed and shift into that next identity and get the results that that identity was meant to create and can create, those people learn how to overcome, like how to be in that hardship and get past it, how to make those obstacles along the way feel really small compared to the big picture of what they’re going for. That’s it.

Like you have to have the capacity to be in the middle part, in the becoming. Because so little of our time is spent in the achievement and in the being of that next version of ourselves because if you are ambitious and you love to grow, you’re already onto the next thing anyways.

But we have to have that ability to overcome, to be bigger than, to take everything that’s in our way and make it really small and solve it and think bigger than it. But that requires being in discomfort a lot. It’s not energetic discomfort. It’s not just like being exhausted all the time. That’s not even what I mean. It’s just your capacity to direct your mind, your capacity to not listen to yourself all the time and agree with yourself and believe yourself about everything, your capacity to choose every single moment, higher levels of power, more personal power, more responsibility to take more control of your life. That is it.

If you can learn how to do that, if you can grow, if you can expand in your intellectual capacity, your emotional capacity, both for negative emotions and positive emotions. If you can expand into your physical capacity to show up even when it’s inconvenient and even when you don’t feel good or even when you have chronic pain or even when whatever it is that normally takes you out and has you reverting back, your moods, whatever it is, whatever has you reverting back to the current version of yourself, instead of staying shifted into the future version of yourself who has the future results that you want.

That’s what you’ve got to work on every single day. I love coaching on marketing and selling and delivering, and I spend a lot of time in my own business coming up with amazing ideas and executing those ideas and being better at selling and being better at delivering, and those are part of my values of my company.

But the internal work that I do as an entrepreneur that has me growing so quickly, that has helped me sell $40 million of coaching in the last decade, most of that in just the last few years that has helped me create an eight-figure business, that’s helped me come back to that business after becoming a mom, run a business while also pregnant and super sick. I’m able to do all of those things because I have an internal capacity that is infinite and I am always able to access it.

In the hardest moments, in the toughest circumstances, in the biggest levels of growth, when I’m having to direct my mind to the hardest, when it’s spinning out and going down the rabbit hole. That capacity to feel all of that, experience all of that, and persevere and keep going towards what I’m creating to save that focus on my vision moving forward and on my purpose and what I’m working to create and the infinite game and the bigger picture. That capacity is what has gotten me through everything in my business and kept me in business for 10 years.

And also, even more recently, I was on vacation in Miami and I was in the pool and I was just thinking about like my capacity to experience joy at home, and joy in my business feels like it’s compounding right now. It just feels like the most insane thing. I’ve had an epiphany that the more I love being in my business and the happier I am and the more fulfilled I am with the things I do every day for work, the more happy I am at home, the more fun we have at home, and then the more joy I have with my family and my babies and my future baby that’s on her way and with my husband, then the more excited I am. It’s like it used to feel like it was this or that, but it really is this and that.

Back to the beginning, whatever it is for you, it really can be this and that. But it does take an increased capacity. You can’t do it as the version of yourself that you currently are. If you already had that capacity, you would be doing it. You’d be killing it at work and building your business. You’d be managing your team and getting everything, getting your team up to speed so that they can keep up with the speed that you want to go.

You would be achieving $200K and loving your life of travel that you love to do. Whatever it is that it’s like this and that, you would already be doing it if you had the capacity to do it. So we have to develop it. That is how you become the new identity, is the new identity has a different level of capacity than you have.

I was telling my client who has had a baby and now is kind of in the later parts of postpartum and really coming back to her business, I said, this version of you has to have a completely new capacity to be a mom, to steward the life of a little, to be present, to be the type of mom that you want to be, and also run a business that is growing. That is something you’ve never done before.

Just like, and I was telling her, I’m like, you know, we talked about birth, and if you’ve ever had a baby, like we always tell ourselves, like I’ve been getting a lot of Instagram videos, and they are about like natural births, and they say that when a woman is about to actually deliver the baby naturally, one of the most common things that you know it’s about time is she’ll say, I can’t take it anymore. And as soon as she’s like, I can’t take it anymore, they just know, like the midwives, the all the people that are helping know the baby’s coming, like it’s happening right now. And I think that that’s so true for everything, right?

The moment we think that we can’t take it, one of two things happens. You either retreat and take a break and you lose momentum or you compound it and you break through and you have the business baby. You make the money, you do the thing, you make it to the other side. And a lot of people have a really hard time doing that without burning out because they’re resisting the process the entire time.

So we’re gonna talk about that in Capacity Work as well, is how to expand yourself, and your energy and your thinking, and even your physical capabilities and your stamina in business. And to be able to do that without burning out and having to take time off and having to start over because every time you start over, every time you check out, every time you take a break, every time you retreat, even if it’s just for a little bit, every time you step out of the being in the flow of the new identity, you have to build it back up. And then a lot of people, what they do is they spend a lot of their time in the absolute hardest parts.

They spend a lot of their time building momentum, building themselves up, building up their belief, and then they drop it, and then they have to start over, and it’s exhausting to do that, especially when you’re in resistance of the process in the first place, and you don’t wanna be doing it, and you’re imagining the life of leisure that you could be having if you had a 100K business or a 200K business or a $2 million business or a $10 million business and things were just working and things were just amazing.

But really, if that person didn’t get there by a life of leisure, they got there by expanding their capacity for hard things, for solving big problems, for believing new things, for believing when there’s no evidence that shows you you should be believing. Their capacity to believe in themselves and have self-confidence, their capacity to believe in other people and their ability to get results, their capacity to hear an objection and not go into their negative emotion about it and to talk through an objection with someone and to still believe and to still fight for someone’s dreams.

There’s just so much work to be done that it could be fun, it could be inspiring, it could be the thing that you look back on and it’s your favorite time of life, but only if you feel yourself expanding and you feel your capacity growing and you know that it is inevitable that it’s leading towards what you want. But if you’re giving up and retreating because it’s so hard and then having to start over all the time, it feels like you will never get there, but because you’re in this endless cycle that is true, it never ends there, giving up or taking a break or disengaging.

One of the things I’ve done in the last year that has been the most profound thing is when my brain is in a spin or a heavy emotion, instead of going to bed watching TV and distracting myself, I sit with it the whole night. I journal through it, I’m aware of it, I’m intimate with it, and then I don’t let myself distract away from it. I make myself feel it all the way through, like I go in there, I get in there. I increase my capacity to be with myself when things are hard. And then the next morning, I usually wake up and I have a million ounces of energy. It’s just like pouring out of me.

Colleen says, “So true, just like building a business, I thought giving birth would feel natural and normal, but because it’s something I’ve never done, it feels so scary. It makes you feel like something has gone wrong even when it hasn’t.”

Yes, I was not about to have a natural birth. I’m all about the pain meds that can be given to me. I feel like I have a very low pain tolerance, but I think I have quite a high one. But my epidural didn’t work, and I hadn’t practiced any type of breathing or pain management at all because I just was like, oh, no, I’m getting an epidural. And then it didn’t work. And so I’m like learning how the doctors are in the room with me while I am gripping the bed teaching me how to breathe through pitocin-induced contractions, which are the most painful ones that you can have.

And it was one of those things where I think about, the only time you really learn your capacity and what’s really available is when you challenge it. There’s no other way to do it. You have to go do the thing. You have to live the thing. You have to put yourself in the experience. That’s the only way to do it.

Audrey, this is totally me, “I’m so ready to get out of hiding, but I resist the entire time looking to beat this exhausted cycle and actually help and produce.” Yes. Yes. This is a big piece of it is not being in resistance. If you can really relax into this and allow into this, and I’m gonna teach you guys how I do this in CapacityWwork, if you haven’t signed up yet, you can just comment all caps CAPACITY, and we’ll send you the link to sign up. We start Monday.

But this is it, this is it. The resisting is what creates the burnout, and the tired, and the overwhelmed. If you do it right, expanding your capacity will leave you with energy at the end of the day. Like you will do more than you ever did in an entire day and then you’ll be like, all right, are we gonna go out to dinner? What are we gonna do? You wanna go for a walk? Like you will have energy instead of feeling like your energy is depleted. On most of my days where I have expanded my capacity to do more than I thought, those days I have to, and I’m gonna teach this process for you, but I have to intentionally downregulate.

I have to intentionally rest and turn my brain off because I could just keep going. Like I get so excited and then I have so many ideas and all I wanna do is just take action on all of them. And so I’ve actually learned a process that also helps me reign that in so that I don’t just keep going through all hours of the night, but I actually do honor my commitments to be with my family and to enjoy being with my family. And I don’t have thoughts of like I’m missing out or it’s gonna go away or I can’t trust that it’ll come back because I am creating it and generating it so reliably for myself now. 

Jessica says, “Stacey, do you think selling has changed from a few years ago?” Absolutely. I do think it has changed a lot. It’s changed a lot. And I think a lot of coaches are having a really hard time with that. And I think right now in the world, there’s so many things that have contributed to it, but I do think that people are slower to buy. I think they’re less motivated, less excited. They’re less in belief. There’s more noise than ever before. There’s less attention span than ever before.

I think Google released a study of what it requires for someone to purchase things on the internet now, and it’s kind of astronomical how much is required. And also, people are making lots of money in the coaching industry. Not just me, my clients, communities I’m involved in, like there’s lots of money still to be made, but you do have to figure out how to break through this. And one of the biggest steps to selling right now in this, especially if you were selling prior to the last couple of years, prior to… like if you were selling in 2020 and 2021 and even the beginning of 2022 and things were really great and then things have been hard since, the biggest thing that is getting in everybody’s way is just understanding it’s going to be harder.

I have to sell three times as hard as I ever did in 2020 and 2021, or even 2019. Like I have to actually be more visible, write more emails, do more things, and show up more than I ever had to. But it’s either that or don’t make any money. And what I’ve been telling my clients that if you can increase your capacity to show up more and learn to sell in the current environment that I don’t know is ever going to change, like this is just buying behavior, or just injected with so many messages. Think about if you scroll, I don’t have TikTok for this exact reason, TikTok is like destroying people’s attention spans, but it can happen with Instagram and Facebook, too. When you’re scrolling, your brain is like, oh, I’ve got 30 seconds, or I’ve got this.

Especially the way I teach is not, you don’t have to overcome some algorithm to make money. But I do think a lot of people are experiencing resistance and frustration and telling themselves unhelpful stories about not wanting to work that hard, or not wanting to have to do this amount of work for this amount of money or whatever. They’re telling themselves very unhelpful stories. And instead, for me, I just decided I wanted to increase my capacity and I wanted to learn how to sell to people in this current space and day and age. 

I want to be able to sell to anyone always. And this is actually, if you expand out and you think about the world, past, present, and all of the future coming up, this is something that will always be true. This will always be happening. The sales environment will always be shifting.

And this is something I actually learned when I was selling mops in Walmart and pitching, is that I used to sell like nationally everywhere. I went from, you know, I would sell at a Kmart in the Bronx, New York, or a Walmart in Jasper, Indiana, or Ralphs in Burbank, California, or a military base on Whidbey Island in Washington State, all over, like literally all over. And people in different parts of the country in the United States have different personalities and they would have different ways that you had to speak to them.

I was actually talking about this on one of my calls this week too. I was saying in Jasper, Indiana, it’s a bunch of farmers that are like they’re German, Catholic farmers, and speaking to them and doing a show for them is very different than people in Burbank, California shopping at a Ralph’s. It’s a very different experience, or it’s a very different experience being in the Bronx, New York.

One of the things I was really, really good at is figuring out how to communicate with every single area that I was in, every single store that I was in. Walmarts were very different than if you were in a department store. The energy was completely different. And so this is something I’ve just always had to do is adapt to the environment and get really good and figure out what needs to be done and how I have to communicate and how I have to show up and the energy that I have to meet people with.

And I don’t think it’s any different than, you know, there’ll be like those of us that are actually in it and figuring it out and selling in a time where it feels hard right now, it will get much easier because we’ll figure it out. And then it’ll change again. And so the people who make money for years and years and years and stay in business indefinitely are the people who have the capacity to just learn with the shifting times. That is going to be required always, is just learning with the shifting times. And there will always be shifting times.

It will never just be like, one of the thought areas is that, maybe things will level out and just get easier sometime soon in the future. And I remember hearing a podcast like a year and a half ago and this person has a billion-dollar business and has been in business for like 40-something years and said that the number one thing that people do in shifting times, no matter what type of shift is happening, the number one thing people do that cause them to not succeed and never succeed is they don’t go all in during that shifting time. They wait in out thinking one day things will shift back and be easier and then I’ll just jump back in then, or I’ll start my business then instead of, I’ve got to figure it out now.

I started my live infomercial pitching job right at the tail end of the 2008 financial crisis. It was like 2009 and I had no idea first of all that there was even a financial crisis because I had no money back then to be in crisis about. That was just regular life for me at the time. I didn’t have any thoughts about it, about figuring it out. There were people that had been in the industry for a while and had been really frustrated that sales were down, but I didn’t know anything about sales being down or things being harder, so I just learned. I was trained in the financial crisis environment. I was trained on how to sell.

And I became a national trainer for the company in six months of being with the company. And after my very first show, in training, my trainer called the national trainer and said we have our next national trainer. This girl is going to be our next big trainer. It’s just how you approach it. I didn’t have any other thought than I want to be the best and I want to be really good at this and I want to figure this out.

And that’s the thought I choose now and it’s the thought I chose in the beginning of my business, and it’s the thought I will continue to choose no matter how markets shift, and politics shift, and world things shift, and buyers’ behavior shifts. It doesn’t matter. I will shift and be the identity that figures it out and I want you all to do that too. All right, have an amazing rest of your week. Bye!

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program; where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple five-step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to StaceyBoehman.com/2Kfor2K. We’ll see you inside.