Kirsty Knight [00:00:02]:
Okay. Hello, my friends. Welcome to this special episode of the podcast. I am super excited about this one because I have a very special guest here with me who’s kindly agreed to come on and share some of her story and her perspectives and experience regarding her time in business as it relates to time and productivity, particularly hustling and work life balance, all those things. So I’m delighted to introduce you to Stacey Boehman. Stacy has been a business coach of mine pretty much since I certified with the Life Coach School in 2020. So I basically joined 2K for 2K then, and I’ve done three rounds of her mastermind, the 200K mastermind, which I have to say, I think is one of the most supportive and inspiring and high quality masterminds out there for coaches and probably just for in the online business space. I haven’t been tempted to join any others, to be honest, since I joined that one.
Kirsty Knight [00:00:58]:
I just don’t want to be in another room. So I left to have my baby, but I’m hoping to be back probably next year when the dust has settled and, you know, the chaos has subsided. I’m hoping it will, but, yeah, so I love the room that you’ve created, and so please introduce yourself properly to my listeners, tell us a bit about whatever you want, who you are, what you do.
Stacey Boehman [00:01:23]:
Well, hello. My name is Stacey Boehman. I am a Master Certified business coach with the Life Coach School. So Kirsty and I were certified with the same school, which is a huge school. There’s so many thousands of coaches. I think it’s also the best certification program to do. Now, I always say I’m biased because obviously I only have one view of that one, but I thought it was great, the experience was great. And I have been helping life coaches make money since I started my business in 2015.
Stacey Boehman [00:01:56]:
And I niched down to life coaches and helping them specifically with sales and marketing and making money and entrepreneurship. In 2018, when I went through master coach training, which was super fun, or right before, maybe six months before master coach training, and I have sold almost this year, in the next couple of months, we’ll cross $40 million of sales, which is so fun in my career, not in a year but in my career, but we are at the eight figure mark in our business as well. So that’s super fun and I’m super happy to be here. I will say I appreciate such a generous welcome, and I really think that, you know, I think there’s so much a coach can do. So much. Obviously, you know, I believe in 100% results and getting our clients what they came for. But I do also think that there’s things a coach can’t control and how a student shows up to the coaching and how a student engages in the community and the value that they give, the support they give to their peers.
Stacey Boehman [00:02:55]:
That’s something that you can foster, for sure, but it’s people like you being in the program who really show up and go all in and just are the best of the best of a quality of a client that makes the room so special. So I’m just going to throw the love right back to you.
Kirsty Knight [00:03:10]:
I’ll take it.
Stacey Boehman [00:03:12]:
Love it.
Kirsty Knight [00:03:13]:
Okay. Fabulous. All right. Thank you so much. So there are a couple of things that I wanted to bring you on specifically to talk about.
Stacey Boehman [00:03:20]:
Yeah, I’m game. Let’s go. I love time and productivity.
Kirsty Knight [00:03:24]:
Okay, perfect. Because. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I remember you saying maybe, maybe a while back, but I’m fairly sure I remember you describing yourself as a hot mess at one point in business at the beginning. So in terms of, you know, I don’t know what you’re relating that to, if that’s just organization or time management or whatever. But I also remember, I think that you did. You worked with a coach specifically on your time, time management. I remember following your story at the time, and I’m very open about how much of a hot mess I was. I started a campsite business, a glamping business, actually.
Kirsty Knight [00:04:02]:
So basically, like, bell tents in a field.
Stacey Boehman [00:04:04]:
Oh fun. That’s the only way I would ever camp, is if I could glam.
Kirsty Knight [00:04:09]:
Exactly. That’s my thought, too. So I set that up in 2015. That was my first business. But the way that I did that, the way that I approached that was very much, I had, like, sort of three philosophies to that. That was like, don’t waste time planning, just dive in. So I had no business plan or strategy or whatsoever. The other one was like, how hard can this be? It’s surely going to be easy.
Kirsty Knight [00:04:32]:
And then the other one was basically just work all hours under the sun to make it work. And they were my dad’s philosophies. He’s a farmer. He passed them down to me, I’m sure, and they didn’t work out so well in that business. I was working all the time, like, all the time, and it was very messy because I had no planning whatsoever. I just dived straight in, and it turned out it was really hard. It was harder than I thought.
Kirsty Knight [00:04:54]:
So I’m really open about the fact that I was a hot mess. Like, my systems were disorganized. My time management was basically lots of post it notes, like, piled up on my desk. It was terrible. I had lists just running through my head. I was just, yeah, all the things and changing that eventually, like, coaching mixed with time management skills and working on that really helped me streamline that business and go from working all the time and having piss poor time management skills, if I’m honest, to being able to step out away from that business and actually run it while I’m on holiday and things like that. So I would love to just ask you about your experience, your journey, whether or not it looked similar or not, because I know that you’re a hustler and now your business is very organized, very streamlined.
Kirsty Knight [00:05:45]:
And efficient.
Stacey Boehman [00:05:45]:
Yeah. It seems to be, most days.
Kirsty Knight [00:05:47]:
I mean, you’re still human.
Stacey Boehman [00:05:50]:
Yeah, I mean, I would love to talk about it. So I think the first question you asked is the hot mess ness. And I think the way you framed it is a very interesting question that I’ll answer the best I can. So I think in, because everybody, it’s different for everyone, but for me, the way that I would talk about me being a hot mess was really just lacking skills. And I think I love that. You also said you talk about time management being a skill. I was really being a great coach and a great salesperson, but I was not good at time management.
Stacey Boehman [00:06:27]:
And so when you are not good at managing a calendar or managing tasks, then you do show up messy, and the longer you do that, and then the more you excuse it away as just a personality type, I think that’s what we do. We say, oh, I’m just a hot mess. That is like, oh, my personality. I’m just gonna excuse my personality for this lack in presentation, organization and thought. What’s the word I’m looking for? I’ve lost all the words since I became a mom. I feel like. But, like, pre-thought, right? Like, putting pre-planning into something without having done that, then it’s like, oh, everything’s just messy, and I feel on fire. So I am a hot mess. And that really translated into everything.
Stacey Boehman [00:07:18]:
I was the person even before I found coaching, where I was always late. Everyone knew it by extraordinary amounts of time. Like 30 minutes to dinner, maybe an hour too late. If I am supposed to be somewhere, I would miss flights. I’m just late chronically. Everyone knew that my grandma used to say, you’ll be late to your wedding. You’ll be late to your funeral. Just like you live chronically late.
Stacey Boehman [00:07:43]:
And there was always an excuse as to why, right? It would be traffic, or I couldn’t find my keys. And it always felt like the whole world didn’t understand. It’s also coming from a mentality that is, I’m doing the best I can, and everything’s just so chaotic. And it’s not my fault. It’s all outside of my control. So I was constantly walking around, excusing myself for all of these things that have happened that are outside of my control that kind of have me showing up. Like, if you’ve ever had dinner with a friend who’s 30 minutes late, and they come in and they’re, like, literally rushing so hard. The whole restaurant is like, what?
Stacey Boehman [00:08:17]:
Who’s here? Because you’re making such an entrance. I don’t know if you’ve experienced that, but it’s like, people who are chronically late and chronically disorganized tend to make an entrance that is not fashionable and not cute. They’re like, there’s a wake of craziness, right? Like, chaos. Chaos coming behind you. And that’s how it felt to me, no matter how good I was at coaching. And at this point, when I think the journey, you’re referring to where I worked with a coach for my productivity skills, at this point in my career, I was making, I think that year I made $860,000. The year before that, $325,000. And that came from pure marketing skills, sales skills, and being a good coach.
Stacey Boehman [00:08:59]:
And at that point, I had changed everything about my life. I had changed my money story and going from paying bills late to paying bills on time to not having bills. Or if they I do, they’re automatic. I forget I even have them. And so I changed so much about my life, my relationships, my self concept. I learned to become an entrepreneur. So I’d done so many things, and yet there was that thing dragging behind me all the time, like a little, like, monster just coming behind me into all of my things.
Stacey Boehman [00:09:27]:
And I talk about this still today. I still have a free training in one of my programs. I keep it because people say the content is so amazing, but I’m, like, fresh out of the shower with wet hair and a bun, no makeup, frumpy sweater, my Christmas tree is still up, and it’s April, and I’m delivering this amazing training. And so, long story short, to say at that point, there, there does become a point. And for everyone, it’s different. For some people, it’s the bar to entry. If you’re a parent, maybe, and you’re working a full time job and you want to start a business, the bar for entry might be organization, right? If you can’t carve out the time to make it happen and be consistent with that time, you’ll never gain traction in your business. For other people.
Stacey Boehman [00:10:12]:
Like for me, I didn’t have kids when I started my business and my work was flexible, so it wasn’t the bar for me. But I did get to reach a point where I couldn’t work any more hours and the mess got so big that it felt like this heavy cloud sort of over me all the time. And so I did within my master coach training, one of my projects to get master certified was I had to learn the concept of Monday Hour One from the life coach school and I had to learn to put my life on my calendar and honor it, and I had to show up and talk to a coach about it when I didn’t and work through all of the excuses I wanted to make and turn them into ownership, and it changed everything for me.
Kirsty Knight [00:10:55]:
I didn’t realize that was a project for you, but I love that you said that it’s a bar to entry for some because I was thinking about basically there are different phases of entrepreneurship, I think, with regard to time and productivity, and I think that you’re right for some people, if you have a full time job, then you need to be good at carving out time. Otherwise you’re never going to get, you’re never going to start your business. The next phase is you sort of, you might have left your job, so you actually have tons of time, but that’s when people tend to just fill up their hours with all the things and like all, all the overwhelm and all the learning and not actually have a clear strategy or whatever. And so they’re working all their hours but not making any money. And then if they can get past that phase, then the next phase is almost like you are working, but maybe you’ll be making a little bit of money, but that is where your time, it almost becomes your glass ceiling, like you said, like, you can’t, you can’t make any more money in the hours that you’re working because you haven’t got any more hours to give. And so I feel like you move through the phases and time mastery skills sort of at each of those levels. It’s really useful to need it to get to the next level, to ever get to the point where you can be making the money that you want in the hours that you want to be working, basically with a work life balance. So I think that, yeah, it might not be the same for everyone right at the beginning.
Kirsty Knight [00:12:24]:
And for me, I think because I didn’t have a job, like, I started my business and I just went straight in. So I had hours, but I filled them all up, and then I couldn’t fit any more time in. Like, there was no time. And that’s when I really needed to start, like, leveraging my time better. And so, yeah, I love that you said that.
Stacey Boehman [00:12:44]:
Well, I think you’ve touched on something that’s so important, which is that there’s the ability to use the hours you have. Well. But then there’s also the skill of choosing how, what you put in those hours. And that, to me, I call that essentialism, figuring out what I want to create in my life and what’s essential. Or even, it’s like, there’s prioritization, right? So I talk a lot about how people always ask me, how do you manage being a new mom and running an eight figure business? And one of the things I tell them is everything that’s significant and matters to me that I want to be a part of with my child. And then my family goes on my calendar first. And I also have very specific work days where we don’t put those things on those days, typically, unless I okay it ahead of time and those work days, I stick to those work days.
Stacey Boehman [00:13:36]:
So that’s a priority thing, right? I’m putting my top priorities on my calendar first, so I know my needs are met. Whether it’s my needs or my kids needs or both are the family needs, I know those needs are met. They’re already on the calendar. Then what goes in my work calendar is that’s where essentialism comes into play, where you’re looking at, here’s what I want to create. Here’s the time that’s available. What are the most impactful things I can spend my time on in these. In this calendar that I have and learning that, learning what’s the most significant? Because I think our brain tells us everything matters. Every, I always say, people say everything’s urgent and important.
Stacey Boehman [00:14:13]:
I’m like, well, if everything’s urgent and important, nothing is urgent and important, right? They can’t all be. There’s only one priority, right? Like, there can only be one or two or three priorities. Everything can’t be a priority or the meaning of the word is lost. And so you have to get really good at what’s the time I’m going to be working. What do I need to think in order to work well in that time period? And what can I do that matters most to get me towards those goals? Learning that skill. And we can also talk about planning because I know a lot of people are resistant to planning or they don’t think they have time to plan. But that is one of the things I learned in my kind of, like, million dollar to $10 million phase.
Stacey Boehman [00:14:52]:
That became one of the most important things is planning my week, planning our launches, planning things so far ahead of time and really is so vital. It’s like an hour of planning or a day of planning or two days of planning is the difference of achieving something or not.
Kirsty Knight [00:15:10]:
In most cases, I totally agree. I’m in a challenging position at the minute only because I have a three week old baby and I…
Stacey Boehman [00:15:17]:
Is this your first child?
Kirsty Knight [00:15:18]:
Yes.
Stacey Boehman [00:15:19]:
Oh, bless you.
Kirsty Knight [00:15:20]:
Yes.
Stacey Boehman [00:15:20]:
I feel you. Listen, I just feel like, you know, I am lucky to come into parenthood after really making so much money and becoming a master coach and learning to coach my brain. I always think, like, how do moms do it if they don’t have a coach or they don’t know how to coach their brains? I seriously don’t mean that judgmentally. I literally am like, how do they do it? Because it’s so hard. And I will just tell you. New mom to new mom. I feel like the first year, I felt like you, like, just, like, exactly like, you just have no idea what’s going on. No matter what your skills are at managing your brain or your time or anything, it’s like having this new life that you have to keep alive.
Stacey Boehman [00:15:59]:
And literally your life revolves around them. It revolves around their sleep, it revolves around their eating, and it is chaos. Like, there’s a reason maternity leaves, I think, are getting, at least in the United States, they’re starting to get longer and longer. I think in Europe they’ve always been significant. But, yeah, it’s hard. It’s so hard.
Kirsty Knight [00:16:19]:
I know. I’m having to really check myself because it’s like, I teach planning. That is one of my philosophies. I’m like, plan your time. Plan realistically. Be so aware of your calendar and plan. And I basically, I think my mom gave me this book that was like, I remember what it said. It was like 07:00 a.m…
Kirsty Knight [00:16:38]:
to 07:00 p.m. Or something like that around your child, “The Contented Baby” book. And I read it while I was pregnant, and I was like, oh, this is perfect. It’s given me, like, a schedule that is pretty much like, oh, good, I…
Stacey Boehman [00:16:53]:
Already know where this is going.
Kirsty Knight [00:16:54]:
I was like, like, literally everything is in here. Like, wake up at 645, feed the baby, then do this, and then, you know, and I looked at it, and I was like, right. How can I fit my business into this schedule? So I mapped it onto my calendar just like I would any other thing that I have ever mapped into my calendar. And I thought I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get into this routine anyway. Well we are three weeks in, and we are nowhere near that routine. I just had to go back…
Stacey Boehman [00:17:21]:
I think these routines, though, forget that there are, like, humans that don’t always operate that way.
Kirsty Knight [00:17:28]:
Right which is a real shame, because, yeah, I basically had to go into my calendar, and delete all of it. I was like, okay, this is not happening. Yeah. I need to just basically be guided by, okay, if I know that if I feed her, then she needs burping, and then I’m gonna change her nappy, and then she’s gonna have a nap.
Stacey Boehman [00:17:47]:
Yes.
Kirsty Knight [00:17:47]:
And I don’t know how long that’s gonna be…
Stacey Boehman [00:17:51]:
You will get into a groove, though.
Kirsty Knight [00:17:53]:
Yeah. My time management skills are not working quite as well as they were before I had the baby.
Stacey Boehman [00:17:59]:
Yeah, yeah, But you will get back into the swing of it. But I think this is such an important conversation to have. And, you know, I think this will give you so much material for your people, because I also think a business is a new baby. And so, for some people, it’s like, if you are you, maybe you’re skilled at parenting and your littles haven’t been that little for a long time, but now you have an entrepreneurship baby, and you don’t know how it works, and you don’t know how to keep it alive. And now you know how to keep a business baby alive, but you have to keep a now real human baby alive. And so it’s like you guys are going through the same journey just in different ways, and you’re an expert in that. That’s what I love about coaching.
Stacey Boehman [00:18:38]:
I coach with people that I make way more money than them, but they have a skill that I don’t have. Right. And so I go seek that skill. So, like, you may not have the parenting thing yet, but you will. But I do think in the beginning, even people who have multiple babies, like, they have all told me, like, each baby is different. They’re all unpredictable.
Stacey Boehman [00:18:57]:
You have to learn their habits. People used to, like, press upon me, like, things like, oh, well, you know, with my kids, you have to just do this, like, blanket kind of advice. Make sure you take them out all the time and have them, excuse me, sleeping in their stroller, or you’ll forever be in having to take naps inside. My kid refused to sleep on the fly. Ever. Never, never. Only now, when he’s two, will he get. If we get him so exhausted, like, we take him to Disney World, and he’ll get so exhausted that he’ll need to take a minor 30 minutes nap in a stroller, but he will not do it.
Stacey Boehman [00:19:36]:
He has to have… He’s like me. He has to have perfect conditions. It must be 68 degrees in his room, very dark, like, with his stuffies, sound machine on, baby songs on. Like, that is the only way. And books must be read prior, otherwise this kid is not sleeping. And so you just can’t take, like, the generic advice. The books are lovely, but you have to really just get in and learn your child.
Stacey Boehman [00:20:00]:
And I just don’t think any. I don’t know. My. My theory that makes myself feel better, at least, is that you can’t, like, just learn that through a book. You have to learn your child through awareness and paying attention, and there’s a learning curve with. With it, no matter how great you are. So you’re just in the thick of it.
Kirsty Knight [00:20:19]:
Yeah, I definitely feel in the thick of it. Although three weeks in, things have calmed down considerably from week one because, yeah, week one was like, what is happening here?
Stacey Boehman [00:20:30]:
I can’t believe you’re doing a podcast at three weeks in. Like, I’m so impressed. I mean, I was doing nothing at three weeks in, but my nanny, we hired her, I think, two weeks in, and she said that she walks in our house, and I just looked like a deer in headlights. And she said, oh, this poor woman. She needs me.
Kirsty Knight [00:20:47]:
I actually wanted to ask you about that because. Because, I mean, it’s too late for me in terms of prep for my baby, because, I mean, I did some prep. I did record a bunch of podcasts beforehand so that they could go out. I wrote a bunch of launch material I could reuse and repurpose later. And I also batch cooked, like, 42 meals in advance.
Stacey Boehman [00:21:10]:
Oh, great.
Kirsty Knight [00:21:11]:
So I did that.
Stacey Boehman [00:21:12]:
Look at you go.
Kirsty Knight [00:21:14]:
So I did okay in the organization, sort of start of it, although not as well as I would have liked, obviously, because I was just pooped. I was just so tired when I was pregnant, and my motivation waned massively, so I was like, ah, fuck it. I’m not just not gonna bother. I’ll just deal with it when it comes. So, yeah, it’s too late for me, but what advice would you give? Or what did you do in prep for your baby? Just for anyone listening who is thinking of, like, setting up their business or something in advance of having a baby.
Stacey Boehman [00:21:44]:
It’s so interesting. I was thinking about this. Cause I’ve been working on some material for my own podcast. And, you know, it’s so interesting how I prepped for the first baby, I think is gonna be completely different than how I prep for the second baby. And I think it just matters, like, what you are and where you are for the first. For Jackson, I did not batch content for my podcast. I was so, so sick in my pregnancy up until, like he was born, I was still sick.
Stacey Boehman [00:22:14]:
People said, oh, you’ll have your baby, and the nausea will immediately go away, and it’ll blow your mind. I was still nauseous for a month after I had my baby, too, but I was just so sick, I could not eat my entire pregnancy. I went in to deliver a week late. I was induced, and I checked in to tell them, I’m, you know, here to be induced. And the lady looked my whole body over, and I had to look at her and go, I’m nine months. I was like, because I couldn’t eat my whole pregnancy. So I was so, so, so sick. So there was no batching.
Stacey Boehman [00:22:46]:
We just didn’t sell for three straight months. And I invited 20. No, it wasn’t 20. Like, ten, maybe, of my students to that had been in my programs for a really long time to come on, and I had, like, thought about, what are the things? I’ve watched them over the, you know, for example, in the 200K mastermind over the last four or five rounds. What have I seen them really work through and work hard on that? I think they’ve come to the other side and they’ve mastered, and they could share that. And so I invited them. I gave them a topic and said, hey, I’ve really noticed in the mastermind, you’ve gotten really good at this, and you’ve been coaching a lot of people on the page on this, and I’m really seeing that this is very valuable.
Stacey Boehman [00:23:27]:
Can you record your own podcast for my audience? And so we did that. We played those, and then we also mixed in a couple of, I call them most valuable podcasts, but some of the most downloaded episodes we’ve ever had, because as you, we have, I don’t even know how many, 200 and something, 289 something podcast now. And so people who find you later in the game, they don’t necessarily go back and listen to episode one through 280. So if you take a most downloaded episode and you replay that, then it gives the people who followed you later on a chance to kind of hear that episode again. And so we did a mix of students hosting and most valuable podcasts, and I took a twelve week maternity leave. So we did that for twelve, actually a couple weeks starting before I had Jackson as well. And then I have a team, so I gave my team projects that they could be working on in the back end to organize and to clean up. And that would be like, here’s what would be amazing if you do this.
Stacey Boehman [00:24:28]:
They created a couple of workbooks. I kept them busy ish while I was gone, but I took the whole three months and honestly, I needed it. And I also ended up coming back and taking a really, really slow, like four week kind of ramp up to come back, where I was kind of just showing up to my calls and the things I had to do. And we actively weren’t pushing out more sales. So it was about four, four months where we just didn’t, we had our funnels running, which bring in some sales, but we weren’t doing any kind of like launches or pushes.
Kirsty Knight [00:25:03]:
Okay, you were repurposing content or you’d already written content. Oh, yeah.
Stacey Boehman [00:25:07]:
So I have a social media team, so I was never running my social media. We already repurpose email because I wrote just hundreds and hundreds of emails over the years. And so our Monday email that goes out, they just select one that hasn’t been used in a while and send it out. I rarely write new content for that now. And same for our waitlist emails we created. So we send emails for our 200K mastermind, every Wednesday. And I just created a template of take a call, break down the topics we coached on and give them a little bit of like, what they could use in their week, use some coaching, create a coaching montage. So my editor would go in and take a weekly call and edit the highlights, and then we would showcase a 200K earner as well.
Stacey Boehman [00:25:51]:
So the email would have a coaching montage some coaching tips, a 200K earner, and they were all able to do all that without me. So if you don’t have systems and clients or systems employees, contractors, you know, if you don’t have that set up, it becomes a little difficult to do it that exact way. But I know I’ve coached so many people through maternity leaves where they’ve had other people in the mastermind coaching for them. I had one student that actually sold coaching before she went on maternity leave and told the student, told the client, it won’t be me coaching you for the first x amount of weeks. It will be this other coach that’s going to be equally amazing. And they’ve been trained by me and they’ll be updated by me. And then when I come back, you’ll have the option to either keep working with that person or me. And she said people are opted to just keep working with their people, which was so fascinating.
Stacey Boehman [00:26:44]:
So it can be done at any, at any level. And I also know colleagues at my level who kind of worked here and there. I think I will work a little more on my next one. If things go as planned. I’ll probably still lead some of my calls. Maybe I’ve been kind of. That’s what I’ve been thinking about back and forth is I noticed that how long it took me to get back my momentum back. It was nice to have the twelve weeks where I wasn’t working and for the first time, mom, I felt like I really needed that.
Stacey Boehman [00:27:16]:
Um, but now I feel like I’d rather, if I can, if it’s appropriate, if it makes sense for my health and my baby, then maybe after four weeks or six weeks, I’ll step back in and do just maybe a couple weekly calls here and there to get up going sooner. But that’s a decision for me versus less about my business.
Kirsty Knight [00:27:38]:
Yeah, I love that. I actually did something similar because I’m obviously definitely not at your level in terms of my business setup, but I basically have a VA and that’s it. But I had a friend (who I met actually in 200K) who is coaching for me because I sold a group just before. So I was launching in the month before I had my baby and I sold it to them. I actually extended it. I said, I’ll give you an extra month in that container.
Stacey Boehman [00:28:08]:
Oh, so great. Yeah.
Kirsty Knight [00:28:09]:
And you’ll also get my friend, who’s amazing, and she’s going to coach you like once a week for that month. And that’s been so helpful, I think. I think because partly, I was like, “oh, you don’t need to take a full six weeks. You know, you don’t need to do the full six weeks for me. I’m sure I’ll be able to do some coaching or whatever.”
Kirsty Knight [00:28:28]:
And she insisted that I just give her, like, the six weeks, and then she said, and if you want to jump back in, you can. And I’m so grateful, because the other first three weeks was like, oh, my God. It’s so weird. I have such a good handle on time normally, obviously, because I decided I’m good at this. This is what I’m gonna coach on, and I am so time aware. And the last three weeks, it’s like, time has, like, accelerated ridiculously.
Kirsty Knight [00:28:53]:
I’m like, how is it. 05:00 p.m., already? And I’m barely up.
Stacey Boehman [00:28:59]:
Which day are we in? I’m not even sure. Is it Tuesday?
Kirsty Knight [00:29:02]:
Yep.
Stacey Boehman [00:29:03]:
Have we slept? I’m not sure what’s happening. Yeah, I mean, I think that is so, so par for the course. I mean, it just. That’s. I read somewhere that, and I’m gonna get it wrong, but it’s something like, if you’re nursing for the first year or something like that. The energy equivalent of nursing a baby is the same equivalent of climbing Mount Everest, and I don’t think that anyone talks about that. So we just don’t know that it takes that much energy. And so it is so confusing why it doesn’t feel like you’re doing that much.
Stacey Boehman [00:29:40]:
And so it’s like, why? I mean, it does, and it doesn’t. Right? It’s not this, like, active. It’s not what we’re used to in showing up for our business. And so it is a little bit confusing of, like, how is the day going so quickly? And how am I not able to manage this? And it’s really because you’re like, oh, I created a calendar and thought I would manage that while I climbed Mount Everest, and I’m confused why it’s not working.
Kirsty Knight [00:30:05]:
Right. I also saw something that said it was the equivalent of a full time job or whatever in terms of how many hours you breastfeed. And I started tracking. I don’t know if you’ve ever used the app. Huckleberry. Is it Huckleberry? So, basically, I was trying to track, like, how frequently I was feeding her. Because we had some problems in the hospital, I had to start feeding her formula, and even though I’d wanted to breastfeed. And I was like, when was the last time we fed her? Because it felt like it was only half an hour ago, but it was like 2 hours ago.
Kirsty Knight [00:30:33]:
And so I started using the app and then I managed to start breastfeeding. And basically you can log like naps breastfeeding this, that and the other. I looked back last week and I was like, I did like five and a half hours of breastfeeding on one of the days.
Stacey Boehman [00:30:46]:
It’s intense. I remember so many times where I would be like, wait, I just fed him. What do you mean? It’s been 90 minutes. Are you sure?
Kirsty Knight [00:30:54]:
That is exactly my experience right now. I’m like, what? That is, I literally have just finished and I haven’t. It’s just by the time you’ve done a nappy change and everything else. Yeah, I’m like, I’m really, it’s really putting my skills to the test and just my time awareness is gone, and God, I’m having to really recalibrate my expectations.
Stacey Boehman [00:31:11]:
Yeah, yeah. But I think that that is like another ninja skill for productivity, like for time management. I was just talking about this with my husband because he’s not so great at this. I call it like my, my two basic skills that I think have me excelling at momhood and business is commitment to what I’m going to get done, what I’ve said I’m going to get done, and flexibility. And so I’ve, and I don’t think people understand that this is not just a personality trait, productivity, all of this. It is literally a learned skill and when you get very, very good at it. So I’ve just, even before I had Jackson, I was really good at, when I went through master coach training and I had to calendar everything, we would have everything on the calendar and I would look at my five days and they would be so full and I’d be like, I don’t know how I’m going to get all this work done. I see it on the calendar, but, like…
Stacey Boehman [00:32:08]:
I don’t necessarily believe that I’m going to be able to get it done. And then maybe I would get sick and lose a day or something would come up and we would have to work on something completely different for a day. And so then I would look at my calendar like, oh, so I thought it was going to be impossible at four, five days. Now I have four. So now we have to be flexible with either. We’re going to take, take some steps out of the things that were on our calendar and what we were doing. We’re going to take some steps out, like make it simpler, or we are going to take it off the calendar completely and either not do it at all or move it in. My CTO calls it kick the can down the road.
Stacey Boehman [00:32:45]:
And just getting good at, like that is an actual skill set of getting good at looking at that calendar and being able to rearrange it and actively rearranging it and then not being defeated because you had to rearrange it or because things changed. My husband is one of those people where he operates so well and gets so much done, but he does not like to be thrown off his plan. And if he gets thrown off his plan, like, so we had this opportunity. It’s Derby week in Kentucky. So we do. The Kentucky Derby is happening this week, and we weren’t going to go. We took a ton of friends last year and we did two full days, and we also went, like, the week four. So we were just like, okay, we’re taking a break next year and it’s coming.
Stacey Boehman [00:33:27]:
And then we started feeling fomo. And so then we were like, okay, let’s just call our ticket agent and see if we can get tickets. So we, they had tickets for Friday, which is the Oaks race. And my husband’s like, well, we can’t go on Friday. The dog is getting a bath at the groomer. And I’m like, okay, well, we could go to the Kentucky Oaks and have a day date, the first one since Valentine’s Day, or. And we reschedule the dog bath, or we stick to the dog bath. But he’s like, you can’t, you know, there’s no flexibility in his plan.
Stacey Boehman [00:33:58]:
Once he’s decided something is happening and he really struggles, like, whether it’s travel or, you know, I’m the type of person where if we had a bad travel day and we missed a whole day of vacation, I’m like, okay, well, let’s see if they can extend the room. Let’s change the flights. We’re staying an extra day. I get more flexibility. And so I actually think that’s so, so important. The ability to say, I created my best laid plan for the week or the month or the launch or the maternity leave, then this is how it’s actually going. And with all the factors that I did not anticipate. And now I get to take my awareness and what I know and my skills and relook at the calendar and redecide again and move it around.
Stacey Boehman [00:34:43]:
And I move things around, even just on my day, from a day to day, I move stuff around on my calendar all the time. And I also think people are like, well, by the time you plan your calendar and then rearrange the calendar, you could have just been doing all the things. But it’s one of those things where it’s slow down to speed up because once you have this skill, doing my calendar, rearranging my calendar, all of that takes absolutely no time. And it really does create the life where I always believe I’m going to get my things done and I’m able to be flexible. So if my child needs a vaccine shot or he is sick and needs to go to the doctor, or it’s a beautiful day and we can run to the zoo for his morning, you know, activity, I’m able to do those things because I’m so good at commitment. I always get it done, no matter what, even if it’s after he’s gone to bed, like, I will get it done. And I’m super flexible. So I’m, I’m always available to get something done in any given moment and use the time that comes my way.
Stacey Boehman [00:35:40]:
So I think that’s super helpful for maternity leave coming back. Like, just knowing we make, we make the best laid plans in our calendars and then we have to be, I think being flexible also makes you feel a little bit less like you’re being controlled by your calendar. And I think that that’s also, I know I’m on a little bit of a tangent, but why people don’t want to do productivity work is a lot of, you know, I don’t know who your exact clients are, but in the coaching world, we attract a lot of people who are creatives. And so they tell themselves their creativity and their freedom and their flow will be, will be killed, you know, if they were to try to calendar and be more productive and plan and work on time management, and I always tell them, like, that was exactly who I was. That is exactly. And even now, if I’m like, over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been filming modules for 200K mastermind. And I, on those days where I’m going to be heavily filming, I don’t want anything on my calendar because I know there’s this creative process that’s happening where I’m going to be organizing my thoughts, getting them on a flip chart, recording, re recording, rearranging. Like, I want that thought process.
Stacey Boehman [00:36:56]:
But for the most part, I feel like I’m so much more creative now because I have all the energy back from the storm that followed me everywhere. The hot mess storm. Right. I’m not. I’m not making excuses anymore. I’m not showing up late to things. I’m almost always on time or sometimes, occasionally. Now that with Jackson, I’m, like, a minute or two late, but not very late.
Stacey Boehman [00:37:19]:
And not to my client calls. I mean, to, like, dinner or something. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for us to be five minutes late. Although I feel like we have gotten early and earlier and earlier with Jackson, it’s almost like we fear that we’re gonna be so late with him and everything required to travel with him that we leave extraordinarily earlier. And so I feel like we’re earlier than. We might be a few minutes late, but we’re earlier than we were before I had Jackson, because we’re just so aware of the time. But, yeah, like, I think it creates more creativity. I think it creates.
Stacey Boehman [00:37:55]:
You have more energy because you’re just not. The hot mess isn’t following you everywhere you go, and that really weighs you down.
Kirsty Knight [00:38:01]:
Right. And I think that. I mean, I had a lot of shame around how messy my business was and, you know, and the chaos that was in that business. And once I had dealt and sort of worked through that and had a bit more self compassion with that, then I. Yeah, I had a whole renewed sense of motivation and, you know, sort of excitement for that business when I didn’t feel like it was so heavy because there was so much mess.
Kirsty Knight [00:38:32]:
Yeah. Also, I love what you said about commitment and flexibility, and I think I definitely got to that point. Like, that is how I ran my time before. Before baby Fern.
Stacey Boehman [00:38:39]:
But you will find your way back. I promise.
Kirsty Knight [00:38:44]:
But it has definitely helped me. I mean, coaching has helped me enormously get to the point where I’m also much more self compassionate about being flexible. I think that people. Yeah. They see it as. I have to put it on the calendar, and then it’s super rigid, and I’m gonna beat myself up if I don’t do it.
Stacey Boehman [00:39:00]:
Yeah.
Kirsty Knight [00:39:01]:
Whereas I’m the same. I can plan something on my calendar, and then if it’s a sunny day, we can go to the beach. We will go to the beach. And I don’t have any self judgment around that, and I’ll get it, and I have the belief that I’ll get it done when it needs to be done, and it enables me to plan in a way that feels good to me.
Stacey Boehman [00:39:23]:
I think that the self judgment I mean, you tell me if you would agree, but I think that the self judgment a lot of times, or even the shame comes from, like, pre doing this work. Hot mess. Stacy, who might have canceled her calendar to go to the beach, was doing that all of the time and had no commitment to whether I’m, in belief of whether I’ll actually get it done. And so it was this, like, constant trend that was always happening, a constant excuse that was showing up versus now it’s, I own my calendar. I own. I’m so productive. I get so much work done when I work that I feel very empowered to say, and today I’m gonna, yeah, I’m gonna go to the Oaks with my. My husband.
Stacey Boehman [00:40:10]:
And I do actually have a full day scheduled that day. So I was like, and Saturday or Sunday, I’m gonna get that stuff done. And that’s a trade off I’m willing to do, is I’ll work this weekend so that I can take a day date with you on Friday. So I think it’s like. I don’t know. I’m curious what your thoughts are about that. But I think it comes from when taking extra breaks, playing hooky, not following through your calendar, being just, like, never having a plan, when that is how you are always living and you’re transitioning, it just feels bad because you’re attempting something new that you’ve never done before, and you have all that kind of, like, hot mess energy coming from behind you versus when you’ve really worked through all of that. You don’t call yourself a hot mess anymore.
Stacey Boehman [00:40:59]:
You don’t look at yourself that way. You honor your calendar 90% of the time. You are always getting your work done, sometimes even faster than what was in your calendar. And then you decide, hey, I have this opportunity to take a beach day, and I trust myself that I’ll get the work done some other time. I know I will because I’ve developed this skillset. Then there isn’t even, like, this need to have shame or disappointment because you know who you are and you know the type of the way you operate, the type of person you’ve become.
Kirsty Knight [00:41:32]:
Yeah, 100%. I totally agree. I think that. I think that also with procrastination. If you procrastinate on a bunch of stuff, you’re not able to enjoy the time off that you take because you’re constantly putting it off, that you’d be better off not scheduling it on the days that you know you’re not going to do it and work on the thing that is in the way of getting it done so that you can be the person who gets it done and then can take a beach day without feeling guilty.
Stacey Boehman [00:42:02]:
Yes. Right. Well, so one of the things that they had us do in master or had me do in master coach training was the coach that I worked with on time management. We would put everything into my calendar, and then I had to look at my level of belief on getting that work done. And so I love scales. So I would always ask myself, on a scale of one to ten, what’s my belief that I’m going to get this done, this task done in this amount of time or this amount of work, all of these tasks on my calendar in a given day or a given week? And if the answer is I don’t believe I’m going to get it done, then it becomes, do I need to change my energy around the work that I need to get done? Meaning I need to believe I can get something done that I think is going to take 4 hours and two. There’s been one thing that I thought was going to take, like, it was going to be a whole day’s work, and I got it done in 14 minutes. That was recently.
Stacey Boehman [00:42:55]:
Recently. And I was like, oh, I see. Like, our brains have a lot of thoughts about getting work done and how long something will take. And so we had to, like, look at what’s my belief that I’m actually going to do this work, that I’m going to get it done? And then you have, the most important thing that they taught is if it goes on your calendar, it can only go on it if you believe it. Otherwise, you can schedule a full calendar. If you don’t believe it, it’s going to be the opposite of helpful. It’s going to totally defeat you.
Kirsty Knight [00:43:27]:
Absolutely. Yeah. And I teach my clients, like, realistic planning is, like, step one always, like, is it realistic? And I think if you’re ambitious and you’re optimistic and you’re hopeful that you’re going to get things done, that’s very different from actually believing that you’re going to get it done. Like, I can super ambitious and hopeful that I’m going to get it done, but I already know when I put it on my calendar if I actually am going to get it done. Like, you know, when you’re planning, if it’s yes.
Stacey Boehman [00:43:55]:
I think you just have a feeling in your body about it, right? Like, you can just check in and be like, I actually believe this calendar and I’m excited to get it all done versus I’m, I’m not going to. Like, I. I want to be excited about my week, so I try to have only things on my calendar, whether it’s work or family related, that I’m super excited about. And even if it’s, like, really hard work, and I know it’s gonna be really tiring that I like to have things. Like, I used to put dog walks on my calendar. Like, this is my time. And in the summer, we put family walks on the calendar because that’s, like, the most important time to me in warm weather, is that we all take a family walk, but we put that on our calendar, so I know I have rest coming up.
Kirsty Knight [00:44:38]:
Yeah, I agree. I do the same. Or I did. I’m going to.
Stacey Boehman [00:44:43]:
Yeah, yeah.
Stacey Boehman [00:44:43]:
No, you will. You will totally get better. I just. I can’t emphasize it. And I will also say it took me two years to really feel like I was back. I think that’s longer than a lot of people. Yeah, I don’t say that to scare you. I say that because no one told me that it could take that long. And my expectation was that it should happen so much faster, and it was just, like, I wish.
Stacey Boehman [00:45:05]:
And I wasn’t hard on myself at all for it. I had postpartum anxiety, too, so I was, like, battling mental health at the same time. And so I didn’t. I was very, very kind to myself through the entire process. But I think it was, like, very hard to. For me to rationalize who I used to be and how hard I used to work and how much I used to be able to produce and the goals I knew I could achieve with that work ethic, not hustle, but just work ethic. Before I had the baby and then after I had Jackson, how, like, I still. My brain has a hard time understanding.
Stacey Boehman [00:45:41]:
I was just getting coaching in my own mastermind about. He’s at the point where he’s going to toddler like things now with other kids and bringing home every virus under the sun, and dad gets none of them and mom gets all of them, even though dad’s the main caregiver when I’m working. And I get every single one. And so I’ve been so sick, and I was just getting coaching on, like, listen, like, what is happening? I just feel like. But I think it’s like, postpartum anxiety, new mom phase. Then I finally get through that, then it’s like, I’m sick all the time, and we. One of my colleagues just said, something that was really helpful. She said, are you calendaring for realistic availability of your time as a new mom of a toddler?
Stacey Boehman [00:46:27]:
Like, are you really looking at what your life is like as a mom of a toddler, and does that fit? And, like, I know this isn’t, you know, for everyone that has jobs. I seriously, again, do not know how women leave the house and work full time. Like, I think it’s the most, like, why are they not getting more accolades? That’s, like, my. My predominant feeling of women who have to leave the house to go to work, not, you know, 60 hours a week in a doctor’s office or at a law firm. Right. Or a corp, you know, a call center, whatever it is, it’s like, I think that is so incredibly hard. And, like, just women are not getting enough credit for the things that they’re doing and what they’re capable of doing.
Stacey Boehman [00:47:10]:
But I also know in the coaching world, we get into entrepreneurship because we want to escape that and we want to be able to own our time and be more present with our families and do the thing that we love. I think it’s like, that’s the pull of entrepreneurship for a lot of coaches in the industry. And. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s just. It’s. It’s knowing what you’re gonna like? What do you want to get out of it once you’ve transitioned your self concept and, like, merged them? As I was an entrepreneur, I’m now a mom.
Stacey Boehman [00:47:48]:
I have to merge these together, then under get a flow every three months to six months, it will change, but get some form of flow for what our life is going to be like in this phase. So we move my meetings around Jackson’s nap schedules. A lot of the times, like, I like to put him down for a nap, and then I like to work the hardest when he’s napping. And so we move things around. We don’t move my call schedules, but any of, like, the internal meetings, we move those around. My breastfeeding schedule changed a lot, so we just, like, it’s fluid in the back of my business, but it’s like merging those together and then getting that new idea of what is realistic for me to do to achieve at this new level. I like, it’s hard and…
Stacey Boehman [00:48:32]:
I wish people talked about it more.
Kirsty Knight [00:48:34]:
Yeah, I’m a big proponent of that.
Stacey Boehman [00:48:36]:
I love that you’re talking about your journey with your people. I think it just shows that you’re being a good leader. Which is being willing to be vulnerable and bring your people along with you.
Kirsty Knight [00:48:46]:
My honest truth.
Stacey Boehman [00:48:47]:
Yeah, I think that’s, like, that’s what people want. They want the honest truth.
Kirsty Knight [00:48:52]:
Yeah, and, yeah, and I, like you said, I’m already having to adjust how I was working before and, like, question, how the hell am I gonna get things done?
Stacey Boehman [00:49:05]:
Yeah.
Kirsty Knight [00:49:05]:
And also coaching has been so useful just to manage my brain because, yeah, I could definitely find myself thinking things, like, I’m never gonna fucking get anything done. Like, how is this possible? But I can talk myself out of it and be like, I’m totally gonna be fine. Like, it’s gonna be fine. And I can already start to see how. Okay, I need to be a little bit more organized, a little bit more efficient in these little windows of opportunity that I have to get some of the stuff done. And I’ll be sharing that for sure.
Stacey Boehman [00:49:34]:
But, like, this is what I mean by, like, so people who don’t have coaching when they’re going through this, like, you catching yourself and finding awareness around it, other people would just say to themselves, I don’t know how the hell I’m gonna get all this done. And then they just wouldn’t do it.
Kirsty Knight [00:49:49]:
Right.
Stacey Boehman [00:49:50]:
Yeah. They would shut down their dreams, shut down their desires, not move towards what they want. And I think that can run you down just as much as figuring out the timing piece and the productivity piece to just get it done.
Kirsty Knight [00:50:03]:
Yeah, yeah.
Stacey Boehman [00:50:05]:
They both take energy. It’s like, what energy do you want to be zapping you? Energy that it takes to learn how to be productive and get the stuff done that you want to get done to live the life you want to live or the energy of never, like, having chaos and not knowing how to manage it and not living the life you want to live.
Kirsty Knight [00:50:25]:
Right. Yeah. And not all burning yourself out because you’re trying to do too much. You can’t manage yourself in that situation.
Stacey Boehman [00:50:34]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s. That’s like a whole other thing. I was just interviewing someone on my podcast, and we were talking about burnout. I was like, oh, my God, this could be an entire podcast. Like, it’s such a meaty topic. But I have to constantly look at that as being a new mom as well as listening. I’ve been doing a lot of work where I just listen to my body and what is my body telling me? And anytime it says I need rest, I really look into that.
Stacey Boehman [00:50:59]:
I don’t always acknowledge it, I don’t always give it, because I feel like, as a new mom, you could just say yes to that every day, all the time. But if my body is really needing it, I feel like there’s this soul thing that I feel like I’m like, oh, I’m very tired. I need a break. And even if I’m behind on work, I will just ask for it. I will just tell my team, like, listen, we have to push this back. We have to find a new way. I have to take a break. Like, I need, whether it’s a vacation or a day off with my kid or an afternoon off to sleep or whatever it is, I’ve really worked at giving that to myself.
Stacey Boehman [00:51:34]:
And I think for everyone listening, that is also valuable.
Kirsty Knight [00:51:37]:
I love that. I woke up this morning, I tried something new this morning because I was awake at 6.20am or whatever, feeding her, and I thought rather than me go back to sleep and snooze for 2 hours, which I could have done after that, I thought, oh, I’ll get up and have a shower and get stuff done. I had a very productive morning. And then I think at 09:00 am, I crashed. I was so tired. Like, I literally had 2 hours just because I only had 2 hours sleep last night or whatever. So I was like, oh, this isn’t working. Yeah, I can be super productive for 2 hours, and now I need to kip for 2 hours.
Stacey Boehman [00:52:10]:
Yeah, yeah. And you have to be able to do that, too. I think when you trust yourself to make always the best calls, life gets really good.
Kirsty Knight [00:52:21]:
Yeah. I love it. All right, well, thank you so much. I. Yeah. I’m so grateful for you to come on, have this conversation with me and share a little bit about your story and what has helped you. I’m learning the ropes as we speak.
Stacey Boehman [00:52:39]:
You will figure it out. I know it.
Kirsty Knight [00:52:41]:
But, yeah, I will get there. But I’m amazed. I have not heard my baby cry. So I think my mom is doing a sterling job downstairs.
Stacey Boehman [00:52:48]:
Yeah. And she’s loving that time.
Kirsty Knight [00:52:53]:
Oh, she is. Yeah, grandma is loving her grandma experience, for sure. Yeah.
Stacey Boehman [00:52:59]:
That’s so good. That’s so helpful. All right, well, thanks for having me on. I’m so grateful.
Kirsty Knight [00:53:04]:
No, thank you. Please let my listeners know how they can find you, wherever you want to send them, if they are coaches and they need help with learning how to sell because you’re the boss at that.
Stacey Boehman [00:53:14]:
Yeah, absolutely. They can find me. I’m on Instagram. Stacy Boehman. It’s spelt s t a c e y b o e h m a n. It’s German, so it looks like Bowman, but it’s Boehman. Um, I am not German.
Stacey Boehman [00:53:32]:
My husband, obviously, is German. So Staceyboehman on Instagram, and then they can go to the Make Money As A Life Coach podcast. Those are the two best places to find me,
Kirsty Knight [00:53:41]:
And it’s an excellent podcast, if I do say so myself.
Stacey Boehman [00:53:44]:
Thank you so much. So much. It was so fun to talk to you today.
Kirsty Knight [00:53:48]:
And you. Thank you so much, and I will speak to you all next week.
Stacey Boehman [00:53:53]:
Okay, sounds good. Bye.
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