Ep #424: Life Coach Training Reimagined

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode 424.

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 friends. I’m so happy to be here today and talk to you about Life Coach Training Reimagined and Reinvented. I, as many of you know, have been going through this process of reinventing myself and my business and my life over the past, I’m going to say, seven years.

And I go through this reinvention process, I’ve been through it three major times in that seven years, and I’m actually teaching a course on how to go through it right now with a lot of my students who were interested in learning the process and going through it.

And I’ve been sharing a lot about my process and what I’m doing within those classes, but I want to share the results of that reinvention here with you. So I recorded a podcast where I shared how I kind of reinvented the way we market Scholars, and I know that that was helpful for many of you who are trying to build your own businesses and do marketing and switch up your marketing.

And so I was happy to hear the response from that one. And so I wanted to share my reinvention of certification, and why I did it the way that I’m doing it, and how excited I am about the result that we’re going to get, and why I decided after all of these years to present it in this way.

So I’m going to kind of take you through my process. For those of you who don’t know, I just want to do a little recap. I used to have lots of different products that I would sell all the time. And when I started working with a coach about, I think it was six years ago, I decided to just offer two products.

That’s Self Coaching Scholars for clients and certification for my students who want to become coaches. And that has been incredibly smart and incredibly successful as a business model up until now.

And as I was going through the reinvention process for my company, I questioned everything. And as those of you who are going through that process with me, you know that we throw everything out and then we only bring back in or decide on new possibilities based on a new mindset.

And so I got a pretty significant offer to buy The Life Coach School. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars to buy The Life Coach School shortly after I started this process. And it really kind of made me pause because it’s a lot of money.

And I started really thinking about what I really want to be in my life, and what really matters to me. And I’m not selling the business, and I did not accept the offer and won’t be doing that at all. But the process of thinking about it was really crazy because as I was going through that reinvention process, one of the things that I considered as part of my reinvention was, what if I wasn’t a life coach?

What if I didn’t coach at all? What would that be like? And as soon as I opened up that as kind of a consideration, then I got this offer, which of course would probably mean that I couldn’t be coaching. I wouldn’t be competing with my own company if I did sell it.

So there is a whole magic to reinvention and opening yourself up to new possibilities. So I wanted to do that with certification. The first thing I said was like, maybe I just don’t train coaches anymore. Everyone’s like, “Slow down, what are you doing? You’re freaking us out.”

But it’s kind of like you start in this place where let’s consider all possibilities. Let’s consider all things. And then I really started to feel why it’s so important for me to train coaches, and why I would never want to give that up, and what it really means, and what we really offer.

And as I was talking about this with lots of different people and with my friends and with other professionals and with marketers, one of the things that I started to realize is that it’s very, very important for me to provide a space where I can certify people in using the Self-Coaching Model, and holding space for clients.

Holding space is being in that non-judgmental area of I have no idea what you should do in your life, but I can help you find your own answers. That holding space skill is something that does not come naturally to human beings.

We tend to want to judge everyone and we tend to want to give advice to everyone and fix everyone. And I’m talking about judging positively and negatively. Those three things that we do with our human brains, not good for coaching.

And so I get a lot of people that come to me, that come through Self Coaching Scholars that really want to use what they’ve learned on themselves to help other people. And we’re always telling them to please don’t do that. Please don’t do that because the problem is you don’t really know how to coach.

We haven’t really taught you how to hold space. We’ve demonstrated coaching and we’ve taught you our tools, but you don’t know how to coach. And so we see a lot of people that go out there and try and coach people without having the skillset of holding space. And that’s a significant skillset.

Without having an education in how to use the Model with a client, in having full understanding of how to be culturally responsive, and to be trauma-informed, to understand what happens with your own desires and your own thoughts and your own concerns while you’re coaching someone, it’s a very complex process to coach someone properly.

And when you have the training, and we provide it, and we make you practice it, and we make you demonstrate it, you are able to coach in a way that is much more effective, loving, and appropriate and safe for the people that you’re coaching.

So I really thought a lot about how important it is to not give up training coaches. We really need to make sure that people are certified and know our process for using our Model.

But I did question whether we should keep just focusing on people who wanted to become coaches, or if we could open it up more and we have a lot of people that come through coach certification that aren’t ever going to be owning their own businesses as coaches.

They want to learn the coaching skills so they can take them back to their businesses, take them back to their families, take it back to just to their own personal life and have mastery with it. And so as I was redesigning and reimagining my coach training, I did really take that into consideration.

I want to make sure that everybody who comes through coach training to get certified in the Model is really understanding that this doesn’t have to be your full-time career. This doesn’t have to be something that leads to entrepreneurship. This doesn’t even have to be something that you do corporate level or even in your current job.

Although, if you have a job, you won’t be able to help yourself because life coach training changes you because you are your client through the entire training.

Maybe you want to take this to your foundation or your charitable group or your non-profit. Or maybe you just want to take it into your community, into your family, and teach your family and be able to coach them in a way that is appropriate for holding space.

So as I was reimagining it, I really took that into consideration and I asked myself the question, how can I make it even more awesome? We are literally, in my opinion and in most of the opinions of my students, the best coaching school in the world.

What you get when you sign up for our coach training, the training that you get, the tools that you get, the support that you get, the ongoing connection to community that you get, and the mastermind event that you get every year is unsurpassed. We just don’t have any competition for what we charge in our space for what we do. And the amount of successful coaches that come through our school is unsurpassed by any other school as well.

So we are very proud of the product that we create and very proud of the school that we have. And so we definitely didn’t want to reimagine it in a way that would make it not as good. We wanted to make it better.

And so I asked myself and lived with that question, how can we make it even more awesome, for a long time. And one of the ways that I was able to get some more information and really do some consideration with this was I did a sales call with 10 clients who were interested in signing up for coach training.

And I basically told them about the coach training, asked questions, and asked them why they hadn’t signed up yet. And what was fascinating to me is by the time we were done with the call, all 10 of them said yes, they wanted to sign up now. It was like 100% conversion rate.

And what I realized is that the reasons that they hadn’t signed up yet were reasons that were not good reasons for not joining. And that we hadn’t done our job in helping them overcome their own internal objections.

Now, there are some people who are not appropriate to go through our training, who literally just aren’t a good fit. Whether it’s financially, or emotionally, or time wise, whatever. And we understand that some of the sales call that we do, we are going to tell some of those clients, “Yeah, we agree, you shouldn’t have signed up yet and you shouldn’t sign up now, it’s not the right time for you.”

And so the fact that no one on that call of 10 people that fit into that description was astounding to me. And two of the people on that call, they didn’t want to sign up because English wasn’t their first language. And they felt uncomfortable with coaching in the group.

The way that we had done coach training before, I reimagined it so you would be in a group of 10 and you would be coaching in front of people. And so I wanted to change that format so that wouldn’t be an objection. I wanted to customize coach training even more than it already was.

One of the things that we had dealt with is that someone with English maybe being their second language, or not having as much exposure to Self Coaching Scholars, or not having as much exposure to self-help, or hadn’t listened to the podcast as much is that they needed more basics. They needed slower training. They needed to really be more spoon-fed the content, which we wanted to be able to do and give them the time to do that.

But then we also sometimes would have someone in the class that had been in Scholars for three years and was a Diamond, Triple Diamond, and had listened to every single podcast, and had taken notes on everything, and had been practicing Models on themselves, and they were kind of in a different space.

And so although it’s always very important to go back to the basics and learn them again, and we highly recommend that for everyone, we wanted to be able to customize the pace of the class for specific students’ needs. And what we realized is that six months for someone might be too short of a time to learn all the material, and that’s how the format was set up. And for some people, it was way too long. They wanted to learn it in six weeks.

So I started asking myself the question, how could we customize coach training so that someone that wanted to listen to all the materials, study it all, focus on it for six weeks straight as a full-time thing could get through the training and get certified in six weeks, whereas someone who wanted to take a year or longer to understand and practice the material would have that as well.

And so we decided to change the way that we teach it and the way that we support it so it could be self-paced. And the first step in doing that is we wanted to update and recreate the curriculum. And as some of you know, I personally teach all of the classes on video for the curriculum, and all the concepts that I’ve created are taught by me.

Those were recorded a few years ago, so we wanted to update all of those videos and all of that content and update the curriculum and make any adjustments that we needed to really emphasize more inclusion and more ideas and kind of address the concerns or the areas where we didn’t teach as well as we could have.

And although our content was still very valid and still very applicable and still awesome, we just wanted to make it better. So I recommended to my team, why don’t we do a live class where we re-record everything? So instead of my just going into a studio and re-recording all the content, let’s offer a one-time class where people can come and learn from me live and I will teach them from a stage in front of them.

They can interact with me as I’m teaching the content. And we’ll have a limited number of people that can come live so it’s not crazy. But I haven’t taught live in several years, and so we felt like it would be a great opportunity for people who really want to get through the training in a shorter period of time, five days, by immersing themselves all day every day into the training that they could actually have the full coach training in five days instead of five months.

And we wanted to bring in the instructors that are currently teaching coach training, that have been teaching it every single day since we did it to offer different perspectives than mine, and different ways of coaching, and address problems that could come up, and demonstrate coaching, and actually practice coaching with the students.

So we were so excited about this idea. We lost our minds about it. And we knew that our students would love it too. So I invited coach instructors to come, I marked off my calendar, we got a place in Austin where we could do the video, we got the video crews, we got everyone. And we have started selling coach training and everyone’s crazy excited and amazing.

And this will be the one time that we teach it live, and we’re doing that over a five-day period so we can record everything, and then we will have it on video. And after the live training, the way that we’re going to do coach training after that will be at a self-paced video-watching scene.

So you could, if you miss the live training, the way that you could consume it is the exact same way we’re teaching it live is you could just watch all the videos in five days, study all the videos, practice all of the things, and be certified within probably a month.

And the way that we’re doing it with the live students is very thoughtful because we thought, listen, we need to make sure that even though they’re learning the material in a short amount of time, they still have all the time they need to practice and hold space and to learn how to do it.

And we knew that within that five days, if we’re teaching all the content, they would have space to practice, but not enough. So we decided to include 20 private practice calls with an instructor. So if someone comes to the live training and learns directly from me, they will then after the training have - that fifth day is that integration day - and then they will have 20 calls to practice.

So on those calls, they can have their instructor listen to a coaching call that they did and give them feedback. They can get coached by their instructor if they’re struggling, they can coach their instructor and get feedback on how the coaching went.

They can get help with a tool they don’t understand, they can practice Models, they can practice delivering content and teaching content, whatever they want to do within those 20 calls to support them specifically on that call they will be able to do.

So even though they learned for five days directly from me, then you would also get to practice for 20 calls in private with your instructor on anything that you want. One of the ways that I actually recommend that people utilize that call is that they do a coaching call with someone else, and they grab maybe a 10-minute segment of it, and then they listen to that coaching call with their instructor, and the instructor can pause the call, give them feedback, pause the call again, give them feedback.

The other thing that they could do is bring a client with them and coach that client in front of the instructor and get feedback on that as well. There’s so many opportunities of how you choose to learn and you will get feedback from your instructor. Hey, here’s where you need to work.

And so you can customize your next three calls to focus on that work and get feedback from the instructor that yes, now you’re on the right track. Some of our students are natural-born coaches. They come out of the gate, they’re great, they don’t need as much practice, they naturally hold space, they feel ready, maybe they were certified from another place or maybe they’ve just been a natural-born coach their whole life.

They don’t need as much help, so they can use those calls for getting their own coaching, or practicing coaching or whatever they want to do. Or maybe getting some ideas about how they want to take their next steps. They can use them for whatever they want.

And it really helps customize the whole training for them. They, of course, get the workbooks and the hard copy of the textbook. So one of the things that we love about that for them is that they can use that in all of their coaching sessions.

Especially when they’re new, you have all my tools, all my worksheets to kind of direct your coaching sessions as you’re learning and getting seasoned as a coach. You don't have to be coming up with all of the content. You can practice using all of my content.

So the next question that I asked myself as we were working through this as a team was what is the most important part of coach training, what do we need to make sure that they get?

And this is how I answered that question. Number one was the curriculum. Obviously the curriculum has to be solid and it has to prepare the coach to coach anyone on anything that is appropriate for coaching. And I have developed these tools over the last decade plus to use in my own practice with my own clients.

I have thousands of hours of coaching different clients on different things and different topics. And as I have coached clients through all of these different things, I have needed to adjust tools and create tools and create programs and ways of communicating that have helped me coach my clients that I’m now able to teach to all of my students.

So that’s the first and foremost. I want to make sure that all of the people that go through our training to get certified in the Model get all of our tools in the curriculum and that they understand the Model inside and out so they are qualified to hold space and coach someone. Whether they want to be a paid life coach or not is not relevant.

So number one was the curriculum. Number two was the demonstration of the curriculum. So once you learn the concept, it doesn’t come alive for you until you see it demonstrated. So the way that we’re going to teach in the live is I’m going to teach the concept, and then we’re going to have one of our students get coached on the concept with one of our coaches.

And then I will give feedback and we will discuss and we will talk about the tool being demonstrated, how effective it is and why. The third piece is really practicing with yourself. So once you've learned the concept, once you’ve seen it demonstrated, then you want to be able to utilize that concept on yourself.

And what’s great about everything we teach at The Life Coach School is that it can be used on a client and you are your best client. So whatever we teach you, you will practice on yourself. And maybe by accident, improve your whole life.

So you’ll be using the Model on yourself, you’ll be using all the worksheets on yourself, you’ll be able to practice, and you will be able to see the effectiveness of the tool by how you feel and how you change. And you will know if you’re using it right because you will be able to feel that difference in your life.

And if for some reason you can’t feel the difference or it doesn’t feel effective, you can get one of your coaching calls, one of your 20 calls and get help with coaching yourself. So the first thing is the curriculum, the second thing is the demonstration, the third is us teaching you how to practice the tools on yourself. The fourth is practicing the tools on clients and the fifth is practicing on the clients with feedback.

So the three last parts there are practicing on yourself, practicing on clients, and then practicing with feedback. And I think those three treated separately really matter. In the beginning, it’s very hard to get in the flow with a client if you have someone giving you feedback live.

Because you feel your coach is right there, and you know that the instructor’s right there, and you know that they’re watching you, so you can’t really drop into the space of holding space. When I used to teach coach training, that’s how I used to teach it.

I would teach the concept, demonstrate it, and then have the client or the student right there coach someone, and then I would be giving them feedback. And it was very hard for my students to have the space they needed to learn the concept because they were trying to do it right in front of me.

And so we kind of pulled that piece out of the immediate learning experience so you have the space to make mistakes and play with the concepts and try out the tools, kind of in a safe, non-feedback environment. And then once you feel like you really have it, then we give you feedback.

And this is really important for anyone who’s going to be using coaching in their life. Again, it doesn’t need to be someone that is going to be coaching clients for a living, or coaching people at work. This could be someone you just want to coach your friends, we want to make sure if you’re using the Model from school, that you’re using it properly and in a way that could be really effective for the person that you’re trying to help.

So the three big topics, the overarching topics of what we are putting into and creating in the curriculum really lead to anyone being able to benefit from our training. The first one is learning the Model.

I personally want everyone on this planet to learn the Model or a tool that is equivalent. I’m, of course, biased to the Model. I think it’s the easiest one to use, I think it’s the best tool to use. But because it represents the truth of how the world works, it isn’t the only thing that works to help you understand your mind. It’s just one tool of many demonstrating the truth of the universe.

So the first thing is really making sure that we offer this certification to anyone who wants to master the Model for themselves or to use it on other people. The second piece is really using all of our tools to learn what is possible in your own life and to help your clients understand what’s possible in their lives.

One of my big passions in life is reducing suffering in the world, unnecessary suffering in the world. And really reducing limitations that cause that suffering, and limitations that are completely unnecessary that we have imposed on ourselves artificially.

So once my students have learned the Model, then it’s very important for me to talk to them about what’s possible for them in their own lives, and what’s possible for them to help their clients learn, or the friends, or the people around them to learn what’s possible in their lives.

The mission for human beings is for us to evolve and to create beyond our current limitations and to solve problems from a higher level of thinking than we currently have. And one of the ways that I know how to do that is to help the brain expand what’s possible in life, and that’s the second motivation that I have for coach training.

And the last one is to really help anyone who wants to have an impact. And getting certified in the Model is the key I think to having an impact on the world. Because when you develop mastery in the tools that I create, you are able to be that biggest version of yourself.

And when you are that biggest version of yourself, when you’re showing up as the lightest light you can be, you cannot help but impact the people around you. I’m not talking about having an impact on thousands of people, although many of you will come through coach training to do that, to have an impact on thousands of people.

I’m talking about just having an impact in your own life and in the lives of those immediately around you. And so we have redesigned the training to really address those three things. Making sure that we whoever comes through is certified to use our Model and knows how to hold space, that they understand what’s possible for their own lives, and that they’re helping expand what’s possible for the people around them, and that they’re having an impact, a positive, amazing impact on the world.

If I, as one woman, can create a school that trains students to have an impact on the world, it compounds my impact. And that is my goal is to have a positive impact before I leave this planet. And so that is why I have created coach training the way that I have.

So the question some of you may be having and the question that we had is who should this training be for? Who should take it and why? And one of the reasons why we decided to turn it into a program that was more customized and more one-to-one as needed and more self-paced is that we could offer a different type of payment plan for those who really need it.

And so we got with our sales team and we started talking about what are more affordable, longer-term plans that we can do, payment plans that we can do that won’t be so hard on some of the students that want to take it but can’t come up with the money.

And one of the reasons why we haven’t ever been able to offer payment plans with a lower payment is because of our upfront cost by having instructors teaching classes of 10. But by changing the way we’re offering the teaching and offering it as we go, we were able to offer and customize lower payment plans for those people who really need them.

And if you’re interested in learning more about that, you can contact our customer service and one of our sales associates can contact you and help you figure out a payment plan that may work for you that we haven’t had before.

And for me, that really felt like being more inclusive, giving more opportunities, without taking a risk to the cashflow in my business that could then have ultimately affected my employees and the people that work for me. And so we’ve really expanded who can take the training and who can afford it.

And we’ve also really expanded who we’re focusing on taking the training. We want to invite more people in that aren’t necessarily going to stop being a doctor or stop being a lawyer, or stop working in corporate. Or maybe they want to keep those jobs, they want to be able to incorporate all of our tools in with their current patients, their current clients, their current employees, their current colleagues.

And so we’ve adjusted the training so it’s really more available to more people. And it’s also very clear that if you want to become a life coach and you want this to be your business, you still have me as that example of how to do that and we teach all of that in our entrepreneurial course, which is included in how to be a life coach, included in the coach training.

That’s a complete full curriculum that we’re still offering and still supporting and still encouraging for people who want it to be their career, but we’re also not requiring it for those who may not necessarily want it to be their career.

So we want to encourage people that are ready for the perfect career at home as a life coach, we want to encourage people that are ready to take this back to their own businesses, and we want to encourage people who want to get certified as a coach so they can go work as a coach for another coach, or for another organization that’s hiring coaches.

But we also want to really include those of you who want to take it for your own mastery, work on your own self. Especially at this upcoming live event, we’re going to be able to really work with you intensely in person or on Zoom, some of you will be Zooming into the live event, on all of the ideas and concepts that will move the needle.

I think sometimes people when they’re in Scholars, they think - it kind of goes like this. People are like, “I listen to the podcast, I understand everything.” And then they get in Scholars and they’re like, “Wow, okay, there was a lot more I didn’t understand.”

And then Scholars people are like, “I got this, I can coach,” and we’re like, “Please don’t, please get certified if you’re going to use our Model to help other people.” And then they get certified and they're like, “Wow, that was a whole ‘nother level.” And that’s what we want to do for our coach training, and that’s what we want to do for our certification, and that is what we have done.

So I really love our training, I love what we offer. I’m so proud of once you get certified, all the benefits like the entrepreneur training, like the applied coach training, like all of the alumni benefits and all the alumni training that you get ongoing for no extra fees, the mastermind event that you can attend live for a very small fee, or you can get the virtual recordings of that for free, that makes me so proud.

So many business people are like, “You should charge for all that,” but I feel so proud that my coaches get to get that ongoing. And even if you’re not a coach, even if you just want the support of learning as my tools evolve, you will get all of that ongoing.

So as we’ve reinvented this curriculum, all of my previous coaches that have been certified by me over the years, they will all get these recordings and all the updated curriculum for absolutely free. They will get it all because they’re already Life Coach School coaches.

So if you would like to join me, I would love to have you. I would love to have you come to Austin and work with me live. This will be the last time I teach it live probably for four to five years. So if you’re interested in that special opportunity, it is actually the same price as all the other coach trainings.

We never vary the price. Everybody pays the same. So if you’d like to do it live, I’d love to have you. Go to TheLifeCoachSchool.com/certification and find out all the details, find out how we’ve reimagined it, and we’re also going to do a webinar.

You can go to TheLifeCoachSchool.com and go to that Hello bar at the top and find out about the webinar that we’re going to teach all of these ideas and give you more exposure on everything that I’ve talked about here on the podcast.

So have a beautiful week everyone, I’m so excited for Life Coach Training Reimagined and I hope to see you there. Take care. 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.