Ep #414: The Value of Time

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.

Hi coaches, welcome to episode 414. Today I have a very short but very potent episode for you. I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of time. I believe time is more valuable than money, deeply in my core. But I believe a lot of people have an opposite belief, and that belief creates every single objection they might have to hiring a coach to expedite results to save time.

Many people live in the belief that money is more valuable than time. This may even be their realistic life circumstance that their money is more valuable than their time. But I want to create a world, and I think you do too, for everyone where time is more valuable than money. But I believe that’s actually true regardless of circumstantial financial situations. I believe this for every human.

Time, if you just think of it as an overall, what we’re doing here on the planet, the thing we’re doing is living. We are experiencing time. That is the thing. It’s the finite thing that we have. It does not matter how much money we have. Depending on what your view is of the point of life, it’s to live. It’s not to have money. So time is more valuable than money. But most people see money as more valuable than time.

So as I’m coaching students on their consult calls and the objections their clients come, when they have this belief that money is more valuable than time, this is why they cling to their money. If it’s more valuable than their time, then they’re going to hold on to it very strongly. This is why they will want to try it on their own. Oh, let me try it on my own with my own time and my own energy because my time and my energy isn’t more important than the money. I would rather use my time and energy. They may not realize that’s what they’re deciding. They might not know that’s what they’re saying.

But that is what they’re saying when they say, I think I’m going to try it on my own first. I need to try the things that we’ve talked about on this call. It’s like, let me use my time and energy first and see if it works before I trade any kind of money. This is why they take a while to decide. I need lots of time to decide because the money is so important to me.

This is why I make decisions very quickly because my time is so important to me. I don’t want to be thinking about something for endless amounts of time. I don’t want to be in the messy in-between. I don’t want to be in, I have a problem, here’s a solution, and let me work myself up to getting to that solution. 

So I’m having a conversation with my client who was talking about their client and how they’re very stressed about money, but they’re getting incredible results, and they know that what they’re coaching them on is going to 100% come back to them. And they were saying how they just didn’t think that they were going to renew. And I said, “Well, if they don’t, it’s because they’re valuing their money over their time and their experience.” 

Like, if it’s really helping, it’s really working, why wouldn’t we want to move towards better, faster results? Why wouldn’t we want to move towards more of what we really want in this one precious life that we live? Why wouldn’t we want to double down on a better life experience other than, well, let me just do it on my own now so that I can save money, because right now that’s the thing I have to prioritize.

So if money is a more scarce resource to the person you’re speaking to or even to you, I always say we’re client one. So if money is a more scarce resource, then you will have to guard it. It’s the entire DIY community, right? The do-it-yourself economy is built on money is the scarce resource, so we need to DIY. But you’re thinking, and this is so important because I think when I coach on things like this or when I offer this perspective, it could seem like that’s fancy for you. You have millions of dollars. Good for you. You don’t live in the real world. 

But I started very differently than I’ve ended up. I had no business in this lifetime having millions of dollars. I had no business with the life I was born into and the resources and the money I had, and the decision-making that I did. I had no business becoming a millionaire. None. But this is why I feel so strongly in saying this, regardless of what the actual financial situation is, regardless. And if you remember, I invested in my life before I invested in a business. I spent money on my life when I had no business spending money on my life to improve my life when there was very limited resources of it. And my time, circumstantially, might have been less valuable than my money.

So I’ve been in that position. I have been in the DIY economy. I have been the person that needs to guard the money because it is a scarce resource. But ultimately, this is the way I started making my decisions that completely changed my life. Before I ever became a coach, before I ever became an entrepreneur, before I ever was going to be paying for coaching to get some sort of financial return, to try to get a financial return. Before any of that, when I was just living a messy life existence, when I had lots of negative results happening in my life, none of which were things I deeply wanted or none of which were intentional. This is what I thought about when I thought about exchanging my scarce resource of money in order to expedite results, in order to speed up results, in order to create a life where my time was more valuable than my money. 

This is what I thought. My thinking and my decision-making creates my results. So if my thinking and my decision-making creates all my results and I have a stack of negative ones, unintentional ones, ones that do not make me feel like I am living the life I want to live, then that’s what I have to change. And what I recognized very early on is that it was actually costing me money not to have someone help me create better thinking and decision-making in my life. That it was going to cost me a lot more in my lifetime to not figure out how to live intentionally and create positive results for myself. It was going to cost me a lot more money than the money I was going to invest for myself. At the time, I think my very first investment was $5000. It wasn’t a lot, but it was a lot for me.

And then it was $6000, and then $10,000, all before I actually became an entrepreneur. But I knew, so whatever that is, what, $21,000, I knew over a lifetime, if I have a life coach helping me think differently, decide differently, feel differently, create differently, this will save me an insane amount of money in my lifetime.

One of the big things I even coached on was money and learning how to get a hold of my money because I was behind on a lot of my bills. And I didn’t seem to ever understand how to get ahead. And so that was one of the things, amongst many of the things, better relationships, better time management, more intentional use of my time, being more powerful in my life, taking more responsibility, creating with intention- all of the things. 

And I knew that was going to create way more compounding results than guarding that money because I clearly didn’t even know how to use that money. I wasn’t using it well. If you don’t have enough money to invest in yourself and go do something that you really want to do, that is a result coming from the way you think and make decisions and the way that you operate in the world. So if you ever want to break out of that, you have to change the thinking and the feeling and the decision-making that creates that result. I don’t have enough money to live the life I want to live.

But more importantly, the thing that I thought is, if you think money is more valuable than time and your thinking creates your results, then you will continue to make decisions with your time that create money being more valuable than time. That’s not what you want. I know it’s kind of a, what?

I remember being at a free money seminar, three days. I drove to Chicago from Kentucky, which is about six hours, to go to this free money makeover event for three days. And this was one of the epiphanies I had, is that if I continue to believe money is more valuable than time, I will continue to make decisions with my time that create money being more valuable than time. I will never break out of that cycle. I will never end up with the results where my time becomes more valuable than my money because I have so much of it.

I wanted my time to be more valuable than my money. And you want that to be true, in my opinion, to take it a step further. I think you want that to be true because you’re also rich. I think it’s two stages, right? I think always, no matter how much money you have, your time is more valuable than your money. You get one life. That’s it. One.

If you’ve listened to my episode on emotional wealth over material wealth, it is one of my greatest beliefs. Deep down in my core, I believe our emotional wealth is more important than our material wealth. I believe that our freedom, our happiness, living life as if we only get one, one time, one shot, that is more important. So it’s also been why I invested, you know, I remember having a $300,000 business, and I’m living in this tiny rundown apartment complex, making way more money than everybody else. 

But at the time I was like, I’m creating this asset that’s going to keep building more and more money, and I don’t need the material wealth of a big beautiful home. Eventually I bought the big beautiful home, but I didn’t need it. I was like, I want to get to a million dollars. I didn’t buy the big beautiful home until that was done. I hadn’t made a million yet, but it was the year I made $860,000. So I just, in my belief system, I was like, this is done, this is happening. Like, I’m there. It felt like it should have already happened. And I crossed it a couple months later. 

In my mind, that million-dollar business mattered more. So it’s important that you know that I have that belief too when I talk about this, the value of time and it being more valuable than money. And I believe many of you agree with me on this, but what I have found, and I’ve been thinking about this for myself is sometimes, if we grow up in a society, in a world that has the belief system that money is more important than time and that’s the way society is structured, then you will get to moments in your career and in your life where the decision to invest or to do something big in your business, whatever it is, that decision could be so big that your brain tries to revert back to its most thought-out decision-making process. It’s most rehearsed decision-making process.

And so if you’ve spent 30 years believing, 40 years, 50 years, 60 years, believing money is more valuable than time in some capacity or being given that message by your family or by society, and then you have this really big decision, if you’re not very intentional with it, your brain could be like, I don’t want to lose the money. The money is very important. I don’t want to give up the money. The money is very important. I need to guard the money. It may not come back. And we’re not thinking about our time. 

But if you want to create a life and a result where you have emotional wealth, and to me that’s the first stage, you want your time to be more valuable than your money, regardless of how much money you have. That’s the only way you start creating an intentional life, is you start intending things prior to creating the things. You start making decisions prior to creating the thing. You make it as if you are going to inevitably create the thing, and that’s how you create the thing. So that’s the first stage. I believe time is more valuable than my money, even if I don’t have lots of money, even if I don’t have that level of privilege. 

And then you create a life that’s so privileged that your time is more valuable than money circumstantially. That you make more money per minute, per hour, per day than you can spend, or that an investment or that a thing would cost. So you’re like, oh, something’s $20,000, something’s $50,000, something’s $100,000. Well, that might be worth more, even it’s so crazy. Now, and this happens a lot in my millionaire rooms, we’ll be discussing, like, is $100,000 worth our time? Is something that we would, when you’re looking at your offers, and you’re like, I wouldn’t do it for $100k. I wouldn’t do it for a million dollars. It would need to be more than that. That’s like wild land. 

I want you all to be there, by the way. I want you all to be able to say I don’t get out of bed for $100,000. That is my goal. And the ultimate goal would be like, I don’t get out of bed for a million dollars. Like, come on. I just think, why not? Especially if our time is more valuable than money, let’s go create something so wild that you could say that to yourself. Maybe it’s like, I don’t get out of bed for$10,000. I want you to have that level of rich life. And I know that level of rich life comes from the belief time is more valuable than money. 

And then I go take actions that prove that to be true. I value my time very highly. I use my money to expedite things, to get better at things, to grow my brain, to improve my skill sets, to create a better life experience, to stack up to be all of my decisions made with time and money. And it’s not willy-nilly decisions. It’s my decisions around time and money are strategically set up to help me create a life that feels rich and then is rich for you all. But if you’re not coaching on money, I still think the message holds true because I do believe there are two life experiences that you can have, right? 

So the first stage is your time is more valuable than money, and you have only a little money, and you make do. You can live modestly; you can do the bare minimum of work and the bare minimum of spending. You can live under your expenses, and you can have a rich life of time, very strategically.

I know so many people who do very well with the money they have. They make incredible decisions, they make very intentional decisions with the exact circumstantial amount of money they have, and they choose for that life to be very rich in experiences and love and connection and all of the things that I would want for every human in the world. 

And then the next level is time is more valuable than money and you have a lot of it. So you live exactly how you desire to live. You can do all the extra things that your brain can dream up, upgrades. You can do dream things that you see on Instagram or on social media, and you’re like, oh my God, what a life. That would be so amazing.

We all have big dreams. This is the other thing I believe is we all have actually really big dreams. It’s just whether or not we have the tools and the support to go after them, which is where I believe entrepreneurship comes in because it allows us to make incredible amounts of money and live really, truly any life experience that we want to live.

And even in this scenario, you can live dramatically under your expenses, and then what I believe happens when you have lots of money on top of lots of time is you have a very rich life of experiences and contribution and time. You get all of it. It’s not, let me make sure my desires don’t exceed my income. It gets to be, let my desires exceed my income, and then let my income grow to that desire. And for me, that has been the most fun experience. When I use it for myself instead of against myself, it’s such a fun experience.

And I believe the second is a bigger world. And I believe most of you listening want a bigger world. You want it for yourself, but you also want it for your clients. And I also believe the people coming to you, seeking out a life coach, want that too. 

I think the greatest thing to ever personally develop anyone ever is developing a better relationship with time, right? If someone’s interested in personal development, the thing that will personally develop them the most is figuring out how to use their time better. And the first step to that is exchanging money to speed up and secure your ability to use time better. Because if we knew how to use it by ourselves better than what we’re using it now, we just would be.

If we could have thoughts that created a better use of our time, if we had thoughts that gave us more energy with the time that we have, if we had thoughts that gave us more productivity, if we had better thoughts that helped us edit and organize and prioritize better, if we had better thoughts that created more alignment or congruence with the things that we’re doing so that the outcomes are better, every ounce of the relationship with time, there’s nothing that’s going to make you develop yourself more. And I believe entrepreneurship requires this of us.

For those of you listening, turning this around to you for a second, I really believe putting time as your highest priority and getting support to use that at the highest level, that is the ultimate thing you can do for the ultimate life experience. And entrepreneurship require that of you so deeply.

People are always telling me, “Oh, I don’t have enough time, so I’m going to quit my full-time job so that I have time to build my business.” And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. Develop a better relationship with time so that you can do both, so that your business doesn’t make you go broke. Create proof of concept. Have money coming in so much that you’re able to grow your business, invest in yourself to grow your business. If you don’t have to, you don’t want to take on debt for your business. If you don’t have to, I did, but if you don’t have to, why would you? 

And keeping my job full-time until I made $100k kept that debt ratio way down. It could have gone astronomical if I was like, oh, you know what, for the next year while I build my business, I’m just not working. I would have instead of being in 10k in debt, I think at 100k I was in 10k of debt, and then I paid it all off. But it could have been 70k because I was making 60k a year after taxes. So it would have been $70,000 in debt if I was like, oh, and probably more because I don’t think I would have made as much money. But I was getting on my calls feeling so much sufficiency because my job was paying for all of my bills and a lot of my investments. And then the bigger ones I decided to use debt and leverage that to have more time. 

But I think it would have been like, I wouldn’t have made as much money and I would have had a lot more debt and I don’t know if I would have grown as fast. So I’m always telling my students, you need to press your time. You need to improve your relationship with your time by expanding your capacity around time. You need to put pressure on your time to really kind of force a capacity expansion around time, to force yourself to manage your time better and be bringing money in so that you’re able to take care of yourself and you’re more sufficient when you’re selling.

And then when you have proof of concept, and your business is making so much money, and you can really trust your business as a grown-up business, you’ll see a point, like, I always tell people the best time to leave your job is when you start making more in your business per hour than you are in your job, because now it’s costing you money to stay at your job. That’s the best time.

But until then, personally develop yourself and your relationship with time and use money to do that. Invest in yourself, invest in your thinking and your decision-making and your outcomes, the way you want other people to do that with you. So that you create a bigger world for yourself, and your people, again, who are seeking out personal development, seeking out a life coach, they want that too. They want a bigger, better world.

No one is showing up to a consult with a life coach or a nutrition coach or a business coach or a career coach or a marriage coach. No one’s showing up to that consult, a parenting coach. No one’s showing up if they don’t want a better life than what they have now. They want something they don’t have yet. And most of them, some of them it might be money, but most people, because I coach all life coaches, you are business coaches or money coaches of any kind, most people are wanting a better emotional experience, a better life experience. 

But then they’re going to turn around and decide about that life and emotional experience, getting their children help, saving their marriage, learning how to have a better relationship with people, growing that career, being more productive, whatever it is. They’re going to take that thing and they’re going to decide, oh, wait, you just told me the price. I was really on track with the value of what you were describing for this life or emotional experience that I want, but now you’ve added a price to it and now my brain is like, no. I really want this, but I don’t really know if I’m going to get it, and money feels more valuable than time.

So let me just try it on my own. Let me just see if things online. You know, I haven’t really given it a go. Let me really give it a go and then I’ll see. People only ever say, I’m going to try it on my own when they’re trying to save money. You can’t convince me otherwise. 

There is no other outcome. I can hire an expert to help me do it faster and better. If I genuinely believe this could work, and this is the other piece, if you genuinely believe it could work, you wouldn’t be wanting to try it on your own. That would be the only reason you would want to try it on your own is you believe it could work. So you’re not believing, right? Because if you didn’t believe it would work, you would just be like, I don’t think this is going to work.

But you believe it’s going to work, so you want to try it on your own. The only reason you want to try it on your own is because you want to save some cash. You want to save money. So you’re valuing money over that result, over the speed to which you could get it, over the percentage of chance of you getting it, because your percentage of getting something is going to be higher if you hire an expert, and you’re valuing the money over all of that.

But when you develop your relationship with time and you invest in yourself and your thinking and your decision-making, what ultimately ends up happening is you have a great relationship with your one and only life, your one and only.

I would never gamble my time. I would very much rather gamble my money. Think about it. Money is a renewable resource. You can get more of it. I’m always telling my students, whenever they invest in something, the thing I do is I automatically tell myself if I don’t make the money back through my revenue increasing, how will I pay this back? How long will it take me? Okay, it’ll take me a year to pay this back. I’m just giving an example. Let’s just say it’ll take me a year to pay this back. Okay, but let’s say that in that year that it takes me to pay it back, I’ve become someone completely different who lives my life ongoing forever differently.

Even if I got no results. Let’s say no results. I didn’t become better. Let’s say I invested in my business, my revenue didn’t grow, I didn’t become better. It was a failed investment. I will still be the person at the end of my life that gets to say I played full out, I tried everything. I really went for it in my one and only life. And I will make up for it, whether it’s in a month or a year. I’ve already replaced the revenue or the income, the way that I would if I go on vacation, right? We go on vacation, maybe you spend $5k on vacation, and then you go make that money again, and you replenish it.

But you can’t make that time again. So this is why time is the more valuable resource. You can always get and make more money. You can never make more time. It is actually finite. We have one life, x amount of hours, x amount of days, x amount of years, and we don’t know how much that is. That’s it. It’s not renewable.

So investing, exchanging your time for money, is the least expansive way to live life regardless of your financial situation. It is actually the least expansive way. It’s perpetuating the cycle of using time, losing time, and not usually gaining much money. Preserving money, sure, but not gaining. So I can use time, lose time, preserve money, but for what? What are we ever preserving money for? The end of our lives? Retirement when it’s over and we’re allowed to finally live? We could just live now. We could live now. We could say this is the life I would want in retirement. So I’m going to make decisions that create this now. 

If you read up on people who retire, it’s like, maybe part of it is I don’t want to work. Many people actually end up going back to work. They just didn’t want to do the thing they were doing. But really, they just want to live life on their terms. They want to feel like I get to be in charge today. But we could decide that now. I get to be in charge today. We could live that now. And for me, I’m interested in that second layer. I want to help people get so much money that their time becomes increasingly valuable and they’re very scrutinizing of how they use it.

My husband always laughs, my poor team. He made this comment that anytime there is like any sort of hang-up, whether it’s a technical issue or investigation, anything where it’s like you could be sitting around waiting for something, I’m always out. Always, immediately. If I don’t have to be here and you don’t need my brain solving this, I’m out. 

But because I’m going on to the very next thing on my calendar that I can do to create value and then I’ll swing back when it’s been solved, it’s like my brain is always thinking, how do I use my time in the best, most efficient way? Because I only get a certain amount of it. So I want my people to live their lives in a way where their time becomes increasingly valuable in that way, where you would also scrutinize every ounce of the way you use your time. Where you make all of your choices based on preserving your time. You only do what you want to do. Your brain focuses on your genius; your soul focuses on your desires, your experiences, soaking up life, creating memories, curating intentionally. I’m going to say it again: this one magical life you have. 

And then you’re able to expand time. The only way that you actually can, which is use it the best that you can. Using time well gives you the feeling of more time. So it makes it feel not quite as finite. It gives you more usage of that time. So you can pay with your time and create a cycle where your time is always valued under your money, or you can pay with your money to figure out how to start using your time better. And to me, this is the entire reason to hire a coach, to buy a program that teaches a skill set, to join a mastermind, to do any investing in yourself personally or professionally.

So for you, if you have a client on the call who’s thinking about doing it themselves, or they want to spend lots of time thinking about whether they should invest with you, I would wonder why they want to pay with their time. Do they see it as their most valuable resource? I would never want to do that.

And first and foremost, I might ask you that very same question. Are you paying with your time right now? Are you DIYing things? Are you trying to figure it out on your own? Because if you’re trying to figure it out on your own, guarding money as your most precious resource, not valuing your time above your money, you’ll never talk someone else out of that. You’ll never say the thing. I can only say this with such conviction because I do it. I live it constantly. And I did it way before I ever had a business. 

The decision was never invest this money so you can make more money. That’s not the decision I was making. It’s so important you hear that. I was making the decision, invest money so you live differently. And I saw that as a better exchange from the very beginning. It’s why it’s so easy for me to sell coaching.

It’s not… people think it’s because I offer a financial outcome. There’s no promise. But because I coach entrepreneurship, because I coach business and people invest in business because there is an implied hope of financial return, they’re like, oh, well, you know, people can make more money, so they can justify that to themselves. They pay 10k and they’re trying to make 100k or whatever it is. So they can justify that as an investment. But I did this way before. I was justifying investments not with financial return, but with a life returned to me as the author, the creator, and the intender of my most important desires. 

That’s what I was doing. That’s the result I wanted to create. That’s what I was willing to part money with in order to have an expert guide me. I didn’t want to do it on my own. I had 30 years of doing it on my own. It wasn’t working. Maybe that was the biggest miracle is that I had the self-awareness, it’s not working. Some of us don’t have that self-awareness. We’re like, oh, let me try it again first. And then we take so much longer trying to be scrappy. I don’t think your business is where you want to be scrappy. I think your business is where you want to be very abundant and generous with yourself. 

This is the way I think about it. If I want my business to create abundant, generous returns, I need to start by being abundant and generous with what I feed it. So I feed it only the best, the top tier, the most advanced, every single time, without question. If you give me a low-end offer, I’m going to be like, what’s your best offer? If you give me the entry point, great. If I need to take the entry point, I will. But where’s the max? Where’s the closest proximity? Where’s the highest level of mentorship? Gimme, gimme. And I’m willing to pay for it because what I know to be true is that I would rather have the help, support, and the opposite of DIY, done with me. I would rather have that experience every day of the week. I know it’s going to speed things up. 

That’s my podcast for you today. I want you to think about, use yourself as client one first. I went kind of back and forth on this episode, but use yourself as client one, because you’ve got to see where you’re doing it first. And then the more you step out of that, the easier it will be for you to stand for other people. You can’t stand for them unless you’ve gone through it. And I think good and bad, if you’ve invested in yourself and it didn’t go according to plan, but you survived, if you have let go of the pain and the shame and you’ve processed into wisdom, you’re like, yeah, sometimes it doesn’t go the way you think. You’ll survive. That’s failure tolerance. We get up and we go again. I have very high failure tolerance for investing in myself too. So I just am not afraid of people. 

So many of you also get stuck when people are like, well, I might spend this money and I might not get what I want. And I’m like, yeah, there’s no guarantees. But there’s a better chance if you invest and hire an expert to get you help. There’s a better chance at that than doing it yourself because you haven’t been able to figure it out yourself. So I know one has a higher chance than the other. So if you’re worried about money, I would for sure invest in yourself. I would for sure invest in help, because the worry for money isn’t going away. The life situation that creates the worry for money isn’t going away, and you’re not doing it yourself, or you would have already. That’s the point. 

All right, y’all. Go through this for yourself if you haven’t already. If you have, stack your experiences for yourself. Look at it through this lens and be like, oh, you’re right. I do make these decisions. I need to stop letting people off the hook. I need to stop not pointing this out. I need to stop being too nice because it’s costing them money and time. It actually is costing them both to keep DIYing it when it’s not working. One life, X amount of hours, X amount of days, X amount of years, and we don’t know what that is. An unmeasurable amount of time, I mean, truly, we know that maybe you could live to 100 years. If you’re like the best health, so you could maybe use that, but it could be 70, it could be 50. So whatever it is, we want to make sure we’re using those hours the best possible way we can. 

All right, y’all. Have an amazing rest of your week. I will talk to you next week. Bye-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.