Ep #316: Q2 2020

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 316.

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 you doing, sheltering in place? I have come down to Austin. I don’t know if I told you guys this, but we bought a condo here in Austin and we hadn’t stayed here or done anything here. So, we needed to come and get it organized. And this was good timing for us to do that.

But we’re in this building and we’re very high up. And so, I have the most magnificent view of Austin and all of the very empty roads. But it’s a beautiful day today. The sun is shining. Nature just goes on about her business. I love that.

So, a couple of things I wanted to tell you – one of the things that’s kind of exciting, I’ll talk a little bit more about it in detail, is that we are hiring. Our demand for coaching and the need for coaching and people signing up for coaching has gone through the roof since we’ve entered into this crisis, which makes sense. And we need people to help us with coaching.

So, we’re hiring coaches. We just brought on two more, I think a couple of days ago. And we’re also hiring positions within the company to do some executive functions in the company too. So, if you go to thelifecoachschool.com, we’re hiring. You can apply there for those jobs.

I also wanted to let you know that we closed down enrolment for our class that just started for certification. But since we’ve closed down enrolment, the demand and the desire for enrolment and certification has gone through the roof. Lots of you are wanting to become life coaches.

I think what’s interesting about this time is it kind of brings everything to the forefront. It’s like everything that maybe people were putting off doing, weren’t sure about doing, now becomes crystal clear. And I also think some people like the idea of having a career where you can work from home, seeing that’s where a lot of the trajectory seems to be going.

I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts lately and they’ve talked about how once we go this virtual for a couple of months, a lot of that virtualness won’t go back to what it originally was. And so, I think the desire to have more of an online presence and to be able to do stuff virtually, the demand for that has gone up. And we do that. We teach that very well at The Life Coach School.

So, we are going to be implementing a track that you can jump into and, if you’re willing to double down on your work, you can catch up to the current class that is already going. It will take extra work in the beginning, but for those of you who don’t want to wait until our next class, we want to make sure that you have the option of getting in now because a lot of you have time to be working on it because you’re at home and a lot of you aren’t working right now. Lots of opportunity there. So, you can go to thelifecoachschool.com/certification to find out more information about that.

Okay, so, let’s talk about Q2 2020. I was talking to my friend Kris Plachy, who I’m always talking to every day. And she’s working with her clients right now. She has a lot of clients that have brick and mortar businesses who are having to lay off people and having to adjust and furlough.

And she’s been working with them in terms of how to unwrap their minds around what’s going on in the world right now and what’s going to go on with their businesses. And so, we have a lot of conversations about that.

And for some reason, when we were talking about it, she kept talking about second quarter. And a lot of times, when we run businesses, we think in terms of quarters for our business’s quarterly taxes, quarterly goals, that sort of thing. I know that that’s how I think about it with my business.

But I hadn’t really thought about this quarter, Q2, being such a significant quarter and such a significant way of looking at what the world is going through right now. And for some reason, thinking about it in terms of a quarter instead of 30 days or 90 days just really resonated with me in terms of my focus time and how I want to focus.

Now, in some of the previous podcasts, I talked about having a long-term vision. And I think that’s incredibly important right now for us to get out of short-term fixes, short-term panic, short-term uncertainty and focus on the long-term to kind of calm our nervous systems down. And the more time we can spend with a vision and our future and knowing that this will pass is very good for us focusing our brains emotionally.

But I want to also talk about focusing on Q2, quarter two, which will be April, May, and June. So, as far as we know at this point, we will be sheltered in place all the way through April and possibly longer than that. And so, I think, when we think about not just being sheltered in place and many businesses being closed down, but also the months and weeks that will follow us not being sheltered in place and the possibilities there, I think thinking about life in terms of one quarter, even though there’s so much uncertainty in that one quarter, will give us a focus.

So, the next three months are very unknown. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the virus. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the world.

I like to think that someone is listening to this right now three years from now, somebody’s listening to what it was like for us to not know. And three years from now, they’ll be like, “Look at what you guys were thinking back then. Look at how your minds were. Look at what you didn’t know.”

It’s kind of a trip to think about, that you right now are listening to me three years ago and you can see how uncertain I am about the next three months, but you, person listening to this three years from now, are 100% certain. It’s kind of fun to think about that in terms of time.

So, if you’re listening to this in 2020, you’re in the same boat with me. We’re uncertain about the next three months in terms of what will happen with the virus and what will happen with the economy and what will happen with our businesses and what will happen with the regulations and the rules, in terms of whether we’ll be able to be shopping again in public or going to restaurants or not.

So, what we’re going to do on this podcast – and we’re really going to develop this more as we get into Scholars, we’re going to be talking a lot about this in Scholars and give you a lot more insight. But I wanted to give all my podcast listeners kind of a general way of looking at this.

And there are some things that you can decide right now that you want to do in Q2. And if you’ve heard me talk on the podcast before, you know that al of our power comes from our ability to make decisions. So, when we make a decision right now about Q2, we generate power. We generate momentum. We generate focus.

Now, it doesn’t mean that you won’t end up needing to change that decision. You might need to change that decision based on a circumstance outside of your control. But, in the making of the decision and focusing on the decision right now, you’re generating power.

And even if you have to change the decision in the future, changing the decision will also generate power. It’s waiting and reacting that has no power in it, that has stagnation in it.

So, I want to encourage all of you to make some powerful decisions. And I’m going to give you two options, two ways to approach this.

The first one is for those of you who are feeling like there’s a lot of little things that you want to get done and you don’t have any focus around them. So, if you feel like there’s a lot of things around your house, there’s a lot of things you want to get cleaned up, there’s lots of tasks that you want to do, I want to encourage you that you pick 25 things to do in the next quarter, 25 small things as a to-do list.

And you follow the process in Monday Hour One, which is free inside of Scholars. You follow that process to write down everything that you want to get done, all 25 things, and then calendar them right now.

Some of those 25 things will take multiple spots on your calendar because they’ll take longer than one day or one hour to complete, and some of them will just be one thing on your calendar. Take an hour, Monday Hour One, to sit down and put all those things on your calendar.

And then go to the time where it’s the end of June and you’ve accomplished all those things. And feel that. Feel what it feels like to have accomplished all of the things that you said you were going to do this quarter.

Now, some of you don’t have a lot of the little things to get done. You’ve already been doing Monday Hour One for a while. You have a lot of your tasks accomplished. What I’m going to recommend for you is that you do an impossible goal, a quarterly impossible goal.

Those of you, again, who are in Scholars can go into the coaching tools archive and find the book on an impossible goal. And there’s a lot of content in there that will help you get your mind wrapped around why that process is so powerful for you to engage in.

It’s much less about the achievement of the goal as it is about setting the goal and going after accomplishing it and at the end of the quarter, where you will be emotionally and physically and the action you would have taken because of that impossible goal.

Typically, we do an impossible goal for the year and then we break it down quarterly. But what I want to recommend is that you adjust the content in that booklet and in the video, you adjust it so you’re just doing it for the quarter. Pick one at the end of the quarter, what is the impossible goal that you want to accomplish?

I was recently talking to some of my coaches in our Slack channel, and one of the things one of the coaches had said was that when this all first started happening, some of her family members had come to her – she’s a life coach – had come to her and said, “Oh my gosh, this is such a scary time. Everyone needs to hunker down and hold onto their money and just wait this out.”

And she had said to me that that didn’t resonate with her. She knew that people needed her help. And even though she was nervous about going out and selling and putting herself out there because she was feeling anxious herself, she knew that people needed her.

And she posted that she had her highest revenue month, her highest producing month, which was amazing. But even more amazing than that was all the people that she was able to help. And so, she had felt like, had she been nervous and scared and held herself back, that many people wouldn’t have gotten the value that she had to offer them and the help that she had to offer them.

And so, even though some goals may feel impossible to you right now, that possibility, even just stating it as a possibility, will change your focus. So, for example, a lot of businesses may feel like this is not a growth quarter.

A lot of my clients may not feel like this is the quarter to lose weight, or this is the quarter to completely stop drinking. And what I want to recommend is that you consider yourself wrong there and that you allow this to be the quarter where you do the impossible thing. Not only do you quit drinking, but you quit drinking during a crisis, or you cut back on your drinking during a crisis.

Because if you can do it during a crisis, it will be much easier afterwards. And this isn’t the time for holding back in terms of creating value for the world, but you double down on creating value for the world and you had your most profitable quarter ever in your business.

I want to offer that if your kids are home, you may think this is definitely not the quarter where I’m going to be cleaning out my house. But what if it was? What if this is the quarter with the kids home, with the homeschooling that you actually get your house fully organized and systematized, even though you’re working and taking care of the kids?

It may seem impossible. But as you read through that content in that book, I want you to notice – now, by the way, that book is in Scholars. So, you need to be a member of Scholars to get in there. But if you’re not in Scholars, I’ll give you just a short summary of it.

When you take a possibility that seems impossible and you state it as something that’s possible for yourself, in that statement, your life changes. In that statement, you have created something, you’ve created a possibility and believed in it enough to make it something real that exists in the world.

That doesn’t mean the result is real in the world, but the possibility is real in the world. And that is a real thing that matters. I can’t tell you, I learned about this process, I learned about doing this for myself. I’m going to say now it’s been almost five years ago. And it completely changed the trajectory of my life. And so many of my students learning this process of stating an impossibility as possible and letting your brain kind of trip out on the impossibility of it is what creates growth and creates opportunity.

At this time, many of us have so many negative thoughts, have so many anxious thoughts in our brain that we feel like we can’t handle any more. And what I want to suggest is, this is the time to really allow yourself to see what you’re made of, to see what you can create.

So, let me just share you briefly my process and what I’ve decided to do for Q2 2020. I have decided to offer more coaching sessions, classes, and group coaching sessions than we ever have ever offered in Scholars. It will be our record. It will be the word record.

So, everybody who is in Scholars right now, who has been in Scholars for years, this will be the month where they get the most coaching, the most value that they’ve ever received in any month of Scholars. And once we double down on that, I think we’ll just keep continuing that because what we thought was possible was lower than what actually is.

The other thing that I’ve decided to do in Scholars that’s super-exciting and fun and I’m looking forward to is I’m going to create a private podcast – so, all the classes that are taught in Scholars are already fed to all of our student through the iTunes app, but it’s private.

So, for example, you get my podcast now in the podcast app, but you can also get the Scholars one fed into that same app, so it’s super convenient. And one of the things I’ve decided to do is I want to have the private podcast go into Scholars, but I want to also add additional private podcasts. So, it’s not just the classes that I teach in Scholars, it’s also additional content.

So, here’s what I want to do. Here’s my idea. When I was driving down here to Austin, I called Kara Loewentheil. Many of you know her. And she’s in upstate living with her mother right now, sheltering in place. And I wanted to see how she was doing and I wanted to talk to her.

And we talked on the phone for about an hour and most of it was spent laughing hysterically because, if you guys know Kara, she’s hysterical. And her sarcasm is fantastic. And we just end up laughing so hard. And we have a very dark sense of humor, but we also talk about resilience and love and helping the world and all of the things.

We had the most amazing conversation. And what I told her was, “I wish we could share this conversation with people because it’s so uplifting.” I feel so good. She was feeling good. We had laughed so much, it just felt like such a healing amazing experience to be able to talk to her.

And so, I said, “Let’s do a podcast together and I’ll put it in Scholars and we’ll feed it through the private podcast.” And she was all in. And then I said to my other friend Kris Plachy, I’m like, “Let’s do the same thing.”

And then I thought about all my other friends. I thought about Ryan Moran and Frank Kern and Katrina Ubell and Jody Moore and, you know, all the people that I normally talk to on the phone, what if I just recorded all of those conversations and shared all of the insight that I get from talking to my friends and they get from talking to me and in a much more casual way where there’s a lot more revealed there, how fun that would be for all of my Scholars.

So, I’ve decided to launch and implement that into Scholars as well during this month. So, we will probably have the first one of those – I think we’re recording that this week, so we’ll have that ready to go.

The other things that I have put on my list for that is we’re going to implement that fast track for certification, which will be super-exciting for them. But in addition to that, I’m also going to – I have a Peloton here in Austin. I have committed to doing 20 live Peloton classes. And I want to start reading novels.

I usually am obsessed with reading non-fiction and I’ve decided I want to read novels. So, I have three novels. I’m already into one of them. I’m going to finish all three novels over the next quarter.

For you, what is it you want to be able to say to me, or to anyone, on June 30th? What do you want to be able to say? I cleaned my house? I lost my weight? I read these books? I took these classes? I got certified in this? I learned how to play the guitar? I created a bunch of content?

One of the things that I have done and I’ve talked about a little bit on the podcast is I’ve written this book – here’s the short version of the long story. Harper Collins made me an offer to write a book. I decided that I wanted to write the book. I committed to them to doing that. And while I was waiting for the book contract to come – it was over three to six weeks – I actually wrote the entire rough draft of the book, I was so inspired.

The contract came and I decided I didn’t want to write the book based on the contract. There was a lot of intellectual property that I wasn’t willing to give up, so we decided it wasn’t a good fit for me to write a book with a major publisher, but I have this book already written.

And I sent it to an editor and they sent it back to me and said all the things that need to change to make it ready for public consumption. And I am going to work on doing that. But in the meantime, what I decided to do was actually read that book into the recorder, into my microphone, and share that within Scholars too.

And the title of the book is What’s Possible. And it’s written mainly for women, but also for men. But for women, in terms of teaching us how to think beyond what we’ve been socialized to think, especially around money. So, I will be releasing portions of that book as I read them into the Scholars feed. You’ll be able to access all of this content within Scholars, but also in the paid podcast feed through Scholars as well.

I will be sharing clips from all of these to give you all, on the podcast, a little bit of a taste of that. But I have to tell you, since I set these goals for myself and since – these were things that I would not have done, I hadn’t thought of until this whole crisis came – that since I’ve written those things down and put them in my journal and thought about them on my walks, I feel energized.

I feel a sense of incredible momentum and excitement. I can’t wait to read the book aloud. I can’t wait to talk to my friends and record those conversations and share them with you and get your feedback on them. I can’t wait to do all the coaching that I’m doing in Scholars.

It has me optimistic. It has me focused on what I can control. It has me thinking about the things in my life that I can create. And at a time when things have been slowed down for a lot of you, in terms of your job and being able to get out of the house and, for some of you, in terms of scheduling and maybe having the kids home, the question becomes, what can you do?

There’s some stuff you can’t do, but what are some things that you can do? And when I coach people, they’ll want to tell me all the stuff they can’t do, all the things that have changed and all the things that they’re disappointed by. And listen, I think that’s an important process to go through.

I think acknowledging our feelings and our thoughts about the future that we thought we were going to have right now that we’re not having is important. Processing that emotion is really, really imperative in order to move forward. But you don’t want to get stuck indulging there.

You don’t want to get stuck feeling sorry for yourself because that can be a problem. I’m watching some people feel sorry for themselves and then get freaked out and then feel sorry for themselves and then get freaked out as a pattern. And I think acknowledging all those feelings and processing them is important.

But also, one of the best ways to get out of that loop is to focus on the future and what you can do and what you can control and what you can create. So, I really want to encourage you all to think about this next quarter.

We’re not going to be able to change much of that C-line, the circumstance line. That line is going to be basically told to us. We’re going to be told what our circumstances are. But we can control out T-lines and we can control a lot of our own result lines.

We can result what we put in our bodies. We can control how much exercise we get. We can control what we create. We can control what we offer in terms of value. And we can control what we deliver to the world, what we add to the world, instead of just waiting around to see what the world’s going to bring to us.

And this is my encouragement not only to all my friends that I speak to and all the people that I love and to you guys, but it’s my encouragement to myself. It’s how I’ve kept myself focused and excited about the future and about the next three months.

Instead of feeling bummed out about what I don’t have, I’m very excited about what I do have and what I can create. And what I do have is my own brain. And what I do have is the Model and the ability to coach myself through any emotion and to pay attention.

And just because the world is different than I expected it to be, doesn’t mean that I can’t keep growing, evolving, and changing. And I wish the same for each and every one of you.

So, here’s to Q2 2020. What are we going to be saying to each other on June 30th? Let’s go.

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