Ep #159: Time Management: Making Time

Welcome to The Life Coach School podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. Now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Well, hello, my friends. How are you today? Today I am anxious. I have been anxious, I'm going to say, ongoing for the past three weeks. Which I work through my anxiety, for sure, every single day, but some days I just want to wake up and have it be rainbows and daisies. You guys know what I'm talking about? Like, "I don't want to have to work through anxiety.

Here's the deal. This is what's so crazy. About three years ago, I had my Mastermind group, my coaches, study the idea of the upper limit and how busting through our upper limits cause us to freak out, basically. That's my summary of what's happened to me over the past three weeks. I set some crazy goals. I hit those crazy goals. Then I proceeded to have an internal panic attack.

I think it's so interesting because so many of us think that all of our issues come from lack of success, not getting what we want. It's just not true. A lot of times we hit our goals, and meet our goals, and surpass our goals, and then we have to deal with the identity-shattering prospect that is.

Here's what I think it is, because I've watched this happen with so many of my clients that have lost weight, so many of my clients that have stopped drinking, so many of my clients that build successful life-coaching businesses they didn't know they were going to be able to do, and bust those limits in terms of how much money they thought they would be able to make. What happens afterwards is usually not just a huge celebration. What happens afterwards is an identity shift, which is like giving birth to a new version of yourself. Even though it's a joyous, wonderful experience, it's also challenging to recognize that you were wrong about yourself, and it's also challenging to step into the new version of yourself.

I'm really going through that transition right now. I feel like sometimes I just want to crawl out of my own skin. I have all my "old issues." I say “brain, neuro pathways want to come alive again.” Like, "Hey, maybe the solution is eating everything in the house. Or maybe you should start drinking chardonnay again. Or maybe you should just lay on the couch all day.”

What I've been doing is just literally doing the work that I'm assigning my students and Self-Coaching Scholars. That is literally the work that I've been doing on myself. It's literally saving my life as I go through this next upper-limit version of my life and stepping into that next experience.

I want to encourage all of you. There's a lot of you within my Scholars program that are having this same experience, which is I think super amazing, but also it's not going to get you a lot of compassion from the people around you. "Oh, poor you. You've lost 50 pounds. Oh, poor you. You were able to quit drinking," or whatever it is. Or, "Poor you, you made $100,000 this year."

I understand where you're coming from. Even though you've had this huge success, it's almost like the cognitive dissonance is de-calibrating. I just want to acknowledge for those of you who are going through that, I'm going through that right now, too. I'm ready for the next version of myself. I'm ready to step into the next version. I'm also struggling with it, too. I'm just being super compassionate with myself and allowing myself to go to that next level and experience that as brand new as I possibly can. I'm willing to let there be some anxiety. I understand the process of this. I know that there's never going to come a time where I'm going to land and not have an upper-limit issue unless I stop growing. I think that this is true for all of us to take this time to acknowledge when we are transitioning into the next version of ourselves.

Oh, by-the-way, if you want to know more about the upper limit problem, it's in a book called, The Big Leap, written by Gay Hendricks. I highly recommend. It's such a good read. I'm actually going to jump on Amazon right now and re-buy that book and read it again because of what I'm going through right now. I think it's one of those things like, as you go through it each time, you're going to have a different experience. Those of you feeling anxious, my hats off to you. Let's do this.

We're just starting a new month of Self-Coaching Scholars and this month is all about time management, and making time, and using time. I think one of the most important things to remember about time is that it is relative. The way we experience time is dependent on how we think about it. It's not something we experience directly as fact.

The reason why we know that is because sometimes time seems to go fast and sometimes it seems to go slow. My son, Connor, just went to the DMV and got his permit. He was there for a very long time. It was just two hours, but it felt like a very long time. That's what we're going to talk about this month. That's what we're really diving into. That is the practice that those of you who are in Scholars will be doing: really taking care to deliberately create and manage time.

Now, there is something inside of our brains that resists us doing this. We resist planning. We resist making decisions ahead of time. We resist thinking about what we are going to do with the deliberateness. We have this sense that being able to react, being able to be spontaneous, being able to not have plans, is somehow a more free life.

I want to tell you that the opposite is true. Please hear me say this. The more you plan, the more free you will be. Here's why. The more you plan, the more you will be able to deliver yourself the results you want. You'll be able to create the exact life you want. You'll be able to enjoy your free time without guilt. You'll be able to produce so much more. You will feel so much more in control of your life. People, I think, misunderstand that spontaneity is somehow a freedom, but really what most people are saying when they say that is they're out of control of their own life.

Now some of you, the reason why you don't want to plan, the reason why you don't want to think ahead, is because you have a hard time with your follow-through. It's kind of like the best laid plans. You figure if you don't make any plans, then you can't set yourself up for disappointment.

I see this mostly with my clients who are trying to plan what they're going to eat. They have the best intentions of what they're going to eat the next day, and then that day comes along and they don't follow through on their plan. This reflects not so much an issue with time, not so much an issue with food, but an issue with honoring commitments to ourselves, having our own backs, our relationship with ourselves.

The example I use a lot of the time is that most of you, if you made a lunch date with me, would show up on time for that lunch date and we would have lunch. You wouldn't blow me off, not call me, not show up, think we could do it the next day. You wouldn't show up a half hour late usually. Most of you would respect my time, show up on time, be present. We treat other people often much better than we treat ourselves.

I will say that when you start running your life as if you are the most important person to respect and love in your life, that shows up in every other area of your life. It doesn't come naturally. I think it's so baffling. Why can't we just be born with self-respect? Why can't we just be born with complete loyalty to ourselves and our word? Why can't we just be in integrity all of the time? Why is this something we have to continually practice and continually focus on?

I feel like so many times when we are trying to honor our own plans, we are in conflict with our survival brain. I think our survival brain is well-intended. It's trying to keep us alive, but it also pulls us so far off track. It tells us, "Oh, that doesn't matter. Go eat. Go rest. Go hide. Go be afraid. That's how we will stay protected." It pulls us off of that deliberate planning that we do.

As humans, that is one of our super powers. Our ability to plan something, to follow through on a plan, and to be consistent with creation: that is not something that most animals are able to do at all. It's something that we haven't evolved into doing naturally. Many of us have learned it in our programming in childhood and it makes it much easier as adults, but even more of us haven't learned it on a consistent basis, how to honor, and follow through, and be consistent in our word to ourselves because our brain and the way that we have evolved pulls us off it so easily. We literally have to overcome the part of our brain that is in survival mode in order to evolve ourselves, in order to create something in our future and follow through on it.
One of the super powers that you are able to do in your life because you're a human is you can make time. I want you to think about this literally. Have you ever thought that you've lost time by not planning? Well, you can do the opposite. You can make time by planning.

Here's what I mean. When you plan something like, "I'm going to work on this thing for an hour," and then you honor that plan, you have used that time so efficiently that you then give yourself an hour of time to relax. Many times when you don't plan, it takes you two hours to do the same thing because you haven't thought of it ahead of time. Therefore, you lose that hour.

As we go through this podcast, I want you to focus on that being true, as that being a possibility for you - that you have the ability to make time. The reason why I know that is because of how much I'm able to achieve and create in such a short amount of time compared to how I used to be. How much more free time I have now compared to how, when I didn't make a plan, I wasn't able to create those results. I wasn't able to get so much done in such a short amount of time.

These are the main things that I have found that create time. One is obviously planning, deliberately planning ahead of time how to use your time. Number two, making decisions strongly. One of the biggest wastes of time, in my opinion, is indecision. I'm talking about indecision before you've made the decision and I'm talking about indecision after you've made the decision.

I watch this happen with my students all the time. They decide that they want to be a life coach. They decide the people they want to work with. Then they change their mind and decide something different. Then they change their mind and decide something different. Then they change their mind and then they question whether they want to be a life coach. What I recommend is you decide to be a life coach and then you never look back. Then you decide who you want to work with and you never look back. When I say never, I have my clients commit for at least a year.

Now, it doesn't mean you're not going to be interested in a number of other things, but indecision will pull you off your path. It's like if you're trying to hike up a mountain and you can't decide which trail to take, and so you keep changing your mind on which trail to take. It's going to take you so much longer to get there if you keep turning around, and going back, and getting on a different trail. Number one, plan your time. Make sure you include time off, and time to relax, and time to play, and time to be spontaneous.

Number two, make decisions strongly. Make a decision and then don't change your mind back. Commit to that decision no matter how you end up feeling. You're going to feel doubt. You're going to feel scared. You're going to feel like it was the wrong decision. If you can believe there's no wrong decision and you can stay committed, you will blow your mind at how much time you save by just going straight up the mountain and not questioning yourself.

The third thing that's very important when it comes to making time is taking massive action. Instead of wondering how to do something, start doing something. You want to find out how to do it? Start doing it. You will immediately know whether it's working or not. You can change your mind only in the sense of what you're doing. You don't change your mind in terms of the decision that you've made.

For example, you decide to be a life coach. You decide to help people lose weight. You don't change your mind about helping people lose weight, but you may change your mind about how to market, or how to go after it, or how to write a blog post. You keep trying and taking massive action until you get the result you want. This is not the same as efforting. This is not the same as being busy. This is taking massive action, which means you create a result.

Now, let me be really clear on this because there's been a lot of confusion within our group here and I want to make sure you guys understand this. When you take massive action, you're always going to produce a result. That's what I want you to focus on. What is the result your action created? Not what was the action you took.

A lot of people say, "Well, I did this, and I did this, and I did this." I don't want to hear what you did. I want to know what that created. Did it create the result you want? If it's not, you need to take different massive action. If it created the result you want, then you keep taking that action and you keep creating that result. Focus on the results you're creating from your massive action, not on the activity that you're doing. Activity takes up time. Taking massive action creates results and makes time.

The next thing I want to say when it comes to planning was one of the most important things, honoring your plan, is the next most important thing. Having a plan that you don't honor isn't useful. People ask me all the time, "How do you honor your plan?" You make it mandatory for yourself. Most of us are not good at following through on our own plans on our own decisions for ourselves. I decided one day that when I make a plan and I put it on my calendar, I'm going to do it no matter how I feel. That's the really important piece: no matter how I feel.

Here's what I found out. When I make a plan today for tomorrow, tomorrow I, for sure, am not going to want to do that plan. Here's why that's so important. I have a much better, emotional, adult process the day before I'm about to do something versus the day of. Here's why. On the day of, I want to respond to how I feel in the moment. How I usually feel in the moment is my survival brain dictating to me to procrastinate, dictating to me not to do something, dictating to me doubt, dictating to me fear. I have to plan on that. I say to myself, "Tomorrow, I am going to record a podcast."

Now here's what's going to happen: tomorrow at 10:00, I'm going to want to lay in the sun. I'm going to want to take a hot bath. I'm going to want to call my friend. I'm not going to want to record my podcast. In that moment, I won't feel like it. I'll want to procrastinate. I'll want to put it later in the day. I'll want to change it. But I never, ever, ever do that to myself, ever, anymore. It is precise. It is precision. It is not negotiable. 10:00 podcast. Sit down. Record it. Do it.

Now here's what's interesting. Typically, I don't feel like doing it the moment that it's time to do it, but once I get into it, I'm all-in, loving it. It's almost like my brain has to have that little battle.

Now here's what's important. If every time you want to do something from your prefrontal cortex, from your vision of your life, you don't do it, you just keep spinning in the life that you currently have. If you make plans and you follow through on those plans, you get better at overcoming that survival brain. The survival brain never goes away. It's always telling you to run in the cave and hide. Always. It's always telling you you're probably going to die, but you get better at managing it when you step out, make a plan, and follow through on that plan. That is the most important thing I can teach any of you and it's the most simple, so it sounds easy, but it's the most difficult.

If you say you're going to eat something tomorrow, eat only that. Don't eat anything else but what you said you were going to eat. If you plan your day for tomorrow, make sure you plan some free time. Make sure you plan some enjoyment time. Follow through on that exact list of things that you told yourself you would do. Wake up at the time you said you were going to wake up and do the work that you promised yourself you would do no matter what, especially if you don't feel like it.

One of the other best ways I know of how to make time is constraint. We've talked a lot about this in Scholars. We've talked a lot about many of you wanting to take on two, three, four goals and then what you say is, "I'm so overwhelmed, I don't do any of them." My feedback to each of you has consistently been pick one and stick to it until you get the result you want one at a time.

You can still be doing other things to support your other goals, but your main focus is that one path to the top of that one hill to get that one result that you're focused on. If it's weight loss, let it be weight loss. If it's money, let it be money. Pick one and go for it. You can still learn about other things. You can still play around with other things, but your main focus, and most of your energy, needs to go into one goal at a time.

Here's another really powerful time-management technique: fail. Fail. Did you know that failing saves you as much time as succeeding? Isn't that crazy? When you think about failure, what is failure? How do we define it? You didn't get the result you wanted. You took massive action and you didn't create the result you wanted.

What's amazing about this, if you can change your way of thinking about it, it doesn't mean that you're going backwards down the hill. It just means that that trail isn't going to get you there and you just need to try something different. That's all it means. You keep going forward. You keep learning. You keep moving. If you're afraid of failing, what do you do? You stop. You learn nothing. You move nowhere.

One of the best ways to save time is to fail. Then you'll never go on that trail again. You'll know it didn't work. Or you'll redo it in a way that will work and then you'll have that knowledge and you'll have that accomplishment under your belt. The opposite of failure isn't succeeding. The opposite of failure is doing nothing. Be willing to fail.

With my Master Coaches, I always ask them to provide one epic fail a week. If you're not doing an epic fail a week, you're probably not succeeding. If you're not putting yourself out there and be willing to risk failure, you're probably not succeeding at the level that you could.

Here's another really good time-management technique that a lot of you have a really, really hard time with: say no. Way too many of us are people-pleasers. Way too many of us say yes when we should say no. One of the best ways to save time is to say no.

Here's the way that you do it. You decide what is your one main goal. You constrain your energy. You make a plan for it. You plan deliberately. You do not deviate from that plan. When somebody asks you to accommodate their schedule or their plan, if it doesn't work with your plan, you say no. You learn to practice saying no without explaining yourself. You do not need to offer an explanation when you say no.

In fact, what I want to offer to all of you guys is that you don't make excuses for saying no, either. You certainly don't make up lies for saying no. You have to be willing to say no to other people so you can say yes to yourself, to your own dreams, to your own clients, to your own people, to your own family. You have to be willing to say no. You have to be willing to let other people be upset. You have to be willing not to please them in order for you to have your time, in order for you to make your time.

Okay, make decisions strongly. Take massive action that is result-producing. Plan with precision, discipline, and integrity. Honor your plan. Constrain your focus. Fail. Say no.

Here are some other tips, and ideas, and practices on time. Delegation. When you think about the value of your time and what you're good at doing, it's very important to utilize delegation. You are very good at doing something that is the most valuable to your life. This is your unique ability. The more time you can spend in your unique ability, the more time you will have, and the more money you will make. Delegate to others to do the things that are in their unique ability.

I learned this from Dan Sullivan and I have used it in my family life. I've utilized it in my business. I've utilized it with my friends, even in my social life. What I'm very good at, what I really enjoy doing, is what I focus the majority of my time on, and I delegate everything else. For example, I would rather pay someone to clean my house that truly enjoys cleaning my house, and has that as their unique ability, and is way better at it than me, while I coach or teach a class. You need to decide for you what your focus is and what you can delegate.

Let me offer this, too. A lot of you think you can't delegate because you think that delegation means you have to pay someone. That is not true. You can trade time. You can make deals with people. Like my husband and I made a deal a long time ago that I would never have to go to children's birthday parties. He loves going to kids' birthday parties, doesn't mind at all. We made that deal. It was kind of like a delegation, right? He's like, "I'll take the kids. No problem." There are other things like helping with their homework that he doesn't like to do. He delegates that to me. I'm all in.

Completion. So much of our life is spent in inaction, which means not starting things and quitting before we finish. This is a complete time-suck. Finishing things creates momentum and buys us more time with that energy. Think about the things that you start and don't complete. It's so debilitating. Not just energy-wise, but integrity-wise. Your ability to trust yourself. You will form an opinion about yourself based on what you do. Honor your commitments to yourself and complete the things that you start. You will build up so much integrity and respect for yourself that that momentum will carry you into way bigger accomplishments that maybe you can't even imagine doing now.

So many of us look at our lives and think that what we can accomplish depends on what's available to us in the world. I want to offer that what you can accomplish is based on what you follow through on. You don't have to know the exact how. You just have to start taking action, make a plan, and follow through on your action.

Busyness is mental laziness and lack of planning. Being busy is always optional. Define that word for yourself and then don't ever use it in your vocabulary. You have a choice on how to look at the items you are currently doing. The truth is you can only do one thing at a time at all times. Busyness is a mental construct revealing how much you are thinking about, not how much you are doing. I'm going to repeat that because you guys all need to get ahold of this. Busyness is a mental construct revealing how much you are thinking about, not how much you are doing.

I am an expert on this because I live with a man who is always "busy." It's not because he's doing so many different things. It's because he's thinking about so many different things at the same time. I will tell you, it doesn't matter how many things are on his to-do list, he's always busy. There's two things or three things. It's a reflection of what's going on in his mind.

I want you to never tell anyone that you're too busy again or that you're busy. If you catch yourself doing it, stop it. All it means is that your brain is noisy. You are always only doing one thing at a time. When people say to me, "Hey, I know you're really busy, can I get some time with you," I'll say, "I'm not busy. I have plenty of time."

Now it doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to make time with you because people use busyness as an excuse. "Oh, I can't meet with you. I'm way too busy." I've for sure done that myself. But when you tell the truth, "I have plenty of time, but I can't or don't want to meet with you, or I can't meet with you because it's not on my schedule the way that I've planned it and I'm not going to put it on there," then you get to live with the truth of that. It's very interesting.
Next, stop trying. What does trying mean? If you put trying in the A-line of a model, what you get is a certain result of nothing. Trying something is not the same as doing something. This is not merely semantics. What is the difference? Think about how those words feel. Remember that feelings drive action. Try on how these two sentences drive action. "I will try to do that," versus, "I will do that."

Think about how each of these sentences will drive a different level of action. If you have a sentence, "I will try to do that," your A-line will be trying to do something. "I will do that," is going to create the feeling of determined and then your A-line will be taking the action to complete it. The result will be much different. Stop trying to do stuff. Remove trying as an option. There's no reason to do it. It robs you of your time.

Next, stop distractions. A distraction is something that pulls you off focus, an agitation of the mind. Distraction is a mental stop away from progress. Our brain, in effect, is quite lazy when it's untrained to stay focused. It would much rather rest by distracting and focusing on the phone ringing, the latest tweet, or the cutest Facebook post. It takes a conscious effort to keep the brain focused, to keep the brain working. Notice your distractions.

My coach, Frank Kern, taught this and I do this anyway. Even before I learned it from him, I noticed that I did this. I went, "Ah, I wonder if that's why the two of us are so effective at getting so much done is we do not have our work on a computer that has ways for us to go on to Facebook." Not that I'm on Facebook ever. But notice what your distractions are. The TV, music, people at the door, people texting you, Facebook on your phone, Twitter on your phone. What are the distractions that are pulling you away from progress? Make a real clear inventory of those distractions and notice what they're costing you.

Stop multitasking. There's not a real way to multitask. We can't do two things at once, so multitasking really means we keep shifting from one thing to the other. What this doesn't take into account is how long it takes us to shift. We are much better working on one thing to completion and then starting the next thing.
They actually did this test where they had people who had two things that they needed to accomplish. They either did them both at the same time or one at a time. One at a time was so much faster because they didn't have to keep shifting their focus in between the two. This is the idea that I have about constraint, too. Do one thing. Do it to completion and then pick another thing.

Okay, so here are the practices. Here are the ideas. Delegation. Make sure you're focused on your unique ability. Completion. Follow through and complete things before you start new things. Busyness. Get rid of mental laziness and lack of planning. That's all busyness is. It's just revealing how much you're thinking about, not how much you're doing. Stop trying to do things. Trying to do things is a complete waste of time. Start doing things. Stop distraction. They're pulling you off task, preventing your progress. Stop multitasking. It doesn't really exist. It makes everything take longer.

If you're in Scholars, I have some great questions for you at the end of this workbook. Take your time to fill them out. You guys, if you can get ahold of your time, if you can start making time in your life, it will change everything. That's all we're doing this month in Scholars is really planning our time, really focusing and being precise, and then following through on that plan.

It may seem tedious to plan. It may seem boring to plan. It is the exact opposite. It is the most exciting, life-changing thing you can do in your life. This is not simply getting a new planner and learning how to plan stuff better. This is changing your relationship with yourself and your word. I am super excited about this month. Can't wait to see how much you guys change your lives this month. Talk to you guys next week. Bye.

Oh, and this week, I have Kirstin Sarfde, also known as Coach Kir. She has a great segment for you on binging. If any of you struggle with binging, whether it's food, or alcohol, or even anything you do kind of against your own will, I think you'll really enjoy this segment from her. I also want to encourage you to go to her website and check out her video series. She's amazing, adorable, and brilliant. Enjoy!

Hey, guys. Instead of the regular outro today, I wanted to share with you the audio of a video I created about a free training I'm giving away. If you're interested in checking out the free training, make sure you go to thelifecoachschool.com/join to join us in the training.

Watch. Listen. What is the one thing that changes everything, the one that everyone wants? We want it more than money. In fact, it's the reason we want money. We want it more than a new job. We want it more than being thin. We want it more than success. It is the one thing all of us want without exception. It is the one thing that changed everything for me. It helped me stop procrastinating, stop overdrinking, stop overeating, stop making excuses.

In a minute, I will tell you exactly what that one thing is, but first, let me introduce myself in case some of you don't know me. My name is Brooke Castillo. I'm a Master Certified Life Coach. I'm the co-founder of The Life Coach School. I'm the author of Self-Coaching 101. I'm the creator of Stop Overeating Masterclass. I'm the coach for Stop Overdrinking. I'm the host of the top-rated podcast, The Life Coach School podcast. I'm living my very best life with more success, freedom, and accomplishment than I ever imagined.

It wasn't always this way. I used to dream about the life I now have. I struggled with overeating and constantly losing the same 20 pounds. I struggled with overdrinking and lack of sleep, hangovers, and feeling out of control. I suffered with feeling like my life wasn't meaningful and not having work that fed my soul.

Then I discovered the one thing that changed everything: how to feel better. I discovered the process of how to feel better. Up until about 10 years ago, I didn't realize how important my feelings are. I didn't understand that it was my feelings driving my actions. Everything I was doing and not doing in my life was because I was afraid, frustrated, doubtful, self-conscious, anxious, worried, ashamed. These feelings all led to the actions that were creating the terrible results in my life.

I had no idea. I didn't truly understand that feelings drive all action. No wonder I was overeating, and overdrinking, and procrastinating. But after learning that feelings drive actions, actions create our results, and thoughts create feelings, everything changed for me. I was stopped in the tracks of my life. I had a huge epiphany. If thoughts cause feelings, and feelings cause actions, and actions cause results, then I could understand everything about my life. There's nothing in my life that isn't one of these things.

I went to work to create a model that would help me understand this truth and start applying it to my life. I realized that the one thing all of us want is to feel better. We want to feel happy, abundant, loved, loving, and important. If we felt this way, there's nothing else we would ever need. There's nothing out there that we want independent of how we think we will feel in the having of it.

Learning this, and how to apply the model, changed everything. I went from anxious, frustrated, and self-conscious, to relaxed, excited, and self-confident, all within a very short amount of time. Feeling this way made it so much easier to manage urges to overeat, overdrink, procrastinate, gossip, and distract myself. I now live with a sense of pride, contribution, and the knowledge that my life does matter and is significant.

I also know that you are watching this today for a reason. Most likely, it's because you're just like me. At least you can relate to the desire to feel better. I want to tell you that the one thing you must want, and all of us want, is to feel better. Please don't worry that you don't know how. You don't need to go to years of therapy or even study a library of books. What you need to do is learn and start applying the model process right now.

Here's what I got for you. My entire training on How to Feel Better is based on a decade of coaching, studying, and application. It's eight concepts that literally change everything. It teaches the process of how to change what you are habitually doing and creating.

Here's what it will do for you. It will change how you think about yourself and the world. It will give you a repeatable process for finding out why you feel bad and how to change to feeling good. It will show you that you don't need to get anything else in life to feel better. This training will show you that when you do feel better, it's so much easier to change your life.
Here's the best news ever. I'm going to give you this training for free. Yep. Students pay thousands of dollars to take and attend this training and change their lives forever, but I'm giving it away right now. Why? Because I've decided to give it to everyone who joins my Self-Coaching Scholars this month. I'm including this $1,997 training for free when you join Self-Coaching Scholars. Self-Coaching Scholars membership is only $297 per month, a fraction of the cost of this training alone.

But that's not all. You also get all the benefits of Scholars in addition to the How to Feel Better training. You will get live calls with me once a week where you can ask anything you want on the training and the coaching we do on the course. You will also get the new money training, the time training, the podcast study guide, and the companion book with How to Feel Better, stop overeating training, stop overdrinking training, the model training, how to coach yourself training, how to stop buffering training. All for the monthly membership fee of $297. You will also get the training in May on relationships, and June on self-confidence as long as you stay member. You can cancel at any time with no hassle whatsoever.

Even if you only decide to stay a member for one month, you will have gotten How to Feel Better, the time training, the money training, the books, and the live coaching with me all for $297. I can't make you an offer better than that. Go to thelifecoachschool.com/join now. Enrollment closes and then the button stops working. This is an incredible opportunity to work with me live. I can't wait to teach you the most important thing I've ever learned, the one thing that changes everything. Let's get started.

Once you click that button and enroll, you will get immediate access to the membership and the How to Feel Better training. Go ahead and start looking around, playing some videos, or even reading through the book. We will ship you your package in the mail within a few days. That will include the exact schedule of the calls. If you can't make it live, don't worry. We record everything and place it in your membership area for you to watch at your convenience. It's our goal to over-deliver in every way. See you inside.

Podcast Feature: Kirstin Sarfde

Hello, my name is Kirstin Sarfde, but I also go by Coach Kir. I'm a certified life and weight loss coach. I'm so excited to be with you today and very grateful that Brooke has given me this opportunity to be a part of her podcast. I work with women who binge eat and the reason why is because I struggled with it for about 10 years. Now that I don't anymore, I so badly want to help others overcome it, too.

I want to begin by clarifying what I mean when I say binge eating because I know some people have their own definitions. I classify it as eating large amounts of food in a short period of time while feeling like you're out of control and unable to stop until you are beyond stuffed. Typically, it's done while alone and afterwards feelings such as disgust, regret, guilt, and shame are present.

It's much more intense than just overeating. Before a person binge eats, they feel this urge to do it. This urge and how to deal with it is what I'm going to be talking about today. If you're a binge eater, you're probably quite familiar with this urge. It's composed of any thoughts or feelings that make you feel compelled to binge eat.

This urge is the reason why you binge. Without it, you wouldn't do it. Learning how to sit with the urge is the most crucial part of not binging because once you give into that urge, it's all over. Or at least really difficult to stop. You prevent binging by not giving into the urge.

What's the deal with these urges? I'm going to talk a little bit about what goes on in your brain when an urge strikes. The urge originates in the most primitive part of our brain, sometimes referred to as the lower brain, or the lizard brain. This is the unconscious part of our brain that has automatic reactions to our internal and external environments.

Your urge is one of those reactions, but this is not the part of your brain where you make your decisions. That's the prefrontal cortex, or higher brain, where the true you lives, and where you know your real wants such as to not binge eat. The lower brain sends out the urge, but it's your true self in your higher brain that decides whether or not to act on it. The urge itself cannot make you do anything. It cannot make you get up and eat food. Eating the food is a decision that you make. Two separate parts of your brain are at play here. What that means is urge does not equal binge. Urge suggests binge.

I know for myself, while I was still binging, I thought I had no choice but to binge when the urge hit, but that's not true. All the urge is, is a request or a demand that you binge. You get to decide whether or not you'll comply. You'll notice that there's a moment when you make that decision to go for it. The urge made a convincing argument and you went with it, but you don't have to.

It's important to understand that this urge is not coming from the real you, the “you” in your higher brain. It may sound like you and you may feel it in your body, but it's not you creating those thoughts and feelings. It's like the urge has a mind of its own. That's why we feel like we've been taken over when it hits. It has a voice of its own and it creates its own sensations.

You truly don't want to binge, but that urge does. You don't really want to do it one more time, but it does. It's good to recognize what your urges feel like to you and also some of the things the urges say to you to try to convince you to binge.

This is a great time to be aware of your thoughts, the ones the urge creates, and the ones that you create. The urge will say things like, "One binge won't hurt." Or, "It will be fun," which was a common one for me at times when I felt I was bored and lacking fun in my life. It was probably because it was fun in a way, when I begin it at least, while buying my binge food or when I'd first start eating. But it wouldn't be long before it wasn't fun anymore. I just felt awful. All in all, the experience of binging was not fun, just that first part. But in the moment, I would choose to believe what the urge was telling me and that it wouldn't end badly, even though it always did.

You get to decide how you want to respond to those urge thoughts. Do you want to believe them? Will it be fun? Will one binge hurt? You can disagree. If you know it won't be fun and one binge will hurt, you can say no. All it is, is a sentence in your mind, nothing more. It's meaningless. It's like your drunk neighbor who's loudly yelling nonsense at you. You're just like, "Okay, buddy. I hear you, but I'm not with you."

Then there's the thoughts you choose to think when the urge hits. Just a refresher, your thoughts about a neutral circumstance create your feelings, which then drive your actions. We'll say the urge is the circumstance. It's present, but it has no power until you give it some with how you think about it.

These thoughts will determine whether you make this feeling you're having worse and also whether you'll give in and binge. Something like, "I can't believe this is happening again, what's wrong with me," can make you feel powerless or upset, leaving you to give in and binge. Instead, consider how you can think about the urge to take away its power and create a more calm feeling. Something like, "I feel the urge, but it means nothing and I don't have to respond." The urge is already making you feel uncomfortable. You don't need to make it worse by thinking thoughts that are just going to cause more uncomfortable feelings.

The great thing here is if you're able to stay calm and not get worked up, the urge will go away. We're used to making it go away by giving it what it wants, a ton of food, but if you just let it be, it will go away on its own. It may take 10 minutes, it may take an hour, but it will go. You are not destined to live with an unrelenting urge to binge for the rest of your life.

I'm going to give you an example of how this works in a different scenario. Say you're babysitting an annoying little boy that you've taken shopping with you. He's hounding you to buy him candy and he will not shut up. You start feeling really aggravated and you argue with him, but that just makes him argue back and whine more. Finally, just to shut him up, you buy him that candy. That boy is your binge urge. It hounds you to binge. If you argue with it, it just gets louder, so you finally give into it to shut it up.

What if you just allowed that little boy to do his thing? If you just stayed calm, let him try to bug you, and you just let him be a whiny kid, then you leave the store without buying him the candy and eventually he'll get over it. That will happen with your urge, too. If you can calmly let it be there and not react to it, not argue with it, it will go away eventually.

The key here is staying calm and not reacting. That's where your thoughts come in. You create calm for yourself and you also create aggravation. Here's where you decide which you want to create. If you want to not binge, I suggest you shoot for the calm feeling. Think about what thoughts you can think to create a feeling that won't drive you to binge eat.

Now, I know it's uncomfortable to not give into the urge. Even if you know you don't have to, the discomfort is usually the reason why we do. After you've decided to stay calm and not react, the urge will still be present and it won't feel good. Everyone's urges are different, but I'm almost certain that no matter how yours feel, it's not good.

Remember what the urge really is: thoughts and feelings. You can control the feelings that you create with your thoughts, but you don't so much have control over the feeling the urge created it. That one you just have to deal with, but like any feeling, all it is is a sensation - completely harmless, non-life-threatening. The worst thing it does is cause discomfort. I know you don't want to deal with being uncomfortable, but let's be real here. You know what's more uncomfortable than just sitting with a binge urge? The feeling you have after you binge, both physically and emotionally.

A great way I've found to practice feeling uncomfortable is to not scratch an itch. I bet most, if not all of you, scratch immediately unless for some reason you can't like you're in public and it's an inappropriate place to scratch. Typically, you go for that immediate satisfaction.

I challenge you next time you have an itch to not scratch it. See how long you can stand to let it be there without reacting to it with a scratch. Of course, an itch is nothing compared to a binge urge, but I will say the better you can get at dealing with little bouts of discomfort, the better you will be at bigger bouts of it. Baby steps, people, will get you to big places.

Then what do you do when you're feeling the discomfort of the urge? You do something, anything, except look in your cabinets, or refrigerator, or go to a store that has what you're craving. You can watch TV or a movie, read a book, go for a walk. Whatever you decide to do, focus on it.

We get to decide what we want to focus on, so if you find your mind wandering to that urge, bring back your attention to your activity. This is a concept similar to meditation, which is also a great thing to do in this situation. In meditation, you can just focus on something such as your breath. Your mind wanders and then you bring it back to your breath. Don't allow yourself to get upset when you think about the urge. Just do your best to not judge yourself and keep your attention on anything other than the urge.

Now this all takes practice. If you've been feeling the urge and binging for a long time, this all may not be so easy. This is the best way I know how to not binge. What's great is the more you can do this, the quieter the urges will become. Eventually, they will cease to exist.

Back to that little boy, if you don't buy him that candy enough times, he'll realize it's just never going to happen and stop asking. What's the point of whining if you know there's no chance you'll get what you want? You're teaching your brain that you don't binge anymore and, therefore, it's going to stop demanding that you do.

One last piece of advice, which will make this process so much easier, is to stop dieting. When you restrict your food intake, your brain thinks you're starving and that you need large amounts of food. Your lower brain, which just wants to keep you alive, will continue pushing you to binge, which is what you're trying to get away from. If you're trying to lose weight, you can work on that after you stop binging.

For anyone who struggles with binge eating, I hope this was helpful. Try it. See what happens. If you mess up and binge, it's okay. Try again. The more you do it, the easier it will get, and the less you'll even have to do it.

Thank you so much for listening. If you want to learn more or if you're interested in getting some coaching, you can find me at coachkir.com. That's coachkir.com. Thanks again to Brooke for having me. Bye-bye, everyone.