Ep #395: The 90 Day Relationship

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode 395.

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.

Hello my beautiful friends. What is happening? I’m excited for this podcast today. It’s called The 90 Day Relationship and it’s interesting because I had this 90-day relationship a long time ago.

And we created a course around it and created marketing around it and we’re going to include it in Scholars. And I’m so proud of this course. I think it is such a cool addition to Scholars and I’m excited for all of you who’ve been asking for it, who want to do 90-day relationships, and want to be a part of this experience that I had an am still having.

As you know, I decided - or maybe you didn’t know. After my divorce, I decided to go back into the dating world. And I didn’t want to start having hookups or just be dating for the sake of dating. I wanted to use dating and relationships as a way to further my growth as a human being and explore love and explore an emotional connection with someone, not just a physical connection with someone.

And so I created this idea and executed it in my own life, and then was telling all my friends and everyone about it. And everyone was going crazy, like, “What are you doing? This sounds amazing, I want to be a part of this, how do I do a 90-day relationship?”

So then I was teaching everyone about it and then my students started asking for it, and so we decided to create a course. Me and my partner in my 90-day relationship created a course around it. And so you’ll be able to learn all about it.

We did calls in Scholars to prepare for the course and then we recorded the course. And so we talk about our experience and how we set it up and what an amazing benefit we both got from doing the 90-day relationship. And although we intended on it only being 90 days, it ended up being nine months and it was pretty awesome.

And so I want to invite you to learn a little bit about it on this podcast, but more importantly, to jump into Scholars and watch the whole course to decide if you would like to have a 90-day relationship yourself.

We set it up for someone who is dating. That is the way we executed the 90-day relationship. That’s the way that we lived it. But you can also, and many of our students have done a 90-day relationship within their marriages and within relationships that they’re already in in order to take a deeper dive into the experience of a conscious, focused relationship.

What I have learned since I started dating and dating as an older woman who has already done a lot of self-help and a lot of self-development is that there is nothing more exhilarating and revealing than our relationships. And you can even do a 90-day relationship with a friend.

It is an intense experience of being in a relationship with someone where you can really explore all of what happens in a human brain in relationship with other humans. And all of the primal feelings that come up, all the primal thoughts that come up, all of our natural inclinations from years of evolution that come up.

Not to mention your whole history with relationships that show up in relationships, your history of your childhood, all of your thought patterning will be revealed to you in relationships. And so it’ll be an opportunity for you to really grow.

Since my 90-day relationship that turned into nine months, we have since broken up and are no longer together, but it will always be a relationship that I will cherish having grown so much from it that I highly, highly recommend to anyone who wants to use relationships to further their growth to try a 90-day relationship.

So let me just tell you a little bit about what it is and how I came up with it. I originally was sitting around a table with some friends of mine and I presented this idea to them. I said, “Hey, what do you guys think about me going on to these apps, these dating apps and proposing a 90-day relationship to someone that I match with?”

And there was lots of mixed messages or mixed responses I should say in terms of what people thought about this idea. Some people thought it was too long of a time to commit, other people thought it was too short of a time, and what if you really liked each other?

That was the funniest thing is they were like, “What if you end up really liking each other?” I’m like, well, obviously you can extend the 90 days. It’s not like you have to end it.

But it was interesting how it kind of got everyone thinking about dating in a different way. So we had some really good conversations about it. I actually think my initial proposal of time might have been more like six months, and then I changed it to 90 days.

So as I went out on the apps and I started presenting this idea to men that I wanted to date, many of them were very intrigued by it and we would talk about it on first and second dates about it being kind of a container of time where we could choose to be exclusive with each other and kind of dive into a relationship.

There could be lots of intimacy and lots of vulnerability and lots of communication on purpose in order to grow but not necessarily in order to maintain a long-term relationship.

And I think this is what happens in a lot of relationships and a lot of dating scenarios. I think people look at each other, especially those of us who are older to dating, older in our lives, it’s like, we don’t want to waste our time.

It’s like we sit down at the first date and think is this a person that I could marry? Is this a person I could spend the rest of my life with? And it’s so limiting because if the answer is no, this isn’t someone I want to spend the rest of my life with, then it’s going to be very limiting to the number of people that you may or may not want to date.

And I think a lot of times, we think it’ll be a waste of time, if this isn’t going to be my partner forever, I’m really looking for a long-term intimate partner, if this isn’t going to be my partner forever, this will be a waste of time. And I want to argue that it’s not a waste of time.

I think what is a waste of time is going on a lot of first dates looking for someone to marry and rejecting them immediately and not growing. It’s like, there’s not a lot of growth that comes from just constantly rejecting people because you’re only giving them a first-date chance to be marriage material.

I have found that actually developing a relationship with somebody and diving into communication and intimacy and love is so much more advancing, even if that’s not the person that you’re going to end up with.

So I know that it’s kind of an alternate view on things, but I have found it to be very true. I have been in short-term relationships that have been very intense since my divorce and I have learned and grown so much from each one of those, versus just dating, kind of casual dating, I don’t feel like I have learned as much about myself.

So what it is is it’s basically a timeframe, it’s a 90-day timeframe where you invite someone in to have a relationship with you for that period of time. And you can decide the rules of it, but my recommendation is that it’s exclusive.

If you’re choosing to date, this is a dating situation, you choose to be exclusive with each other to just focus on each other for 90 days and to take the vulnerability and the love and the commitment as deep as you can within that 90 days with no pressure to continue after that.

It’s like, the option to break up, the option to not date any longer is really genuinely there after 90 days. And you know that that’s what you're getting into with each other, and so I feel like it’s something that more people are willing to commit to because there isn’t the forever, there isn’t the burden of forever.

It also filters out anyone who is just a player, who is just wanting to have just a physical relationship, who isn’t interested in doing the more intimate kind of communication, the more intimate discussions on values and life and growth and truth and any kind of trauma, or anything that may come up within the relationship.

So in this course, I share very personally my experience with that and what came up for me and the things that I worked through and how powerful it was to have such a positive and a negative experience in such a short and intense amount of time.

And I think now in retrospect, looking from within the relationship, from the 90 days, which turned into the nine months, what I learned about myself within that relationship was incredibly powerful.

But what you don’t see in the course is of course now, in hindsight, my perspective, which is what I will talk about in the final video that I’m going to create for the course is that looking back on the relationship now and how I showed up and how I didn't show up, and the things that I said, and the things that I revealed and how much that helped me grow as a woman, how much that helped me grow as a person.

And being able to look back at that relationship and see what I liked about myself, what I liked about my partner, what worked, what didn’t work has made me accelerate in my life so much because of that timeframe.

One of the things that made this easy was that my partner in the 90-day relationship said to me, “Bring all of you, bring all of you to this relationship.” And I had never had that experience before where I showed up for a relationship and I just laid it all out.

I just said this is who I am, this is me authentically, this is what I’m afraid of, this is what I love, this is what I don’t want, this is what I do want. I let myself be my exuberant, loud, crazy self in that relationship in a way that made me kind of see myself in a new way.

Within that 90-day relationship, I practiced in really intense ways communication and how to talk to someone in a way that was very intimate and very open and very vulnerable. I learned how to listen, I learned how to give feedback, I learned how to hold space within a relationship that’s a little bit different than coaching within a relationship.

I practiced loving. One of my commitments within that 90 days was I wanted to love this man more than anyone had every been loved in 90 days and how could I show up and love hard and well and what did that look like and what did that feel like to me.

That was a really powerful experience. And one of the things he had said to me is, “You’re just relentless with love.” It’s just like all of his insecurities or issues that came up were just overwhelmed with how much I was flowing love towards him and talking about love with him and kind of removing all the barriers that separated us from loving each other.

It was really powerful. Which created this level of intimacy in such a short amount of time that I swear, we hadn’t even been together that long and we were finishing each other’s sentences. We were understanding where the other was coming from. We were feeling each other in different spaces. Like, I could feel something wasn’t quite right and he could feel when something wasn’t quite right with me.

And we could talk about our fears. We could talk about things that maybe I would never have been willing to talk about in another relationship because of the structure and the way that it was set up.

The other piece of it that I really practiced was self-awareness. I kept watching myself react, watching myself feel, watching myself open, watching myself close and noticing things that I’d never noticed about myself because I was – especially in the beginning – kind of in the throes of that falling in love experience. I was able to see myself kind of in a new light and in a new way.

I had tons of adrenaline happening. I had tons of excitement. But I also had a ton of fear come up and worry and avoidance and anxiety that came that I was able to pay attention to and listen to.

When I was originally starting my marriage way back in the day, 25 years ago, I didn’t have the tools that I have today. I didn’t have the self-awareness that I have today. So, being able to go through that relationship and kind of pay attention to myself with the Model, with the Thought Model and understanding what was going on with me was so revealing, was so interesting to see, like, all of these fears and all of these worries and concerns that I hadn’t been in touch with, that I thought I had worked through, that I thought were done resurface in a way that made me feel really insecure at times, and really secure at other times and really confident at some times and then really worried and anxious.

And so, I was able to kind of bring up some things to work on that I didn’t even know were there, and that was very powerful.

And then, the last piece that really helped was finding acceptance, finding acceptance with him, finding acceptance with me, for the relationship, for the circumstances that were going on with him in his life, the circumstances that were going on with me in my life. And these were new things that I needed to accept about myself and new things that I needed to accept about my life and about kind of how the human experience begins and interacts in relationship.

And so, because it was new and because it was such a short amount of time, I was able to drop into acceptance so much faster than had I been afraid. And this is what’s so interesting about it.

I remember so many times in the relationship where I wanted to leave, especially in the beginning. I was like, “This isn’t going to work. I can’t do this. I’m out of here.” And I kept telling myself, “I’m going to leave. I’m going to leave. I’m going to leave.” And that’s kind of my pattern of avoidance.

But because we had committed to this 90 days, I stayed. And because I stayed, I was able to really accept my own fears and not react to them, and accept my own avoidant tendencies and not react to them because I had this short amount of time to explore that.

And I think this could be true even within a marriage. If you’ve been married to someone for a long time and you go into this 90 days with them and you follow all the worksheets that we give you and you follow kind of the process of the 90-day relationship, you can drop into things that maybe you had just pushed to the back, maybe you had just buffered away. And you can really drop into true acceptance of yourself and your partner when you kind of bring up these things to explore and talk about and be honest about with each other.

I think it could take any relationship to a deeper level of intimacy. I think for me, it was really falling in love with today. One of the things that’s great about a 90-day relationship is you don’t get caught up in the potential of the person. You don’t – and this is very common in relationships is we’re like, “Oh, they’re getting better,” or, “They’ll be different.” Or, “They’re going to, as soon as…” we do that to ourselves.

And we start falling in love with this version of this person that isn’t who they are in this moment. And that’s the same for us, like, “I’m going to get better in this relationship. I will change in this relationship.”

But one of the things that the 90-day relationship did is it just made us drop into, “This is what we have in this moment and this can be beautiful and this can be love and we can grow from this and we can tell each other the truth about this.”

It really collapsed time into pure unconditional love. And whenever there was resistance to that, whenever there was this, “I want you to change to be different so I can love you more easily,” we were able to talk about it in a way that let us show up in our truth and make an attempt to love ourselves and the other person right now in this moment with not having to be better than we were, not having to be different than we were, but just being who we actually were in that moment.

And so, if any of you are tired of the endless dating process, you’re in a new relationship that you aren’t sure about, if you have maybe been in a marriage for a while and you’ve lost each other, you’ve gotten into just some routines and just some patterns with each other that you feel like you’re not growing in your relationship, you’re not telling each other the truth, there’s not a lot of active love, this could be an amazing opportunity for you.

The 90-day relationship is really about igniting yourself and being willing to show up in a way that you’ve never showed up before for 90 days. You can do this with your friendships. You can do this with even family members. We’ve had people do the 90-day relationship with their parents, a 90-day relationship with their kids.

So, if this sounds like something that you might be interested, I’d like to invite you to come into Scholars. The class will be live when you enter into Scholars and you will be able to dive right in, get into those videos, watch the videos, and we have worksheets in there and exercises for you to do with your partner.

We tell you how to start one, how to invite someone in, how to communicate with them on the apps in order to get it done. And we also talk about how to actually execute the relationship once you get into it. What are the things to look out for? What are the things you need to worry about?

We share our experience of what it was like for us and how much it changed our lives and what came up for us and the obstacles that we had and I think so many of you will benefit from sharing our experience and learning the idea and the concept of the 90-day relationship.

So, if you are interested, if this excites you, please join us in Scholars. We’d love to have you. Just go to thelifecoachschool.com and you can sign up there and we will see you inside. 90-day relationship, everyone. See you then. 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.