Ep #234: What Do You Want to Believe?

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.

Well hello, my friends. How are you beautiful people today? What do you mean you’re not beautiful? You’re gorgeous. Look at yourself. Look at yourself. Come on, amazing. You’ve got to love your face. You’ve got to love your face. I think that’s some of the best work we can do in the world, to stare at ourselves in the mirror until we love our face. I’m telling you.

I’m super excited to be doing a new retreat coming up. We’re going to work with photography and taking pictures and looking at pictures and using them to find a way to love your face. So actually, maybe – I was going to call it the Picture Project, but maybe I should call it Love Your Face. Anyway, more information on that coming up.

But right now, what I want to tell you about is an opportunity you have to be on the podcast. We are going to do an episode that features you all. And the way that we want the episode to go is it’s basically going to be a collection of the best lessons that you guys have learned on the podcast. So everything that you’ve taken and applied to your life, the best parts of that, we want to create into one big episode for you to enjoy.

It’s kind of like you all get to talk to each other, “What’s your favorite part of the podcast? What was your most influential part of the podcast?” I get hundreds of emails from you all telling me how, just listening to the podcast, you have applied what I’ve been teaching here and changed your lives. And that’s so exciting for me to think about, like, all the people that I’ll never meet that are listening to the podcast that are changing their lives. It’s like, modern technology is so awesome.

And I get to read all the emails, which I absolutely love by the way, and the letters I get in the mail, all the things. But you guys don’t because it’s kind of one-way communication. So I thought it would be fun for you to all kind of talk amongst yourselves about your favorite tools that you’ve applied in the podcast.

What I’d like you to do is you’re going to call into a number and tell us – it will be recording, and you’ll tell us what your favorite tool is and how you’ve applied it to your life and then maybe make a reference to the podcast. So maybe if there was a certain podcast you’ve listened to over and over again, make sure you reference it. If there’s just a tool that I’ve talked about throughout the podcast that you’ve applied – or maybe for some of you – this is what some of you tell me – there’s just one thing that I said that one time that changed everything, that was the tipping point for you. We would love to hear about that as well.

So what you’re going to do is you’re going to dial this number; 12762005335. Pavel set this up for us. It’s a Google Voice number and you’re going to leave a voicemail and he will download them all and edit them. And hopefully, if there’s not too many, we can include most of them and you will be featured on the podcast. Feel free to share your name. You don’t have to share your name if you don’t want to, but I’d love to know your name. And just a short couple minute segment on your favorite part of the podcast, how you’ve applied it to your life, anything else you want to know.

I think that will be a super fun episode and I look forward to hearing what you have to say. Alright, let’s get on with the show, my friends. Here’s the deal; today, we are talking about, what do you want to believe? That is the name of the podcast.

And it’s a little bit misleading because of the word want there. And I did that on purpose because I want you guys to consider the difference between wanting to believe something and actually believing something. It seems like a very subtle difference, but it’s everything.

And I’m going to give you an example of it because I’ve just recently truly figured this out for myself and I think that’s why I’m getting the results I want so rapidly in my life. And when I work with my most advanced students, my most qualified students, I can see that often they’re still not quite getting it.

An example that I have is one of my students. She’s actually a master certified coach. She’s in the training right now and she set a goal for herself in terms of something that she wanted to do in her business. And it was a very measurable result and she was really excited when she set the goal and she’s like, “Let’s go crazy…” and kind of made this big goal for herself and she kind of wanted to believe in it, right, and kind of pretended like she believed in the goal.

And that happens to a lot of us, right? When we first set a goal, we don’t really believe in it yet. And nor should we. And if we do already truly believe in it, we probably need to set a bigger goal because it doesn’t require any thought work or anything for us to evolve through. So I always recommend that you set a goal that kind of freaks you out in the beginning because it will require the most internal growth, which I think is the point.

So here’s what happened. So she set this goal, and she’s very capable of achieving this goal, but it was definitely a stretch goal for her. And as she started working towards it, getting closer to this goal, she started recognizing that the numbers weren’t quite adding up the way that she had wanted them to.

And immediately, what I noticed was that she started explaining why she wasn’t going to meet her goal. She started justifying why it wasn’t going to happen. She started wondering about it. And all of her vocabulary and all of the things that she was writing to me – we were doing some communication through Slack – was, “Well it’s totally fine if I don’t meet my goal. It’s still a great accomplishment. This is not a big deal…” kind of energy.

And then also, “I wonder why I didn’t meet my goal…” in a very kind of passive way. Mind you, she hadn’t even gotten to the deadline yet where the goal was complete and yet she was already not believing in it. And so I think this is kind of the offering that the world offers up to us, right? We say it’s easy to believe something after it’s already happened. It’s easy to believe something when you’ve already done it before. It’s easy to believe something when all of the evidence is stacking up in favor of the thing, quote en quote, being true.

What’s challenging is to believe something when you don’t have the evidence, to believe something will happen, that you will create it, when the evidence isn’t going in your favor, when you’re not seeing the results that you hoped you would have seen. Can you believe in something then?

When you start to doubt yourself, can you believe? And so, there’s a big difference between wanting to believe something and feeling like wanting it is not within your control, that you can’t believe something unless you have a lot of evidence and believing that you can believe whatever it is you want to believe.

So that’s a lot of believes, but here’s the thing; if I want to make $100,000 this year and it’s currently September and I have only made $40,000 this year, when I look at the evidence and I look at my goal of making $100,000, I can then start to justify and come up with reasons why I didn’t make that much money and why I won’t and how it’s impossible. And I can literally stop believing that I can still meet my goal of $100,000. It’s very easy to stop believing at that point.

Now, at the beginning of the year, when I still have a whole year in front of me, it’s easier for me to believe that I can make $100,000 because I feel like I have a lot of time. But once I’m seven months in and the numbers aren’t adding up, it’s harder for me to believe it. And that’s when I most need to believe it. That’s when I most need to commit to the belief is at that point and all the points up until there.

And this is one of the reasons why I always say you should have 90-day goals. So if your commitment is to make $100,000 in one year then you need to break it down to 25K, 25K, 25K, 25K, so you can work within the 25K belief system every quarter.

So when you get to seven months and you’ve made 40K and you start believing that you’re not going to hit your goal, you are literally not believing what you want to believe. And you don’t think it’s a choice. You think, “Well the math isn’t adding up. I can’t believe in that. That’s not going to be possible for me.”

But as soon as you believe something is impossible for you then it becomes impossible for you. So making a choice to believe in something feels like one choice. It feels like one decision, but really, it’s 100 decisions. It’s 1000 decisions to continue to believe in something until you achieve that something.

Now, the second thing I want to offer you, which is a really important distinction, is the difference between wanting to believe something and actually believing it on purpose, living in the belief of it as if it’s as good as already done. So the first piece of this was really about giving up on believing in something, but the second piece that I’m sharing with you right now is the distinction between wanting to believe in something and actually believing in it.

I can always tell when someone really believes in something because they start talking about it as if it’s already completed, as if there’s no doubt. So when I talk about making $100 million in a year, I talk about it with my team like, “So how are we going to accommodate this issue and what are we going to do in terms of taxes and how are we going to hire this many employees in order to accommodate this?”

I talk about it as if we need to take action to deal with the $100 million, as if it’s already done and I do believe that it’s a done deal. It’s not just a matter of, like, negotiating the details, versus talking about it like, “Wouldn’t it be nice? How are we going to do that? That’s crazy.” I mean, I do say that it’s crazy sometimes. But I notice when I shift in and out of belief because I shift from, “It’s already done…” and committing to believing in it and talking as if it’s already done versus trying to figure out how we’re going to do it.

The more time you spend in the energy of trying to figure out how, the less you’re believing in it, which is so interesting because I want to talk about the two different energies there. This, “I need to figure this out,” energy is sometimes graspy and full of scarcity. When you already believe in something, it’s more coming from a place of abundance and curiosity. Like, “Huh, that’s interesting. I wonder how we do that. I’m going to try this.” Versus, “Oh my gosh, we’ve got to figure this out. This is so hard. This is going to be crazy…” and it feels like pressure.

It’s a very subtle difference. So I think about this a lot with the wine, with me drinking wine and I really learned this lesson when I started my relationship with my belief system of I don’t prefer to drink wine. And here’s what happened; I started thinking about people that don’t like wine, that don’t even think about drinking it, they just don’t do it.

And I started studying what’s going on in their Models, what’s going on in their brain during that time. And what I noticed is, I would go to dinner with them and they wouldn’t be thinking about what they were going to tell the waiter. They weren’t thinking about how they were going to explain to me that they’re not drinking. They weren’t obsessed with what they were going to drink instead. They weren’t needing to think about wine for one second. in fact, it didn’t even occur to them.

And if the waiter asked them if they wanted a glass of wine, it was like, do you want a different chair? Like, it didn’t even trigger them at all with anything. And so, what I realized is that in my effort to become a person who didn’t want wine, I was trying so hard to figure out how to accommodate my desire for wine that I wasn’t believing that I could be someone that didn’t desire wine.

So when I practice the Model, I just prefer not to have wine. I just don’t desire wine. And I started living as if I were already that person, what occurred to me is that when people don’t use wine to deal with their emotions, when they don’t drink wine, they just deal with their emotions.

So when someone that doesn’t want wine has a feeling of restlessness, they just have a feeling of restlessness. They don’t think about wine as a solution for them. And that was a huge distinction for me because I turned myself from someone who wanted to not want it to someone who didn’t want it. And I noticed that those two identities for myself were completely different.

Wanting to not want it meant I was always thinking about how to get over wanting it. And being someone who didn’t want it never thought about that, and that’s absolutely the reality of my life right now. Instead of thinking about wine, I think about how to process my own emotion, how to live in a world where I am feeling all the time instead of drinking.

So when I go out to eat and they offer me wine and I feel restless about my day or what’s been going on in my mind, wine isn’t even an option. It doesn’t even occur to me. It’s not a solution. I just think about my emotional life.

So understanding what does someone believe who’s already accomplished what you want to accomplish will be mind-blowing. So let’s go back to the example of my client who had her goal in her mind and if she had been believing that she would accomplish this goal, that it was as good as done, she wouldn’t be explaining why she had the number that she had right now.

So, for example, if I’m making $40,000 as of September and I want to be making $100,000 as of December, I’m not sitting around – and I believe that I will – I’m not sitting around spending time explaining why I’ve only made $40,000. It doesn’t even occur to me. It’s not even relevant.

What’s relevant is by the end of the year, I will have made 100K. Curious how I did that. And then we get to work. It’s not, “Oh, I hope I can do that.” What does someone who’s already created that think on the way there?

So for me, if I’m a person who believes that I will make $100 million in a year, I don’t make what I’m making today mean anything about that goal. I don’t say, “Well I’ve only made this much this year, so how in the world am I going to be able to make $100 million. It’s not enough. I’m not going to be able to do it.” And then I start explaining it away.

I see it as a stepping stone. I see my total revenue for this year as a stepping stone to my next goal because I know I’m going to achieve it. How could it possibly be something that prevents me from doing it? It can’t be because it’s something that I know that I’ve already done.

And if I have an urge for a glass of wine, I make it mean nothing. It’s kind of like, have you ever had an urge to punch someone? Have you ever had an urge to scream and you just didn’t? It happens to me too. Every once in a while, I have an urge to eat something that I don’t want to eat really, or an urge to drink something that I don’t want to drink. I don’t make it mean anything.

I don’t make it mean that I need to drink it or I need to overcome it or anything. It’s just allow that urge to be there. It means nothing. It means nothing.

So if you’re a person that’s already achieved your goal and you’re coming back in time to experience the journey again, what do you make it mean that you’re not there yet? You know what you make it mean? Nothing. It’s just part of the process. It’s just part of the deal.

You don’t stop believing in your goal. You don’t stop believing in yourself. You don’t make it mean something about you or your goal. You’re still 100% committed to the goal. So when people talk to me about this, my favorite example to use is children learning how to walk, because we all figured it out, right?

And think of how many times we failed, but did we ever stop believing in our kid? Like, if you have a kid that’s learning how to walk, did you ever, at any point, be like, “I don’t know. This kid may never walk.” Did that ever occur to you once?

Now look at the evidence. That kid is not walking well. That kid is falling; that’s what that kid is doing. That kid is trying to walk. And that was us too. Think of how long we sucked at walking. We had to hold onto shit. We were, you know, wobbling, not able to get from one spot to another, having to hold our parent’s hands, all of it.

Did you ever stop believing? Do you ever look at a toddler and just be like, “I don’t know, buddy, it’s looking rough? No, we never – it doesn’t even matter how long it takes them, it doesn’t matter how many times they fall, it doesn’t matter if they’re four years old, right? You’re going to get this. It’s going to happen.

Never doubting, never doubting, we just keep going at it, you can still do this. That’s why we all end up learning how to walk, right? Now, if you struggle along the way learning how to walk, that doesn’t mean anything. Isn’t that amazing? What if you believed in every goal you set for yourself the way that you believe in your children learning how to walk?

What if you just really had no doubt, not even for a second, that you would achieve it, even when all the evidence is to the contrary? Because there’s so much evidence to the contrary all along our journey to learn to walk. So many things that we could interpret as, “This ain’t going to happen.” And we never do, ever, ever, ever.

And we believe all the way up until the point; all the way up until that point. Now, here’s the third piece I want to offer you; what is the downside of believing in something all the way up until the deadline? And I’m not talking about pretending to believe in something. I’m not talking about hoping. I’m not talking about wanting. I’m talking about believing it all the way up until the point where the deadline happens.

I can’t think of one. I can’t think of one downside. Now, you may say to me, “But what if I don’t achieve my goal?” But as soon as you ask the question, what have you done? You’ve stopped believing. You’ve opened the door to the doubt. So I don’t like to answer the question because then it opens the door to, “Well I’m going to believe in this even if it doesn’t happen.” But as soon as you say, “Even if it doesn’t happen,” then you’ve opened the door to stop believing it. See what I’m saying?

So the point is, my goal of making $100 million isn’t about making $100 million. It’s about believing in it and becoming the person that could do that. That’s the journey, right? It’s not about getting there. And I think that’s the hardest thing for most people to understand is that if you wait to believe in something before you’ve already achieved it, you’re probably not going to achieve it because belief has to align with our result.

And if you do achieve it because part of you believed in it, you probably won’t be able to do it again and you’ll probably believe it away, “Oh, that was a fluke.” But, what if you believed in something with all your heart no matter what, right up until the very last minute? And then once that deadline happens, you may say, “Oh, I was going to make $100,000 this year…” and let’s say you only make $40,000, what’s the downside for you having committed to believing in it? Nothing.

And all it does is reveal all the ways that you didn’t believe in it, that you weren’t able to align yourself to that end result. And that, my friend, is learning. That is what we want to reveal to ourselves. Where aren’t we believing in ourselves? Where aren’t we believing in what we want to create in the world? Where are we aligned with doubt when we could be aligned with belief? That’s what makes life interesting to me.

That’s what makes it all worth it. That’s why I love goal setting. People say, “Oh don’t set goals. Be in the present moment.” I’m like, you can set a goal and be in the present moment. And in fact, there is no other alternative. And what happens when you set that goal is you bring up your present moment doubt and fear and that is nothing you can’t handle. And that is what will make us strong enough to keep setting bigger goals and keep our life so much more interesting.

So are you willing to believe in something when nothing is proving it true, when there is no evidence? I think that’s our privilege of being human. I can believe in anything I want to believe and I don’t have to have any evidence. I don’t have to have any proof. I mean, isn’t that what faith is for most of us. I believe in something because it serves me and it serves my life and it helps me show up in the way that I want to show up and be in this world.

And that is something I am committed to. And even when there’s evidence to the contrary, I will continue to believe in my capacity to create. I will continue to believe in unconditional love, no matter what. I want to believe that I can love anyone unconditionally; anyone, no matter what human error they have made. That’s what I want to believe and that’s what I choose to believe.

And here’s the last piece that I want to offer you here; no matter what your circumstance is, no matter what has happened in the world, in your life, in your own mind, you get to choose what you want to believe about it. And it is very, very tempting to believe what other people believe, because then we can feel connected to them through our belief.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s a step I want you to consider before you just believe by default what other people believe, and before you just believe by default what you’ve always believed. I want you to take that moment of consciousness and decide, I want to believe this. I want to believe that all humans are 100% lovable, regardless of what they’ve done, even if other people don’t agree with me.

I want to believe that I am capable of being an example of what is possible as a human. No matter if all my evidence is to the contrary, I am committed to believing that, no matter what. What are you committed to believing on purpose for you? I believe that there is no emotion that I can’t feel. I believe that I don’t need to buffer away my emotions, no matter what. That’s what I want to believe. That’s what I’m committed to believing.

So think about your most precious goal. Maybe it’s the goal you haven’t told anyone about, maybe it’s the goal that you wish you could believe in, even if other people didn’t believe in you. You have to believe so hard. You have to believe for everyone. People say, “Other people don’t believe in me.” I said, “Who cares? Why is that even relevant? They can’t even create in your space anyway.” The only thing that happens when other people believe in you is you just decide to believe in yourself more. You can decide to believe in yourself more even if they don’t. isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that awesome?

So if you have set a goal and you have evidence that you’re not creating that goal, that that goal isn’t going to happen for you, why don’t you consider believing in it anyway? Because when you believe in something hard, here’s what happens; the possibilities start to present themselves. The options start to present themselves. The miracles start happening beyond anything you can ever imagine. And the more you believe, the easier it is to achieve.

But believing is hard, my friends. Believing does not come naturally. We have to manage our mind. So if you could believe anything, what would you believe about your precious goal, about that thing you want to achieve, no matter what anyone else says? And I just want you to know, just between me and you right now, I believe in you and your ability to believe in that goal, and you don’t have to tell anyone else how hard you’re believing in it because you won’t need to, it will start to show in your life.

Alright, my friends, have a gorgeous beautiful week. I want to believe that you will. Talk to you soon, bye-bye.

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