Ep #101: Awareness – Watching Models

Welcome to the Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. Now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Well hello my friends, thank you so much for all of the gifts and all of the love for the 100th episode. You guys are amazing. Some of you sent me emails saying you finally did a review because I got to 100 episodes. That is a long time that it took y'all, but I appreciate it. Some of you sent me a review, which I appreciate it, and one of you, Denise, even told me that the reason you hadn't done a review is because it's kind of challenging but then when you did it on your phone it was very easy and that you could do it very easily. Denise offered to help anyone that's having trouble, she's one of my certified coaches and she offered anyone that's having trouble writing a review to help you write a review. I'm going to put her email in the show notes. Thank you Denise for offering to do that, and for any of you who want to thank me for 100 episodes, I would really, really appreciate it. I just want to give a huge shout out to Diane who sent me the most beautiful bouquet of roses, totally unexpected. I'm sorry. It wasn't roses. It was all sorts of different flowers, just a beautiful bouquet. They are seriously gloriously all over, they're like splayed I should say all over the kitchen counter.

I also want to thank everyone else that sent me beautiful gifts, I can't go through them all but I really, really appreciate it and I really appreciate all the notes and posts that you guys did. Thank you for thanking me, I really appreciate it. This is one of those things I do because it's something that I love and I know is appreciated. Every time that I have students that I meet live and in person they tell me how much they love the podcast. We just did an in person event, how to feel better, in person event. God it was so awesome, it was such an amazing group of people. I feel like sometimes things just align, and it was such a great group of people, such an amazing experience to work with them all for the whole day. It just seemed like the amount of work that you're able to do on someone’s psyche in one day in person is really powerful. Unfortunately we're not doing anything else like that for the rest of the year, so I don't mean to sell it. We do the in person training, which of course is that times steroids, and we had a couple of people who did that how to feel better event that signed up to come to our in person training. We're stoked. We love them. We're totally stoked to have you guys coming, can't wait.

Okay, so let's talk about the next few episodes and what I have planned. I know that you guys, I've talked about this before but I usually go through about 10 episodes and I send them over to Kirsten who does all my design for the art for my website for each of the podcasts. I usually send them over 10 at a time, and what I have coming up is ridiculous, and here's why. I went to do this last in person training and everybody there was so ridiculously smart, and so learned, learn-ed, on the concepts in the podcast that I was able to teach at a ridiculously high level. I'm thinking, well, most of y'all that are listening to this, maybe if you didn't come to the in person training, are still as learn-ed as they are. I'm going to start teaching you guys, at least for the next 10 sessions, at a super high level.

Now if you just found my podcast and you're just listening to this, please go back to the beginning and listen to the beginning ones because this will be quite literally very confusing to you if you don't understand the basic concepts of my model and how I teach it. It will be really confusing, so I just want to, just pause this one, make sure you subscribed, and hey, write a review. I'm such a review pusher today. Then go back and listen to those first, at least the first 10 so you have a good understanding of what the model is before you dive into this one. Okay, now I want you to know that had I heard that on a podcast I would think I was smart enough and I wouldn't go back to the beginning, and then I would be confused. If you're that person, come on, let's do it, but I warned you. I totally warned you.

Here's what we're going to do, I am going to, for the next 3 sessions I'm going to talk to you about really some higher level visionary things when it comes to the model, and when it comes to coaching, and changing, and what we teach at the in person training in terms of client evolvement and that sort of thing. Then I am going to talk to you guys about weight loss, I have 2 sessions coming up in early March on weight loss that will blow your minds. Okay, I already have some episodes on weight loss so if you haven't listened to those I recommend you listen to those, but I have 2 more coming up. Then here's what I'm going to do, I have 2 free podcasts and then I am creating a webinar on weight loss. Now I usually do my webinars for free, and I usually have about 1000 people sign up for a webinar because they're excited about it, then I usually have about 250 people show up live and ask questions and are live on the webinar. What I'm doing for this webinar is so elaborate and so intense, and so overally encompassing that I'm not going to let someone sign up and not show up that hasn't paid.

The whole time I'm creating this webinar I'm like, "People aren't even go to show up to this and it's so freaking good." That's what I kept thinking in my mind, so instead of just changing that thought around I decided I'm going to change my circumstance and make the webinar paid. I'm going to be doing a webinar coming up in March 31, I do not have a way for you to sign up for it yet but when I run the weight loss podcasts that will be coming up in early March, I will have all the information to sign up for that webinar, it will be $97.00. I'm already creating it. It's ridiculously awesome. It's all my latest and greatest stuff you guys and there's so much. I have so much good stuff that I've learned about weight loss and doing the Stop Overeating Masterclass and watching everybody lose weight, and oh my God it's so powerful. I can't wait to teach that to you. I'm not just going to let people just sign up and then not show up, or wait for the replay or anything like that. You have to sign up, you have to come live, and you've got to pay. It will be $97.00 if you're interested in that, keep an ear out because when you hear those weight loss podcasts, I will be telling you how to get on that.

Of course I will also be opening up enrollment for Stop Overeating Masterclass, which is my very high-end small group of 6 coaching program for people who want to lose weight permanently, and forever, and never think about losing weight again, that's a promise. All right, holy cow, that's my intro. Some of you are already at work so you'll have to listen to the rest of it on the way back, but what we're talking about today is awareness watching models. This is the first in a series of really good in depth podcasts where I'm going to take you into some work on them.

I have this concept called watching models, where you're looking at the models that are in your brain and you're discovering new models that are in your brain. One of the things that we have a hard time teaching and selling students in our coaching group is the concept that consciousness is treatment, that watching models and doing models is in an of itself treatment. Awareness is treatment. What I mean by treatment is literally changes you, by observing your own mind, by becoming more conscious you are changing. That is a huge part of the process.

Now when I teach people about models so much of the time they just want to change to a new model. I had a question recently from one of you guys on the podcast area on the website, the question was, how do you explain that 50% of the time we're going to experience negative emotion, but also that we are the cause of our own emotions? Shouldn't we try to aim for 100% positive emotion? I say, "Good luck." There are so many unconscious thoughts that we have, so much prior programming to undo and so many incoming events and programming to do that in order to keep up with those 60,000 thoughts a day and to only have 100% positive thoughts, I have found to be impossible. I think that Byron Katie and Ekhart Tolle can do it, and I say if you can do it rock it on. Here's what I've noticed, the more I try and do in my life, the more I try to evolve in my life, the more negative emotion that I have. I'm not willing to give up my evolvement in order not to feel negative emotions. I think every time we evolve ourselves we open up that discomfort and I'm all in.

Is it your responsibility what you feel? Yes. Are you able to track every single thought that you have so you don't feel any negative emotion? No. Is that okay? Not only is it okay, it's part of the human experience, it's part of the deal. Okay, so let's talk about the phases of consciousness, and this is what I taught in the very first part of my course when I was teaching my in person training, so I'm giving you kind of a like window into that. By the way if you're totally geeking out on that and you love that and you want to come hang out with us for 6 days and get this like turbo charged, then go to TheLifeCoachSchool.com and let us know, we'll hook you up.

Okay, so let's talk about the phases of consciousness, and the first phase is unconsciousness. That's where most of us human beings are. Most of us do not spend a lot of time observing ourselves. Most of us do not think about what we're thinking about. Most of us don't pay close enough attention to even what we're creating in our lives and taking responsibility for that. Most of my clients come to me completely unconscious. Most of you guys come to this podcast with a level of unconsciousness and just by listening to this podcast, just by getting this knowledge in your brain, just by paying attention to your own mind you are learning how to be more conscious.

The next step when we have a client that comes to us that's completely unconscious, or if you are unconscious what we do is we start to look at what are you doing and what are you creating in your life. One of the best ways that I know how to do this with a client is to ask them and to write it down. If you're coaching yourself you just write it down. What are the current actions you're taking in your life? Just write them all down. You'll be surprised. Let me give you the example of this with food. You want to be very specific with this. A client will come into me completely unconscious and I'll say, "Well what are you eating?" They'll say, "Not that much." I'll say, "Okay let's keep a food journal." That all of a sudden gives us a lot of awareness as to what they're doing, and why they're getting the results they're getting. People will come to me and they say, "I don't have enough time, I'm totally overwhelmed with everything that I have to do, I can't get everything done." I'll say, "Okay, let's keep a time journal. I want to know everything that you're doing in your life." People will say, "I'm having a problem in my relationships." I'll say, "Okay, tell me about what's going on in the relationships, what are you doing in those relationships and what result is that creating?"

Most of the time, what will happen is a client will give you a story that will include, you'll ask them what they're doing and you'll ask them what results they're creating, and they will immediately give you what other people are doing and what they believe is being created for them. They won't recognize that they are the ones that are actually creating it. What I have them do, and I've talked about this in the podcast, you guys can scroll through over at TheLifeCoachSchool.com. If you go to podcast you can scroll down every podcast that I've done, and I've done 100 in case you're interested. I've done 100 podcasts. You can scroll through them pretty quickly, and you can see which ones talk about awareness and which ones talk about separating out the facts, and that's what I have my clients do. I have them separate what are the facts of what is going on in your life, and what's all the story. That's like a really good first step.
Then asking them, "What are you doing? What are your actions? What are you creating, and what are the results of that creation in your life?" If I say to my client, "This is what you're eating, and this is why you're overweight." I say to my clients, "This is what you're doing with your day. This is why you have no time to workout." Whatever it is, we look at what you're doing and what is that creating in your life. Now that creates the second level of consciousness, you're becoming conscious of what you're actually doing, you're paying enough attention to recognize “wait a minute, what I'm doing is creating this result in my life, what a trip. I never even realized that that's what I'm doing.”

Then the next layer that you want to look at is consciousness of feelings, once you get the consciousness. Now, if you're tracking with me, you'll notice I'm moving up the model from the bottom. I asked what are you doing and what is that creating, now we're asking what are you feeling? Once you become conscious of what you're doing and the results you're creating…first of all, most coaching only works on that action result line. Most coaching will find someone and say, "Okay so what are you doing and what is that creating? Let's change that, let's change what you're doing and what you're creating." That's why the results aren't permanent because they don't work their way up to the cause of the problem. That's where we start because we want to increase that level of awareness. The first level is unconsciousness, second level is awareness of actions and results, now we're at the level of feelings. We want our clients to understand what they're feeling.

One of the best ways is to ask them. If they don't know you have to look at their life and see how often they are distracting themselves from what they're feeling. Most of our clients do that, right? They get too busy, they overeat, they overdrink, they rage around, whatever it is they're doing not to feel what they're feeling. That level of consciousness is really requires us to tap back into the body, to see what's going on within the body, to notice the patterns of resistance and reaction, and avoidance that are going on with our feelings. Again, if you don't know about feelings go and listen to all my podcasts on feelings so you can understand.

One of the things that you want to do is make sure that you understand the difference between your emotions, and you want to understand your ability to actually feel them. Do you feel your emotions? Do they feel like vibrations, and can you distinguish between them? Can you name them? If you're a coach many of your clients will not be able to name their emotions, you will have to work with them and help them, do that. We have lots of worksheets that we give to our clients to help them do this, and it's really powerful to write down what you're experiencing and what you're going through as you're feeling a feeling. That will really change that level of consciousness.

Now we've gotten to the middle of our model right? Our clients really understand that their actions are creating their results, and they understand how they're feeling. One of the things that you can do there is to connect to them, “hey notice when you're feeling this way, this is the action you take.” Now that they have that full understanding of why they're feeling that way then they can understand, oh, okay, and I notice when I'm feeling this way it creates these certain actions.

Then the next level of consciousness is your consciousness of your thinking. Now, this is challenging for people. When you ask them what they're thinking, they tell you about their life. They tell you a story about what's going on in their life. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, when they're telling you that story they're actually telling you what they're thinking. Here's where your mind might go, “what the what?”

If I ask you right now what are you thinking you're going to tell me a story about your day. You're going to tell me what's going on for you. You're going to tell me your thoughts. You won't realize that you're telling me your thinking. You'll think you're just telling me about your day, right? So I'll say, "Hey what are you thinking?" "Well I'm thinking that my brother came over today and yelled at me, he won't pay me back for that money that he owes me. I'm really frustrated about that, then I had to go to work and that guy at work is still being a total jerk. I still can't get enough work done and my boss is terrible," right? You're telling me all of your thinking when you tell me that, but you don't know that you're telling me your thinking. You think you're just telling me your day.
What we need to understand is that fourth level of consciousness, that fourth phase of consciousness is not just about writing down thoughts, it's about being conscious that they are thoughts, okay? That your story is really just a bunch of thinking, that your thinking is just a sentence in your mind, that your thinking is optional, right? If it's just a thought then I can change it. If you say to me, "Oh my brother came over today and was yelling and screaming. It was really awful and he's terrible," whatever. You think that you're just telling me what happened, you don't think that that's an optional thought, right? You're just sharing the news, but your interpretation of that event, your thoughts about that event are optional. If you don't understand that your thinking is what's causing your experience of that event you won't be conscious of your thinking.

Here's what happens in our coaching session and here's what happens when I'm first training students: we understand the concept of our thinking, we understand that our thoughts create our feelings, we understand that thoughts are optional intellectually. Until we understand the concepts intellectually, that is very different than being conscious of your own thinking. The knowledge that thoughts are optional, the knowledge that thoughts create our feelings is not the same as being conscious of your own thinking. This shows up over and over again in our coaching sessions because what happens is I'll say to a client, "So why are you feeling the way you're feeling?" They'll go immediately back to attributing it to a circumstance. Then I'll show it to them, I'll explain it to them, I'll say, "No, the reason you're feeling this way is because of the way you're thinking. Can you see it?" They're like, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it." I'll come back and ask them, "So why are you feeling the way that you're feeling?" They'll say, "Oh because of my circumstances." Understanding something intellectually and really being conscious and having that understanding in a conscious way is very, very different.

Okay, so what most people want to do is understand something intellectually, they don't want to apply it to themselves, and they want the answer. If you are conscious that every single time you feel a negative emotion it's because of the way you're thinking…if you really understand that, that every single time you feel a negative emotion, it's because of how you're thinking, you won't be in a hurry to change your thinking. You understand, as soon as you understand that the thought is causing the feeling you understand that it's optional, you can let it go. You don't have to replace it. When people think that their thoughts are involuntary and that they don't have options, that's when they want to replace it, that's when they want to focus on something else. You see how it's like this intellectual game you're playing, it's like you're trying to hack your own mind.

Think about this you guys, if your negative thought is causing your negative emotion, understanding that is enough. If you understand that it's optional then you can choose not to think it, literally you can choose not to in that moment. You don't even have to choose not to because you're awareness that it's just a thought can dissipate it immediately. Everybody wants to get to the part where we get to the new thought. I totally get that. Until you understand that it's genuinely a thought creating your feeling, then there's no reason, right? There's no reason to go to the new thought because you don't believe it's a thought causing your feeling, why change the thought? That's the same when you're working with your clients.

Then the fifth phase of consciousness is understanding cause and effect for all of it. Understanding that “oh my gosh, my thoughts are creating all my feelings, my feelings are creating all of my actions, my actions are creating all my results.” When you really, genuinely understand that and you distinguish between circumstances causing all of those other things, that's the ultimate level of consciousness. Now notice we haven't even at this point changed anything. All we've done is become conscious. All we've done is become more conscious. When it comes to thinking we're just asking, "Why are you choosing to think this way? Your thoughts create your feelings, why are you choosing to think this way?" We haven't said, "Change the way you're thinking," all we've done is ask another consciousness question. Once you truly understand your model, once you truly are conscious of it and you watch your model act our in your life, create the effect in your life, once you understand the cause of something, changing it becomes effortless.

Now, we can try and change it against it's current thought patterning, but here's the way that I want you to think about it. This is the way I do it with weight loss, and I promise you I'm going to talk a lot more about this. Here's just a glimmer of the weight loss thing. I can teach you how to eat less. I can teach you how to have more willpower. I can teach you how to pack your eating so you're not as hungry. I can teach you all of that. Or I can find out the cause of why you want to overeat and solve for that. And once I've solved for that, I don't have to teach you about willpower because you won't need it. You with me on this sisters and brothers? You get it? When I treat the cause of the issue, I don't have to finagle with the symptoms. It doesn't mean we don't treat symptoms. We have a lot of like tricks up our sleeves at The Life Coach School and how to treat symptoms. That's where we start, that's just the very beginning, that's nowhere near the end. For some other coaching schools that's their whole sha-bam. There's nothing wrong with that, man.

The second level of consciousness, just dealing with your actions and results is what most people don't do. It's a step in the right direction. What I want to do is get you down to the cause, like what are the thoughts that you're having? What are the feelings you're having? What is everything that you're doing that is creating this result for you? Those are the 5 phases of consciousness, and why I ask you, "Why are you choosing to think this way?" You immediately know that it's optional, then and only then can you see this is an option, this model that I'm watching in my life is an option I don't have to choose. At that moment you'll have a paradigm shift, at that moment you have a perception change.

Mary Williamson, she defines a miracle as a perception change, and I'm totally with her. Understanding that your thought is the only problem in any situation is a miracle in and of itself because you can change your thought. I haven't tried to change anything yet. We're only watching models. We're only increasing consciousness. I have worked with many, many, many people only to this one level, only to watching models and seeing their lives completely change. Now, there is relief in awareness, understanding why you are where you are, understanding why you feel the way you do, understanding why you're thinking the way you're thinking is such a huge relief. It's so empowering just to understand that, so please do not underestimate the power of consciousness, of increasing consciousness in your life, of increasing awareness in your life.
Once again the phases of consciousness are, one, unconsciousness. Two, awareness of actions and results. Three, awareness and consciousness of feelings. Four, consciousness of thoughts. Five, consciousness of cause and effect. Once you can do that and watch your models you have increased your consciousness to a level that most people will never get to. Most people never get to experience what it's like to be the observer, to watch yourself think, to think about your own thinking.

Please don't try and skip over this step, this level of consciousness is huge, just become aware of your own models. Now I know that many of you listening to this podcast have joined me in the How to Feel Better online course. I want to let you know in that course you get direct email access to me. I am the one providing all of the support for that course because I want to hear what your questions are and what you're getting. If you're in that course, at the bottom of the page where it says, "Ask any questions," I want you to know that those come to me and I usually answer within a few hours on those.

If you're not in the How to Feel Better course, you should join it immediately by going to TheLifeCoachSchool.com, and if you look on the top tab there it will show you how to click and get there on the How to Feel Better course. We take all of these concepts to a deeper level, and you'll be able to apply all of the ways of how to feel better, how to think better, how to take better action and how to get better results in detail in that course. Other than that, I hope you guys are having an amazing week and I will be happy to talk to you guys all next week. Take care, bye.

Thank you for listening to the Life Coach School Podcast, it is my honor to show up here every week and connect with people that are like minded wanting to take their life to a deeper level with more awareness and more consciousness. If you are interested in taking this work to the next level I highly encourage you to go to TheLifeCoachSchool.com/howtofeelbetteronline. It is there that I have a class that will take all of this to a deeper application where you'll be able to really feel and experience how all of these concepts can start showing up in your life. It's one thing to learn it intellectually, it's another thing to truly apply it to your life. I will see you there, thanks again for listening.