Ep #240: Lessons from Success

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 there, my friends. Today, we are going to talk about success. Success, my friends, it’s so important; or not. What does success even mean? I looked it up in the Googles. It said, “The accomplishment of an aim or purpose. The attainment of popularity or profit. A successful person is a person who achieves desired aims.”

So, I have had an incredible amount of success over the past five years. I have had more success than I ever thought was possible, and I’m super appreciative of it. And I’m also wanting to talk about it because a lot of people have told me that they don’t want to talk about their own success because they feel like they’re bragging.

And I feel the opposite. I am very humbled by my own success. I am in awe of what we can do with the Model. I am in awe of being an example of what is possible and how profound it is to live a life on purpose and to aim toward success and hit it.

And I am not at all under the guise that it’s because I’m an exceptional human being. And in fact, I know that I’m not exceptional in the sense that I’m not better than anybody else. I’m not an exception to the rule; we can all do this.

It delights me that we can all get the success that we want in our lives. So I’ve had a crazy amount of success. I feel like I have been able to lose all my weight and keep it off effortlessly. I have been able to quit drinking. I have been able to buy our dream house and have a beautiful relationship with my family, with my kids, with my husband, with my mother, my family of origin, with my father, who’s passed away. I have a great relationship with him – which, by the way, it’s not too late, if your parents are dead, to have a great relationship with them. We can talk about that more in Scholars, for sure.

I feel like I’ve a very balanced lifestyle for the level of success that we have and that we live to. I work three days a week and run a very successful business. We have had tremendous success in our business in terms of financial success and success with our clients and the contribution that we’ve made to them, and also success with our employees and being able to build a really highly functioning business.

And I’ve had success with my emotional freedom. I feel very fee in terms of my relationship with myself and my willingness to experience any emotion and feel like I’ve attained a level of emotional intelligence and maturity that helps me get through all of the discomfort that I experience because my goals are so big.

So I feel like sometimes I look around and I’m like, “What the heck? This is awesome. This level of success is so fun…” and not because of the stuff that I’ve achieved, the stuff that I have gotten; it’s because of who I’ve become and what I’ve had to overcome in order to become a person that can create whatever I want in the R-line of the Model.

It’s possible for all of us, and my mission in life and my goal in life is to be an example of what is possible with the Model, and then to also teach it to as many people as I can. And that is the dream that I am living every single dang day.

I got a text from one of my mini godsons. I have lots of little godsons. I don’t have any goddaughters, which is kind of a bummer because I already have two sons. Somebody give me a goddaughter already. I’m just kidding; don’t give me any godchildren. I have a lot of godchildren.

Anyway, what that means in our world, in my world, is that I step in and offer advice and am supportive for these young men in my life that need my support. One of these young men texted me and was saying that he felt like everything was against him and he felt like – you know, his parents are getting a divorce and things aren’t going well with them and he feels like he can’t catch a break in his life. And he’s just trying to be a good person and nothing seems to be going his way.

And he wanted my advice, and I wrote him back and I said, “Listen, you can’t just go and be a good person in the world and expect to achieve your dreams.” Being a good person is the starting line, my friends. That’s the baseline. You can’t rely on your parents being a certain way or your boss being a certain way or your life being a certain way.

You have to decide what you want and you have to go, and you got to go get it. You’ve got to be a good person and you’ve got to go get what you want in your life. You’ve got to get yours. You’ve got to have enough courage to go out there and get it and fail and try harder and get it again.

And this young man was feeling a little bit of pity and I told him so. I said, “Self-pity is not going to get you anywhere, son. You’ve got to decide what you want. The feeling you need to generate is courage, not self-pity. So don’t send me these messages where you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Send me messages telling me what you’re going to do in your life.”

And so, I wanted him to know that success is available to him no matter what, he just has to decide to get it; that’s it. And that’s what I did. I just decided what I wanted, I decided I wanted to be a successful person. I wanted to create some success in my life and I had some really big goals that I wanted to achieve and I went out there and I achieved them.

And I’ve got to tell you all, that is no easy feat. That is some hard work. And I’m super proud of myself and I’m super humbled by the experience. And I want to share with you, in this podcast, the lessons that I’ve learned and the lessons I want to offer from success, from being someone who has gone through the discomfort enough to achieve the goal.

And by the way, I’m going to always continue to do that because, for me, it’s about the process. It’s about the anticipation, and it’s about who I get to become on the journey, not about what you get when you get there. What you get when you get there is really awesome, don’t get me wrong, but that’s not the reason to do it.

And I want to say, earning success is super fun, especially as it applies to money, and a lot of the success that I’m sharing with you has to do with the money that I’ve made and the success that I wanted to create. And I think it’s important to remember that when you set a goal for yourself and you achieve that goal for yourself, you actually are aligned with the goal long before you actually reap the benefits.

So you’re already aligned as a millionaire before you actually get the million dollars. And when you learn how to align with what it is and to be what it is you want before you get the results, that is, I think, the secret to the universe. And I remember listening to lots of tapes on these ideas from all of my teachers and never really understanding what they meant; never really understanding what it meant to believe hard, to believe on purpose, to believe no matter what, and to believe big.

And I think the way that you get to know those things is by practicing them and doing them. The sweetest thing about making millions of dollars for me is not the money that I have in my pocket. The sweetest thing about it for me, and for my husband, Chris, my business partner, that we talk about is the ability that we have in our pocket now.

What’s magic is not the cash. What’s magic is the ability to create the cash and to know that we have done that with our belief system and with our action. That is what makes me feel confident and powerful and excited.

I’ve talked a lot about growing up and feeling as if, if somebody could take away your money, they could take away your lifeline. They could take away your freedom. And I never wanted to feel that way. I never wanted to feel like money was the powerful thing and I was a slave to it. I always wanted to feel like I was the powerful thing and money was just the effect of it.

And I feel like I’ve been able to create that in my life and it makes me a little bit giddy to think about it because nobody can take that away. And not only can nobody take it away, but I can teach it to other people. And I want to teach it to as many people as I can. I want to teach this idea because I believe that the more abundant mindset there is, the more abundance there is.

A lot of people believe in this zero-sum game; if I have more money, they’ll have less. If I share my wisdom with them, then I’ll have less money. I think the opposite is true. I think the more wisdom you share, the more everybody grows and the more abundance there is. The pie just gets bigger. Instead of fighting over the small pie, let’s just make the whole pie bigger.

So here are my lessons that I want to offer you. Take them as you will, my friends. Lesson number one, do not justify your success. You don’t owe a justification or an explanation to anyone. If you make a lot of money in your business, you make a lot of money in your business. Good on you. Congrats. Own that.

You don’t have to explain it away. I watch way too many people explain it away or diminish it. Own it. And but what you want to buy without an explanation. Listen to me, I listen to a lot of business podcasts and a lot of people, a lot of well-meaning people, will offer business advice and say, “It’s not about the money, my friends, it’s about the lifestyle. It’s not about the money, it’s about the contribution.”

Okay, why can’t it be about the money too? Why can’t it be about that? Why do we make that seem like a negative thing? I heard these guys say the other day, “It’s not like you want to go buy a Lambo or matching Lambos…” Listen, if you want to earn a lot of money and go buy yourself a Lamborghini, I bless you. God bless you, you go buy a Lamborghini. Go buy a Rolls Royce. Go buy a Porsche. Go buy whatever you want.

And you know what – don’t explain it to anyone. If someone says, “Why did you buy a Lambo?” The explanation is, “I wanted a Lambo.” That’s it. I earned money and I bought a Lambo; that’s it. I went and bought a house, I went and bought a car, I went and bought a diamond.

You get to buy whatever you want with no explanation about it. Just make sure you like the reason of why you’re buying it. You don’t even have to tell anyone the reason; just make sure you like your reason. And because you want it is a good enough reason, okay.

So I believe in doing what you want, what feels true to you, with your life. And that means what you do for your career, and that means how much money you make, and that means what you spend that money on, okay. So don’t justify your success and don’t justify how you spend your money, please. And don’t apologize, for the love of goodness gracious; do not apologize for having money or success.

Own it. Own it; it’s yours to own. And if it makes other people uncomfortable, that’s okay, that’s not about you. That’s about them. And I’ve got to say, Dan Sullivan really helped me with this so much with his teaching on wanting what you want and just being who you are without explanation or apology to anyone ever. It’s just been so freeing to me. I love it.

People hate on me because of my money and because I don’t, maybe, give it to them in the way they’d like me to or I don’t lend it to them the way they’d like me to, or I spend it on things they don’t want me to. I’m okay with that. I’m okay with other people being upset with how I choose to spend my money. That’s up to them. It’s really none of their business, but it’s up to them if they want to be upset about it.

Number two, play the long game. Never trade instant success for long-term integrity and authenticity. And what I mean by that is, as you grow in your life and as you recognize that you can create whatever it is you want in your life, you may often feel tempted to take a quick win and to be in a hurry and to gobble it all up because it might go away at some point.

And I just want to say that, if you ever have to trade what’s true for you in order to do that, the answer is no, even if that means you end up with nothing. And I want to say, there’s been a couple moments in my life over the last few years where I’ve made those decisions and those decisions have always ended up compounding in interest for the long-term.

So I had some short-term decisions that I made about some people that I was working with and they were being unrealistically demanding of my time and what they wanted from me and I decided I didn’t want to do the program because I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I had set myself up for that.

I don’t even blame them for it. I take full responsibility for it. I put myself in that position and I decided to give them all their money back so I could go to the next level of my evolution as a coach and also play the long game and not the short game. And it was a huge decision for us at the time and I talked a lot to Chris about it, and it ended up being the best decision for us.

And so, a lot of times, even my coach will tell me, like, “Hey, there’s some short-term wins here that you can take and you can cash in on.” And I often am just like, “Yeah, but the truth is, I don’t want to. I don’t want to work an extra day. I want to take some time off. I don’t want to do that opportunity right now, even though it means more money and more contribution and more value to the world. I don’t want to do it, and that’s okay. And I have a long time ahead of me. I have many, many decades of making money and contribution and value, and right now, the answer is no. and I want to grow slowly and I want to play it for the long game.” And I’ve never regretted decisions like that; thinking for the long-term instead of trying to sell myself or my business out for a quick win.

Number three is, it’s still 50/50 when you achieve success. It’s such a bummer. I have to tell you, it’s such a bummer. I used to have this idea that I would get thin and then I would never feel another negative emotion. And the opposite is true, because now that I don’t buffer with food, I feel all the emotions – all the unpleasant ones – so much more deeply than I did when I was overeating.

The same is true with alcohol and the same is true with money and with success and with achieving a successful business. I had the idea that I would be happy all of the time once I achieved my level of success. And the truth is, I’m about as happy as I used to be about the same amount of time.

I’m super happy about different things, but I’m still only happy half the time and I think that’s how it’s supposed to be, and I think that’s how it will always be and I think it’s because my thoughts that I generate about my life are happy about 50% of the time, and I’m okay with it. I don’t want to be happy all of the time.

I’m willing to keep growing and be uncomfortable and feel courage and feel discouraged and it’s okay; it’s how I want my life to be. I was reading an article about the guy – I think his name’s Brian Acton – who sold WhatsApp, the app.

He sold it to Facebook for like $19 billion, somewhere around there. And the article I was reading was how he regretted that decision. And I was like, dang. That’s so fascinating, right? Because he had put his life’s work into this app and then he sold it to Facebook and he ended up not liking what Facebook was doing in terms of the privacy and that sort of thing and he regretted having sold it.

And he also talked about how owning the business and creating the business was such a joy, but he had to sell. It was an offer he couldn’t turn down. And people say that to me sometimes. A lot of people ask me if I would ever sell The Life Coach School, and I always say no, I would never sell The Life Coach School.

And they’ll say, “Yeah, but what if someone came along and offered you a bunch of money, like a billion dollars; an offer you couldn’t refuse?” And the only reason you can’t refuse something is because you think it’s unrefusable because it will make your life better than it is all of the time.

And what I know to be true is that a billion dollars doesn’t make your life better than a million dollars. Isn’t that crazy? I was telling Chris, “What would we do with $19 billion, honestly? What would we do with that?” We have no idea. We’d have to spend years – like, what do you do with that much money? How do you be a responsible steward of that much money?

I don’t want to figure that out. I honestly don’t. And I think about this guy and my heart breaks for him because I feel like we have been taught that a certain amount of money will solve that ache inside of us and that we can’t refuse it. But the truth is, we can refuse it. And that ache inside of us is never going away, my friends.

That is the human experience. We can make peace with it. We can learn how to live with it, but the ache that drives us forward, that discontent is what urges us forward and that is the point of our lives. And a billion dollars is not ever going to make your life better than it is right now.

What will make your life better than it is right now is your thinking. That is not to say – and please don’t misunderstand me – that money won’t solve a lot of problems. It will. Money solves a lot of problems. It’s crazy how quickly money can solve problems too.

But it doesn’t solve your thinking. It doesn’t solve your mind. Your mind just finds different things to prove itself true. And it may not use money, it will switch to something else. So just know that it’s not better there than it is here. It’s not better.

Are some things better? Maybe. Are some things worse? Probably. But the way you think is the way you think is the way you think, so it’s still 50/50.

I’ll tell you what I mean when I say I’ve become a different person. It doesn’t mean that I’m happier all the time. That’s not what I mean when I say I’ve become a different person. It means that I’ve been able to understand more clearly how my brain works and intersects with the world.

And I’ve gotten better at being able to create what it is I want to create. And here’s the craziest thing about that; the craziest thing. And I’ve heard people talk about this before and I never really understood about it. The anticipation of Christmas, for me, was always better than Christmas.

The anticipation of your dreams coming true, the hope and the promise of your dreams coming true is sweeter and more delicious than your dreams actually coming true. The idea that you can make your dreams come true is so exciting and powerful and delightful.

Do you remember wanting to get married? Do you remember wanting to have children? Do you remember wanting to move into that house or go to college or date that boy? Do you remember the anticipation of that and how spectacular that is? And then the achieving of it is amazing too, but just in a different way.

So I want to say that, like, so many times when I start working with my students and they start talking about what it is they want, I just taste that desire for them and that excitement and that possibility and that dance between not quite believing they can do it yet, and it’s almost like – I can’t even tell you – it’s like the anticipation of introducing someone to themselves. That’s what my work feels like.

I feel like, oh my god, you don’t even know how amazing you are yet. You don’t even know what you can do on the planet yet. I am so excited to help show you that because that is such a great high. That is so fun, to figure it out, and that anticipation.

But it’s almost like you only experience it once and then you get the hang of it and then the excitement over it isn’t quite as fun. I used to love to go to Las Vegas and play the slots and one time I won, I think it was $4,000 on the slots and it was the craziest thing. $4,000, we went and bought Chris a suit, we moved everyone into the penthouse, it was so fun.

And we went to check out this casino here in Oklahoma. We’re in Texas, but you can drive to Oklahoma from here and I was telling Christian, my son, “But if I win $10,000, it’s just not as exciting anymore.” Our net worth is now millions of dollars, so $10,000 to us isn’t as exciting as it used to be.

It’s kind of an interesting thing to think about. It doesn’t mean that it’s not great having money. I love having money, but when you think about the difference in what delights you and what has the potential to delight you, it changes. It changes a lot.

So I think one of the most magnificent things about having the success of being able to create money is the freedom to do what you want with your time. Money gives you the freedom to do what you want with your time. You do not have to work if you don’t want to work. You don’t have to work for somebody that you don’t want to work for.

You don’t have to do anything for money that you don’t want to do, and I love that. And I love being able to solve problems. I love being able to be generous. I’ve always been generous and now it just makes it so much easier to be generous with the people that I work for, with my family, my employees.

And when I say the people I work for, I mean my clients and my students. And I’m generous with them. I’m not like giving my clients money, but I’m generous with them in the amount of value that I give them for the money and the freedom I give them as it applies to accessing all of my content. Whereas before, I used to charge a lot of money for just one portion of what is now in Self-Coaching Scholars, as part of a huge offering, and that feels so awesome to be able to be that generous.

And the next lesson I want to share with you is that everybody has advice on what you should do. When you’re successful in your business, when you lose all your weight, when you stop drinking, when you get married, when you leave your marriage, however it is you define success, everybody seems to have advice on how you should do it.

And I love listening to advice and I want everyone’s advice, but you always have to make your own decisions and do your own research. That’s super good advice that you should take. People have lots of ideas about how I should invest my money and how Chris and I should set up our businesses and how we should travel; all of those things, what we should do. And we listen to everybody and then we get together and make our own decisions and we live by our own decisions.

I think one of the really important things to remember when you’re considering success is that the worst that can happen is a feeling and you’re going to have it whether you try to achieve your success or you fail. You’re going to have it either way.

So here’s what I mean by that; a lot of people have told me recently that I’ve achieved, kind of, this level in my business, so why try for more? Why not just be happy? Business is killing it, everything’s going great, it’s a beautiful business. Why challenge myself? Why try and go for anything more challenging than what I already have?

Why reach for a higher level of success? And I think the answer is the same for me as it is for all of us, where we’re all successful at some level. Now, we start comparing ourselves to other people, we may not feel successful, but we are all successful. We have all arrived. We all have lessons to teach from our success.

So for me, I think the order of how we should try to do things is success is the best solution, failure is the second-best solution, and not trying is the worst solution.

So if I can go out there and lay it all out for success and win, that’s the best. If I can go out there and lay it all out and fail, that’s the second best. And the third best, the worst option, is just sitting here and doing nothing, not even trying, not even asking more of myself, because failure and not trying pretty much feel the same; except that not trying doesn’t give you the option or the opportunity for success.

And so that is why I keep going after it and remembering that the worst that can ever happen is a feeling. And unfortunately, the best that can ever happen is a feeling. And here’s what’s true; when you go after success, you get to feel the feeling now.

Remember, the anticipation of Christmas is better than Christmas. So as soon as you set the possibility and you start believing in the possibility, you don’t even have to achieve it to enjoy it. Do you know how much I’m enjoying my goal of making $100 million a year?

Do you know how much delight that has brought into my life? I haven’t even achieved it yet and I’m enjoying it immensely. I’m defining myself by it. I’m defining my business by it. My husband and I are defining our future, our present, by it. That’s the reason to go for success. It’s always worth it. Even if you miss it, it’s worth it.

My last lesson – and I really mean this and I really want you to take it seriously – is, it has to be fun, or forget it. Stressing out over a goal, over success, is a big fat no.

So I set a huge goal for my team. And I didn’t set it for them. I basically gave them a challenge with a reward. I said, “If you guys do this, here’s the reward.” And it’s a pretty big juicy fun reward. And I also told them, “I love the idea of you guys accomplishing this goal and I love the idea of you guys getting the bonuses, but more importantly to me is that you have fun and you enjoy it because if you start wanting the bonus at the expense of yourself and you start wanting the success at the expense of having fun, you have missed the point.”

You have to love the process. You have to be, in the process, the person, that is worthy of the goal, the person that is aligned with the goal. You can’t hate your way to love. You can’t stress your way to freedom. You can’t do it. It doesn’t work.

But how can you have, like, the best time creating abundance, creating an offering, creating joy? How can you do that and enjoy the process and get the bonus at the end, and make the money? That’s’ the only question that matters because, as soon as you set a goal, if you feel yourself tightening up against success, you’re doing it wrong.

You know when success feels amazing? While you’re creating it. It feels amazing when you achieve it, but not even as amazing as the anticipation of it.

I hope you guys hear that. That is the most important lesson. So often, you hear people, they throw their lives into their businesses. They throw their lives into wanting to achieve success at the expense of enjoyment, at the expense of their family and friends. That is not what you need to do.

Success is what you create right now to get the success, to align your model to have the success at the end. I am being that person right now who creates that result of $100 million and I’m enjoying it and loving it.

As soon as I stop loving it, I have thought work to do to realign myself with the success that is inevitably mine. And one of the things that I love for you all is that you can hear in my voice as my models start aligning. I can hear it in my voice.

There was the first time I told you about that big goal of making $100 million. And now, can you hear me talk about it differently? Can you hear that it’s closer, that I’m more aligned with it, that I’m enjoying it more? That is how we do success. You have to love the process of it; the process of accomplishment, the challenge of it, the self-doubt that comes up, the worry, the stress, the, “How am I going to do this? I have to know how. I have to know how.” The buzzing in your brain, it’s all part of this experience of living a successful life.

You’re going to have the buzz in your brain anyway. You’re going to have the self-doubt anyway. You might as well go for it. It’s super fun, not just on the other side of success. That’s not even the most fun part. The most fun is the journey there, up the mountain. Once you get there, the view is beautiful, but don’t miss the journey. Don’t forget to enjoy it. As soon as you start hating yourself and worrying about yourself and doubting on yourself, then you miss the point.

So those are my lessons of success, my friends. I’m so happy to have been able to create it for myself so I can now be an example of it for so many of my students and my clients. And my wish is that you too create your level of success so you can be an example to all of the people that are studying and watching and looking up to you.

And us all, as a human species, will continue to do this for each other; enjoy, and in abundance, and in discomfort and pain, because that is the human experience. And when we experience it that way, we are all successful. Have a beautiful week, everybody. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

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