Ep #298: Talent Stack

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.

Well hello there, my friends. How are things? Things are great for me. Really, honestly, truly, I have just been having an amazing life. We’re about to go to Mexico, and then we’re going to go to Amsterdam, and then we’re going to go to the Caymans.

I can’t wait to teach classes from those places and show you all where I’m at, from within Scholars. That’s going to be super exciting. I can’t wait to share with you all the behind the scenes that we’re doing, all the plans that we have, so exciting.

We have just released Scholars 2.0 and I have to say, so proud of it. It’s so amazing. The site is beautiful. The content is completely up-leveled and awesome. It’s always been amazing, but it’s even better now, I think. Classes are better. Everything is up-leveled.

And people ask me, “Why did you create a Scholars 2.0? What was the reason that you did that and why, you know, it was all working, why didn’t you just let it be what it is and leave it at what it was?” And I shared with everyone that I’m always looking to improve and grow and go to the next level and challenge myself, and that is true in everything I do, especially in Self-Coaching Scholars.

I don’t know if most of you know how much time I spend in creating my products and creating the content for my products, but I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what I want to share with my students.

And I always think of it from the perspective of myself struggling and how, when there’s areas in my life where I’m struggling, I always am talking to my colleagues, “How can we help people solve this problem, including me right now, please? How can we solve these issues? How can we make it so life is more energetic to live, where it energizes us and grows us and provides us with a tremendous amount of accomplishment and a tremendous amount of success and growth and evolvement?” All the things that I think make a life worth living, make a life worth continuing.

A lot of my students come to me when they’re stuck and lethargic and tired of their lives and frustrated by their lives. And my goal is to help everyone take their life up a notch, to have their futures be better than their past, to have their life constantly be evolving, so when you look around at your life, you wonder how you got so lucky, you wonder how you created such abundance and such amazing opportunities for yourself.

And I will say that I think the process of doing this is simple, but it isn’t easy. And so my goal with Scholars is to really help you follow that simplistic process and help you get through the hardness of it. I never tell my students, “Hey, this is going to be totally easy, it’s just a snap.” What I do tell them is, “This is going to be hard and I’ve got you. I’ve got the tools, I’ve got the ideas, I’ve got the concepts, I’ve got the ways for you to go through this in a way that makes it so you can get to the other side of it.”

I don’t want it to be easy for you. I want it to be challenging. The more challenging it is for you, the stronger you’re going to get. And I have some ways of making that easier for you to get through.

So I was doing a webinar for Scholars and I sat back and I asked myself this question. And this is something that all of you should do if you sell something. And all of you sell something. You’re either selling yourself or a product or your business, or your ideas.

So you have to think back and think about what is it that I am offering to my student, to my customer, that is of tremendous value, that is of more value than they are paying? And first of all, if you can’t come up with that answer then you either need to create more value or charge less. That’s the key ingredient. You have to offer more value than you’re asking people to pay.

And that’s always been my goal in life. That’s always been a requirement in my life is I always offer much more value than I expect in return. This podcast is a great example. It’s free. And it’s free in the sense that you don’t have to pay for it, but what I think about consistently and often is the time that you invest in listening to this podcast, and I take that very seriously. And I want to make sure that the content that I’m creating for you is worth that time that you spend with me. And I really feel like I take that into account before I prepare any kind of topic.

So what I wanted to do in this podcast is talk about the idea of a talent stack. You could call it a talent stack or maybe you would call it a skill stack. And what it is, is it’s just a stack of skills, a stack of talents that you can pile on top of each other and the combination of that stack will be able to produce the type of life that you want to live, the type of results that you want to create in your life.

So I sat down one day and said, “What are the talents, what are the skills that I have that make my life so extraordinary? And what are the skills and talents that I need to teach to my students so they can create the lives of their dreams? What do they need to know? What do they need to incorporate into their life? What do they need to learn how to do in order to approach their life in the way that I teach, in the way that has us be the highest functioning?”

And I did a big brainstorm of all of the talents and skills that I see in my most successful students, that I see in my most accomplished colleagues, that I see in my most successful and thriving people in my life. And I came up with a talent stack of five. And these five skills, if mastered, allow you to play at the highest level of life.

So, if you think about your life as a game, think about it as a videogame maybe or as a sport, and if you want to play at the highest level of that sport, meaning your skill is at the highest level in the world, so you’re able to live the life on your own terms.

So, for example, if you’re the best gymnast in the world, if you’re the best basketball player in the world, if you’re the best gamer in the world, you have a tremendous amount of options. It doesn’t mean you have to play at the highest level. You can play at any level that you want. But you have the skill set to play at the highest level and to produce at the highest level.

So, if you think about that videogame, life is a process of leveling up. It’s a process of getting to that next level. And in order to get to that next level, you have to develop skills. And there’s a couple of ways of going about it.

There is just playing and failing constantly. So if you see – I have teenage boys – so if you see young kids on videogames, they become so immersed in them and so obsessed with them because they’re always trying to get to that next level and they keep dying and they keep getting killed or they keep losing and they want to try again, try again, try again until they can up-level.

I love this as a process. I think this is a process we need to have more in our lives. We need to be willing to die 1000 deaths in our own lives, to fail 1000 times in our own lives in order to up-level to that highest level.

And if you think about what are the skills that you have at the highest level that makes it so much easier for you to play the game against someone that doesn’t have those skills, what are the things that you have developed in your talent stack, in your skill stack, that makes your life better?

And the unfortunate thing that I realized when I created this list of five things, the unfortunate thing that I realized was none of these are taught to us in school. The most important skills that we need in our lives in order to live and evolve at the highest level are never taught to us. They’re not taught to us as children. They’re not taught to us as adults.

Our industry is really the only industry teaching these concepts and what’s unfortunate about it is that only the people that are interested in our industry, in life coaching, are learning them. And I don’t want it to be that way.

I want it so everyone can learn these skills. And one of the best ways that I know to spread the word, to get the information out about the skills we need to have, the life skills, the mental health skills that we need to have is to have a tremendous number of people living at the highest level because then there’s so much curiosity.

“Oh, I notice your life is changing. I notice you’ve had so much more success. I’ve noticed that you’re creating the results you want. I’ve noticed that you’re so much more peaceful, you’re so much happier, how did you do it?”

And that is why my industry, my business is taking off so incredibly; not because I’m just this amazing businessperson, but because what I’m teaching is affecting lives in such a positive and profound way that other people are noticing and everyone wants in.

So I’m going to go over this talent stack with you. I’m going to go over what these things are that you must develop and master in order to live at the highest level.

The first talent in the skill stack, in the talent stack that needs to be developed is awareness. I will say that this is the one that is most lacking, and without this one, none of the other ones matter.

So, I talk about this a lot in previous podcasts, I talk about it a lot in Scholars. And it’s one of those easy ones that you can overlook and take for granted. So I want to make sure I slow you down and really have you think about this one.

Awareness means you’re paying attention to your own life. What it means is you’re aware of your responsibility and your agency in your life. You’re aware of the results that you’re creating. So when you look out at your life, you’re aware that everything in your life is something that you have created, that you have generated as a result in your life and that you’re paying attention to those results and you recognize how you’re creating them.

You’re also aware of the circumstances in your life. You’re aware of the things in your life that you cannot control, the things kind of outside of your immediate action base, so the things that are occurring in the world. And you’re aware of those things without judgment.

So you’re paying attention, you’re looking at the world. You’re looking at your life. You’re seeing what’s going on and you’re paying attention to it, especially in your own personal life.

You know the difference between how you’re interpreting your life and thinking about your life versus the facts of your life. And I would say that knowing the difference between your thinking and the actual facts of your life is an easy concept to understand intellectually.

If I explain to you, “Hey, this is a fact in your life and this is your thought about it,” you’ll understand the difference. It will make sense to you. But when you’re in your life, when you’re living in your life, you’re not spending a lot of time differentiating those two. You’re interpreting the world and taking that at face value as reality. I still do this all of the time if I’m not paying attention. I’m interpreting the world and the state of affairs of the world as if that is factual.

So the first thing we have to do is just pay attention to our lives. Look around, see what’s true, see what’s factual, see what our thoughts are and how those are different from what’s actually going on. We have to look at the results we’re creating and taking responsibility for them.

We spend a lot of time working on this in Scholars. This is why we have daily short assignments every single day in Scholars, so we can work on accessing our brain, looking at our brain, being the watcher of our brain instead of always being at the effect of it. Okay, so that’s the first skill, awareness, and that’s an ongoing skill that we can always be developing and always getting more in tuned with.

One of the things that I just noticed today, when I am talking to people who don’t have the Model in their life, they don’t understand how the world works in terms of our mind and our feelings and actions and results, my awareness of their life is so much more intense than their awareness of their life.

I can witness their life in a way that they don’t yet have the skill to do. And that’s what makes me such a great coach too, right? I’ve spent so much time witnessing my own life that then I’m able to witness other people’s lives.

And what’s so amazing about that awareness is I don’t get hooked into other people’s drama anymore. I don’t take their thoughts, feelings, and actions personally. I understand that their models are their models and that mine are mine. And it creates so much less drama, so much less friction, so much more peace in my life, by having the awareness of what’s going on for them is caused by their thinking and that I’m not responsible for how they think or feel or what they do.

The second skill that we want to stack in our skill and talent stack is thought choice. And that is the skill of being able to choose and think the thoughts consciously that we want to think.

What typically happens in most people is that we have about 60,000 thoughts per day. Most of them are not deliberate choices. Most of them have been programmed our entire life and are on an automatic script that runs in the background of our life, that we think is just our life, we think is just the commentary that is required for our life.

Before we are introduced to this work, we spend very little time choosing our thoughts consciously, choosing what we want to believe, choosing what we want to think, choosing what makes sense to us. So it’s very important that we develop the skill of choosing our thoughts.

And this is kind of an elaborate skill. This isn’t something that you learn overnight. This isn’t something that you learn from a podcast. This is something you learn from practicing. Much of the work that we do in Scholars is about choosing thoughts and learning how to believe them and learning how to think them so we feel them, and learning how to repeat them so they become real.

This is not the same as repeating an affirmation. This is not the same as believing a thought or thinking a thought that is not believable and just repeating it over and over and over in our heads, but just doing that in a cognitive sense where we’re not actually feeling it.

The skill I’m talking about when it comes to thought choice is choosing a thought that you believe that’s better than the thoughts you’re currently thinking and that you feel so they have an effect on you, they have an effect on your life, they have an effect on how you feel and what you end up doing. So being able to choose and think thoughts on purpose is a superpower. When you combine awareness of what you’re thinking and how the world works with thought choice, you have two of the most important ingredients to mental health.

The third skill for the skill stack is how to process feelings. I was talking to my son, Christian, who’s 19. And I was asking him about his feelings. And I was asking him about what it feels like to feel feelings and what feelings feel like to him.

And there was a lot of confusion. There was a lot of, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, mom.” The skill of processing feelings, the skill of knowing how to kind of digest a vibration through your body in order to release it isn’t something that comes naturally. And it isn’t something you know how to do just because you’ve heard your mom talk about it a lot.

Processing feelings is something that you have to have the ability and the awareness to know what you’re feeling and then to feel it on purpose instead of buffering, to feel it all the way through without fear, to let it vibrate within you and know that it is harmless.

And again, this is one of those intellectual concepts that you must understand first, but then you must actually do it. You must actually be able to stay with a feeling and not give into the urge to avoid it, not give into the urge to buffer against it, not to ignore it and pretend that it isn’t there, but to actually acknowledge it with the skill of awareness and then to process it, to allow it to be there, to be present with the present moment even when the present moment is uncomfortable.

It’s a skill. It’s like if I was training a gymnast, I would need to teach them how to do a back-handspring, let’s say, or a flip. It’s a skill. They would have to learn how to do it. Now, when they first come in, they’re not going to know how to do a flip. They can’t just run and go try to do a flip. It’s impossible. They have no idea what they’re doing.

So in Scholars, we take all of our students through the process of learning how to recognize and start processing their feelings by not buffering, by staying present, by allowing vibrations, by talking about it, by being the watcher, understanding the Model.

A lot of people tell me they don’t want to process their emotion because they’re afraid their emotion will never stop. They’re afraid that they will dive into this deep, dark well of emotions and never come out. And that comes from not understanding what causes emotions. That comes from not truly understanding the Model.

Because, when we start processing our emotions, what we recognize is that we’re causing them. And we don’t recognize this so we’ll stop causing them. We don’t recognize this so we’ll beat ourselves up for feeling bad. We recognize this so we can be fascinated and curious and have compassion about how the mind works to create emotions in our body, how language in our brain is what creates all of our suffering, creates all of our emotions, all of our discomfort.

And again, it’s not so we can eliminate any negative emotion from our life. In fact, half of our life will be negative emotion. That’s how our brains are wired. And when we can embrace that and process emotion, we become unafraid. We become unafraid of living the lives we’re meant to live. We become unafraid of setting big goals. We become unafraid of failing. And that’s what helps us evolve in our life.

So, so far we have the three. We have our awareness, we have our thought choice, and we have our processing emotions. Those are three of the most important skills that we teach in Scholars, that I teach at The Life Coach School, that I covet in my own life. Those are the skills that I think are the most important skills that I have, way more important than understanding marketing or finance or how to drive a car. Those emotional skills, those emotional talents are the ones that make my life so much better.

The fourth one is the ability to take massive action. Now, let me remind you that massive action means we take action until we get the result we want. You can see how the first three skills are really important in order to be able to execute the fourth skill.

We have to be aware of what’s going on with us mentally. We have to be aware of what’s going on with us in terms of our emotions, in order to be willing to take massive action. Most people take action one time and fail and give up. That is the pattern I see in most of the human race.

We don’t know how to process the negativity that comes from failing, so we simply avoid it and we never experience it again. We live a life that isn’t anywhere near the standard of what we want to live because we’re too afraid of putting ourselves in harm’s way.

We think those emotions are harmful when they’re not. And the reason why we don’t know that they’re not harmful is that we haven’t allowed ourselves to process them through. We think being embarrassed or humiliated or frustrated is something that is just going to be constant and that there’s no way to process it and there’s no end to it. So we just put it away and let it fester.

But massive action is the willingness to never quit, the willingness to keep moving forward, no matter how many times we get punched in the face, no matter how many times we fall down. We pick ourselves up with compassion and curiosity and fascination and growth and we keep going until we get that result we want.

We make sure that the result we want is worth the massive action to take it. and what happens in that process is that we get stronger, is that we learn more about ourselves, that we develop a tenacity and a resilience that we’ll be able to apply and up-level to the rest of our lives.

If we’re unwilling to do hard things, if we’re unwilling to take massive action, there’s nothing that’s going to keep us growing. There’s nothing that’s going to make us stronger. We can’t get stronger doing the easy things. We can’t evolve by sitting around and being stuck all the time. We have to be willing to take that massive action.

And that doesn’t mean hustling or exhausting ourselves or tiring ourselves out. All it means is we go through the pain of failure in order to take the next action, in order to find out how to get to the result that we want. We set big goals for ourselves. We often don’t know how to get there. We often don’t know what is the path. We learn as we go, especially if we’re setting goals that nobody’s accomplished before.

And the way that we do that is by committing to massive action. And I’m telling you, that is one thing that we are not taught. We are not taught how to fail. We’re taught to avoid failure. We’re taught than an F is very bad and that we should never get an F, and if we get an F, then we’re in trouble instead of seeing an F as an opportunity to learn and grow more, to take it to the next level.

What we’re taught in school is to always get As, to always be succeeding and to never fail. So it makes sense that we would pick things we could always succeed at. But the things we always succeed at are the things that we’re already good at, that are not going to cause us to grow, not going to cause us to change, to uplevel our lives.

The last skill in the talent stack brings them all together. And it’s the ability, the skill of creating results. It’s the skill of knowing what you want and being able to create it, to have an idea in your mind, and knowing how to make it real, knowing how to produce it.

I tell this story about how my husband, when we first started talking about some of the ideas that I had, he would think that we were just dreaming, we were just talking about possibilities. But then I would go out and create that dream, I would make that dream happen.

And what he realized is that when I say I’m going to do something, it’s not just an idea. I go after it until I get it done. And when you’re able to produce the results you want, it’s equivalent to having a genie. It’s equivalent to having a magic lamp. You simply make a wish and then you follow the formula. You use your skill stack to make it come true.

I’ve done this with my weight. I’ve done this with drinking. I’ve done this with my business and hiring a team. I’ve done this with my financial goals and making $25 million, which is impossible in so many ways. It’s an impossible dream when you just think it in your mind.

But when you’re able to create it because you have a talent stack, because you have a skill stack, then $25 million can become $100 million, can become $200 million. You can start thinking in bigger ways because you have the formula. The formula for making something happen is having the skill stack. It’s being aware of how the world works and how results are created. It’s knowing how to choose your thoughts. It’s knowing how to process emotion so you don’t let the failures get you down.

It’s the ability to take massive action without wearing yourself out or beating yourself up. That’s how we produce the results that we want to produce in our lives. And when we’re able to produce those results, what happens is we get bigger and better ideas. Once we’ve created something magnificent, we want to create something else magnificent, even more magnificent, even more powerful, even more of a contribution.

How can we help more people do more things that they want to do in their life? There’s nothing more gratifying than that. And the way that we create that contribution, the way that we create that value for the world is by first doing it with ourselves, by first creating that talent stack with ourselves.

So I want you to think about this stack and think about where you’re at in terms of these skills for yourself. How aware are you? How good are you at choosing thoughts and thinking the thoughts that you want to believe and that you do believe? How good are you at processing an emotion? Are you able to stay and process emotion and not give into urges to do things that don’t serve you? How good are you at taking massive action? Do you have the skill of producing results?

You’ll know how good you are, the talent stack, because you’ll be able to look at your life and see the results that you’ve created and you’ll see how you did it with the skills in that stack. You’ll see how you learned to create the results that you want, by living into these skills. The skills are the same for everyone, whether you’re aware of them or not. These are the skills that help you create the life that you want.

So, how did I create Scholars in order for this to make it easier for you to build these skills? And I just want to give you a little bit of insight into how I did that. The first thing that I did is I decided I was going to teach one main concept a month.

So I created a workbook. I created a video each month that covers a concept that you can constrain your mind around and learn one concept at a time. Too often, we’re trying to learn too many things.

So when you join Scholars, you get the monthly topic, which is a video of me teaching that topic, and you also get a workbook. And the workbook is set up for daily work because the brain is a repetitive machine and it likes familiarity. So in order to reprogram your brain, you need to do a little bit of work every single day on the topic that we’re working on.

That is the point of that workbook. And I very purposefully created an actual physical workbook that I send you because I think it’s very powerful to take the information out of your brain and to see it outside of yourself.

Now, you can, of course, use this workbook online or you can print it out, or you can put it in a journal. But what I really love to see is people using their hands to write their answers. I think there’s something powerful about the written word outside of your brain, seeing what your thoughts are outside of your brain.

The other way that I have incorporated, into Scholars, the ability to build this talent stack is by offering, as part of Self-Coaching Scholars, a weekly coaching session with one of my coaches. And the reason why I decided to add this, even though it’s a big amount of work for us at The Life Coach School to offer this, the reason I decided to do it is because there are so many things that are hard to see in your own brain at first.

So you can start doing thought downloads and writing Models and looking at your life, that you’re going to miss so much because there’s so much background noise that you just think is the truth. When you work with a coach, they can see these things in you, way better than you can see them yourself. And so in your weekly coaching one on one private session, you’ll be able to talk through some of these things and your coach will be able to point them out to you.

The other thing that I offer in Scholars is group coaching. So I do a coaching session with a group that is in Scholars where you’re able to submit to be coached. And I pull you on the video and I coach you one on one in front of everyone.

This is powerful for you, as the client, because you get direct coaching with me. But it’s also very powerful for the people watching. One of the things that we have learned in our research around coaching is that sometimes our lack of awareness about ourselves is way more challenging to see when we’re working one on one.

But when you see someone else have an issue similar to yours and you see them be coached on it, it’s so much more obvious and you can take that coaching session and then apply it to yourself. And I would say that sometimes when I’m coaching on a coaching call like that, by the time I get to the third person, it’s very common for someone to say to me, “Well, you already solved my problem with the person you coached before. I already get it now. I already understand it. You don’t even need to coach me now because they had a similar problem and I see how I need to solve it. And I see how to solve it so much more clearly because I can see it in them because I don’t have all these preconceived judgments about their life.”

So they’re not making excuses for their life. They can see, “Oh it’s so obvious.” So that’s why we offer group coaching once a week in Scholars.

I also included in Scholars what we call the Study Vault. And what I did is I took all the classes that I’ve ever taught over the last 14 years. I used to do a lot of small group coaching courses. I did weight loss courses and overdrinking courses and how to feel better courses and money courses and entrepreneurial courses. And I used to teach those individually.

And when I decided to narrow down my focus and just focus on self-coaching scholars, I decided to take all those previous courses that have so much value in them and I decided to include them all in the Study Vault.

So, we do give you a warning, when you join Scholars, not to get too lost in there. There’s literally hundreds of hours of content on all the topics of life coaching that you could possibly be struggling with. And they’re very well organized, and very professionally done, so you’re able to go in and find the topic that you want and get some knowledge and some coaching and see some examples of that in real time.

We warn you about going in there because it’s like Netflix. You can become kind of entranced by all of it, especially if you love coaching and you love watching someone be coached and love learning new concepts, that can really consume your time and energy. So we want to warn you that you stay focused on the main topics that we’re teaching during the month and that you go into the study vault when you have extra time or there’s a specific topic that you want to do research on.

We will be continually adding to the Study Vault. All of the content that we’re currently doing in Scholars will be archived in there. All the content that we previously have done is all archived in there.

As you go through the statuses in Scholars, after you’ve been in there for six months, after you’ve been in there a year, you get ongoing increases in the level of content, in the master classes that I’ve taught, in the coaching calls that I deliver at the higher more advanced levels.

We designed Scholars to be like your gym. It’s not something that you join for six months or six weeks and then you’re done. You establish a membership there and you use it for your mental health.

We have Triple Diamond Scholars now, Scholars that have been in Scholars for three years. And when I’m coaching a Triple Diamond Scholar, I’m coaching them at a whole new level. They have practiced enough and learned enough and heard me coach enough that they’re able to go to the next level in their coaching. They’re able to utilize their talent stack in a way that makes it easier for them to understand things at a deeper level and create at a bigger level.

So, I want to invite each and every one of you to join me at thelifecoachschool.com/join. If you’ve been thinking about joining Scholars and you’ve been hemming and hawing and you weren’t sure about it, I want to encourage you to join now. It’s better than it’s ever been.

Starting in January will be all new content. You sign up in December to start in our January class. When you sign up in December, when you sign up today, you will get a box in the mail that will have all brand new content on the Model, on how to utilize Scholars, on how to start changing your brain and how to start developing this skill stack, this talent stack that you’re going to need to create the results that you want in your life.

I know that some of you struggle with the financial piece of it. For some of you, the payment of $297 a month is a struggle. And what I want to say is that, if you talk to and look at the testimonials for Scholars, if that amount of money, to take care of your mental health, is a struggle, you need Scholars more than anything. We need to get you into a financial place where that amount of money is something that you have to be able to invest in yourself, whether it’s in Scholars or another life coach or another area where you’re working on your brain.

We invest way too much money in our houses and our cars and going out to dinner, when what we really need to be doing is investing in our own self-care and investing in our own brains and in our own mental health.

So I want you to go to thelifecoachschool.com/join. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about this talent stack. You can, of course, learn this talent stack outside of Scholars, but I have created Scholars for those of you who want to learn it, kind of if you want to mainline it, you want to learn it as fast as possible.

I’ve created this program for you. And my dream is that you’ll look at my life and see me as an example of what is possible, but also then someone will look at your life once you’ve gone through Scholars and they’ll see your life as an example of what is possible.

I know what is possible for you. Whatever your dreams are, I know that they are possible for you. Have a beautiful 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.