Ep #268: The Capacity to Have

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. I just got back from Sonoma. Oh my gosh, you guys, we had the most amazing house in Sonoma. Gorgeous house. Literally on a hill surrounded by vineyards. It was amazing.

We went there, I went with my friend Kris Plachy and we went there to record our new product for Coach Tank, which is called Entrepreneurial Management, where I share all of my secrets, all of my hard-earned blood, sweat, and tears material of managing a small entrepreneurial, fast growing organization.

And I have to say, we just kept looking at each other and we're like, "This is so good. This is so life-changing. Can you imagine if I would have had this a year ago?" So we're very excited. That should be coming out in a couple months. The other thing that we did while we were there is I had my photographer Danielle come and we took photographs while we were there of me and Kris, but also of me in the vineyards and me in the house and just a lot of pictures of me.

But anyway, we got some super fun pictures of me and Kris, Kris Plachy laughing and having such a great time too. So I will share those with you as soon as I have them. You can check for those in the show notes and I'll put a link to some of those photos, or maybe I'll just add them to underneath the podcast because those are super fun.

If you want to find out more about Entrepreneurial Management, you can go to the Coach Tank tab at the bottom of my website and learn more about Coach Tank and the products that I'm creating with my certified coaches. If you want to do a project with me, become a certified coach and let's do it.

I have one more - couple more coming up this year I'm super excited about. One of them is on time management, the other one is about selling expensive things. Cannot wait to share those with you as well. And I can't wait to create them. It's so fun to hang out with my certified coaches and geek out on creating content. That is my absolute favorite thing to do.

So that leads me beautifully into what is happening in my life right now and what is happening in so many of my students' lives and my colleagues' lives and my friends' lives, and that is success and growth and abundance and all of the challenges that come along with that.

One of the things that we've been talking a lot about lately is success pain and leadership loneliness and the capacity to have. I have been watching this in all of the people around me and in myself and it is so fascinating. The capacity to have is something that most of us are really challenged with. And it means the ability to be with, to have success, in whatever way it is you define that.

So with my weight loss clients, I watch them struggle with the capacity to be thin, literally, to have the body that they want to have. With my clients who make a lot of money, I watch them struggle with the capacity to have money in their bank account without spending it or sabotaging themselves. I watch this in my clients who establish relationships that they've always wanted and their capacity to have a mate or have a friend is so much more challenging than any of us anticipate.

I was just coaching someone today, a man in my Scholars group, and he just retired and he has all the money he wants to have and all the freedom he wants to have, and he's really struggling with it. Really struggling with the identity crisis of it. And I know, I know, I know, poor you with your terrible problems, having too much.

But here's the thing; it's an issue. It's something that we struggle with at every level of our growth and every level of our development. Is it a great problem to have? Absolutely. But nonetheless, it's a problem, and I'm going to address it and not pretend it away because it's not as negative of a problem than someone else might have. This is a problem that we deal with at all levels of our growth and it's something I want to teach on, and it's important.

So for me personally, I watched myself do this with money as I started making about a million dollars, and I started having excess money in the account, in the bank account, in the personal account. And what I noticed is that it was challenging to have a lot of money in the account. It was like, well, we need to do something with it, we need to spend it, we need to buy something. It made me nervous to have money in the account.

And then I just watched this with one of my friends who has just made a really sizable amount of money. She's paid off all of her debt, paid off all of her bills, and now there's just money in the account. And so every time I talk to her, she's telling me about the thing that she's buying or the thing that she's signing up to buy, or the contract, just all the spending is starting to happen.

And you know, maybe wanting to buy a new house, all the things. And I said to her, "Hey listen, I think you should just have this money for a while before you spend it." She was like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "What is your capacity to have this and be with it without spending it?"

And it was really kind of alarming to her to recognize how challenging it is to just have that money, to just have - like I was telling a client the other day like, what is it like to just have $200,000 in your bank account without spending it? Without investing it, without doing anything with it for just a minute. Just be with it. Is that challenging for you?

What is it like to have accomplished something amazing and then to just be with the accomplishment, without going to the next one, without wishing it away and making the goal bigger but just being with the success that you have? It's a challenge.

So I want to talk about sabotage and how that is how many of us deal with having. With having success, with having money, with having accomplishment, with having achieved a goal. Many of us get to the place where we have arrived in some way and we immediately sabotage it.

Let me give you a perfect example of this. My whole life I had dreamt of being with a man who was kind and caring and respectful and lovely and connected, caring, non-threatened. And then when I met Chris and I started dating him, I could not tolerate the having of him. I did my very best to kick and scream and sabotage and try to get him to leave me.

It made no logical sense. I would yell at him for no reason, I would bait him into fights, I would push him out the door. I would act crazy, my friends. Crazy. That man would say to me, "I don't know what you're doing, but I just love you." And that would make me even crazier.

And I did everything in my power to sabotage my relationship with him and to get him to leave. And I look back on it now and I see how much my relationship with Chris healed me from myself because he didn't engage in the crazy, I couldn't blame him for it.

And so it forced me to look at myself and forced me to look at my own crazy and forced me to look at my own sabotage, and forced me to look at my inability, my incapacity to have a relationship and to have intimacy and to be in a space where I could be connected without drama.

I was completely inept at it. And at the time, I just kept beating myself up over it. I just kept telling myself that there was something wrong with me and that I couldn't do it right and all of those things. But what I realized was that I just didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to be in a successful relationship.

Same thing happened to me when I lost weight. I kept gaining it back, I kept struggling with just being there at that weight. It felt like literally my skin was burning off. I didn't know how to be with the accomplishment. And I've watched this happen to countless number of clients, where we get to there, we get to that place, and then we don't know how to be there. We don't know how to just have. We don't have the capacity to have the abundance that we have created for ourselves.

It's literally an identity crisis. What I see happen is people accomplish or accumulate or find the dream person or the dream house or whatever it is that they've been dreaming about their whole life, and then they get there and they feel guilty about it. They feel like an imposter about it. They feel afraid that the other shoe is going to drop, that someone will find out, that they don't deserve the thing.

And so then the very thing that they've always wanted then becomes a source of shame and then they start sabotaging it and hiding it and lying about it. This very thing that was the thing, the answer, they can't feel proud for it. They can't feel excited about it. They can't enjoy it because there's no capacity for joy.

It's like we haven't allowed ourselves to be present in the journey of the accomplishment of then being there. It's almost like the good thing is actually a foreboding. So it's almost like as soon as something good happens, we're immediately anticipating losing it. Or we don't believe it because of the cognitive dissonance.

So I want to explain to you why this happen so you can really create and establish your capacity for having. So, the identity crisis is really how you choose to see yourself. So you have these thoughts about who you are and what you're capable of, and then you have this inkling that maybe you're wrong and so you set new goals for yourself and you try to accomplish new things.

And for a while, there is a cognitive dissonance, meaning what you are doing isn't matching up with what you're believing. So for example, if I say I want to make 100 million dollars and I'm currently making 25 million dollars, the cognitive dissonance is the belief doesn't reflect my reality, and that's uncomfortable because all of my doubts come up.

But then what happens is I achieve the goal of making 100 million and the cognitive dissonance then becomes I haven't fully stepped into the fact that my result has fully aligned with my model because I haven't been able to accommodate the success. It's the craziest feeling. And I want to tell you, it's a skill that you have to develop.

It's when your reality is bigger than your thought has been able to truly absorb. It's almost like a little deer walking on the thing, it's like you've believed it enough to create it, and now it's real but do you believe it enough to have it?

You wouldn't think there's a difference there but there is. Because immediately upon the dissonance being there, meaning holy cow, I just made a million dollars, holy cow, the scale says I weigh 125, holy cow, I just met the man of my dreams, that saboteur, that imposter syndrome, that feeling of guilt and feeling of undeservedness comes up immediately because although you've created the result, you don't know how to be with it yet.

And I want you to know that this is coming, that this is for sure going to be something that you experience if you are evolving and growing and attempting to blow your own mind. You will have to learn the skill of having, of being in abundance.

I watched someone do this recently financially and it was really fascinating to watch them feel guilty about their money and proceed to give most of it to charity. And I watched the process, which was coming from a place of guilt and undeservedness and a lack of the ability or the capacity to have and not from a place of true charity. Not from a place of wanting to help, but from a place of literally this money hurts me to have because I feel so guilty about it, I must give it away.

And one of the things that I teach my students is I say don't give it away until you've truly had it because you won't even feel like it's yours to give. You won't even have experienced what it's like to own it, to be with it. And if you don't practice that, it will always be fleeting.

I was reading an article of one of my favorite mentors, teachers, and I won't mention their name because of what I'm going to tell you, but I've followed them for years and I've loved their work and I know that they make millions and millions of dollars, tons of clients, lots of amazing thing happening with this person. And I've watched from afar their success and I've been very excited for them, and they were recently talking about how they couldn’t afford to do something.

And I was like, what? Who is this person even talking about? I know for sure this person is making millions of dollars, and they're saying they can't afford it. So I'm watching this concept play out with this person and I kind of dug a little deeper and saw that there's a capacity and ability to create money, to create success, but there isn't one there yet to be present with it, to have it, so it's always a chase.

And one of the indicators of this is really successful people who haven't stopped hustling. In my millionaire group, I have watched my students grow up, literally, into maturity financially. And the most obvious indicator is that they calm the heck down. They stop the crazy hustle. The more money they're making, the more chill they are, the more confident they are, the more ability they have to be present.

They're not worried about it getting taken away or losing it, or that it was a fluke. They have settled into success. They have built up their capacity to have. And from there, we grow. I just wrote a Friday Coach Like about this where if you're not on my list, make sure you get on my Friday Coach Like list, and I basically talk about how when you want more from a place of enoughness, your life is so fun. It's just an abundant party.

When you want more from a place of not enoughness, you're always stressed and you're always afraid and you always feel inadequate. And where you start from is where you end up from. So when you want abundance, you create more abundance, and when you want from scarcity, you create more scarcity, even if you create money. Even if you create success, you will sabotage it.

It's like a train wreck watching this happen. It was a train wreck watching it happen to myself. I'd look back on my past and see that I almost lost the love of my life. I almost lost my beloved because I didn't know to be with him. I didn't know how to have love. I didn't know how to have a healthy relationship. I felt like a complete imposter. I felt completely guilty. I felt like at any minute he was going to leave me or cheat on me or treat me terribly. I didn't know how to be with it.

He had to teach me literally how to do that, just by being with me. I had to learn how to have money in my bank account without immediately buying something or immediately spending on something. Just having it. Just being with it. And of course, we all have to learn to be with ourselves.

One of the things that I know for sure of the experience of being human is that being with ourselves means being with our own brains, and our brains will tell us that we are not enough and that we are not lovable and that we're not capable, and that we don't deserve what we have and that we should feel bad and that we should give it all away.

But I also know that none of that is true and that we can choose a different way to be with ourselves. And when you're able to be with yourself and understand that you are complete and you're 100% lovable and that you're 100% enough and that you don't have to deserve anything that you have and you don't have to feel guilty about anything that you have, feeling guilty that you have clean drinking water when someone else doesn't does not serve the world, my friends.

Feeling guilty about the privilege of clean drinking water or anything else does not serve the world. And people will say, "Well, if you feel guilty, then you will go give other people clean drinking water." No, my friends. You will just give yourself less of it. If you want to help the world, if you want to share clean drinking water, you do it most effectively from a place of abundance, from a place of overflowing abundance.

I have so much, I love that I have so much, and I will and want to share from a place of love and abundance. Not from a place of imposter syndrome or self-sabotage. Because when we do it from that place, we end up having a finite amount to give, and when we give from abundance, it's a never-ending flow that we give.

Now, I want to share with you that this happens - I watch this happen with people who work for me. I watch this happen with people who aren't used to getting what they most want. It freaks them out and they try to sabotage and they do it unconsciously, and then they blame someone else.

So I just want you to be on to yourself about this. I want you to notice when you win, when you succeed, when you accomplish, when you get the lucky break, when someone accepts your book proposal, do you then not write the book? Do you then struggle against yourself and against the possibility or success, or the success that you already have?

I just want you to ask yourself why. Why is success hard for us sometimes? One of the main reasons is we don't think it should be, so then we beat ourselves up for not appreciating what we have. And beating yourself up for not having a capacity to have really is the ultimate in self-sabotage.

The answer is compassion. The answer is accepting your own worthiness, your own blessings, your own abundance in your life. There's this beautiful quote by Abraham that says, "The best gift you have to give your children is your own happiness." So when you spend time working on your own happiness, that is the best gift you have to give.

And I remember thinking that that was the complete opposite of what I believed to be true because I believed that I had to sacrifice my happiness for my children's happiness, especially when they were toddlers. Are you guys following me? Toddlers, are you kidding me? Those little monsters will steal your happiness if you let them.

They're happy unless they're not, but you for sure will not be happy. But here's the thing that I learned. I couldn't reconcile that as a parent, but I thought about that with my own mom who raised me. And I remember thinking the only thing I ever wanted her to be was happy. She was so unhappy. And she used to tell us that she had sacrificed everything for us, and that it was basically our fault that she wasn't happy.

And I would have given anything and done anything, I was always the good girl because I wanted nothing more than my mother to be happy. And I've seen that in my own life. My capacity for joy and happiness is the gift I give to them. My capacity to grow and live a huge life without apology is the best gift that I have to give my children, to show them how it's done.

I feel like for women, the best gift I have to give women and feminist and feminists is my capacity to be a woman at the highest level. Not to sabotage myself or complain about it or hate, but to just be with my ultimate potential, to be an example of what is possible as a woman. And it's not easy to have.

And when people don't have and they point fingers to people who do have, they clearly do not understand the human experience because for whatever reason, our brains want to tell us that we don't deserve it and that it's not enough and that we should get rid of it or that we should share it and that life should be fair. All the things that create the guilt and the resentment that we have.

But when you recognize that those are just thoughts in your mind, those are just brain through errors, that is when you can embrace success, you can embrace having what you have, you can embrace abundance. And from there, you can create more. It's not I don't have enough and I have to get enough and then I'll be enough. It's I always am enough no matter what I have and when I create more, I can learn how to have that too, and that is the point.

We have to learn how to be and have at every level of our evolution. In many ways, it's much easier not to have because you don't have to deal with guilt or imposter syndrome or the urge to sabotage. But I want to encourage you to go through that fire because it's a new way of evolution for you personally and your brain, and for humankind.

And the most amazing gift you have to give the world is to grow into the fullest version of yourself and have it without apology, to show us how it's done. Not because you deserve it or you don't deserve it, but because you are a human who is enough, who created what is possible for you in the world.

Be with that. In my opinion, that is the point. Have an amazing week everyone. I'll talk to you next week. Bye.

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.