Ep #5: Small Steps for Long-Term Success

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 Diva, what is happening? I’m so excited to chat with you today. Listen, I have to share a client win. I love client wins. They’re so much fun.

My client, Jamie, just posted this in our 2K for 2K course. She said, “Wanted to share a win. I have been in the group for one day. Binge-watched your enrollment videos and signed a client within 24 hours. So I made my money back plus some. I love your enrollment process. Much better than what I was doing, I must say. Thank you Stacey, celebrating success.”

Listen, this is crazy. I love when people do this. I have had people do it in 24 hours, I’ve had people do it in five hours. The possibility is endless. I find most of the time when you’re a coach and you’re not making money, it’s like the simplest, smallest little shifts are everything. Sometimes it’s just one thing.

I have had people make their money back off one module. I think that the program is like, what I say it is is like, 32 micro steps and if you’re not making money, it’s always one or more of those steps. And for some people it’s literally just a couple of them, some people it’s all of them, but it’s universal. For every coach, there are 32 micro steps that are under the category of four big steps. But 32 just really micro steps and it’s always one of those things.

So right on, Jamie, I’m so excited for you. Welcome to the 2K club. If that’s what you did in 24 hours, I cannot wait to see what you do from here on out. Alright, so I’m excited to chat with y’all today because I’m about to go teach my 200K mastermind peeps for three straight days.

So I have 35 women coming and I just put the finishing touches on the lesson plan and I’m ready. I cannot wait to get there and dive in. And it has me thinking about you and what I think is really a big cornerstone of my process, my four-step process, and the methods that I use, and what I’m about as a teacher and a mentor for life coaches, which is growing your business in small bite-sized pieces as a time.

Here’s why. Think about when you’re making no money and you want to be making 100K and you’re at home and you want to get to work in your business and you start thinking, “Okay what do I want to do? I want to make 100K, I want to make money as a life coach.” And the jump from where you are to where you want to be is so big that you have no idea what to do next.

So you slide into overwhelm with all of the things to do and the confusion on what to do first and how to do it and when to do it, and doubt that you will ever get there because it’s just too much. And then finally a really good dose of self-pity sets in, followed by some self-judgment for all the self-pity that’s happening.

Listen, I can explain it that way because I have been there. I get it. By the way, that isn’t useful at all if you’re layering judgment on top of your pity. It’s not good. So here is how you get out of it and stay out of it. You focus on small simple steps to keep you moving forward.

You take your 100K goal, or for my clients, it’s like 200K. 100K isn’t cool enough for them, and rightly so. You all are badasses. You know you’re meant for more. 100K is boring, it’s usual. Let’s go for the unusual, shall we?

So you take your 200K goal and you break it down into little bite-size pieces. I teach my clients how to do it 2K at a time, and that’s what you’re going to learn on the podcast and in my 2K for 2K course. And here’s the magic for why that is; 2K is like, one client. You could just decide your package is $2000. There, I just solved your pricing problem. You’re welcome.

And now when you look at where you are today at home, wanting to do something in your business and you’re thinking, “Okay, I want to make 2K, I’m going to sign one client. How can I do that? What can I do next?” All of a sudden it doesn’t seem like Mount Everest that you’ve got to go climb and overcome.

It’s like okay, I go out, I meet some people, I tell them I’m a life coach, I make some offers to help them. Okay now this is something I can do. If you break it down even further, you can say, what’s the one thing I can do right now to move myself forward? And then you make yourself answer.

You might be tempted to think your ideas are dumb or they won’t be good enough, but I’m going to just really encourage you to trust that answer, no matter what it is, and keep making yourself answer, and keep trusting in that answer and taking action. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated action. The unsophisticated action usually gets the job done.

That might look like, what’s one step that I can do to move myself forward to signing one client right now? And your answer is make a Facebook post, send an email, sign up for that networking event, go meet someone, anyone, tell them I’m a life coach. You get the idea. It can be small. Small gets the job done. Small is good enough.

In fact, it’s everything. I have on my website, and it’s totally true, that you can’t get to 100K without going through 2K first. It’s literally how math works. Well, you also can’t get to a super defined niche, perfect client messaging and spot on positioning in the marketplace without writing that first email to help you figure out who you are and how you help people, without coaching some folks, without taking 1000 tiny steps along the way.

But what most coaches do is they look at the coach making six or seven figures and think that their business has to look like that coach’s business in order to get clients, so they might as well take no action until they can figure out how to get their action to look like that other coach’s action. That other coach, she started out like a hot mess just like you. Promise. And it took her years of really small actions and being bad and messing up and figuring it out to get that polished.

Listen, you cannot think your way to six figures, to multiple six figures, and I know that might seem like the opposite to what you have been taught, that you can’t think your way to six figures. But you really can’t. You can’t just sit around thinking about how to create a six-figure business that looks like the ads you see on Facebook and make money without ever having taken an action.

There has to be action as well. And what most of us in the world do is we try to take steps in our head. Like, we try to think the steps. So this is what it looks like. We like, try to figure out what the next steps are ahead of the next step need to take so that we are prepared and we know what’s going on. And so then what will happen is we’re like – we have an idea and we’re in four steps deep into this idea, we start figuring it out.

We’re like, “I’m going to launch this course, it’s going to be called this, and it’s going to be about this and I’m going to do this and I’m going to market to this and I’m going to do it this way and I’m going to launch it then.” And so now all of a sudden we’re five steps, six steps in and then we realize a problem to our plan in our head. And then we start trying to solve that problem in our head.

And then we get really stumped and then we start to spin out in confusion and it’ll never work. I call this innovating in thought. To make money, you have to get out of your thoughts. You have to innovate in action. Like, actually go do stuff. You got to take that first step and then the second and then the third and then the fourth and deal with the other problem when you get to it.

And the best way to do that is to just keep things small, keep things simple so that you stay out of your head. You could start thinking about how you’re going to make 100K and start creating your business model and your plan and who your ideal client is and you’re like – you get so far and then you’re like, wait, but this won’t work because of this, this, and this, and then you just take yourself right out of the game.

Instead of – just take the first action. Just take one step. That’s all you have to do. What’s the next small step that will move you forward and then the next, and then the next? My business that you see now is truly a result of four years of massive action. One small step at a time. I literally focused on one client at a time. One person to me, one relationship to build, one live stream, one post a time, all the way to six figures. $2000 at a time. You can do it too.

Now, I also get a lot of pushback on this because people will tell me that 2K isn’t enough and it doesn’t excite them. But less really is more here because every time you make $2000, you’re going to get a little bump of accomplishment and pride and guess what? Excitement.

And you’ll keep taking action and you’ll keep building that pride and accomplishment and it will turn into confidence and pretty soon, those 2K goals will add up to 200K. But thinking 2K is not enough has you trying to bite off more than you can actually chew and it spins you into inaction and disbelief. It gets you into urgency and having to get it all done at once, right away, and it puts you into overwhelm and exhaustion and it does the opposite of make you excited.

In fact, I was recently at an event of my mentors and I ran into a girl who wants to build a two million dollar life coaching business, and she just signed up for my course and she was asking so many questions in like, rapid fire. And if you answered one question, she went to another, and if you answered one question, she went to another. She had like, a million questions.

And this urgency and this vibe about her of like, “I’ve got to get there, I’ve got to get there right now,” and that energy comes from thinking that it’s not – I’ve got to get to two million dollars this year really quickly because nothing else is enough. And we don’t realize it’s coming from that place. We just get really excited about our goals.

I’ve had clients come in and they’re like, “I’ve made no money and my goal this year is $500,000.” And I’m like, “What if we started with $100,000? Maybe even $50,000, and then we just start it 2K at a time.” And I’ll have clients tell me, “2K is not enough,” and they’re like, “I know I can make more than that. I know I can make 100K.”

But then when I ask them to go out and make 2K, they can’t. This is very interesting. If this happens for you, I want you to think about this. If you say 2K isn’t exciting, my answer is always going to be, “Then go out and do it today.” If it’s so boring and simple, go do it. And if you do it, do it the next day and the next day and the next day. Keep doing it.

But this is what happens. So many coaches come to me and they’re like, “I want to make 500K, I want to make two million, I want to make” – these really big inflated numbers and then they get really down about the 2K and they’re like, yeah this isn’t a lot of money, I’m just not excited about this. But what happens is when I ask them to go out and do it, they can’t.

This is interesting. If this is you, you really got to look into it. Because thinking 2K is not enough has you biting off more than you can actually chew and how we know it’s more than you can actually chew is if you haven’t made the 2K yet over and over and over and over. And it spins you out into inaction and disbelief and it gets you into this urgency of having to get it all done at once right now, and then there’s just like, overwhelm and exhaustion. And it really is the complete opposite of you getting excited.

If I could just say that over and over, it’s the complete opposite of you getting excited when you spin yourself out into confusion and you have 50 million questions about the money you want to make and so much so that you can’t take action because you’re trying to figure it all out at once. It’s like, you’re like literally, there’s a giant puzzle of 1000 pieces laying in front of you and you’re like, I have to have the puzzle done today. I will only settle for the full puzzle.

And then you’re like, trying to figure out how to make all of those pieces magically go together all at once. It doesn’t work. You’ve got to start with one piece at a time. And how you know if you’re capable of building that puzzle in a day is if you do it, but you’ve got to still start the one piece at a time. That’s how you make $200,000, $500,000, even two million dollars. It’s the one puzzle piece at a time.

And any time you’re coming from not enough, you are literally going to produce 10 times less than what you’re trying to accomplish. I’ve actually broken this down. I teach a coaching tool called the model in my coaching practice and I’ve actually broken this down for clients when they tell me 2K isn’t enough but they haven’t even made 2K yet. So they’re telling me it’s not enough but they haven’t made it yet, and I break this down for them in the model and I show them and it blows their mind every time.

I’ve done this once with a client where we put $2000 in the model and how her thought was that it wasn’t enough and what was so interesting is that with the feeling that not enough produced and then what she did with that feeling, how she showed up in her business, it was actually producing $200. That’s all she’d made. That’s so crazy, you guys, but it’s true and it happens every time.

Not enough, like not enough time, not enough money, it doesn’t matter, but not enough will always produce 10 times less than what you’re trying to accomplish. Think about it. If 2K, if one client isn’t enough, that is the energy you put out into the world. Even if it’s unintentional, like subconscious thinking, you are literally pushing clients away.

Have you ever been in a relationship – think about this. Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who thought you weren’t enough? How fun was that? How much did you want to be around that person? And here’s what’s really interesting is I’ve actually been in a relationship where I wasn’t consciously aware of this, obviously, at the time, but in hindsight now, I thought the person wasn’t enough for me. Like, I wanted them to be different and I wasn’t calling it not enough.

I was saying that I just want him to be more ambitious and I want him to have bigger goals and I want him to do the things I want to do and I want him to be more romantic and more engaged in the relationship and spend more quality time with me and it was just all these things. And in hindsight looking back, that wasn’t even pleasurable for me.

So the coach who has one client, who thinks that one client isn’t enough, it’s not fun for them and it’s also not fun for the client. It feels awful. And it’s the same to be true when you have no clients and you’re trying to go get clients but you think that the first client or the first $2000 isn’t enough. That feels bad for you as the coach, that experience, and it feels terrible for your clients.

And any time someone isn’t all in to make $2000, it tells me that that’s exactly where their mindset is. It’s not enough. And even now, I want you to really hear this. I focus on my goals 2K at a time. I think every day when I email my list – I’ve been doing this thing where I email them almost every day. Sometimes I don’t on the weekends, but almost every day, with value and encouragement.

And I think about every day when I email my list about just one person who is on the fence about joining my 2K program, I’m thinking about them. I think about what they need to hear to get past the fear, the doubt, the uncertainty, and all the little questions in their brain. I think about what’s one more thing I can show them to get them excited about this process and to make them see how possible it really is for them to make money.

Like, that one person is who I write the email for. And you know what is so crazy? Over the last couple of months, I’ve been averaging at lease one sign up a day or more in my program. Funny how that works. And here’s the big deal; at the end of the year, that’s going to add up, I promise. And it will for you too.

Small doable steps, they will take you everywhere you want to go, I promise. Your first step as a life coach who wants to make money is $2000. $2000 at a time. One client. That’s it. So simple.

Alright, you have a beautiful week. Go out there and just focus on that one small step and ask yourself, what’s the next small thing I need to do to move myself forward? You can do this. I know it. I’ll see you next week.

Hey, if you are 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 $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.