Ep #192: A Year in Review

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

Hello, hello my friends. I am so excited about this podcast. It's one of those like, surreal moments in my life because if you've been listening to the podcast, I've talked a lot this year about how when I set my goals for the year I started in January of last year by talking about my goals in the past tense. So basically, I talked about how I met with my team and I said to them, "Hey, here's what we did in 2017" and I presented my vision as if it was already done.

And it was really a cool way to do it, to talk about it from the perspective of it already being done, and now as I go into my year in review, it is already done. So it's like, I have been here before. So I want to encourage all of you guys to do a year in review, and this isn't just for your business. This is for anything that you have done this year.

We are in the process right now of creating a magazine for Self-Coaching Scholars. We asked everyone who has been in Self-Coaching Scholars for the year, this year, to submit any kind of before and after story, any kind of success story that they've had, and the submissions were seriously off the hook.

My associate who was processing all the submissions was slacking me and telling me that she was balling reading all of them, they're so good. So it just makes me happy to be able to give that opportunity to everyone in Scholars to kind of reflect back on their success story for the year. And I want to give you guys all that opportunity as well, and I also don't want you to skip this if it hasn't been a success story year, so to speak.

I've been thinking so much lately about my current success and my - I don’t know, I feel like, explosion of all of my dreams coming true at once. It's super fun, but I've been looking at all of the years that it required for me to go to work and to fail and to show up when I didn't want to show up to make all of this possible. And so I think sometimes we disregard those years where there's not a lot of accomplishment, as if they're not as important, and I want to tell you that everything you can glean and learn from every year that you have makes it so important.

And it's very easy to keep your eye on the horizon where you're heading and to always feel like you're never getting there, because as soon as you achieve one level of success you set a bigger goal. So it seems like you're always just moving towards and never arriving, and that's why I think it's really important, at least once a year to reflect back and review your year and to ask yourself, "Is this the year that I wanted it to be and what can I learn from this year to decide what I want to do next year?"

In Scholars in December, we're spending the entire month planning 2018. And I'm giving you this, a year in review, in early December so you can have the whole month to kind of do the same thing in terms of reflecting on what worked last year and what didn't work. What worked that I want to do more of, and what didn't work that I want to change?

So let's have a look at it. How did it go? And are you a different person now than you were then? And what I mean by that is have you evolved into more of yourself? Not different in the sense that you've become a different human, but that you're the same human but different in the sense that you have grown tremendously.

Each year I think gives us the opportunity to cycle through the exact same life, or to evolve and grow, and if you don't live consciously, if you don't live on purpose, if you don't focus on what you want and who you want to be, you will by default just rinse and repeat the life that you're currently living because that is what your brain is programmed to do. Your brain is programmed to think the thoughts that it's already thinking so it can be efficient. That will feel comfortable and familiar, and your brain likes comfortable and familiar.

You think you like it, but really it's how your brain has evolved to live to keep you safe. It's misguided, but that's what it's set to do. So all of the work that I've been doing and teaching is all about getting to the point where we can think about our lives in a much more conscious and deliberate way, and then follow through on the actions that will deliver us the exact life that we want to create. And the desires that you have matter, they are not just whims, they are, in my opinion, important maps to where you are headed.

Now, I want to be clear about something, this is kind of a side note that came up with a couple of my clients recently. I think a lot of times, we feel like our desires aren't important enough. So I have a client that just wants to look good in a bikini, and I have a client that just wants to make lots of money, and I have a client that wants to buy a Mercedes, and they often feel like those aren't purposeful enough things, those are shallow things to want, and yet they want them. They want those things.

And one of the things that I want to be clear about is sometimes, honoring those wants in the short term without judging them leads to a deeper accomplishment, a deeper level of knowledge of yourself. So for example, wanting to look good in a bikini may require you to like really pay attention to your life, pay attention to what you're eating, pay attention to why you're eating, to really dive into your emotional life and if you're eating emotionally.

So even though the end goal may seem "shallow", the work to get there may be deep and important. And so I really want you guys to embrace this idea of wanting what you want and not having to justify it. It's another lesson that I learned from Dan Sullivan. He's like, "You can just want something because you want it. You don't have to have a great reason for wanting it. You can just want it."

And the only thing I would say is make sure that you want it for a reason that you like. Does the reason serve you? When you get it, will you be served by the process of getting it and by actually having it?

So the difference between living the exact same life over and over again or evolving and choosing to change and grow is planning deliberately, the thoughts you decide to think on purpose, and the amount of buffering that you end up doing. So here's the difference between a life that's deliberate and a life that's just default.

Number one is planning, number two is the thoughts you decide to think, and number three is the amount of buffering you do. I want to tell you that the clients that I have that do the most buffering are the ones that are living the same life over and over and over again. Because in order to tolerate the lack of growth and the lack of contribution that they're making, they're buffering just to get by.

And I have noticed that so many of my clients when they stop buffering and make that shift to just doing even just a few more things in their life that they want to do, makes a significant difference in where they end up. It's just a little shift in that trajectory has you ending up in a completely different spot at the end of the year than if you hadn't made even just that small change.

If you buffer a lot, your brain will be on autopilot, and autopilot means it just runs the program that it's always been run, that it's always been running. If you don't make the effort, the things you want to change won't ever change.

So by looking back over the past year, we can see what thoughts, feelings, and actions we want to perpetuate and which ones we want to change. The way that we can keep this simple is by focusing only on the results you created first. So when you look at just what are the results, what are the things that I created in my life, you're going to see your thoughts, feelings, and actions because results are the effect of your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

You're going to know what you were thinking and feeling and doing by what you created. So what we're going to do is take a look at your results first. It will reveal your planning work, it will reveal your goal work, we don't work or plan based on activity alone. We evaluate based on results.

So let me just make a side note in case you're new to the podcast and in case you don't know what I'm talking about there. A lot of times, we plan our days, we plan our life based on to-do lists and activities. These are the things that I will do. And one of the shifts that I have asked my students to make to see if it has an effect in their life ifs to shift their to-do list to the results list.

This is what I will actually create. This is what I will actually do. So on the to-do list, instead of saying, "I will go to the store", which is an activity, you want to put the end result of what it is you actually want to create, what you actually want to get, instead of the activity.

Now, this says two things. First of all, it lets you know if you've actually accomplished the result that you're wanting to accomplish, the reason why you're going to the store, and it also gives you other options for activities to get that same result. So for example, if the result is, "I need milk at the store" - let's say milk and bacon. Let's say I need milk and bacon from the store. So get milk and bacon becomes the result that I want to achieve.

Now, when I look at that result, all of a sudden, my options open up. I don't necessarily have to go to the store. You guys know about Instacart, right? I'm obsessed with Instacart. They are not sponsoring the show but I would let them just because I love them so much.

You could have someone else pick it up for you, you could have Instacart bring it to you, you could order it online, right? There are so many different ways that you can get that result, that all of a sudden, the same patterning of how you've been living your life starts to have options associated with it, and that's just a small example. When you do those with bigger examples, you'll be amazed at how much change you can create instead of just continuously doing the same activities without questioning why or how, or if they're the most efficient thing that you could be doing.

Now, I want to - there's a slight caveat here, and I want you to think about this. So just because you might not have achieved the result you were aiming for, if you did take action, or even if you didn't, you did achieve a result, and that is the result that we are after here. So this is important to remember. When you're going through and looking at the results from the year before, from 2017, you may say, "Well, I wanted to build a business, I wanted to leave my job, I wanted to get married, I wanted to lose weight, but I didn't, so, therefore, I didn't get any results." No, you did get the results.

So one of the results may be that you're in the same job. One of the results may be that you are the same weight you were when you started. One of the results may be that you did not add any clients, right? So you did get a result. The model is always working; you're always producing a result. What is the result that you produced? It may not have been the one that you wanted to produce, but what is the one that you produced?

And I can't even tell you how important this is, because a lot of people when they tell me, "I didn't do anything this year", no, you did sister, brother. You did. You did a lot this year, and you created a lot of results. And it's good for you to know that you're producing results because as long as you're going to be producing results, you might as well produce the ones that you want instead of just going on to autopilot.

So for the sake of this podcast, I want you to pick one area of your life. Now, you can go back and do lots of areas in your life, but start with one. So I want you to pick one area of your life to look at at a time, and I recommend you look at the one area that represents the most growth or change that you've had this year. And if you feel like you don't have one that has a lot of growth, that's fine, just pick one of them.

Here are the following categories you can pick from. One, mental health. So for those of you who joined Scholars and have had huge shifts in the way that you look at the world, the way that you manage your mind, the way that you manage your emotions, that would be a really good one for you to pick. Physical health would be another one for many of you, again, who joined Scholars and stopped overdrinking, stopped overeating. For some of you it may be you got in physical shape. For some of you it may mean that you healed your body from a sickness. Something like that, or that you went through that process. Another category you might pick from is work, another one is family life, another one is financial life, another one could be social life.

So for me, this has been the most spectacular year for our business and our work goals. So I am picking work as a way of evaluating first. Now, what's important, and I'd like to teach that there doesn't always have to be an exact balance in your life in terms of all of the things that you do. I think a lot of times, what happens is people try to live a balanced life and they end up just living a guilty life because they feel like they're spending too much time with the family, too much time with the business, too much time at work, and they're never letting themselves enjoy any of it because they're always feeling guilty that they should be living a more balanced life.

So if your life was unbalanced, I want you to say, "That's okay." It's okay that your life was unbalanced. You personally need to be balanced for you to be at the highest functioning, but your life doesn't have to be. And I want to tell you something. If you're feeling guilty about your life, you are not in balance with your thinking because it's not serving you.

Okay, this was also a huge year for my family life with our move to Texas, so I would do a separate evaluation of my family life and the results that we created for our family there too. So like I said before, I always have a team meeting with my business team in January and plan the year. This has become a touch point for me in my business.

Last year we met in Arizona and I presented my plan for the year starting at the end. I presented it as if it was already done. And this was a huge change for my company because I had decided to reduce the certification program from four to one, and eliminate all my group overeating intensives, which was all of the revenue-producing areas for my business. So it was a huge change. I was introducing Self-Coaching Scholars as my new focus and my new business model, and this was going to be an incredible adjustment and change for me and everybody in my company, and I remember experiencing the sense of excited achievement as I presented it, and I want to tell you guys like, that is when you know you're like tapped in because it's like I was rehearsing my gratitude for having created this change in my company before I even attempted to do it.

And this is what I teach, like, being in gratitude that you've lost the weight, being in gratitude that you quit drinking, being in gratitude that you changed your job before you actually do it. You have to identify and rehearse being the person who has already done it, because who you are - who I was when I presented that idea and who I am now is very different. It required me to become a different entrepreneur, a different businesswoman, a different self-manager in terms of my own thoughts.

So being able to identify where I will be, who I will be, and how that's different from where I am now is imperative. Who I was at the time and where my business was at the time was not capable of creating the business that I presented. I want you guys to think about this, this is crazy. Think about this.

I have a goal to change my whole business. This is a year ago, right? At the time that I set the goal, I am not capable yet of achieving that goal. How many people stop there? Where they say, "Okay, here's my goal but I'm not capable of achieving it, so, therefore, I won't do it." That's the opposite way that you should think about it because obviously if you're setting a goal, you shouldn't yet be capable of achieving it because you haven't yet achieved it.

So the fact that you're currently incapable of achieving it is an obvious situation. It doesn't mean stop, it means go, become the person who is capable of achieving it. You guys following me on this?

So I had to borrow the belief from my future self to make it happen because we were going to have to change everything. So here are the results that we created that didn't exist before. Now, that's a cool thing to think about too in terms of results. Think about what didn't exist that now exists because of your year.

Now, for some of you, this may be a few things, for some of you it may be a huge list, but I'm going to present to you my list. Now, remember this was a huge year for me but some of your lists may be smaller, but pay attention to all the little things too.

So here is the list of what we created that didn't exist before. We created an entire new membership website, we created 12 new stand-alone monthly trainings which included four podcasts, a booklet, and three videos. We created an entire entrepreneur course, we created an entire money course, we created in-person model-thons, we created a VIP offering, we created ten different webinars and mini-trainings for the marketing, we created three new marketing funnels and - this is my favorite part - we created eight new positions on our team. Two customer service positions, a Scholars lead, a certification lead, tutors, teachers, logistics lead, and an executive assistant.

This exercise, just writing those things down blows my mind, and here's why. I created value that didn't already exist this way in the world. I created jobs that didn't yet exist because I set a goal and because I became the person capable of achieving it. I created a position for someone to create their livelihood. That is amazing to me. I created a training that has helped people build their businesses. I've created a training that's helped people be more financially abundant.

I had to become a different person than I already was because I'd never done any of this before. By increasing the value in the world, I increased my personal value as an asset to my company. Think about that. Now, for some of you, you're going to increase your value to your family, you're going to increase your value to your friends.

And what I mean by that in terms of value, I'm not talking about your intrinsic value, because that's always 100%, right? You're always 100% valuable, there's nothing you can do to increase. I'm talking about the value you create in the world as a producer and as an ability to produce. I now know so much more about marketing, business, managing people, hiring, and finance than I did last year, all because I set that goal for myself.

I have knowledge in my brain that I didn't have before, and I have experience in my brain that I can rely on that I didn't have before. Our net worth has increased substantially as my effect on the world has grown. This - you guys, this one sentence, I don't even know how many times I can say it to emphasize its importance.

Your net worth will increase substantially as you increase the value that you offer the world. Please don't hear your brain saying, "Well Brooke, she can do that, but I can't." That is not true. There is value that only you can create, that combination of you and the world, that mix, that is just you. Only you can create it. It'll be different than mine, but it will be valuable for you to offer it, even to just one other person. Even to your boss, even to your employees, even to your family.

The success stories that I have coming out of Scholars is beyond anything I've ever experienced or imagined. I've truly and deeply learned that the more I give, the more I get. This is the form of money but it's also in personal satisfaction and gratitude.

Here's what I did last year. I made a plan and I kept myself fixed to it. I did not waver. I wanted to. And this is something to remember, you will want to waiver. You will want to change your mind, you will want to add seven things, you will want to change what you were focused on. But if you don't, if you stay fixed to what it is you plan on doing, the benefits that you get from doing that are so much more than just accomplishing the goal.

You learn how to change yourself and your ability to create. I have made myself into a much more effective creator. I love these two words together, remain unflinching.

So when you start Scholars, when I started Scholars, and four people signed up and I had changed my entire business model, and four people signed up, it would have been very easy for my to say, "This isn't going to work, I can't do this, this was a bad idea. I won't achieve my goals." But I remained unflinching. I did not change my mind, I did not believe the doubt, I kept focusing on the person I would need to become, the capabilities I would need to create in order to be someone who had the result that I knew that I wanted to create in my life.

I did not burn myself out or wear myself out in the creating of it because I managed my mind really well throughout it. I don't allow myself to get burned out because burnout comes from stress and busyness, not from a focused unflinching mind. And here's what's so magnificent, is that the work I did in Scholars as a teacher and as a student of my own tools kept me on track to make my own goals happen.

So as you write your own list, I want you to take your time and write down every single thing you created. Good or bad. Right now, you might feel as if you aren't growing as much as you want, you might think that last year wasn't a good evolving year for you. That's fine, but you can still do the process of uncovering what you did do and what you did create so you can learn.

When you do this exercise first, it makes planning for the next year so much more clear. For me, what really made a huge difference for me was that I constrained my focus to one thing. The only focus I had all year was to create, market, and deliver Scholars. That was my number one focus in my business. I did not have competing distractions.

I felt energized by the work and my success and not drained by it. This is so important. This is what I've been teaching all year. What drains our energy is buffering, confusing, overwhelming, and stressing, and those are all optional.

It also comes from not planning downtime. I currently have downtime every morning until 11 am, and on Tuesdays and Fridays and weekends. That is my downtime. It makes it so when I do go to work, I'm completely refreshed and focused. So in my case, I set a number, I set a goal and I crushed it. Now, for some of you that won't be the case, but make sure your lists and your results and creations from the past year are all written down so you can learn from them.

Now, the second part of this podcast and exercise, I want you to do is to document any lessons that you learned that you want to take with you. What did you learn that you didn't know before that you want to take into your future with you? Take the time to understand, take notes on your own life. Learn from your own life.

Now, this is different from the failures you want to beat yourself up with. In fact, I want you to leave all of that in the past and let it go. You won't need it where you're going. You only want to take the lessons from the failures, not the beating up part of the failures.

Now, here are the huge lessons that I learned this year from all the work that I did on myself and in my business. Number one, not everyone wants to move as fast as I move, and that's okay. It was a really painful lesson for me, you guys. Really painful, and it's been one that I've kind of contended with my whole life because I've always felt different and I've always felt like I needed to accommodate for other people.

Sometimes my life and my pace and my production level freaks people out because they can't keep up with it. And they want to keep up with it but they can't, and they want me to slow down so we can all stay together, and a lot of times, I used to slow myself down to do that in terms of how fast my brain thinks and the goals that I want to do and the things that I want to create. One of my coaches, colleague's friend said to me, "You know, you're dragging people with you because you don't want to leave them behind, and it's not helping you and it's not helping them."

And so I really got that lesson this year, I really decided that the standard for what I'm creating and where I'm going has to be high and I can't lower it for any reason. And not everyone has to come with me at the pace that I'm going. It's ridiculous, right? The pace that I'm going is fast, and I just want to keep going. And so I gave myself permission to just allow myself to go as fast as I want and to allow other people to go as fast as they want. If they want to come, great, and if they can't or if they don't want to, that's great too.

That's a huge lesson. I know it sounds so obvious to some other people, but for me it was a really, really big one. And this really applied to some of my employees, that saying goodbye to them was better than dragging them along, and this is especially true if you love them. Because when you try and force employees or you know, contractors to do something they don't want to do, nobody has any fun. And one of the philosophies we have at The Life Coach School is you have to have fun or stop doing it. Like, literally we believe that. It has to be fun.

If your job is drudgery, if you dread it, you're doing it wrong. Let's change it until you're doing it right. And one of the things that was really painful for me in my business that I wasn't anticipating is how quickly things would need to change and how quickly my employees would need to adapt to that change, and that some of them didn't want to. And it's totally fine. Like, really, totally fine, and that was like a huge lesson for me to not be upset that other people don't want to do what I want them to do.

It sounds so juvenile, but really, that's a very emotionally immature way that I was thinking that I really needed to grow up around that. And I have to say, I'm actually very proud of the way that I was able to do that and that no one - it's not like you have to get in fights with people and get upset with people. There are sometimes relationships that just complete themselves in a beautiful way, and I want to take that into my future. I want to always when I'm working with people in my business, I want to make sure that everybody's thriving or it's no deal.

You know, it's kind of like Steven Cubby says, you know, "It's win-win or no deal". I can't be thriving and you're not, and you can't be thriving and I'm not. It has to be - we have to be a good fit. And even though that's cliché and said a lot, I think it's really important.

Another lesson that I learned this year is that selling is an obligation that I have to the students who need my work but are afraid to bet on themselves. And that is no matter how uncomfortable it might be sometimes. I did a lot more selling this year than I ever have in my life, and sometimes selling is uncomfortable and taking as many opportunities as I took to sell was challenging because I have this belief system that you shouldn't have to sell stuff, right?

And I shouldn't say I have that belief system anymore, but I've done such good marketing that I usually feel like the selling just takes care of itself. But one of the things that I was so committed to doing was really selling my students on themselves, on the opportunity of themselves to take their mental health to the next level. And when I thought about it that way, I was really willing to do a lot more selling, and I'm so happy that I did that because so many people have told me that they were really reluctant to work with me, they were really reluctant to be coached, and that my selling them on themselves really helped them take it to the next level.

And so I've started really seeing that as a responsibility. Not just as something that I do for myself and my business, but something that I do for my students and my clients to give them the opportunity to grow and develop, so that's been big.

Another lesson that I learned is that I need to be much more involved in how my money is invested and why traditional wisdom about retirement doesn't apply to me and my husband. We did a lot of meetings this year - as many of you know, I moved to Dallas, one of the reasons why we moved here is there's no state income tax and our business is growing and we wanted to buy a piece of property and build a building and the cost of all of that in California is much higher than here.

And so when we moved here we got all new financial people and sitting down and talking to them about our future and about traditional wisdom about how we should invest our money and how we should plan for retirement doesn't really apply to us. And so it was really - I should say it was like a wakeup call for me because I had just kind of delegated all of that to the financial people to take care of, and when we started researching it and like really looking at what was happening with how my money was being managed, I realized that I hadn't been responsible enough for thinking about that.

So that was a huge change and one of the things that we're doing is we're studying with a group right now, it's called the Wealth Factory. We're studying with them about everything that has to do with money and insurance and trusts and estate planning and all of that. And so that's been a huge kind of, humbling experience, I want to say, this year.

And as I look back over 2017, it's all a huge hell yes. I'm so proud of myself and my team, and I've learned so much that I'm taking with me that are life lessons for me. And I talk a lot about this idea of letting people be wrong about you, and I've been listening to Gary Vaynerchuk a lot. He's hilarious. Warning, if you check him out, he swears a lot, which I love, but you may not.

I've bee listening to him a lot and one of the concepts that he talks about a lot is that people hold themselves back because of other people's opinions. The generalized other, other people, like, when you say, "People will criticize me" or people will - who are these people? Like, it's usually like three people that we narrow it down to. Who are these people that we're afraid of judging us?

And I used to be in that boat where I was like trying to control everyone's opinion of me and trying to make sure everybody liked me. I did this when I started my first business, Europa, and I was running a salon, I wanted to make sure that all my employees liked me and thought I was great. And I wanted to make sure that all of my friends supported everything that I was doing.

And what I realized is that it's just exhausting, and it's impossible. So one of the things Gary said that I really loved was that you have to care about your own opinion way more than anybody else's. And that applies to your mom, to your husband, to everyone. And that is not selfish because if you have a relationship with yourself where you're tapping into your own wisdom, where you're truly connected, your opinion will not be selfish. Your opinion will be important to your life.

And so I think that that's a painful, sometimes isolating decision, but it's also one that really I think creates true intimacies with yourself so when you are with other people you aren't ever pretending. It's always the truth about who you are. You aren't people-pleasing, you get to be who you are. That is some tough work, but it's worth it, and the people that are meant to be in your life will totally respect and understand that.

So I think next year's going to be even more awesome now that I have kind of these new lessons under my belt and I went through a lot of discomfort discovering them, and I had to let a lot of people be wrong about me. They think they know why I'm doing something or they think they know who I am or how I run my company and they're wrong about it, and that's okay. They don't know me, that's okay.

I want to give you guys that gift of doing that work. Like, just live your life according to your standard and according to what you know is important and let other people be wrong about you. It's okay. You're not going to be able to change their mind by living according to the way they want you to live your life.

Okay, now it is your turn. What did you create this year? What lessons did you learn this year? How have you changed over this past year? If you could talk to yourself one year ago, what would you say and how will you use this when planning next year?

Please take the time to look at what you created. Look at - give yourself lots and lots of time to do this exercise. What did you create in the past year, good and bad? And what did you learn? And how do you want next year to be different? If you want it to be different, better, even just a little better, even if it's just 10% better, what will you do? Where do you want to be a year from now and how can you reverse engineer it to make sure that you get there?

I'm telling you, if you plan now for the end of the year, the work required will seem like so much less if you have a full plan and you calendar it like I taught you to calendar it and you just follow and honor your calendar, you can blow your own mind.

And I will tell you something, the bigger and more impossible the goal, the more you will grow, the more you will create, the more you will learn, and that's when all of a sudden life becomes this amazing adventure. Everything becomes so much more exciting and so much less stagnant, and I know from talking to you, that most of you, that's what you're looking for.

So do this exercise. Don't try and gloss over last year and think that it wasn't important or that you didn't learn anything or that you didn't do anything. I promise you, you did. When you study last year, you will see the impact, the effect of what your brain is currently thinking. You want to know what's going on in there, look at your life. You want to change your life, you look at what's going on in there.

Have an amazing week everyone, I'll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out Self-Coaching Scholars. It's my monthly coaching program where we take all this material and we apply it. We take it to the next level and we study it. Join me over at the TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. Make sure you type in the TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in Self-Coaching Scholars. See you there.