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When deciding to spend money on yourself it’s not really about affordability, the money is almost always there, instead it’s about feeling comfortable spending money on yourself. Over the past 5 years, I have spent over $200,000 on myself, my happiness and my business and today I will share the 3 things I believe about investing in myself that has helped me get past the discomfort.
Topics in this episode:
How I was able to invest in myself even when my body was shaking and sweating in fear
The wrong question to ask yourself when you are thinking about spending money on yourself
The power of believing you are worthy of investing in
2 specific questions to help you get over the hurdle of investing
If you feel resistance to investing in yourself, start with this question…
How to ensure you make the “right” decision
What you will get out of an investment in coaching
Show Notes & References:
Decide you are worth it and schedule a free breakthrough call to learn more about coaching: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
Can I afford it? Is the wrong first question to ask when you're considering spending money on yourself or investing in yourself, as I like to call it, it's not really about affordability. The money is almost always there somewhere. Instead, it's about feeling comfortable spending money on yourself. Over the past five years, I have invested almost $200,000 in myself, my brain, my happiness, and my business. And it's never something that feels super comfortable, but I do it anyway. Why? Three reasons: I am worth it. My happiness and success is worth it. And I know that whatever it is I want is inevitable. Today, we're diving into how to invest in yourself. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Every six months for the past three years, I have invested $25,000 in myself. That's $50,000 a year I invest in a business coach. Her name is Stacey Boham. Now, that's a lot of money, and I've never had that money just sitting in my bank account. It's an investment that I essentially have to take out a loan for. I have to put it on a credit card, just like you might for college or when your kid need braces or when you buy a car. And I know some people think I'm crazy. I have family members that do not understand and even vocalize their disapproval of me taking on this debt in order to hire a coach. And I will admit that every six months, when I have to decide if I'm going to re-up with this coach, I sort of freak out because I know it's a lot of money.
I like to tell people that I inherited my sort of, like, frugal save, don't buy anything unless you have the money, cash to pay for it - that sort of financial sense, I got that from my dad, who has always been very good and somewhat frugal with his money. He helped me to open my first bank account and is the person that I go to to talk about financial stuff. I inherited all of my very cautious financial sense from him, which has really served me well in the sense that I don't live beyond my means. I know how to budget. I know how to manage my money well. But where it has not served me is when it comes to investing in myself, can I afford it?
That's the first question that I would ask myself before spending any money, whether that was a meal out or it was a large purchase or an investment of any kind, that's the filter that a lot of women use when it comes to making financial decisions, do I have the money? But when it comes to investing in yourself, I call that strategic investment. Can I afford it? It's the wrong first question to be asking, because for 99% of you listening right now, the money is there. It's somewhere. It might be tucked away into an account you're building up to put a down payment on a house, or it might be in your IRA, or it might be in a college saving fund, or some 401K. Or the money might be there in the form of a loan, a personal loan, credit card. This is money that someone is willing to give you in advance. You have access to it. It's actually a huge privilege to have someone that is willing to give you an advance on money, because it means that they trust you're going to pay it back. Money is truly available to us everywhere.
How comfortable are you spending money?
The question you're wrestling with is never if you can't afford it. The question is, how comfortable are you in spending it? When it comes to investing, the problem isn't in the dollars and the cents. It's in comfort. Most women don't feel comfortable spending money on themselves. And because it doesn't feel comfortable, most women don't. They let their brain talk themselves out of it. We need to fix our roof. The kids need new shoes. We're saving for a trip to Hawaii. I don't want to have debt. I want to make sure I have a rainy day fund. What you likely have forgotten, though, is doing something you've never done that's not going to feel comfortable at first. Whether we're talking about getting up early to work out, if you've never done that, believe me, that is not going to feel comfortable. Or asking for a promotion at work, if you've never advocated for yourself, that's not going to feel comfortable either. Or if it's investing $8,000 in yourself to hire me as your coach, if you've never spent money like that on yourself, it's not going to feel comfortable.
The first big investment I made on myself was $8,000 to pay for coaching certification. And I had to pay it all upfront. I remember I had to sell stock in order to pay for that program. And it was stock that we were using to save up for a down payment on a house, the bill. It took a lot for me to make that initial investment, but I was sort of able to justify it because it was like schooling, right? And most of us don't have a problem investing in education. The real challenge came at my next investment at the next level, and that was an $8,000 investment in a group coaching program that was going to teach me how to essentially build up my coaching business. I found this program through a Facebook ad that was promoting a free webinar that I attended. And I got a lot out of that. So much so that I felt compelled to then book a free consultation with a sales rep of the program. And on that call, I had to make a decision on whether I was going to invest or not. And I remember this deep pit in my stomach, like I was likely crying and frantically.
I remember texting my husband to see what he would say, trying to kind of get his approval of some kind, which I would never suggest to somebody at this point, but at that point, I was just trying to feel comfortable spending this money and I needed somebody else's buy in to tell me it was okay.
And this money, once again, was going to be coming out of me selling stock again for the down payment fund. And I actually remember that. By the grace of God, I swear the line went dead. Somehow we got cut off and we got disconnected. And I just felt like it was this little divine moment that God gave me where I could call my husband frantically in that moment, which I did, and get him on the phone and say, I'm thinking about investing in this thing. Here's what it is. What do you think? And for him, I love this man so much. He was so supportive and was like, look, if you think that that's what you need to do, let's just do it. And got his ‘approval’, if you will. But really, I wasn't needing his approval. I was needing the comfort of knowing that I was making this investment and that it was okay. I just love my amazing husband who has been so supportive of me over the course of the years in starting this business and all the things that I've done.
There can be fear when investing in yourself…
And so I had this two minute window where I called my husband to try to make myself more comfortable making this investment. And then the sales rep called me back. It was enough time for me to just kind of go, okay, I'm going to do it, even though my whole body was shaking and sweating out of fear. Fear that I would make this investment and then I wouldn't learn what I needed to learn, and then I would just be back in the same boat again. Fear that I was going to be scammed. Which is, I think, kind of funny today because I built my business in that same way. I used to run Facebook ads to webinars, and then I would get on a phone call with somebody and talk to them about coaching. And I don't have that kind of business set up right now, but at the beginning I did. And that whole bunch of people that are on my email list currently, all of my original clients, they came through that system - but at the time, I was so fearful that I was going to be scammed and ultimately, I wasn't going to get what I came for and that it would just be a waste of money. It was so difficult for me to make. I remember how difficult, I can literally feel my whole body tensing and remembering this moment where I made my very first really big investment in myself it felt like.
If we go on to talk about my future investments, then I went on to spend about another $3,500 on business coaching and eventually finding out who is my current coach, Stacey Bohman, where I pay her $50,000 a year. So I have gotten comfortable with investing in myself and spending money that my brain likes to tell me I can't afford. And even though I know I have five years of spending probably close to $200,000 on myself and on my brain and on my education and now on my business, let me tell you, spending money on myself still feels uncomfortable. I've just learned how to do it anyway.
So for the rest of our time here today on this podcast, I want to share with you how I am able to invest and how I help my clients to invest in themselves despite all of the discomfort. There are three very specific things that you need to do if you want to start investing in yourself, whether that's to hire me as your coach or another coach, or to buy yourself a new car or hire a personal stylist or save for a vacation that you're going to go out with just your girlfriends. And I want to be clear that the important word here is want. If you don't want to learn how to spend money on yourself and invest in yourself at a high level, then that's going to be the first place for you to start.
Do you want to learn how to invest and spend money on yourself?
When I am talking to working moms about hiring me as their coach, one of the questions I asked them is, do you want to work with me? Because if the answer is no, then it's time to move on and politely and respectfully move forward in our separate ways. No hard feelings. I want them to go find someone that they want to work with. I know that's going to be the most effective thing for them. So you need to do a little gut check if you're feeling resistance to what I'm sharing here, I want you to ask yourself, do I want to learn how to invest and spend money on myself?
Decide that you are worth it.
So the first thing you need to do if you want to learn how to invest in yourself - now remember, it's not about the money. It's never about the money. The first thing you need to do is to decide that you are worth it. You are worth spending thousands upon thousands of thousands of dollars on. You might be rolling your eyes a little bit at me because I do talk a lot on this podcast about believing in yourself at a different level. I was just having this conversation with a working mom last week that told me that she desperately wanted to work with me. I could feel her energy, she could feel it, she knew that I would help her make the career change she wanted. I could help her really learn how to end all of the negative self talk and feel confident in herself in a way that maybe she never has before. And what got, in the way of her making the investment in coaching and in her happiness was not that she couldn't afford it, though that's what she wanted to tell herself. It was that she didn't feel worthy of it. We talked about how she wouldn't hesitate to spend that kind of money on her kids if she knew that the investment would result in them being happy or furthering their happiness or their career or whatever it is that they wanted in their life. And not only would she be willing to invest in their happiness, but if they were adults thinking about investing in themselves and they were hesitating in it, she would coach them. She would tell them that for sure that they should do it. She believed that they were worth it, that they were even worth going into debt for, but that she was not.
If you want to learn how to invest in yourself, it starts with you feeling worthy of being invested in.
And I know a lot of you are in the same boat. I know a lot of you that see yourself as the lowest priority. Your kids come first, and then maybe your job, and then your partner, and then maybe a clean house, and then maybe you. And if you want to learn how to invest in yourself, it starts with you feeling worthy of being invested in. I'm going to give you a couple of my thoughts on why I think that you are worthy to be invested in. But this is a really important exercise for you to do on your own to mine your own brain for the reasons why you're worthy to be invested in. And if you have a hard time answering that question, think about why your kids are worthy to be invested in. Because whatever your answer is to that, it's the same for you.
So here are some of my thoughts. You are worthy to be invested in because you are human with an immense amount of value. The world needs you to be operating at your best. You have great ideas. You have great energy. The world needs you. You deserve to be happy. You work hard, you try hard. You give yourself away. Your cup needs to be filled so you can continue to give yourself away. You're worthy to be invested in because you have an immense amount of untapped potential. You're just getting started. Life is not on the decline. It's on the incline. You have to make more money. You have more influence. Your company needs you to be operated at the highest level so you can solve more complex problems in your company and in the world. Your kids deserve to see you as the badass working mom that you are. I could go on and on and on about what I believe about you and your worthiness to be invested in, because it is what fuels me as a coach.
I want to help you reach your highest potential.
These are the beliefs that I have in you. It's really why I do what I do. I want to help you reach your highest potential. I do not want you going through life thinking that you're not worthy, that you're not deserving, that you're less than, that you're not enough. I want you to learn how to always be in control of your happiness, because the world needs you. Our companies need you in big leadership roles. Your family needs you to be happy, and you deserve it. Now, if your thoughts about yourself don't match mine, this is your work to fuel yourself with the belief that you are worthy to be invested in.
Now, I remember this was really the thing that allowed me to invest in coach training and make that big leap out of my corporate career with that very first investment of $8,000. I remember coming to my husband and saying, look, I don't know if this coaching thing is going to really work out. I don't know if I'm going to have a business at the end of this. I don't really know. It might be the most expensive personal development journey I have ever been on, and I still think it's worth it. Agreed. And ultimately, I jumped in, and here I am today. So that's your number one. You have to decide you are worth investing in. And notice it's a decision. You may or may not believe it right now or have that strong energy like I do, behind it, but you still can decide to invest because all it is is a decision. You can cognitively know that you're worth it and still have some feelings that are lingering, like, maybe I'm not. That's okay. You can still decide to invest anyway.
Now, the second thing that you need to decide is that whatever it is you want, it's worth it. This is why the question, Can I afford it? Isn't really a useful question, because most of us can't put a price tag on happiness. And if your only filter is if you have the money in the bank account, then what you're really saying is, happiness is only possible if I have the money. But what about people that are poor? Do they deserve to be happy? How do you quantify more time with your kids? How do you quantify a career change that results in you waking up every morning and feeling like you're doing something that matters in the world? Can you really only have those things if you can afford it comfortably? Something about that doesn't feel right to me. Happiness is not something that you can have only if you can afford it. It's something that you deserve, not something that you've earned. Your happiness is worth investing in.
What I gain from the long term investment.
Now, for me, I have a business coach. She cost me $50,000 a year and like I said, I don't have that money. When I pay her, I put that investment on a credit card and then I slowly pay it back just like you would a lot of big investments. But the reason I do it, and I have done it for the last three years is what I gain from the long term investment. Just like you make an investment to go to college and it's really not going to pay off for years after college. Maybe that first job you get out of college, it all kind of pans out and maybe not usually it's down the line that the degree really gets you moving through the ranks faster. In the same way, when we invest in ourselves and in coaching at this level, we are not investing just in today, but her entire future. And I believe that's worth going into debt for that. That's worth investing in.
A conversation I often have with potential clients is how does learning how to create your own work life balance and to love your job, how does that impact you five years from now? How about ten years from now? Because it's not just a today investment. Yes, things will get better today. You'll start seeing your kids more. You'll start thinking about work less, you'll feel more confident and less like an imposter at your job. You'll start making values based decisions. You will start to do those things. What kind of a positive impact is that going to have on you for the rest of your life? Every six months, I continue to hire my business coach because I am learning how to create a sustainable six figure coaching business for the rest of my working life. I'm learning how to be in control of how much money fluctuates into my business and how many hours I work. I'm learning how to expand my vision for what I'm doing and the people that I'm impacting. I'm learning how to do that now and that's going to have a lasting effect on my business success and on me as a businesswoman. It makes sense to invest $25,000 every six months to learn how to make $200,000 and sustain that for the rest of my life. The math makes sense.
Why wouldn’t it be worth it?
Now, I'm not a business coach. I'm a life coach for ambitious working moms. And I teach them how to feel like a kickass mom while having a meaningful and fulfilling career for the rest of their working mom life. I teach them how to never have their work life and their mom life feel like they're in conflict. I teach them how to have sustainable work life balance that they feel 100% in charge of no matter what the upfront investment for a lifetime of balance and a lifetime of ownership over your career and your motherhood experience. If we work together one on one, that investment is $8,000. Is it worth it? And that sort of feels like a magical question, right? I mean, why wouldn't it be worth it? I hear that a lot. It's hard to quantify something like your happiness, something like seeing your kids more hours in the day, something like having a calmer brain and not always thinking about work. And that's the question that I ask myself every six months when I reinvest in my business. Why wouldn't it be worth learning how to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in my business every year and sustain that? And when I ask myself that question in that way, I've never really been able to come up with an acceptable answer, an answer that isn't just based in fear. And I'm going to come back to that in a moment. We're going to talk about the fear based answer. But I want to wrap up this point number two. You get to decide what is worth investing in and what's not.
If you really want to work with me in coaching and you're having a hard time with that $8,000 investment, then your job is to find all of the reasons why it is worth it. Your brain is stuck and is not, and you just need to redirect it. What would be different in your life if you were happy or in a career you love? What would be different? Or if you felt more confident? What would be different? What would you do if you learned how to be present and not always think about work, or you started that dream business, or you went after that promotion? These are all the things I've worked recently on with my clients. What do you gain by making this investment and going after what you want? You just have to keep redirecting your brain over and over and over again and think about it in the long term, in the short term, and with as much specificity as possible.
You won’t invest unless you believe in the results.
The third thing I want to offer to you, if you want to invest in yourself at a higher level and you can't get past the money, is to decide you will get what you came for no matter what. Because really, the only reason you wouldn't make the investment is if you believed that the results were worth it and you believed you were worth it is if you believe that the results are not possible for you. If it's an investment in coaching, then it would be that the process won't work for you. Maybe it worked for other people. You can see that there's testimonials. You can listen to my client interviews and all those things, but it may not work for me. If it's an investment in a vacation for your family that you've always wanted to take them on, it's believing that that vacation will be as restful as you want it to be will be as connecting as you want it to be for your family, that you really will be able to shut down your work brain. Or if the investment is a weight loss program, the only reason you wouldn't invest in it if you believe that losing weight was worth it, is if you don't think that you can lose the weight. We don't buy anything we don't think is going to work. You don't walk into Target and buy clothes that you don't think are going to look good on you. You don't go buy medicine to fix your headache if you don't think it will actually take away your headache. Right? You follow me? You don't buy a car that you know is a lemon. We're too smart for that.
‘I have to believe that the result that I want is worth it.’
So when it's time for me to re-up with my coach every six months and my brain puts on a fight saying, oh, my gosh, that's a ton of money, maybe you should just sit this round out. What my brain is offering to me is just fear. My brain is saying, what if this just isn't working? I mean, maybe you're really just not capable of the success you want Rebecca, other people have figured it out, but maybe you're just not as good as other people. You're doing things wrong, and you should really figure out a different way. If I really believed those thoughts, of course I wouldn't invest in my business coach because I believe it's not working. I have to believe it's working in order to continue to invest, I have to believe that the result that I want is worth it.
You have to believe that in coaching you will get that career change that you want, that you will start that business, that you will learn how to shut down your work brain, that you will get unstuck and crystal clear on what it is you want in your life and why. You have to believe that you will make more money, that you'll go after that promotion without it impacting your family. You have to believe that coaching is the mechanism to get you where you want to go. Your brain might say, but I don't know. How could you really know? Maybe it won't. And here's the kinds of things you have to start talking to yourself about. Do you believe that you'll get a degree after four years of investing in college? You can't read into the future, so you can't be sure, but you probably don't question that. Do you believe that when you invest in a new car, that it will take your family on its next family vacation? It will get you to and from work. It'll be safe, reliable. You can't read the future, so you don't really know for sure, but you probably don't question that.
In this case, when it comes to investing in yourself, you have to trust that you will do what it takes, just like you pulled all nighters in college to ensure you got that paper in and pass that class. Just like you trusted yourself to run the presentation even though you were only 70% prepared. You have a track record of showing up and following through, and now is no different. Decide you will get what you came for, whether that's the rest on the vacation or that you'll go to the gym three times a week if you buy that membership, or you're going to show up with honesty and integrity at every coaching call. I have not made $200,000 in a twelve month period in my business yet, even though that's what I'm working towards with my business coach. But I still make that investment in it because I believe it's working, that it's inevitable as long as I don't quit. If I quit, of course it's not going to work out. If I don't invest and I give up, of course it's not going to work out.
Whatever it is that you want, it's inevitable because you show up.
That is the level of belief I want you to have in yourself. It's inevitable. Whatever it is that you want, it's inevitable because you show up strong, you're willing to ask for what you need. You know how to put your mind to something and you believe it's worth the effort. It's not about the money. After spending the last five years investing close to $200,000 in myself and having probably well over 200 and 5300 conversations with women about investing in themselves in coaching, I know it's never about the money. The money can be found. It's there. It might not be comfortable to spend, but it's there. You just need to believe that you're worth investing in, believing what you want is worth it, and believe the results of the investment are inevitable.
You are worth it and what you want is worth it.
Working moms, if you've been thinking about investing in yourself and hiring me as your coach, I have opened up ten spots in my calendar to work with you to help you feel like the badass mom that I know you are while meeting all of your career goals, I can help you get there. It starts with scheduling a free breakthrough call where we will get clear on exactly what it is you want, what's getting in the way of you having it, and talk about exactly how we're going to make it happen in coaching. You can go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to find the time for us to connect on a free call. Because let me remind you, you are worth it and what you want is worth it, and the results are inevitable. All right, working moms, let's get to it.
