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If you’ve been listening to The Life Coach School podcast for a while, you probably already know that I love money. I openly talk about it and often freak people out.

I strongly believe that when you have a lot of money, you can do so many things, including making a positive impact on the world and helping others end their suffering.

On this episode, we cover the topic of making money, as well as the importance of adopting a new mindset conducive to increasing your earnings. Tune in as I share my personal story and background that helped me form my abundance mindset and explain how you too can exceed what you thought was “normal” for you in terms of how much you can earn. Check it out in below…

What you will discover

  • The 5 main components that make up our lives.
  • The biggest misconception about money.
  • A different way of thinking about money that I teach.
  • My background that formed my money mindset.
  • Why it’s important to figure out what the word “earning” means to us.
  • How you too can go beyond making your “normal” earnings.

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.

Hello my friends. How are you guys? I'm amazing. I just got back from a 6 day training, teaching my 6 day training with 30 of the most amazing students I've ever seen in my life, except for the course I did before that one, what I did before that. We had such an amazing time. What an amazing group of people. What an amazing journey we all took together. Everybody really being honest and open to all of their issues and everything they need the coaching on and we were able to do some epic work. All of us. It’s so magical. I love, love love doing in-person trainings and getting everyone together. That’s what's up. That’s what I've been doing. It’s so exciting. It’s so fun.

The next training is coming up in September. From then on, we will only be doing the training once a year. We will only be doing certification once a year. We have developed our program now so that we spend a year with you building your business. That takes a lot of manpower and energy from an us so we’re only going to do it once a year. That’s what's up. When you come to the Life Coach School, we take care of you. We’re going to give you all of our attention and make sure you're rolling. If you're interested in that, go over to the Life Coach School site and opt-in or you can e-mail [email protected] and she will hook you up with all the information you need for our upcoming September training which will be our last training of the year. Then, we’ll offer another one until the following September. Again, once a year is what we’re going to do.

Here's the good news. We have an advanced training that we will be teaching. That advanced training is coming up in July. Before we get started on this episode, I want to talk a little bit about some of the concepts I'm going to be teaching in that training, not to sell the training but because I want you guys to understand where my head’s at as I'm planning this upcoming training. It’s a two-day training. Again, you go to thelifecoachschool.com for more information on it. What I do want to tell you is as I'm planning to teach the training, as I'm planning everything that needs to happen for that training to happen, I am so excited about some of the concepts that are coming to me. This is usually what happens when I start a new training that I obviously get all these ideas and I'm writing frantic notes and getting excited.

One of the questions that I ask myself, and I know it’s a question that you guys ask yourselves and you, for sure, are asking your clients and your clients are asking, is how do you have a good life? How do you have a better life than you're having now? One of the main tenets that I teach of course is feeling better. I have a whole program on how to feel better. What about all the other components? What are the components of our lives? One of the ways that we can look at it is that the model includes everything. The model that I teach, self-coaching model includes everything, all the components of our lives. Our lives are made up of five things. They're made up of circumstances. They're made up of thoughts. They're made up of feeling. They're made up of actions. They're made up of results. There's nothing else in our life that won’t fit into one of those things in our lives.

When you think about your life, you can think about it in terms of those five buckets. What are the circumstances of your life? What are the thoughts you have about your life? What are the feelings you have in your life? What are the actions you take in your life and what are the results? What is the contribution that you're making in your life? If you can break all of those down and put models together that make your life, so all five of those components are just overwhelmingly amazing, you will have an amazing life. I really feel that I've been able to dial this in for myself and really have an amazing life.

It include some negative emotion, of course, it includes some negative thoughts, it includes some circumstances that aren’t ideal all of the time, but the way that we use the model and the way that I'm going to teach it in this advanced training is how can you take what you have to the next level, how can you use your mind juice, which is how I like to say it, to create the life that you want by being a conscious creator, by being so aware that you realize how you interact with the universes, how you create your life. If you're interested in coming to that training, that’s the good news that we’re going to be talking about.

I am opening the training to anyone who would like to come. I know that there are a lot of therapists and coaches that are already certified and people that have already had a lot of training that would like to come and learn from me and that’s why I am creating this course. For those of you who are just really avid students of the podcast and you just want to take all of your personal work to the next level, this would be a perfect class for you as well. This class is not just for coaches. It is open enrollment. It’s an opportunity for you to learn from me live. We had so many people come to the training that just said, “Oh yeah, it’s all different in person. It’s really different than just learning on the podcast.” If you're one of those people, please come and check us out. For our two-day training, we can't wait to meet all of you. I can't wait to teach you guys all of this new material, this new way of thinking about the model and how to advance your life using it.

Let’s talk money. I love money. You guys know that I love money. I talk about loving money and freak people out all the time. It’s great. People don’t talk about loving money. They think that money is the root of all evil and that money is terrible. A lot of people put money down when I say I love money. Everyone wants to fall over on their chair. I don’t know why. I think money is fantastic. If you think about everything that you could do if you have a lot of money? I think you know helping the world and helping people end their suffering is a beautiful thing. The more money you have, the easier time you're going to have being able to do that.

My main focus in life is to help treat suffering at like the middle age, middle income portion of the world. A lot of people want to go and build homes for people that don’t have homes and feed children that don’t have food. Of course, totally needed, an absolutely admirable for the people that do that work. My work is on the intense suffering that people go through emotionally and cognitively, unnecessarily in, what I would like to call, middle America. At a certain level of success in terms of a certain amount of money and a certain amount of intelligence and a certain amount of accomplishment, there's still a ridiculous amount of suffering for those people. I think their suffering goes highly unacknowledged because it feels like it’s not real “suffering” because you have food to eat and you have a car and you have a job. But I will say, I think that suffering is just as real and can be more debilitating than suffering that’s more obvious. That is my dedication to the work, is to work with people who struggle the way that I struggled.

I feel like the more money that I have, the more people that I can help. And so I love money. I love what it can do for my clients. I love what it can do for my family. I love what it can do for all of us who get to enjoy what we can do with it. I don’t apologize for that ever. I know that that turns some people off and that’s okay. I think that there's this misconception that if I have money and I like my money and I like spending my money, that somehow someone else will have less money. I think we need to clear that up right away. It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not like if I make a hundred thousand dollars, that you will then only get to make $20,000. They just keep making more money. There's plenty of it. I think they said there's enough money for everyone on the planet to be a millionaire, like literally.

I think that we get into trouble when we start believing that certain corporations and certain people, when they have a lot of money, it means we have less. I think that, I don’t know, there's this unspoken idea that there's just one pie and that we all are just trying to get our little slice of it. I don’t choose to believe that that is how anything needs to be or that is how certainly in America the opportunity is. You should make a new pie. There's not a slice left for you. You just go to work, bake a new one. That’s how America is, that we have opportunity to really create whatever we want. We have the ability to literally create as much money as we want and use it for whatever we want.

I want to talk to you guys about money because one of the things that we were doing in our big group discussion when we were talking… on the last day in our certification program, we talk about business. We talk about being an entrepreneur. We talk about making money. One of the things that was very obvious to me is that half of the room was very concerned that the other half of the room would find out how much money they had, that people, they were very concerned that people would think, “Oh, I don’t have enough money,” or, “I have too much money.” It was between that and level of education. We had people with multiple PhDs in the room and then we had people that didn’t even have a college degree. We were all loving and hanging out together and working on the same cerebral stuff. It didn’t matter what the level of education was to learn this stuff. It’s the same with money. It doesn’t matter how much money you have in your bank account in your ability to show up and help other people in that room.

We did a lot of coaching around money and thoughts about money. Everyone gets equally delighted and horrified when I talk about money. I can see it on their faces. I think people love the idea of loving money and spending it on whatever you want, being able to enjoy it without apology, which is something that I do. Then, they also were horrified by the idea that we could just earn money and spend it as we want that somehow that was reckless and that somehow, we were doing that to fulfill a need that wasn’t fulfilled otherwise. One of the things that I'm going to talk about later on in the podcast is the idea of generosity and how that has served me in my life. You’ve heard me talk about abundance and the idea of what abundance is and how to think about it.

I think that money, and I've always said this, is I think money just makes you more of who you are. The more money you get, the more you get to demonstrate who you are in the world. If you're already a very generous person, you're going to be generous in the world when you have more money. If you're already worried about money, getting more money will not make you less worried about money. I think that’s a big misconception as well. One of the main things that we talked about which I thought was briefly interesting conversation was earning money, especially entrepreneurial money, and when you own your own business and you earn money and you earn money helping people, how do you wrap your mind around it? We have this conversation about how people have this idea that it’s my money and your money and their money versus just money in general.

I’ll give you an example. We had a student in class that was talking about her husband’s money versus her money. We had people talking about my client’s money versus my money. We talked about this idea, okay, when does the money become yours? Is it when the client gives it to you, pays you for a service then that money becomes yours? Then, when is it no longer yours? When you purchase something. Is that the way that most people think about it? I like to just think of it as the universe’s money and all the universe’s money is my money too. If you want me to teach you something and you give me money, then it’s our money.

It’s not like you have money and now all of a sudden, I have money. It’s our money. It’s in the world. We’re going to use it to … You're going to use it so you can come to a training and then I'm going to use it so I can go to a training. It’s all in this big pot. It’s not necessarily this is mine, this is yours, this is theirs, but really just thinking about it as like who’s oxygen is it? I just breathed it in. Now, you're breathing it in. Whose is it? Trying to claim it like that I think is a different way of thinking about it as just thinking about like it’s our money. My money and my business with my clients. It’s like our money. This is what we’re doing to build this amazing thing. I love thinking about it that way.

I think it’s important to… when you are becoming an entrepreneur, if you are an entrepreneur or a freelancer, that you ask yourself really clearly why it’s okay for you to charge money. Because if you don’t know the answer to that question and you don’t feel good about that answer, then you will never charge enough for your services and you probably won’t attract the type of client that you would most want to work with. For those of you who don’t work entrepreneurially, you can still think about this in terms of your salary and how you're paid. If you don’t work at all, how you get money and how you spend it. How is it possible that you get money and spend it if you're not earning it? I think that’s a very interesting question when people say, “Well, that’s not my money because I didn’t earn it.” Then, you have all a sudden start to defining what does it mean to earn money and how do you define that.

It’s worth taking a minute for us to pause here and let you think about the answer to that question because how you answer that question will really define your life. I think the way we are raised and what we are taught as we’re being raised with money or without money, what we’re taught about it will define that later. Many of us don’t go back and question what we were taught. It’s important for us to do that now. When you think about the term “earned money”, what comes to mind? A lot of my students will say, “Well, my parents just tell me, money doesn’t grow on trees. You have to go out and earn it.” A lot of my friends that are parents talk about how important it is to teach our children the value of money and teach our children how important it is to earn it and it doesn’t grow on trees. You can't just buy whatever you want whenever you want.

I always argue, especially with my intellectual friends who I can pick a fight with and they’ll have intellectual argument with me, I love to talk about this because I was never taught that. My mom never said, “You have to go and earn money in order to have it,” ever. In fact, my mom received an inheritance from her dad and had money and was able to provide me with money without going out and earning it as you would think earning money as many people would define it, by getting a job. I was thinking about this the other day and I thought it’s a really fascinating way of looking at it for those of you who are married and don’t work too. What does it mean to earn money? If you don’t earn it, how do you define it? If you do earn it, how do you define the word earning?

My mom used to just, whenever I need money, she would just give me a $20 bill, always. I would be going to the barn to ride my horses and I would say I need some money and she’ll give me $20. I would go to the barn and very few of my friends had money with them at the barn. We would have vending machines. It was hilarious because the $20 bill, you couldn’t put into the vending machine, it wouldn’t take it. We’re always trying to get change so we could spend this money that I never thought of, “Hey, this is my money so I'm going to buy myself a snack and not you.” I was like, “Hey, we have 20 bucks and there's three of us. Let’s make something happen.” We used to walk down to a Taco Bell and buy lunch because we couldn’t put that … We’d be in our horse boots, walking down there, riding boots going down there.

I think from a very young age, I was shown, money is very easy and that you actually don’t have to earn it. What's interesting about that in the truest sense, you don’t have to go and sell lemonade on the side of the road or you don’t have to go get a job in order for there to be money. There's plenty of money and my mom had plenty of money and she didn’t work. That was what I had learned in my mind without being taught it directly. What's interesting about that is I could not wait to get my work permit. I would go to the barn and I wanted to get a job at the barn and work there but I wasn’t old enough yet. You had to be 15 to get a work permit. I was counting down the minutes until I can get my work permit and get a job. I remember that minimum wage at the time I think was like $3.38 an hour. I could care less. My mom was giving me $20 bills, remember. The $3 an hour didn’t matter. It was being employed and being able to go to work for someone. I couldn’t wait.

As soon as I got my work permit, I went to work at the barn. I also went to work at Chevys Mexican Restaurant. I was so excited to interview for that job. I was so excited to get it. I love working and I haven't stopped working since. I have always wanted to work. I used to have a job, it’s so interesting, I used to have a job at Nordstrom. I told you guys the story about how I got involved in a cult and gave them all my money. Then, I got a job at Nordstrom making money. I had some of my own money in a checking account I used to forget. I’d work at Nordstrom and I worked really hard and I loved it and I would forget to pick up my paycheck because I had some money from the settlement that I’ve gotten back from my cult situation.

Anyway, and I would just forget to pick up my paycheck and people, they’ll be like, “You didn’t pick up your paycheck. Oh my gosh, what are you doing?” It was because of the way that I thought about money. I was never careful about it or worried about it. That’s different than not taking care of it. I always took care of it in the sense that when I did get it, I would cash it and I would spend it properly. I didn’t do a lot of stupid stuff in terms of the way that I spent my money but I always wanted... The reason why I think I got involved in a cult situation is I never wanted to be dependent on it. I never wanted to be dependent on money like the way I had seen my mom. I felt like she was always worried about the principle. Don’t touch the principle and always live off the interest.

I'm not really served my mom well. In the sense where we talked about earning money, my mom earned a lot of money by taking care of her money in investing it very wisely. She didn’t have the traditional type of job. She did get an inheritance but how she took care of that earned her a tremendous amount of money. I was thinking about talking to her about this because I don’t know that she would use those words in terms of earning money but I really feel like that’s exactly what she did. I think it’s important for us to decide what we want that word to mean to us. If the way that we talk about it feels good to us, that’s really important because, and here's where I always talk to my students about how important it is to consider this idea, if you are very vested in earning your money like how much money you earn per hour, you will be very limited in the amount of money you will allow yourself to earn.

For example, we talk a lot to our students about the difference between earning a hundred thousand dollars versus earning $500,000. Earning a hundred thousand dollars, you can hustle your way to a hundred thousand dollars. You can work, put in some long hours. In fact, I think that’s what everyone needs to do. I think your first hundred grand per year, you really need to hustle. You can work enough hours and do enough coaching clients and do enough groups and hit the pavement enough to make a hundred thousand. If you want to make $500,000 a year, you can't hustle hard enough per hour to make that happen. The math just doesn’t work. You either have to charge a really significant amount of money per hour that you're going to get yourself into some issues with your own belief systems of how much you're worth per hour, how much is coaching worth per hour.

I love this part. I love the part where we get to, “Am I worth charging this? Is this group, coaching group worth charging this? Is this training worth this?” I always tell my clients, I say, “This is … “ or my students, I say, “This is how you know if you're charging the right price for something, is you ask yourself, would you pay that exact amount yourself for that? Then, would you be delighted that you did?” I just recently did Stop Overeating Masterclass course. I'm just bringing that to an end. That was a significant investment for the people that invested in. One of the women who I know spent that money, and it was not an easy amount of money for her to spend, she said to me, “It was worth every penny and more.” That’s such a huge compliment to me. I would spend that money again twice to get that same result, to get that same experience in my life.

Can you guys think of things that you would do that with? It felt like a lot of money at the time but you're so glad that you spend it. For some of you, maybe it’s your education. For some of you, maybe it’s your car. For some of you, maybe it’s a pair of Louis Vuitton shoes or bag or whatever. Whatever it is and you're like, “Yes. That was such a good spend. That was such a good use of my money. It felt so great to be able to say yes. I love that I did that.” I think that that’s how we should feel about all of our purchases. When we purchase something or even use our money for something that we feel amazing with how we used it. We also feel amazing in how we received it. I know that I put a lot of quality out there in the world. I know that I showed up.

One of the things that I like to teach and one of the things that my teachers have taught me and this is especially the work of Abraham I think has taught me this the most is that you give to the world in a way that you best know how. You receive in the way that the universe gives and you don’t question it. For example, if I buy the person behind me Starbucks, I say I want to pay for the person behind me Starbucks order, I want to pay for that, I may not have someone paying for my Starbucks order the next time around, but I will have a very generous wonderful life coming at me, if that’s what I'm putting out into the world. It may not come back in that exact same way but if I show up in the world and I give generously, I will be receiving generously. It may not be in the same way that I expect. It may not be in dollars. It may be in something completely different.

I love knowing that. I love knowing that whatever I put out into the world will create a more generous world. If I'm generous in the world, that would create more generosity and I will get to experience that from just being alive. I think money really helps us demonstrate that in our lives and how we feel about money, what we’re willing to charge, what we’re willing to give away for free. When you think about earning money, are you thinking about everything you're putting out there in the world and letting it come back to you in a way that feels good to you or are you thinking about I need to earn this much per hour or I need to earn what's fair?

When you think about what you want to create in your life in terms of what you want to create in terms of money and what you want to earn in terms of money, one question that I think is really fascinating to think about is what is normal? Because your ideas about what is normal will affect everything in your financial life. I mentioned earlier to you like to me, it was very normal for my mom to give me $20 bills when I was young. That was back in the day even. She was just giving me a $20 bill and she bought me pretty much anything I needed and wanted. It was just available to me. My mom was very generous. She never told me that I had to do anything to earn money. She didn’t put me on allowance. We had tons of chores to do around the house. We spent a lot of time doing dishes and cleaning the house. We always did our own laundry. We had to take care and pick up after the dogs and everything. That but it was never tied to a small amount of money, which I think is interesting. We’re expected to work. We’re expected to show up but it wasn’t tied to when you do this, you’ll get this amount of money.

I think that has served me so beautifully in my life because I think a lot of times, the amount of work that I do physically doesn’t match the amount I make. It’s more I feel like the higher level of thinking that I do, the more money I make. I think that’s a beautiful way. I want to teach all my students to think that way. If you think at a higher level, at a generous level, at a compassionate level, then you will be able to exceed what you have always thought was maybe normal for you in terms of how much you could earn. Coming from the life coaching industry, when I was talking to my coach and I told him I wanted to make seven figures in my business because my passion in life is to be an example of what is possible, he just giggled at me and said, “Well, that’s a good start. It’s somewhere where we can start.”

His perception on what's a normal amount of money to be making in our industry was very different than what I had been exposed to. I’ll tell you what. Just that one interaction and just talking to him really changed my paradigm around what is possible in terms of our ability in this day and age with computers, being on the internet, owning our own businesses, how much of value we can create for the world and therefore, how much money we can make is really exciting. I love to watch some of my mentors. I like to look at Pat Flynn and Amy Porterfield and John Lee Dumas. These people that are out there in the internet really generously giving of themselves and how much money they post there, some of them post their income reports and just being able to see how much money they're able to make by showing up in a way that’s really authentic and beautiful and offering so much to their clients. It’s so inspiring to me.

I really want to encourage all of you that are my students, that includes I guess anyone who is listening to this podcast, if you’ve never even taken a live course from me, is to think about what are you doing to invest in your life and in yourself, how do you feel about the amount of money that you are earning or creating or bringing in and do you want to change that? Do you like your beliefs about money? Do you like what you think is normal? What's a normal amount of money to make? What's a normal amount of money to spend? Do you like the way the way that you're thinking about it?

I'm going to end because I actually have seven more talking points I could talk about on this one. I feel like I was just been rambling on and on about all of these ideas because I get excited about them. One of the things that I really want you to think about is the possibilities for what you could change when it comes to your financial life. If you could have any amount of money, really think about that, would you create it for yourself? If the answer is no, really explore why. People won’t like me if I have more money. I won’t be able to relate to people. Whatever it is that goes on for you. I’d like to think about the difference between what does that mean to earn a million dollars? What does that mean to inherit it? What does it mean to have it given to you? What is the difference for you and how can you think about creating money in a way that feels good? It feels good because of what you're able to create and what you're able to give.

I want to say there's nothing more amazing to me than giving to the world anonymously, giving to people anonymously, not expecting anyone to come up and thank you but just really giving what you have to give and knowing in your soul that it will come back to you. I really, really want to encourage all of you to start doing more of that. We give because it feels great, because it creates an abundance mentality, because it’s how we want to show up in the world. There is no better way I know of to do that than with money because it really, I think, is a quick demonstration of what is possible. That’s why I love making money because I love showing the world, I love showing my students, I love showing other people what is possible when you are dedicated to creating with abandon and really not limiting yourself in what's possible. I want that for all of my students.

I hope you guys have a most beautiful, wonderful week. I look really forward to talking to you all next week. If you want to check out the advanced training, meet me in person, spend a couple days here with me, I would love to have you come. It’s much, much more affordable than my other trainings and it is worth every penny. As you know, it’s worth that investment in yourself. Come check us out. You can find out more about the advanced training by coming to thelifecoachschool.com and clicking on trainings. I will talk to you guys next week. Have a great week. Bye-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 will 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.

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