#011 Sacrifice Seasons: You can have it all...just not at the same f*cking time

In this raw and real episode, Stef breaks down the truth about sacrifice seasons in entrepreneurship that nobody wants to talk about. If you're building something big, this is your permission slip to let go of the guilt and lean into what it actually takes to create the freedom lifestyle you're dreaming of.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• Why you can have everything you want—just not all at the same damn time
• The myth of "having it all" and why successful women aren't showing you the whole story
• What sacrifice season actually looks like in your relationships, lifestyle, and time
• Why most people quit right before their breakthrough (and when they typically give up too early)
• The real truth about those Instagram entrepreneurs with the "dream lifestyle"
• How your nervous system will sabotage you during sacrifice season—and what to do about it
• The difference between strategic sacrifice and burnout
• How to identify your non-negotiables vs. what needs to be cut during your building season

Quotable Moments:

• "You can have everything you've ever wanted in this big beautiful life... just not all of it at the same f*cking time."
• "The sacrifice season isn't a punishment. It's an investment. You're trading temporary comfort for permanent transformation."
• "Most people quit right before their breakthrough. They quit in month three when the breakthrough was coming in month six."
• "The women you follow online....that you look up to...they're showing you the result, not the process, so you don't have realistic expectations of what it's actually going to take."
• "The discomfort of discipline is temporary. The pain of regret is forever."
• "Your brain will try to convince you that you're missing out. That's just fear talking. Fear that's dressed up as logic and its lying to you."
• "Sacrifice season doesn't mean burning yourself out. It means getting crystal clear on what's essential and what's just extra for now."
• "Your sacrifice season is your secret weapon. It's the chapter in your story where you prove to yourself that you're willing to do what others won't so you can live how others never will"

Related Episodes:

• The Shedding Season (referenced in this episode)

Share This Episode:

Know someone in their sacrifice season who needs to hear this? Send them this episode and remind them their future self is already thanking them.

Transcript

0:00

Hello, you beautiful souls. Welcome back to Call Her Coach, and today we are talking about something nobody wants to hear, but everybody needs to understand, okay? The sacrifice. Seasons. You know what's wild? Every single woman who is literally out there crushing it in business right now, making multiple 6, 7, 8 figures, you see'em online, they're living the freedom lifestyle is what I like to call it. Every single fucking one of them went through a season where they had to choose. They didn't get to have it all at once. And I see you. I see you sweetness over there thinking that you can build your empire. You can keep up clean house. You can keep up on your laundry. You can make a dinner every night. You can maintain your social calendar. You can keep up with every friend and family obligation. You can stay on top of every single hobby that you have, and you can still get eight hours of sleep. Girl, I love you. I truly do. But that's not how this whole building a business thing works. Okay? You can absolutely have everything that you've ever wanted in this big, beautiful life. You just can't have it all at the same fucking time.

Speaker 1:26

Welcome to the Call Her Coach podcast. I'm your host, Steph Willis, neuro operational coach and creator of becoming her the neuro identity calibration system behind high-end Regulation for female entrepreneurs. This. Podcast is for high functioning type A women who are done with surface level mindset hacks and ready to understand the science behind success and wealth. Here we blend nervous system science, wealth psychology and tactical, no bullshit business strategy so that you can rewire your identity, expand your capacity, scale your business, and increase your income if you are ready to regulate, recalibrate, and become the most wealthy version of yourself. Let's dive in.

2:15

We have been sold this lie that successful women just have to have it all together. We've been sold this lie from a very young age that successful women just have it all together. We can do it all because we're women that we're simultaneously over there crushing every single goal that we set out. We have the perfect relationship. We are in peak physical condition, and we get to show up to every single birthday party and brunch invitation while completely being in our feminine. And that's what we have capacity to do. It is absolutely not, not accurate whatsoever. I hate to break it to you, uh, but if that's what you thought, success looked like as a woman, you should be able to do all these things. It's a lie. It's a lie. Just go ahead and release that from your inner being. It's not real. Uh, we're four different human beings every single month. We have hormone cycles that are wild, like we have to adapt to those. And next week, I think that's what I'm gonna talk about is the masculine and the feminine. Feminine. The feminine of being a woman and how you have to have a balance of both. When I made my first$450,000 my first year In high ticket, I became a top 10 global distributor out of 2 million in my high ticket business. You guys, do you wanna know how I did that? I said, no a fucking lot, like a fuck ton. I said, no. I missed events. I had friends who didn't understand who probably still to this day don't, I had family members question things. My social media wasn't this like. Perfectly curated lifestyle. I feel like maybe if you look back on it, you think it was, but it wasn't.

Speaker 2 4:02

You guys, I even had to give up this perfect perfectionist image that I have always carried. I'm a little bit of a, of a perfectionist, like a little bit of OCD, like. I like to have a very clean house. I like to have everything organized. If you know me personally, like you know that everything always has a place, everything is always clean and wiped down, and laundry's done, and all these things, I had to let go of that I had to ask for help and support. I'm a very independent woman asking for help and support. Feels like to me, giving up, it feels like failure. And for the longest time I had a lot of guilt around asking other people for help. During my sacrifice seasons, I had to ask for help with the laundry. I had to ask for help with the dishes. I had to ask for help with cooking dinners and lunches and breakfast, and I had to ask for help. Cleaning the house where prior to my sacrifice season in what I'm building now, I handled all of that. My husband didn't because he was the one that was bringing in the majority of the income. And now we have swapped places. And in the beginning it was a very, very, very, very, very uncomfortable for me to let some of this shit that really doesn't matter, go. And so now. Because I did that, I can have a messy house and I'm okay with it because I know that I'm working towards something way more fucking important than having everything in its place. Maybe one day a week I'll help out, but right now it's not my priority. My priority is my future. And in the sacrifice season, some of those things you gotta give up. It's hard. I'm not gonna lie to you. It's hard. But maybe you don't have to have a spotless house. Maybe this is your opportunity to ask for help.

6:00

I was too busy building an actual lifestyle to worry about any of those things. The sacrifice season isn't a punishment. It is an investment. You are treating temporary comfort for a permanent transformation. And in relationships during your sacrifice season, your friends probably not gonna get why you can't make every single girl's night anymore. Your family's probably not gonna understand why you're working on weekends and on vacations, and you just have to be okay with being misunderstood for a season. To be quite honest with you, the people that are meant to be in your life will still be there when you come up for air, I promise you. And the ones who are not, they're making space for your next level. And if you haven't listened to my episode, um, I think it's number three or four on the shedding season, you're gonna wanna go back and listen to that for sure, because you gotta go through some shedding seasons, okay? And in your lifestyle, maybe you're not gonna be able to go on your annual vacation this year because you're investing that money into your business. Or hell, maybe even it's just a time investment. Maybe it's not anything to do about money. But you're investing your time into building something so that later you can maybe that looks like you are driving the same car for another two years. Maybe your wardrobe doesn't get refreshed every season because every single dollar that you have right now or that you don't have is going back into paid advertisement, going back into your development, going back into your business, going back into your team, going back into developing systems so that you can scale. And talking about your time, because this one's a huge one. When I was building my business, I've been in the high ticket industry for three years. I've been in online social selling network marketing, um, affiliate marketing, all things for about the past decade now. But when I was building my high ticket business, and that's what I'm gonna focus on, for comparison's sake, been here three years. I had to get. Really fucking ruthless with my calendar. If it wasn't revenue generating or soul nourishing, it got cut, period. Point blank. That's it. That means that I had to say no to things. I really, really, really wanted to say yes to. Like weekends out with my friends, um, going to bars, going to, you know, things like that. Skipping out on traveling for a whole year. And you guys know that's my love language is travel. But my first year, I didn't go on any vacations. I skipped out on every single one of them. So many things I had to say no to, and find a way to fall in love with that no, so that it wasn't this painful thing that I would eventually look at with resentment. Because your brain isn't gonna like that very much. We'll talk about nervous system here in a second. You gotta find a way to say no and also fall in love with it. But those years of sacrifice is what got me what I have now, because I have went through multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple over the past decade, sacrifice seasons. I now have freedom, real fucking freedom, like The kind where I get to go snowboarding tomorrow for the rest of the week because my friend, my best friend is flying in from across the country. I don't have to ask for permission off. I don't have to worry about only having two weeks of vacation a year. That never sat well with me to begin with. That's why I got into entrepreneurship, online entrepreneurship at that. But that's the kind of freedom where I don't have to work before noon because I built a business and a lifestyle that serves me through sacrifice. And the most suck thing that I see that breaks my heart a lot of the times is that most people quit on themselves. They quit right before their fucking breakthrough, and it, oh, it's soul crushing for me. They quit in maybe month. Three when maybe their breakthrough was coming in month six. They quit after their first year when year two or year three was gonna be their first million dollar year. And you know why they quit. You know why? Really? It's because sacrifice seasons are very fucking uncomfortable. It's hard to keep going when you can't see the finish line yet. I mean, hell, you can't see anything. To be honest with you. You are running on pure belief of yourself because everyone around you is a living. They're quote unquote, normal life. And then you start questioning if you're crazy for doing things differently, You're taking the road less traveled, and it's bumpy. Like you're out there hiking and you ain't in shape. And it's hard. It really is. And a lot of people quit because they think that the sacrifice season should be shorter than it actually is. They think that three months of hard work or six months of hard work or. Hell, even a fucking year of hard work should equal 10 years of results. And that's not how it works, unfortunately. I wish it was, but it doesn't. All those women that you're following on Instagram right now who have the lifestyle that you want, the ones traveling first class working from their phones, laptop, lifestyle, living a true freedom lifestyle, they did not get there without working their fucking asses off. Off. They went through multiple sacrifices into you guys, multiple fucking seasons. they're not out there posting about all the nights that they cried in their fucking car, the friendships that they lost, like I'm getting emotional, but it's so true and I wouldn't change a fucking thing about it. The family members who maybe called them crazy, who talk behind their back, the friends who talk behind their back. the months that they were almost not able to pay their rent or their car payments, or maybe they had to cut back on groceries because they reinvested every single dollar back into their business or their development, they are showing you the results, not the process. So then you don't have realistic expectations of what it's actually gonna take for you to get that lifestyle. That's why I'm so passionate about this episode right here, because every single woman, every single person that you look up to that has exactly what you want, we built that fucking lifestyle in the very messy, un uncomfy, day to day, boring, mundane shit. And you know what? Your nervous system is going to freak out during sacrifice seasons, and you wanna know why. Because your beautiful little brain up there is only wired for safety. It's only wired for belonging. And when you start to pull back from your normal, when you start to pull back from people, when you start to make different choices than everyone else around you, then 99% of the population, your brain and your nervous system is going to interpret that as danger. This is where the regulation work becomes crucial. This is you becoming her in the very, very, very un uncomfy parts. You need to be able to hold that discomfort of being different without going back into what's familiar, because everything in your body is gonna tell you to abandon ship. Here's what I like to remind my team my legacy leaders all the time, you guys. The discomfort of discipline is temporary. The pain of regret is forever. five years from now, do you think you're gonna wish you'd gone to more happy hours, or are you gonna be grateful that you bet on yourself during that critical building season and you didn't get distracted? Your brain is gonna try to convince you that you're missing out, that you are sacrificing too much, that it shouldn't be this hard, that everyone else has it figured out and you're doing it wrong. That you're fine where you're at. That is just fear. That is just fear talking, that it is lying to you. And I wanna also make this abundantly clear too. Okay guys, coming from someone who has once completely clinically. Burnt herself out. Sacrifice season doesn't mean burning yourself out or abandoning everything that matters to you. I promise. It means getting crystal clear on what does, what's essential, and what's just extra. For now, self self-discipline is the greatest form of self-love. Self-discipline says this is a quote from Will Smith. One of my favorite people to listen to when I am down and out, and I need some motivation because, you know, life gets a little hard. and he says like, you know, you really want to eat that piece of pizza, but you know that if you eat that piece of pizza, you're gonna feel like shit the next day. You're gonna have guilt around it. So the self-discipline, the self-love is not eating that pizza. Even though you right now want that pizza version of you tomorrow is gonna be thankful that you didn't. So for me, during my sacrifice seasons, my marriage, my relationship with my husband, that was a non-negotiable. My mental health, that was a non-negotiable. My morning routines, they keep me regulated. Those were non-negotiables, but the afternoon girls dates with my friends, the vacations, the normal weekends out, the bars, the tv, those all got cut. Maybe it looked like me waking up an hour or two earlier so that I could get things done so that I could still have my morning routine. You gotta move around the schedule. During sacrifice season, and you need to ask yourself what are your absolute non-negotiables? And be honest, not what anybody else says should be a non-negotiable, not what I say, not what Instagram says, nobody else, but what's actually keeping you functional, healthy, and aligned during your sacrifice season. It doesn't matter. And the beautiful part here, you guys, is that the sacrifice season doesn't last forever. It's like running a race, not a marathon. Pretend you're a sprinter, Business is built in sprints. Sacrifice season doesn't last forever. You are not giving up these things forever. You're not giving them up permanently. You are prioritizing strategically for a concentrated period of time to create the foundation that lets you have it all. Eventually, you can have it all just not at the same fucking time. So if you are in your sacrifice season right now and you are overwhelmed or maybe you're missing your old routine, I want you to know that you are not missing out on anything. Nothing. You are investing in a future version of yourself who gets to have everything that you've ever wanted, that you're working towards the women who have everything. They did not get it by half-assing their sacrifice. Seasons. They went all the way in. They made really hard choices. They made really big cuts. They stayed focused. When everyone else, 99% of people out there on the planet are distracted. If you are part of that 1%, you're going to be misunderstood by the other 99%. So I getting around people who want and desire the same things in life are gonna make sacrifice seasons a lot easier versus staying in your current circle that doesn't get it. Your sacrifice season is going to be your biggest secret weapon. It is the chapter in your story where you get to prove to yourself that you are willing to do what others won't, so that you can live how others never will, and eventually, the beautiful thing here is that gets to be the blueprint to inspire others after you've done it and proof that they can do it too. So keep going. Your future self is already thanking you. I will see you next week on another episode of Call Her Coach.