Ep #321: Love vs. People Pleasing

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 321.

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. How are you, my friends? I’m really, really loving recording my book. And here’s the deal. I am reading the book that I originally wrote. I wrote it within a six-week period, during the time I was offered a book contract, and the time that I didn’t sign my book contract.

And I tell the whole story in the recording, but I just love this book and the stories that it shares and what I teach in this book. It’s something that I haven’t taught this – I’m going to say – aggressively before. And I’m releasing it in Scholars in chapters. So, if you’re in Scholars, you’re getting it in the private podcast.

If you want to access the book, I highly recommend that you join Scholars and set yourself up on the podcast stream. So, in your iTunes account, you will get the book chapters as I record them. But I wanted to give you a little taste of it today in the audio form, so stay all the way to the end of this podcast and you’ll get the intro of the What’s Possible book. And hopefully that will entice you to join Scholars and get the whole book.

We’re releasing that at the same time we’re also releasing the Conversations with My Friends series that I’ve been doing. And so, I’ve been recording lots of those calls too and sharing snippets with you on those, every other podcast.

So, for this podcast, we’re going to do a little snippet of What’s Possible. And I know that you will love it as much as I do. It’s really, really good content. And I think it’s content that we all need, especially us women. So, enjoy that.

Today, I’m going to talk about love versus people pleasing. And I want to talk about this topic because I think often that my teachings are misunderstood and misused by the brain. Because that brain of ours is so clever and it wants what it wants and it wants its beliefs to be proven true, so it can even use something that I teach in a way that it isn’t meant for it to be interpreted that way.

And I’ve seen this happen quite a bit with my students in Scholars, so I want to make sure that it’s not happening unconsciously for you as well. And so, I’m going to go through and teach you the difference between loving and people pleasing. And especially the difference between unconditionally loving and people pleasing.

One of the things that I’ve noticed is that the terminology for unconditional love can be misinterpreted. So, the way that I teach about unconditional love is that love is something that we do for ourselves. It’s a beautiful choice that we can make towards someone, no matter what they do.

And so, people don’t have to change in order for us to love them. People don’t have to behave in a certain way for us to love them. People don’t have to even behave properly for us to love them. We can love them no matter what.

And when we do that, we feel the experience of love in our bodies. And so, therefore, it’s really one of the ways that we can take care of ourselves in the world. Now, a lot of people have heard that teaching and misinterpreted that teaching to be, “We love people at our own expense.” And that is the opposite of how I teach unconditional love.

So, for example, a student or a client might say to me, “I’m going to love this person unconditionally. So, that means, I’m going to let them treat me however they want to treat me. I’m going to have them act however they want and I’m just going to be lovely and wonderful to them and I’m going to invite them over ad I’m going to spend time with them and I’m going to continue my relationship with them because I love them unconditionally. And therefore, I don’t have to have any boundaries or any limits to anything that they do because I love them unconditionally.”

I’ve heard students describe to me staying in marriages that they think are unhealthy because they want to love their husband unconditionally, or staying in friendships where the person is literally abusive to them and they feel, “But I want to love them unconditionally.”

And it’s really, really important to me that my teaching isn’t misinterpreted that way and that there’s a really clear distinction between why you stay in a relationship long enough to be happy and what unconditional love really means. And it never, ever, ever means doing something at your own expense.

When you say or think about unconditional love in a way that costs you your love of yourself, you are doing it wrong. Unconditional love has to always start with you and unconditionally loving other people is also about you. And you will know the difference because of how you feel.

If you stay in a situation that you don’t want to stay in and you say that the reason you’re staying in that relationship is for unconditional love, you are mistaken. And this is really important because you’ve heard me teach, “Don’t leave a relationship in order to be happy.” Stay in a relationship until you recognize that you are the source of your own happiness, and then decide if you want to leave.

Do not stay in a relationship simply because you want to unconditionally love someone. Unconditionally loving someone doesn’t require anyone, including you, to do anything.

So, let me give you a really clear example of this. Think about someone who is challenging for you to love but who you love unconditionally. And ask yourself this question; do I believe loving someone unconditionally requires me to lie? Spoiler alert, the answer is always no.

So, if you are in a relationship attempting to love somebody unconditionally and feeling as if, in order to do that, you have to lie to yourself or to them, you have missed the point. In fact, that is a copout and it doesn’t feel good. That’s how you know it isn’t unconditional love.

Lying is people pleasing. People pleasing is lying. And it is not unconditional love for yourself. It’s the opposite. It’s lying about who you are and not loving yourself with the condition of how you actually feel.

So, how do you make sure that you are unconditionally loving yourself first and then using the concept of unconditional love or staying in a relationship long enough in a way that is serving you? Here’s the easiest way that I know how to separate out some BS here.

Unconditional love for yourself and for others always includes the truth and loving them no matter how they respond to the truth. So, I’m going to lay it out really clearly for you.

So, if I say, “I unconditionally love my mother, and therefore I spend every holiday with her and she can come over whenever she wants, that is unconditional love. And even when she comes over when I don’t want her to come over, I love her anyway because that is unconditional love.”

Okay, that is not unconditional love. That is people pleasing, and you know because it doesn’t feel like love; it feels like resentment. Unconditional love means you tell your mother the truth. You say, “I don’t want to come over for the holiday and I don’t want you to come over unannounced ever again.” And then, however she responds, you love her anyway.

That is unconditional love. That is truth and unconditional love. That is not people pleasing. Unconditional love and people pleasing is never a thing. It’s either unconditional love or people pleasing. People pleasing is always lying. It’s always at your own expense. Unconditional love is always for the truth and for love of yourself and the other person.

So, the challenge of unconditional love means, starting with yourself, do you love yourself enough to tell the truth? And will you love yourself even after you say the truth out loud and deal with any consequences or repercussions from that truth? And will you love that person no matter how they respond to your truth for your sake? And if you can answer yes to that, that is the work that is worth it for you and that’s what feels amazing long-term.

See, people pleasing feels amazing in the moment because you tell people what you want to hear and you get the response you want, so it’s that little hit of adrenaline. Unconditional love is what feels good for the long-term. It’s you telling the truth for you and saying, “This is what I believe and this is what I want and this what’s true for me,” and letting the other person respond and be who they are with your truth is unconditionally loving them.

And sometimes, that sounds like, “I don’t want to be friends with you anymore. I don't want you to come over. I don't want to be married to you anymore. I don’t want to spend holidays with you. I don’t want you to come to my house. I don’t want to go out with you to dinner. I don’t want to help you with your charity,” and loving yourself for not wanting to do those things and loving them for how they respond in any way.

Let’s talk about a marriage. If you’re in a marriage and you are committed to loving your spouse unconditionally, you can’t do that if you don’t love yourself unconditionally first. That’s, like, the prerequisite. You have to love yourself first 100% unconditionally, including all of your opinions and all of your thoughts and everything that feels true to you. So, you start with that.

And let’s say your spouse is doing something that drives you crazy, quote unquote. It’s really your thoughts about them that is driving you crazy. Now, loving them does not require them to stop doing that thing. Let’s say it’s drinking. It doesn’t require them to stop drinking at all. They can keep drinking, you can keep loving them.

But loving them does not mean that you have to stay with them or that you have to be around them when they’re drinking, or that you have to agree with their drinking. It doesn’t have to be anything like that. But that doesn’t affect how you feel about them, how much you love them. What you do will affect what you do about you. Do you see what I’m saying?

So, if you love yourself and your own opinion and you want to honor that for yourself, that’s going to require you to tell yourself the truth about what this person is doing and whether you want to be around it or not. And so, unconditional love is fierce for yourself. It’s honoring what you want for yourself and telling the truth to yourself and to the other person and then allowing that truth to live with any response that happens and loving anyway.

We don’t want to put ourselves in positions where we’re calling resentment love, where we’re calling people pleasing loving unconditionally because it doesn’t feel like love. It feels like obligation. And so, we completely miss the point. And we start draining ourselves of our own self-respect and of our own truth. We don’t know how to hear our own truth. We don’t know what’s true for us. We get so good at people pleasing and calling it love that we lose ourselves.

And I’ve talked a lot about my own personal experience with this. and I want to tell you, the way that I was able to recognize it is it looked like love only from the outside. I’m thinking about my relationship with my mom and all the people pleasing I was doing in that relationship. It looked like love from the outside.

And so, everyone’s like, “Oh your mom’s so great and you guys have such a great relationship.” But I didn’t feel like it was love because I wasn’t telling the truth to myself or to her. And so, there was no love. There was nothing that was requiring me to love her because I wasn’t coming from a truthful place. I was people pleasing her, lying to her, and calling that love. Do you see the difference?

And we could call that unconditional love because we’re putting up with all sorts of behavior and telling ourselves that we love them anyway. And what we think love means is that we stay and we say yes and that we are kind. That is not what it means. Love is fierce in the truth.

Byron Katie taught me this with four words. Is it four? Maybe five. “I love you, and no. I love you, and no.” And it means really recognizing that truth in yourself.

I’ve been going through this a lot in my own personal life recently too. And I’ve been doing a lot of – in the next podcast, I’m going to talk a lot about the relationship friendship work that I’ve been doing in my life, as I go through this transition from being home with my kids to them going away to college and how that’s kind of got me looking at the rest of my life and the work that I’ve been doing on that that’s been really enlightening about my own self.

And I keep telling my friends, I’m like, “You know, you would think that I’d be able to recognize this in myself more clearly,” but it’s so unconscious that I have to dig it up to have a look at it. It’s just so patterned in my own brain.

And so, when you look at your life, when you take an inventory of, “Where do I think I’m still people pleasing? Where am I lying? What isn’t true for me anymore and what is true?” And going through each of your relationships, going through your conversations with yourself, going through not just your relationships with other people, but your relationship with your life, with yourself.

What is coming up for you? What is that looking like? And do you feel like you are loving yourself unconditionally for your truth and what is true for you? And that, you want to take that all the way down to your reasons.

You want to say, “This is what’s true for me and this is why.” And make sure you like your reason because, sometimes, it’s just another manipulation. You want to make sure that you understand, “I don’t want to be friends with this person anymore and this is why and I like that reason.” And knowing that, that doesn’t mean you don’t get to love them anymore, and knowing that that doesn’t mean that you don’t get to love yourself anymore. In fact, loving yourself is required before you make decisions. If you can’t make a decision and love yourself, that’s really important for you to know.

So, a lot of the coaching that I do where I see people loving at their own expense, quote unquote, they call it loving at their own expense, but love is never at your own expense; never. It’s never a denial of a truth that is yours.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t choose to make a sacrifice in your own life for someone else. But when you’re doing it from love, it feels amazing. It feels right. It feels good. You’re not reluctant to do that thing. You know that that is the most loving thing that you can do for yourself and another person.

I think about, like, with my kids, what I would be willing to do for them that would be a sacrifice. Now, here’s the deciding factor though; does it require me to lie? Because my history is that I have been willing to lie at my own expense for everybody else. That is not a genuine sacrifice that feels good. See the difference?

So, let’s do an example for – I’ll think of an example with my kid. So, if my kid says – let’s say Christian says, “Hey, will you drive me to the airport so I can go and do this thing?” And I don’t really want to drive him to the airport because I have a class I’m supposed to be teaching and I’m like, “I don’t really want to do that but I’m going to do that just to make him happy,” kind of thing, and then I lie about it, “I’d love to do that. That’s so great. That’s exactly what I want to do,” and not really telling him, “I’d rather not but I will.”

Do you see the difference? It’s like, the sacrifice needs to be made known and is truthful. Like, “Look, I don’t want to do this thing, but I’m willing to do it for you. It’s like, it’s not a want match, but I’m willing to do it because I love you. That’s what I’m going to do.” Versus the pretense and the lying that we often do at our own expense.

We don’t really want to do something, right? Or we tell them that we do want to do it when we don’t. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to do it because sometimes we do a lot of things that we don’t want to do, but we have to tell ourselves the truth about it, and the other person if we want to clean up that people pleasing. We have to stop the lying.

So go through and ask yourself where are you lying to yourself. Where are you telling yourself that things are okay where they’re not? Where are you telling yourself that you are loving something or enjoying something or wanting something when you’re really not?

When I ask this question to clients, they’re afraid to tell me the truth because they think that if they tell me the truth, that I’m going to make them change. That’s never the case. I always say, “Listen, you get to think whatever you want. My only suggestion is that you tell yourself the truth about it.” Because you can’t know what is genuine for you if you don’t have any integrity with yourself.

So if you tell yourself you want to do something but unconsciously you really don’t, you’re just lying to yourself, you miss out on you and what’s true for you and you miss out on your guidance and your direction and your wisdom.

So you can tell me, “Hey, I don’t want to be around my husband when he drinks.” Maybe you’re going to say that to me. “I hate it.” Tell yourself the truth about that. It doesn’t mean you have to stop being around him. You can do things you don’t want to do. But just tell yourself the truth about it.

And don’t lie to yourself and say that you’re doing it from a place of love for him or for you because lies, lying doesn’t create any foundation for love. Truth and love go together. That’s why it’s so challenging. Unconditional love is not for just anybody. It is tough. It’s much easier to people please.

People pleasing is the much easier life, trust me. It’s the much easier way to develop and stay in relationships on the surface. It’s gut-wrenching long-term personally but it’s easier socially because you get to tell people what they want to hear and have them respond the way you would love for them to respond.

But inside, you lose yourself and you certainly don’t get to experience what it means to unconditionally love someone. Unconditionally loving someone is telling them the truth, having them hate you, and loving them anyway. That is unconditional love.

Unconditional love is telling someone the truth and loving them no matter how they respond and loving yourself no matter how you respond. Lying to yourself and lying to other people is called people pleasing and that is not love. And you know because it feels terrible. It feels toxic for the long run. It’s a low-grade toxicity you create inside yourself.

So where are you lying to yourself? Where are you not willing to tell yourself the truth? And where are you lying to other people and not being willing to tell them the truth? You can continue to lie to other people if you want. Of course you can. But I want to highly recommend that you stop lying to yourself.

Tell yourself when you’re lying. Acknowledge when you’re lying. Acknowledge when you’re people pleasing. Do not call it unconditional love. And certainly do not call it unconditional love with a nod to The Life Coach School. Unconditional love is the truth and then we love.

So this is how it worked for me is I started to tell myself the truth about what I genuinely wanted and where I didn’t have boundaries and where I was lying. That was step one. I didn’t change anything right away. I just acknowledged it. I started to pay attention to it. I started seeing where I was calling something love where it was at my own expense.

And the longer I told myself the truth about it, the more intolerable it became to lie. And then I started telling other people the truth and loving them because that’s an act of love is to let someone really see you and to tell them the truth and stop lying to them. And that’s when I learned to unconditionally love.

So do not get those confused. Unconditional love is never at your own expense. It never includes lying. It always includes the truth and then loving yourself and them no matter how they respond.

Alright my friends, if you’re struggling with this, if you need help with this, get a coaching session in Scholars. This is the game-changer. If you're not unconditionally loving yourself, you cannot live your best version of yourself. You can’t even find out who you are if you’re lying to yourself, people pleasing yourself, and people pleasing other people. So do this work. It’s worth doing. Alright, please enjoy this excerpt from What’s Possible.

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What’s Possible by Brooke Castillo. Before I get started reading my rough draft of this book to you, I want to tell you a little bit of the back story behind this book and why I’m deciding to read it to you in its rawest form.

This book came about in such an interesting way. I was approached by an editor at Harper Collins. And it’s such a dream for me to tell this story because when I first started out, when I first wrote my first book 10 years ago, I dreamt of being able to have a publisher want to publish my book and have someone offer me a six-figure advance to write a book and all the things that happened when this amazing woman reached out to me and asked me to write a book for Harper Collins.

I was thrilled and I couldn’t wait to say yes and let’s do it and let’s go for it. And so I had so many books that I could have written. She told me she wanted me to write a book on business and I told her I wanted to write a book called What’s Possible.

And I wanted to write it for the girls and the women mostly. For the dudes too, but mainly for the girls and the women. We’re never taught to dream about what’s possible. So I put a book proposal together and I was very excited to submit it and the cover of the book proposal is the cover that you see on this audiobook.

And I sent it in and they replied back and said we absolutely love you, we want to do your book. Now, if you understand anything about book publishing, and I’ve learned a lot about it is that book publishing has changed a lot in the past 10 years, past 20 years since I first wanted to write and publish a book.

And it used to be that if you were just a really great writer, people would read really great books and you’d have a great audience and then you could become the bestseller and people would talk about your book. And that is still true if you’re extremely talented and you’re a great writer and you write a great story.

For non-fiction, you need to have a platform. Having a platform is really the best way to sell a book. So the bestselling book last year was Michelle Obama’s book, and the reason why that book is such a hit is not because she’s such an amazing writer, not because she writes such beautiful prose or that she has a lot of brand-new content.

But it’s because everybody loves her that reads her book and she has a huge platform of people that are interested and want her book. And the same was true for me. They offered me an advance to write a book for Harper Collins because I have a huge audience of people who are already fans and would buy the book.

And so I want to make sure that I tell you that because it’s important for you to know that it’s not - your book proposal and your book being found is mainly because Harper Collins and any other publisher is a business and they want to make money. And if you’re going to be able to sell your book to lots of people, they are going to want to make you an offer.

So they came back to me with a contract. They said they were going to come back to me with a contract within the next several weeks. So while they were working on the contract, I started writing the book. And I got through and wrote most of the book between the time they had given me the offer and were getting the contract done.

I literally wrote the entire book. It just poured out of me. And when I got the contract to sign, there was a lot of things in the contract that I didn’t like and that I didn’t want. And mostly, that the rights to my work that I put into this book would no longer be mine and that Harper Collins would have some rights to what I said and what I put in the book, and I just wasn’t willing to give that up.

And certainly, the financial benefits of doing the book were not significant compared to what I would be able to do if I sold the book on my own, and so it wasn’t worth it to me to risk my proprietary right to my own material just to have a Harper Collins book.

So I gave up on the dream and they were amazingly gracious and wonderful, and I went on about writing the book and refining it and editing it. And I did find someone who would edit the book and go through it and add a lot of professional verbiage to it and make it sound a lot more ready for the mainstream.

And the truth is when I got that copy back of it, back of the book, I didn’t like it as much. And because it was more palatable to the mainstream, it was less palatable to me. It had less of my voice in it, less of my, I think kind of snarkiness and belligerentness and the things that make people hate and love me.

And so I decided to not read you that version of the book. I decided to just read you my original rough draft version and as I go through and read the book, I’m going to also create notes and side comments and I’m going to laugh if I wrote something that doesn’t make any sense and I’ll try and talk you through it to make sense.

I think you will enjoy this more because you guys usually enjoy what I enjoy, and so I think that we will enjoy this process together. I love the message of this book. I love what I’m teaching in this book and I really think you will too. So let’s get started.

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A note to my reader. This is a book about extraordinary success. It’s a book about making lots of money. I’ve had the audacity to use one to define the other, and I’m not apologizing. I want you to know before we get started that you have picked up a book about becoming successful and wealthy. You’ll know if this book is for you if you just quietly, under your breath said, “Hell, yeah.”

This is also a business book because business is how we make money. That business might be your own or you may work for one, but businesses and success go together. Businesses, even big ones, are what reinvent possibility in our world year after year. They literally create all the things we need and use. They make the economy work and they pay us the dollars.

Being a woman fully engaged in the economy is the thrill ride of my life, and I want you to jump on with me. But mostly, this is a book about your brain. Without exception, using it well is the only way you will ever be extra successful and rich. The thoughts that run through it are the most expensive, most valuable, most important things that exist on planet Earth or the universe. It’s about time you started paying much more attention to them so you can create the exact life you’re choosing.

When you’re done reading this book, you’re going to know how to be extraordinarily successful, which means you will know how to do business and be very, very wealthy. I want this for you more than you can possibly know. I want it for you as much as I have wanted it for myself.

As a master life coach, I teach many things. I teach about unconditional love, self-care, relationships, and purpose. Those are all very important and worthy topics. My exclusion of them in this book is not a reflection of how much they matter. It’s simply an indication of my constraint.

This is my book dedicated to success, business, and money. It’s one of my favorite topics and something I’ve truly figured out how to do very well. I can’t wait to share every single secret with you.

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Introduction. What’s Possible. I didn’t even know it was possible to make one million dollars in one year until Amy Porterfield, an online entrepreneur, announced that she had done it. I remember exactly where I was standing in my white kitchen, listening to her podcast, staring at my phone. I froze. One million dollars a year.

I felt something shift inside me. She mentioned it, not like she had won the lottery, but like it was normal and doable. I got the sense that she would do it again the next year. She had launched some courses, built her list, and done some affiliate marketing. There was nothing impossible about anything she was doing.

On some level, I guess I knew it was possible to make millions of dollars in one year, but the problem was it had never even occurred to me to do it. It wasn’t even in the realm of optional things to think about. It was like a language I didn’t understand, a culture I’d never been exposed to.

As soon as I knew it was possible, it became my new goal, my new dream. I started to see everything differently. My brain changed. I started thinking in seven figures and acting towards seven figures. Two years later, in 2014, I made one million dollars in my business.

Since that day, I have not stopped talking about success, possibility, and money. I’m so thankful Amy shared her income out loud to teach me what was possible, and now I’m committed to doing the same. It turns out that what’s possible has to start with a single thought. The possibility has to occur to us. We have to think about it. We have to understand that our mind drives all results we ever create in our lives.

What has never occurred to you that is absolutely possible for your life? In this book, I’m going to show you how much you haven’t considered. I’m going to invite you to come out of the well-intended fog you might have grown up in to see it for what it really is.

Your education impossibility has been based on what has happened in the past when all your possibility is actually in the future. The most basic truth is that extraordinary success is about understanding that what is currently impossible for you now is the possibility for your future. Impossible is temporary.

So many of my students reveal to me that they never thought they could be authors, influences, millionaires, non-drinkers, naturally thin, unconditionally loving, the list goes on. It’s not that they tried to be these things and failed. The tragedy is they didn’t even consider trying. They didn’t even have one thought about it. And if we don’t think about it, we can’t feel it, we can’t do it, and we certainly will never create it.

When it finally occurred to me that I could make one million dollars, the possibility, the thought was born. It was now real. I had never been exposed to this consideration until that one moment in my kitchen. But then it was there. The more I considered it, the more I thought about it, the less impossible it became. It’s not magic. It’s how the world actually works. Thoughts ultimately create our results.

I think the revelation was so huge for me, in particular, it was because I had already come up with the self-coaching model. I was already using it every day in my business to manage my mind, coach my clients, and teach my students. I knew in my bones that the model was the way the world actually worked. I could find no evidence to the contrary.

The model teaches that our thoughts create our feelings, and our feelings create our actions, and our actions create our results. I had seen it over and over in my life, and understanding the model had already changed everything for me.

I had used it to lose weight and to stop drinking and develop a much more loving relationship with my mother and myself. I had watched it work on my students and their weight, relationships, and success as well. I was and still am convinced that everything starts with a thought and the rest of our lives will flow from our thinking. So when I heard Amy say that, I realized I had never thought I could make a million dollars in a year. That was the reason I wasn’t making it. That simple.

In that moment of revelation, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I had to go through the process of believing something new. I had to change my thinking from where I was to a new way of thinking. I had to follow the self-coaching model, a mind-feeling-action process that I was already using and teaching.

I had to let go of my current reality and what I knew in order to embrace a new reality based on what I now knew was possible. I committed myself. I made the possibility a proclamation and started thinking it on purpose all day every day. I went through all the self-coaching steps to get one million in one year.

These are the exact steps that will absolutely work for you as well. If you do the things I teach you in this book, you will achieve extraordinary success. I can prove it. I have dozens of coaches who have used these tools and the belief that more is possible than we ever thought to achieve success that blows our own damn minds. It is my honor to be able to teach you that process in this book.

Throughout this book, I’m going to invite you into my private discussions with a group of extraordinary women. This group of characters is my mentoring group that I meet with quarterly in windowed conference rooms in beautiful hotels. In these private rooms, we plan to do the impossible in each of our businesses, and then we go do it.

We spend a lot of time belly laughing and crying, but mostly we systematically change what we believe and therefore what we do. I’m excited for you to meet this group of unique, talented, and hilarious women. Stacey’s story in particular is going to blow your mind.

I’m going to start in part one with teaching you what you must know, what all extraordinary, successful women know. These are belief systems you need to adopt and use to replace whatever is currently keeping you stuck. I will tell you what they are and then go into detail why they are true and why you must believe them deeply and seriously.

I will warn you, you might be resistant to some of these beliefs at first. They aren’t easy to accept and believe. If they were, everyone would already have extraordinary success. But in order to step out of the crowd of universal belief that produces ordinary success, you’re going to have to stretch yourself.

In part two, I’m going to take you through the tools and steps of how to go from where you are now to extraordinary success. These are the tools and the practices that you will need to do over and over to change your brain, change the way you feel, act, and ultimately, change the results you are creating.

These tools are simple, not complicated, but difficult to apply. Anything new and unfamiliar is going to be rejected by your brain at first, so I’m going to ask you to stay with me and consider this material as the most valuable thing you can possibly learn, even though it might be difficult.

You must go through the process of letting go of everything you already know and do and exchange to do something completely new and foreign. But don’t worry, I’ve got you. I’ve been through this thousands of times with my students. It’s a predictable process that starts with an a-ha moment that feels more like remembering something you’ve always known than learning something new.

Then, as you recognize you might have been wrong about a lot of things, you will go through what we call the river of misery. It’s not enjoyable, but it’s a necessary part of the process. It’s a true identity crisis as you let go of one belief structure and accept a new one that will produce more successes than you ever thought possible.

I’ll hold your hand and show you the pitfalls and lead the way if you start veering off track. I’ll remind you what to think and what to do when you forget and I will keep believing in you and your dreams, even when you want to forget and quit. I will remind you of what is possible and how important it is.

In part three, I will give you some inspiration. I will share the stories of some of my most successful students who followed this exact process to achieve the impossible. These stories will blow your mind, but they will also show you how possible it is to do it yourself.

What I love most about these stories is that the women are all so different. They all come from different backgrounds, experience, and education. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is that they did the thought work I teach to overcome anything that got in the way of creating the success they now know is possible.

But before we get started, I want to give you a brief introduction to me as I will be your guide through this process. I love it when people ask me what I do at a cocktail party. When I answer, “I’m a life coach,” they do the equivalent of telling me I’m adorable. Half smile, twinkle of pity, and then they say, “Oh nice, what does your husband do?”

They have no idea that being a successful life coach is one of the most profitable careers on the planet today. I have been a life coach for 14 years. I started as a weight coach, doing one-to-one coaching, and now I run the best life coaching school in the world. I don’t say that lightly. I think we literally have the best tools, the best teachers, and the best program for the price of any single other opportunity out there.

I have reached a mastery level with my coaching from coaching thousands of hours with thousands of people. I have also spent a significant part of my working life thinking about how to make self-help and coaching tools better and more usable. I have used them in my own life to make it so much better than it used to be, and thousands of my die-hard student fans have followed suit

They are showing up in ways they never have and feeling better than they ever believed possible. I have been at this a long time, but I’m just getting started. In 2014, when I made one million dollars in one year, I realized that I had been putting way too many limitations on what I thought was possible for success.

Since that time, I’ve gone through the process I will teach you in this book to increase my income every year. I went from one million to two million to five million to 17 million, to 25 million. And this year, we’ll do 35 million. My current goal is to get to 100 million within the next eight years.

I promise you, I’m not a special unicorn. I’m not different from you. I’m not more capable or smarter or have more advanced degrees. I’ve simply reprogramed my brain into a new reality of what is possible in my lifetime. I will prove it by introducing all of my students who are all very different from me, except for the process we follow and the extraordinary success we all have.

I can’t wait for you to meet them, but more importantly, I can’t wait for you to join them. It is possible, my friend. Let’s begin.

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.