Ep #63: Dreams and Desires

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.

What’s up everyone? Hey, so I feel I haven’t talked to you guys in a long time. I know for you it’s only been a week, but I sometimes batch my podcasts, so I feel I haven’t talked to you guys in a long time. I’ve been working on my next podcast which has at this point probably already has its first episode up on the Internet. It’s called How to Be a Life Coach, so it’s already there in iTunes. You can check it out in iTunes by doing a search on Brooke Castillo, How to Be a Life Coach or you can check it out at the LifeCoachSchool.com, but I’m doing a podcast over there on the business side of coaching. I’m going through our 14 steps for building a life coaching practice and I’m going through all the marketing tools.

There’s two sides to being a coach. There’s learning how to be a coach and learning how to coach and then there’s learning how to build your business. That other podcast is all about building your business and the steps that you need to go through in order to build it, so check it out. I would really appreciate it if you’d head on over there and give me a review because I’m probably not going to have any at this point. I think I just released it. By the time you listen to this I will have just released it two days ago and it’s probably very lonely over there wanting a few little five star reviews, so listen to it. If you love it give me some love. You know I’m always going to keep giving you love.

Okay, so today we’re going to talk about dreams and desires. Let’s talk about why desires matter. Now one of the things that I’m always talking about is how important it is to go into your brain, go into your mind and see what the heck is going on in there. A lot of people when I start working with them I have an exercise that I do that’s called write down your 25 wants, what are 25 things you want in your life. So many of my clients have such a hard time with this because they have lost track of what they want.

The other thing that I think is really challenging for many of us is to want from that place of abundance. Some of us because we feel our lives are okay and we’re doing fine we stop wanting because we’re not in a place of scarcity or we’re not in a place of feeling we should have any wants, so we don’t allow ourselves to. As you know in many of these podcasts one of the things I talk about is wanting from that place of wanting something just because you want it, not because you’re unhappy. For example, you don’t have to want a new job because you’re unhappy in your current job. You could love your current job and still want a new job, right. You don’t have to want from that place of dissatisfaction, you can want from a place of satisfaction.

Another important thing is you can want from a place of non-justification and this is something I’ve really learned recently from my teacher Dan Sullivan is that you don’t ever have to justify your own wants. I was like “what’d you say?” Love this idea that I can just want something and I don’t have to justify why I want it and I don’t have to explain why I want it and I don’t have to make it be some altruistic reason. One of the most important things that I’ve come to in my life is my relationship with money. I have a very good relationship with money. I want more money from a place of abundance. I don’t want money from a place of scarcity and I don’t ever feel I have to justify wanting money or having money.

I was just talking to someone, I was actually going to hire someone to do some copywriting for me and we were talking about this desire and want for money. He was a very expensive copywriter and so I was talking to him about it and he said to me we make a lot of money, but we spend our money on … He was telling me all these charitable organizations and I said that’s fantastic. I said but in my opinion it’s okay to make a lot of money and not give it away if you don’t want to, right? I felt oh, but I just want to let you know we spend our money on really important things and I said it’s your money. If you want to buy yourself a Maserati I think that’s what you should do. It’s your money and you’ve earned it and I don’t think we need to explain some altruistic intention for our money.

We get to have what we want because we want it. If we want a Maserati or we want a Louis Vuitton bag or we want to buy our kids a new set of golf clubs, not that my son wants a new set of golf clubs, but whatever it is we don’t have to justify it to anyone. I’ve noticed so many people trying to over explain their choices in their life as if they have to justify their wants. When you’re thinking about your own desires I think it’s important to first clear out the clutter in your mind, so you can actually access your genuine desires and then you can ask yourself why you want something and you get to like your reason or not. You don’t have to offer that reason to anybody else.

For example, I don’t know why I’m on Maseratis right now. One of my really, really good girlfriends her husband bought himself a Corvette and I laughed so hard because I grew up in the ‘80s, so when I picture a Corvette I picture some slick haired guy in one of those ‘80s Corvettes that’s driving around going hey, what’s up, right. When she told me that he bought a Corvette I’m like you’ve got to be kidding me, that seems so cheesy. Then I went over and saw the Corvette and it is hot. It doesn’t look anything like the ‘80s Corvettes. It is sweet. Pavel, maybe you can find a picture of … For any of you guys that don’t know, Pavel is the guy that is amazing for me and he edits all of my podcats, so hats off to him. Maybe you could find a picture of a 2015 Corvette and put it in the show notes for them, so they could actually see that it doesn’t look like the old school day. I wouldn’t even know it was a Corvette.

Anyway, wow, that was a tangent, but I’m coming back, come back to me. Here we go. Let’s say you want a Maserati and the reason you want the Maserati is because you love Maseratis, you want to drive in it, you think it’d be super fun. Now that’s a reason that you may like. Now if you want a Maserati because you want to impress people and you want people to think you’re awesome and you want people to admire you or be jealous of you or something, that’s a reason that you have to check with yourself and make sure hey, do I like this reason for wanting a Maserati. Now you don’t ever have to explain that reason to anyone else, just make sure you like that reason and that’s why it’s important to clear out the clutter.

Let’s talk about some deeper desires and some deeper dreams. About two weeks ago, I was on a public coaching call. What, you don’t know what a public coaching call is? C’mon, you got to go to the website, LifeSchoolCoach.com, opt in for the public coaching call. Every other week and this is actually going to go to once a month, but every other week for the past six months, I think, I’ve been doing a public coaching call which means I will coach you on the call for free. The only thing that you agree to do is be recorded and let other people benefit from your coaching experience.

We’ve had some amazing people come on and be coached that share some really deep things on there and they’re willing to be coached. If you are listening to this and you have volunteered to be coached on the call, I honor you so much and I really appreciate you being so brave to be coached. There was a woman who was on the public coaching call and if you opt in when you get that recording you’ll get access to past coaching calls. One of the things that she said was that she had this dream of being an artist and she had back in the day been an artist and been very successful at being an artist, but then had taken a job at a university and had worked there ever since. She really felt like she was missing out on her desire to be an artist.

What I told her was … First of all, I asked her about why she didn’t want to be an artist now and what were her concerns and what were her fears and, of course, there were many. That’s what happens to most of us. We bury our desires underneath our doubts, so tweet that, how about it? We bury our desires beneath our doubts and then we never really get to experience manifesting our desires because we’re so afraid that we’re not capable of doing them. One of the things that I told her was that you’re never going to regret believing in yourself. You will regret doubting yourself, but you’ll never regret believing in yourself and going all in on yourself.

You’re not always going to be successful when you bet on yourself. You’re not always going to be successful the first time. You may have to try something many, many times and she had been an artist and hadn’t been able to stick with it because of needing to cover herself financially in other ways, but now she was really in a position where she knew that she could be successful at it in some ways, but that desire was tucked away underneath her doubts. Now here’s the good news about it. When you have a desire that means something to you it doesn’t go away, right. It’s nags at you. Now you can eat and drink and overwork and try and hide that desire, but it always, it’s just like that little poke, poke, hello, hello, I’m still here.

Now why is that? Why do our desires nag at us and thank goodness that they do. Here’s why I think that happens. I think that our desires are really our maps to our destinies and that sounds very dramatic, but I really do believe that what we desire if we follow that indicator and follow our dreams then we will live the life that we are meant to live, that’s inline with our true selves. I think that’s true for little desires and I think that’s true for big desires. I think it’s true for wanting the food we want to eat at a restaurant, wanting the people that we want to hang out with, the desire to have a bigger home, the desire to send our kids to college, the desire to buy a new outfit, to lose weight, to get a college degree, to become a life coach, to become an astronaut.

Whatever it is, our desires, if we listen to them will lead us to a life where we feel the most alive. Our desires if we don’t listen to them become a problem. You guys know what I’m talking about, right. If you have an unmet desire, a neglected desire, it shows up in ways that require distraction, right. If you’re not going to honor or pay attention or even acknowledge your desire you’re going to have to do something pretty significant to distract yourself from it. A lot of people drink and overeat and overwork, right. Those are the ways that we hide from our own destiny and I’m not saying that at all to be dramatic or for anyone to beat themselves up. I just think that that’s how it’s setup.

I think desires are sacred and I think they’re the most important information and I think they’re the most neglected information that we have. We pay attention to other people’s desires, we pay attention to what the world might want for us and so many times we don’t pay attention to our own deepest desires. For those of you who don’t know what your dreams or desires are you need to clean out your thought clutter before you’ll be able to find that treasure within you. The other thing that you can do is allow yourself to dream without being encumbered by your own doubts and this is an underrated activity.

When you think about what you most want in the world, when you think about what matters the most to you, what’s going to happen is you’re going to have limits that come up. For example, you’re going to say if I could have whatever I want in the world, if I could wave a magic wand then I would want to travel to Italy. Then immediately your brain says we can do that. You have young kids and you have a full-time job and you don’t have any money, so you can’t do that and so then that desire is just immediately put away. If you entertain your desires, if you talk about your desires, if you look at them and put them on vision boards and create visual reminders of what your desires are your brain and your heart go to work on making them come true.

Let me share with you an example of that for me. When I was doing this work, actually it was in the March co-training, I was sitting down, we were broken up into partners and we were doing our want lists and I was doing mine with one of my master coaches, Suyin Nichols, and we were writing down everything we want. One of the things that I want so much is to provide a school where my coaches can be crazy successful. Now immediately what comes up for me is I can’t make my coaches be successful because that’s on them and, of course, that is true, right. You can only be as successful as you show up in the world and as you are willing to do the work that you need to do to have your dreams come true.

I want to provide an environment where I can make it as easy as possible to be successful as a life coach and as a weight coach. Immediately I see my brain going to work to push that desire away and that’s not possible and we can’t do that. I allowed my doubts to come up and then I put them aside and I said but what if I could, what would that be like? I just daydreamt about it. I dreamt about so many of my students being able to really live their dreams, really see clients and really make the money that they want to make and support their families and make a difference in their lives. I really provided an environment that made it easier for them to create those results for them in their life.

I just started feeling overwhelmed with this sense of excitement and enthusiasm and participation and everything just started to feel amazing. That’s so important. When we’re thinking about our desires and our dreams so many of us stop at the doubt, right, so we start thinking oh, I’d love to have that Maserati. Then we say that’s not ever going to happen, there’s no way I could ever possibly have a Maserati. I can’t even afford to pay my rent, how am I going to get a Maserati, right. We just push it away instead of really imagining what it would be like to have it and to drive it and to be in it and to drive our kids in it or whatever it is that we imagine and all the reasons why we want to have that car and really allow ourselves to go there.

What happens is we tap into that emotion, we tap into that positivity and what happens for me is possibilities and ideas and solutions start coming to me. That’s what’s been happening to me when I think about helping my coaches. I have all these new ideas of how I’m going to add stuff to my life coach training and my weight coach training to make their lives easier, so they can utilize all the tools that they need and they don’t have to go out and search for them. I have them all there and I’m providing them with a really clear blueprint on how to create the business of their dreams, so then I can have my dream come true which is my coaches all being crazy successful.

If I hadn’t allowed myself to invite that emotion in I don’t think I could have accessed so many of the solutions that had come to me. I think that’s true for all of us, right. If you want to go to Italy you have to go to Italy in your mind, you have to imagine what it would be like in Italy, you have to imagine I really want to go to Italy, so that’s why this is coming up. I want to take my family and I want to fly on Virgin Air and I want to fly first-class to London and then I want to go to Capri and I want to go to the Amalfi Coast and I’m just imagining it and I’m looking at it on the Internet and we talk about it all the time. All those emotions are there and so then the possibilities and the solutions and the ideas and the ways to pay for it all start coming to me as well.

Now here’s what’s true when I think about the woman that I was talking to on my public coaching call. I’ve been thinking about her so much lately and thinking about all of her talent that’s within her and all of her desire that’s within her and all of the doubt and the fear that is within her. I wonder about what is the point of all that, you know what I mean? Why do we come to this planet and have to be filled with so much desire and equal, if not more, doubt? I think about my students who so desperately want to make six figures being life coaches and they really see that it’s possible. They see that they can do this for a living and they can see that they can help people and they can see how much value they have to add.
Then they have so much doubt about it being able to happen for them and how they’re different and why it won’t work for them and how they’re not good enough and all of that doubt. I wonder, okay, universe, what deal is this? You’re giving me so much desire and so much doubt. Why is that? What I think is that nothing’s gone wrong because we have doubt. In fact, I think that’s the hand we’re dealt. It’s like here you go, here’s your desire and here’s your doubt, what are you going to do? What are you going to do with all of it? Which one are you going to honor? Are you going to honor your doubt or are you going to honor your desire and your dreams?

You will feel very differently in your life based upon how you think about your dreams and what’s important for you, right. You’re going to think about it in a very different way if you are committed to honoring your desires and your dreams. I want you each to think about that. How committed are you to honoring your desires and your dreams and do you know how important they are? I was thinking about this the other day, if everybody on our planet was committed to honoring their own dreams, to pushing through their fear, to pushing through their doubt and really doing what was in our hearts, what would the world be like?

First of all there’d be so many more happy people, right, because we’d all take that risk and work for ourselves. I think that what derails us most of the time is when we give in to fear and doubt and we don’t give in to our dreams and desires. Here’s the rub, right, is the more we honor and pay attention to our dreams the more doubt we’re going to have, right. If we’re just living a life where we are not looking at our dreams and not looking at our desires, we’re just sitting around living this mediocre life. We’re not going to have a lot of doubt come up, we’re not going to have a lot of fear come up because we’re not acknowledging our dreams, we’re not acknowledging our desire, we’re just status quoing.

I think that’s what happens for a lot of us is we don’t want to dream and set goals and go after big things because that ignites our doubt and it’s unfortunate that that’s the way the universe is set up, but it’s not a reason not to do it. Not paying attention to our desire because it’s always accompanied by doubt is not a reason not to focus on our desire, you know what I’m saying? Are you willing to ignite all your fears in order to live the life you’re meant to live? What I told her and what I was so … I don’t know, I just felt so strongly about and I wanted to make sure she really heard me is that if you fail, if you go after your dream and you don’t make it the first time or the second or the fifth, who cares? You went after your dream.

What does it mean to fail going after your dream versus failing ahead of time, committing to failing and ever even going after it. You know what I mean, I just think at the end of the day we’re not going to say God, I really regret following my heart, I really regret honoring my desire, I really regret chasing that dream of mine. I’ve never heard anybody say that. Now it doesn’t mean that you aren’t risking falling hard because when you fail at something that doesn’t matter to you it’s not as long of a fall. When you fail at something that really matters to you it’s very painful. What I mean by fail is you give up on it.

One of the mantras we have at this school is do you want this and do you want it no matter what? Are you willing to go after it no matter what? If the answer is yes it doesn’t matter how many times you don’t succeed because you’ll never fail because you’re going to keep going and going after it no matter what. What I want to leave you with is this. Ask yourself how committed are you to your own desires. Do you acknowledge your desires as sacred or do you dismiss them as frivolous? Do you pay attention to what you want? When you look at your dreams and desires do you know why you want them and do you like your reason? If you do, go get them.

Don’t explain yourself, don’t justify why you want it. You don’t need to justify any of your dreams, any of your desires to anyone but yourself. Then show us what it’s like to live your life according to your own desires, unjustified, your own desires. I don’t want to explain my life to anyone. I want my life to be the explanation. If you are honoring your doubt over your desire I want to challenge you to change your mind. I want to challenge you to honor your dream over your doubt and be willing to fail because at the end of the day you’re not going to care that you failed going after your dream. You’re going to care so much that you never went after it, I promise you that.

All right, you guys, when this ends I want you to really tap in, really think about what your dreams and desires are. Give yourself 10 minutes after this podcast ends to just daydream, to just feel your dream and what it would be like to have it. Enjoy that feeling, it’s there for a reason and it will help you tap into the actual way that you can get it. You would not be given the desire if you didn’t also have the ability to make it come true. I promise you that. Have an amazing week. Don’t forget to go check out my other podcast, How to Be a Life Coach and I will talk to you soon. Take care. Bye, everyone.

Thank you for listening to The Life Coach School Podcast. It would be incredibly awesome if you would take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes. For any questions, comments, or coaching issues you would like to hear on the show please visit us at www.TheLifeCoachSchool.com.