Ep #114: Making Money with Stacey Boehman

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, episode 114, Making Money with Stacey Boehman.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. What’s going on in your world? It’s been a little bit exciting and kind of crazy in mine. So settling into the new house and while I was in California a little while ago, which I mentioned on the podcast, we had the house repainted while I was gone and new carpet put in when we came back and then we did all the cleaning work to get rid of all the leftover things that hadn’t yet been moved and sell some odds and ends and just clean it up, get it listed on the market.

I don’t know if the market is as hot in your neck of the woods as it is in mine, but oh my goodness, we listed it and within two days we had 19, 20 showings, and eight offers. It was just wham, wham, wham, very fast. Very fast, very exciting.

I think the new buyer – I haven’t met him yet, but I just have this feeling I’m just going to like him. I think he loved my garage, I think he loved the backyard. I had a five-car tandem garage that was kind of hidden. And it was great for storing stuff, really unique in my neighborhood. It’s mostly a three car garage neighborhood.

And then I had this beautiful backyard, which I loved and had a lot of privacy. Had a kind of farmhouse behind me, and most houses in that neighborhood, you have someone looking at you on your back porch and mine was not like that.

So I think this gentleman fell in love with that and I’m super excited to have it all done and it went better than expected. So that’s what’s happening in my world. Still a little bit – I’m going to be honest, still the grief grenades here and there. But the more and more we got through the moving and the stuff and all of it for me, the easier that it got. So glad to have that almost in the rearview mirror.

Alright, let me tell you about today’s episode. It’s a little bit different than what we’ve done before. If you’ve listened to the podcast that I did not long ago about money, I talked about someone who inspired me. It was an episode called Money Fears. I talked about someone who inspires me and has just such a wonderful money story.

And so I invited her on to the podcast so she could tell it to you herself. Now, she’s not a widow but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. She is an example and we need more examples like her of women who make money.

And do it in a way that’s authentic and through service. And so I’ve invited her to tell you her story of what it was like to move from being literally broke and in debt. She’ll joke about it but she had two spoons to her name. Two spoons, to making multiple millions of dollars a year.

And doing it in a way that is full of integrity and class. And completely breaking the myth that it takes money to make money, or that you have to be some sort of specials snowflake to make money. I love her story because she’s been such a guiding light to me.

I’ve always looked at her as another coach in my industry and said, if Stacey can do it, and she can do it in a way that’s honest and in a way that is not perfectionist, then any one of can do it. We can all do it. And this is – doesn’t matter what your career is. It doesn’t matter at all.

It matters that you understand how to think on purpose about money and that you understand that you get to be in charge of your relationship with money, and that whatever is possible for someone else is possible for you too and we all need those examples. So I hope you’ll enjoy this interview with Stacey Boehman and with that, we’ll jump right in.

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Krista: So welcome to the podcast, Stacey. I am so excited to have you here. I have talked about you on the podcast already, so my listeners, if they’ve listened to one of the episodes that I did about money, I kind of just told a little highlight of your story. But I’m really excited to have you on because I want them to hear it from you. So welcome.

Stacey: Yeah. I’m excited to tell it.

Krista: So why don’t you just start by just giving people the highlights? Who you are, what you do, all those kinds of things.

Stacey: Yeah, oh my gosh, okay. So my name is Stacey Boehman and I am a business coach for life coaches. I help them make money. So I feel like I have studied money indefinitely, lots and lots. And you and I were talking before the podcast, I came from no money.

My parents were both blue-collar workers, no college education, my siblings and I were the first of the – the first generation of children to go to college in my family. We grew up in a shotgun house, Indiana, in the Midwest. And mostly, I will just say about my early days, what brought me before I came to coaching is in the Midwest, there aren’t a lot of people who have a lot of money.

Even in Louisville, we live in kind of a – Louisville is a little bit more of a progressive city in Kentucky, and even here, there isn’t – there’s old money and horse money but there isn’t a lot of entrepreneur money, there isn’t a lot of people making a lot of money.

So that’s what doctors did and people who worked hundreds of hours a week and it just wasn’t – the belief in our family was that it was never for us. That you have to work really hard for money, that it doesn’t come easy, requires lots of sacrifices and it’s only for a select special few, and it’s definitely not us and our family.

And so I had that. I went to college for theatre and tried to make it as an actress and actually hated it. And then I stumbled into selling and I was in Atlanta auditioning and I showed up for an audition and they were casting live infomercial salespeople. And I was like, this is perfect. I also worked for Radio Disney before that as a salesperson. And I was like, this is perfect for me.

Krista: I didn’t know that, Radio Disney, okay.

Stacey: I did. I was Stacey Fuego. I don’t even remember why. Anyway, so I ended up being really amazing at it, being on this stage and entertaining people and selling, I was amazing at it. I did it for seven years, got super unhappy after a long – I would say four years in, just not fulfilled. I’m always interested in that.

Do people have that moment where they realize they’re not fulfilled and are they aware of it? I definitely was. And so I was always searching in my mind and I had lots of ideas. I wanted to be a food blogger, so I would buy a bunch of food stuff and follow a bunch of bloggers and take photos just with my iPhone that were absolutely terrible, and I tried to create my own website and come up with my own recipes.

It was a complete disaster. And then I had gotten invited to go schmooze some new people in our company as – I was their top sales rep for seven years and so I got invited to go schmooze some new people that were coming into the company and one of them was a life coach.

And I remember being in the middle of the grocery store, we’re pitching knives or something, and being like, what is a life coach? I don’t know what that is, but for sure I need it. And so we just had a conversation. It was about my relationship at the time, so it had nothing to do with unfulfillment or career choices or anything.

And that conversation was so powerful, she nailed exactly what my problem was and how to solve it in five minutes. It transformed me. And I remember saying like, can I hire you to be my coach? And then I think it was a year later that I actually hired her and then I just spent a year working on my life, decided I wanted to be a coach.

I found The Life Coach School Podcast at episode 11. I enrolled in her very first coach training that she mentioned on the podcast and then started my own business as an entrepreneur. And actually, I will say I had also started an Amway business when I was 17.

Krista: 17?

Stacey: Yes. So I think I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur of some sort. It just wasn’t – I wasn’t able to find the thing that clicked and coaching to me was like, the only thing that would get me up in the morning and make me want to stay up at night and be really excited about.

I remember signing my first client and having a commercial shoot in the same day and I went to the commercial shoot and I was miserable. I was like, I hate this, and I had just had this consult and it lit me up, and I was like, this is what I want to spend my time doing. I want to spend my time helping people, not sitting around waiting for the director to say alright, let’s do another take.

So I never went to another audition after that. And I just hustled my butt off for a year and a half. I mean, hard, I went to work and created six figures, and then went on to create many millions now.

Krista: Yeah. That’s why I wanted to have you on the podcast because I’ve watched that growth. Not obviously since the beginning, but I’ve been watching you and you’re just such a phenomenal example of a woman making money in the world with her brain.

And we don’t have a lot of those examples. And you’re also just an example that you don’t have to have money to make money. And I think that’s something that – I was definitely taught that. That you don’t make money unless you have it to start with, and only the people who have it are the ones that make more of it.

And I very much relate to the whole Midwest kind of growing up. I really never thought I would make more money than my parents. I just imagined, they’re middle class, you don’t make a lot of money unless you become a doctor or a lawyer and I’m not that. So I’m probably just going to make what they make, and kind of resigned myself to that until I discovered coaching and I started seeing people like you making so much money and making such a tremendous contribution to the world.

I also thought that – I wouldn’t say that I thought that everyone who made money was dishonest or icky, but I really kind of associated making money with not living in integrity.

Stacey: Oh, for sure. I think that’s how people justify not having it is like well, I don’t have it because I’m a good person and the people who have it are bad people, so I get to feel good about not having it because I’m one of the good people.

Krista: Right, which is so not useful. Keeps you playing small.

Stacey: I remember being on a yacht. Someone invited me – it was the craziest story, but I got invited on a yacht while I was in Miami with a client for Fourth of July, and I remember it was this guy who invited me and he was there with his wife and his extended family and their small children.

And I remember watching him be so engaged with his kids, and I caught the thought that I had, “Oh, I’m surprised. He’s paying attention to his kids, he loves his kids.” It was so fascinating that I had so much judgment about rich people who have yachts and lots of money clearly don’t care about their family or their kids.

It was so fascinating to see that. And that was after I had already made a couple hundred thousand. So I think there’s a lot of – if you don’t grow up with money, there’s a lot of thoughts about people who have money. I have a whole podcast about thoughts about rich people.

Krista: And wanting to have money when you have lots of thoughts about people who have money is like having a foot on the gas pedal and a foot on the brake. It doesn’t work. You don’t get anywhere.

So one of the most fascinating things to me about your story because it’s just so different than my life experience and I find it really inspiring is what you sacrificed to create what you have. So can you kind of explain that? Because I think there’s – I shared it a little bit on the podcast but I’m sure I didn’t do it justice and I’d like people to hear it from you. This whole idea of at one point you had two spoons.

Stacey: You know, this has become almost like a cartooned story of the people who follow me but it really is true. At one point I had two spoons and I remember actually I used to sell the ShamWows, you know those orange cloths, and I used to use that as a cutting board because I didn’t have a cutting board either. I had nothing.

And what’s really funny is I didn’t – at the time, it wasn’t like this devastating story of I have no spoons and cutting boards and something has gone wrong. I was just living life, like, yeah, this is what happens. Just didn’t feel like – I don’t know, when you don’t have money, I was talking about this with somebody else.

It was right around the 2008 crisis, the financial crisis that happened. I was selling and pitching and doing infomercials in Atlanta at the time, I think. I don’t even remember that being like, oh, people can’t buy things because they don’t have money. I was so poor I didn’t even know that was going on. No idea of financial things in the world.

So I had no preconceived notion that I couldn’t make money or that people wouldn’t buy. I just – when you’re that poor, I think it actually works in your favor because you’re just not – you’re used to not having money.

Krista: Right. It doesn’t even occur to you that two spoons and a ShamWow as a cutting board is…

Stacey: Yeah. Of course this is what it is.

Krista: Okay. So even with two spoons and a ShamWow as your cutting board…

Stacey: I love it. Like wait a minute, what?

Krista: I know, I’m trying to process.

Stacey: Listen, I have the craziest stories. I used to drive around my car, I hit a deer in the Midwest, you always hit deer in the Midwest, they’re just everywhere. And I couldn’t afford to fix my car so I had a bungee cord holding the hood on to the car. That level of poor.

So I think your original question was like how did I make the sacrifices if you had no money to start a business, to hire a life coach, to do all those things. And I will say that I think it will be really relevant to your audience, as widows, I think – I didn’t have that story, but I had a similar story where I was really unfulfilled, really unhappy, crying in my car every day.

I did have some knowledge of something has gone wrong because I would look at the people that I went to school with and they had houses and they had normal cars and they were married, and I didn’t have any of those things, so there was some piece of like, I am missing a component of life and I’m not understanding that other people are getting, and why is it so easy for them.

There was that there. But it was like, there was never a huge motivation or drive to do something about it. And then I had got promoted with my company, they flew me to Puerto Rico, they wanted me to basically save the Puerto Rico market.

So I gone down to Puerto Rico and was teaching the sales force down there how to sell, and it felt like okay, I am succeeding, something has moved, I’ve moved up in the company, I have this opportunity. And then at the time, I had been dating someone for seven years, we were living together, and all of my life fell apart over the course of two days.

I met a guy down there, totally fell in infatuated, cheated on my boyfriend, and got robbed at gunpoint on the beach in the middle of the night. And it was like, happened so fast I had this moment of how did I get here? This isn’t me. I have a college degree, I had a 3.5 Grade Point Average, I had done well in school.

And it was like, all of the culmination of things of like, this moment, it just shifted something inside of me of this is not how my life was supposed to be. This is not my understanding of who I am in the world. This doesn’t make sense. And it was just the lowest of the low of the rock bottoms for me at the time that made me go, okay, I have to figure out what happened because I didn’t think I was unhappy in my relationship.

It was like, everything was kind of okay. And I caught myself in behavior that didn’t make any sense and so it felt like what am I not seeing about myself? And that was motivation enough to say something has to change. I have to figure out what I’m not getting about life.

And I remember I flew out the next morning, no phone, because the robbers took my phone, and I had to have someone at the airport text my boyfriend to come pick me up. Like hey, I don’t have my phone, I got robbed, come pick me up.

And I landed and I think the first thing I did, he went and got me a phone, and I drove to a parking lot in a grocery store, I called the coach that I met and I said, I’ve got to hire you, my life is a mess and I don’t know why. This is why I think that maybe widows can relate.

When you have that bottom fall out in whatever that is, and obviously my story is nowhere near losing a spouse. But when you have that bottom fall out, it’s like, there’s nowhere else to go but up. So there’s a lot of discomfort that – there’s so much discomfort, you’re already in the minor discomfort of like, I sold furniture to pay for her, I sold clothes, I cashed in an IRA, all of the IRA that I had. I think it was $5000 at the time.

I cashed that in. I worked extra hours, I did everything, scraped by every penny to pay for her. But that to me was so little discomfort compared to what happened in Puerto Rico and where I was and the discomfort of my life.

Krista: Yeah. And I think maybe that’s – it’s a little different than my experience after losing Hugo, which was I had gotten to a place where it was rock bottom initially, but before I started coaching, I had gotten enough therapy to get back to functioning.

And so it was less about rock bottom there and more about mediocre. More about feeling hollow and empty and just thinking this can’t be all there is to life. I’m functioning, I’m going through the motions, and people are telling me that I’m strong, but I don’t feel strong. Surely there is more for me than this life.

And also, to your point that you had about your career and just a low spot there, just realizing this isn’t what I want. I don’t know exactly what I want but I know this isn’t it. And so it sounds like you were in a place where you were like, the only place to go is up and for me it was more it’s okay, but the idea that it could be better, there was a little flame of that and a deep desire to believe that that could be true.

Stacey: 100%.

Krista: So one of the things that you talk about, and I’d like to hear how this kind of factored in is you talk about finding sufficiency and how you did that. Talk about that and how that has kind of been important in your journey.

Stacey: So first of all, I will recommend a book if that’s okay that I think is – I always say it’s the money bible. It just changed everything inside of me. It’s by Lynne Twist and it’s called The Soul of Money. And the whole book is about lack and insufficiency and getting to sufficiency. Not even abundance, but sufficiency and what that is, and the role that money plays in modern society.

And she also compares a lot to people who are not living in modern society, Amazonian people who are out in the rainforest and not living with money. And so there’s just so much about the human relationship with money in modern society and how it affects our brain. It’s so good.

Just heartfelt. She has stories about Mother Theresa in there, just so good. And I remember highlighting everything in that book, I mean, I couldn’t read it fast enough. But so I will say there are a lot of little gems in there if your audience wants to take it deeper.

But for me, it was learning to be okay with in my mind not having. And learning to see what I did have. So it was being okay with the things that I maybe want that I don’t have yet, and then also feeling like I have plenty with what I do have.

And so I remember – I tell this story a lot, but I remember I was investing in coaching, I had gone I think to The Life Coach School at that point. And I had racked up a ton of credit card debt to pay for The Life Coach School, to pay for my one on one coach.

And I remember I needed to go to work and I checked my – I had to buy produce for my shows. I was selling some kind of kitchen product. And I checked my back account and it was negative. And I remember seeing the red lines and thinking I’m going to have to call my boss and ask her to wire me money because I can’t buy produce to work today.

And I remember seeing that number and I had been studying coaching and our ability to choose our thoughts. I remember thinking, what’s the truth right now in this exact moment? Am I okay? I have shelter, I have food to come home to, I know my boss will lend me money, I’ll be able to use some of that produce – I literally would use that produce to eat.

I will have food. It’s cold outside, I am warm. I went through all the things in my head that I had. And all of the ways that I was okay in that moment, and I remember looking at that bank account and feeling okay and even happy. I felt a little pride that I was able to coach myself in that moment.

And so then I remember thinking I could live in a box and have coaching tools and still be happy. I’ve realized how to free my spirit and make my spirit and how I feel separate from the money I have. And that was everything. From there, it just went on.

Krista: Amazing. One of the things that I notice my clients sometimes struggle with – so when you become a widow, sometimes you get life insurance, sometimes you don’t. So sometimes, some of my clients have less money than they’ve ever had before because they went from being a double income home to trying to figure it out on their own with crazy expenses.

Sometimes they find the spouse had debt they didn’t know about. All these maybe unexpected medical expenses that weren’t covered. So sometimes there’s this less money than ever, and then sometimes there’s the complete opposite of that where there’s more money than ever. And I think it’s very surprising. When you think that money provides safety and then you get a whole bunch of it…

Stacey: You realize it does not very quickly.

Krista: Right. And I know that you have had this experience as you have earned more money. Can you talk about that a little bit and share with listeners what you’ve learned?

Stacey: I will tell you, this is what I tell my clients. My clients always think the solution to their happiness is more money, especially as entrepreneurs. Like if I had just 10 clients, if I were making $2000, $20,000, $200,000, two million, whatever it is. If I had this money, things would be better.

And I always tell them that this is the biggest thought error that we have as humans. Whatever your biggest mental and emotional struggle that you have, when your circumstances improve, often instead of that going away, it gets magnified.

So money enhances who you already are. So if you are an anxious person about money, or you have insecurity around money, or you think money creates safety, and you don’t know how to create your own safety emotionally and mentally, separate from money, what happens is you get more of it and then how you feel without it gets magnified.

So if you’re stressed at a level five out of 10 and then you get two million dollars, you’re going to be stressed times however many, 1000 times more than you were. It’s not going to be the thing, it’s not going to change the emotion or solve it.

And so many of my clients do that. They make a lot of money and they don’t do this work first, and then they realize, wait a minute, I’m at 100K and I’m more stressed than I was when I had no money. And I’ve had that same experience at millions of dollars.

I’ve seen hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars sitting in my account and felt anxious and stressed and like there isn’t enough and your mind just goes to like, well, but if something happened to me, then I’ve got to take care of my husband, and then I’ve got to take care of my future kids, and I’ve got to take care of the business, and I’ve got to do this. There’s just always a place and ability for your mind to freak out about money. It doesn’t solve it at all.

Krista: Yeah, which I think is great for people to hear because I think many of them, they’re not talking about the money that they have or don’t have, especially when they get life insurance money, nobody wants to talk about it. And so because they’re not talking about it and they don’t have what you just shared in their minds already, they’re often thinking that there’s something wrong with them, that they’ve done something wrong, or they aren’t going to be able to handle the money, or they’re going to lose it, and then they isolate and they don’t know how to get out of that.

Stacey: And they might also be experiencing – I don’t know, but I had this experience where when you don’t feel good about the money that you get and how you got it, you often try to get rid of it to feel better. And so I can imagine if you get money by losing someone that you loved the most, that could feel very unclean, dirty, sad. There could be a lot of negative emotion around that money.

And for me, when I was selling and doing live infomercials, I was so unhappy, there was a period of time where I was making $10,000 a week but I was spending all of it because it felt so bad, I hated the way that the money was coming to me, and it was very subconscious. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s really what I was doing. This money doesn’t feel good to me, I’m not loving the way I’m earning it, so let me get rid of it.

Krista: Yeah, I do see that. I do see that quite a lot. And then also on the opposite end of that, some resentment. So for the widows who don’t get money, who end up worse off financially than they were, then because they have never been taught that money doesn’t cause safety and security, then they can kind of become obsessed and resentful that they didn’t get the money, and are unable to create their own safety and security with the current financial picture that they have.

Stacey: Yeah, 100%. And I would say for anyone listening that has experienced that, I was very bitter around money for a long time. I remember I went to The Life Coach School, I came back, and I thought going to the school would bring me clients. I don’t even know, like they would magically appear.

I did think that. I don’t know – I look back and I’m like, I don’t know how I came up with that. But I got certified with my best friend and she came back and went to this – she was in a show in Texas, she was in musical theater. And she went to this show and she decided to be a coach for artists and she signed a ton of clients at this professional show.

So she comes back with all these clients and she’s making money, and I have no clients. And I felt so bitter about money, about not having clients. It was just such a – there was a period of time, I would say six months, where I was so resentful. And it really made trying to create money or think about how to bring in more resources so difficult because all of my energy was being drained resenting that other people had more money than me, that I didn’t have money.

And all of my brain’s ability to problem solve and get creative and think about me and bringing money in, it was just – I wasn’t even available to it. So I do think that that’s one of the first steps. I’m sure you would agree, but one of the first steps of dealing with money is you have to deal with all of your feelings about it and focus on just what’s going on with you and your money. Nobody else.

It doesn’t matter that someone else got money, another widow got money and you didn’t. You have to be really with where you are and your money and your relationship with it. That is the only thing that makes any money circumstances change.

Krista: Yeah, totally. I wonder what you think are the concrete kind of tangible steps of that process too. Partly it’s kind of seeing that – it’s hard to explain I think this concept of neutrality and money, but that really, your emotions about money don’t come from money. Owning that how you feel about the money you have is something you get to decide.

Stacey: Yeah. I will say, what’s interesting is like, I think there was a balance for me of finding sufficiency with what I had for me in every moment, like what do I have, how am I okay, and I would run lists in my head. I have clothes right now, go through lists, and prove to myself I’m okay.

There was a piece though, like, finding neutrality, yes, and also for me, it was more I don’t love my money situation, I’m not happy, and what am I going to do about it? So I kept a little bit of the – I didn’t have to get rid of all the bitterness and the resentment around the money. It was just I would think about you have no money in your account, you can ruminate on that, or you can think about what you need to do to make money.

You can think about the money, the debt that you have, or you can think about bringing money in to pay it off. You can only really focus on one at a time. And bringing money in is always going to be such a better result. Such a better way to focus.

And so I think what you’re saying is it is so intangible, and that’s hard for people to grasp in the beginning, this idea of shifting your thoughts in the moment to change your actions, change your circumstances, your results. But it really is the most tangible thing you can do is every moment catch your brain and what it’s focused on.

Is it focused on what you have or don’t have? Or is it focused on creating more? I would think about okay, I’ve got to go out and meet people, I’ve got to serve, I’ve got to help other people, I’ve got to get out talking about my business. That’s what I’ve got to do.

Whether I have money or not, that’s the next step. Whether I feel bitter or not, that’s the next step. So some of it is also being willing to take action and being okay with feeling really bad about the money too.

Krista: I love that. It’s not so black and white. It’s both.

Stacey: I think it’s like, yeah, this circular – if I could say this is what was happening in my mind in that time, it was a solid circular path of finding sufficiency, really being willing to feel my negative emotion around my money, and then doing something about it. Rinse and repeat, all of the time.

Krista: Yeah, okay. And so then for people who are like, okay, I want to make more money and I don’t really know how to do that, you talk a lot about creating money with your mind, creating value. So how would you explain that in your words?

Stacey: Okay, I’m just going to tell you the thing that’s the most true for me, which is I hired someone to help me do this. I have to just say I didn’t know any of this before. I didn’t know how to create money with my mind. I didn’t know how to change my thoughts. I didn’t know how to even create other options for myself.

Pitching was all I knew, I didn’t know there was another option. And lots of people offered me jobs, but they were never more money than I was making pitching. So I remember US Bank offered me a senior banking position, I had no banking experience and no banking licensing and they were like, we’ll pay for all of your – whatever that is, I don’t know if it’s called licensing or not, but we’ll pay for all of it, pay for your training.

But they couldn’t match how much time I got off and the starting salary was like, half of what I made selling knives in grocery stores. So there were a lot of opportunities but they weren’t more than what I currently had. So I always tell people, if you knew how to do something to change your circumstance, you would.

No one’s sitting around being like, I have all the tools and knowledge, I know exactly what to do, I just choose not to. Truly, no one is doing that. So I just have to say find experts. Whether it’s listening to a podcast, I immersed myself. I stopped watching TV, I stopped listening to music in the car and I listened to audiobooks and podcasts and I just started finding people and messages that resonated with me.

And that started opening my mind and fueling me, and then I hired someone. And then I started to go to work – it’s so helpful for someone else to see your own mind. So for me, that was the first step and the most important one, to believing that anything could shift was having someone help me who had gone before me and done it.

Whatever money you want to have, how you want to come up with your money, because it doesn’t always have to be entrepreneurship. It could be by leveraging investments. I have a client of mine in my mastermind who specializes in that. She teaches people how to become financially free.

So there’s a coach for that. If it’s getting a raise at work, I have another client who specializes in making career moves, getting raises, asking for more money. So the second step might be or even the first step before hiring someone might be to say what are the options for you creating more money?

If you were thinking about your life now, would it be to start a business, would it be to ask for a raise, would it be to get a new position, would it be to leverage some money? What would be the options? And then you can find an expert that can help you do it the best.

I decided I wanted to be a life coach, I hired Brooke Castillo, she was the best. So it’s like, figure out how you’re going to create that money, what are your options, you might even have a couple, and then find someone to help you do it. To me, that’s – I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for but I think that’s the most truth for me.

Krista: I think it’s great and I also think it’s great to normalize expectations of what it is going to be like. Even if you find someone or when you find someone who has done it and who knows it, it’s also not going to feel amazing the whole time.

Stacey: Well, because I think the biggest thing is whatever your biggest pain point is is going to be the hardest reason to get help and to have an expert helping you. So if it’s I want to make more money, you’re going to often feel like you don’t have enough money, but you have to hire someone to help you.

So it feels like you’re in this Catch-22 of I want to make more money, and I’m going to hire someone, but the thing that I did that might be helpful for everybody is I found what I was willing to – what do you call that? The rubber band. I was willing to pull back to shoot forward.

Krista: Say more about that. What did that look like in your life?

Stacey: It looked like immediately, I want to make more money, so I want to spring forward, but I’m going to pull back because I’m going to have to give some money up to hire someone to help me figure this out. So I have a momentary lack of money that’s going to feel even more lackful than the money I have, in order to pull back, get help, and then spring forward.

And that’s the same even in our business. I’ll give a different analogy. When we want to scale, what often happens is we spend an entire quarter not making money. Not selling actively. We have funnels and our program is open all the time so people can join and we make some money from that, but if we’re not actively doing webinars, actively pushing promotions and selling, then we’re not – we might just be paying for our business expenses. We’re breaking even.

But we might do that for an entire quarter and then go out the next two quarters or three quarters and make in those quarters more than we made the entire year before. So another way to say it is harvesting vegetables. If you want to have vegetables, you’re going to give time to planting them and it’s going to be a long period of time where they’re not popped up and you can’t eat them yet, but you have to keep going and doing the work.

Krista: And then at some point that will bear fruit or vegetables.

Stacey: And listen, I will also say, I have a lot of resilient, resilient clients. I want to say that you can also make so much change with free resources. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to have this security – in my mind, the security and safety of help and someone who had gone before me.

I remember telling my best friend two years before I found what life coaching was, I said I know I can be successful, I just need someone to tell me exactly what to do and I’ll do it. And I did. My coach told my exactly what to do and I went out and did it.

But I have so many clients who have made – they’re never paid me a dime, they just listen to my free resources, and they’ve been very resourceful and they’ve gone out and implemented the things and signed clients and made money.

Krista: So I would love to know, what do you think since you do a lot of this kind of coaching obviously, what do you think are the common excuses that people kind of hide behind?

Stacey: With making money? It’s easier for other people. It’s harder for me, no one understands my specific circumstances. And I will say I was the queen of that and now I tell my clients, so what? You’re starting further back than everybody else, you still have to run the same race if you want to get to the finish line.

So if one person has one mile to run and you have five, but you want to end where they’re ending, you’ve got to run four more miles than them. And you have to be okay with that. And the sooner you get okay with that and stop feeling sorry for yourself about that extra four miles, the faster you’re going to get there and run that race. And so for me, that was the biggest thing is like, I had to learn to become an entrepreneur, how to like people…

Krista: How to like people. It did not come naturally.

Stacey: I was the person that was like, ew, people, gross. Hate them all.

Krista: That’s really hard for me to imagine.

Stacey: Yeah, just super introverted. Really introverted. Super high social anxiety. Very socially awkward, even now. My husband makes fun of me about it all the time. I like, rock in my own world when people know who I am and there’s respect and authority and I’m talking about things I know and I’m an expert in.

But if you get me in a circle with the neighborhood folks, talking with all of our dogs, Neil’s going to be like, what happened? Let’s replay that moment. Where did you go in your brain? So yeah, I had to learn how to like people, learn to hold a conversation that wasn’t weird and awkward and made other people uncomfortable.

Those were basic things. And then I had to work on all my money stuff and all my thoughts about money. And those were the entry points for me. And I had no friends. I had traveled for seven years, all my friends from college stopped inviting me places, we fell off because I was always gone.

So I also knew no one to sell coaching to. So some people start coaching or a business and they’re highly connected, they’re in the corporate world, they know lots of people, they get lots of referrals, they make money very quickly, they already know how to sell, they might come in as marketing experts, they might be highly sociable and extroverted and loving around people.

So they don’t have any of those hurdles. And so you have to just make peace with it. You’re going to have to work harder than other people and that’s okay. It’s what you have to do.

Krista: And be willing to do it.

Stacey: So that’s the first one I will say is like, we call it special snowflake syndrome. My situation, you don’t understand, it’s so much harder than other people’s. I get that a lot too with my single moms. If they’re raising kids by themselves and I will always agree with them. Yes, it’s so much harder for you than it is for me being childless right now. So much harder. I agree with you. And what are we going to do about it? Do you still want the result?

Krista: And who do you want to be. Yeah.

Stacey: That’s probably the biggest one. That’s the biggest one that gets in people’s way. I think the second one is thinking something’s gone wrong when they fail a lot. That’s like…

Krista: Talk more about that.

Stacey: I just don’t think – this will apply no matter if you’re not a life coach or not, but I always say there’s eight phases to owning a life coaching business and six of them are being told no in some way. So there are eight phases. There’s 80% of those phases, all you’re hearing no is in some capacity.

You start showing up on social media and no one reads your posts and engages. Then they engage, but not very many, and they don’t ask for consults or anything. And it just keeps going. You get them on a consult, they say no, then they say yes and they back out.

It’s all no’s. And being able to – what most people do is they go to beating themselves up or blame. Outside forces, other people, teachers, whatever it is. So it’s either blame other people or beat the hell out of myself. It’s a lack of resilience and an ability to fail and for that to be okay, for that to be normalized and to keep getting up and going back out there. I think that’s a big thing is like, something has gone wrong as soon as they fail. This wasn’t for me, I don’t have it in me, it won’t work for me, it’s some version of that. It’s not meant for me, I’m not able to pull this off.

Krista: Yeah, I should quit.

Stacey: Right. So I think that’s another big one. And I just think those are the top two that come to mind. What comes to mind when you think about it?

Krista: Feeling feelings. Being willing to experience whatever it is you’re experiencing and not make that mean that something’s gone wrong. Because I think it’s easy to romanticize creating something new in the world and what that’s going to be like.

And even if you have a coach behind you and you have someone giving you the step-by-step, it’s still going to put you in a place where you’ve never been before. It’s still going to push you beyond your current sense of self and your current identity, so of course you’re not going to feel good the whole time. And normalizing that for yourself, that totally, we want to feel uncomfortable because uncomfortable equals growth. Uncomfortable is what gets us to this dream that we have. And because we aren’t taught that, then we think that means something’s gone wrong. It shouldn’t feel this scary.

Stacey: Yes. This is a really good story that is not entrepreneur related so it might be super helpful to your people. Neil and I recently started a portfolio for the first time and started investing because up until now, we’ve always put all the money back into the business and I said I would do that until we could no longer do that, until the cashflow was above what we could reinvest.

And so we started a portfolio and we had a conversation with a financial advisor and he asked what type of investors we wanted to be. He was like, there’s the investors who do not want any risk, they’re going to get the lowest amount of reward, but they won’t have the risk involved.

And there’s the middle person who’s going to have higher risk and he walked us through what you’re going to have to experience when you’re in this and there’s the high risk people. And he’s like, so if you’re mid-risk, what you’re going to have to be willing to experience is when you put money in and it drops, you can’t freak out and take your money out.

You have to be willing to ride the loss of money for potentially a couple of years, until it goes back up. And it’s going to be like that through the entirety of the next 30 or 40 years, however long you’re investing. He said where most people get tripped up is as soon as they lose money and the market goes down, they pull out. And then of course we put money in and immediately it drops.

Krista: The universe is like, here you go.

Stacey: We lose like, $15,000 in a couple of days. And it’s like, 100% what you said, you have to be willing to feel the emotions and keep going. And not react and pull back.

Krista: I read somewhere or heard somewhere that there was a study done about the people who made the most money and dead people actually made a lot of money.

Stacey: I believe that because they can’t pull out.

Krista: Untouched, because they – right. So get in there and stay in there. Totally accurate. But yeah, you’ve got to be willing to feel all the feelings.

Stacey: Yeah, so it’s like whatever path you want to choose, whether it’s you want to find something new that’s fulfilling for you, even if it’s just – for some of your people, they may not even want to start something new. They might just want more fulfillment and they can find that in activities and passions.

I have recently taken up skiing over the last couple of years. I love it. I’m terrible at it. But I keep going through it and every time we go out to Aspen and ski and I hire an instructor, I’m like, I’m always going to go with an instructor and minimize failure. I’m going to minimize the failure of my not knowing and speed up the trial and error.

And so I focus on one thing every time and last time it was just learning how to stop. It’s all we did for an entire week. I went out to the mountain to the little bunny slopes and I learned how to go uphill to stop. That’s it. But I keep going and I allow it to take time.

So I think that that’s – whether it’s a hobby or a passion, you want to learn tennis, you want to learn painting, you want to play the piano, or you want to start a new business or you want to get a job, you might ask your boss for a promotion and you might get a no, and then you might ask them again, and you might get a no. You have to be willing to keep going. And…

Krista: What are you going to work on?

Stacey: Yes. So asking hey, why didn’t I get that promotion? What do I need to work on between now and when I ask again? What would make it a hell yes for you, a win, that would be easy for you to give me this extra money? What could I bring to the table to do that? And be willing to keep going.

Krista: Totally, yeah. Also think too, this is one of the reasons I’ve loved watching you on your journey is because sometimes, it’s easy to think that only the imaginary perfect people can be really successful and create the lives that they want. And I think that’s partly because of the way that people present themselves.

Successful people often just show us the highlight reels and they don’t really show us the truth of what it’s like to be them. And so one of the things that I’ve found really encouraging about you is that you’ve always just been very willing to be human.

I’ve never seen you try to pretend to be somebody you aren’t, or shy away from asking a question when you wanted the answer. I’m just curious, did that come easily to you? Is that just who you are? Or have you had to work on that?

Because I’ll just tell you, I remember joining your program back when it was Diva Business School, and I totally didn’t identify as a diva at all. I did not believe – I was just like, not there. But I was so encouraged and inspired by the way that you showed up in the world as just authentic and genuine, but not perfect, and so malleable and willing to learn and grow and share. And I think that’s really unique.

Stacey: Thank you for that. Yeah, I’m trying to think about that. I think there was a lot of having to have a strong relationship with myself in order to do that. If I can love myself in my ignorance or my failure, my awkwardness, whatever it is, if I can love myself through that, then there would be no reason to hold back.

There would be no reason to ask the question. For example, I’m known for coaching very smart people and they will say a word and I don’t know what the word is, and so I ask them what it means. And I don’t make it mean anything about me. They just used a word and I don’t know what it means, and I want to be on the same page, so tell me.

And I think it’s that. The letting go of what other people might think about you allows you to kind of really show up and just be in the game. And be playing full out, and making a muck of it, and being a little bit messy.

Krista: Yeah. And in the process, it’s created a business that makes multiple millions of dollars and has a huge impact on an entire industry.

Stacey: And here’s what I’ll also say because this might also speak to your people. I was telling my husband this the other day. I also hate – I’m a huge proponent of I think false positivity is really toxic. And I think Instagram, Facebook are huge pieces of that. And I think also, the coaching industry can unintentionally do that when we teach that things are only working if you’re happy and you’ve got to be positive to make change.

And I often talk about being valuable and selling, even when you’re feeling negative. But I was telling him, I had a pretty traumatic childhood and a really unhappy home life. So I would do a lot of extracurricular activities to stay away from home and be safe at school.

And I used to have a teacher in middle school – no, this was high school, who would – when I was leaving the classroom every day, would corner me and say you can’t leave until I see you smile. And I think about how destructive that was for me at the time.

Instead of asking, hey, is everything okay at home? Is there a way that I can support you? Is there a way that I can help you? Hey, I just want to let you know you’re doing great in class? Has someone told you today that you’re doing really well? Has someone told you today that you’re important?

Instead of doing that, it was you’re wrong because you’re sitting in my class frowning. I haven’t taken the time at all to ask you what’s going on at home or to know anything about you, but I’m making you wrong. And for me to feel better and comfortable, I need you to smile and be happy. And so that was like, coaching really helped me be okay with not feeling happy all the time.

Krista: Yeah, with not being okay.

Stacey: And not presenting happiness for the comfort of other people. If you don’t like that I’m smiling, go look at someone else. If I’m not smiling, look away. I don’t have to be – I think about that a lot with my business. If I don’t make it mean that I’m not an expert unless I’m happy all the time, or I’m winning all the time and succeeding all the time, as long as I’m not making it mean that, then why would I hide it from you?

Why wouldn’t I tell you if I failed, if I’m emotionally struggling, why wouldn’t I be able to tell you the truth of me unless I mean that that truth of me is not good enough or is wrong? I think we could just use a lot more of that in the world.

Krista: There’s a whole lot more of that. And not forcing gratitude and yeah, just being genuinely authentic. It’s very freeing for me, especially as a newer coach, to hear you could actually make a lot of money with a half-managed mind and genuinely love your life and still not be perfect.

Because as someone who’s just kind of always had that Type A personality, drive to be perfect, it’s really refreshing to see people who are making a difference in the world, being super authentic, not trying to be something that they aren’t, and it’s just freeing and refreshing and I think we need more of those examples in the world and I love that you’re one of them.

Stacey: Thank you. I was just going to say one more thing. When I was launching my business, I had been severely heartbroken and humiliated. And I won’t get into the details of it but I felt horrible all of the time. I would just be crying all of the time.

And a lot of people make that mean that you can’t help other people or be in service or make an impact in the world when you’re going through stuff. And I brought people along, and what happened is all of the first clients I signed were also in a lot of emotional turmoil, struggling, most of them.

They really needed help with deep, heavy things, and because I was showing up talking about deep, heavy things, and talking about how I was processing things, that’s who I attracted. And I was able to help them.

So it’s like, whatever place your people are in, if they are still struggling and in the grief process, if they want to make a difference, if they want to do something, I just want to encourage everyone not to let this you need to be perfectly happy in order to take the next step, I want to encourage you that you actually don’t.

And there are a lot of people that feel bad in the world for various reasons and they’re looking for someone to feel safe and okay with feeling bad with. They want to make that connection and that is going to be as inspiring to them, if not more, than someone who’s positive all of the time and just life is perfect.

Krista: Yeah, because then they just feel unreachable, unattainable. You think they’re special snowflakes. Yeah, totally. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on.

Stacey: You’re so welcome.

Krista: If people want to get in touch with you, I mean, if you’re a life coach and you’re listening to my podcast, you already know who Stacey is. But let’s just pretend people don’t know.

Stacey: Yeah, but also if you’re not a life coach and you never want to be one, I have a lot of people who use my free resources to make money who will never work with me because they’re not life coaches and I just want to offer that. If you’re wanting to shift any sort of money beliefs or any sort of career changes, if you’re in selling and you just want to sell better, whatever it is, feel free to use my free stuff.

Yes, my content is just for life coaches, but for me, I’m like, you got to start with whoever you find that you think could help you even a little bit. I listened to lots of people that were not in my field in the beginning just to have someone to listen to. So if they want to, they can go to Make Money as a Life Coach Podcast and they can also find me at staceyboehman.com or on Instagram, @staceyboehman.

Krista: Amazing.

Stacey: Happy to share all the free resources.

Krista: Much appreciated. Alright, take care.

Stacey: You too. Thanks.

Krista: Thanks, bye.

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If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about, even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.