Ep #459: Time and Trust

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode 459.

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 friends. Welcome to another episode of Walking with Brooke. I am actually on the trail in South Beach, Miami, walking right next to the beach with all the other folks in beautiful, gorgeous weather. I came out here to speak at an event and record some videos and it’s just been an amazing time. I’m really enjoying it.

We’re also celebrating my girl Tonya Leigh’s birthday, so I’m looking forward to that. She gets in today. But I wanted to talk a little bit about time and trust today. And there are some things that have occurred recently that have really made me think about the idea of what you say you’re going to do and actually doing it.

So if you listened to the last podcast with Monica, we talked about self-discipline and kind of honoring your word to yourself. And I’ve talked about boundaries before as it applies to time, and I’ve talked about being on time a lot, and I’ve talked about planning your time a lot.

So I’m going to kind of cover all of those topics in a more general way today. So I want to start with time as an opportunity to build trust with yourself. I just spoke on stage on a panel with Stedman Graham and he said, “We are all equal because we all have 24 hours in one day.”

And I don’t know why, but that just, what did he just say? That’s crazy. Now, we don't have equal money, we don’t have equal opportunity when we’re born, we don’t have equal situations, but we all have equal time.

I hadn’t thought of it in that way because - the reason why it’s so important and so impactful is that time is by far our most precious asset because nobody can get more of it. We all have a limited amount of time on this planet and no one’s trading their time on this planet for money because that doesn’t make any sense.

And this is why people focus so much on their health and taking care of their health and taking care of themselves so they can have more time. So when I think about time being our most precious asset, and I compare it to maybe money or gold or diamonds and how we treat those things compared with time, it’s fascinating to me.

And I think a lot of us, many of my clients, I know I used to be very sloppy with my time. So I had this visualization of going in to someone’s house and there just being money strewn all over. There’s just dollar bills, $100 bills, thousands of dollars just laying on the ground, in the corner, in the cupboards, it’s not organized, it’s not stacked, it’s not counted. It’s not disciplined.

And for so many of us, that’s how we treat our 24 hours. We treat our 24 hours as sloppy, as if it doesn’t matter. So I want you to think about if each one of those hours was a diamond, or a million dollar bill. Is there even such a thing?

How would you treat your time differently? And one of the ways you can do that is by planning your time to do the things that you most want to do on this planet while you’re here. And you saw from two podcasts ago, one of the ways to really hone in on your values and what you want to do and how you want to spend your time here is to ask yourself the five questions of how you would handle your life if you only had a year left to live.

So that’s a big way of getting a hold of what really matters to you. But if we want to take it down to a more finite level, granular level, we can think about it in 24 hours and how we treat our time and how we treat other people’s time.

One of the things that I am known for is being punctual. And the other day I was driving with one of the men that usually drives me in Austin and he said - he doesn’t usually drive me. He’s driven me a couple of times. And he said, “Oh, I’ve driven you before. You’re very punctual.”

And I don’t know, for me I was like, yeah, I love that he knows that, he noticed that about me. It was something he took note of. So I was thinking about, any of my events that you attend start right on time and end right on time. Maybe 10-minute variants as an exception.

If you attend a class in Scholars, you will notice that it starts right on the hour and ends right on the hour 99% of the time unless there’s some kind of glitch. You will notice that this podcast gets posted at the exact same time every single week 99% of the time. Very punctual, very much on time, very much committed to doing what I say I’m going to do with my time, to both myself and to other people.

So I want to talk a little bit about what it’s like to go to an event or what it’s like to have an appointment with someone and have them not honor their time, not do what they say they’re going to do, and not honor your time, which is saying what they were going to do to you.

So I recently leased my penthouse in Austin. I leased it out for a year and as I was moving out, I needed some movers to come and pack up some stuff. And they said they would be there between 11 and 12, which to me is crazy that they have an hour of time that they can actually show up.

So when someone says that, they’re going to arrive either at 11:01 or any time between that and 11:59. So we were waiting for them. And at noon, I contacted my assistant and I said they still aren’t here. She replied back to me and said, “Okay, now they’re saying they’ll be there at 12:30.”

Now, I am supposed to be taking a plane to come here to Miami. So at 12:30 they still weren’t there. So then they show up at about 12:45 and kind of saunter in and say, “Oh hi, we’re here.” I said, “Yo, you guys, where are the boxes? Where’s the tape? We got to get going. You’re already an hour and a half beyond when I hoped you’d be here, so now we just really need to get to work.”

They never even acknowledged that they hadn’t honored their commitment, they hadn’t done what they said they were going to do. And so at that moment, I thought a lot about - because what happened was I was supposed to be getting on a flight. So the driver that was supposed to take me, the one that said I was very punctual, had to wait an hour because the other people were late.

I was telling my friend, I was like, “This bothers me so much, I do not like to be late. I do not like to tell someone or myself that I’m going to be somewhere at a certain time and then not show up at that time for myself or for that person.”

And so now obviously, there’s exceptions. I was an hour late to this situation with the driver, and he had to wait for me. And my assistant couldn’t have anticipated that because they had told us that they were going to arrive at 12:30.

So there were all these things that required me, I guess, to show up late. Now, I could have canceled the movers and still shown up on time, but what I want to point out here is that for me, it is a rare exception and there are going to be rare exceptions for all of you.

There are going to be things you can’t control and you're going to show up late for a thing. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about most of the time. Do you make sure to arrive to an appointment, to a meeting, to the start of a class, to the end of a class on time?

And if you don’t, I want you to ask yourself the question why. Why don’t you do that? And how do you think that affects your treatment of your time and your treatment of other people’s time; our most valuable and precious asset?

So when I go to an event, I remember going to Tony Robbins, going to an event, and showing up right on time to the event. And coming in and expecting the event to start right on time, expecting that he would come out on stage right when he said he would, and to end up waiting a long time before that actually happened.

And I’ve since learned, especially doing much larger events, that sometimes people aren’t registered, sometimes there’s not enough people that have had a chance to get through the line to get in the door. That's all going to happen.

But I think the acknowledgment that, hey, you have to be registered by a certain time because we start exactly on time, so make sure you’re registered by 8:30 because we’re going to start right at nine, whenever possible, creates the experience of trust between both of them.

I can rely on you. You do what you say you're going to do. You don’t just say it’s going to start at nine. You actually start at nine. You don’t say that you’re going to meet me for lunch at two. You actually do it. Your word means something.

Now, if you show up 15 minutes late on the regular, people are going to start thinking, “What she says isn’t really what she means.” Now, you can apply that to time, but I think that it actually affects every part of that relationship.

If somebody sees you as someone who says they’re going to do something and doesn’t actually do what they say, there’s a variance to it, there’s some slide room, there’s an apology included usually, then the other things that you say, the other things that you commit to aren’t going to be taken as seriously.

And for those of you who are coaches or business people out there in the world, trying to help people, trying to serve people, one of the most important relationship qualities you can develop with your clientele is trust. And one of the ways that you build trust the fastest is consistency of your word and your action together. You do what you say you’re going to do.

I’ve been having a lot of questioning around what does it mean to be easygoing with someone, and what does it mean to be more strict and more precise with someone. And I deal with this with my employees, I deal with this with my friends, colleagues.

I think there’s a beautifulness to an easygoing affect, right? It lets someone off the hook, they don’t have to feel bad about being late, life is more flowing, it’s more easygoing, right?

But you never really have any certainty. What does it really mean to say I’m coming over at five? Do we know - is there an interpretation? Does that really mean between five and six? If that’s the case, why don’t we just say that?

So there’s that balance between that and hey, you’re 30 seconds late. What the heck is going on? And one of the things that I’ve noticed with the effectiveness of my team, and I’m talking mostly now about my assistant team because that’s who I work directly with.

My assistants know that there is a precision to my calendar. There’s a precision to what time our calls are going to start. There’s a precision to what time they’re going to end. There’s a precision to my expectations. There’s a precision to what I tell them I’m going to do for them, I do for them.

And we all trust each other with those constraints. We know that there’s not a lot of easygoingness to be happening in the relationship. So I’ve been questioning, is that a good thing or is that a negative thing? Is that too precise?

And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the most loving thing that I can do is to create a sense of certainty, to create a sense of commitment, of doing what we say we’re going to do when we say we’re going to do it. I think that’s what makes life easygoing. I can trust them and they can trust me. And when you have that level of trust, you can relax.

Not have to worry, “Are they going to be there? Are they going to show up? Are they going to be late? Are they even going to acknowledge that they’re late?” You know these friends that you have that are always on time, right? They’re always respecting their time and your time. So when they say they’re going to be there at a certain time…

Now notice, those friends possibly are the ones that bring out that in you. If I’m going to meet my friend Moni, I know she’s going to be on time. I’m for sure going to be on time, if not a little bit early because I don’t want her waiting for me. It’s not a good use of her time and I want to respect her time.

And she’s taught me in so many ways how to treat her, with her consistency, and with being true to her word on when she’s going to be somewhere. So I don’t want to be authoritative on this and say you should always be on time. I’m not saying that.

I just want you to consider if time is your most valuable asset and it’s other people’s most valuable asset, how do you treat their diamonds? How do you treat their gold? How do you treat your diamonds? How do you treat your gold? How do you treat your most valuable asset?

And I also want to suggest that honoring your calendar and honoring your time is easy. It’s easier than not doing it because you just do what you say you’re going to do, and you just follow your schedule most of the time. Sometimes you’re going to not allow for enough traffic time, and sometimes you’re going to get your time zone messed up.

Listen, that’s every once in a while, that’s a given, that’s not a problem. It’s when it’s happening more than 90% of the time that you have to question, why am I not being more precise with my most valuable asset?

And when I think about people who are much more successful than me, that have much more money than me, more followers, more success than me, all the things, bigger houses, bigger toys, bigger influence, and I look at their lives and I say, “Yeah, but they have 24 hours too in every single day. When it comes down to it, are they treating their time more valuable than I am?”

And I was talking to one of my friends about this, one of my friends who’s on his phone a lot, and we were talking right after I spoke with Stedman. We were talking about social media and I said to him, I said, “How many followers does Oprah have?” Or something, we were talking about her influence. She was 27 million followers or something.

And I said to him, “Do you think she’s on social media? Do you think she’s swiping on social media?” And he said no. I said, “Oh really?” He’s like, “She doesn’t have time for that.” I was like, “Really?” Because if anyone has time to be swiping on social media, isn’t it Oprah? She’s a billionaire.

If she wants to swipe on social media, she definitely has the same 24 hours that we do. But he’s like, “There’s no way she’s on there.” And we looked on her site of who she’s following on Instagram and it’s only herself. She doesn’t follow anyone but herself.

And it had such an impact on me to think of all the people that aren’t consuming with their time, that aren’t distracting with their time, that aren’t buffering with their time, who aren’t sitting on social media. Oprah would be one of them. Her time is more valuable to her than that.

And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t swipe on social media. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that our perception of what is a good use of our time should be questioned and you should ask yourself, if I have 24 diamonds, how do I want to spend them? If I have $24 million, how do I want to spend it?

If I had 24 hours, the most valuable asset, way more important than money or diamonds, how do I want to allocate that time? How do I want to honor that time? And how do I want to create trust with that time that I have?

I will tell you, planning your week with your prefrontal cortex, which is making decisions ahead of time with your highest level brain and honoring those plans, is the key to succeeding in your life. You cannot let your primitive brain run your life and get the highest level of success possible. You literally can’t do it.

You’re going to plan with your highest brain and you’re going to have a fit with your lowest brain and you’re going to do it anyway over and over and over again until you create the life you want. And how you create the life you want is directly related to how you treat your highest asset in your business life, in your life, which is the time you have on this planet.

What do you want to spend your time doing? How do you want to treat your time? I’m simply asking you to answer the question. Have a beautiful week everyone. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

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