Ep #195: Best of the Podcast Vol. 1

Welcome to The Life Coach School podcast, where it’s all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

So this is going to be fun. I'm so excited for you, and this is the perfect podcast to share because it's a best of, and what we've done is taken most of the main concepts that I teach, the best concepts that I teach, and we have put them into one podcast. So if you want to introduce someone to the podcast, that hasn't ever listened before, this would be a great place for them to get a great overview.

This is also my gift to you, for being my listener for so long, for staying with me, for giving me reviews, for loving my work and telling me that you do. This is my honor to do every week for you all and I am so proud of the body of work that I have created here and the interaction and feedback I've received from you all.

So I recently just listened to the edited version of this and was so excited with the breadth of information we are able to share with you in this one episode. So please enjoy, and make sure you listen all the way to the end to my outro. It's really important to me. Thank you.

There are circumstances in the world. Those are the things that we cannot control. Everything that happens outside of us is a circumstance, and that's just a given. There are so many things that we can't control. We can't control other people, we can't control our past, because it's already done, we can't control anything that happens out there in the world. And those are all of our circumstances, and really, those are the only things that we can't control in our lives. The rest of the components of the model include our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, and our results, and all of those things are within our control.

Now, we forget that often. We think that everything is either in our control or nothing is in our control, and it never is that way. It's always that circumstances are not within our control, and everything else is. Everything in our present experience is within our control. What we decide to think, what we think about, the conscious thoughts that go through our head are completely within our control. Now, we forget this. We don't remember that everything is within our control. We think that our thoughts are not within our control, and in fact, most of us don't even know what we're thinking. We're responding to our thoughts that we aren't even aware of.

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If you try and change your action without changing the thought or the feeling that's driving the action, you're going to have a struggle because you're going to have to work against that feeling and that thought that's creating that feeling. So that's why for so many of us, change is so frustrating, because we try to change how much we're eating or we try to change exercising, or we try to stop procrastinating without changing the thought and feeling that is driving that very thing that we're doing.

And when you can instead really get a hold of why you're not doing something or why you are doing something, then it will reveal to you the thought and feeling combination that's driving it. When you change the thought and feeling, the changing the action becomes so much easier.

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A lot of us want to put a goal out there because we believe that everything will be rainbows and daisies as soon as we achieve it, and it gives us some sense of control over our lives. But what I really want to teach you and what I really want to make sure you understand and all of my students, is that the only reason why any of us ever want anything is because how we believe we will feel in the attaining and getting of it.

So for me, the reason why I wanted to be thin was because I believed it would make me happy. Whatever it is you want in your life, it's because you believe that you will feel better in the having of it. And so first, identifying how is it that you really want to feel. Would you answer the question the same way? Would you say, "I just really want to be happy"? You know, I remember asking this question to my mom a long time ago and she just said, "I just want to be at peace." You know, other people will say, "I just want to be excited." What is it that you want to feel? What is it that seems so elusive? And then ask yourself what you think would give you that feeling, and are you focused on something externally in something that you think you need to achieve, or are you believing that you can create whatever emotion it is that you want now?

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I would say that most people don’t achieve their dreams because they don't want to fail. And you know, there's not a lot of consideration as to why. You know, I'll have a lot of people say to me, "I have a real fear of failure" and I'll say, "Well, what does that mean? What are you afraid of? What is failure? Why are you afraid of it?" And they'll think about it, and come back and say, "You know what, I've never really thought about it that way." So that's one of the things we do in coaching, we always try to get to the cause of all the issues. We don't try and solve problems, we just try and solve the cause of problems, and one of the main causes of problems is not understanding why.

So the first think I think that's important to do is to understand what is failure. How do you define it? So, of course, I went to Google, because Google knows everything, and I ask Google, "What is failure?" And I was totally surprised by the definition that came up. It said, "The omission of expected or required action." The omission of expected or required action. I love this definition of failure. If failure means we just didn't do our own expected action or something else didn't do our expected action, it just seems so benign. It seems so, "Okay, well that's what happened, there was an omission of action on either my part or your part." That's what we're calling failure? Well, that's not a big deal, right? It's just something didn't turn out the way we had expected. So what most people do is they just stop expecting, and therefore they never fail. They keep their expectations really low, they just keep recycling the same life, they never go outside their comfort zone, and then they never really have to deal with trying to miss their own expectation or not meet their own expectation, and I think that's such a shame. So many of the clients that I talk to, that is their main issue, is they just don't feel alive anymore because they're not putting themselves out there because they're afraid and they don't want to fail.

And I ask my clients all the time, "Why are you avoiding failing? What is the reason?" And it always boils down to avoiding wanting to feel something. So if failure is really just not meeting your own expectation, or not taking the required action to meet your own expectation, then really what's going to happen when that happens is you are going to think some thoughts that’s going to create some negative emotion. So the real reason why we're avoiding any kind of missing the mark, any kind of not meeting our expectation is because we don’t want to feel what we're going to feel when that happens.

Now, here's what's really interesting about that. When you don't meet your own expectation, the only feeling that you're going to end up having is based on what you decide to think. So stay with me. So you set out to do something, and you have an expectation of the result, and you miss that expectation. Now, at that point, you get to decide what you're going to make that mean. You get to decide what you're going to think about that, right? So if you think about that in a way that hurts your feelings, if you think about that in a way that's dejecting and disappointing, then you're going to experience that negative emotion.

And so ironically, the whole reason you're avoiding failing is because you're avoiding something that you have complete control over, which is your reaction to failing. Are you guys following this? Because it's really important. You're avoiding something you are in charge of and acting like it's happening to you. So most people, when I talk to them about failure, will say that failure happens to me and then I have to experience it. But that's not the truth. What really happens is we miss our expectation and then we decide to make it mean something that hurts. We decide to make it mean something that causes us a negative emotion.

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Couple things I want to share with you that you may not be able to discover in yourself. These are things that I find in my clients that they say, "Oh my gosh, I had no idea I was doing this." And one of the things that we avoid failure by doing, is by being confused. We say, "We're confused, we don't know how", and we say, "I don’t know". And really what we're doing is avoiding putting ourselves out there into the world in a way where we don't know if we'll meet our own expectation and we're afraid of how we'll treat ourselves on the other side of that.

So please be careful. If you notice yourself not taking action, not putting yourself out there in kind of failure's way, if you're telling yourself the reason you're not doing it is because you're undecided, you don't know, or you are confused, just know that is the sweetest way to avoid failure, and you need to be on to yourself. You need to pay attention, you need to have a look at that because when you avoid failure, you also at the very same time are avoiding success. Spinning yourself really away from what you want but telling yourself the reason why is because you're confused.

Being confused, saying I don't know, and being undecided is just a way of hiding. So tell yourself the truth about it. I never say to myself I don't know how to do something. It doesn't serve me to say it. What I say is I'm figuring out how to do something, I am going to figure out how to do something, or I'm learning the steps to understand this. Saying it in that way doesn't stop me. It keeps me going. I don't say I don't know, I say I'm figuring it out. I don't say I'm undecided, I say I'm going to decide and I know there's no right decision, and when I make a decision I'm going to go out there and I'm willing for it to be the "wrong decision", I'm willing to fail.

So just notice that little smokescreen of confusion and I don't know that prevents you from taking action that will lead to failure because the reason you don't want to fail is because you don't want to feel the feelings that you would cause yourself to feel when you're thinking that way.

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Everything you do in your life is because you want to feel a certain way. Every single thing you do is because you want to feel a certain way. That's just really good to know, and if your feelings are caused by your thoughts, and everything you do in your life is in order to feel better, wouldn't it be important to know what you're thinking? It absolutely would, and the problem is nobody teaches us this. They don't pull us aside and say, "Okay, here's the deal. Everything you want in your life is because of a feeling. A feeling that you think you will have in getting it, or the feeling you think you will avoid in not getting it."

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Fear is not a valid reason for not taking action. It just means you have a mismanaged mind. What I mean by that is those thoughts that you're having that you're choosing to think are creating fear that is stopping you from taking action, and in that case, I don't want you to honor that fear. I don't want you to cuddle that fear. I don't want you to spend a lot of time in that fear. I want you to understand it enough so you can find its cause, find your thought patterns that are causing it, and then change it. And if you're not able to change it immediately because it's a deeply patterned thought, I want you to take action anyway. And the reason why - there are two reasons why you can take action while you're still feeling fear and knowing that it's an illogical, irrational fear.

The first reason is when you take action and you put yourself out there, all of the things you're afraid of, all those rational fears get proven wrong, right? You're able to go out there and actually take action and see that you're not going to die by the hand of a tiger, or the mouth of a tiger. You're going to be fine. And it's actually like when you look into the science of fear and the psychology of fear and how it's studied, people who have really severe phobias, which is full on irrational fear, one of the ways that they treat that is through something they call exposure therapy. So if someone has an irrational fear of say, spiders, or snakes, they will actually expose them to the spiders and expose them to the snakes in a safe environment so they can now make a new association that snakes aren't scary. And that's actually the same thing that we can do to ourselves by doing the very thing that we're "irrationally afraid of", we can expose ourselves to it and learn that it's not scary. Because when you really think about the things that you're afraid of, they are very irrational. I mean, we're terrified of public speaking, we're terrified of putting ourselves out there and having someone see us in a certain way. But when you really think that through, like, what's the worst thing that can happen? You get up there on stage and I mean, really, even if everybody is laughing at you, if you think about it, you're not in any harm's way. Like, you're not going to die from that, and yet some people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of dying. So there's that illogical crisscross that's happened.

So think about all the things that you're afraid of, whether it comes to your business or your life or meeting new people or putting yourself out there or being seen, what you're really afraid of has nothing to do with life or death typically. It has nothing to do with whether you're going to survive or not. The main things that we're afraid of are our own creation, our own feelings. So when we think about public speaking and we think about making a mistake and everybody laughing at us, what we're really terrified of in that situation is the feeling of humiliation, which is again, a feeling we would create by what we would make it mean if everyone was laughing at us. And we don't really think this through, we just stop at fear.

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If you want to know why you're feeling anything you're feeling, all you have to do is ask yourself, "What is the thought that I'm currently having that is causing this feeling?" So if you're feeling excited, it's because you're having a thought that's exciting you. If you're feeling sad, it's because you're having a thought that's creating sad for you. So ask yourself right now, "What am I feeling?" Name that feeling that you're feeling right now. And then ask yourself, "What are the thoughts that I'm having or the thought that I'm having right now that's creating that feeling?"

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One of the things that's really important to remember is that when you identify as a victim, you are losing all of your power, and it really affects the way that you live in your life. The main way that I see the victim mentality show up in my clients is with blame. Now, they don't see it as blame, they see it as just an explanation as to why they're miserable is someone else's fault. If their husband ran the business better, if their husband hadn't abused them years ago, if they didn't have such a nightmare of a boss, right? Looking at other people and giving them all the power for how we feel is the victim mentality. It's completely abdicating responsibility for how we feel because of some powerful perpetrator in our life.

So think about that for just a minute. Is there someone in your life that you think is the cause of your pain? Is there someone in your life that you feel is really causing you a lot of trouble? Now, here's a hint. If when I asked that question, if you felt defensive, if you felt like, "Well, she doesn't know my life. My situation is very different", and if you felt like you kind of needed to puff up and maybe explain to me, then you may be in the victim mentality. The victim mentality is ripe with defensiveness and I love the way Byron Katie says that defense is the first act of war. If you feel like you need to defend against other people, you're probably in the victim mentality. You need to defend yourself.

So blame is really the main characteristic. The other characteristic that you'll see in yourself possibly, or in the clients that you may be coaching is that when we have the victim mentality we want to hide. We don't want to put ourselves out there. It makes sense, right? If we feel like we're being victimized, we don't want to put ourselves out there and have someone attack us. And I just want to say that the victim mentality is not a sign of weakness. It's a belief pattern that we've established in our brain that affects our life, but it does not mean we aren't intelligent, capable, amazing people, and it certainly doesn't mean that we're not strong. It just means that we have this mentality looping in our brain.

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If somebody can just say whatever they want to you and you don't get upset or you don't say anything back, aren't you just being a doormat? And I actually think the opposite is true. I think that when somebody says something and you allow it to devastate you, you have given all your power to that other person, you have identified as the victim, and that is much more of a doormat than when you allow people to be who they are and say what they'll say, especially if it's to you, and it doesn’t mean that you don't say something back. It just means that you don't say something back out of anger or out of negative emotion that you've created based on what they've said. If somebody says something to you that is derogatory, let's say, and you just blow them off, you're just like, "I hear what you're saying, it's an interesting opinion you have right there" or "You know you just say that out loud", it changes the whole experience, versus if I cower down and accept what they've said and say, "Don't say that to me, that's so rude", and then all of a sudden, I'm like curled up in a ball and lashing out like an emotional child instead of just knowing that that person's opinion, what that person says has everything to do with that person and nothing to do with me. And in fact, when you're able to handle situations like that, you stay in your integrity, you stay in your emotion happiness, and they appear to themselves and to everyone else as in the negative emotion that they are.

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When you ask a great question, you come up with thoughts to think. And when you are inquisitive about yourself, you can find ways to focus your brain and tell it what to think. Remember, it's just a piece of machinery. It is just there to serve you, basically. It doesn't really care what it thinks. It just wants to be efficient at what it thinks. So if you think about something that you really want to create more of in your life, think of a great question and then put your brain to work thinking about it.

I always think the first question anyone should start with that's new to life coaching, that's new to coaching themselves is, "What am I thinking?"

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Now, there's a process we follow that's called a thought download, and when you ask yourself that question, you write it right at the top of a page, what am I thinking, what you will come up with is a slew of thoughts, and the way that we recommend you deal with thought download in response to that question is just write without stopping. Go, go, go, go, go. Don't think about what you're writing, don't worry about it, don't try and fix it, just get it out of your brain so you can have a look at it. What am I thinking? That is your thought download.

Now, that in and of itself will reveal so much of you to yourself. And that is a very powerful thing, to have a look at your own mind. And many of my clients are like, "No wonder I'm overeating", "No wonder I'm so stressed out all the time. Look at what's going on in my brain."

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One of the things that questions really do to help serve us in our coaching practice is they help us treat the cause and not the symptom of the problem. One of the most powerful questions you can use as a coach is to ask why. It seems like such an innocent little question, but it really can increase the consciousness of the entire planet one client at a time. When we ask why, our clients have to go into their mind and find the meaning and the intention that drives them, and many of your clients will have never done this before, and many of you may have never done this before. It's one more step on the journey to consciousness and emotional adulthood. Don't ever underestimate how many of us are on automatic pilot playing out the programming of our childhood without question. We do what we think we should do based on what we were told as children, and we've never evaluated whether it still applies or even makes sense.

Your clients will come to you miserable and have no idea why they're miserable, and maybe you don't know why you're miserable, so ask yourself why. It's such an obvious question. Why are you miserable? Do you know the thoughts you're thinking that are causing you to feel miserable? Why are you upset? Do you really know the reason, what you're thinking that's causing you to feel upset? Why are you overweight? Why are you broke? Why are you in any situation that you are? And make sure that you're asking the question in a way that serves up awareness to you and helps you understand your thinking behind it.

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Our capacity for happiness has nothing to do with anything going on externally. Joy and happiness come from what's going on in our minds, and if that's true, all thoughts are available to me in this moment, then there is no future moment where I will have the ability to have more capacity for joy than I have right now, because my capacity for joy is at full capacity from the minute I'm born, right? The only thing that holds me back from experiencing joy is my brain, and from thinking thoughts that block my joy. So stay with me on this. So if I think that all of my capacity for joy is here now, and no matter what changes in my external world, the only thing that will ultimately change joy and how I feel is how I think. So if I think about more success for example, and I think about maybe my business being even more successful than it is now, and I think that will make me happier, I have to remind myself, "Wait, no, that won't make me happier, because if I go back to my own teachings, to my own learnings, to my own beliefs, I believe that what makes me happy is my thinking, and whatever thought I'm going to have when I'm more successful is a thought that I could actually have right now."

So then my mind exploded, and then I thought, "Okay, so this moment right now is as good as it will ever get in terms of my ability to think thoughts. The only thing that will change is my external world. The only thing that might change is that some circumstance in my life. And so the only thing that really, ultimately is going to bring me happiness is the thought I have in that future moment.

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If you use your mind properly, you can create anything you want in your life, but what I've learned on a whole new level and really what I'm hoping that I'm teaching you and showing you is that you don't need all this stuff, you can get it all, but you don't need it to be happy. And in fact, if you're looking at something in your life externally and you don't think it's great and you don't think you're successful enough or you don't think your relationship is good enough or you don't think your kids are behaving right or you don't think your house is nice enough or you don't think your bank account is big enough, whatever it is, just know that those things do not have the ability to rob you of your happiness, and you don't have to improve those things to feel better.

It doesn't mean you don't improve those things if you want to. Rock on with improving anything you want in your life. But just don't tell yourself that you will be somehow happier in the getting of those things, that that happiness is right here, available to you right now, and you can find peace and joy in this moment regardless of your bank account, regardless of your weight. And when we really understand that and I just noticed myself this morning saying, "I can't wait", you guys do that? "I can't wait until this happens, that's going to be so awesome", "I can't wait to teach this class", or "I can't wait to show these people my work" or whatever it is, and I had to catch myself a little bit and be like, "Yes, that will be awesome but it's not any more awesome than this moment right now, and can I find the awesomeness in this moment?"

And so I sat there and I felt myself resisting it. I felt myself thinking, "No, this moment's not as good as that moment is going to be", and I asked myself, "Why am I believing that? Why am I choosing to believe in that because I know conceptually that I can be in that space of joy right now if I allow myself to experience it?" And I will tell you what happened. In that moment, I tasted it. I tasted the ability to be fully joyous now and not because of anything outside of me.

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I think the more alive we're willing to be, the more negative emotion we're going to experience. Now, that's not to say that we don't create that negative emotion because we do. We create it with our thought patterns and the way that we think, but that doesn't mean that something has gone terribly wrong. And a lot of times, when we feel a negative emotion, things are going terribly right, and those can be our indicators that it's time to connect and become more conscious and dive into ourselves.

I think that most of what we are experiencing with our clients through life coaching and through weight coaching right now is what I would say an epidemic of people resisting and avoiding emotion. I think they are spending so much time trying to be happy without actually being happy and making the effort to do that by resisting anything that feels like a negative vibration in their body. And the way that they do that is by pretending it's not there, pushing it away, and avoiding it.

So I think that you know, really understanding that the way to enjoy life is not by putting the brakes on negative emotion and in fact, it's the opposite. It's by really opening ourselves up to diving into the negative emotion that gives us the full experience of what it means to be alive, and I think that is ultimate happiness.

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There is a huge difference between allowing yourself to feel a negative emotion and actually reacting to it. And in fact, most of the time when you see someone who's in a bad mood, someone's who's upset about something and kind of snarling at you about it, it's not because they're truly experiencing negative emotion, it's because they're resisting negative emotion.

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A manual is basically an instruction book that we've written for somebody else, and we've tied all of our emotional life to whether or not they follow it. And even though it may seem very justified to have expectations of other people, it is also quite damaging and frustrating for ourselves to do so because we have these belief systems that if other people would just behave themselves the way that we would like them to behave, then we could be happy. And the problem is we don’t even realize that we're doing this. We think that we just have reasonable expectations of people in our life and that they should behave in a way that is reasonable. But what we think is reasonable and what other people think is reasonable is often times very different.

So one of the first things that I think is really important to remember is that adult people have the ability and freedom to behave however they would like. That includes you. There is nothing that you really have to ever do, and there is nothing that anyone else has to do for you. And one of the I think challenges with some of the modern therapy is that therapists would actually sit down - this has happened with some of my clients and say, "Hey, what are your needs? Let's make a list of what all your needs are, and then you need to tell those needs what your needs are to this other person and then that person can try and meet your needs."

And I think that's a manual that's set up for disaster because I think that we are responsible for meeting our own needs and when we're in a relationship with someone who expects us to fulfill their needs, then we've all of a sudden gotten into this situation where not only do we have to take care of ourselves, but we have to take care of somebody else. And if we're unfortunate enough to be in a relationship where I'm feeling like I'm responsible for someone else's needs and they're feeling responsible for my needs, then you're in a real tight manipulating situation because I'm going to be constantly trying to control that other person so I can be happy and they're going to be constantly trying to control me and no one's ever really going to win because the truth is, first of all, you can't control another person, and second of all, there's nothing they could possibly do to make you as happy as you want to be.

So my suggestion is first of all, we acknowledge and realize that we do have these manuals for other people and we back that up and start taking responsibility for our own rules and our own operating manuals for ourselves. I mean, the truth is most of us can't even control or manage ourselves and yet we want to control and manage other people, which is somewhat ridiculous because you know, if we can't even control our own behaviors, how we do think we're going to be able to control someone else? I mean, any of you who have tried to control someone else and all of you have, you find yourself wanting, you find yourself frustrated.

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Think about those requests that you have of a person in your life. You know, try and write down like three things it would be awesome if this person would do, and then really take the time to think about what would you feel, what do you imagine you would feel if they just voluntarily did all these things with so much pleasure. Now, what would you be thinking? Remember, all of your feelings come from your thinking. So what would you be thinking if this person behaved in this way that you want them to behave? Now, think about that. Do you have that thought available to you now? Can you think that about this person without them having to do all those things? Because if the answer is yes, you've just like scored because you don't have to go around changing other people in order to feel better.

What you can do is feel better on your own accord, and you can decide that I'm not going to make my life about what I believe I'm entitled to from other people and their behavior, and in fact, I'm going to start believing that I'm not entitled to have anyone behave any other way than the way they behave. The only thing I'm entitled to is taking care of my own emotional life and my own brain to make sure I'm thinking thoughts that serve me. And if I really want something done and it's really important to me to make sure it's done, asking myself why I'm not willing to do it and do I really want someone else to do something that they don't want to do.

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A lot of people think that what boundaries are, are things that we do to control other people, and that is not the case. Boundaries are a way that we take care of and protect ourselves, and boundaries are not something that we create for other people. We create them for ourselves. So let's start, and let me just give you kind of a visualization that will really help with this. If you think about your house and living in your house and the boundary line you have around your home, then it's really clear what a boundary is, right? So all of us have either a really clear boundary around ourselves or we don't. And when we don't have clear boundaries, then people don’t know if they're violating them or not, because if you don't have a clear boundary set up then people don't know where it is. So the first thing that all of us need to do is be really clear with ourselves as to what our boundaries are.

An example I can use is most of us have a boundary that we will not be physically struck by anyone else, right? We don't go around telling people, "Hey, by the way, please don't hit me and if you do hit me, I'm going to leave, or I'm going to call the police", right? We don't have to say that. We just - it's just kind of one of those unspoken really clear boundaries that most of us have. And you know, that's true for a lot of us when it comes to you know, verbal boundaries too. Many of us will not tolerate being yelled at by other people, and that's a pretty clear boundary for many of us. Now, for some of us, it may not be as clear of a boundary.

And what it means to have a boundary is you're really clear as to what you will stand for basically in your life and what you will expose yourself to. Once you have these really clear boundaries, then you can speak them to other people, and you can talk to them about them when necessary. And the only time you need to use a boundary or talk about a boundary is when there's been a clear boundary violation.

Now, if you're picturing the image of the house and you have this house and you have this boundary lying around your house, if somebody comes into your backyard, or if someone comes into your house, they have crossed into your boundary. That is a boundary violation. And at that point, you can either freak out, shoot them, yell at them, scream at them, or let them know, "Hey, I'm going to call the police. This is how I'm going to handle this, you need to leave." We inform them that there has been a boundary violation and then we let them know what we are going to do because they have crossed our boundary.

It is the same in life. We're not talking about the physical boundary of our house, but we're talking about the boundary of our emotional life, of our physical life. So what a boundary is it's a really clear request of somebody else with a really clear consequence. Now, the word consequence there can be misunderstood, and so I want to make sure that you really are clear. The consequence is something that you will do, it is the behavior that you will take.

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A lot of my clients will come to me and say, "Okay, I'm ready to set some boundaries, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm basically going to remove this person from my life. I'm done. I don't want to deal with this anymore." Now, that is not a boundary. That is an escape route, and I understand the desire to delete people from your life, to not talk to them because they trigger you in a way that's difficult, right? So if you can just eliminate that person from your life then you won't have to deal with what they bring up in you.

But I want to encourage you to explore the idea that the people in your life that trigger you the most can be your greatest teachers, and I know that sounds so clichéd and my clients get so annoyed with me when I say that, well that's great but I don't want this person as my teacher, I don't want this person in my life, but the reason why you don't want that person in your life is either because you haven't learned how to set proper boundaries or you don't have them at all, so this person is able to violate your boundaries in such a way that you haven't been able to follow through on any kind of consequences and you haven't set them properly.

So those are the people in your life that will give you an opportunity to learn how to be in a relationship with people without having them violate your boundaries. You don't have to eliminate the person completely in order for that to happen, and you can you know, notice that there is that temptation to just remove the person, or you can really sit down and consider, "What can I learn from this relationship?" Especially if it's a family member, somebody that really has been involved in your life for a long time. How can I use this as an opportunity to take care of myself and actually create some real authenticity in my relationship with this person through this conversation?

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When you are able to manage your mind into a space of happiness, which means that pretty consistently if you want to feel happy, if that's a choice you want to make, you can find your way there. That takes a lot of practice with managing your mind and being able to create thought patterns that are believable to you, that create happiness, and that's what most of my work is about doing and that's a lot of the work that I do on myself. But once you've been able to do that pretty consistently, and then you start setting goals of higher achievement in your life and you start really putting yourself out there in terms of what you want to achieve, again, not because you believe it will make you happy but because it's something that you feel is coming from within you, then it will start to bring up the fear and the doubt and the frustration, which will seem like it's in direct contradiction to your happiness, but part of the process of achieving that success is to find a way to process those emotions and therefore the thought patterns that will take you to the next level of success. And here's how that works. When you set a goal that you don't believe you can achieve, which is always what I like to do, all the thought patterns that don't serve you come to the surface. That is the work. That's the work that is more important than the actual steps to achieve your goal. You do the work on that negative emotion that comes up, on those thought patterns that come up, and once you've done that work, then you achieve that equilibrium of happiness again, and from there, you create the success.

So even though it seems like a contradiction, it's not. It is one and the same. Now, if you are trying to achieve something to get happiness on the other end of it, that is why you're going to quit. Because if your goal is happiness, and on your way to the goal you're feeling nothing but frustration and doubt and fear, you're going to think you're heading the wrong way. The truth is, you're heading the exact right way because by evaluating and processing those thought patterns and those emotions, you're taking yourself to the next level of yourself, which makes it easier to achieve that next goal, that next level of success.

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Anxiety in and of itself is harmless. It's our reaction and our resistance to it that causes problems, and that is not just semantics. I want you guys to really think about think because it's a game changer. Anxiety does not need to be eliminated because anxiety in and of itself is not the issue. It's our resistance and reaction to anxiety that causes us problems.

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Criticism in and of itself is not painful. It's when somebody criticizes us and we take it on and we believe it and we make it mean something about ourselves. Now, here's this example and I know I've used it in this podcast before, but if someone was to say to you, "I hate your blue hair", you don't really get devastated by it because you know you don't have blue hair. Most of us don't have blue hair. If you have blue hair, then change the color to blonde or something. But you know, someone makes a criticism towards you and it's something that you know is not true for yourself, then it just kind of washes over you.

It's when someone criticizes you and there's part of you that believes it that it gets to you. And if someone criticizes you and you make it mean - you make their opinion mean something about you, that's when you get into trouble. That's when you start really hiding and getting away from that criticism because you don't want to expose yourself to that, and the reason you don't want to expose yourself to it is because of what you are making it mean. That's really good to know. You're the one causing all your pain, not the people that are criticizing you, but you believing it, taking it on and making it mean something.

So if you can allow people to criticize you and allow them to have opinions of you and allow them to judge you and not make it mean something about you and not make it mean stop and don't do anymore, and not make it mean that you're unworthy or incapable or not good enough, then it can actually have the opposite effect. People are paying attention, people are taking the time to write something about me. This is really an indicator that I'm standing for something. You know, I've said something that's a little bit controversial, that means that I'm showing up, I'm not just being vanilla bland. I am being myself, and not everyone's going to like me, and that's okay.

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The definition that I use for massive action is taking action until you get the result you want. So when someone says to me, "I'm taking massive action on this" and it's usually, you know, my life coaching students or my weight coaching students that are building their business, and they'll come to me and they'll say, "I've taken massive action", and I say, "Well, you haven't taken massive action because you aren't still taking action until you get the result you want." And I understand that that can be very frustrating, to take action, not get the result you want, take action, not get the result you want, take action, not get the result you want. There's always a reason, always an excuse to stop taking action. In fact, it's so much easier to quit than it is to keep going. And massive action is a commitment to keeping taking action until you get the result you want.

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There is massive action and then there is passive action. First of all, passive action does not get you the results you want. It doesn't get you closer to the results you want. Passive action has to do with consumption and massive action has to do with creating. And so when you're taking action, you need to ask yourself, "Am I creating or am I consuming?" Here's what I mean. I can read books on a topic, I can take classes on a topic, I can talk to someone about a topic, I mean literally, I can read for days on a topic and search the internet on a topic, and then go to four more classes on the topic. That feels like action to me. I feel like I'm moving, I feel like I'm taking steps. But all I'm doing is consuming in those situations, even though it's active, it's consuming. I'm not in the process of creating. So passive action is kind of another word I use like intellectual action. You're thinking about doing something, you're writing down ideas about doing something, you're talking to other people about doing something, you're not actually doing something.

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The question that I like to ask a lot of my clients, and this might make you laugh, this will give you kind of an indication of how I am when I coach. One of the questions I like to ask is, "So what?" I know it doesn't seem to be very compassionate or empathetic, but it really is. Someone will come and they'll have this whole story, "Oh my gosh, can you believe that this happened to me and this happened to me and this happened to me", and I'll say, "So what?" And it just stops us right in our tracks. It's like, "What do you mean, so what? So what that this happened? Don't you care that this happened?" Well, I just want to know like, why does it matter to you? What are you making it mean? So what?

And it really is powerful, and I want you to think about this. I want you to think about your problem that you brought up to your mind's eye, and think about the answer to the question, so what? How you answer that question is really your problem because how you answer that question is all of your thinking about the problem. And the problem needs to be separated out. So when you ask yourself, so what, that will separate the thoughts out. If you want to know exactly what you're making the problem about, then you write down the facts only of the problem.

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When you have a full body you experience less vibration in your body. It's like filling up a glass with water and flicking it. You have less vibration than when the glass is empty. So yes, it can dull your emotion. But remember, it's not just dulling your negative emotion, it's also dulling any positive emotion that you may have. Knowing that and owning that you sometimes overeat in order to dull your emotion is really important. Tell yourself the truth about it. Don't tell yourself you lost control, don't tell yourself you can't help it. Tell yourself, "Yes, I chose to eat that because I didn't want to feel." And remind yourself that that was a choice, because that can be empowering, knowing that you're making that choice instead of feeling completely out of control.

And then once you've owned that choice and you own it every single time over and over and over again, then you can decide if you want to keep doing it. And only then you do it from a compassion, loving space.

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I think that we feel like we're entitled to have an easy life, and I'm not sure where we picked up on that idea. I think that we're entitled to have the strength to overcome our obstacles, to achieve greatness within ourselves, and you know, people say that, "That's such BS", and "Nobody needs to be working that hard", and "You're just ambitious", but I don't think that's true. I think that there is this sense of pride that you get from overcoming your own crap and working through it and arriving on the other side of it, only to start it again. But you do get better at it. And so every new goal that I write - and think about this for yourself. If you don't write goals for yourself, why is that? Why don't you write goals? Is it because it brings up all of your self-doubt and your frustration and your fear? And so that's why you don't want to set goals because you can't deal with those emotions?

But if you do, and those emotions come up for you, I'd like you to think about that as a natural progression, that that's - "Oh, that's what's supposed to happen. When I set a goal for myself, it's supposed to feel like a challenge, it's supposed to feel like self-doubt". And from there, I can do the work to overcome that, to become the person that I really want to become.

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The first type of relationship I see is where the client I'm working with is pretending, they're burying their head in the sand, they're being indifferent, and they're neglecting. So what that means is they're just not dealing with the relationship. They're going through the motions, they're pretending they're happy, they're not really acknowledging a lot of any of the issues that are going on, just trying to like, sneak around the person and nod and wave.

So that's kind of the first way that I've seen people try and deal, and what happens is it completely blocks any kind of connection, of course, it blocks any kind of intimacy, it blocks any real interaction that could enhance the lives of both of the people involved, it creates a lot of seething under the surface issues. So think about your relationship, are you indifferent? Have you gotten to the point where you just don't even bother anymore?

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Ongoing connection to someone requires honesty, it requires vulnerability and it requires a lot of self-coaching; a lot of self-work. And one of the things I love - Marianne Williamson says this - she just says, “It only takes one sane person in a relationship to make it better.” If one person works on themselves and they work on their mind and they work on taking responsibility for their side of the street, the relationship will improve, even if the other person doesn’t change.

Now, a lot of people get pissed off when I suggest this because they’re like, “Why should I have to change and they don’t have to change?” And then it’s that conflict. And what happens when you recognize that you’re responsible for how you feel and that you can take care of yourself and that they don’t have to fulfill your needs, you have the ability to fulfill every need you have, then the relationship becomes much more enjoyable because there’s much less of a demand on the other person to take care of you emotionally.

And that’s a much better place to be for both people in the relationship. It opens up a lot of communication and it opens up a lot of kindness and compassion, which most human beings respond to much better than they do to blaming, shaming and controlling.

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Many people stop wanting anything because it hurts when you want from a place of scarcity. If I want $100,000 and I’m in a very scarce place believing I’ll never have that amount of money, then wanting that money will be painful. If I want $100,000 and I know that that will be easy for me to earn, wanting that money is exciting and feels good, because I’m wanting it from a place of abundance.

And one of the best ways to practice wanting from abundance is to want the things you already have; to want all of the wonderful good things in your life and to feel that energy of wanting and having; wanting and having. It’s a little different than being grateful for what you have. It’s a different vibration when you really want something you already have. When I talk about wanting from abundance, that’s what I mean. And if you practice it enough - and I mean really practice it - you can end up wanting something that you don’t already have from a place of abundance; from a place of knowing that you will get it and that you have the ability to get it.

And from that place, you will enjoy the process of earning the money much more, because you believe you will have it, and the chances of you actually getting it are much higher because you’re being fueled from a place of positive emotion.

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Emotional childhood does look like us having temper tantrums and rage fits and yelling and screaming at each other, right. It puts us in a place where we don’t feel like we have control over ourselves as adults, and we, therefore, start acting like serious toddlers.

I’ve done this so many times in my own life. I catch myself acting like a whining, screaming little girl because I’m not taking responsibility and I’m yelling at someone; blaming them for how I feel instead of truly taking responsibility for every emotion that I have.

When I am in emotional adulthood and I take responsibility for how I feel and I make choices for how I want to feel, I end up so much more empowered. And I get to be more of the person I want to be instead of being in this default emotional childhood space.

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There are two things to remember when it comes to a new thought you want to believe: you have to believe it and it has to feel better. Now, it doesn’t have to feel – like a lot of times, you’ll come up with a thought that sounds good but you don’t believe it and it doesn’t feel better. That will not be useful to you. So I say all the time, you can’t go from, “I hate my body,” to, “I love my body,” if you don’t believe that. you have to go from, “I hate my body,” to, “I have a body.”

Now, “I have a body” feels better than, “I hate my body,” and it’s believable. Now, it’s not to rainbows and daisies yet, but that’s okay; we’ve made that shift. We’ve created a new thought, we’ve believed it; we’ve shifted our paradigm a little bit.

When we talk about believing new thoughts, there’s a process to believing. And the better your new thought is, the easier time you will have believing it. The idea is that when you completely believe it then you will create a result to reflect the belief. Language can help as you’re creating the new thinking form the old.

Remember, without language, we don’t have thoughts. We think in language, so being careful about the words that you choose and the language that you choose will be really helpful in coming up with new thinking. For example, if you have a thought that says, “I can’t stop drinking; I drink all the time.” Then you’re going to go to, “There are times when I don’t drink during the day.” Notice the first thought is, “I can’t stop drinking; I drink all the time.” Okay, notice how that feels. Then you change it to, “There are times when I don’t drink during the day. There are times when I don’t even want alcohol. I want to not want alcohol. Someday I will stop drinking. Someday I won’t even want to drink. It’s possible I will decide to stop drinking someday. It’s possible there will be a day when I stop drinking. I will stop drinking. I don’t drink anymore. I don’t ever drink.”

Notice how I just went through the ladder of thoughts. We started with, “I can’t stop drinking; I drink all the time.” We didn’t jump to, “I don’t ever drink.” It’s not believable. But, we could go to, “There are times when I don’t drink during the day;” Now that I can believe.

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How do you take a current thought that feels so true it’s hard to let go? You can add modifiers to that thought. So like for example, “My brother annoys me.” This is one of my sons, right. “My brother annoys me -- and that’s okay.” You can add, “And that’s okay,” to the end of any thought, and that will soften it for many people. “My brother annoys me -- and that’s okay.”

Now, “My brother annoys me,” is a thought that feels annoying, that feels awful. But going to, “My brother doesn’t annoy me,” is a big leap for my son, right. He doesn’t believe that at all. But going to, “My brother annoys me; and that’s okay,” is a good first step.

“My husband keeps forgetting my birthday -- and that’s okay. I have a hard time being vulnerable -- and that’s okay.” So for some of you that are having a hard time letting go of certain beliefs, just add onto the end, “And that’s okay,” And see how that shifts it just a little bit.

“I hate my body -- and that’s okay. I can’t stand my marriage -- and that’s okay.” Right, because it releases the resistance to it. A lot of times, we prevent our own awareness by pushing away thoughts that we don’t want to be having. As soon as we embrace those thoughts by adding, “And that’s okay” to the end of it, then we release that resistance and have a little more authority over the thinking and controlling the thinking.

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The contrast of thoughts need to be by choice. The balance of thoughts can be within your control when you decide what you want to believe and why. Do not be confused. Every thought you have is a choice. Many of the thoughts you choose to think will serve you even though they cause you pain; but many of them won’t.

Look at each one consciously and make sure you decide again that it’s a belief that you want to keep. And if it isn’t, I want you to think about changing it. Own it so you can have some authority over it so you can change it, maybe into something that serves you more.

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When we take the edge off our emotions, we are dulling our internal warning system. We are ignoring ourselves. So for example, when we are at a party and we’re super bored and we drink so we don’t feel bored, we are ignoring ourselves.

When we go to a party and we’re insecure and socially awkward and we drink so we don’t feel that way, we are ignoring ourselves. We’re not evolving past that emotional work. In fact, we’re devolving. We are locking ourselves into emotional immaturity by not doing the work of first processing our emotions and then really listening to, “What are those emotions telling us? Where do we need to develop?” And in some instances, we really need to develop our social skills, we really need to develop our self-confidence in those areas.

In other situations when we’re completely bored, we either need to work on being less bored on purpose and being more entertaining to ourselves. Or, we need to stop hanging out in situations where we’re consistently bored; where we’re consistently showing up and having to drink to make our lives seem better than they really are.

I mean, if you think about this, if drinking helps you deal with a life you don’t like, then you are going to get really good at dealing with a life you don’t like, instead of changing that life into something that you do like.

So I was working with a client the other day and she was talking about how she really needs to come home from work and unwind because her day is so stressful that she needs a way to compensate for that. And what I told her is, “Well as long as you come home and drink, then you never learn how to manage your stress better.”

And, in fact, you never learn how to change your level of stress by becoming that emotional adult, becoming emotionally responsible for all of your feelings and then guiding yourself to be more productive and less stressed, to having thoughts that serve you in a deeper way than thoughts that cause worry, anxiety, frustration and stress. So what we do is we just repeat that same life because we’re compensating for it with alcohol.

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If you feel like your anxiety, frustration, sadness, grief or your pain is caused by the external world and you’re unable to control the external world, you will be tempted to buffer; which means you’ll be tempted to escape how you’re feeling. You will be tempted to avoid your emotion because you will feel as if your emotion is being caused by the world outside of you, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and the only way to escape into a false pleasure.

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The best way to find peace in relationships is to give up right and wrong. No one has to be right, and no one has to be wrong. No one wins in a difficult conversation. Most of the time you end up with two losing parties, even if someone feels like they’re right; they usually walk away with a sense of disconnection and the person who was “wrong” feels like the loser in the relationship – when really you’ve both lost.

Next time you’re having any kind of difficult conversation, any kind of argument, anything where you’re raising your voice, and disagreement about the kids, any disagreement about anything, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to give up the need to be right. You’re going to hear the other person’s story about why they’re right. You’re going to find out what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking – you’re going to really put yourself in their shoes.

You’re going to both agree on the facts of the situation only. Then you’re going to notice that the reason why you’re disagreeing is because you each have a different sentence in your mind about what those facts mean. And once you have that base of understanding, then you’re going to brainstorm solutions. You are no longer allowed to talk about the problem at that point. This will be very, very powerful.

Now, here’s the other piece I want to offer you: you can have this conversation and share this process with someone that you really know well, or you don’t even ever have to bring this up to anyone; you just do all the work.

So you ask them, “Please tell me your side of the story.” Now, you’ve gone into the situation being willing to give up being right. So they’re going to tell you their story and why they’re right and why it matters to them and why everything needs to change or why you need to do it differently, or whatever it is. Then you’re going to repeat back to them what the facts are. “Hey, can we at least agree on this?” You don’t have to tell them, “Hey, here are the facts of the situation.” You’d say, “Hey, we agree that you got home at 5:30. We can agree that dinner was ready at five. Those are things that we can agree on.”

Then at that point, you know what their sentence is in your mind and you know what the sentence is in their mind. So you have a sense of that; you don’t even have to talk about that out loud. Then at that point, you can brainstorm solutions; they don’t even have to be in on this whole deal.

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One of the most common questions I get is, “How can I change my thinking rapidly? I want to feel better now.” My answer is always this: you have to start with awareness. You have to understand that your thinking causes your feelings; not just intellectually but really understand it. This means that you don’t try to feel better about a negative situation but rather you recognize that the only thing making it negative is your thinking.

This is the biggest mistake most beginners make with a model. They understand intellectually that their thoughts are creating their feelings, but they don’t really understand that the circumstances in their life are completely neutral – that none of those circumstances have to change at all in any way in order for you to change your thinking.

Most people want to change the circumstance in their mind in order to feel better. The circumstance stays the exact same, the only reason it’s negative is because of you.

That is a hard pill for most of us to swallow. We have abdicated our responsibility and felt that we are at the effect. I’ll hear clients say to me all the time, “Well it feels like that’s true. It feels like that hurt my feelings.” The reason it feels that way is because of your feelings, not because of the circumstance.

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A lot of you are perfectionists, and it sounds like that’s a good thing. But I want to tell you that perfectionism is for scared people. If you have to be perfect, you never have to take action. If it has to be perfect, you’ll never put it out into the world. If you have to be perfect, it’s because you don’t want anyone to be able to criticize you.

You don’t want anyone to be able to point out a flaw. You don’t want anyone to be able to email you about a typo or something like that because it’s so intolerable for you to handle.

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There’s a reason why God gave you the ingredients that he gave you, the universe gave you, you were created the way you were created; however, you want to say it. How you use those is completely unique to you. You are the only one that has the specific combo and how you decide to use it in the world will create something that no one else could possibly have created in the same way; and I do think that’s important.

I do think that that matters in the world. I think that the opposite of self-growth is safe, avoidance, familiar, comfort and effortless; not wanting to make an effort. Although there is the theory – and I tend to believe it because I see it happen to so many of my clients who have this underlying desire to be something bigger in their lives, and they ignore it, they don’t pay attention to it. And instead, they indulge in comforting activities and they indulge in false pleasures.

And what they end up with is a burning desire in them that is unfulfilled. So what they feel is being unfulfilled, and I think that comes from this place of knowing that you have this potential, knowing that you have this ability, knowing that you have this desire and ignoring it.

So it’s almost like the quote, “If you take what’s within you and use it and create it in the world, all your dreams will come true and it will save you. And if you take what’s within you and you don’t use it and you keep it inside you, that very same thing can kill you.” And I think that’s a fascinating way of looking at self-growth.

And I think that if you are one of those people that has that inkling, that desire within you, I think it’s really important to pay attention to it.

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As long as you are, what I call, dwelling in comfort, you are not creating your results with intention, with deliberateness. You are not evolving; you aren’t taking yourself to the version of yourself that you could be. You’re stalling out, you’re waiting.

Now, I’m not saying that that’s not a nice temporary thing to do. You’ve got to stop and enjoy; you’ve got to stop and smell the roses. But, the difference between knowing if you are stalling out and evading your life by dwelling in comfort is when you look at the results in your life, are they the results that you want?

Are you creating your life on purpose or are you just taking what you’ve created from your past? Are you just reliving something that you’ve created in the past because it’s familiar? And don’t be confused and think that you’re not the one that’s created your life; because you are.

Be willing to be awkward. Be willing to be a beginner. Be willing to suck at it long enough so you can get to the other side. It’s not supposed to feel amazing the whole time. It’s not supposed to feel comfortable.

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Polarity is not something to resist; it’s something to embrace. Within everything we deem is negative is the positive we so desperately want. We can use this to our benefit. We can use it to plan for obstacles.

So, one of the processes that I teach on Scholars is that every obstacle to achieving a dream can become a to-do for achieving that dream. Think about a dream that you have.

For many of you it’s losing weight, for many of you it’s quitting drinking, for many of you it’s making more money, feeling better, changing your job; whatever it is. And where you are now and where that dream is - in between, the only reason you aren’t there yet is because of obstacles; things that are in your way of achieving that.

And if you take each one of those obstacles and create a solution or an answer or strategy for that obstacle, then you will have the path of exactly what you need to do to achieve it.

I learned this from Dan Sullivan, one of my mentors and teachers. And I have to say, it completely changed how I felt about my goal. Because it used to be that I would think about my goal and I would feel scarcity, fear and doubt. But as soon as I was able to write down all the obstacles and turn them into strategies, I had a clear path to my goal.

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So these are the main things that I have found that create time. One is obviously planning, deliberately planning ahead of time, how to use your time. And make sure you include time off, time to relax, time to play and time to be spontaneous.

Number two, make decisions strongly. Make a decision and then don’t change your mind back and commit to that decision no matter how you end up feeling. You’re going to feel doubt, you’re going to feel scared, you’re going to feel like it was the wrong decision.

If you can believe that there’s no wrong decision and you can stay committed, you can blow your mind at how much time you save by just going straight up the mountain and not questioning yourself.

The third thing that’s very important when it comes to making time is taking massive action; instead of wondering how to do something, start doing something. You want to find out how to do it? Start doing it. You will immediately know whether it’s working or not, and you can change your mind – only in the sense of what you’re doing. You don’t change your mind in terms of the decision that you’ve made.

So for example, you decide to be a life coach, you decide to help people lose weight – you don’t change your mind about helping people lose weight, but you may change your mind about how to market it or how to go after it or how to write a blog post. You keep trying and taking massive action until you get the result you want.

This is not the same as “efforting,” this is not the same as being busy. This is taking massive action which means that you create a result. Now, let me be really clear on this, because there’s been a lot of confusion within our group here and I want to make sure you guys understand this. When you take massive action, you’re always going to produce a result.

That’s what I want you to focus on; what is the result your action created? Not, “What was the action you took?” A lot of people say, “Well I did this and I did this and I did this…” I don’t want to hear what you did; I want to know what that created. Did it create the result you want? If it’s not, you need to take different massive action.

If it created the result you want, then you keep taking that action and you keep creating that result. Focus on the result you’re creating from your massive action, not on the activity that you’re doing. Activity takes up time. Taking massive action creates results and makes time.

The next thing I want to say when it comes to planning being one of the most important things, honoring you plan is the next most important thing. Having a plan that you don’t honor isn’t useful.

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Whenever you hear yourself say, “I don’t feel like it,” I want you to remember that that is normal, but it’s not a legitimate reason to not do something. You will not always - and in fact, most of the time when you are evolving into the next version of yourself - you will not feel like it, because evolving is uncomfortable.

Discomfort is the currency to your dreams. So you will feel the opposite of feeling like doing it, and that’s when you know that you must move forward. And that’s why having time scheduled to do it and knowing that it’s not negotiable is the best way to follow through on those things; because if you are constantly only doing what you feel like doing, you are going to be moving backward.

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Wealth is completely proportionate to the amount of value I’ve created. So if somebody gives you a job and says, “Here’s your job description. You need to come in for eight hours per day and provide customer service.” Or, “You need to come in and make sales.” You can be sure I’m going to go into that job and whatever they’re asking of me, I’m going to double down. I am going to blow their minds. They’re going to know I’m there because they’re going to be like, “Whoa, where did this girl come from?”

Right, I’m not just going to go in and do my job and please them; I’m going to be of service. I’m going to create value. I am going to blow my own mind in what I’m capable of doing in that job. That job doesn’t owe me anything – they owe me nothing. They’ve given me a job; I owe them. I’m going to show them. I’m going to produce the most anyone in that job has ever produced. I am going to be the best version; not for them, for me.

I’m going to create value in the world because I know that’s going to come back to me ten times. And that’s how I think about money. Money comes to us through many different ways by the amount of value and service we provide; what we give of ourselves to the world.

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

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At a very young age, I had the sense that if I set a goal and I worked at it and I believed in it that I could achieve it; and I’ve proven that to myself over and over again. And I think the two components of that that are so important - those two fundamental things to know - is really getting to know yourself and what it is you want, and then believing that you can have it.

I don’t think that that’s a luxury; I think that’s the point of everything. I think the point is asking yourself what you want, setting that goal and knowing that there’s going to be a lot of adversity and obstacles to getting it, and that is the point of our lives; to overcome all of the adversity and obstacles that are in the way of what we have and what we want.

I think what we want and what we decide to want is our purpose. I don’t think our purpose comes to us in some magical unicorn rainbow way. I think it’s a decision.

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So there you have it. That is a collection of some of the best work that we have all done together over the past four years. I’ve taken so much feedback from you all and all my coaching experiences, with each and every one of you, has contributed to this podcast and the knowledge I’ve been able to share with all of you.

I want to take this time and just do a huge hug and a huge thank you to Pavel, who has been the one to make this podcast happen. Truly, he has been a full partner in this podcast creation. He’s not someone that helps me with the podcast; he is my full partner.

He has expected me to be on time with the podcast. He has asked me to change an episode or two when it’s not on brand and maybe I’m not having my best day. He’s given me really positive feedback; given me really good insight and ideas and I just love him so much and I want to make sure you all know that he is the reason, really, that this podcast has always been on time and always been edited and ready for each of you on Thursday morning.

He is a gem of a human being in every single way. In almost four years, I’ve never once heard him make an excuse or complain or have him miss a deadline; ever. He is the most amazing example of what is possible when you are producing high-quality work in this world. And what’s so interesting is we have this crazy intimate relationship but we rarely ever talk directly to each other.

I really just depend on him tremendously and whenever I think I might lose him I go into complete panic mode and freak out, and he’s always there and he always calms me down.

So, Pavel, thank you so much for everything you do for me and for us and for this podcast! You are my partner in creating something so amazing, and thank you so much for putting together this best of. I know that you are the one person in this world that has listened to every single word of this podcast multiple times, and I really, really appreciate you as a business owner, as a friend, as someone who shows up and does amazing work in this world.

If you guys want to record a podcast, there is no other choice but Pavel. You need to go to http://DigitalFreedomProductions.com to get started with him. I couldn’t recommend him any more highly than I do.

Have an amazing week everybody. I love you guys. Talk to you soon.

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