Guest: Desiree Stafford + Limiting Beliefs + The Importance of Confidence

01 Jul Guest: Desiree Stafford + Limiting Beliefs + The Importance of Confidence

My guest on today’s episode is Desiree Stafford, the owner of High Personal Impact. Desiree helps ambitious coaches breakthrough to their next level of income and impact without working harder

Key topics we cover:

✔️ Desiree’s own entrepreneurial journey and her path to coaching.
✔️ The limiting beliefs she encounters most often.
✔️ The importance of confidence in yourself and the service you provide– and why this is a key foundational piece you can’t skip over!
✔️ Paid ads are not a cure-all for your business. (Amen and amen.)
✔️ Who are Desiree’s ideal clients and why.

You can find Desiree online at: https://www.powerhouseonfire.com/nextlevel
And on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/desireestafford/

Transcription by Otter.ai

Hello, hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Causey Consulting Podcast. I’m your host Sara Causey and I’m also the owner of Causey Consulting, which you can find online anytime at Causey ConsultingLLC.com. I’m excited to welcome my guest today, Desiree Stafford. Desiree helps ambitious coaches breakthrough to their next level of income and impact without working harder. Very exciting stuff. Desiree, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today. Thanks for having me on, Sara. It’s a pleasure. Excellent. Well tell us about your own entrepreneurial journey. How did you get started? Well, it’s very interesting. I had despite being my fourth business, I had three successful businesses offline. And it was the disappointment of the last one. It was a multiple seven figure business that went out of business. And I went back to work feeling like a total failure, you know, like, tucking my tail between my legs and feeling just like I wasn’t cut out to be an entrepreneur. Yeah. So I went back to work for someone else, which was a painful experience in and of itself. You know, after you’ve had the experience of being out on your own making your own money, calling your own shots. Now having to you know, take direction from someone else was was difficult. And it’s actually what led me to becoming a coach because my mother of all people reached out to me one day and she was like, she knew I was unhappy. And she said, I think you should be a life coach. I heard someone on the radio talking about, you know, being a life coach. And she was like, well, you like to tell people what to do. So maybe that would be a good option for you. And so, you know, I did a little bit of research on And honestly, I wasn’t lit up about the idea of life coaching, I initially, I really was passionate about helping people in business number one, probably like, you know, all coaches that I know, I had been coaching my entire life I just didn’t know you could get paid for it I didn’t know is actual, actually a profession. So as I did more research, I realized that what I really wanted to do was help other entrepreneurs in business because I recognized, you know, by understanding what coaching actually does, like the power of it, that had I had a coach, I probably would never have made the choice to go back to work, I probably would never have quit on myself the way that I did. So I was really determined to get back out, you know, on my own number one, but also to really help entrepreneurs really become more successful in their businesses. So that’s, that’s what led that was my journey to here, where I am now. Oh, that’s so interesting. So it was a radio interview that sort of sparked the journey that led you into coaching here. You’re Yeah, that’s so cool. So talking to talk about the evolution of your coaching business, how it’s changed from that initial aha moment of like, Oh, you know, Desiree would be good at this to where you’re at now. I think what’s what’s changed was probably my understanding of the work that I would be doing. So remember what I said initially, I wasn’t lit up by the idea of life coaching. But it turns out that that’s a lot of what I do today, though, I help people make a lot more money, I help them attract more clients, those kind of things. So much of it has to do with what’s going on internally with my clients and shifting their own perception of the value that they offer to their clients and the work that they do. So while the the result hasn’t changed much other than the fact that they’re bigger than they were before. I think what’s changed More has been my own understanding of how I support my clients and the real work that’s necessary. Because so many of the people that I work with have tried all of the external stuff. And they get themselves to a certain point of success, but it’s really what’s going on internally that needs to shift in order for them to have the breakthrough that they’re after. Yes. Oh my gosh. That’s a great segue into my next question. I recently sat down and recorded an episode with Christine Teh, who is an IRS enrolled agent and a finance coach and money is one of my favorite topics. So we got into limiting beliefs around money, some of the ideas that people carry with them about money or people who have money. And I would love to know in your coaching practice, what are some of the limiting beliefs that you see most often? I think all of them go back to “I’m not enough.” So typically, somebody you know will come to me because they want to work with more and better people. clients, they want to work with people who are at a higher level. What stops them from doing that is they’re afraid of being found out. They’re afraid that they’re not enough yet they don’t know enough yet, you know, or that they can’t command the fees that they want to command because again, they’re not enough yet they don’t know enough yet. So in my opinion, everything boils back down to I am not enough, which is why so many people undervalue like the clients that come to work with me, they’re frustrated, you know, when they see somebody who’s half their age with half the experience commanding double the fees, or 5 or 10X the fees that they’re currently charging, when they know that they’re good at what they do, but they can’t figure out how to get out of their own way to allow themselves to give themselves permission to command those kind of fees to call in those level of client. And it always comes back to this, I find that no matter what level of success someone’s that I work with people who have pre six figures, folks who are at 100K a year, quarterly, and even half a million dollars a year. This belief that I’m not enough is what needs to shift because then it then it shifts the energy behind everything that you do behind the marketing that you create behind it. show up on your sales calls and in your coaching sessions, and therefore, you get bigger, better results, your clients get bigger, better results, but this is the belief that needs to be shifted. Oh, gosh, man, that’s powerful stuff. And you’re so right. It is amazing how much the energy that we carry with us the I think of it like a broadcast signal, you know, if the the broadcast signal that you’re putting out is I’m not enough. I’m scared. I don’t feel qualified to be doing what I’m doing. Then even if you think you’re faking it to make it, it’s like the world responds to that broadcast signal. Absolutely. I actually want to add one more thing to that because I don’t know that it’s always apparent to the entrepreneur. Yeah. Because often what happens is, they prop themselves up on external factors such as their clients results with in the case of the people that I work with. So if their clients results, if their own results in terms of their income, it’s the amount of work that they do, right. And at some point, they get To the place where they recognize that Wait a minute, I’m working really hard, and I’m not seeing a shift. My clients are getting amazing results, but I still don’t feel good enough. Right? So I don’t. I think the point is that so often, it’s hidden, this belief is hidden because they find ways to kind of prop up their confidence until they get to a place where all of the things that they used to do to make them feel better about themselves to fill that void stop working. That’s very well said it reminds me of the phrase “physician heal thyself.” You know, if someone is coaching their clients to get awesome results, and the clients are celebrating, but then there’s that part lingering in the coach that, you know, feels like the cobbler that had no shoes, so to speak. Yep, yeah, I get it. What kind of tactical or practical mistakes Do you see because I’ve heard the entrepreneur Dan Lok, throw out the analogy that typically it’s about 70 to 80% mindset issues and then the other 20 to 30%, or tactical practical mistakes that need to be tweaked. And I think that’s a pretty good ratio that I would say, been the same for me. So when you see the tactical practical mistakes that people are making in their business, what are some of the commonalities or common things that you see on that component? I think doing the right things at the wrong time, you know, like running to paid ads, and you know, paying to write a book and, you know, getting all these logos next to your name. It’s there like vanity, you know, yes. Hence it to build yourself up to prop yourself up when the real work is to make build yourself up internally. I call this positioning from the inside out, versus trying to go out into the marketplace and convince people that you’re so awesome, right? That what a lot of people experience is that they may big build a big audience. They may attract a lot of people. They may build a big list, but they’re getting fused. sales, because they’re not fully sold on themselves or what it is that they’re selling. So if we do things in reverse, if we really get you confident in what you’re selling and, and the way that you deliver and why it’s magical, and you know, all of the good things, then energetically, the shifts will occur so that you make more sales, and then you have the cash flow to go out and do those other things, if you choose to do them at a later point. But I think a lot of people, you know, for example, people will come to me they want to scale. They’re not in a position to scale. Making 20 or 30 or 50 k a month, they’re not in a position get to scale. Right, because their business model is broken. Yeah, there’s no way that they’re going to be able to take on as many clients as they want. So we fixed this problem first. So I think a lot of people and it’s, I wouldn’t say it’s their fault, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Yes, following the gurus, Guru says to do this and do this and do this and you don’t know what the hell to do. About really getting the proper guidance that also aligned with what your actual vision is. And from my understanding what most people want is they want more freedom, right? They want financial freedom, time freedom, they want mental and emotional freedom. So let’s get you that stuff first. And then everything else is icing on the cake. And that can be done so much faster. If you cut out a lot of the crap that you don’t need and just focus on the things are actually going to bring the sales in. Mm hmm. I’m so glad that you mentioned rushing to paid ads because I have seen people throw so much money down a hole. It’s like a vortex that goes into nowhere because somebody to a guru, as you said they followed some gurus advice that said, Well, okay, the next stage that you should be going to in your business is to run all of these paid ads. And, you know, I’m always willing to tattle on myself and I’ll tell you Desiree, in some of the early stages of my business, I threw money down the hole of Facebook ads, you know, not knowing what I was doing. And when I look back on it in hindsight, I mean, I can’t even say that I got good data. You know, sometimes people will say if you run an ad and it didn’t convert to a lot of sales, but you got good data from it, that’s still a great learning experience. But you know, there’s ads I ran that I didn’t even get good data from and and I think about you know, I could have just taken that money outside to the burn barrel I have on my farm and lit it on fire for warmth and gotten more out of it than I did. That’s what it often feels like. I would be agile myself, which is why I’m so passionate. Getting yourself to a point where you have a proven message you know that your program is going to sell no matter what you’re not looking for validation from clients to know that yes, works. Like when when you’re fully sold. That’s when everyone else is going to be sold. That’s when you actually get an ROI from your ads. Now I’ve done ads, unsuccessfully. It myself and what I hired people to do them for me, and I also did it successfully, what do you think made the difference. You know, like I have my message dialed in. I actually am at a place where I don’t run ads right now. I think I might do them probably later in the year but not not for the same reasons that I did them before, I think before and I think this is why a lot of people do them and why they are not as successful as they would like is that people when they’re not converting at the level that they want the consistency that they want, organically, they think, well, if I just go and do some ads, of course, it’s going to be consistent when you haven’t fixed the problem. Why it wasn’t consistent when you weren’t organic first. If you fix that, then your ads will give you the ROI. Yes. Virtual round of applause to everything you just said. Yes. So who who would be your ideal client? I mean, you’ve done the work you’ve gotten dialed in, you know who you like to work with who’s the right fit for you. So describe for all of the listeners what your ideal client looks like. My ideal client is–Great question, by the way– is a coach who is ambitious. Someone who wants results like yesterday, someone who’s willing to put in the work. They’re coachable. Obviously, they’re, you know, it almost goes without saying they’re hard working, because everybody that I attract is someone who’s worked themselves to the bone and looking for his growth without having to work harder, right? It’s not that they don’t want to work, it’s that they’re tired of giving their business their all and not seeing the return on that investment of time and energy. So this is for someone who’s looking to make, you know, the shifts in terms of how they’re running their business so that we can simplify their business model, we can simplify the way that they attract leads and convert prospects into clients and they’re looking to make quantum leap. So I’m looking for somebody who wants to add anywhere from 30K to 50K or more pretty quickly to their business. I mean, I like clients who are wanting to see ROI within the first four to six weeks. Awesome. If someone like that is listening to this episode today, and they’re thinking, yes, this I want to find Desiree, like now, where do they need to go to find you? The most direct place is my website. It’s powerhouse on fire.com. So you have to enter the www. to go there. But if you go there, there’s actually a webinar that I have available. So it’s powerhouse on fire com forward slash next level. And there’s a webinar that will actually walk them through the entire process that I that I walk my clients through to help them get massive results really quickly. And then I’m also available on social media like LinkedIn and Facebook. Cool. I highly encourage you if you are in Desiree’s ideal target market, you’re listening to this take advantage of that take full advantage of her webinar, visit her online and on social media. You can learn some great things. I watch her videos on LinkedIn all the time and find the content to be excellent. Check her out, two thumbs way up and Desiree, I know you’re busy. I really appreciate you taking the time today to sit down with me and have this chat. I appreciate it. Thank you. Again, our guest today was Desiree Stafford you can visit her online and view her webinar at http://www.powerhouseonfire.com/nextlevel. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to this podcast and leave a review for us on iTunes. See you in the next episode!