Ep #398: Feeling Good Practice

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo episode number 398.

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, my beautiful friends. I’m excited to be here today. I’m kind of coming into like a new phase as a person right now. It’s really interesting. I had what I kept calling a midlife crisis, which was not a crisis at all. It was fantastical, amazing, beautiful, ecstatic time in my life, and really kind of redefining myself as a woman in a business that’s very successful, with children that have gone away to college, and being newly single.

And it has been an adventure. And I’ve had a lot of crazy fun. I’ve just been really, truly having the time of my life. And I now kind of feel myself phasing out of that a little bit and getting kind of more quiet and home-body-ish again and focused. And it just feels awesome.

And it’s really cool how the weather is starting to kind of cool down and the days are shorter and it’s darker earlier and I just feel more cuddled-up within myself, if that makes sense.

So, one of the things that I’ve been wanting to talk about, one of the things I’ve been studying a lot recently is feeling good. I am in the process of creating a course in Scholars that I’m going to teach live in Scholars, the Possibility Formula. And it’s the second half of my book that I wrote, really about what extraordinarily successful women do to create what’s possible in their lives.

And I want to get as good as I can at teaching this because I feel very compelled to help as many women become successful in the way that they want to become successful as I can. And I also very much want to help men do this as well.

I think that women have some different and specific challenges that men don’t have. And obviously men have challenges that women don’t have. So, I’m focusing more on the women. But everything that I teach and that I apply here can be applied to any human being with a human brain that wants to achieve extraordinary things.

And practicing feeling good and the feeling good practice that I’m going to teach you and that I’m going to be really diving into in Scholars is a cornerstone of this practice, of this goal-achievement.

And I was recently talking to someone who’s a writer. And we were talking about how, often, when I go and tell people that it’s possible for them to make millions of dollars, that it’s possible for them to achieve their dreams, that it’s possible to blow their own minds, that in some way, that may be irresponsible, like blowing smoke, like not facing reality.

And if there’s anything that makes me crazy, it’s when someone tells me that I shouldn’t tell other women that they’re capable of their own greatness.

And people come to me with their straight faces and say, “I don’t think this is realistic for other people.” And I always think about my Millionaire Mastermind group. And I think about this group of women who all have made a million dollars – much more than a million dollars now, but have all made a million dollars.

And it’s all because they changed the way that they thought. They changed the way they thought about themselves and their lives and what was possible. That is the only thing that changed. They were always capable of it. They always had the talent to do it. They always had the ambition and the gumption. They just hadn’t done it yet because they hadn’t changed their thoughts yet.

And had I not done my work to help them change their thoughts and had they not done their work to change their thoughts and the thoughts of all of their clients, there would be less women in the world achieving their dreams, making millions of dollars, and doing all of that.

So, the argument that because someone thinks it’s not possible for everyone, that I shouldn’t be saying this message to anyone, is insane to me. It’s ridiculous to me. And it gets me all fired up and excited.

So, this is why I’ve been spending a lot of time recently really trying to hone in on my teaching on this. I want to take my teaching to the next level in terms of, “How do I teach someone how to feel their way into the action they need to take in order to achieve their dreams?”

So, I want to start by just summarizing the process of goal cultivation, impossible dream achievement, and aligning with your future self and creating your life from your future.

One of the terms that Joe Dispenza says that I think is so fantastic is, “Remembering your future.” And one of the things that Dan Sullivan says that I love is, “Your future is your property.” I think these two concepts are so impactful when it comes to looking at your own life and looking at your future and what you can create.

So, the goal of this work is to understand that the Model is the vehicle that we use to change how we think, feel, and do, and therefore the results in our lives. So, one of the things I want to focus on in this specific podcast – there are other podcasts where I’ll focus on other areas and other angles, but we’re going to talk about practicing feeling good and how it’s important for you to have a feel-good practice.

If you’re in Scholars, you’ll hear me ask many times, “How much airtime are you giving to your dreams?” You’re giving a lot of airtime to your past – and when I say airtime, it’s your brain, thought time, right – a lot of airtime to your past, a lot of airtime to your present and what’s not working and what isn’t what you want it to be. But how much time are you giving to your future?

How much time are you spending contemplating, meditating, thinking about what is possible to create in your future? And nine times out of 10, people will say to me, “I’m giving about 10% of my energy and my thoughts to my future.”

And if you’re not putting energy on your future, you can’t create from your future. If 90% of your thoughts are coming from your past and the programing of your past, you are going to do very well at recreating your past, and recreating the level of income you have at your past, and the way you feel, and your habit of thinking. All of it will just be recycled.

And when you look at many people’s lives and you look at the lack of change, the lack of growth, the ack of advancement that they have in their lives, the reason why this is, is because we are not taught that we need to keep refreshing our thought patterns and we need to keep dreaming and imagining and visualizing and focusing on our future.

And when we create a future that we love and that we can align with, we generate the emotion that we need and the motivation that we need in order to take the action to create it.

So, one of the practices that you must do in order to create the future of your dreams is to feel your future ahead of time. And there’s a distinction I want to offer in this podcast that just recently came to me in a way that it hadn’t come before. I’ve talked about these ideas before, but I really want to emphasize a difference between feeling as if you have something already, as if you’re already in your future, experiencing the result in your future, and therefore feeling the having of it. I want to differentiate that from the feeling of wanting it. They’re two very different things.

I was talking to a girlfriend of mine and I was telling her about my goal of $100 million. And I was explaining to her about how much I’m enjoying that goal, how much I’m enjoying the abundance of $100 million. And then she was talking about her goal, which is $100,000, which is a different number of zeroes, but the same aspirational focus out into the future.

And as she was talking about it, I could see her separateness from it, her desire for it, her telling me she believed in it. But I could see, in the present moment, that she wasn’t feeling it and wasn’t living into that place of abundance. And it wasn’t because of the actions she was taking. It was because of how she was being.

When you have something already, you can be the person that has it. Which means the feelings are coursing through your body. The thoughts that you’re thinking about are of abundance and of having, of completion, of the joy of being that. There isn’t a separation between it.

So, when I had this realization, I started thinking about how much time I spend experiencing my future ahead of time. How much time in a day I spend in $100 million, in the beingness of that, in the person who is that, who has achieved that, who is enjoying being that, and most importantly feeling that.

And it’s not a feeling of wanting it. It’s not a feeling of desiring it as much as it is a feeling of enjoying it, experiencing it, and being it. So, when we talk about practicing feeling this emotion of our future, I want to be clear that you can’t actually feel anything in the future. You can only feel right now.

So, in this present moment, I go inside my brain to the future and I think thoughts of having and experiencing and being in my future. And by thinking that in my brain in this moment, I create that emotion now. I create the feeling of abundance and the feeling of completion and satisfaction and pride in myself now.

And that vibration in my body, those thoughts in my brain feel real. They feel true. I have observed, in my brain, a possibility, a future for myself that I am literally experiencing in this moment. And from that experience, I’m able to create in a way that is much more powerful than had I not spent time in my future.

I’ll give you another example. I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently about dating and the idea – I have a lot of single friends – and the idea of wanting a mate, and the lack of a mate, and then this desire to find that mate.

And we laugh a lot about how – especially one of my friends who really wants to get married and have a baby – we laugh a lot of times about, like, “Where is this guy? Where is he? Why isn’t he here? I’m mad at him.” And we kind of laugh and make jokes about it.

But I started thinking about the difference between being in love in this moment, experiencing love in this moment, and attracting love from that place versus desiring to be in love and wanting to be in love, and therefore not being in love now.

And the question then becomes, can we be in love now before our mate arrives? Can we live in love, in the space of completion, of having, of presence?

The answer is yes, and I’m going to give you the practice of how to do that. And I’ll use the two different examples – the one of wanting a mate and the other of wanting more money – to help you to be able to do this.

So, there are so many amazing emotions that create positive vibrations and motivation; love, fun, excitement, gratitude, proud, worthy, whole, complete, acceptance, delighted, free, healthy, calm, peaceful, successful, accomplished, excellent, amazing, satisfied.

There’s an exercise that we do in Scholars that’s in the vault. It talks about the top-three feelings. It’s in the class How to Feel Better. And when you look at your day and you look at the feelings that you have in a day, how many of them are those positive emotions? How many of those are you generating on purpose because you’re going to your future and remembering it and using it as your property and creating it on purpose to generate those emotions?

Most of us go through our lives unconsciously. We live in a 50/50 world of positive and negative emotions. But we’re not even creating them consciously. So, they’re just the same old emotions over and over and over again.

We’re having a habit of emotion because we’re not creating from our future. And so, when we are in a place of having, experiencing that emotion now, we can settle down our nervous system and create in a creative vortex of ideas that is not available to us when we are in a needy, scarcity, how-greedy mindset.

So, here’s the process. Step one, you want to know exactly what it is you want. And one of the things that I love to do with strangers, friends, clients, is ask them, “How much money do you want to make?” Makes everyone crazy when I ask this question.

“I don’t know, I don’t care about money, I don’t need money.” I get all this pushback. I don’t have a number. And I always kind of push a little bit and say, “Hey, we’re not taught to think in this way, but I think it’s a very powerful way to think and I think it can serve us by making our thoughts conscious by really thinking about we’re going to make some money, we might as well choose it consciously and decide, and if it brings up stress for us to pick a big number, then we can work through that stress.”

And we don’t have to pick a big number if that’s not what we want. We can pick a small number. Let’s just pick a number consciously. So that is true for your money goal, and that is also true for a relationship goal, or maybe even for friendship goals.

Whatever your goals are, the more specific you can be, the better. So knowing exactly what it is you want. Now, I highly recommend that you get specific. And the reason you’re going to get specific is because being specific about your desires, about what you want will help ignite a more complex spectrum of emotion.

So if I say I just want to meet a person to be my companion, I’m going to have a certain level and intensity of emotion. But if I’m like, super specific, if I say, I want to meet someone that has their own business, that is very ambitious, I want to meet someone that is 6’5, I want to meet someone that loves to travel, and wants to go to Paris and to Italy, and has a breadth of experience in their life from traveling, and has lots of friends, and has a good relationship with their family, and also knows about self-help, and they’ve done work on themselves and maybe had some therapy or maybe had a coach before.

As soon as I start getting really specific about the things that I want exactly, then I can start generating the visualization of being with that person. And when I can visualize that accurately enough and real enough in my brain, then I can actually experience the emotion of having that.

And that is the same is true in your business, in your life, in your financial situation. What is the amount of money you want to make? How do you want your work life to be? What do you want to spend that money on?

What will it be like to look into your bank account and have a certain whatever amount you want in your checking, whatever amount you want in your savings, maybe to look at your mortgage statement and it says paid in full, whatever it is that you want to dream?

And this is really the first step that I think takes time and journaling and pondering and really thinking about. And for me, the word that really helped me get this dialed in was exactly. What is it that you want exactly?

And again, it doesn’t matter if you get that number exactly. It doesn’t matter if you find this person. You say you want someone 6’5 and you meet someone 6’3, that’s not the point. The point is to be as specific as you can now so you can create the visualization to generate the emotion.

So make a list of exactly what it is you want, and don’t be afraid to dream big, to dream perfectly for yourself. In a perfect world, if you could have whatever you want, what would that be?

And the doubts will come up and that, be realistic, and this isn’t - just ignore all that noise and write that idealized result that you would like to have. And then when you look at that list, what you’re going to realize is that each one of those things will be a circumstance in your life.

So I don’t want you to necessarily think about it as a result you’ve created at this point, although that will be true. I want you to do this visualization and this practicing of feeling good as if you already have it. You are the person that has 100 million dollars. You are the person who is in love with this mate that you want.

You are this person who has made $100,000 in one year. And then you ask yourself, how would you be? And this includes your patterns of thinking and feeling. And you want to take your time with it. How would you be when you woke up in the morning?

And be careful not to get specific on what you would be doing. That’s not what I’m asking for here. I’m asking how you would be. What would you feel?

Now, as you start thinking about this, the thoughts that you would be having will also appear. But we’re going to kind of enter this from the F-line. I want you to think about how you would feel.

How would you be talking to your friends? How would you be working? How would you be traveling? How would you be at night? When you go out to dinner, when you’re making phone calls. What is your internal experience like in the future when you have already accomplished and are having these things?

This is an imaginary, like you are imagining your future in your brain, but it’s a very real experience in your body. And the more you can make it real, as if you are already there, as if time doesn’t exist, we’re not going to go there, but let’s maybe pretend like time doesn’t exist, you are in your future, experiencing in your physical body your future ahead of time. Who are you? What is it like to be there?

Now, if you start to spend as much time having your future as you do having your present life, you will feel a shift. You will feel a momentum. You will feel good.

And this is literally practicing feeling good. You are literally rehearsing for your future life. They talk a lot about this in sports, right? Where you rehearse making the putt, you visualize making the basket in your mind, ahead of time. Many, many, many, many times.

And then when you’re actually there, it’s as if you’ve done it 100 times because you have done it in your head 100 times. So that is what we’re going to do.

You’re going to practice it the first time, you’re going to go to the list that you’ve made with all those circumstances that you want and you’re going to start asking yourself, what would it be like to have them? And you have to practice having them in your brain.

What would I be doing? How would I be acting differently than I’m acting now? What would be the feeling? And as you go through your day, you’ll notice that you’re not feeling that way.

Maybe you’re not feeling love, relaxed, secure, peace, connected. You’re not identifying with the having of your future. You’re identifying with maybe the lack of your present.

And when you’re in that moment, you can redirect your thoughts to literally being someone who is beyond all of that - who is beyond this current circumstance - and feel your future in this moment.

The more you do that, the better you are going to get at feeling good on purpose. Now, as you feel good on purpose, you will start taking action from that place.

Positive emotion generates positive energy that wants to be utilized, that wants to be expended. But it’s not going to be in a hustled, frantic, scared, trying to overcome way. It’s going to be in a peaceful, calm, directed way with a sense of certainty about your future because you already are experiencing it.

So let’s do an example of your future. And the future that you want with no limit. Think about your example. Think about something for you. And one of the things that I’ve asked in previous podcasts is what is your relationship like with your future, are you in love with your future, are you defining yourself by where you’re going instead of by where you’ve been.

And you will know when you’re in love with your future, you will know when you’ve been experiencing your future because the alignment with it will feel obvious. It will feel exciting, it will feel like love, and you will talk about it a lot.

Do this experiment with yourself with other friends. When they talk, how much time do they talk about their past, how much time do they talk about their present, and how much time do they talk about their future? And what I have found is that most people who are successful and who keep growing spend a lot of time talking about their future, a lot of time talking about where they want to go, where they’re going to go.

And this is true whether it’s they’re traveling, or they’re creating a business, or they’re planning parties to meet friends. Those sorts of things. The energy from the future being pulled into this present moment and creating that positive emotion with that anticipation creates an energy.

And I want to say this because I’ve said a lot of times before that it’s not better there than here. And what I mean by that is when you actually arrive in your future, when you actually do make the 100 million, when you actually do meet the mate, your life will not be better than it is today.

It will be different. Your thoughts will have changed. Your thoughts may be better. But your life will not be better in the sense that it’ll still be 50/50. And when you know that and you spend time mentally in your future, for a long time before you arrive there, when you do arrive there, it will seem obvious.

You’re not going to be shocked by it, you’re not going to be overwhelmed by it, you’re going to be on to the next. I just had a coaching session with a woman in Scholars who had just made a million dollars for the first time, and she was already stressed out about the margins weren't the way she wanted them to be and how was she going to do $10 million.

There was no celebration in being in that moment of a million. She was already beyond her present moment into the future, which is an okay thing to do, as long as it’s generating positive emotion for you.

And so as much as we want to be able to process our negative emotion and identify it and clean it up, we also want to be creating and practicing positive emotion on purpose. And this is one of the best ways I know of how to do it.

Sit down, think about exactly what you want, spend time experiencing in your body what it would be like to have that now. And the truth is the external things, the circumstances are not causing those emotions. And even when you have the money and have the mate and have the external things, they will won’t be causing the emotion.

The emotion is always created by your thinking, whether that’s in this moment today, or in that moment then. And experiencing ahead of time is just pure joy. You get to enjoy the results of your labor without having yet done the labor.

You get to be in the space of having and that emotion and that vibration and that experience is really ecstatic ahead of time. And it does take practice. And it does take time to learn how to feel good. And I want to add one last thing before I let you go this week.

There is a huge difference between believing in something and feeling it, and experiencing it and being it, and wanting to believe something. And I think a lot of you come to me and you say, “I believe in myself, I believe in this dream.”

And what you’re really saying is I want to have this really badly and I believe that I can believe in it someday. But the way that you know if you truly believe in it is how you feel and what you do when you’re faced with failure.

Because when you truly believe in something and you have felt that experience of having it ahead of time, it doesn’t matter when you fail because you’re so aligned with that future, you know that the failure is just a stepping stone to that experience.

And as soon as you fail, you can go back to the feeling good experience of having the end result again and trying again and continuing forward. When you focus on this current moment that you would call a failure and you start habitually experiencing those emotions at the expense of your future emotions, that’s when you get into trouble, and that’s when you get into a habit of thinking and looking for evidence against yourself.

So just make sure, when you look at your day, how much time did you practice feeling good, feeling your future, loving your future, creating your future in your mind and experiencing it ahead of time so you are literally a conscious co-creator of your life and not just reliving your past inadvertently?

I want to tell you that if you think you’re living on this planet and just experiencing circumstances that are coming at you, I want to explain to you that is not the case. You are always creating your experience in your brain.

You’re either creating it from the past, or you’re creating it unconsciously. If you want to create your future, if you want to create your life, you must become conscious. You must wake up. You must make decisions about what it is you want and live your life into it.

We do that by practicing the vibration of goodness, of alignment, of abundance, of having in our bodies now. The more time you spend there, the easier it will be to create.

If you want to do this practice with me, if you want to go through this whole series of steps and get help with it, make sure you’re in Scholars. We’re going to be going through the possibility formula in Scholars and really breaking down each of these steps and practicing each of these processes so the future becomes inevitable, your future, what you want for you.

I think that is reality. And I think it is my responsibility. Not irresponsible for me to tell you that your dreams can come true, but I’m responsible for telling you that they can. And there’s a process for doing it, and it may not be what you think, and it’s following this possibility formula.

Have a beautiful week everyone. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

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