Ep #505: Change Your Life in One Year

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo episode 505.

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.

Brooke: Hello, hello. You ready to go? So many of you are ready to change your lives, and so many of you are going about it the wrong way, and I want to help.

Let’s talk about how to change your life in one year, the daily process. Here’s what you can expect today from me. The first 30 minutes will be learning the process.

Now, those of you who are brand new to me, this will be kind of an introduction to our process. For those of you who have been with me a while, this will be a review. Pay attention.

We’re going to do an overview of my year-long program that’s coming up in 2024. You’ll be able to ask me any questions you want about that. And then we’re going to do questions and personal coaching. Any of you that want some coaching on maybe the changes you want to make for the year, any questions that you have about yourself personally, I’m happy to answer that.

So first 30 minutes, presentation, last 30 minutes, coaching, questions, talking about the year-long program, okay? So we’ll be together for about an hour. Okay, let’s get started.

So this is one of the most important concepts that I teach all of my students and I have to keep reminding myself, and it is that every life, no matter life it is, consists of only five things. And it’s very important whenever you’re trying to change anything that you consider all five of the things that make up your life.

So here are the five things. Circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. Circumstances are the things that exist outside of your control. Those are the things that happen in the world that happen to you.

And your circumstances are going to cause you to have thoughts, and thoughts are just sentences in your mind. Just one sentence in your mind. You can hold it. I always say you can hold that sentence in the palm of your hand.

Your feelings are vibrations in your body caused by your thoughts. Your feelings that vibrate inside of you are what cause you to take action or to not take action, and the actions that you take in the world produce your results.

It’s very important when you are trying to change your life in any direction that you understand how these things are influencing each other. Because if you don’t understand how all five things influence each other, you’re going to be trying to change your life in a vacuum.

And this is exactly what happened to me before I learned the tools of life coaching. I kept trying to change one area of my life. Maybe I would try and change an action, or I’d try and change a thought, or I’d try and change a feeling without considering how the other things were influencing that.

And so the change was never permanent and it was always a struggle. By understanding these five things and how they interact with each other, changing over a year-long period becomes so much easier. So let’s review some of the categories and some of the things that you may be wanting to change.

So the first thing we’re going to talk about are the circumstances of our lives. So one of the main circumstances for many of us in our lives is our partner, our spouse, the person we live with, the person that we spend the most time with in our lives.

That is a circumstance. And sometimes we want to change that circumstance and that’s okay, but we need to understand why and how it’s influencing the other four things.

The next thing are your kids. Most of us don’t want to change our kids permanently, like get new kids, but sometimes we want to change our kids, change their lives, change the way they’re behaving. Our financial status, many of us want to change our financial status. We want to have a higher financial status, so to speak.

Our career, that’s a circumstance that we currently have. Our health is a circumstance that we may have. We all have health but we may have health issues, we want to improve our health, that’s a circumstance.

World events. Right now in the world we are going through a lot of world events. And if we don’t understand how those world events interact with the other four components of our lives, we can end up feeling so much negative emotion that isn’t necessary.

The second category are our thoughts, and these are the sentences in our minds that we have about our circumstances. So here are some thoughts you may want to work on and change. “This is too hard,” how many of you are feeling that way about your life?

“This is not the life I wanted.” Maybe there’s a certain area of your life that isn’t the life you wanted, maybe it’s your entire life. What part of your life, part of yourself, something, you may be having a thought like that. You may be having a thought, “I know I’m not living to my potential,” and you may want to change that.

“I need to lose weight” may be a thought that you’re having. “I need to stop…” whatever it is. I need to stop yelling, overdrinking, overeating, procrastinating, crying all the time, whatever it is.

“I’m too…” what is it? For me, it used to be I’m too fat, I’m too loud, I’m too obnoxious, I’m too big for my britches, literally and figuratively, I’m too aggressive, I’m too lazy. What is it for you? Maybe you’re having a thought like that.

“Life sucks.” Maybe you’re thinking that your life sucks and that’s what you want to change. Maybe your thought is something like, “I’m not good at…” and you’re having a thought like that that is holding you back from doing the things that you want to do in your life, maybe get better at. Okay, so those are your thoughts.

“I can’t” is a huge one that I spend a lot of time coaching people on. “I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do that, I can’t do this other thing.” We don’t even realize that when we think a thought like that, we’re creating emotions and actions that don’t serve us.

Alright, what is the third category? Feelings. Here are some feelings you might be having right now that you want to change. Boredom. How many of you are bored with your lives, bored with certain areas of your life, bored with certain people in your life, bored with the progress in your life?

Frustration. I know that so many of you are feeling frustrated with things that are going on in your life. You don’t even realize how much of this frustration and the feeling of it is unnecessary. Aggravation. I know that for me, this was one I really suffered with a lot.

Apathy, I just don’t care anymore, but I want to care, but I just don’t care, but I want to care. I was just talking to a client the other day and she was like, “I really want to lose weight but I just don’t care enough to,” right? It’s that desire with the apathy going on that maybe you want to change.

Dissatisfaction. A lot of you are really struggling with low-grade dissatisfaction with your lives. You want to be more satisfied, you want to be more fulfilled, you want to be more excited, and you’re just generally dissatisfied.

Another feeling you might be experiencing is hopelessness. I know for so many of you, feeling hopeless and helpless about so much of the tragedy that’s going on in the world, so much of the hate that’s going on in the world, and you’re kind of stuck in this perpetual state of helplessness and hopelessness, and you don’t know your way out.

Alright, what is the next thing? The next category, actions. Here are some actions that may be happening that you don’t want to be happening. Maybe it’s overeating, maybe it’s overdrinking, maybe it’s procrastination, maybe it’s too much social media-ing.

I think when I wrote this I put social media-ing and they spell-corrected me. But this is a real thing. So many of you tell me that you’re just stuck on your phones wasting away your day, burning up time because you are trying to avoid feeling emotion. Too much TV, too much overreacting in your relationships, criticizing, too much criticizing of other people, too much judging. Maybe you’re judging other people, maybe you’re judging yourself too much.

Alright, what are the results that this might be creating for you? Underearning, overweight, lack of accomplishment, strained relationships, self-loathing, self-neglect, unfinished projects. This may be the totality of your life. You may have all of these things. I know for me, there are certain times in my life when I have had all of these things happening to me. Really struggling with all these negative results in my life.

So when you can understand the five things and how they interact with each other and how they influence each other, then you can start to ask yourself the question, how do you interact with the world?

Because when you think about circumstances that are happening and results you want to create, that’s you plus the world. That’s you interacting with the world. And we are not taught to think about the world that way. We are not taught to think how do we think, feel, and act in a way that has influence? And how do we think, feel, and act in a way that doesn’t cause us to be influenced against our will?

So all of our power starts to become by the influence we have on the world versus the influence the world has on us. So if you think about change, if you think about your life changing and if you have an imbalance of influence, meaning the world is influencing you more than you’re influencing the world, it is going to be very challenging for you to change.

But if you have understood these five things in this process and your influence on the world, on your own life is more powerful than on you, you’re going to have so much more fun. When I learned this, when I learned that I was not at the effect of the world but my life was at the effect of me, I started having the most fantastical life.

A great example of this is with money. When I first started understanding this process, I was making about $300,000 a year, and I used to look at the world and think, “Okay, the world is telling me how much a woman my age with this much experience can make.”

And I was living within the constructs of that world influencing me, without questioning my thoughts, my feelings, or my actions. And when I started unraveling that and becoming much more self-aware, what I realized is that there was no limit to the amount of money I made, except what I was believing in my mind.

And within the next three years, I was making a million dollars a year, and within the next 10 years, I was making over 50 million dollars a year. And I want to go beyond that and make 100 million dollars a year just to practice my influence in my own life.

So the question then becomes, how do we increase our self-awareness so we can change? How did I go through that process of understanding my thoughts, feelings, and actions, how they created my results, and how my circumstance has influenced me so I could change myself and therefore influence my life in a much more powerful way, and a way that was faster?

So as I learned this process for myself, I started to teach it to my clients. I started to teach it to my students. So here is the process in a nutshell. First, you have to pay attention daily to yourself and to these five things.

When we go unconscious and we’re not paying attention, that’s when we get swept up in the influence of life. You have to learn how to use your brain to understand your brain. Your brain is your most important asset. It’s the only thing that you have that will influence your life, and if you don’t understand how it works and you don’t understand how it affects your discipline, your procrastination, your confidence, you will never be able to create a life that changes as quickly as you want it to.

You have to get your own thought-feeling baseline. You have to understand and become aware of what you’re thinking and feeling. It’s really important for us to eavesdrop on our own mind, to come out of our lives and witness our lives instead of just being in it. And that’s what life coaching did for me.

Life coaching really taught me that when I’m with a coach, I can look at my life and look at my brain from the outside and then get back in and influence change.

The fourth part of this process is you have to evaluate the effect on your action and results. So when you look at your baseline of thoughts and feelings, you have to then do the math and say, “When I think and feel this way, this is what I do and what I create.”

And we don’t do that to beat ourselves us, to get mad at ourselves, to judge ourselves. We do that so we can see how powerful we are. Sometimes we don’t understand that we’re creating our own results. We think the world’s creating our results.

But as soon as we go through the process of, “Wait, this thought is creating this feeling, which is creating these results in my life,” then we see our power, even though it’s powerful in a negative way. As soon as we get that connection, we can switch it, we can change it, and start influencing it to the change that we actually want.

And then all of our power comes from deciding consciously what to think, what to feel, and what to do. All of the power of decision is lost when we don’t have self-awareness. I can’t tell you how many people I ask, “What do you want to do? What do you want in your life? What do you want to change?” And they say they don’t know.

So you can’t decide to get what you want if you don’t know what you want. And that’s what life coaching does. That’s what this process does. It uncovers your truest desires, your truest purpose, so then you can use the power of decision to decide, not just what to do. You can’t just decide what to do. You have to decide what to think, what to feel, and what to do.

So much of what we’re thinking and feeling is unconscious. 60,000 thoughts per day. Think about that. 60,000 thoughts, each thought is creating a feeling, action, and result, a feeling, action, and result. We think our whole life is being created by the world but our whole life is being created by all of these unconscious thoughts that we didn’t even choose to think.

They were programmed by our society, our parents, our teachers, our experiences. Let’s go back to my example around money. What was I taught from society about money? I was taught that a certain amount of money is what I should make. I was taught that too much money for especially women was uncouth, unnecessary, morally wrong.

If you get more money than what you need to survive that somehow you’re focused on the wrong thing. That’s what we’re taught. That is the society we are swimming in and believing, “Oh, you have a million dollars? Why? Why is that important to you? I’m focused on love and helping people.” The whole idea being that those two things can’t exist together.

What were you taught by your parents? What were you taught by your parents about money that you’re not even conscious of? By watching them and their life with money, watching how they did money, what they said to you about money.

What were you taught by your teachers? Your experiences? What have you learned without even knowing that you learned it? And what do you believe without not even knowing that you believe it that’s influencing your life?

We have to come to the understanding that so much of what we’re doing is unconscious. Now, the question is why. Why is our thinking unconscious? It’s not our fault. It’s because our brains, those beautiful assets are so efficient and they want to take anything that we’ve thought multiple times and just put it in the unconscious brain so it doesn’t take any unnecessary energy to think it, which is a beautiful thing when it comes to driving a car and walking and all those things that we want to just be automatic.

But it’s very dangerous when it comes to thoughts and belief systems that are affecting us in what we’re trying to change in our lives. We have to become aware of those things.

We let life happen to us with pre-programmed thoughts and feelings. Life doesn’t happen to us outside there. Life happens to us when we don’t question our thoughts and our feelings and what we want them to be.

Our power comes from decisions. Now, so many of us are living what I call a default life. We’re living on automatic pilot and the automatic pilot is a direction book that has been programmed from us back in the day that we’ve never questioned.

We’re not making regular decisions about what to think, about what to feel, about what to do. We’re trying to change our lives by working against all of that unconscious programming. And when we shift from living that default life into making regular, fast, and powerful decisions, that’s when we start to change.

Decide what you want. How do you do that? People say, “Well, I just need to discover what I want.” No, you have to decide what you want. And that takes effort from the brain. The brain doesn’t like making big powerful decisions like that because it takes energy.

But you have to decide what you want and you have to know that there are so many more possibilities that maybe you haven’t even considered yet. You want to decide what to think about your circumstances on purpose. If you make decisions about how to think about the things you can’t control, you’re going to feel better. Way better, and more empowered.

You have to decide to feel your feelings instead of avoiding negative emotion. When you avoid negative emotion, you hide from your life. You don’t want to hide from your life. You want to show up for your life. You want to be open to all of that emotion. Bring it on.

We teach you in our program, we teach you how to feel negative emotion so it processes through and you can keep moving forward instead of ducking and hiding and being afraid of those negative emotions. The willingness to feel any emotion combined with conscious decision-making are the two main skills for living your best life, and here’s why.

When you decide that you’re going to do something big and amazing and grand with your life, it’s going to bring up all this emotion. And if you don’t want to feel it, you’re going to go right back to deciding not to do those things.

But if you make a big decision about your life and you’re willing to experience all the emotion that comes along with it, that’s when you’re going to enact change. When you’re willing to feel the discomfort of change because you don’t make it such a big deal, that’s when you can create the life you want.

And thousands of my students, thousands, literally thousands over the last 10 years have proven that over and over and over again. And what we thought was so awful and uncomfortable and terrible is so worth it when it comes to creating the life we actually want.

I believe that one year is the perfect amount of time to change. If you think about it, think about how old you are right now and how long it took to program your brain to be where it is now. And if you committed one year to the process of reprogramming your brain with new conscious thoughts, feelings, and actions, after that year, that change would become permanent.

It’s one year to establish the skills of self-awareness, of world-awareness that is questioned. And this is the really important piece here. So many of us think we’re just observing the world innocently when really, we’re judging it. We have this awareness that is so limited to what we’ve been taught before that we don’t even know that we can question it and open it up.

It’s kind of like what I was telling you about money. Cognitive control, how much control do you have over your thoughts? How much are you paying attention in order to maintain that control?

Emotional processing. How many of you have learned emotional strength? You’ve learned the ability to process emotion without fear. Behavior and habit management. We can’t start trying to change our behaviors and our habits if we don’t know what our thoughts and feelings are.

How many of you have tried to change something, stop overeating, start being more disciplined, going to the gym, and after three days, you’re like, “I just can’t do this anymore?” Because you don’t have control over your thoughts and feelings, you’re just trying to work your behavior against your thoughts, which creates too much cognitive dissonance.

And this is why the brain will always win. The brain is motivated by consistency. It wants things to stay the same, it wants to produce the least amount of energy, it wants to have the most pleasure, and the least amount of pain.

This is perfect when we’re trying to survive, but this is not perfect if we’re trying to elevate our lives and up-level our lives. When survival, which is now, is no longer an issue, but our survival brain is still activated, we have to use the skill of our prefrontal cortex, all the skills that I’m talking about today, to manage that survival brain so you can utilize it to create the life that you want.

Small steps every day for a year creates a new system for thinking, feeling, and behaving. And that’s why I created this program so every single day you can focus on paying attention to your brain and creating the change that you want. This ultimately creates better results. The results that you want.

Now, a lot of people will come to me when I tell them I’m a life coach and I tell them I’m working on this like, “Why does this even matter? Why can’t you just live your life and be grateful?” You can. You can be grateful without even being conscious.

And listen, if the alternative is being ungrateful, I’m going to go for grateful every single time. But as a woman, I can’t even tell you how many times I have been told to just settle down, to stop being so ambitious, to just be grateful for all the blessings that I have.

And I always want to say I can be grateful and want more. I can be grateful for what is good and want more. And I don’t have to be grateful for crumbs when the whole pie is available to me. And I’m tired of people telling me that if I want the whole pie, there’s something wrong with me because I think the opposite is true.

I think we all have, every single one of us, has our own pie that’s waiting for us. And if we don’t claim it, nobody does. But instead, we’re sitting here just being like, “No, these crumbs are just fine, I’m just grateful for this.”

Listen, that’s okay. I like the crumbs but I like the pie too and I want a whole piece and maybe I want three pies. And that’s okay too. And I can be grateful for the opportunity that my foremothers created for me to be able to get that, and I feel it’s ungrateful for me to just sit around and not utilize the opportunity that was so hard earned for me.

So let’s talk a little bit about the difference between your current ability and your ultimate capacity. There is your ability that you have learned so far right now, and most of us try to create change from our current ability. And we get into trouble because we’re limited in our current ability because we haven’t increased our consciousness and we’ve stopped learning.

Many of us just learn up to college and then we stop learning. But I want to encourage us to continue to learn for the rest of our lives because as our current ability stabilizes, we forget to look at our ultimate capacity. What is the capacity of my life? It’s not limited to my current ability, and yet, so many people think about the possibility and the capacity of their own life limited to their current ability.

Your current ability is our starting point right now. The best you’ve ever been is the ground that we’re starting on. The capacity is where we’re going. And too many of you haven’t even considered your capacity. You haven’t even talked to yourselves about it. You haven’t even wondered about what you could be capable of. And that’s what I want to bring to each and every one of you. What is your capacity?

Because if we don’t focus on our capacity for greatness, contribution, evolving, generational growth, building on our ancestors’ forced growth, think about this for a minute. If you think about our ancestors, they weren’t pondering their capacity. They were pondering survival.

In order for our ancestors to survive, they had to evolve. But now we’ve gotten to the point in many areas of our lives where we’re not forced to grow. Many of us could just live the same life for the rest of our lives. And if we do that, as a species, we will not evolve, we will not use human ingenuity, we will sit around and enjoy the pleasures of life and there won’t be any growth.

And that’s for us individually and that’s for us globally. So we must now consciously focus on our capacity for greatness, contribution, and evolving on purpose because we aren’t being forced to do so. And if we don’t do that, we run the risk of buffered stagnation, and that’s where we just stay stagnant and we buffer against that little calling inside of us that is urging us to grow.

If you think about a plant and the seed and how it is urged to grow into the flower, that’s what human beings are too. You feel that, right? But we’ve gotten to the point where we can buffer against that. We don’t have to listen to that urge to grow. We can ignore it. We can hide from it. We can be afraid of it.

And if we do that, we end up with a life of buffered stagnation, and you know what that feels like. Most people will live the same day over and over, only using the ability they learned from their younger years. Change requires us to keep learning and to keep growing and to keep pushing ourselves into that state of discomfort to allow for that little feeling inside that’s urging us to grow into the flower.

Explore more is what I want to encourage each one of us to do because with increased consciousness, we can explore more possibilities. A lot more possibilities.

When I think about the possibilities that have been created for our lives and dished out to us, especially as women, here’s what’s available to you. You can be a nurse, or a doctor, or an attorney, and you can be a mom, and you can get married, and you can have children. Here’s kind of the possibilities.

And we aren’t presented with the myriad of possible directions that our lives could go. Nobody said to me, “Hey, maybe you could have a career where you work from home and make millions of dollars helping people.” That was never presented as a possibility to me.

The first time I considered a possibility is I had a life coach say to me, “What would the perfect day for you be?” And I said, “I want to get paid to read self-help books. That’s what I’d love to do more than anything is I love reading about self-help and I love reading about business, and I wish that I could get paid for it.”

And she said, “Well, why couldn’t you?” And as soon as she said that to me, possibility dropped. That’s what we call it when we’re in Get Coached in Scholars, we call it a possibility drop. I have a whole book on there about what is possible and a possibility drop is maybe I could make a lot of money reading self-help and business books.

Turns out that actually worked out very well for me. But I never even considered it. I thought I had to follow the traditional route of being a psychologist. And when I studied psychology in school, I did not want to study it. I did not want to be a psychologist. I didn’t like what was being presented to me.

But when I discovered life coaching, my whole life lit up. It was presented as a possibility. So what possibilities have been presented or haven’t been presented to you yet? New possibility thinking, emotional stress - I mean, strength, not stress. We don’t want emotional stress. We want to learn how to process emotional stress, and the way that we do that is with emotional strength.

Consistent high-value action and quality results. This is what the skills of processing your own capacity and your own possibility gets for you. Here’s what we do in our program, our year-long program every single month that’s going to be starting in 2024. Here are the concepts that we cover in order to have full-processed capacity growth by the end of the year.

In January, we talk about why you must coach yourself to grow, and I’m going to show you that workbook in a minute. We talk about the power of emotion. In March, we talk about believing new things. April is all about time management. May is about relationships, June is self-confidence, July is about changing your past, which means changing your relationship with yourself in your past.

In August, we teach you how to live into your purpose, in September, we teach you how to get it done, stop procrastinating. October, we teach you how to organize your life and your mind. In November, it’s mastering emotional balance, and in December, it’s doing the impossible.

The clients that I have that have gone through this year-long process multiple years in a row have completely changed the trajectory of their life because we take into account all five components of a life. And here are the results that we have had from so many of our clients.

Increased financial status, connected relationships, less anxiety, more action towards their goals, more control over their results, a full range of emotions with more emotional strength, more time. It is possible to create more time for yourself to do the things you want to do, and way more confidence.

So why this is the perfect plan, I want to tell you why the plan that I have is the perfect plan. So whether you join us or not, you’ll be able to understand the components of what you need to do in order to change your life in a year.

For us, we have a monthly lesson where you focus on a new skill and a new ability of mental and emotional strength. We have daily written work which I think is so important, and you can either write it on paper or you can write it on your computer, but it’s getting it out of your brain so you can see it outside of your brain with your brain. Very important piece of this.

Private weekly session with a coach is imperative. Being able to talk to someone privately and confidentially about what’s going on in your brain and have them have the perspective from outside of your brain to help you is amazing.

Weekly group coaching, you’re going to see this in a minute towards the end of this call when I’m coaching someone else live. Seeing someone else be coached on an issue that you may have is life-altering because you can see in another person what you can’t see in yourself. It’s very powerful.

I created a program that is accessible and inclusive because of the incredible value for the price. Now, here’s why. When I first started coaching, I did a lot of one-to-one coaching. I was charging $5000 a month for coaching as I got more successful.

But I couldn’t reach as many people as people wanted coaching with me. I had so many clients because of my podcast that wanted to coach with me and I couldn’t coach them all. So what I did is I created a program where I could, where I could coach everyone.

And because I had so many people interested that wanted that coaching, I was able to offer it at a very inclusive, amazing price. So in our program, you get a monthly lesson, daily written work, private weekly session, and weekly group coaching. There’s no other program that offers this for $297 a month.

And you get two months for free if you join for the year. And for the rest of this month, we are incentivizing you to join for the entire year and get two months of the entire year for free, which includes all four of those amazing things.

Okay, there’s one more thing I want to show you that is amazing. This is our workbook. And this woman on the front, this gorgeous lady, Melody Forbes on the front is a Six-Carat Diamond. She has been in our Get Coached for Scholars program for six years and she is amazing and she was on the cover of one of our workbooks at the very beginning.

So, I love you Melody, amazing. And so this is the cover of the workbook that you will get for January. And I just want to show you a little bit what these workbooks look like. So you get the contents, which is basically the first part of it just kind of goes over what we’re going to relearn and discuss during the month and then it gives you content that is all very summarized for you.

And you do a quick read of this, this summarized part, and then you get to go into the workbook part of it, which there’s this monthly assignment and you’ll take 10 minutes and empty your brain on paper by doing the thought download, and then you do a couple of Models. And we teach you how to do this. And then you do it every single day in your workbook, on your online workbook every single day for the entire month.

And then in February, you get a brand new workbook that has different exercises. And what this does is it creates a consistent habit of managing your mind, of increasing your mental strength, of increasing your emotional strength, and you’ll be taking action.

There are so many parts of this that include taking action with all of your fellow Scholars that are in there with you, and I do the work too. So when we get on the calls to talk about it, we discuss what’s going on. And I used to do these workbooks years ago when I was in a completely different place, and now here we are, I think it’s been five years since I’ve done one. I’m going to be doing them all year with you.

And the other piece that I wanted to share with you that is part of the Get Coached in Scholars program is I’m going to be doing a weekly behind-the-scenes sharing my work with you of what I’m going through with my mind, my feelings, and my actions.

So many of you have said that being part of my process has helped you with your process. I may be doing bigger things in certain areas, but we may be doing the exact same thing in other areas. So I’m going to be working on my business and earning, and I’m going to be working on my body and my health, and I’m going to be working on my relationships.

So I will share all of that process with you as we go through those months. Now, for the rest of this time, I would love to coach you. I would love to answer any questions that you have. If you would like to be coached, simply raise your hand, I will call on you.

And let me just look at the Q&A really quickly and see what we have going on there. Oh, someone is asking if I can show them the Vault. I’m not going to show the Vault on this call today but if you want someone to show it to you, you can definitely go to customer service.

There are so many trainings inside of that Vault that I’m afraid of overwhelming people, I’m not kidding. That is my life’s work in there. So obviously you can go in there any time you want and go to the Netflix of the Vault, but so many people, what they do is they - it’s kind of like going into Netflix and feeling like you have to watch every single movie in there. It becomes overwhelming to them.

So I just want to focus on your change and what it is you want to change. “Will we get different group coaching in other areas in the week?” Yes, yes. I am going to be doing all of the personal coaching, so I will be in there multiple times a week doing coaching and we will do coaching on the topic that we’re working on, but then we’ll also do coaching on any other topic that you want publicly.

Somebody says if they’re already in the program and they’re already paying $297, how do they transfer over to the 2024 program. You don’t have to do anything. If you want to stay on the monthly program, you don’t have to do anything to transfer over. The site is going to be updated on the 24th automatically and you will be automatically enrolled in it.

If you want to sign up for the year program and you’re already a member, you just sign up for the year-long program and as of January 1st, you will be automatically switched over. You won’t have to do anything. So you just go to the join page right now and sign up for the year-long program. Your membership will not be interrupted at all.

“Can you speak about the money class that’s also included if you join?” Yes. I am doing a year-long money class called Money is Your Friend, where I am going to talk about all the lessons that I have learned getting very, very wealthy, and what I’ve learned about money, what I’ve learned about mindset, what I’ve learned about net worth, what I’ve learned about investing.

I’m giving myself a whole year to teach you everything I know. This is also going to be a very interactive class with lots of homework. For those of you who are very interested in earning lots of money and increasing your net worth and increasing your monthly income, this will be the class for you. It’s like no other class that I’ve taught. Now, there’s tons of other classes in there, in the class vault on money that give you the basics. This will be the next version of that.

“I think that my feelings of shame are in fact an urge to grow.” Oh, that’s really interesting, so let’s do some coaching. A lot of you are asking the same question as I’m scrolling through here, so I think I’ve answered most of them. Alright, let’s start with you Alexandra. Somebody’s asking, “What’s the difference between capacity and potential?” I think they’re very similar. I wouldn’t get too caught up in that. Hi.

Alexandra: Hello. God, I never expected this.

Brooke: Yay, hi.

Alexandra: Well, it’s funny, it just happened last night. I’ll try and describe it briefly. I feel like I’ve made wonderful progress. You coached me on my relationship with my daughter and she came home from overseas, it’s been fantastic. I feel really proud of myself. But last night just briefly, my husband and I had a call from a doctor in Greece about going to this holistic health center because I’ve had serious health issues, and we’d been waiting for a while to be sent all these reports.

And basically he said he felt that this condition was too unpredictable, it was stressful for me to go there, very expensive, I’m in Sydney. And unless something changed, it wasn’t a practical idea. And he just said, “You just need to make sure you don’t get stressed or overwhelmed. You have to try and eliminate stress.” And I thought, “Well, I’ve done that,” and then my husband’s like, “You’ve got this deep stress and you need to see a psychologist or something.”

Brooke: Okay, let’s talk about it because I want to make sure that this is applicable to everyone and it is for sure, okay? And this happens to a lot of people where we get used to being stressed. We get used to being anxious. We get used to kind of this underlying pain that we’re going through.

And sometimes we don’t even notice it. Like your husband points it out to you and is like, “No, you still have this going on.” And it’s affecting people around you maybe, it’s definitely affecting you. And so if you were to want to change something - let’s talk about this time next year, what would you want to be different in your life? Just very simply.

Alexandra: In that area?

Brooke: Yeah.

Alexandra: Well, not to react to his statement because I suppose I just felt so put down and criticized and felt patronized. He thinks he can see the problem. In fact, he saw it differently to how I saw it.

Brooke: Right. But what if by the end of next year, your relationship with your husband was just much more peaceful no matter what he said? Because husbands are going to say things, y’all. In case you don’t know, they like to say the things that they say, right?

And so if you imagine that there is a world in which he can have his opinion and you can be, instead of feeling shame or pain or frustrated or angry, you could just be curious. And that doesn’t even sound like a possibility, it doesn’t even sound like something that maybe you would even want to do.

But if your goal is to eliminate stress, if your goal is to not be reactive or stressed out by what he says, which is hysterical because it’s so ironic that he’s telling you that you’re stressed and the thing that he’s saying is causing you to feel stressed.

Alexandra: Definitely.

Brooke: Right.

Alexandra: I feel more stressed now than I did then.

Brooke: Right, I’m more stressed than before you told me I was stressed. Now I’m stressed about being stressed, I’m stressed that you think I’m stressed.

Alexandra: Definitely.

Brooke: Right? But you can see how your thoughts about what he said makes it so much worse, right? Like he’s judging me, he thinks he knows better than me, he’s criticizing me, and then you get defensive and upset and then feel shame and anger, versus just being like, “Hmm, interesting perspective for him to have.”

And maybe we’re like, “It’s okay for him to be wrong about me, it’s okay for him to be confused, or maybe he’s got a point that I could consider.” It’s just going to have you be much less stressed than where you are now.

My favorite thing is when someone’s like, “You seem angry,” and you’re like, “I’m not angry.” Or, “You seem to be stressed about things,” “Well I’m not stressed.” And then we’re like, “Huh.” And that self-awareness - I think sometimes when we feel like we’re being attacked, sometimes that self-awareness feels like we’re allowing people to treat us in a way that we don’t want to be treated. And all of our power comes from the opposite. Does that make sense?

Alexandra: Yeah, definitely. I mean, all those things are there but I’m just having trouble sort of accessing - just dropping the shame, as you say. Feeling judgment.

Brooke: Yeah, so what we do is we go through the process of looking at the circumstance, which is what he said, and then we write down all of our thoughts about what he said, and we own that. So that’s your homework, okay?

Alexandra: Okay.

Brooke: Okay. Write down all those thoughts. Alright, my friend. Okay, who’s next? Who have we got? Let’s go with Kim. Somebody says, “Yeah, I want three pies too, thank you for understanding me.” You got it.

Kim: Oh my goodness, hi Brooke.

Brooke: Hi.

Kim: I have been following you since 2016/17, I was in Scholars when you would send out the physical workbooks so…

Brooke: Back in the day day.

Kim: Back in the day. I still listen to the podcast and I’m excited to join for the last best year.

Brooke: Yeah, let’s go.

Kim: Cool. So my main thing is I’m in my new mom era. I have a toddler and another on the way. Obviously he’s amazing, love him, he’s great, but I’m struggling to enjoy the process a little bit. Some days obviously are easier than others, but this morning it was like, “I don’t want to get out of bed, I don’t want to take care of him,” and I think this is kind of an overarching theme in my life too.

Again, kind of apply it to everyone is I’ve always been ambitious, I’ve always had goals, know what I want, and in theory would love a big family. But getting there, the process of the work, doing the work and buckling down, my initial - I want to do the path of least resistance. So I’d rather sit on the couch and watch Netflix than do the work.

Brooke: Welcome to everyone.

Kim: Exactly.

Brooke: Here’s what’s kind of cool that I was talking about in the presentation is our ancestors had that forced evolvement. When you have kids, it’s forced evolvement because I remember, and you’ve probably heard me tell this story of when I took my toddlers to the park and I was like, “I really could just leave them here.” I really did have this thought. I’m like, “Nobody is forcing me to take care of them, this is a choice that I’m making.” And it changed my thought from I have to take care of them, it really felt like I have to, to I’m actually choosing this.

Kim: And that’s the thought I try to get to is I can choose to enjoy this moment.

Brooke: Okay, but that’s what I was just going to say. I think your struggle is you think you should be enjoying it more.

Kim: And I’ve tried to also give myself grace and say not every day is going to be fun, and that’s okay. So I’ve tried to introduce those thoughts. I think I have also just trouble maybe practicing the thoughts and really believing them and making it habitual because I always kind of come back to the beginning. And then it’s another day of, “I got to do this.”

Brooke: And that really is what it is, is developing that skill set. And I do also think that many of us compare our lives to some ideal life where no one’s ever upset about taking care of their kids, which is hysterical. It’s kind of like people that compare their childhood to some perfect childhood that someone else is for sure having that isn’t them. And we have to remember this process of life isn’t about pure happiness and enjoyment all the time.

Kim: It’s 50:50.

Brooke: It is 50:50, but also, who do you want to be when you’re not feeling it? It’s not like, “Well I’m going to get up anyway and be happy,” and all of that. But listen, this is part of the deal. And something about the discipline of taking care of kids is so educational, right? Because we will do for our kids what they need whether we feel like it or not, period.

And I think that’s a fascinating thing to witness. Versus with ourselves, we’ll just say, “No, I’m not going to take care of you.” But with our kids, we’re like, “Alright.”

Kim: I can make an excuse for anything in my life for why I don’t want to do it.

Brooke: Right. So it’s kind of like, how do you witness your own life? How do you witness your own self experiencing your life from a place of curiosity and awe and wonder instead of judgment? That is the work of our lives. Because here’s the thing, and you’re the perfect example of this.

If you want to have a big family but you’re judging yourself for not enjoying the first two, I mean, you don’t even have the second one yet, right? You probably won’t have more kids.

Kim: Correct.

Brooke: And for us, it’s making money or losing weight, I don’t even like the first three weeks of this. But if you see it as a process of growth and evolvement and you don’t have to love every second of it, then you might be more inclined.

Kim: So it’s not that I’m thinking I want something but I actually don’t. It’s just going up against those negative feelings and pushing through.

Brooke: Exactly. And it’s not even pushing through, it’s just allowing it to be there, right? It’s just experiencing it, being like, “Oh, this is what it’s like to have a toddler that I’m madly in love with and do not want to feed,” and feeding anyway.

Kim: I need to practice my emotions, feeling the emotions.

Brooke: And instead of thinking, “Oh, I shouldn’t be feeling this way, or I shouldn’t be experiencing it,” it’s like, no, this is the process. And we’re all sold this story that we’re supposed to enjoy our lives or we’re doing it wrong.

Kim: Why can’t we have fun all the time?

Brooke: And if you look at Instagram, everybody’s having fun but us all the time. And their kitchens are clean and their children are perfect too. What is going on? But if we stop doing that, we can be involved in this messy life in a way that’s more interactive and more powerful and less judgmental, especially self-judgmental. I think you should have five kids.

Kim: Well, I don’t know about five but maybe there’s a third somewhere along the line.

Brooke: I’m just kidding. I mean, being outnumbered seems scary to me.

Kim: Yeah. Alright, well thanks so much Brooke.

Brooke: Alright, you’re welcome. Alright, who’s next? Who do we got? Let’s go Christine. Yes, the Get Coached classes do include replays for sure, so if you’re not there to make the class live, there are replays. If you sign up for the year, you start January 1st, that’s right. “I’m from France working full time, is this program feasible?” Yes, we have many international clients who work full time. Christine.

Christine: I’m going to be a Three-Carat Diamond this month.

Brooke: Let’s go.

Christine: I’ve had the same goal and I’m not getting there yet.

Brooke: What is your goal?

Christine: I’ve had progress in other areas. Weight loss. I want to lose 30 kilos, I’ve lost 10. I’ve put on some of that 10, about four of that 10.

Brooke: So you’ve lost 10 and you gained four back?

Christine: Yes.

Brooke: Okay, so tell me why. This is very, very important because when you make a statement that says I’m not making progress, it sounds very passive like you’re observing yourself. Versus I’m not making progress because of decisions that you’re making, right? So what is the challenge that you’re having? What’s the obstacle?

Christine: Doing the work.

Brooke: Okay, so are you writing a protocol?

Christine: I have a loose protocol.

Brooke: Okay.

Christine: I do a daily…

Brooke: A loose protocol, that’s a new term.

Christine: I do a daily plan and I’ve been doing that for the three years now.

Brooke: Okay, good.

Christine: But there are days when I haven’t. But I’m just not really knuckling down. Often the daily plan on the weekend, again, is very loose.

Brooke: Okay, so let’s talk about that. I’m not losing weight because I’m not eating on my protocol on the weekends, right? If you state that, then all of a sudden we have a problem we can solve. When we say, “I’m not making progress,” it’s very general. It’s kind of like, well, how do we make progress?

So we want to be very specific. In the weight loss program, the way that I talk about it to try and simplify it is you create a protocol that you think will help you lose weight. It’s a hypothesis basically. And then you follow that protocol exactly because if you don’t follow it exactly, we don’t know if it works, right?

So the first step is am I following my protocol? And the second step is if that answer is yes, then the second step is am I losing weight? And if the answer is no, then we have to change the protocol. That’s weight loss. That’s the simplest - for those of you who aren’t in the program, that’s the simplest program.

You make a hypothesis about what will help you lose weight, you follow that protocol exactly. If you're losing weight, continue on, if you’re not, change your protocol. That’s not the hard part. That’s the easy part. The hard part is staying on the protocol.

And the reason why it’s hard to stay on the protocol is because of feelings. We don’t want to feel. We don’t want to feel the feelings that are associated with the protocol. So the work isn’t even about the food. It isn’t even about the protocol because that’s the easy part.

It’s about why am I not willing to feel the feelings that come up when I don’t eat that food? Why do I create a loose protocol? Because I don’t want to feel. I don’t want to feel restricted, I don’t want to feel deprived, I don’t want to feel hungry, I don’t want to feel any of those emotions. And we push against them, and that’s why we have what I call this buffered stagnation in our life. So what about making 2024 the year that you feel all the ugly feelings?

Christine: Yes, that’s why I’m here.

Brooke: Okay, good. Good because I think there’s wanting to do something and then there’s deciding to do something. And I know for me because I had your same struggle, for so many years I hadn’t truly decided that no matter what, I was going to feel instead of eat. That was it for an entire year.

And maybe a year feels too long. Maybe you just start with the quarter. For this quarter, I’m going to see what’s possible if I create a stricter protocol that I know will help me lose weight, but also one that I can enjoy eating the food enough that I’ll stay on it, and see what will happen.

For me, when I decide on purpose, here’s what I want to say. For me, the weight loss process was my one thing that I did. That was the one thing that I chose to do and apply all these tools to. And when I figured that out, every single other thing fell in place because I developed that skill set, but it was hard.

It was very hard, but it wasn’t hard in the same way that starving myself and hating my body and overexercising was. It was hard in the way that I didn’t know how to feel instead of eat. And when I learned how to do that, that was the key. So now I’m very thankful for the weight loss process. The weight loss struggle is what created that for me.

Christine: Yeah, it’s just - you’re right. It’s just the feeling, it’s nothing else. But I do need to thank you, you actually saved my life and my husband’s life.

Brooke: Oh my gosh.

Christine: We got caught in a rip on a deserted island, middle of nowhere, out to sea, if we didn’t make it back to this island we were in the Indian Ocean in the middle of nowhere halfway…

Brooke: Oh my gosh.

Christine: And I had the mental strength - my husband was drowning. He was going under me saying bye. And I’m saying no, and I had the mental strength to keep him afloat, drag him back out of a rip, tow him for an hour before someone found us, and was able to get him back and without the mental strength that I had from your program, if it had happened three years ago, and the physical strength from going to the gym to try to lose weight…

Brooke: Oh my god.

Christine: There’s no way we could have done it. So yes…

Brooke: I have total chills. That is amazing. You’re a bad ass.

Christine: I am now, yes. So thank you. Even though I’ve lost some weight, what I’ve gained is just so much more.

Brooke: Oh my gosh, I love this story. Oh my god, that’s amazing. Thank you so much for sharing. You got this. 2024 is going to be the year for you, okay? Deal?

Christine: Deal.

Brooke: Alright my friends, listen, no matter what your goal - maybe it’s like Christine and you want to lose weight. You want 2024 to be the year that you finally do the thing. We’re all going to be doing it together. We’re all going to be feeling the emotions instead of eating, instead of drinking, instead of procrastinating.

We’re going to be putting ourselves out there in our businesses, we’re going to be putting ourselves out there in our relationships, we’re going to be dating if that’s what’s important for us, to find a relationship. We’re going to be moving to the places we want to move to, writing the books we want to write, doing the things we want to do, and exploring the possibilities for our lives.

I want you to join me for the last best year of getting coached in Scholars. If you have any questions, email us, otherwise, sign up today for the year-long program and let’s have the most amazing year.

Any of you who asked questions who were not answered, or raised your hand for coaching and want coaching, come in to Scholars in 2024 and I’ll coach you. Alright my friends, and you can have private one-on-one coaching. Thank you for joining me today everyone. Alright my friends, take care. Bye-bye.

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Hey, if you’ve ever wanted to work with me as your coach, now is the time to do it. You can join me in Get Coached in Scholars by going to TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. This is going to be the best year ever. It’s your turn to change your life. Let’s go.