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So many of us have accepted a life that is not to our liking – a life that includes too many things that cause us an enormous amount of trouble that we don’t know how to manage. This causes us to live in a reactive mode, feeling like we’re at the mercy of our own lives.

I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from my podcast listeners and students about what they’ve learned from me. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that people understand what it means to consume the concepts that I teach, but they are not great at applying and practicing them.

In this episode, I would like to fill in that gap between the knowledge of self-help topics that many of us have and the practice that’s required to apply it to achieve the end product of the life that we ultimately want.

One of the things that I’ve been teaching to my students extensively lately is the art of living deliberately. What that requires is deciding how we want to live our lives and then practicing living our lives that way.

There are only a few components that go into the study of ourselves and how we interact with our lives. And if we make it a consistent practice to study, plan, prepare, and show up in the world how we want to show up and be the way we want to be, then we can live a life that is much closer to the ideal that we have in our minds.

Tune into this episode to find out how you can begin this much-needed journey of studying yourself.

What you will discover

  • The difference between understanding concepts intellectually and applying them.
  • How I decided to do the work that I do today and why.
  • The value and skills imperative for us to understand as human beings.
  • The power of removing buffering from our lives.
  • The importance of choosing love and why that path is not disempowering, against the contrary belief.
  • The most empowering stance we can take in our personal growth journeys.
  • Why we have to accept all of our emotions.
  • How the same circumstances can be positive or negative for different people.
  • The effects of studying yourself and becoming a self-coaching scholar.
  • The details of my upcoming “Get Coached” program.

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.

Well, hello, my friends. Today I'm going to talk to you about studying yourself. The reason I've decided to create this lesson and also an accompanying course to go with it is because of all of the feedback that I get from all of my podcast listeners and all of my students about what they've learned from me. One of the things that I have noticed is that people understand what it means to consume and to learn, but we aren't as good at applying and practicing. I know that many of you have learned a lot of information. You've learned a lot of information from me. You've learned a lot of information from other teachers. You understand intellectually how the world works. You understand somewhat how the rules of the game are played, but very few of us practice getting good at our game, the game of life, the way we want to live our life.

One of the things that I've really been teaching a lot lately to my students is the art of living deliberately. What that requires is that we decide how we want to live our lives and then we practice living our lives that way. There are only a few components that go into studying ourselves and how we interact with our lives. If we make it a consistent practice to study, to plan, to prepare, and then to show up in the world the way that we want to show up and be the way that we want to be, then we can live a life that is much closer to the ideal that we have in our minds. So many of us have accepted a life that is not to our liking, that includes too many things in it that cause us too much trouble that we don't know how to manage, and so we end up living in a reactive mode feeling like we are at the mercy of our own lives. I will say that, for me, the way to get out of that reaction mode is actually quite simple. Now, it's not easy but it's simple.

Here's what I mean by that. When you understand the rules of the game, you understand, for example, soccer. You understand that in order to play good soccer, you need to understand where you are in relation to the field, you need to understand that the ball needs to go into the goal, you understand how you use your other team members. Let's say you've studied the game of soccer and you understand it intellectually. This is what happens to many of my students. They read a book on soccer, they read a book on self help, and then they think, "Okay, I've got this. Now I'm going to go into my life with this knowledge and my life will be better." Well, that's the equivalent of going into your soccer game with an intellectual understanding of the game and not being able to have practiced, not been able to have made mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, not to have a specific game plan that relates to you personally, but just to go out on the field and run around and try to get the ball and try to get into the goal. We wonder why we're so exhausted all the time and we never score the points or get the results that we ultimately want.

I would like to fill in that gap between the knowledge that many of us have when it comes to self help and emotions and our cognitive ability and behaving in the world and the practice that's required to apply that knowledge to then have the end product of a life that we ultimately want. We live in a culture right now where we want that instant result. There's a lot of us that haven't done the practice and the deep work that really is required in order to show up effortlessly in our lives and on the field, in order for us to take what we want to live effortlessly and practice it enough so that it does become effortless.

The way that I like to describe this process is the first thing that we have to do is kind of uncover how we're currently living. We need to bring that into our consciousness and understand it. Then we need to decide how we want to live, if it's different than that. Then we have to practice living that way until it becomes unconscious. Basically we're taking the unconscious, making it conscious just so we can change it to make it unconscious again. We don't want to have to live our lives constantly nit-picking and evaluating every single thing we do. If we're willing to do that in the beginning, then we'll be able to have a life much more to our liking in the end.

It's really the difference between consuming knowledge and learning, which we're very good at. We're very good at taking in information. We have short attention spans. We like to be entertained by information. The next step has to be applying that information. It has to be going to the place where we actually are willing to use it in a game. We're willing to use it and make mistakes with it until we can get better at it. We're willing to study ourselves while we're engaged with life. That is something that most of us, not only do we not do it, we genuinely don't know how.

Because of this, I feel like this is kind of a missing piece with a lot of my students. Up until this point, I've taking on students that want to become life coaches and weight coaches and I've been working with people very intimately that want to stop overeating and overdrinking. Most of my programs, up to this far, have been very small groups of people that I have worked with for six months to a year and really seen this evolution from understanding the knowledge and really applying it to their life, being willing to go into the vulnerability and the discomfort of being a beginner at something, not just understanding it, but actually applying it. It's kind of like the example that I always use of that unicycle. It's one thing to read a book on riding a unicycle. It's another thing to get on it and try and ride it. My coaching is really moving into not just new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of looking at the world and new ways of looking at our brain, but also into how do we apply that so it makes that significant difference in our lives.

I want to tell you a little bit about me and my experience with that and why I feel so passionate about moving into this area. One of the things that has always been important to me is that I make a contribution to the planet, that I come here and leave it better than I found it. For me, what that looks like is different than what it looks like for a lot of people. I used to kind of be a little bit insecure about this. I used to feel like I needed to have a bigger and better dream.

I'd hear people about building schools in other countries and I'd hear about people that were helping starving children. I'd hear about people that were going into environments that I wasn't familiar with and helping abused children. That all felt like so important and such meaningful work that people were doing. I've always been one that I only feel compelled to work hard on things that are true for me. None of those things, although they seem true for other people and they seemed really important to other people, it just didn't seem like my calling. What I decided to do is to really understand where's the suffering in the world that I can most relate to and that I can have the biggest difference for.

What I decided was that the most suffering I had ever experienced was when I was filled with anxiety over my weight and overeating like a crazy person and hiding that with shame. Even though I feel like that's a different kind of suffering than starving to death and not having clean drinking water, which of course is very legitimate suffering, I feel like it still is such an important piece of the suffering that's happening in the world and it's where I can have the biggest impact. I've spent most of my career working with people who really suffer with overeating. I'm still very compelled to do that and I feel very passionate about working with kind of my sisters that have that issue.

What happens is once we get the eating issue kind of solved and once the weight comes off, then there's the whole rest of why we were overeating in the first place, why we were overdrinking in the first place that's still there and left to be solved. That's what the work of self-coaching is, that's what the study of self is. That's what understanding what are the components of life and how do I learn them and how do live them deliberately and how do I get better at them? That has become my life's work. That's how I moved into writing the book Self Coaching 101. That is how I moved into training coaches. That is how I have done a tremendous amount of work with many men and women who want to understand their brains and how their minds and their brains affect the way that they live their life and affect the way that they feel about themselves and about their life.

My purpose in doing this work has always been to release people from suffering. I remember when I was in so much emotional suffering that I remember thinking if there was a way that I could solve this for myself, that I would share that solution with others. I would feed that need I have to make a contribution and share it with others.

The other purpose of my life has always been to be an example of what is possible. I find great satisfaction in moving towards my highest ambitions for my life. That's in all areas of my life. That's in my relationships. That's in my success in my career. That's in my ability to overcome my own self-limiting beliefs and obstacles as it applies to what I'm capable of doing, to how much money I am able to make, to the products I'm able to create. All of that is part of my process. My relationship with what I call buffering, how willing am I to be present in my life and not escape my life, how can I make my life so it's worthy of not escaping, that has been the main focus of my life and I'm willing to put in a lot of time and practice daily in order to play the game of my life exactly at the level I want to play.

That's really how any endeavor works. The more you practice your craft, the more you study it, the more you repeat all of the things and visualize and put yourself out there and be willing to make mistakes, the more successful you are going to be at your sport, at your job, at your life.

I feel like it's my mission to work with a small group of people and to show everyone in that group what it can be like if you practice the life you want, if you look at the components and you study them and you see where you are now and where you want to be and what that difference is and practice to get there, that's what it can be. I feel like I've done that repeatedly in my life. I've set those goals for myself and used that ambition to overcome my discomfort and to evolve myself to the next version of myself. Every time I've been willing to do that, I have had less and less suffering in my life. I've had less of an experience of feeling like I'm powerless, feeling like I'm a victim, feeling like I'm at the effect of what is happening in the world and more as if I'm creating my own reality with my mind.

Here are the values and the skills that I think are imperative for us to understand. There's the overall arching understanding of the components of life, which I've taught a lot. There are the circumstances of our lives, which are the facts we can't control and then there is our thinking, which determines how we interpret the world and how we believe. Then there are our feelings, which determines our experience and how we relate and how we show up and what we do in the world. Then there is what we do in the world that creates our results. Everything that I teach falls into one of those five categories. Breaking those categories down when it comes to our life and understanding each of those components is really important when it comes to planning a deliberate life.

I've taken all of those components with every situation in my life and deliberately planned what I want my results to be. I understand that all of my results are an effect of my thinking. As I've gone through this process, I've understood a lot of the skills that are required in order to live at my highest level.

I'm going to start with removing buffering from our lives. I think as I have evolved as a coach and as a teacher, that is one of the things that has come to the forefront of all of the work that I do is removing buffering, removing overdrinking, overworking, over-Facebooking, drugs and drinking and TV and video games, all of those things that we use to escape our own lives. That in and of itself is an art, learning how to be in the world without any emotional escape, being able to be in the world and manage and feel of your emotions is a huge part of what I teach and what I value. That's really about finding a way to live authentically, which I think is a term that's very overused, living an authentic life.

When you use the word "authentic", people make it sound like it's going to be lovely and beautiful and peaceful. An authentic life is half wonderful, beautiful, and peaceful, and half suck. That's what a human life is about. It's about that duality. It's about that contrast. Living an authentic life means telling yourself the truth about what you're feeling, which half the time will not be pleasurable. Always trying to seek out pleasure at the expense of living that authentic life is what leads to all of that buffering. Of course the problem with the buffering is the net consequence that we get from over buffering to escape our own lives.

The second value that I teach and I find to be one of the most important concepts is to choose love. I think so many of us mistaken this to believe that if we're constantly loving that we are always going to be dis-empowered and we're going to let people step all over us. What I have found is that the opposite is true. When we come from a place of love for ourselves and for others, we do not revert into being a victim and we do not vilify other people. We stay in a place of compassion and love, which doesn't allow for any mistreatment either way. The love is what we have for ourselves so we will steer ourselves towards loving situations and the love we have for other people will keep us from retaliating in a way that is from a scary victim place or from a scary predator place. Love will neutralize all of that. I think love is one of the fiercest things we can do and it all starts in our mind and the way that we choose to believe the world is and the way that we choose to believe about ourselves and our interaction with the world.

My third value or skill that I teach is emotional adulthood. What that means is that we take full responsibility for everything we feel. We do not blame our feelings on other people. We do not give other people credit for our feelings. Therefore, we do not feel completely dis-empowered as we move through the world. When we understand that we're responsible for everything we feel by what we choose to think, then we can decide what we want to think on purpose and therefore what we want to feel on purpose. That is the most empowering stance that I can teach anyone to do because then it allows other people in their life to be who they are. Instead of trying to control and manipulate the world, all we have to do is understand and choose our own thinking.

The next component that I teach, it's really important, is that our thoughts are always creating our results. Therefore, those thoughts should be deliberate and they should be conscious and they should be programmed by us. When we go through our lives unwilling to study ourselves and being unwilling to show up in a way that uncovers what our mental programming is, we live in a way that I think is irresponsible. We live based on thoughts that have been programmed inadvertently and therefore we feel like we're out of control of our own lives. We don't understand where our programming came from so therefore we don't own it. I think one of our callings as human beings is to become aware of what we're thinking, to evaluate it, and to make sure we're thinking it on purpose, to make sure that all of the thoughts that we have that create our feelings, that create our actions, that create our results in the world are deliberate and meaningful to us. We aren't just carrying out somebody else's agenda. We aren't just droning through our lives based on some programming that we may or may not have chosen deliberately for ourselves.

The next and last one that I briefly mentioned before is that we accept all of the emotions that are part of being a human being. We do not constantly try and reject any kind of discomfort or vulnerability at our own expense. We learn how to feel and cope with emotions. We learn how to move towards discomfort in order to learn more and to evolve more and to step into the next version of ourselves and our lives and we know that that's going to include discomfort probably 50% of the time. The more willing we are to evolve, the more willing we are to grow, the more willing we are to make a contribution, the more discomfort we're going to experience.

Sometimes this gets misinterpreted that I think you should be stressed out and miserable all the time. Of course that's not what I'm saying. Stress and resistance are not something that I encourage anyone to experience because I don't think they're useful. I encourage us to relax into our doubts, relax into our own frustrations, relax into our own insecurity so we can move beyond those things and up-level those things in order to create a life of much more capacity and capability and ultimately more confidence which will lead to more growth.

I believe the purpose of a human life is to evolve it as much as we possibly can. I believe in the expansion of the universe based on human desire and what it is that comes from deep within us. This is not to be confused with the desire for pleasure, which has been really misguided in our current cultural environment and by many of the products that are available to us. I'm talking about the desire to grow, the natural instinct we have to make a contribution to ourselves and to the world by expanding through our own desires, our own ambitions.

I think that the tragedy right now for so many of us is we are afraid to dream. We are afraid to have big goals in our life because we're afraid of disappointing ourselves. What we do is we end up disappointing ourselves ahead of time. Instead of being disappointed that we couldn't fulfill an attempt, we become disappointed that we never tried and we never put ourselves out there because we were really too afraid of feeling the discomfort of possibly failing. One of the things that I like to teach is that moving towards discomfort can actually be a skill that you develop that will ultimately pay off tremendously in the end if we're willing to do it. It comes from the belief that there's no emotion that you can't feel, there's no emotion that you weren't intended to feel. Disappointment and frustration and anger and sadness are all purposely part of the human experience. The more you live and the bigger you live, the more you will experience that and that is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Those are the things that I really feel powerfully about teaching. What I've noticed is that as I teach those concepts to my students, they move through the phases of self coaching. They move through the process of learning how to coach themselves, of how to study themselves. One of the things that I've kind of determined is that those people are really the scholars of the self study. They are the Self Coaching Scholars.

When I first introduced this information to people, they're what I would call intellectual learners. It's kind of the first phase of this process, where they learn it intellectually, they learn the concepts of the difference between a circumstance and a thought, and they learn that their thoughts create their feelings and that their feelings create their actions. It's kind of like reading the book on the sport. You kind of have this intellectual understanding. There becomes a real increase and awareness during this time. We can start paying attention to: What are my circumstances? What are my thoughts? What are my feelings? What are my actions? We start paying attention to those things and that can give us great intellectual insight. We can start understanding why we do the things that we do. At this point, we may not understand quite how to change it, but that increase in awareness is huge. Our ability, as a human being, to think about what we think about is one of the privileges of being a human. Because we can think about what we can think about, we can change what we think about which will ultimately change everything else in our lives.

The first step is just learning the practice of watching and being aware of your own experience in life. It's what I would call the increase in consciousness. The next phase is really an understanding and an insight that our thoughts are really the cause of all of our emotions. When we really understand that in our own lives and we can see that specific thoughts are causing specific emotions in our lives, we are able, at that point, to release some of those thoughts. We don't even have to replace them. A lot of people will ask me, "If I have a negative thought and it creates a negative feeling, how do I replace that thought?" Well, sometimes you don't even need to replace it because just the awareness of that specific thought causing that specific pain in your life will allow you to release it.

Phase one is kind of understanding the general concept that thoughts create feelings. Phase two is really getting some insight into your own specific thoughts and how they're causing your specific feelings. Then the next phase is really about deciding to think about circumstances differently. It's a deliberate intention to really be conscious of our thinking ahead of time and to really start thinking about circumstances by choice.

Now what happens in this phase is really people start to understand that there are no negative or positive circumstances. The only thing that makes a circumstance negative or positive is how we think about it. This is why, for some people, a circumstance can be positive for one person and negative for another person because they're thinking about that circumstance very differently so their experience of it is different.

Now, the circumstance is still the same. The circumstance hasn't changed. That's a fact. Two people will have two different thoughts about that circumstance and therefore have a different experience of it. Instead of that thought just being something that happens automatically that I'm aware of, during this phase, I start deciding before I even have the thought. I start deciding in that moment what I want that thought to be and deliberately change my experience of the circumstance based on what I choose to believe.

The next phase really is this understanding that all emotions are harmless. We have grown up to believe that our feelings can be hurt. We've grown up to believe that there are good feelings and there are bad feelings and we never want to cause other people bad feelings and that we have the ability to cause them bad feelings and other people have the ability to cause us harmful feelings. What you really start to understand as you move into this phase is that all emotions are harmless, that we can experience any emotion, but we are the sole cause of our own emotions and other people are the sole cause of their emotions.

What this leads to is not a sense of apathy about other people's emotions but a sense of keen caring about our own emotions and noticing that when we feel a negative emotion, we are the only one that is experiencing it. We learn that hating another person doesn't hurt that other person. Disliking another person doesn't hurt that person. Judging another person does not hurt that person. The only person it hurts is us. The same is true when we love other people. We get to benefit from that experience when we take joy in looking at other people's lives and noticing what we love about them and choosing to like them and choosing to love them. We are the beneficiaries of that choice. No matter what we're experiencing in our life, it's part of the process of being alive and our ability to process that pain is as natural is our ability to digest food. We have been designed to experience pain half of the time. We were not designed to escape it. We were not designed to run away from it. We were designed to process it, to experience it, to use it in our lives as contrast to that positive emotion. There is no positive emotion if we don't have that negative emotion. That's what makes it possible.

The last phase is really deciding what you want your results to be and manifesting them quickly, manifesting them on purpose, manifesting them easily. If you think about any result you want in your life, you can back up through the self coaching model and understand exactly how you can get it. This is the result you want. What would you have to do in order to get that result? What would you have to feel in order to do those things that would get you that result? What would you have to think in order to feel that way, in order to do that thing, in order to get the result?

If you're committed to managing your mind, committed to managing your emotional life, committed to managing your actions, there is literally nothing that you can't create in your life deliberately that you want to have. That's when life starts to get fun because even though you know it will be challenging, even though you know it may be difficult, you still want to sign up for the course. It's just like signing up for any course in college. You know that you're going to have to study. You know you're going to have to put hard work in. You know that you're going to have to maybe miss some problems or get some stuff wrong because you will be a beginner. It's all worth it in order to become the person that you will become after you've gone through that process.

That's really that last phase of the coaching process is really being able to pick and choose exactly what you want in your life and know ahead of time that you will already accomplish it, which will create a sense of confidence and a sense of happiness and a sense of joy that will be underlying everything that you do. Even when you are challenged and even when you are uncomfortable, you will have that underlying peace and confidence that there's nothing in the world that you can't do. For me, the only way to get to that final phase of self coaching is through practicing, is through evaluating and being aware and taking care to notice all of those specific things that are happening in your life so you can study them.

One of the main problems with many of my students of The Life Coach School Podcast is that they listen to me every day but I don't have interaction with them in their life so I'm unable to help them look at their lives from an outside perspective. I have to count on them to look at their lives from an outside perspective from within their lives. What's very challenging about that is when you are in your life and when you're thinking about your life, you thought about your life the same way your whole life so sometimes it's very hard to decipher what's a thought and what's real because the way that you look at the world is through your mind. Being able to separate those things out is very important. That's where having a perspective and having a coach come in and give you exercises that tweezes those things out is so very important.

Let's talk about the effects of doing this work. Let's talk about the effects of studying yourself, of becoming a Self Coaching Scholar. Let's start with relationships.

What this work does in your relationships is it allows you to show up in the relationship as yourself, authentically, telling the truth, without a need to control the other person, without a need for the person to be anything other than who they truly are. You're able to show up and hold space for someone so they can be who they are with you and feel that experience of love that you have in your life. Self coaching teaches us how to hold the space for ourselves first so when we are in the relationship with somebody else we can come to the relationship with not a lot of judgment but with an openness and an ability to understand, an ability to hold space, and ability to not be judgmental.

The effect of this work on money and success is limitless. This is something that I've really discovered in my own life is that money and success and the way that we understand it in the world is really just a concept and it's something that we have a lot of beliefs and a lot of thoughts about that aren't necessarily serving us. It's sometimes the way that we were raised. It's sometimes our political culture. It's sometimes the books that we've read. Understanding why we have the amount of money that we have, understanding why we have the amount of success we have is all related back to our thinking and not related to our environment, not related to the economy, not related to where we live. It's really powerful to take back that control and understand that we can make as much money as we want. We can have as much or as little success as we want on our own terms. I think that's a pretty delightful thing to know.

I think feeling like we are at the effect of our economy or at the effect of the job market or the effect of our boss can be very limiting. When we really uncover that those are just thought programming and that we can bust that open and decide on purpose what to live, that's not like wishful thinking. That's not like being Pollyanna. That's not being, "Oh my gosh. Law of attraction is such a joke." It's not like that at all. It really is how the world works. What you believe is what you will accomplish in your life. Being able to play with your thinking in this playground of life I think is super fun when you understand exactly how to apply and practice the ability to make more money and success by using your mind.

The next one is one of my favorites. Of course, weight and health. We can really apply our self coaching to our weight and weigh whatever it is we want to weigh without an effort and understanding the difference between our desire to overeat and escape our lives and the needs we have for fuel and how different those things are and how most of us are overweight because we don't know how to cope with our lives emotionally can be very powerful. Of course when we get our weight managed and under control, that directly affects our physical health and also our emotional health. My goal is for my clients to eat for their physical health and be able to make decisions for their physical health and to live and eat only when they need it for fuel instead of for the emotional health and use their skills of self coaching for their emotional health instead of trying to use food to compensate for their lack of emotional health.

The other area that it affects if your self esteem which is really your opinion about yourself, what you believe yourself to be capable of. How you think about yourself of course affects how you feel because your thoughts create your feelings. The more you are willing to highly regard yourself to manage your thoughts about yourself, the better you're going to feel. The better you feel, the more of a contribution you'll make, the more results you'll have in your life.

This work really affects your overall outlook and your energy in the world. When you really start carefully picking what you think about and where you direct your mind and what's important to you and you think those things and practice those things on purpose, you will choose things that energize you instead of defeat you, instead of thinking that you're fat and ugly and not accomplishing things and not a good mom or not a good dad or whatever, you're going to feel defeated and hopeless. When you start choosing thoughts that are more empowering that serve you, that aren't filled with self-loathing, you will feel much more energized, must more excited about your life, much more in love with yourself in a really positive solid way.

Ultimately, I think that feeling empowered is the ultimate benefit of this work. When you feel empowered, you show up more. You use what you have. You take yourself to the next level. So many of us feel so dis-empowered. We feel so reactive. We feel so beat down so the world misses out on us. The world misses out on whatever our contribution is. However we could best show up, we don't because we feel so dis-empowered. I think what this work does, this self coaching work does, is it helps us take our power back. It helps us become more of the people we are meant to be because we can tap into our truest desires, unleash all that energy that we want to have to show up in the world.

Because of this, because I understand this self coaching work and I understand my purpose in delivering it and because I understand the effects that it can have on all of my students, I decided that 2017 was really going to be about offering that to as many people as wanted to show up and work with me for an extended period of time. I went and met with my coach and I sat down with him and I had an idea about how I could deliver this program and teach this program in a way that would serve all of the people that I want to serve and also serve myself and my own personal growth.

My coach is tough with me and pushes me to create the best business I can possibly create but also in a way that takes care of my self care in a very extreme way. One of the things that I told him that I really love to do is to really study the latest and greatest information out there and apply it to myself and then teach it to my students. That's what I have been doing for the past two years on the podcast and I think that's why my podcast is so successful is because I really take these complicated ideas and distill them down and simplify them in a way that works for me so I can really apply them to my own life and then I practice them and then I learn how to teach them to you.

The missing piece there for us in our relationship is the interaction. I get some questions from you guys sometimes but they're usually answered on the podcast at a later date. One of the things that I'm committed to doing is working with more of you in a way where I can give you that feedback. What we decided to do is create a program that was a year long and plus. The way that I set this up is very similar to a program that my coach offers his clients. Now my coach is a business coach so all of the information that he provides to me is all based on business. He coaches me through my abilities and doubts and frustrations when it comes to building my business.

The model for what he's doing with his clients is a model that I'm duplicating to do for you. This is what the model will look like. We will have a monthly coaching relationship for those of you who want to sign up for what I'm calling Self Coaching Scholars. It's a private membership program with me. The way that I've decided to do it is that I will send you, in the hard copy mail, a program, a course, every month. The reason I decided to do it like this, even though it's a lot more hassle and a lot more expensive than just delivering it online, is that I have benefited so much from my coach doing this for me. Every month in the mail, I get a book from him that teaches me the lesson for that month. He has distilled it down into the most important part and then asked me to do an exercise associated with it.

What I have done is I have created that exact same program for you. You will get in the mail from me a course and it will be in a booklet form and you will read that course and there will be homework applied to it. Now, the reason why the homework is so important, the work required in it, is so you don't just consume the information. You actually apply it and use it in your life and practice it in your life.

I am also including a video that will be accompanying the booklet and it will be on a USB drive. Now, for those of you who want everything online, I'm also providing everything online. If you'd rather not have the package in the mail, you're crazy, but it's totally fine. What I will do is have it all online as well for those of you who prefer to do it online. What you'll do is you'll get that booklet and you'll open it up and you will start studying that lesson. You will also have access to the video. Then I will provide two coaching calls per month for you.

You'll be able to come to the coaching call and share your homework and ask a question and get any help or any coaching you need live and direct from me. Now, if you can't attend live, of course we will have those recorded, but I really want to encourage you to utilize the time and the energy that I have there for you for you to ask me questions, for you to give me examples of how you tried to apply something, how it worked, to share your celebrations, all of those things with me. That will be what you get in the mail. You get a course booklet that will cover the topic of the month and give you homework. Then you'll get two calls in which we can discuss and you can ask me any questions and I can coach you live on the phone.

The other thing that you will be getting in the mail from me monthly is you will get a study skills booklet on the podcast. What that will have is the next four podcasts for the next month will already be recorded and I will be providing you with an overview and a study guide. As those podcasts are released and you listen to them, you will be able to not just hear what I'm teaching to everybody, but then you'll also be able to apply what I'm teaching, ask me questions about what I'm teaching, practice what I'm teaching so you see it showing up as a result in your life, not just as an intellectual concept in your mind. As we go through and have our live calls, you'll of course be able to ask me any question on any podcast that I've been teaching live. My idea for 2017 is that I'm really going to be taking all of the work that we've done so far in the podcast and really building on it with new concepts and new ideas for the coming year.

For example, in January, I'm going to be talking about resilience. I'm going to be talking about how resilience is the one thing that all of us need in order to make our dreams come true. I'm going to talk about what prevents us from having it and how we can have even more of it. We're going to go into a deep study of what it is and how to understand it, but then I'm also going to teach you this is how you apply it to your life. This is how you do it.

The last thing that you're going to get every month from me is a behind the scenes video. One of the things that happens to me pretty regularly is that I get emails from all of you asking me what books I'm reading, asking me how I manage my life, how I manage my time, how I take care of my children and have relationship with my husband and workout and eat healthy and still run my business and manage my employees and all those things. That's something that I share just a little bit of on the podcast but that most people want to know a lot more of.

One of the things that I'm going to be doing is shooting every month a behind the scenes video. I'm going to show you what I'm reading and talk to you about the latest books that are on my bookshelf and some of the best classics I've ever read and the books that I consistently reread. I'll talk to you about the podcasts that I'm listening to. I'll give you recommendations on the ones that I think are the best. I'll give you links to everything there. I will be talking about how I run my business and how I coach clients and I'm going to talk to you about how my relationship with my husband as being my husband and my business partner works. I'm going to include my kids and my husband in those behind the scenes videos. You'll be able to see me with my baseball cap on. I'll take you on walks with me. I'll really show you how my life works behind the scenes because I think that can be very instructive.

I am truly living this work. I coach myself all the time. I take everything that I teach you very seriously in my own life and I want you to see exactly how I do that and how it benefits me. It's not just rhetoric when it comes to me. It's actually the genuine work that I do in my life. I know that you all are very interested in that because you've asked me so many questions and so I'm going to open all the doors up on that, give you a tour of the house, give you a tour of my life, my car, everything, like how I kind of live and function in my life. I'll bring some of my friends in and we'll have some candid conversations that I'll be able to share with you. That will happen every month.

The way that I've set this program up is that it will be a monthly program. When you sign up, you need to sign up by a certain deadline in order to get the information for the next month. We'll be starting in January so it's my hope that most of you will sign up before January and you will start getting your materials by the first of the month. Once you get your materials, you will open up your course book and it's just a booklet. I've distilled it down. It's not a lot of reading. It's just enough to kind of get your brain going, have you do some application of that, start practicing it. Then we'll have the two calls where we will talk about it.

You will also have full access to me through the Ask Brooke section of your website. You will have your very own website where everything will be there electronically as well as having it in your USB and having it in your hands, you'll also be able to access me through a website on an Ask Brooke page. You'll be able to ask me anything and get long and thorough answers from me within 24 hours. As you go through any of this material, you will really have genuine access directly to me.

Again, every month you will get your course booklet, your course video. You will get a study guide for the upcoming podcasts. You will get a behind the scenes video with all of my resources and my current work for the month. It will be an ongoing membership so you will be billed automatically every month and you will be sent your materials automatically every month. I'm asking that everyone that commit to this program do so for the year. We will let people come into the program as the year progresses, but the way that it will work is that if you sign up now, you will get January's information and then you'll automatically get February's, then you'll automatically get March's. Unless for some reason you cancel, you will continuously get those materials. If you don't sign up in time for January, you will only get access to February. The way that we are doing this is, because we are shipping everything physically out the door, we're only going to ship once for each month. Even though you may decide to wait until March to sign up, you will not get access to January and February's work. I would like to take a group through that really wants to progress.

Now, if you are listening to this and let's say it's March or it's April, one of the things that I will allow you to do is to sign up in March and April and you can access the back materials but you will have to pay those membership fees that you didn't pay initially. I will give you all the details of exactly how to do that in the sales page. All of that is to say for those of you who are listening to this in 2016, I really want to encourage you to sign up right away and take this whole year program with me because it is going to be, I think, one of the best things I've ever taught. I've already created the program for the whole year. I've already created all of the materials for January and I have to say I think that they are some of my best work. I think I'm at a point where I've taken all of knowledge and applied it to myself to really make most of my personal dreams come true and so I'm in a place of teaching that I've never been in before. My ability to teach these concepts from a place of truly knowing and experiencing the results has made my clients' results so much faster than they've ever been before.

What I would like to invite you to do is to join me in this membership, is to become a Self Coaching Scholar. I have put together an amazing bonus for those of you who want to sign up right now and who want to be a part of this amazing coaching experience for 2017. I have created a box of amazing content that I want to send directly to your house immediately upon you signing up. It will give you a great overview of the concepts that I feel like are the most important skills that you need to understand in order to live the best version of your life possible. Then, starting in January, we are going to take this work that you may understand intellectually and we're going to do a deep dive with it. What you think you know, you're going to figure out that you only know freshman year of and I'm going to take you all the way to senior year. We are going to get our nails dirty. We are going to dig in the dirt. We are going to do the specific work that is required to become at a master class when it comes to this self coaching work.

This program is designed for clients. It's designed for me to be your coach and for you to be my client. A lot of the work that I have been doing over the past couple years has been aimed at coaches who want to become coaches and coach clients. This is different. This work is for you to be able to be your own client, for you to let me be your coach, for us to go through the process of studying you, for you to learn how to hold the space for you, for you to learn how to manage your mind, how to manage your emotional life, how to manage your behaviors and your activity in the world, and to create the results you ultimately want. I encourage you to go right now to TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join and there you will get all the information that you need in order for you to sign up for this exclusive membership.

Alternatively, if you do not want to go and read anymore and you want to sign up immediately, you can call us at the phone number that is listed there. It will be right at the top of the page. You go to TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. At the top of the page, there will be a phone number. You can call there directly and we will get you signed up. You can also text that number. I've asked one of my very close friends to join us in this program and to provide you with the highest level of service of any program I've ever offered. You are able to call her and ask any questions. You're able to call her and have her ask me any questions. She will call you back. She will help you through this entire program, this entire process, for the entire year long membership. I'm very excited for you to meet her. Her name's Erika and she has been my friend for many, many years and she's very excited to start this program with me and really help support you guys in any way that she can.

There it is! I know you guys have been waiting for this announcement. I'm very excited to offer it to you. It's Self Coaching Scholars. It starts in January. You can sign up immediately to get on the list to be part of the program and to make sure that you get that bonus. I will see you guys all on the first call. I hope you enjoy reading the materials I created for you. Enjoy the beautiful website I've created just for you. I cannot wait to get started. 2017 is going to be amazing. If you have any questions, call that phone number. I'll see you soon. Talk to you guys next 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'll be able to really feel and experience how all of these concepts can start showing up in your life. It's one thing to learn it intellectually. It's another thing to truly apply it to your life. I will see you there. Thanks again for listening.

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