Ep #34: No Hard Days

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.

Hey everyone! How's it going? It's Brook Castillo. I'm stoked to be here, so happy that you're all here. It's funny when I say, "I'm stoked to be here," what I mean is like in your ear buds or in your computer, with you. As you guys know, I'm a huge fan of podcasts. I love listening to them and it's so interesting how I feel like I really know the people that I listen to their podcast because I feel this intimacy with them. I know their voice; I'd be able to recognize their voice on the phone, they share a lot of personal experience and what's going on for them. I know that so many of you all feel that way listening to this podcast because you email me and you post comments. I really find this relationship we all have fascinating and I love that technology provides this opportunity for us to connect in this way. I've had more people come and want coaching from this podcast than in any other thing I've ever done. I think it's because I'm giving so much away, I mean really for free and it's on a pretty consistent level for you all.

I wrote a book, I don't know maybe 10 years ago now, called "If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight?" I used to be fascinated that people could read a book and lose a bunch of weight and then just email me and say, "Hey, thanks for your book. I lost all my weight that I wanted to lose and you've totally changed my life." I would have never met that person. I never talked to that person. I never coached them directly and yet we had such a huge connection because of what I had gone through in my life and then shared. I basically shared what had worked for me and shared my personal experience and then she had taken that and applied it to her personal experience and changed her life. I think that for me that's what this work is all about.

Before I became a coach, I had this deep desire to make a contribution; to have my life be a contribution and leave the planet better than I found it. What I didn't realize was that I'm just going to have to get over myself in order to do that. I was going to have to confront myself and get to know myself and really learn about what it means to deal with the negative emotion and overcome all my self-limiting thinking in order to create something of value for somebody else.

I tell my students all the time at The Life Coach School that you don't really have a right to prevent yourself from helping someone else because of your own self-doubt. You guys understand what I'm saying? It's like when I was writing the book, "If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight?" I was struggling so much with my writing ability because in school I'd always gotten an A for content and a C for grammar. Even though I had an editor, I just kept going through so many iterations of frustration as I was writing. I've since learned that had I given in to that frustration, had I given in to that doubt, that there are hundreds of people on this planet who may not have gotten this information that I provided to them. What a shame that would have been for me to hold back my contribution thinking that, "Well it's my life; I can do what I want with it."

I like the idea that working on ourselves and coaching ourselves isn't just a luxury, it's a responsibility. When people say to me that life coaching is frivolous or isn't it nice to be able to hire someone to coach like I wish I had the money to do that. You do have the money to do it, you choose to spend it on different things is what I really feel is true. I do feel like managing our minds and overcoming all of our insecurities and the things that hold us back from being our best selves is our responsibility, because of them the contribution we'll be able to make. I'm not saying that your contribution will be the same as mine, that you'll be a life coach or that you'll create content that will help someone, but maybe it's your contribution in how you show up in your life, to your family, to the people there, the example that you set. What is your life an example of? Is it an example of someone who is hiding and is not overcoming your emotion? Or is it an example of somebody who is?

I was coaching someone today, one of my students right now. She's just such an amazing student because she shows up and she shares her experience and she shares her struggle and she's very willing to be coached. One of the things she said to me was, "I don't think this process is working for me because I'm feeling kind of discouraged and depressed." What I told her and this is kind of what I want to tell all of you is being discouraged and depressed does not mean something has gone terribly wrong. OK? I think that we are taught, "Whoa, if we have negative emotion it means something has gone terribly wrong." No! It's part of the process of evolving. It's part of the process of having a look at ourselves and acknowledging what's true and acknowledging what we're believing and what we're thinking. If you are discouraged it's because you're believing something about yourself, you're believing something about the process and you need to access what that is so you can overcome it, so you can go to the next level.

One of the things it told her is that the people that are the most successful in my opinion, are the people that are the most willing to feel negative emotion; the ones that are willing to walk in to discouragement; walk in to vulnerability; walk in to fear. Those are the ones that are going to keep moving. There's always a temptation to quit. There's always a temptation to give up so we don't have to feel those emotions that we must feel when we're growing.

The example I overuse is that little kid learning how to walk. If that kid wasn't willing to fall down, wasn't willing to continually get back up and get back in and get back up, they would never be strong enough to walk. If the first time they fell down they just stayed down, they would never walk, but that's what so many of us do as adults. We try something, we fall down, that's it, we're not walking. We're not going to be a coach, we're not going to go for the promotion, we're not going to lose the weight, we're not going to work on the relationship or leave the relationship or whatever it is that we most want to do because we're too afraid of feeling negative emotion.

That's not even the topic that I'm talking about today but I've just been talking about it with some clients and with some students today and I wanted to share it with you. I wanted to make sure you got that information because it matters. It so matters to me that you show up and overcome whatever it is you need to overcome, no matter what to get what it is you want. What you want, your desire is such important information. It is your GPS system towards where you're supposed to go, to be the best version of yourself. If every time you get to a red light you decide to quit and turn around and go home, you're never going to get to that destination. I'm not going to lie; the journey is not full of just rainbows and daisies. There's lots of distracting turn-offs. There's lots of peril that you're going to face but that is the hero's journey, right? It's overcoming something so you become stronger, you become the person that you want to become. It's not just what you do, it's who you get to be in that process.

Today, I want to talk to you guys all about how there's no such thing as a hard day. I'm going to talk to you about that a little bit and then I'm going to talk to you about some upcoming trainings we have coming up next year. If you're not interested in coach training, you're not interested in working with me, then you can just sign off at that point. For those of you who have expressed interest and are interested in doing a Life Coach School training, I'm going to talk about that at the end of this call.

First, let's talk about no hard days. There's no such thing as a hard day until you add a mind to it. What do I mean by that? A day just happens, right? You know that saying like, "If a tree falls in the forest, if nobody's there to hear it, doesn't make a sound?" Hmmm... something to think about. If nobody's to hear it, doesn't make a sound. Very interesting, right? If a day happens, how do you know if it's a good day or a bad day? You don't until a mind determines it so. So there's no such thing as a hard day until you add a mind to it that thinks this was a hard day then we've created the hard day. The hard day isn't made by the day; the hard day is made by the thought about the day. You guys with me on this? So important.

So many of my clients will say to me and this is especially my weight loss clients, they'll say, "Oh, I had a bad day yesterday. It was a hard day yesterday." I'll remind them, "No, you're deciding to tell the story that it was a hard day or tell the story that it was a bad day, but the day in itself is neutral. It's your thought about the day that's making you feel that way." If you can approach your life that there's no such thing as a hard day, which by the way, you have the option to do, what makes something hard is how we think about it, the way we approach it, our attitude about it. Too often, too many of my clients are saying that something's a hard day and that's why they drink a bottle of wine that night and that's why they ate everything in their house and in their refrigerator that night is because it was a "hard day". What they're not realizing is that they're creating the hard day in their mind.

Very similar to the last episode, episode 33, where we talked about our past and how you create whether you had a good past or a bad past based on how you think about it. So how do you want to think about your days? When you think that was a hard day or this is a hard day or I had a hard day, how do you feel? If you feel amazing, if you're one of those people who said, "I had a hard day but I can do hard things and I'm a rockstar and I rocked it out and that feels good," stick with it.

But most of you all are using "I had a hard day" as an excuse, as a reason to not show up, as a reason not to be your best self, as a reason not to process your emotion or be connected. If there's no such thing as a hard day, the only thing that makes a day hard is your mind, what you choose to think about it and you have to have a person in order to have a hard day; you can't just have a day happen without a person and have a hard day, then you know what makes a day hard are your thoughts about it. So what are your thoughts about your day? Again, everything's relative, right? Everything's relative in terms of your perspective in how you choose to approach your day. If I told you to explain, "Wait," and I've actually done this with many of my clients, they'll say, "Oh, I had a hard day yesterday," and I'll say, "OK, I want you to tell me the story about how great your day was yesterday." They're like, "What do you mean? I just told you I had a hard day," I'm like, "No, but you also had a great day but you're just choosing not to see the greatness in it. You're choosing to tell the story of your hard day." Sometimes they really struggle.

What I have them think about is this, "Did you have clean drinking water yesterday? Were your children healthy yesterday? Were you alive yesterday? Could you walk? Could you see? Could you hear? Did you have a car to drive? Were you warm in your bed? Was anyone shooting at you?" I mean, how you choose to focus is what will determine whether your day was hard or not. Did you walk to school in the snow uphill, both ways? Maybe your parents are telling you that. You get to decide how you want to define.

Now most of my clients, the reason that they tell me all the time that their days are hard is because they believe they are weak. They don't recognize that they're thinking that about themselves but they're using their days as evidence to prove that they are weak and that they can't handle it. I'll say of course it's hard. Building a business is hard. Losing weight is hard. So what? Don't wish it were easier, wish you were stronger. You guys have all heard that quote before, "I can do hard things, I'm up for it." If you use something being hard as a reason not to do it, why can't you do it just because it's hard? The only explanation is because you're weak, because you're not strong enough. Those are all choices, those are all attitudes, those are all beliefs about something.

How was your day today? Amazing. Easy. Wonderful. Extraordinary. Of all the ways that you can choose to describe your day, you're going to go with hard. If you really think about it, what was hard about it? Now this is something that I have my clients do and it's an exercise that you can do, too. If you think you've had a hard day, I want you to write down exactly what happened. What are the facts? Maybe your boss said something to you; maybe your kid forgot their lunch; maybe your personal trainer quit, that was an example I had with one of my clients and we had some fun with that one, right? What about maybe it was your child loss the championship game; a friend said something to you; whatever it is write down the facts of what had happened.

Now, what made it hard? What are the thoughts you had about those things that made so difficult for you? What you will realize is that what makes things difficult is the way we think about them. What we believe about our own capability and what we believe about what happens in the world, what happens in our day, will define us ultimately. If we define a day where our kid forgets his lunch and there's a lot of traffic and our boss was in a bad mood as a hard day, what are we saying about ourselves? That we're not strong enough, capable enough, that we want our life to be easy, that we don't want to have to work hard, that we don't want to have to overcome negative emotion, we don't want to have to deal with any of that. We just want to glide.

I will say that I think that this is an insidious problem. I have so many clients coming to me that they feel like, "Well if it isn't flowing to me, if it isn't easy, if it isn't just popping off my vision board then it means I'm in the wrong direction, going in the wrong way." What I say is, "Absolutely not." It's absolutely not true. That's just how you're choosing to look at it, but what if you could look at your life that it's going to be something that is so amazing, that will challenge you and the more you're challenged the stronger you're going to be. The more things you're faced with, the more opportunities you will have to share your values and show what you're made of and be who you are. The easier your life is the less you need to show up, the less strong you need to be. I want a life where I need to be strong, where I can set an example, where I can show that no matter what's going on in the world, I get to be the best version of myself. The more challenge that I create for myself the better, because the more I'm going to have to evolve into a person who can achieve that level of success, that level of freedom. I don't kid myself and tell myself, "Oh, once I get to a certain place then it'll stop being hard," but I also don't tell myself that hard is a bad thing. Hard is a good thing. It's a challenge.

One of the books that I'm having my certified coaches read for our upcoming mastermind is called "Mind Set". One of the things she talks about in that book is how important it is for us to have the mindset of overcoming anything, not because we're smart, not because we're talented, but because we have the tenacity and the desire and the willingness to overcome, no matter what. That's where success is.

One of the things I think is interesting is that people believe that successful people get it effortlessly. There is this huge misconception. You look at professional football players or professional baseball players and the impression that I get when I talk to people sometimes is, "Wow! God, they just get to play their sport. They just get to have fun and then they get to make all sorts of money," or an actress, "Look at her, she gets to go act and have fun and she gets all this money." But when you really look at what their days are like, you look at actress' day and like how they spend their day on a movie set or on a TV set, it is grueling. The expectation of them, what they're expected to look like, what they're expected to act like, the number of lines they have to memorize, the amount of time they just have to sit waiting around and then the acting that they have to do so convincingly is so unbelievably challenging. We want to look at them and be like, "Oh, all they had to do was be pretty. All they had to do was just show up and they get all that money."

I think because of that misconception, we think that somehow our success should be without challenge, that we should just make a million dollars, we should be a successful coach, we should just have tons of clients miraculously. I think there's a shame in that. There's a shame in believing that everything should be handed to us or that we're somehow entitled to it, not only because I think it puts a burden on the rest of the community, the rest of the society; no only because of that but because we don't get to grow into who we're meant to be. If we believe everything is too hard we won't do anything. We won't challenge our self. We'll just give up and give up and give up and then we'll feel that desire that universe is kind of urging us forward and we won't respond to it. We won't show up as the best version of ourselves and then we won't feel proud of ourselves, we won't feel excited about our lives.

I used to say this all the time, if I had the choice between winning a million dollars or earning a million dollars, I would go with earning it every time because of what I would make it mean and how I would feel about the accomplishment would be so amazing to me; and I want to become the kind of person that is worthy of earning a million dollars. If I earn a million dollars and I lose it I can earn it again. If I win it I probably got one lightning strike chance, right? It was just luck and I'm not saying I wouldn't enjoy it and that it wouldn't be super fun. I love to think about how people feel when they win the lottery, but it's a very different process.

If you look at your life and you know that every day in your life you get to decide how you want to define it, no matter what happens. If you choose to define it as amazing, if you choose to define it as growth worthy, if you choose to define it as exactly what is supposed to be happening for me to become the strongest version of myself, you're going to live a very different life than if you're constantly saying, "I have a hard life. I have a hard job. I have a hard relationship. I have hard children. And I have a bad day, I had a hard day. I will have another hard day, that's going to retract you from your life. It's not going to open you up. It's not going to encourage you to take the risks that you need to take.

Now, so many people, you listen to all these anecdotal stories about people on their deathbed, "I wish I would have just done it. What's the worst that can happen? So what if it was hard? I'm up for it, bring it on." Don't you want to live your life like that? Like just, "Bring it on. There's no such thing as a hard day, I got this. Hard days are for weak people. I'm strong, I got this. Having my boss yell at me that doesn't constitute a hard day. He was grumpy or she was grumpy, whatever. That customer was upset that doesn't mean I had a hard day; it means that customer was upset."

You get to decide. Catch yourself talking about your hard days. Catch yourself thinking about it. The stronger you believe yourself to be the less hard days you will have. A hard day can be defined as something we're in a war zone where you don't have water, where you don't have food, where people are being killed that's a hard day. Everything else, you've got this. It's just another way to think about it.

People will say to me, "Oh gosh, can't you just let people have a hard day?" People are just so hard on themselves all the time, but I think believing that you had a hard day and wanting comfort for it is being hard on yourself. It's underestimating yourself. It's coddling yourself in a way that's completely unnecessary. Self-pity doesn't serve anyone. It certainly doesn't drive you into having easier days. You want easier days just be stronger. Remember the very first exercise class you took? I remember the first yoga class I took, I thought I was going to pass out, but now there are no hard yoga classes. I love yoga; the harder the better. I don't describe it as hard, I describe it as amazing. What if you think about your life in that way? What if you didn't allow any hard days? Don't define anything in your life as an excuse or as something negative.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I'd love to hear if you're someone that describes their days as hard and uses that as an excuse not to show up. Let's not do this anymore. Let's make a commitment to focusing on instead of saying it was a hard day, say I'm a strong woman. I'm a strong man. I got this. Bring it on.

All right everybody. Now I'm going to move in to talking about the training that's coming up and so if you're not interested in that, peace out and I'll talk to you next week. For those of you who are interested in coming to a training with me, it's like the podcast but you see my face and you see it for six full days. You come to California, in El Dorado Hills and we have a great little hotel that is called the Holiday Inn Express and it's not cheesy like you might be imagining right now, it's amazing. It's in our little town called the El Dorado Hills Town Center and so right in town there's a nugget, which is like a Whole Foods. There's a movie theater, there's a spa, there's a gym, there's a little pond with a walking trail. There are five to six restaurants right there, you don't even need to have a car.

What happens is you fly in and we pick you up on a limo and we bring you to the Holiday Inn Express. The dates of the training are March 27th to April 1st. You come in on the 26th and we have just a really casual dinner where we get to know each other and we chat and everyone gets to introduce themselves. It's very casual, hang-out kind of environment. Then on the 27th, we get to work. We start the day with me introducing you to some of the tools and we talk about them and I teach them and I demonstrate them. I talk about their importance and why we use them. Then we break for lunch. We have an hour and a half for lunch where we can all go to lunch together; you can break off into smaller groups and go; or you can take some time and just have some downtime.

In the afternoon, what we do is apply everything that you've learned in the morning. It's not a passive class. It's not where you just sit around and kind of think about what you've learned. You actually really start applying it and you start working it. That's how the days go as you go through the training. You start in the morning and ... By the way, when I teach I'm very animated, it's very cooperative, it's not a boring lecture at all. We are really all very engaged. Then we take that break and then in the afternoon we just practice and practice and practice. It's super fun because we're coaching ourselves, we're coaching each other, we're going through ... I have many structured worksheets that we can practice on. It's really a powerful, amazing experience.

What happens is a couple of nights during that week, we're going to go out to dinner and hang out together and we'll do a couple of group lunches. I have a couple of hosted lunches in there where you get to meet, of course, my husband and the other coaches that are helping me with the training out there. So we'll just spend six full days learning all of the tools that you will ever need, many more than you would ever need to be a life coach or a weight coach. We go through the process of practicing and I have a facilitator guide that you can follow through if you were going to have a client for six weeks that we would practice and go through the whole training with. The whole process at the training of how you would actually literally coach a client.

Included in the training is not only all of the training materials, you get full license for the materials; there's a certification process that you go through that we will mentor you through that process and once you're certified then you become a member of our community and we call ourselves the Awesomes and you're a member of that community.

We have a community board where everyone could come and communicate with each other. We also have the yearly Mastermind where everyone comes together and I do a full day of training. I usually have a guest speaker come in. This year, we're doing it in Santa Barbara. We are all going out whale watching together and this is a time for us to come together and learn once a year, set our goals for the year and really bond as a community.

In addition to that training, we also offer a marketing class that gets you going on getting your business started. We provide you with leads, your first 30 leads for your coaching business so you can start practicing your coaching and really helping clients learning based on what you've in the training you can start applying them with your clients. It's a really amazing life-changing experience.

If you go to www.TheLifeCoachSchool.com, you'll see that I have many testimonials from people who have come through the training. I think it's by far the best product; the best training I've ever provided is being in person. There's a couple of reasons why: one reason why is because you have the time to connect away from your regular environment. You get to really just focus on you, you get to focus on all your self-coaching and you get focus on learning this material. It's also amazing to bond with the community of people that are also taking this training. The other thing that I love about it is I get to know you all in a much deeper way than I would, say, if we were training on the phone. I get to see your face and I get to coach you and I get to experience you and there's just something really powerful about that. I do love the phone work as well. I think a lot of the coaching over the phone is powerful but I think there's something about the community, the amount of time we're together. It's amazing how such deep friendships are formed in such a short amount of time because we're also connected through this process.

And the most important thing for me always is that it's super fun. I like to laugh; I'd like to have a good time. I don't want to do anything unless I really enjoy myself. The way that we're doing the trainings that's coming up here, the first one again is in March 27th, the way that we're doing it is we're having you fill out a short questionnaire just telling us a little bit about why you're interested in the training and why you want to become a coach. Or if you don't want to become a coach, you just to take the training, why you want show up and take the training? I want to make sure I get a chance to talk to each and every one of you before you come, so we make sure we create an environment that's really supportive and wonderful and everyone's really excited and its awesome.

Once you fill out that application, we'll set up a phone call between the two of us and talk about your dreams and goals and make sure it's a really good fit and then we'll secure your spot for the training. Carina, my assistant, will contact you and hook you up with all your travel arrangements and any other activities you want to plan while you're here. There's an opportunity if you want to hook up and have a roommate or you want to do some spa appointments or make some reservations or even add on something to your trip while you're out here in California.

I would love to have especially you all that are listening to my podcast and have some exposure to my work already and if you're really enjoying it and it's having an effect on your life, I would love to invite you to come and join me in California for the Life Coach School in person training. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email me at [email protected], otherwise, please go to www.TheLifeCoachSchool.com/training and go to the application form and fill it out and we will get this party rocking. Have an amazing week everybody, I'll talk to you soon. Buh-Bye.

Thank you for listening to The Life Coach School podcast. It would be incredibly awesome if you would take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes. For any questions, comments, or coaching issues you would like to hear on the show, please visit us at www.TheLifeCoachSchool.com.