Join Brooke for a live coaching event. Click here.

I love money.

Money allows us to do many amazing, fun, and helpful things. It can also help us solve A LOT of problems.

Many of us think that the pursuit of money makes us greedy, and it makes us treat other people terribly. We also have this idea that money is something that is either available or not.

What we don’t think about is that money is something that we can create.

These ideas of what we believe is possible or impossible about money are what’s holding us back from being able to have more money in our lives.

On this episode, I go through some of the biggest misconceptions about money and explain how changing that thinking can help you be successful in your life. We also take a look at how we can create money and how changing our language can help us with this process.

You won’t want to miss this important episode!

What you will discover

  • The biggest misconceptions about money that hold us back.
  • How money is created.
  • The relationship between value and wealth.
  • How you can create more money in your life.
  • Why you need to change your beliefs about money and how you can begin.
  • Questions to help you with the process of changing your money beliefs.
  • The difference between your relationship with money and what it can buy.

Featured on the show

Episode Transcript

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.

What's up? Hello, my friends. Money. Listen, I love me some money. Love money. I know that freaks some of you out. You think money is the root of all evil. I do not think money is the root of all evil. I think if you are an evil person, you have evil thoughts and you have money, you're going to do evil things. I think if you're an amazing, wonderful, helpful, awesome person and you have money, you're going to do amazing, awesome, wonderful things.

I'm going to keep saying that I love money and keep freaking some of you out, but some of you really identify with that. Here's the thing about money. I love money for everyone. I want everyone to have millions of dollars. Not just me, not just you, but all of us, because I think the more money we have, the more fun we can have, the more we can help people. More money is great and wonderful. I think aspiring to more money asks us to be more of who we genuinely are.

Now a lot of you think that the opposite of that is true. You think that the pursuit of money makes us be greedy and it makes us treat other people terribly and that rich people are awful and that we shouldn't ever try and achieve wealth and that millionaires have always hurt somebody on their way to getting millions. These beliefs are really pervasive. They're everywhere. People's thoughts about money seem to be their truth. They seem to think that the way they think about money is what money is, is the truth about it.

Here's what I want to tell you about money. First of all, one of the most important things that I think we can all decide together and really believe is the truth is that money can solve a lot of problems. Money can solve a lot of problems. Building wealth is one way to solve a lot of problems. You know what poor people need? They need money. You have to build wealth in order to have money in order to give money.

I think a lot of people believe this idea that there's just wealth in the world and that we all should get a fair ... It's like there's this big pot of wealth, and that we should all get a piece of it. One of the things that I want to offer is that wealth is not something that exists that you go and get. Wealth is something that you create by creating value.

The way that you create your wealth in the world is by creating value in the world and claiming your wealth from that value. There are some components to money that go with that, but I think because of the way we are raised and taught in school, we think that there's this pie of wealth, and when someone else gets a lot of it, we get less of it. The more Oprah gets, the more Warren Buffett gets, the less we get, and especially people that aren't kind that get money, they shouldn't get money. Only kind people should get money is what a lot of us believe.

Just notice your thoughts about money. Here's what I want to say. I want to challenge you on all your thoughts about money, if you don't feel good about money and you don't feel like you have as much of it as you would like. I created a training within Self Coaching Scholars that's on money. It's a four-part series. The first video and the first part of it is all about money beliefs about what we believe about money. They go through a process on how to uncover that.

The second one is about earning money and about how so many of us are limited in what we believe earns money. Most of us believe that you can earn money only from other people. You'd get money from them. You only earn it based on your own time and your own effort. If you want to make more money, you have to give more time and more effort.

What I want to offer is that the way that you create money is by creating value. The way that you create wealth is by creating value. If you look at someone like Oprah's life, she didn't have any more time than anybody else. She maxed out her effort, but so do many people that work at their jobs; they max out their effort, and they don't make as much money as Oprah. If she put time that she had and she put effort in, how come she made so much more money than someone that was working at a nine to five job?

The answer is the value that she created that people wanted. That's a really important thing. You need to ask yourself where does wealth come from. Is wealth just something that exists in the world and we just pass it around to each other or is wealth created by value? You look at that on a big picture and then you also look at it on a smaller picture. I will tell you from my own perspective that what I have found is that wealth in my own life is completely proportionate to the amount of value I've created.

Now I will tell you that was true when I was an employee at Hewlett-Packard, and that is true as I am the CEO of The Life Coach School. When I went to Hewlett-Packard, my goal was to create value, to make myself invaluable to that corporation. My customer was my boss, was my team within that corporation. When I went in and put eight hours of work into that day at Hewlett-Packard, it was to provide as much value as I possibly could to think outside the box, to create the best value I could.

The way that I did that is very similar to the way I do it now. I went in and I found out what's the most important thing to my boss? What would make his life better? How can I help him solve his problems? He's basically my customer. I'm here to provide a service to his corporation, to his group within this corporation. What do they most want from me? I asked them what they most wanted and needed from me, and I over-delivered that in spades.

Now did I do that because I was so in love with Hewlett-Packard and wanted to make sure that their printer parts were perfect? Only because I wanted to provide as much value as they could to my boss, not because I had a passion for printer parts. I'll tell you what I did have a passion for. I had a passion for creating as much value as I could with my life. Whatever I was going to be doing with my life, I was going to be providing value to the people around me. If people were paying me, you can be sure that they were going to be getting way more value than they were paying me for, way more than that paycheck was for.

The same thing happened to me in Nordstrom. I got hired in fashion jewelry in Nordstrom. What they wanted most from me was to sell jewelry. I had the "customer" that was buying the jewelry from me, and I wanted to make sure they were getting tons of value for what they were paying for. That value included what I offered them, the story I told them about the jewelry, how to use it, what to wear it with, but also the customer was my company, Nordstrom, and providing them with the most value that I possibly could because they were the ones paying me.

The customer was paying Nordstrom. Nordstrom was paying me. I showed up and delivered because I wanted to be a person that provided value. I'll tell you that a lot of times that money came back to me directly from the place where I created the value and other times it showed up in different ways. The work that I did at Hewlett-Packard by creating value, I got promoted very quickly within that organization and I got paid very well because of the value that I provided, but also what I'd learned from myself and the experience I got also contributed to the value that I offered the world, and got paid in different ways.

I want to make sure that you don't think that just because you're providing value that there's an exact price tag on that value in that moment. The value comes by being a valuable person. You're creating value in the world. The way that I do that is I always over-deliver.

If somebody gives you a job and says, "Here's your job description," you need to come in for eight hours a day and provide customer service, or you need to come in and make sales. You can be sure I'm going to go into that job. Whatever they're asking of me, I'm going to double down. I am going to blow their mind. They're going to know I'm there because they're going to be like, "Whoa! Where did this girl come from?" I'm just going to go in and do my job and please them. I'm going to be of service, I'm going to create value. I am going to blow my own mind in what I'm capable of doing in that job.

That job doesn't owe me anything. They owe me nothing. They've given me a job. I owe them. I'm going to show them. I'm going to produce the most anyone in that job has ever produced. I am going to be the best version, not for them, for me. I'm going to create value in the world because I know that's going to come back to me 10 times. That's how I think about money. Money comes to us through many different ways by the amount of value and the service that we provide, what we give of ourselves to the world.

Now if you have a belief system that money comes from time and effort, you are going to be sitting there with your hand out, wanting to get paid for your time and effort. You're going to want to get paid the most you can for the least amount of time and effort. What I'm going to tell you is that's going to backfire. As an employer, I know that that backfires. As an employee, I know that that backfires.

Seeing people that always want to produce more than that, they always want to over-deliver, I notice every single one of them always gets it back 10 times, always, not only in their self-esteem and in their self-confidence, but in their willingness to receive. When you've given such quality to the world, you are open to receiving all the gifts, all the abundance that the world has.

When you're constantly living in a place of scarcity, wanting to make sure you get paid for every single thing you do, and when you don't, you stop creating value and you just live in a way where you're going to do your time and get your paycheck, you're never going to blow your own mind in terms of money, ever.

Money is actually very easy when you cleanup your beliefs about it. When you allow yourself to imagine yourself breaking out of the time and effort money prison, you will open yourself up to so much more possibility.

Here's the deal. Most of us think we get paid for our hours, we get paid by the year, and there's a maximum amount that most of us can make based on our education. What is that number you have in your mind? $75,000? $100,000? Most people are about at that point. They think about money as, "This is the maximum amount I'll be able to make in a year. I have to go to someone else to pay me that and, hopefully, they'll pay me what I'm worth." If you believe that, you will get stuck in that rut.

If you allow yourself to let go of, maybe there's not a limited amount of money that we all need to grab from that same pie, maybe I can create my own wealth by creating my own value and offering it to the world. That doesn't mean you have to come up with the iPhone and that doesn't mean you have to have a talk show and it doesn't mean that you have to be the best investor in the world. All it means is that you are going to be the best version of yourself you can possibly be and create as much service to the world as you could possibly do for the sake of how amazing you will feel. You have to not only create the value, not only create the service, but then be open to receiving.

I talk about this in the Earning training inside of Self Coaching Scholars. Earning is not just about creating value, it's about being open to receive money, be open to receive payment and not think that that's a bad thing, not think that's a negative thing, not think that you're taking from somebody else, but that you're building more and more abundance in your own life to be able to give more and more, to be an example of what is possible when you serve the world.

Again, service is just being the best version of yourself. It doesn't mean that you're helping the homeless. It doesn't mean that you're going out and helping people that are in desperate need. Look at the iPhone. We weren't in desperate need of the iPhone. Now we are if we don't have one. If our battery is dead, we're like, "Oh, my God. How did I ever live without an iPhone?" See what I'm saying?

You have to trust your own guidance to take you to the place. You have to stop buffering and clean up your mind and not be responding to negative emotion to be able to access what you have that's of value. Every single one of us has something that's of value. Every single one of us has the ability to create money. Now remember the model. How do we create money?

Now those of you who watched The Secret will think that your mind creates money, but don't forget the rest of the model. Your mind does create money because it creates your feelings, and then your feelings drive your actions. Your actions create your money.

We don't usually think about creating money. We have this sense that money is something that is available or it isn't. We don't believe we can just create it. We just notice what is there or isn't there, and then we complain or we enjoy it. Why is this? Why don't we talk in the language of creating money?

We use words like "earn", "borrow", "find", "make". "Make" is a seemingly good word to use, but the way we define it when it comes to money is usually associated with earning. Most of us usually associate earning money with time and effort. The question we need to ask ourselves is how do those words feel when we use them in a sentence or a thought? Because how those words feel will determine what we do, and what we will do will determine how much money we have.

As part of Self Coaching Scholars, I created a lot of questions for you guys on money. If you're in Self Coaching Scholars, when you go under Assets, you will see that money training and you will see the section on earning and the section on debt. I have a very different approach to debt than most people have. Make sure you watch that part on debt.

Let's start with just a little bit of awareness by thinking about the money we do have. Think about how much money you have right now. What is the reason that you have that amount of money?

Now think about that in terms of your thoughts, your feelings, your actions. What are the feelings about how you've attained your money? What is your opinion about your money right now? When you look through the words above, what do you notice? Are your current thoughts likely to create you more money? Is the way you're thinking about money right now likely to create you more money?

I have thoughts like “money is easy. I had no idea how easy money was. Money is fun.” I love giving. I love creating value. I want to just keep creating more value and keep over-delivering and keep receiving more money. Put your thought about money in the model. Put it in the T-line, and notice what result your current thought about money is getting you.

"I don't have enough time to make money," "Money is hard," "Money is scarce," "I'm never going to have enough money," "I don't have the right education," "I hate my job," "I don't know how to create value," "I don't know how to make money," "I'm in so much debt, I'll never get out of debt." What are your current thoughts about money? Write them down. Pay attention. Do you notice yourself resisting to realize that all of the money available for you to create, you chose to create the amount you currently have? Do you tell yourself the story that it wasn't a choice, that you are doing the best you can, or something else? Explain that to yourself.

Think about what your thoughts are on making more. When you think about making more, do you feel like, "Oh, that's not right. I shouldn't want more. I should be satisfied," "I shouldn't be chasing money," "I don't have enough time"? Are these the thoughts you want to be having on purpose? What do you want your thoughts to be about money? You don't have to tell anyone.

I was just coaching somebody the other day. I'm like, "If you didn't care what other people thought about you, how would you think about money?" She was like, "I would like all the fancy things." She was feeling ashamed because she wants the fancy things. I told her, I said, "You need to acknowledge how you really feel."

Now if you want to change the way you feel and think about money, you can do it purposefully, but make sure you like your reason. If the reason you don't want to admit that you like fancy things is because you're afraid of what other people will think about you, that's worth something to question. Most of us want to keep our lids on the amount of money we make because we're afraid that other people will think we're greedy or that we're rich and that they'll hate us.

Make sure you take a really close look at that because so many of us have committed to believing the same thing about money, that too much of it is too much of it. This may be difficult for your brain to do because we're so used to letting our default thoughts run. Thoughts about money really matter, and you most likely need to change your thoughts to be the opposite of what you're currently thinking.

Money is easy. It's easy to earn money. I don't have to work harder to create more. I love money. I love having money to give. Money solves many problems. Rich people are wonderful. Wealth is available to me. There's plenty of money for everyone. Action, not luck, creates money. Struggle is not necessary for money. We are only limited by our mind. I will prove it to you.

How much money will you realistically make this year and in your life? Can you be radically honest about this? How are you able to predict this? Most of you will look to your past, most of you will be limited by what you think is possible, by what other people have told you is possible. Why did you pick the number that you did? Be very clear about that. Changing that number is much easier than you might think, and thinking is the only thing that needs to change.

If you are really struggling with this, I want to invite you to come into Scholars and take my money program. I have so much to teach when it comes to money. I think part of the reason why that is is because of the way I was raised, thankfully. I was raised with money. Money was always very abundant in my life. I never worried about money. I was able to think that it was easy to get. My mom would hand me $20 bills.

I used to think that money is not a problem, money is fun, money buys cool things. Some of my friends didn't have money, I was like, "That's okay. I got money." I was always very generous with it. I never thought, "This is my money, and not your money," because there's scarcity. I always had $20 bills in my pocket. I would go to the barn with the horses, and my friends wouldn't have money. I'm like, "I'll pay. Why not?" That's how I still am in my life.

I want to say that I don't think you have to be raised with money to have that mentality. My best friend, Erika, has the exact same mentality, and she didn't have as much money as I had when we were growing up, and yet she still has that mentality today, too. It's all based on the way that you think about money and the way that you chose to believe about money when you were a child and the way that you choose to believe about it now, but I want to say that you can change the way you think about it.

Here's what a lot of people think, and this is one last message I want to give to you, is that a lot of people think that when they get a lot of money that they will spend it immediately. It's like, "All I want to do is spend money," but here's what I have found to be true: the more money I make, the less money I spend.

Your relationship with money becomes a relationship with money and not a relationship with what money can buy. That's a huge distinction for most people. Most people have hundreds of thousands of dollars of stuff and no money. We say that we value money, but really what we do is we value what money can buy. The more money we have, actually the less money we spend.

When people say to me, "I want to believe that I have a lot of money. When I believe it, it makes me want to spend money," then I realize you haven't really got it. What you really start to do is you start to value and take care of your money instead of trying to get rid of it as quick as you can.

When I say I love money, I really mean it. I don't necessarily want to spend it immediately on something. I like having money. I like having a savings account. I like having it in the bank. I like having it in my purse.

Which person are you? Are you the person that loves money or do you love what money can buy? Do you need to understand that difference? Because, otherwise, you will notice that you get rid of money as quickly as you get it if you don't have an established relationship with money and what it means. Your relationship with money is simply your thoughts about it.

If you're really struggling with this, I want to invite you into Self Coaching Scholars. You will immediately get access to the asset section under money. In that class, we talk about all the questions that I talked about here.

Now, listen, if you can't afford Self Coaching Scholars and you don't want to join it, that's fine. Just re-listen to this podcast and answer all of those questions and really focus on this yourself. If you want my help with it, come on in.

Here's what we're going to discuss. The first section is all about your beliefs about money and what's holding you back there. The second lesson is all about earning money and debt.

The third lesson is all about spending money and how you feel about spending money, how you spend your money, how it's all optional, and why you spend your money. We've got to change you from spending money to feel good to only spending money when you feel good. Most of us feel terrible and spend money trying to buffer and feel better. What I want to suggest is that you never spend any money unless you've planned it ahead of time and you feel good spending it.

Then the last part, we talk about having money. That's the difference between having a relationship with money and having a relationship with what money can buy in terms of stuff. Most of us have way too much stuff and not enough money. We'll talk about that and my whole concept behind minimalism and how that works with creating wealth.

All right, you guys. Super fun. I love talking about money. I hope that this has given you some food for thought, some questions to think about, something to really sit down with and understand when it comes to, "Wait a minute. What if everything I've ever thought about money is wrong?" Are you willing to be wrong about it? Because the answer is, yes, you might just create a tremendous amount of wealth in your life.

Make sure you guys stay on the line after the outro to listen to Erin. She is going to talk to you about thriving after addiction. She's amazing. I'm in love with her. Do I say that all the time? I hope so, because I am so in love with all of my coaches. Fantastic. Please enjoy.

Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out Self Coaching Scholars. It's my monthly coaching program, where we take all this material and we apply it. We take it to the next level and we study it. Join me over at thelifecoachschool.com/join. Make sure you type in thelifecoachschool.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in Self Coaching Scholars. See you there.

Podcast Feature: Erin Geraghty

Hello. This is Erin from Thriving After Addiction. I am so honored to be here on The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo. Brooke has been an incredible mentor to me and inspiration and one of my greatest gurus. For those listening who are thinking about signing up for coaching with Brooke and enrolling in The Life Coach School, I highly recommend it.

I am a recovery coach, yoga therapist, and an addict in recovery. I work with addicts in recovery who have been committed to sobriety, but reach a point in their sobriety where they realized that they've stopped taking risks. They realized that they haven't felt passionate or fiery about something in a long time, perhaps relationships are not as deep and meaningful as they would like, and we just crave something more, something deeper, a deeper connection.

I wanted to start off today's episode with a quote from Charlotte Gerson: "All chronic and degenerative diseases are caused by two and only two major problems: toxicity and deficiency." Today I want to talk about alcohol and how it can affect us to the point of almost being a disease.

If some of my listeners today are part of AA or NA, you know that one of the things that they promote to us is that we are diseased. There's definitely a reason for that because, in the beginning, our mind is diseased because we've been doing these things over and over again that causes such destruction to us, to our family, to our loved ones. We see people suffer. We don't care. If you ask me, that's definitely a disease. That's definitely toxic.

To bring it back to the quote I read, it talked about two and only two major problems. I talked about the toxicity, but also deficiency. If we question what is that deficiency, I have found in myself on my road to recovery, as well as with my clients, that deficiency is a disconnect.

It starts with us. We are the change we wish to see in the world. As addicts, we disconnect because that's what we do. We're very good at that. We're good at numbing out. We're good at avoidance patterns. We're good at pleasure seeking. I'd like to cite an experiment from about 1960. It was a psychological experiment based on the behavior of rats in drug addiction. Some of you might be familiar with it. It's called the Skinner Box Experiment.

What these scientists did is basically took some rats, isolated them, put them into cages, and gave them the ability to, at any time, press this little lever and all of a sudden they would get an injection of morphine. This was one of the first experiments of drugs and addiction and how a person, or a rat, would behave when given the chance to have unlimited access to a drug.

The rats wound up pressing that lever, pressing that lever, and pressing that lever again. A lot of them wound up dying, they got very sick. It was an interesting experiment and gave us the foundation of how a lot of people still think about addiction nowadays, but I want to point something out. They were completely isolated. They were in dark cages with no communication. The only time that they saw another being was when some food came in from some of the scientists. That would lead anyone to want to do drugs. That would lead anyone to want to drink.

The Rat Park Experiment is actually an updated version of this study on addiction. What these new scientists did ... By the way, you can check out this experiment at www.brucekalexander.com ... they setup this rat park. They put the rats, multiple rats, in these cages and put little spinning wheels that they run on and lots of food and water. There was much fun to be had, much sex to be had.

They also put two water bottles. One was just plain tap water, the other water bottle was infused with morphine. What they found was very interesting. The rats barely touched the morphine solution, rather they just drank the tap water.

This updated version of how we view addiction through this study is so important because as far as ... When the Big Book came out, it was around 1930. We had a certain view of humans and how we process things. The view back then was that the brain can't change and that the way we're setup is genetically predisposed. Once you're an addict, you're diseased permanently, and then you just manage it.

The interesting thing about this experiment is it shows ... You would figure from the prior experiment that if these rats had access to drugs all the time, that they would just have no control over themselves and just do until they died, but what it shows is that when the rats had lively and fulfilling lives, when they had the company of other rats and they had activities to do that brought them joy, they barely touched the stuff. This is playing off of some of Brooke's lessons about bringing more joy into your life and studying yourself and finding your pain points.

If we have deficiency, we open up the space to invite in these toxic elements: toxic thoughts because we get too caught up in our head, toxic behaviors because our minds starts running the show because we're disconnected. Our mind is running on autopilot, which if you've been listening to The Life Coach School Podcast, you know that Brooke talks about patterns, groove patterns in the mind.

In yoga, we call them samskaras. I mentioned that just because there is lots of literature about this type of theory. It's been studied at depth. Deficiency that addicts experience the most is a disconnect from ourselves and a disconnect from God. What is that? For me, I practice yoga. I'm a practicing yogi. I believe in universal consciousness, that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, that we can channel consciousness, and we are consciousness expressed.

When we disconnect because of trauma, we don't know how to process our feelings, we disconnect from God. If we continue to do that, it becomes habit. When we disconnect, the world is an awfully lonely place. The world is an awfully terrible place. There is a lot of pain and suffering.

We develop these patterns a lot of times when we're young, we have trauma, our parents are emotionally closed off, we don't know how to deal with and cope. The vibration inside of us is so painful that we try to disconnect as a coping mechanism. If I am speaking to any addicts today, or addicts in recovery, I want you to first have compassion and just realize that we developed this pattern as a way to save ourselves.

What can we do to bring ourselves out of this disease state and slowly heal ourselves? Because I want to say, as a disclaimer, that this takes work, and it takes consistent work. Not just consistent work, but work that's earnest. You're showing up fully and present as much as you can.
It's not easy. Brooke talks about how when you first retrain your brain, how there's a super highway and how there's the rocky bumpy road. It takes more effort because we go from an unconscious state into a conscious state. The unconscious state has been developed for a while. Because there's autopilot, there's less energy expended, so it's a survival mechanism. When we start to open up new pathways, it does take more effort. For a lot of us, it's very scary because it's completely new, and so it's unfamiliar.

Brooke talks about how in the brain that we have these survival mechanisms, and if it's unfamiliar, the brain is like, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Wait." We've been surviving down this road. Why are we changing up the road?

If you've heard that, you can understand that not only do we have a mental block towards change, but a lot times we'll also have physiological reactions. For sure, if we had this past of addiction to alcohol, when you got sober, you definitely had some very real physical detox reactions. When you start doing this work mentally, it's the next layer of this work, you're probably going to have some mental detox reactions as well. Those are very real.

At first, for example, I teach yoga teacher trainings. I have a yoga studio in Florida called Thrive Yoga and Fitness. I teach yoga teacher trainings. Since graduating from The Life Coach School, I incorporate some coaching because it's been an invaluable tool for me. When these yogis start practicing yoga every day, all of a sudden, about week three or four, all their stuff comes up and they're just stuck in this cloud of having to deal with their feelings because it opened up the pathways in their body. There is definitely a way that we can reconnect to our body and learn to process these feelings.

We talked a lot about the power of the mind on The Life Coach School Podcast, which, for sure, is amazing, life-changing game-changer. I want to talk a little bit about the power of the body. I've been a practicing yogi for over 10 years and, as I said before, I'm a yoga therapist. I've just seen so many transformations of people who came to yoga practice. They stepped up on the mat and they start to have mental transformations. For sure, the thoughts run the show, but if we had stagnant energy and emotions built up in our system, how do we process that?

From the website heartmath.com, I wanted to quote this: "The heart, like the brain, generates a powerful electromagnetic field, McCraty explains in The Energetic Heart. 'The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body. The electrical field, as measured in an electrocardiogram, an ECG, is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain waves.'" I want you chew on that for a moment. That's a lot.

I find that for me, and for us addicts, is that we have so much pain built up in our bodies that we feel like we have to constantly manage. We feel like we're diseased because we're always in some dis-ease. We're always in some unpleasant vibration below the surface. You know what I'm talking about. To process that, I feel like the mind and the body need to be connected. For me, that was how I started to really uproot the disease of alcoholism.

If we can learn to connect to the body, so focusing on the heart. How do we do this? The breath. The breath is a huge part of this process. They are sympathetic, parasympathetic nervous systems.

When we're in fight or flight mode, which a lot of us addicts ... If we drank, probably we've experimented with other things like amphetamines or uppers, even caffeine ... your mind starts going really fast. When we get too close, we clench on to all the thoughts in our head, and we associate with them too closely. Then we start to disconnect from our body. If you're listening to this right now, if you all of a sudden just become aware of your body, just notice if you're holding tenseness somewhere, if you're holding it on your shoulders, around your jaw, around your face. I've seen it all.

If we can first start breathing, deep breaths in and out through the nose, nice and deep, accessing the lower lobes of the lungs so that we can have more oxygen exchange in the body, we start to open up those pathways in our body, so that those built up negative emotions can start to process through.

A great technique to do this is, to start connecting the mind and body, just take your index and thumb and press them together. This is called Gyan Mudra. It helps us to just become aware of the fingertips because sometimes breathing and pressing our fingers together is all we can do at the moment.

If you try that then it's interesting because as you breathe, all of a sudden your body is going to feel like it's starting to come alive. Then once you get feeling, a more subtle feeling through your arms and through your legs, start focusing on the heart and noticing any areas where you're holding on or clenching and see if you can soften the outline of that area. Continue to breathe, continue to relax, and just focus on the sound of your breath and the feeling.

This is a technique I teach some of my clients that are very caught up in their heads. This is a technique that I use myself. It really helps me to ground myself back into my body so that I can release these negative feelings.

Back to the quote I mentioned at the beginning of our episode, the two major problems, toxicity. If we apply that to what we've learned today, a toxic buildup of not just thoughts, belief systems, but also the feeling of the emotions. We can learn to process this.

If I bring it back to the second part of the equation, deficiency, the cool thing is that when we start to flush out this toxicity from our belief systems, from physical things we put in our body, from the emotions we've created, we start to create space. Holding space for yourself is one of the most important things that you can do. It's really the greatest gift that you can give to the world because when you have that space, you have the ability to connect consciously.

You'll find that if you practice this and perhaps adopt a mindfulness practice, so throughout the day, I've recommended to clients that they set a little timer on their phone, and every hour it's just like, "Bing!" or it will vibrate in your pocket. You'll just take some deep breaths, maybe pressing your index and thumb onto one another. I recommend at least two minutes of this, and just removing yourself from whatever you're doing, removing yourself from your thoughts.
My favorite mantra for this ... A mantra is just a saying that you tell yourself, almost like a positive affirmation ... "I'm not my mind, I'm not my body, I'm not my thoughts." "I'm not my mind, I'm not my body, I'm not my thoughts." When you start to do this, you start to feel this wholeness, this completeness, and you start to be able to more efficiently wash away those pain patterns, wash away those pain points, and show up more clearly in the world.

I've used this technique with my clients that are addicts in recovery with amazing results, to the point of I would talk to them one week, we would start this protocol, and then the next week they're a completely different person.

I hope that you enjoy the tools that I gave you today. Remember that if you're listening to The Life Coach School Podcast and you're considering going to The Life Coach School, it was absolutely life-changing for me. It allowed me to do exactly what I'm doing right now. If I can be a testament of Brooke's work, it's worth doing. Don't get in your head too much. Go for it! Sign up.

Today I also wanted to offer you a free gift. If you go to thrivingafteraddiction.com/free-gift, you can claim a free gift I put together that includes a yoga practice guided by me, a meditation, as well as a PDF guideline with elements of how to coach yourself, as well as nutritional guidelines. Namaste.

Get Coached in Self Coaching Scholars Today