Make Money as a Life Coach® with Stacey Boehman | Using NO Against YourselfEveryone needs to get comfy because I have a story to tell you. I’ll warn you now, it’s a rollercoaster of emotions, and while it was happening, I thought it was never going to stop. So, I’m going to share this story with you, and then I’m going to show you why it’s relevant to your journey of creating a coaching business.

What I want for this episode is that you learn something incredibly profound that will deeply change you and how you approach failure and rejection, and how to build your business while also growing your resilience, mental and emotional health. But seriously, I’m warning you now, this story is intense.

Join me on the podcast this week as I share a harrowing story of rejection, failure, hope, defeat, and victory. And most importantly, I’m sharing the truth about rejection, especially in the first years of your coaching business, why I see so many coaches ready to throw in the towel, and why it’s the coaches who battle through this stage that create the most success.

If you want to start making serious money as a coach, you need to check out 2K for 2K. Click here to join!

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • Why my long, demoralizing, frustrating story is much like starting a coaching business.
  • The eight phases every coaching business goes through in the beginning.
  • Why so much at the beginning of being a life coach involves being told NO.
  • How new coaches can contribute to these negative responses without even realizing.
  • What I see so many coaches make it mean when they hear NO and how they use it against themselves.
  • Where real circumstantial things might be making it harder for some people to sell coaching or create a stable business.
  • Why you must be willing to do the work and not quit to become a coach.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Full Episode Transcript:

 

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 115. First of all, it’s been a month since I have recorded a podcast. And what has happened was Zencastr, for those of you who record podcasts. It’s like it had a whole new format. I logged in and I’m like, “What’s happening?”

I can see my face while I’m recording, which is very weird. And I’m like, “Is it supposed to be an audio and video format?” I don’t know what’s going on. But we’re just hitting record and we’re going. But they changed their format and it’s definitely weird. Strange. Lots of updates since I’ve been gone. Look, it was one month. What happened?

So, how did you guys enjoy having guest instructors on the podcast? All I have heard is the most amazing feedback ever. First of all, you listened to all of them, right? Because they blew my mind. Brig Johnson talking about the tightrope. What? Y’all, I have never heard scarcity and insufficiency and sufficiency used that way, talked about that way. It made it clear for me. What? You guys have to go, if you have not listened to them, they are all so, so, so good.

My god, when Sonia talked about her mentor and how she found her mentor. I mean, chills. They were so good. You guys have to go listen to all of them. We have gotten the most incredible feedback on our IG, @staceyboehman if you’re not following us. We’ve got insane feedback from 2K. We’ll have more guest hosts on the podcast, I think.

I had so much fun listening to my students teach work that I know but in such a different way that I got to learn in a different way. It was the most amazing. So, thank you so much, Chavonne, Jennifer, Brig, Dr. Sonia – Dr. Chavonne – Brig, Dr. Sonia, and Jennifer. I am so, so, so grateful. The episodes were seriously amazing, way above my expectation.

And I actually didn’t want to impede their creativity and their creative process at all. So, I didn’t even listen to them until you all listened to them. I listened to them with you. And there was a lot of, like, “Hope this is really good. Never done this before.” And it was 1000 times better than I could have ever imagined.

Anyway, so this past episode, you got to hear a story of me buying my new RS7. We love it so much and everybody continues to comment about how many miles are on it and how often we drive it. And now we’re like, “Yeah, we drive our car. That’s what it’s for. That’s what we got it for.”

I love when you’re rich and you can buy whatever you want and use it however you want. People really don’t like you to buy nice things and use them. It’s really fascinating. And we’re like, “We’re going to drive it everywhere. Take that.” So, we’re having a lot of fun.

So, you heard that episode. So, today, I’m also going to tell you the craziest story that you will probably have ever heard and you’re going to think I’m making it up and you’re going to think it sounds like one of those campfire stories that you hear that has been passed down over and over and over and has been completely exaggerated so much that the original truth can never be found.

And I just want to tell you ahead of time, this story is 100% factual, accurate, nothing has been exaggerated, every detail was documented correctly. And you’re going to literally be like, “What the F…”

And then, here’s what’s going to happen. So, I feel like I’m going to take you on a journey, where you’re going to hear my story. And there’s going to be a part of you that’s, like, laughing. And a part of you that’s like, “What is happening?” and stunned and can’t believe it. And then, part of you is going to be horrified. And some of you are going to feel exhausted. And some of you are going to be like, “Oh my god, I have PTSD from this. This is insane.” I mean, not really. But you’re going to have a little bit of anxiety as I tell you the story.

It was a high, high, high, high-stress situation. You’re going to go through all the feels, I feel like. But I’m going to tell you ahead of time, before I tell you the story, that it ends well, I promise. And then, when I’m going to do is, I’m going to tell you – I’m going to bring it back to your business and to coaching and I’m going to give you, hopefully – my desire is that you learn something incredibly profound that will deeply change you and how you approach no and how you fail and how you build your business and the resilience that you grow inside of you. And also the mental and emotional health that you have along the way will be dramatically increased having listened to this episode.

So, stay with me. I promise, not only is it the most fabulous story. I mean, it really was not fabulous at the time. But I recently told some friends. We did a 40th birthday party for one of my friends, Claire, happy birthday, Claire Byrne, just turned 40. And we did a virtual Zoom party and I told them the story, and their faces the whole time I told the story was almost as good as the story.

So, get ready, buckle up, buttercup. I’m going to tell you the story and then give you a really, really, really awesome way to think about your business moving forward. Okay, here we go.

So, listen, recently I went to Cabo. That’s the first thing you need to know is that I recently went to Cabo. And I decided, when we booked Cabo – so, for a long time, actually for almost six, seven, eight months, I was hearing people going to Cabo and seeing people post on social media about going to Mexico. And I was like, “What? I would never go to another country in a pandemic. That’s craziness. Like, crazy talk.”

Like, I’m adventurous. I’m a little risky. I‘ve definitely been more risky than most humans. Neil and I have travelled a lot in the pandemic. We have lived our life based on CDC guidelines, but mostly normal this entire time, and being very safe. But we have been doing our thing, living our life.

But Mexico is too big of a jump for me. I’m like, I don’t want to get sick in Mexico and end up in one of the, like, extreme worst-case scenarios of COVID in a different country. But then, I saw this video from this influencer on Instagram and the resort that she was at looked so incredible.

And I had already flown private with my friends Lindsay and Chris to Aspen, and I started thinking, “Well, what if we flew private to Cabo?” Then we would avoid the airport. Because I don’t know if y’all have been to Mexico, but Mexico, at least Cancun, Cabo airports are, like, insane.

In normal times – I don’t know what they’re like now – you go in and you’re accosted by 500 people trying to sell you activities and timeshares and all of the things. And it’s a very busy, very – it’s just a very busy airport. There are many airports like that; the ones in New York, the ones in Chicago. But for me, this is like a very busy airport situation where you’re going to walk through lots and lots and lots of people. And I was like, “I just don’t want to do that.”

And so, I started thinking, if we flew private, we would just get on the airplane, get off the airplane, go straight to the resort. The resort I was looking at has seven restaurants. We didn’t even have to leave the resort if we don’t want to. This could be the most luxurious situation ever.

And at the same time, my friend Courtney and her husband Matt, they were like, “We want to hang out with you guys but Chicago has shut down…” And I’m like, “Well, there’s not much we’re doing in Kentucky either.” So, I said, “Hey, let’s go to Cabo.” So, we decided to go to Cabo.

So, here’s what happened. So, I booked the private flight. And my assistant had sent me info and the flights were one price. And then a week later, she’s like, “Oh, they changed their prices. It’s going to be $15,000 more.” And I’m like, “What? This is insane. What happened? How did they just increase the price $15,000 in one week?”

And she’s like, “Well, apparently demand is really high.” And then, you know, a confused mind always says no and I tend to be, like, the person that says no before they say yes. So, I was like, “Absolutely not. I’m not doing that. Find a cheaper plane.”

So, she finds a cheaper flight out of this small airport in Indiana. And I’ve only flown private once. We flew out of SDF’s private airport area in Louisville. But I was like, “Okay, that’s fine. We’ll be even more adventurous. We’re flying out of Indiana.

So, she books the flight and my friends arrive on a Wednesday night. They fly from Chicago. And we were taking off at 11am the next day. So, Thursday morning we wake up. At 7am we get packed. We get ready. And then, there’s a three-hour delay because, overnight, Louisville got two inches of ice and we entered in what I think most of the country – you probably all experienced this – like a polar vortex of massively low temperatures. I think the temperature here was like 10 degrees. The high was 20.

So, not only dd we get two inches of ice, like it literally was falling from the sky. It wasn’t rain that turned into ice. It was ice falling from the sky. It was already ice when it entered the atmosphere.

So, it lands, stacked all over all of Louisville is just ice. And then it’s not going to melt anytime soon because it’s going to be 20 degrees for the next three days.

So, we wait the three hours for the delay, and then we get the information that they’re calling it for the day. There’s no more work that can be done, no planes are flying out of this Indiana airport.

However, SDF Louisville’s international airport, has now cleaned off their runways and they are now taking flights. I learned this much later, but apparently Louisville International, SDF, was able to do that so quickly because they are also a UPS hub and UPS pays for all of the salt and the plowing and the man hours and all of that because there’s no way they’re losing that kind of business. So, they fully fund all of that for the entire airport. That’s what I was told. I learned that much later.

So, knowing that we can’t fly out now for the entire day, my assistants send out 37 requests to other – I don’t even know what you’d call them – other private charters. So, 37 requests for private charter for all of these available planes for a flight that day. And no one takes the request.

And then Indiana comes back even later, maybe around 4pm and says, “We’re not flying out the next day either.” So, we’re sitting in my house with our friends and we’re like, “Oh my god, the first two days of our trip, what are we going to do?”

And at the time, losing two days of the trip sounded like the worst possible thing that could ever happen. It’s kind of like being on lockdown for, what was it, three weeks or a month in the beginning of March, we were like, “This is the worst thing that could ever happen.” Until the pandemic went on for a year…

It’s kind of like one of those moments where we’re like, “This is the worst-case scenario. Nothing else, it’s the worst thing that could ever happen. And it’s not acceptable and this result is not okay and we’re not waiting two days to fly to Cabo.”

So, we sent the same 37 requests for the next day. And then my assistant also starts looking at commercial flights. So, she finds a commercial flight at 6:30am the next morning from SDF and it’s an economy flight with multiple stops, arriving that afternoon.

And listen, y’all are probably going to judge me. But I was like, “Absolutely not.” The only reason I was willing to go to Mexico in the first place is to fly private. And if I do fly commercial, I only fly first class and have for many years. And once you go first class, it’s like you can never go back. It’s very difficult even in normal times for me. I just won’t do it.

In fact, rewind, I’ll tell you a small story as well. We missed a flight once in – I flew down to Austin with Neil to meet Brooke for Million Dollar Mentoring a couple of months ago and we decided to leave a day later and we never cancelled our flight. We just booked a new one and thought we’ll take the returning flight home from that one.

Except if you don’t show up for your flight, they cancel your entire itinerary. So, we get to the Dallas airport and they’re like, “Oh, you are cancelled completely. You have no flight leaving. We can get you on the Dallas flight getting home, but you’re going to have to take economy there.” And I was like, “Absolutely not.” And I made Neil rent a car and drive us from Austin to Dallas to get on the first-class Dallas flight home.

So, I am a pretty princess. I will admit that. I was like, I really, really, really don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that during the pandemic. I don’t want to do that for multiple flights and for four to six hours of flying, and then downtime in the airports because we would have to sit and do delays and all of that. I just don’t want to do that. I would rather move the trip than do that.

So, at the same time as finding this commercial flight, we also find a flight that is willing to take us at 10am the next morning from SDF private. They tell us that the plane was coming from Denver. It came from Denver. It was already at Louisville. So, we didn’t have to freak out about weather or anything like that. The plane was at SDF and it could take us.

But the cutoff to file a flight plan and customs paperwork, which is all this shit that you never know when you’re flying private. You’re like, “What’s this process that has to happen?”

They have to file a flight plan and do customs paperwork. And the cutoff in Louisville is 5pm. And at this point in the day, after having the 37 requests denied and the 37 requests and finally finding one, at this point it’s 4pm in the day. And they also don’t have a departing cost.

So, they say, “This is how much it would cost us to take you there, but we also have to get home. Because the plane from Indiana was going to take us there and bring us back. And then, we have to find out if they’re available to take us back.

So, I didn’t feel like it was responsible to say yes to the flight moving forward at 4pm if I didn’t know if they were going to be able to bring us back or how we would get home from a foreign country. I feel like that’s still, even looking back, pretty smart.

So, I wanted to make sure what the price was I was agreeing to, that we definitely have a flight. And this conversation, knowing that the cutoff is 5pm, happening at 4pm, didn’t happen in time to file the paperwork and get it going that night.

But they assured us that they would file the flight plan and customs paperwork in the morning. The crew was already there, and we would take off at 10am, and we would land nearly the exact same time as the commercial flight that left at 6:30am would have landed.

So, we say yes. We move forward. We cancel our Indiana flight that wasn’t going to take off for two days. We get up at 6am. We get ready. I remember, my friend Courtney came into the bathroom when I was getting ready and was like, “Oh my god, we’re doing it. Today’s the day.” And we were so pumped now. And we wanted it even more now that we sat around for an entire day unable to get there.

We were just so ready. So, we get loaded up. The car service arrives. We get to SDF. And it’s really setting in, the excitement, like we’re going there. and the driver asks for the tail number, which is what identifies which private plane is yours. So, I start texting with my assistant and she’s like, “The office didn’t open until nine so they’re still filing the paperwork. So, we don’t have all that information yet. It’s just going to be a little bit longer. Hang tight in the van and we’ll get the info.”

30 minutes go by and she texts me, “I can’t believe this, but they sold the plane out from underneath us.” Like, what? I didn’t even know that was a thing. I didn’t know that was possible. Apparently, it is. They sold the plane out from underneath us because they closed at five, they had taken our credit card as a hold, but they hadn’t actually charged it. and we didn’t have actual confirmation. But who knew that they would do such a thing?

So, at this point, we cry in the van and then we head home. And then, we begin the process again of finding a new plane. And apparently it was a holiday weekend. I kept hearing it was President’s Day. I’m like, that’s not a holiday. What’s that? I don’t even know what that is. Like, what is happening?

I would never call that a holiday weekend. Memorial weekend, Labor Day weekend, Mother’s Day weekend for sure. President’s Day weekend, what? Seriously, I’m not trying to be rude. I didn’t know that was a thing that made holiday travel crazy. But apparently it did.

So, the process of finding the plane over a holiday weekend was apparently crazy. But a few hours later, they had found once coming from New York and we were told that we could do a 3pm takeoff. A few hours later after that, we were told an 8pm takeoff. They couldn’t leave New York until later with all the other flights taking off from there because, again, quote unquote the holiday weekend.

So, at this point, we’re exhausted and devastated. So, as we’re waiting, we decide to extend our trip a day and try to and make up for it. and we begin making those arrangements. My assistant called to find out what meals we wanted on the plane or if we were going to get dinner ahead of time. And so, we’re getting all of that information ready. And then two hours later, she calls to say that Mexico has changed their mind and they are denying us entry into the country because they’re not going to pay their people overtime to stay past 10pm to receive us when we would land from an 8pm flight.

So, devastated again. We cancel the flight from New York. But good news. The original plane at the original airport – because they said they weren’t flying for two days – would be good to go the next morning at 8am. They had already done a test flight off the runway. They were good to go.

So, we’re like, alright, fine, we’ve already extended it a day. Now we’ve lost a day. Whatever, we’re still going for four days. Let’s do it.

So, we get in the hot tub with some wine and coach ourselves to be ready to really have the time of our lives once we land. And we’re going through the Instagram and looking at all the places and looking at all the menu and just psyching ourselves up, right? Getting ourselves back in the juju.

I also talked to my – I actually had a call with my coach at some point in this time of, like, help me, I might be losing my mind. So, I had a coaching call at some point with my coach in between.

So, we get up at 4am. We get ready. We load up. We arrive at the airport. And we see no plane. So, our driver gets out to check and they tell her that they have been keeping the plane in the hanger until we arrived so that they don’t have to de-ice it. They’re just going to pull it out and then we’ll go right away.

So, 30 minutes later, we see our plane. We drive up. We load up. We get the cutest photos ever, you know, in front of the private plane. It was my friend Courtney’s first time. So, we got all the photos. We get on the plane and we see champagne and breakfast and coffees and it all really started to feel like it was worth it.

Until Neil gets a tap in the shoulder. And there is a radio issue on the plane, and it needs maintenance. And we have to deboard. So, we take our breakfast and we go to the lobby and wait. And we get an update 30 minutes later that they need to remove the entire system and put it back together to figure out the problem, and that it never happens. It’s never a radio issue. And the pilot is assuring me that he’s sure it’s just a short, the wires have gotten crossed, and when they reassemble it, it will be fine and it will be back to go-time. And they just need an hour to an hour and a half.

Now, this may not seem like a lot, but after two days, we’re like, “Are you freaking kidding me? Really not great. So, we try as calmly and patiently as we can to wait. They move us into a room with a TV and these four recliners. I take a nap. Of course, the TV doesn’t work so we’re just staring at the wall.

Two hours later, they come back and it’s not going to be fixed anytime soon. So, at this point, we’re in the middle of deciding to cancel and what weekends we can reschedule this trip, sending Matt and Courtney back to Chicago. And keep in mind, at this point, my friends have been away from their two-year-old son for three days and no vacation, stuck in an airport, at our house, on vans.

So, we’re in the middle of calling it and my assistant calls to say, “Listen, the moment that plane said they needed maintenance at 8am, we started working on an alternative. There is a plane at SDF, customs paperwork has already been filed. The crew has already been tested for COVID. We have to wait one hour for them to get their results back. And then we just need to get you there and you’ll take off immediately.

So, one hour later, the manager of the Indiana airport that we’re out now comes out to profusely apologize. Again, she says this never happens. She tells me at one point – she has tears in her eyes. You can tell she’s at her wit’s end as well. She’s been trying to fix it this whole time for now two and a half days. And she’s like, “We have not had ice or any kind of airport shutdown in a decade. Planes never have radio issues.”

She said, “Unfortunately, planes do get sold out from underneath people quite a lot. That’s happened.” She’s a pilot herself and she was like, “That has happened to me quite a bit.” But she says, “Of all of the worst-case scenarios that never happen, they all just keep happening to you all.”

And she just keeps saying how sorry she is. And so, she says, “I’m going to drive you over I my personal car and take your luggage and personally see that you get there and you will take off at 1pm.” And I asked her, I said, 1pm or, like we’re shooting for 1pm? Those are very different things”, I’ve learned at that point. And she’s like, “No, literally everything is taken care of. All they need is you on the plane and you take off. You will wait for nothing. 1pm departure, everything’s ready to go.”

So, we agree, we get there, and they won’t let us in the gate because the flight crew hasn’t boarded yet. And they still don’t let us through for 30 minutes. Are you ready for this? Because it turns out, they forgot we were waiting at the gate. Just forgot. We waited in a car, five people in a small car with the heat blasting. I had these boots on with shearling in them, kind of like Ugg Boots but they weren’t Ugg Boots. And I’m like, “My feet are literally dripping sweat inside my boots in this car for 30 minutes.” And we’re just sitting here. And then to find out we were sitting there for no reason.

So, finally, they open the gate when they realize that they never did that. And then we finally get to the plane. And as my friend Matt and Neil get out, they inform us, right in front of the plane, that this plane needs maintenance. It’s low on oxygen. But they tell us not to worry because maintenance is next door and there’s no better place to have a maintenance issue than where we are right there. Our plane is literally next to maintenance.

So, we’re like, at this point, “Okay, but literally, how long is this going to take?” And they’re like, “Five minutes. It will literally take them five minutes.” And we’re like, “If it will only take five minutes, we will wait. But otherwise, we’re out.”

They tell us not to worry. It will be 15 minutes max by the time they go get the guy and bring him over and it will take him five minutes to do the oxygen. 15 minutes later, we get a message. Turns out the maintenance guy’s gone for the day. But they’re going to call a maintenance guy from the Indiana airport to come over and fuel it.

So, once he arrives, it will take five minutes to fix it and we’re on our way. And they’re assuring us, please just be patient, give is one more hour. It’s less than one hour. It will take 30 minutes for the guy to get there, five minutes for him to fix it.

45 minutes later, no guy. One hour later, I’m walking up to them to say, “Nope, we’re done. We’re going home. cancel. We’re done.” He arrives. He literally walks through the door. 10 minutes later, it’s fixed. So, we board the plane. But we have one additional stop now to make, apparently, in Houston, because apparently, it’s Saturday at 3pm and Louisville doesn’t do customs on the weekend.

So, we have to stop in Houston to do the customs stuff. I don’t even know what it is. So, I’m just going to say customs stuff. So, we do our stop in Houston and we finally land in Cabo at 7:30pm on day three, exhausted, demoralized.

But listen, we did have a really great time. More on that in a second. But here’s why I wanted to tell you this story at length. Because I wanted to remind you of the eight phases of a coaching business.

The first phase is you get no engagement. Then you get engagement, but no one requests a consult. Then they request a consult, but they don’t show up. They show up and they say no. They show up and they say yes, and then ghost you or change their mind; usually via email or text, or just no communication at all. They show up and then they say yes, and then they quit after a few sessions. Then they show up and they actually do your program and they complete I and it’s amazing. That’s phase seven. And phase eight is where they’re a yes before you even do the consult and the consult is just figuring out details.

Now, remember that of those eight phases, only two of those eight phases are yesses. Two. Six of the phases are failure phases. You aren’t getting where you want to go. You get so close. Like, you get so close that you feel the emotions of being a paid life coach. It’s finally happening. Only to receive an email a day later saying they looked at their budget and they just can’t afford it.

You get the payment in PayPal. You go to celebrate. You post in 2K and you tell everyone you’re a paid coach. Everyone celebrates you. They do their first session. It’s glorious. And then, they message you that they don’t think coaching is for them and they would like a refund.

Listen, y’all, this sucks. I get it. I mean, it literally takes you to both ends of the emotional spectrum. It is an emotional rollercoaster. But it is part of it. It can be part of it. You all often use these six phases to reinforce your belief that you can’t do it, that you aren’t meant to do it, that it’s not possible, that only the select few make it in the industry. That’s what you tell yourself.

You use the six phases against yourself. You use the no against yourself to solo yourself out, to validate all of the terrible untrue thoughts about yourself that you aren’t good enough, to believe that they’re only happening to you, that you’re the only one getting the noes, that you’re the only one getting lots of noes in a row and lots of cancellations and lots of people changing their mind.

But they aren’t you. They are part of the process. They are things that can go wrong in the process of having a business. Just like this Cabo trip. I learned all of the things that could possibly go wrong with private flying, all in one trip. All of them, hopefully. Hopefully I’ve learned them all.

But seriously, I have spent years of my life, of my personal life, me, working on the belief that terrible things happen only to me. That’s a belief I’ve had. They don’t happen to anybody else. Just me. Starting all the way back from my childhood.

And from the outside looking in, you would look at my life now and think anything but that about me, that my life is amazing, all of the things, it’s so much easier for me, all of the things. But this is something I’ve had to work on so much, just in the last year, even with all of my millions of dollars I’ve made.

I had, at one point, a string of vacations go horribly wrong. I spent five days, the last time I was in Cabo actually, so sick that I could not get out of bed and did not leave the room the entire vacation. I thought I was going to end up in a hospital; in a foreign country again. And then the next trip, we went to Miami during the pandemic, when I thought my sanity was going to break from no sunshine and joy. And it rained the entire time we were there. Like, down poured. My wedding was cancelled. Like, whose wedding gets cancelled because of a pandemic? That’s like, literally, maybe never happened.

So, I would find evidence everywhere to prove this awful story that even when I created success, the universe was basically out to curtail my happiness, or didn’t think I deserved this happiness. It has been a battle in my mind. And I’m finally just not getting to a place where these things happen and I don’t create that reality for myself anymore. I didn’t make this Cabo situation mean anything about the universe’s love for me. I was like, “This is the craziest story and it’s absolutely horrible and I’m exhausted. But I’ve learned a lot about flying private.”

But I remember when those six phases of noes in my coaching business, when at the time I had the belief that horrible things just happened to me, and I had absolutely no success, no relationship, no worldly possessions to even remotely begin to have circumstantial proof of the opposite. Now I actually have circumstantial proof, it still comes up for me.

But I remember how hard I was on myself and how low I got with the failures and how many times I almost quit because I used them all as evidence that it wasn’t working instead of that it was, what it’s the natural process of things, these six phases, these six ways that you can be told no.

And even when it’s not a natural process of things, I just want you to know that you still don’t have to do that to yourself. Neil and I talk about this a lot because he was raised and is a practicing Catholic. And he does not have any ounce of ever, literally 0%, never an ounce of thinking that life happens to him because of the universe or God’s lack of acceptance of him. He just doesn’t have that experience ever for any reason ever no matter what happens.

And I, having not been – like I’ve attributed part of this to being not raised with any religion or any spirituality, have really struggled with this my whole life. There are lots of other reasons, but it’s been a very big struggle of mine. And even now, with all of my success and what you could say is, quite unquote my perfect life, I still experience that.

Going to visit my family to get sunshine and visit my sister’s pool and there’s just one cloud over her house the entire day, making it freezing cold and not fun, and I’m like, “Of course, it’s because I came up.” That tends to be where my mind likes to go, is it’s the universe, God’s unacceptance of me. That’s the thing I’ve had to work on.

And this negative internalization or negative personalization of things that just happen in the world, this is what I mean when I often say that we aren’t entitled to starting where other people start or starting with just, like, “Let me go market my business and sign a client.”

Some of us have to start with, “Negative things that happen in the world aren’t evidence that I’m not loved by God or the universe and am not meant to have wonderful things and do wonderful things.” Like, for some of us, if you’re like me, this may be your starting point.

We might stay in those six phases of noes much longer than other people because this might be what we’re working with, or any other thing; being an extreme introvert, not liking humans, not liking talking on the phone, not liking attention, not liking money, having been through terrible trauma, having been bullied so being online is very scary.

There are so many things we’re all dealing with personally as we move through these six no phases of the eight phases, because remember two were yesses. And some of us have so much work to do that, again, we have to be in those phases much longer and we experience the failure of them maybe much harder and more personally than others.

Like, I had a client tell me that she feels like it’s easier for white women to sell coaching than Black women. Some of us are facing that; facing believing and even factually being in a society that is more accepting and setup for success for other people with lighter skin colors. That’s a thing that we might have to start with.

We have a lot of heavy emotional baggage that many of us bring to these six no phases. And some of us have a lot of heavy life circumstances that are actual factual circumstances that we are bringing along with us during these six no phases.

We have a lot of heavy emotional baggage that many of us bring to these six no phases. And we also have really hard circumstantial factual shit we’re dealing with in our lives as well that we bring to these six no phases. And because of that emotional baggage and the circumstantial differences that might actually make it harder for us, because of that along with the lack of awareness that these are just normal phases that you go through, the six phases that are noes…

But even if they weren’t – because I can tell you that they are actual phases, like the six phases are actually phases because of the thousands of coaches that we’ve coached inside of 2K that have all gone through the exact same things. But even if they weren’t normal, because you experienced failure and then you personalize it, because of this, so many coaches quit. They give up. They take six months off or a year, or two.

And I’m here to tell you that whether it’s circumstantial stuff that’s making it harder and you’re going through a lot more failure than other people have to, maybe you are starting off with no money, completely broke, you’re a single mom and there are a lot of things that are more difficult for you than maybe someone who is married and has all of their bills taken care of and is getting to do the business just because they want to. Those might be circumstantial differences.

And then there are people that might have massive emotional baggage. What I’m here to tell you is to keep going either way. But don’t keep going without also doing the work at the same time.

You have to work on your business and yourself and all of that heavy baggage of the soul all at the same time. You have to evaluate what happened each time you got one of those six noes and learn and grow and gain experience and knowledge around those six no phases. Because they don’t just happen for no reason.

That’s why we evaluate in 2K very specifically. Make sure you watch and study the evaluation classrooms in 2K and you are finding actual gold inside those evals. There is always 100% something you can control that can turn a no around into a yes, almost 100% of the time.

We teach in 2K that the customer behavior in those six phases is a result of how you show up almost 100% of the time. You might have those very rare outliers where literally somebody gets on the phone with you but their account is negative. But even then, we have situations where people have found money to pay for coaching. That’s what I mean.

Another example, someone was getting tons of no-shows on consults and we uncovered that he was sending a bunch of reminder emails about showing up for the call and basically convincing them to show up from the predominant belief that they wouldn’t.

So, there are always those things that contribute to those six phases. Before they get on the call and then the entire time they’re on the call, there are things that you are doing as part of that engagement that create those noes.

And the more you focus on breaking down the very specific technique and the very specific mindset and thoughts as you market a new consult, the more you evaluate and find answers to why you got the result that led to a no, when you know the technical reason for the no, even if that was like a thought you were having that led to the no, the less you will make it a personal reason for the no.

And then, when you’re doing that, when you are also at the same time working on your own personal growth and self-concept and healing and you are committed to both processes for as long as it takes, that is when the magic will happen.

I recently sent an email to my list, maybe a month ago, with the timeline of my success, personal and professional. We also did it on IG, but we could only fit the business side on IG because it was such a long email, of what it really looked like to build this $10 million over the last seven years. Yes, we have, by the way, just a small celebration, officially made $10.9 million since I opened Stacey Smith coaching at the time.

In fact, in case you missed that email, I will have Pavel put the entire email with all the personal stuff too in the show notes of this episode so that you can read it, so you can really see what I mean by how much emotional and circumstantial things I was coming up against and all of the failures and noes that I had in my business, and then that I still kept going and how that level of resilience and then the level of work that went into creating this business that looked so easy now. So, we’ll put that in the show notes. Make sure you go to the show notes of this episode and we’ll have that in there.

So, many of you know that I built my business going through the worst heartbreak of my life, living in hotel rooms, broke with a negative bank account. So, when I say that you have to go through the healing work too, the self-worth work, I really mean it.

I coached for a full year before I ever decided to become a coach and then it still took 18 more months before I made 100K. But when you’re willing to totally immerse and attack your goals from the mind and the strategy, that is when you will get more and more of those yesses.

Now, since we’re talking about the eight phases of a coaching business, I do feel like I want to mention this. There are a few ways that you can go to extremes with this information.

You either think you need years of deep healing work and self-worth work before you can even start a business. I always say that you cannot chant your way to cash and you can’t just self-develop your way to a client. You won’t ever magically be perfect.

Like, I told my coach about this Cabo situation and we actually celebrated that I didn’t make it mean terrible things about me and being a victim to the universe. We were like, “Well, here’s a sign of growth. Didn’t make it mean terrible things.”

So, you just have to get started making money now with no excuses. No bettering yourself first. No perfecting before you start making actual strong offers and start hearing noes. The noes are what’s actually going to bring up all your shit to be worked on. How you handle the no is what’s going to help you navigate what person work you need to do. And then what technical part of the sales process that created the no will be how you gain experience and move forward while you work on the personal stuff as well.

So, you get started with where you are and what you have, no matter what, right now. So, another way that some people go to the extreme is you believe it’s a normal part of the process to get the noes. Like you agree with me there. But so much so that you expect them and you shrug them off as part of the process and you anticipate lots of noes so much that you create them into reality.

When you are doing this, often, how you’ll know you’re doing this is you will not have a really strong emotional reaction to not hitting your goal. So, I see coaches that, like, two years in are shrugging, like, “Well, I know failure is part of the process. I’m good. I’m learning a lot.”

That’s why I have you commit in 2K to making money in 30 days. And if you don’t, you start that 30 days over. But you give yourself very constrained timelines. You don’t give yourself a year or two years or three years. It doesn’t mean you’re not willing to give it that much time, but you don’t tell yourself that’s how much time it’s going to take because there’s going to be so many noes.

Another way that you know you’re doing this is if you don’t evaluate meticulously each no, each phase of those eight phases, and coming out very specifically with what you need to do differently and then doing it and seeing progress as you go. If you don’t have a clear indicator of exactly why you are where you are and a very detailed plan of how you’re fixing it, then you’re going to be in this kind of failure expectancy.

And whether you’re attributing that to the process or to you personally, neither are effective or good uses of your time. And then the third way you might go to an extreme – and I’m really sure that there are a lot more ways that you could use this information in an extreme way, but we’ll settle with this one – is when you’re trying to fix everything all at once in this instance. So, you don’t see it as a process and you overwhelm yourself with personal and sales coaching development.

Like in my 200K mastermind, I make them choose three essentials, three things that they think are the most important to work on while they make money. And then everything else, they have to work to be okay with those things not being fixed or not being worked on or given attention to now.

There’s a little bit of, like, it’s okay that it’s not perfect right now, these are the things I’m working on. You’re not going to go from believing that God doesn’t love you, you’re cursed, and everything happens to you and knowing nothing about coaching and sales to signing a client and making money as a life coach in 30 days by buying 10 coaching programs all at once.

But remember, making that leap also doesn’t mean that it takes five years or even two, even if you’re making that big of a leap, okay. You make money while you work on yourself. You focus on other people and helping others while you help yourself on your own time. This is why I recommend that you just get started somewhere.

Another recap. I have an investing series on this podcast where we talk about the three investments you want to make as a coach as soon as you possibly can. And you want to utilize them fully in no particular order. But those are sales coaching, or marketing sales coaching, business coaching, personal development. I really love a one-on-one coach for this. And coach training.

And I have clients that have started in all different orders. I did one on one and then business training and then certification followed my more one on one, more business training, eventually got master certified. I still have a one-on-one coach.

I have clients who start in 2K, hire a one on one later, then after making hundreds of thousands of dollars do certification. I have many who have never done certification. I have some that start with 2K, then do certification, then hire a one on one. There’s no one path. Just those are the three I recommend.

Get yourselves a really good one-on-one coach to work through your personal stuff, learn about sales and marketing, and learn how to coach. At some point, you may be able to do all three at once if you have money to spare and time to give, do all three at once. Totally, that’s what I would do.

But if you can’t, pick one and work on it. But be working as you go. You just have to choose a few things to work on, start working on them, and then gradually over time, all of that stuff will compound. You will see that in my timeline for success if you go to the show notes.

And actually, finally, I want to say this. I thought of another one, which is really more of a thought error, which is believing that the eight phases of a coaching business are linear or sequential, meaning that you have to go through the six no phases and lots of those noes before you get to a yes and that it’s going to be along road. That’s also not true.

Some people sign the first person that they talk to. Some get six yesses in a row right up front. You may get a few yesses followed by a few months of the six other phases. Don’t tell yourself that you’re going backwards, that you’re regressing. Just know that up until 100K or even 200K, you’ll go through these phases and jump around and periods of yes don’t mean that you’re never going back to the other six phases.

And going back to them or being stuck in them for a while doesn’t mean anything either. There is no meaning behind the phase you’re in. Only the specific technical reason or the personal mind fuck that you’re currently in. And you aren’t entitled or doomed for permanence in any of them.

You’re not entitled to being in the yesses forever and never reverting back to the six no phases. And you’re not doomed to staying in the six no phases forever. Even millionaires have bad fucking days and horrible travel and business issues and personal shit happens. It happens, okay.

I really hope this helps you not quit on yourself because that will only make succeeding take even longer. And I will tell you, just to wrap this up, we had an amazing fucking time in Cabo. Like, amazing. I rented this insane two-level yacht that we spend eight hours on just going through the water, out into the ocean, watching whales come up. We had one baby whale literally swim up to our boat. We got to see the entire thing, like a foot away from us.

We saw the most incredible things. We had so much fun. We jammed out on the boat and had pina coladas and margaritas. It was so much fun. We laid by the pool for two straight days and literally the pool was an infinity pool that overlooked the ocean and we just watched whales jump out of the water and we went to – oh my god, we went to Nobu Cabo. Stop it right now.

If you ever go to Cabo, you must go to Nobu Cabo. It will take you forever to get there unless you stay at their hotel. It is a very long drive. But go for sunset. Oh my god. We actually didn’t go for sunset, so I’m just going to tell you, we went at night so it was already dark. But I can imagine what it would have looked like at sunset. The most incredible vibe ever.

And we love Nobu. It’s like our favorite food. But that was our favorite night, until we went to Sunset Mona Lisa and were on a cliff at actual sunset. We got the most amazing professional photos. We saw more whales jump in the air, we saw surfers in the ocean surfing the giant waves. It was so much fun.

We went to the spa and I had my first facial. I’m obsessed with them now. It was really the most incredible, fun, amazing trip. We had the best conversations, the best food. They have the best cocktails. I’m actually thinking of having a 200K event there. We were just so impressed by the customer service, the cleanliness of the place, everything was open-air concept. We had to get COVID tested to get back into the United States. And it’s right – actually the convention center and the testing site is right next to it.

And you just make an appointment, there’s no waiting. You walk up. The nurse takes your COVID test and you get the results back in 10 minutes. What? It was insane. It was just luxurious. And oh my god, the people, they were so grateful for us to be there. They could not have taken better care of us. It really made me realize how many people are suffering from this pandemic and how much tourism and putting back into the economy matters at times like this, along with being incredibly safe and following all guidelines.

They were just incredibly so grateful, so we of course just tipped them, all of the people all of the money. We wanted them to be so well taken care of. But it was four days of incredible fun. And so, I just want you to know that there will be a time in your business – and I will just tell y’all a little secret before we end this. That even when you do get a bunch of clients in the beginning, they’re like – some of them. Not all of them. Because I’m still really good friends with two of my first clients and many of my first-first clients. I think four or five of my bridesmaids are from my first year of coaching. They were all my clients.

But the ones that didn’t stick around and become bridesmaids, there were some doozies. So, even when you get a full coaching practice, your first load of clients, at least half of them are usually the most difficult, just because of where you are when you sell and how your coaching style is just not as skilled yet.

So, you don’t get the best clients ever in the beginning. So, I just want you guys to know though that if you’re willing to go through all of the har work and all of the failure and all of the crap that comes your way, it gets really, really, really good.

Okay, I love you all so much. I hope you enjoyed that story. And I hope that this helps you keep going in your busines. Love you all so, so much.

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.

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