Ep #500: The Best of 500

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo episode number 500.

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.

500 episodes, my friends. I am celebrating. I was lying in bed last night thinking about this. That’s like 500 weeks. 500 weeks of recording a podcast and never missing a week. It’s wild to me that I actually did this. And for this episode, what I asked Pavel to do was to go back through 500 episodes and find the best of clips. And he did that and it’s awesome.

And as I was listening through the best of clips, I listened to this one section, and you’ll hear it in a minute, where I talk about the compound effect. Where I talk about recording the podcast and the compound effect of that weekly consistent commitment that I had to record it and what results that got me.

And it’s like recording one podcast, or recording a podcast for six weeks or recording a podcast for a year may not give you, and it didn’t for me, by the way in the beginning, any huge results. But when you consistently show up and consistently do your job and consistently produce, you end up with this incredible asset and this body of work, which I now have just in the podcast alone.

That doesn’t even include all the other content that I’ve created. But this is just my free content. It’s 500 episodes of content, of my work that is out there publicly in the world. And as I have gone through my life, the most significant kind of feedback that I have received is on the podcast.

So many people have listened to the podcast and changed their life just listening to it. And they recognize me out in the street and they know everything about me because I share everything on the podcast. And I’ve created this community of podcast listeners because of that consistently showing up and delivering for 500 weeks. And I love my past self so much for doing that, for me now to have this level of accomplishment.

I’ve been talking about this recently on the podcast, pretty much for the last year, on kind of how I’ve had this reflective milestone in my life. I think turning 50, I think making $50 million, I think having 500 podcast episodes, 50 million downloads, like all of these touchstones have had a huge impact on me in my life in really deciding and being reflective on myself and my identity and who I am.

And I’ve been doing this like reinvention, for those of you who are kind of on that reinvention train with me, that took the Reinvention class, like for me, that class, teaching that class and doing that class myself has completely evolved me to this next level of where I am.

And so sometimes when I look back on some of my previous classes and some of my previous podcasts, it’s like with this kind of odd feeling of admiration for who I used to be and what I ended up accomplishing. It’s kind of like an out of body experience. It’s really cool.

So I just want to thank each and every one of you who have been my listeners, who’ve been part of my community. I want to thank my students and my coaches, everyone who has given me amazing feedback. Those of you who freak out if for some reason the podcast isn’t uploaded on time and you wonder what’s happened, I love that. I love that we have been this consistent.

In April, it will be 10 years that we have been doing this podcast together. And I am very, very excited about the future and some new announcements that I’m about to make over the next couple of months about some things that I’m doing. And I feel like this has given me the foundation to be able to take everything to that next level.

So stay tuned, I will be making two major announcements coming up over the next couple of months. So I’ll make sure I put them here on the podcast so you’re aware of them. And also make sure you’re on my email list so you can get the details.

Here you are with the best of 500 episodes. I want to take my hat off and bow to Pavel, who has done – him and his team – who have done every single one of my podcast episodes with me for the past 500 episodes. And I just recently got to meet him in person.

It’s so crazy that we hadn’t met in so long. He came to Mastermind and we just had, we’ve had like this amazing relationship. So thank you, Pavel, thank you, team, and everyone on your team that has made all of these episodes so meaningful to me and to all of the listeners.

So without further ado, please enjoy the best of 500 episodes.

Our thoughts are what create our feelings. And everything you do in your life is because you want to feel a certain way. Every single thing you do is because you want to feel a certain way. That’s just really good to know. And if your feelings are caused by your thoughts, and everything you do in your life is in order to feel better, wouldn’t it be important to know what you’re thinking?

It absolutely would. And the problem is, nobody teaches us this. They don’t pull us aside and say, okay, here’s the deal. Everything you want in your life is because of a feeling. The feeling that you think you will have in getting it or the feeling you think you will avoid in not getting it.

So if feelings are the most important thing, don’t you think they should teach us that all of our feelings are caused by our thoughts? And maybe we should learn how to think on purpose so we can create the feelings that we want? That would have been amazing. I really wish someone would have pulled us aside freshman year. Freshman year, the misery of freshman year and taught us this very thing.

Right now you may have a connection in your brain that believes you’re not good enough. I know for sure I have many of these connections in my brain. Some days, for example this morning, when I wake up my brain is filtering and looking for everything that is not good in my life. Everything that didn’t go well yesterday and everything that’s not going to go well today.

Really? That’s what I have to wake up to. That’s what my brain wants to filter and look for. So I have to consciously pay attention to what my brain is doing. Like I said many times, it’s a toddler with a knife, right? It’s innocently running around, not trying to hurt anybody, but it is. And so I have to redirect it. I have to tell it what to think. I have to practice new thoughts.

And I want to offer that there, you know, I have given you some tools on how to do this. One of them is to do thought downloads with whatever is in your brain, which means you sit down and you write down everything that’s in there, like emptying out a purse. And then you proceed to run models on a few of those thoughts and then create new models of things you want to believe.

So when you decide, consciously, what you want to believe and you practice it enough, then it becomes unconscious. It’s kind of like a three-step process. You see what you’re currently thinking. You change it to what you want to be thinking. And then you practice what you want to be thinking on a regular basis until it becomes unconscious, till it becomes natural.

So what are the ways of doing this? So decide, first, what you want to feel, create and do. Decide on the thoughts you need to believe in order to create and feel and do what it is you want to do. Then make a list of those thoughts. And you have to tune in and check in with those thoughts and make sure that they’re believable and when you read them, they feel good.

Now the reason why I say this is sometimes people try to go from a very negative thought pattern to a very positive thought pattern, and all that happens is a lot of negativity. So if you go from “I hate my body” to “I love my body, it’s beautiful and there are unicorns everywhere,” you’re never going to get to the place where you believe that. So all you’re going to hear is, no there aren’t. No you’re not. No there aren’t. No you’re not, right? And so that’s what you will be reinforcing, the negative side of it.

So I’ve offered this before, you can go from “I hate my body” to “I have a body.” And you can practice that thought until you’re able to kind of drop into this new thought patterning. Then maybe you could switch to, “I have a body with the potential to be thin,” right? That you can believe. Then maybe you move to, “I have a body that is thin,” and you can start believing that even before you get there, but you have to, many times, go gradually to that place.

Here are some of my thoughts I use to create confidence and create the feeling of confidence. “I know this matters.” Whenever I’m doing something and I think about what I’m doing mattering, instead of what people will think about me, I drop right into a place of confidence. “I know this will help people” takes the focus off myself and give me confidence in helping people.

“What they think of me is out of my control,” releases me from thinking thoughts about what other people are thinking about me and has me focusing just on what I can control. “What I think of me matters. I matter, what I say matters, who I am matters.” And I think the thing, “who I am matters,” it’s like this caveat is it was decided by something bigger than you and me.

So it’s kind of like this idea that I matter is really not something I created. It’s not something that I decided, it’s just something that’s true and was decided by something much bigger than me. And I kind of just put my shoulders up and be like, you know what I mean? Like, we matter and there’s nothing we can do about it. Okay, so I think that adds a huge sense of confidence to that deeper knowing and that deeper understanding, and it takes us out of that arrogance, right? Because I matter and you matter.

Now, why does confidence even matter? Why is it something that we should strive for and create in our lives? And I personally think that it’s very important because with your dreams, plus confidence, you create the life you’re meant to live. Your dreams plus self-doubt, create a lot of resentment. And so I think it’s very important to generate as much confidence as you possibly can.

So confidence will really determine the actions you take towards the things you want in your life. That’s why it matters.

I think that we need to really consider how much we want pleasure to be the happiness that we feel. And I’m talking about false pleasure, right? Do we want to cobble together a bunch of false pleasures and call that happiness? Or do we want to remove all of those things and find a way to be happy without them?

Is it possible now? If you’ve been using a lot of pleasure in your life, you probably won’t think it’s possible because when you remove all those pleasures, you go through withdrawal and you probably feel deprived and you probably are left with all the emotions that you’ve been unwilling to feel and life feels terrible.

But on the other side of that, when you take away all those buffers and you pursue wellbeing, this is what happens. And this is why I can genuinely say my life is better now. And I’m going to use the example of drinking, but please just put anything in this slot that you overdo.

With drinking, I loved drinking. I would have a glass of wine and I would feel that wonderful, warm glow in my brain and in my body that would make me think that the day had just gotten tremendously better within the last hour, even though I’m still sitting in the same spot, nothing’s changed, right? I’ve just convinced my brain that everything’s better now.

And I tried to imagine a life where I didn’t have that ability to drink something and immediately have my brain think that everything was better. I thought that, in my imagination, what I would be left with if I didn’t have the buffer would be the feeling of emptiness, the feeling of loneliness, the feeling of boredom. I wouldn’t ever be able to make that better. I had given myself this false idea that the only way to change the way I feel after a long day is alcohol.

But what I learned when I stopped drinking is that, first of all, none of those emotions need to be eradicated immediately. It’s okay to feel unhappy sometimes, it’s not the end of the world. And in fact, when you allow yourself to really feel it, you get to know yourself in a much deeper way.

And when you get to know yourself in a much deeper way, you start finding the causes of that unhappiness, and then you can start to change them. And what you notice that’s very different from the false pleasures is that it’s sustainable.

So when I get pleasure from being able to wake up in the morning and not feel icky, when I get the pleasure of being able to sleep all the way through the night because I haven’t had any alcohol, when I get the pleasure of feeling totally in control of myself because I haven’t had any alcohol, when I get the pleasure of being able to put on any clothes that I want to wear and not worry that I’ve gained weight because I’m not buffering, that pleasure is ongoing and sustaining and actually gets better and better and better.

And that is the pleasure that we are meant to experience in our life. And I think natural pleasures, accumulated, equal happiness.

You don’t want to eliminate your negative thinking, you want to get good at allowing pain to be there. That is where true strength comes from, is the acceptance of that 50%. Allowing the negative pain to be there and then changing it if you are the one creating it, when you are the one creating it.

So many of us compound our pain by judging it and resisting it. We think we shouldn’t be in pain. We shouldn’t be doubtful. We shouldn’t be hating ourselves. We shouldn’t be judging ourselves. We shouldn’t be feeling shame. We shouldn’t be insecure. We shouldn’t be nervous. We shouldn’t be anxious. We shouldn’t be heartbroken.

If you could drop all your shoulds about your thoughts, you would be free. You’d be free to feel negative emotion. You’d be free to walk this planet in the truth of the 50/50. I am heartbroken. I am in shame. I am in self-doubt. I am in insecurity. And say yes to that as part of the human experience, as part of being a human being that has the full range of emotions in your life.

Nobody wants to be happy all the time, I promise you. We tell ourselves the story that we want to be happy all the time, but then we have to be happy about horrible things. And no one wants to be happy about horrible things, and horrible things exist. And we want to judge those things as horrible, but we don’t want to judge our emotions as horrible. We want to judge our emotions as part of the human experience that we need to learn how to feel and allow.

There are too many people suffering right now that don’t have the tools that we can teach them, that we can help them, that we can coach them. And when we channel our fear and our anxiety and our worry into our work, we end up producing something with that energy that serves not just the world, but ourselves.

So you have to take the focus of that energy and really use your mental energy, your mind energy to go to work. And to take the anxiety energy, the fear energy, and literally transmute it into something that helps instead of harms.

When you think about the increased attention you can have when you’re alert because of something, that energy is actually very useful. That energy can be applied to your work, to your business, to what we’re calling doubling your business in three months.

What I want us to do is be able to utilize that 50/50, to utilize the contrast to understand what it is we most want right now. And then funnel our energy and our focus into creating solutions and answers and contributions, instead of only focusing on the problem and becoming worried or in despair or depressed about it. We want to focus on solutions to the fear. And how can we, once we’ve processed that fear, provide what it is to ourselves that we need in order to feel more safe?

When you don’t meet your own expectations, the only feeling that you’re going to end up having is based on what you decide to think. So stay with me. So you set out to do something and you have an expectation of the result. And you miss that expectation.

Now, at that point, you get to decide what you’re going to make that mean. You get to decide what you’re going to think about that, right? So if you think about that in a way that hurts your feelings, right? If you think about that in a way that’s directing and disappointing, then you’re going to experience that negative emotion.

And so, ironically, the whole reason you’re avoiding failing is because you’re avoiding something that you have complete control over, which is your reaction to failing. Are you guys following this? Because it’s really important. You’re avoiding something you are in charge of and acting like it’s happening to you.

So most people, when I talk to them about failure, will say failure happens to me and then I have to experience it. But that’s not the truth. What really happens is we miss our expectations and then we decide to make it mean something that hurts. We decide to make it mean something that causes us a negative emotion.

The process of figuring out why you’re overeating is also a process of becoming more conscious and connected with yourself, which is, I think, the point of being on the planet, is to really connect with who we really are.

Is it fun all the time? Absolutely not. Is it easy? Is it a quick fix? Absolutely not. But it’s the permanent fix because if you can figure out why you’re overeating and you can solve that dilemma, then you don’t have to constantly be in a struggle against yourself.

You don’t have to use willpower. You don’t have to use resistance against yourself because you aren’t fighting the symptoms, you’re treating the cause. But what happens is as you stop overeating, all the reasons why you were overeating come up. Those feelings are going to come up that you are going to have to learn how to process and metabolize those feelings.

That’s something that most of us who are emotional overeaters do not know how to do very well. We know how to run from feelings, we know how to avoid them, we know how to react to them, we certainly know how to eat through them instead of experiencing them. Let me tell you, the more you are able to willingly experience any emotion that you’re presented with, and not react to it, the more closely you are going to be at your natural weight.

Let me add something here though, because I think this is something that’s really important. Your natural weight may not look like Jennifer Aniston’s natural weight. Your natural weight may not look like a Victoria Secret weight. And it’s really important that you recognize that all of us have different size bodies, all of us have different natural weights.

We can change what our bodies look like by how much we work out, how often we lift weights. That literally can change the composition of your body, but only to a certain extent. And at some point, there really has to be a recognition that this is the body that you were gifted. Yes, gifted. This is your gift. And you’ve been rejecting the gift and trying to change it and beating the hell out of it.

And if you can see it as this is the body you are meant to be on the planet in, this is the one, you can adjust it based on your behavior, based on how much you eat, based on how much you work out. But at the end of the day, this is the one. And if you are waiting to actively accept your body until it looks like a different version of you, you are going to be rejecting yourself for the rest of your life.

When you’re calendaring your time to produce something, you need to have a result when you’re done. Not just time spent. Think about this, you guys, when I put something on my calendar, for example, I need to create a podcast. I need to get it recorded and I’m giving myself one hour to record the podcast.

Now, how long does it take to record a podcast? People say I don’t know how long it’s going to take me. I know exactly how long it’s going to take me, it’s going to take me exactly as long as I give myself to get it done.

Would I like to have three hours to record the podcast? Sure, that would be great, right? I’d like to have four days to record it. If I give myself four days, that’s how long it’s going to take. But I will tell you, when you give yourself a short amount of time to produce a result, it’s much more energizing and enjoyable. You do not indulge in stress. You do not indulge in confusion. You do not check your Facebook. You do not turn on the TV. You do not have time to do any of that stuff.

You have one hour to sit down and get the podcast done, so you sit down and you get it done. And you’re very focused because there’s that timer going. It changes everything. It takes me exactly one hour to produce one podcast every single time.

Well, how can that be? Some podcasts are longer, some podcasts are shorter. I always give myself the same amount of time to produce the result that I want to produce. And you can do that in your life.

Now, people will say, oh, I like to be more spontaneous. I like to flow. I like to let myself be creative. When I hear people say that and I ask them what their production is like, it’s always very low. Because when you rely on your brain, it’s going to seek comfort and pleasure and avoid pain. But when you give yourself a timeframe, your alertness goes up, your focus goes up, your productivity goes up.

So here are the best emotions that you need to generate in order to be productive. You want to feel efficient. I love this as an emotion, right? People use it as a quality to describe someone else, but it’s a feeling too. Have you ever been in a situation where you feel efficient? You’re getting so much done in such a short amount of time. There is minimum wasted effort.

And if you think about what you are asking yourself to produce when it takes an extra long time, it’s because there’s a lot of wasted effort. Most wasted effort comes from allowing yourself to indulge in worry and confusion. I’m telling you, that is the biggest time suck. You want to feel focused. You’re paying particular attention to one thing and you’re super constrained on it and you want to feel clear.

Feeling clear doesn’t mean that the material is clear. It doesn’t mean that the goal is perfectly clear, exactly how you’re supposed to get something done. But you feel clear and every time something comes up that’s a challenge, instead of indulging in confusion you stay in clarity, you focus on the solution.

And what’s interesting about the victim mentality is it can make people act crazy and controlling. And that doesn’t seem like a victim mentality, it seems like they’re yelling and screaming and controlling. But underneath that is that immense fear of feeling any emotion, any negative emotion.

Vulnerability is the opposite. It’s like bring it on. I’m willing to put myself into really intense, wonderful, risk-taking, life-altering situations because I am willing to feel any emotion. We’re willing to expose ourselves to our emotions without defense, without avoiding, without hiding. If you’re able to hear someone’s feedback, hear someone’s opinion, hear something that they’re saying without being defensive, that is the deepest form of intimacy.

And that is true, not only with other people that you love in your life, but also with yourself. When you can hear your own opinion of yourself without getting defensive and without starting a battle, that’s vulnerability. That is where so much strength lies. Because think about it, if I am willing to sit across from you at a table and hear your opinion of me, whether it be good or bad, that’s a very vulnerable position, especially if I’m not going to defend myself or attack you. I’m just going to be in that space.

That requires so much strength. And what that person says to me may bring up a lot of my emotions. And if I can take responsibility for being the creator of that emotion because my thinking is creating that, whether I’m believing them or not it’s creating that emotion, then I am in the power position. And not only that, I can engage with that person and connect with that person, no matter what.

And that’s where that unconditional love comes in. And that’s where that intimacy comes in between two people. It is a beautiful, beautiful thing. It is the opposite of the victim mentality, which in that situation would go to blame.

Let’s talk about completion versus failure. Let’s talk about throwing things away. Let’s talk about ending relationships from a place of completion instead of feeling like they were fails. I’ve watched people do this in divorces, it makes such a huge difference when they feel like I love you, but this relationship is complete. This relationship has fulfilled me to the maximum amount that I can be fulfilled within this relationship. And I love you and goodbye, versus creating a huge fight about it.

I think that it’s really important to complete relationships. Instead of just letting them fade away, having conversations and meaningful decisions about relationships and where you want them to go and the forms you want them to take, instead of simply deleting people from your life or avoiding people in your life.

And I’m talking about relationships with things. I’m talking about relationships with thoughts, with beliefs and with people. Everything can have its season, and then you can let it go. Goodbyes can feel loving and good and they don’t have to be filled with conflict.

So here is the process I want to give you. It’s simple and it’s clear and it’s very challenging to learn how to do. First you want to take an inventory of what you currently have. Become aware. I want you guys to do this with things in your life, with things in your cupboards, with your bathroom drawers, with your friendships, with your lovers, with the people that are coming over, with everything, right?

The habits in your life, take an inventory and become aware of it. Make a list. Pick a category and make a list. All the things that you have in your office, all the things that you have in your drawers. And go through and decide on purpose if you want to say goodbye. And remember the way that you do that, would I buy it again? Do I love this? Do I want it? Is it serving me? Is it outdated? Is it something you used to love, that used to serve you and it no longer is?

Ask yourself, why are you the way you are? Why do you have certain people in your life? Why do you have the job you have? Why do you dress the way you dress? Why do you have the car you have? Why do you have all of it? Like ask yourself. How are you running?

Are you following your heart and your true desires and moving towards your north star? Or have you been an actor in someone else’s play? Have you been an apple when you really are a peach?

And if you find out the answer is yes, I don’t want you to go changing your whole life, you don’t need to do that. You just need to tell yourself the truth and changes will come from that organic, slow, loving processed place.

And the last piece of this is the truth that you get to decide who you want to be in this world. Your worthiness cannot change. It cannot get more. You can’t find more worthiness. You can’t be more of you. You’ve always just been 100%.

You may not be recognizing it. You may not be showing up for it. But it has always been at the same level. Your whole life, your worthiness has been. Who you are is already complete, is already perfect, you just haven’t noticed. You haven’t listened. You haven’t paid attention to that specific imprint that is only you and honored it with the truth. Honored it with action. Honored it with showing the world that so you can see it reflected back.

The reason we’re on this planet is to play with who we really are in relation to the planet. The point is not to hide it away, to hide your spirit away, to hide that part of you away. The reason I think we’re here is to display it, to show it, to let it have an effect. And you won’t know the effect of you on the world if you’re lying to yourself about who you really are.

It’s very important when you make decisions, and this is something that I highly recommend for everyone, that you process the emotion of quitting or leaving or changing before you leave as much as possible.

So a lot of times when we’re impulsive we’ll quit something or change something in the moment in order to get away quickly. And then we end up processing the emotion afterward. We end up going through the pain of the decision that we’ve already made, after we’ve made the decision.

And what I want to recommend is that you make the decision out in the future. You say I’m going to quit my job in 90 days. Or I’m going to change my career or sell my business or leave my relationship or change the format of my relationship with someone, I’m going to do it in 90 days. And as you’ve already made the decision, you’ve already committed to the timeframe, it gives you time, and the people involved time, to process the emotion of it before it actually happens.

And I have found this to be the kindest way to go through the world. Now, it doesn’t mean that you won’t have additional emotion after you actually move out of the company building or you move out of the house, in terms of the relationship. It doesn’t mean that you won’t have additional emotions. But when you decide ahead of time to put the decision out there in the future a little bit, it gives you time to process.

And I know, for me, processing emotion all the way through often comes in waves. And so being able to allow a wave of it to come and process it through and then another one to process it through and to have really meaningful and beautiful conversations with the people involved as you’re kind of letting go slowly, can make it so it’s so much easier to leave with love and growth and commitment.

I’ve talked a lot about this belief system that I had that if I became too big in my life, if I became too successful, if I was just really outwardly how I felt inwardly, in terms of big, that I would have no friends because it was so over the top that it turned people off. And it turned off people that I wanted to be friends with when I was younger, and they were just like, “You’re a little much.”

And I remember as I got older, going in with groups of people and them just being like, “Yeah, she’s a little over the top. She’s a little aggressive. She talks a lot. She’s always talking about dreams and goals and she’s just so intense.” All the things that I truly am.

And so I found myself so many times dumbing myself down, quieting myself down, being what Martha Beck would call Brooke light. Like a lighter version of myself that was more acceptable to other people so their opinion of me would be more accepting.

And what happened when I did that, and so many of you guys are doing this, was that I stopped liking me because I wasn’t being genuine and I wasn’t being authentic. And when people liked me, I knew they didn’t really know me. I knew they really didn’t like me for who I am.

And I will say, as I have grown, as my business has grown, as I’ve really started to be who I am with no apology and create the business and the life that I want, I have for sure “turned people off” and they have decided to have an opinion of me that isn’t favorable. And that’s totally okay with me now. And I made a decision that it’s okay for people to be wrong about me and have opinions of me that aren’t based in reality.

And so I think that at some point, you have to decide whose opinion matters the most in your life. Who is it that you want to answer to? People are going to look at you and judge you, period. People are going to judge you because of the way you look, because of your hair color, because of your eye color, because of your weight, because of the color of your skin, because of the clothes you wear, because of the car you drive, the stories you tell, the lipstick you wear, all of it.

There is nothing that anybody can do about it. So if you let it go and then you just ask yourself if you’re all in with your own opinion of you, do you like the car you drive, the clothes you wear, what you do? What is your opinion of you? And if you like it, that’s all you need. Have your own back.

Here’s the deal, most of us think we get paid for our hours, we get paid by the year and there’s a maximum amount that most of us can make based on our education. What is that number you have in your mind? 75,000? 100,000? Most people are about at that point. They think about money as this is the maximum amount I’ll be able to make in a year and I have to go to someone else to pay me that and hopefully they’ll pay me what I’m worth.

And if you believe that, you will get stuck in that rut. But if you allow yourself to let go of, maybe there’s not a limited amount of money that we all need to grab from that same pie, maybe I can create my own wealth by creating my own value and offering it to the world. And that doesn’t mean you have to come up with an iPhone. And that doesn’t mean you have to have a talk show. And it doesn’t mean that you have to be the best investor in the world.

All it means is that you are going to be the best version of yourself you can possibly be and create as much service to the world as you could possibly do for the sake of how amazing you will feel. And you have to not only create the value, not only create the service, but then be open to receiving.

Earning is not just about creating value, it’s about being open to receive money. Be open to receive payment and not think that that’s a bad thing. Not think that’s a negative thing. Not think that you’re taking from somebody else, but that you’re building more and more abundance in your own life to be able to give more and more. To be an example of what is possible when you serve the world.

Again, service is just being the best version of yourself. It doesn’t mean that you’re helping the homeless. It doesn’t mean that you’re going out and helping people that are in desperate need. I mean, look at the iPhone, we weren’t in desperate need of the iPhone. Now we are if we don’t have one. If our battery is dead we’re like, oh my God, how did I ever live without an iPhone?

So you have to trust your own guidance to take you to the place. You have to stop buffering and clean up your mind and not be responding to negative emotions to be able to access what you have that’s of value. And every single one of us has something that’s of value.

So many of us, when we save a bunch of money or earn a bunch of money, we become dependent on it to take care of us, right? That’s what retirement is about, saving all this money so later our money can take care of us and we can be kind of our money’s dependent. And I never wanted that to be true for me.

And so at a very young age, what I learned was that I wanted to depend on myself and my ability to create value because my ability to create value will produce money. And so I can produce money with my mind. Now, the reason why that is so powerful and so important to remember is that the only thing I really ever needed to depend on was me.

And I think this is even the more important part, it was much more important for me to invest in my mind than it was for me to invest in a savings account or 401k or in the stock market. If I had money to invest, I typically invested it into my mind.

And I’ll tell you how much freedom that gives me, because I know at any point someone can take away all of the money that we’ve saved, or any of the money that we’ve earned, or any of the things that I’ve used money to buy. And I still have that ability to make money because I have my mind. That is my most important asset, by far my most important asset.

And so instead of focusing on something outside of myself as my most important asset, like my house, or my car, or my rich husband, or my job, or my business, I focus only on my mind. And I take care of that mind of mine like it is the most important asset. And I invest in it.

I’m always studying and reading and coaching myself and cleaning up my mind of thinking and thoughts and focusing on what I believe and staying really positive and trying to stay really educated. That has been the secret to creating value in the world. That has been the secret for me to create money.

So here’s what’s beautiful about this philosophy: if I know that creating value for other people is what will provide me with money, then I can focus on only creating value with my mind. So I take care of that asset and then I focus on creating value for the world. That is my number one focus.

Now, money will come from that, but that is the secondary byproduct of creating value in the world. And creating value in the world is the most amazing thing any of us can do. It feels the best, it’s the most exciting, it’s the most connecting, it’s the most evolving.

When I first wanted to become a coach, there was no such thing really yet, as life coaches. It wasn’t like a viable career that people were doing and that it was an obvious thing that you could make money at. And the people around me were kind of questioning what I was doing and whether it made sense.

And especially when at first it wasn’t working and I wasn’t making as much money as I’d wanted to and I was putting a lot of money in and not getting a lot of money out, I believed anyway. And I believed because I wanted my life to be about self-help. I wanted to believe that I could have anything I wanted to have in my life and do anything I wanted to do. I wanted to believe that so fiercely, that I made it true. That’s what I wanted.

And so when a lot of the evidence in the beginning wasn’t serving that, I kept telling everyone, just be patient, take notes, watch how it’s done. I’m going to blaze the trail here. At the time, I didn’t have anything propping up that belief for me. I wasn’t like, oh, I know a secret. Or, oh, I’m going to figure this out. What I did know is that I had read a self-help book and it had changed my life forever.

And I knew that I could provide that same change for other people. I didn’t know how, but I believed that it was possible and I believed that it was the purpose of my life. And so I committed to doing that, no matter what happened. I stayed focused on that. And there were bumps in the road and I went through doubt, but I always came back to that belief.

And when I accomplished that for myself then, of course, that was my new before stick figure. And I had a new after. Because here’s the thing, when you live your before, right, when you change your before and you start living the after before you’ve created the result for it, by the time you create the result for it, you’ve been living that identity so long that it feels normal.

So, for me, I’ve been living in the identity of a woman, a businesswoman who creates $100 million a year. I’m living that right now. Now, I don’t have that in my bank account yet. But when I do, it will seem obvious because I’m already living that person now. I’m already believing that so hard now, that when the reality is there, it will be like, of course, that is the obvious result.

So that’s what I’m inviting you guys to do. I’m inviting you to believe in something that maybe isn’t reasonable, that maybe is impossible at this time for you. That maybe there is no evidence for, maybe that nobody else believes in. And when you first think of it, it might feel scary to believe in something like that. It may feel scary to put that stake in the ground because what if you fail? But here’s what I want you to remember, it’s much more important what you commit to believing, than whether you achieve it or not.

Most of us are waiting for the big win. We’re waiting for the lottery. We’re waiting for the book deal. We’re waiting to get discovered. We’re waiting for the agent to discover us and then to have this big, huge win. And fortunately, that is not how it works.

Fortunately, the way that we create an effect in our life is by showing up on a Wednesday at two o’clock and getting to work. And trading the instant reward for the compound reward. Trading the instant effect for the compound effect, because here’s the deal, I’m not going to get any applause for recording this today.

Nobody’s going to thank me. No one’s going to tell me what a good job I did. No one’s going to even know. I’m going to turn off this recording and the only person that will know is Pavel, if he happens to look at his computer today, that I’ve recorded an episode.

I’m not going to tell anyone, right? I’m just going to show up and do it. But because I do that every week and that adds up and adds up and adds up, now I have one of the top rated podcasts on iTunes. Now I have so much content that changes so many people’s lives because of all these Wednesdays, because of all these Tuesdays, where I’ve just sat in my chair, I pull out my notes that I’ve prepared, and I go to work.

And I want you guys to remember that the big wins are made up of the little wins. And the big quits are made up of the little quits. The little decisions that we make every day will eventually add up to an effect, to a compound effect.

If you have a bite of a cookie every day, that will add up. If you skip the bite of the cookie every day, that will add up. Will you notice it on the scale the next day? No. Will you notice it on the scale that week? Probably not. But the compound effect of skipping the bite of the cookie every single day for a year will be significant.

Now here’s where that becomes a problem, you may not realize why you’re getting the effect that you’re getting if you don’t pay attention to the compound effect. If you don’t pay attention to how doing something begets you doing something, begets you doing something, which ultimately creates that result.

These little insignificant daily choices aren’t necessarily enjoyed in the moment. I won’t have a deep sense of satisfaction after I record this, although I will be pretty satisfied, but I won’t have a deep sense of it. What will happen is someone will write me an email and I’ll receive it next week and they’ll say, “I’ve been listening to your podcast for a year and my life is unrecognizable and it’s totally different.”

Now, that person won’t write me that letter because I recorded this podcast. But that person will write me that letter because I’ve recorded all of the podcasts. I’ve shown up and done it. I’ve done the thing that was just as easy not to do, that didn’t seem significant in the moment.

The bite of the cookie doesn’t seem significant, connecting with my kids every day when they were toddlers did not seem significant, my friends. It was hard, right? The recording of the podcast when I’m already a couple ahead doesn’t seem significant. It’s the little decisions that we make every single day that turn into the biggest successes.

I am living proof of it. And every other person that you see that is super successful in their life, you can trace it back to the compound effect of what the little choices they’ve been making throughout their life that have added up to one big success.

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.