Ep #440: They Laughed at Me

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode 440.

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.

So they used to laugh at me. This is a true story. I was a life coach before life coaches were really doing the magic that we are all doing now. And I was very interested - in the very beginning - I was very interested in understanding marketing and building a business and having an influence and helping lots of people.

And so I joined all these masterminds with all these internet marketers and read all the books and showed up to all of the meetings basically. And I was, in many cases, the only woman in the room, and I was for sure the only life coach.

And I would go into these rooms and they were filled with men that were very successful businessmen and they would literally laugh, like smirk at me. I don’t even think intentionally. I just think they’re like, “What are you doing here? You’re a life coach? Talking about feelings? Is that even a real thing?” And they would giggle.

One day I went and somebody thought I was the assistant and asked me to get them coffee, which I proceeded to do. It’s a very funny story. I got them coffee, I sat down, then they realized I was actually a participant in the mastermind. They were mortified, I was delighted. These are the things.

And I will say that I went to this one mastermind with Frank Kern and he was the first coach that I had ever had in these kind of bro-marketer-internet groups that truly believed in me. And when I told him I wanted to make a million dollars in a year, he told me, “Well, that’s a good start.”

And he was right. That was a good start. That’s where I started. I made a million dollars that first year that I was with him. And because he didn’t laugh at me, because he took me seriously, and really was a coach to me, I was able to see myself in a new way and succeed.

And I love telling this story now. This year, more than ever, I have been asked to speak on a lot of stages. And it’s kind of a funny story because I was at a mastermind, another mastermind, mostly men, $100 million mastermind, and Pete Vargas was one of the speakers there and he was talking about how speaking on people’s stages was a great way to get exposure for your work.

And so I made a commitment at the beginning of the year that if anyone asked me to speak on their stage, I would say yes. And so a lot of people asked me, mostly marketing people, business people, large marketing events, bro-marketer energy, which I’m down. I’m like, let’s go.

And one of the reasons why they’re asking me is because I’m making so much money now. And it’s sad. They’re not asking me because I’m a life coach and I understand feelings and I understand mindset and I understand how the brain works. They’re asking me, “How did you make so much freaking money as a life coach? How do you make so much money?”

So I have said yes and I have been speaking on these stages to groups of people who want to make a lot of money and want to win at this marketing game. And it’s very surreal for me now to be standing on a stage with a group full of men who are riveted by what I’m saying, taking notes, raising their hands, and asking questions.

They are not laughing anymore. I mean, they’re laughing, but in a great way, in a good way. They’re laughing at my jokes and they’re laughing with me when I talk about what it’s like to be in business. So it’s a totally different experience now that I guess I’ve arrived.

And I will say that there are still some times when I show up at a place and somebody doesn’t know who I am and they assume I’m somebody’s wife and they kind of giggle when I tell them I’m a life coach that I kind of still delight in such things because I make a lot of money. I’m top 1% literally in the world of earners.

And I am truly a life coach. That is who I am, that is what I do, and that is how I make my money. And in the beginning, 17 years ago when I first became a coach, there was a lot of suggestion to me that I don’t call myself a life coach, that I call myself a consultant because there seemed to be this negative connotation with life coaching.

And I was like, no way will I ever do that. I’m going to change the reputation that life coaching has if it’s perceived negatively, and I’m going to change this industry and set an example of what is possible in this industry and change the perception of a life coach as someone’s who’s just a glorified friend to someone who is a very significant person in your life that you use and you hire to make your life better.

We’ve come a long way now. Most people know and believe in life coaching and they have life coaches. And so when people say, “I was talking to my life coach,” or, “I need to go have a call with my life coach,” it now has a very positive connotation versus a very negative.

And any time I introduce myself as a life coach in the general public, people are fascinated and interested and want to know more. And oftentimes want to hire me. So it’s fun now.

So what I wanted to talk about today is becoming a coach and when I meet people and talk to people and tell them about what it is I do, I often tell them that I certify life coaches and that I am a life coach and they want to know more, and they want to understand, and they want to know what it’s like.

And so I decided I’m going to record this podcast so I can just reference people to it that are interested in kind of hearing more about my story and also want to know about the school and how it’s different and what life coaching is and what our training is, and how we’re different than other schools.

When people come to me and they’re like, “We’re looking at a bunch of different schools and trying to decide whether we should come to your school or a different school,” I’m always like, “Listen, you are not deciding between my school and a different school. You’re just deciding whether you’re going to get trained or not. And if the answer is yes, you need to get trained at my school.”

Now, we have a reputation as being the best school in the world. That’s great. We also have a reputation for being expensive. So I want to tell you a story about that. It’s kind of interesting. I am happy when people call us expensive. I want to be the best. I want to be the most expensive, I want to be the highest value.

And I recently hired a coach to work with me on business and work with me on leadership. And yes, I have coaches. You should all have coaches. And I was talking to him. He was asking me such great questions, and one of the questions that he asked me was, “What do people say about your school? What do they say about you?”

And I said, “Oftentimes they’ll tell us that we’re expensive, and they’ll be like, oh, The Life Coach School, they’re the most expensive, they’re the best.” And he laughed. He was like, “How in the world could people think you’re expensive? The value that you give is crazy.”

And it really made me realize that you can make something a bargain, you can make something cheap basically by offering a tremendous amount of value for the money. And so he was asking me, he’s like, “People spend $18,000 and they’re able to have a career where they make over six figures.”

He’s like, “That is the bargain of the century. And the amount of value that you give and what you teach and everything that goes into that is insane. And so I can’t imagine that people would ever call you expensive,” which I thought was kind of an interesting perspective and I loved it. I mean, I’m a bargain or I’m expensive, depending on your perception, depending on how you look at it I guess.

If you’re comparing it to an Ivy League education, we’re very inexpensive. If you’re comparing it to your potential to income, we’re very inexpensive. So let’s go through, and I’m going to talk about my experience and my school and how I set it up in relation to five different things.

Now, what you need to know about these five different things that I’m going to talk about are they are also five different days coming up next week that I’m going to be giving a class on each one of these topics for free, for those of you interested in possibly becoming life coaches, to join me in getting coached and asking questions and having a discussion on these five different topics.

We’re calling it Become a Coach Week, and we just want to give you a chance to really spend some time with us, to spend some time with me, to spend some time with other potential coaches. Taking our time really talking about the school and you and the industry and what we offer.

And so I want to invite you to Become a Coach Week and you can go to TheLifeCoachSchool.com/BecomeACoach and register for this week and you will get these five separate classes totally for free and we’ll remind you and you’ll get the recordings and kind of learn more about me and the school.

So let me tell you what the five things are. The first one is how we help our clients. The second is how we make money as coaches. The third is your coaching mindset. The fourth is tools you use as a coach. And five is how to get trained.

So let’s start with how we help our clients. And this is a really important distinction that I want to make between my school and other schools in our industry. And there are a lot of different life coaches that have a lot of different styles for how they coach.

And when I first became a coach, I went to a coaching organization that I thought was going to certify me. I thought that’s where I was going to get certified. And they were talking about holding our clients accountable and trying to get clients to sign up with us for the rest of their lives, and basically being babysitters to our clients.

And the way that it was set up and the way that they were expecting us to kind of, I don’t know, be babysitters and be accountability partners, and really create a dependency on us as coaches was not something I wanted to be a part of at all. It just didn’t feel like the kind of coaching that I wanted to do.

I wanted to help people create their own independence, their own self-dependency, and their own discipline to really do these things without having to be held accountable. So our school is really about teaching our clients the Model. And the way that we do that is we coach them using the Model.

So if you come to me as a client, I’m going to coach you using the Model without necessarily teaching you the Model. I don’t need to teach it to you in the beginning. I can ask you the questions and kind of guide you and help you understand without having you do the Model on yourself.

And eventually, what happens is you start making so much progress and you start understanding with so much more clarity what’s going on in your life that then you’re ready as a client to be taught the Model. And the way that we do that is when we teach you the Model so you can coach yourself, then as the client, you can kind of go off into the world and come back periodically if you want, kind of a touch-up.

But we’re really teaching you the skills to manage your own brain, to manage your own mind, which is really the whole point of learning coaching and consciousness and self-awareness. So our two main factors that we teach and how we help our clients is we hold space and we teach them and use the Model, the Self-Coaching Model, which is our unique model that is so effective that we are able to create results, long-term results, permanent results quickly. And that is our magic.

One of the pieces of becoming a coach that a lot of people don’t understand is the ability to hold space is something you have to learn. Holding space is not something that comes naturally to us as human beings. We, as human beings, what comes naturally to us is judgment and advice.

And so if you notice with your friends, you’re always giving them advice, trying to fix everything, trying to control everything, tell them how great they are. You’re not helping them look at their own brain. You’re not holding space for them in a non-judging, loving way so they can discover their own answers.

As friends, we’re always offering our answers, we’re always telling them what to do. It’s a beautiful thing as a friend. As a coach, it’s not effective. As a coach, you want to hold space so your client can uncover their own brain. So when I have people that are coming to me as clients, they’re coming to me through Self-Coaching Scholars and being a client of mine, they often feel so good and so excited and like they learned so much they feel like that’s all they need to be able to coach someone else.

We’re always warning them, “Oh my gosh, please don’t coach people against their will. Please don’t leave Self-Coaching Scholars and think that you’re a coach because you understand how to coach yourself.” Coaching someone else and holding space for them is a skill you have to develop. It requires supervision, it requires feedback, it requires practice.

And so if you want to become a coach, a certified coach, where you are really coaching from a place of true effectiveness, you have to learn how to hold space. And that is what we teach in our certification and that’s what all of our coaches know how to do.

We focus on causal coaching, which means we’re treating the cause of issues, not the symptoms. So for example, with weight loss, we’re not just teaching you how to eat less. We’re not just teaching you how to exercise. We’re helping you understand why you overeat, why you over-desire food, why you have over-hunger. We solve for that, and then we don’t have to teach you how to resist food because you will just simply want it less.

We don’t have to teach you how to not eat against your own will and have more willpower because we’re treated the cause of the problem. And when we treat the cause of the problem, it’s a long-term solution. If you come to me to lose weight and I simply hold you accountable for what you’re eating every day and you’re trying to please me and get my approval, you probably will lose weight.

But it’ll be temporary. You won’t be able to keep it off because as soon as I’m not in that relationship with you, you’re probably going to go off and start eating everything off your protocol. But if you understand the cause of what’s going on with why you’re having these symptoms and why you’re having these results, then you’re able to change the problem.

Listen, when I stopped overeating, I stopped overeating forever. I haven’t thought about it since. I’ve moved on with my life. That’s what we want to do for our clients. And one of the other really important pieces of the way that we help our clients and the way that we teach is that we are all coaches first.

All of the instructors at The Life Coach School, we are all practicing, active coaches. We are not just instructors sitting on a podium teaching about coaching. We are actually coaches coaching in the world. So when we’re teaching you about coaching, we know of which we speak.

The other thing that we do to really help I think our clients is be an example of what is possible. When you look at The Life Coach School, you can see the coaches at our school are really doing life. Really showing up, really evolving, really creating massive success in the world.

We are living examples of the Self-Coaching Model. We are living examples of the work that we teach, and that is one of the best ways that we can help our clients because we develop an authority with our clients when we’re living in our own truth.

It’s very challenging if you’re simply just trying to be a babysitter to someone and you don’t have any experience with using the Model, you don’t have any experience with your own success, it’s harder to develop that authority and that connection with your client.

So that really will be what we talk about on that first day is how do we train our clients and how is that different than any other school in the world. Alright, let’s talk about day two. Day two of Become a Coach Week, we’re going to talk about making money.

Now, this is something that I love to talk about and I’m excited to talk about, and I talk about it all the time, and I really encourage all of my students who become coaches to make a lot of money. That’s a huge difference between us and many other schools.

We are very invested in you becoming successful coaches and being an example and making money, and especially changing our industry and the impression of our industry from a hobby industry into really a professional, successful, influential industry.

We are going to talk a lot on Tuesday, we’re going to talk a lot about niches and picking niches and who you want to work with and who you want to focus on. One of the beautiful things about the Model is you can use it on any topic. The great thing about marketing is that you pick a niche that you can sell to so you can get plenty of clients.

Inside of Become a Coach Week, I am going to review our entrepreneurial program. I am going to review marketing, I’m going to talk about niches, I’m going to talk about getting jobs as coaches and what’s that like. If you don’t want to have your own business, what is it like to go and try and work for someone else?

We’re going to talk about creating value and overdelivering and then we’re also going to talk about showing up. Making money as a coach is such a delight. It’s such an honor. It’s such a cool indicator of how much value we’re creating in the world.

Many of you want to become coaches but you’re afraid. Can I make money? Will I be able to make my tuition back? Will I be able to be successful? Will I be able to create that respect and prestige that so many of those other coaches who’ve gone through the school have created?

Now, I don’t know exactly what you’ll do with what I teach you, but I’m going to teach you that of course it is possible for you if you want to become a coach and make money, and we’re going to be talking all about how to make money as a life coach at Become a Coach Week, Tuesday.

And I want to promise you, I’m making a lot of money, a lot of my students are making a lot of money, and we’re having a lot of fun helping people in the process. And day three, so that would be Wednesday, we’re going to talk about coaching mindset in Become a Coach Week.

And coaching mindset is really all about how you see yourself. What are the thoughts that you have about yourself as a life coach? Now, I’m the perfect example of this, right? I am the example of someone who saw myself as a life coach, that was my identity, and I saw it as such a positive thing.

And when I say that I’m a life coach, I feel so proud of myself. I feel so honored to be a life coach. I feel like I’ve had an impact on this industry, and this industry is really about helping people unblock their futures, helping people have the futures of their dream. I can’t even imagine a better title to call myself than a life coach.

So one of the things about the coaching mindset and we’ll talk about this more on Wednesday is what you focus on as a coach is your clients. Now, you’re having to show up every day, you’re having to see yourself as a life coach, you’re having to be an influencer, you’re having to sell yourself in so many ways as a life coach.

But we also train you to remember that this isn’t about you. This is about your clients. This is about serving the world. This is about helping them. And so you’ll see examples where people will come to me in my coaching and they’ll say, “Oh my gosh, I want to make money but I’m so afraid that I don’t look good, I’m so afraid I won’t look good on video, I’m afraid I won’t say the right thing, I’m afraid to go speak at this event, I’m afraid to put a post on social media.”

And I always say, “Your fear is not relevant. Your clients are waiting for you. Your clients need your help.” I just coached someone yesterday. This woman had created this whole program on letting go of attachment and helping people after they’ve broken up from relationships if they were super attached to someone and they were feeling in a lot of pain about it.

And she was a school teacher, but she also wanted to do coaching on the side and she wanted to sell this program on the side. And I said to her, “You don’t have the luxury of feeling bad for yourself when there are people out there that you can actually help. There are people who are needlessly suffering over a breakup and you could actually help them, and they would be thrilled to pay you for that opportunity to be helped by you. And so please don’t wait.”

She goes, “Well, I don’t know how.” I said, “Have you asked anyone to pay you? Have you asked anyone if they wanted coaching? Have you put yourself out there in a way that makes you available to them and lets them know that you can help them?” She was like, “No, because I’m kind of afraid of being rejected.” I’m like, “It’s not about you.”

So really, understanding that coaching mindset. Another lady that I coached yesterday too was all about money mindset. She was afraid that if she earned this much money and she was becoming very successful and she was making a lot of money as a coach, she was afraid that therefore she wasn’t being spiritual.

And I tried to explain to her, she needed to change her mindset to understand that in order to earn a lot of money, you have to ascend out of your human belief systems. The human belief systems that limit you. You need to have faith, you need to have spirituality, you need to have access to evolve, you need to believe there’s something bigger than you and making a contribution matters. That is spirituality.

And it comes with a huge responsibility to serve and also a lot of money, which also comes with a huge responsibility to take care of that money and to be a good steward of that money as well. And how really, doing this work is some of the most spiritual work I think that is being done on the planet today.

And so really keeping that mindset focused on the higher good and what you’re capable of and your own worthiness will make you much more successful as a life coach. So in Become a Coach Week, we’re going to talk a lot about that on Wednesday, coaching mindset. So make sure you register at TheLifeCoachSchool.com/BecomeACoach.

The next thing we’re going to talk about, and this will be on Thursday, is the tools that you use as a coach. So I explained to you that one of the main tools that we use as a coach is the Model. And what’s beautiful about the Model is that we can use the Model for any problem. Any problem that a client brings to us, we can use the Model to solve it.

And we can approach the Model from the bottom, from the top, sideways, whatever way that we want. We teach you in The Life Coach School Coach Training how to use the Model several different ways. But that’s not all. We have many other tools that we give you to put in your toolbox so you can have in order to coach your clients.

The beautiful part about it is we give you this huge curriculum book that has tabs in it for every single tool that you can use with your clients. But even better than that, we give you a second book that is just filled with worksheets. And what’s great about these worksheets is that each worksheet can be used with a client in a client session.

So it has all the questions that you ask your client, it has all the suggestions, it has all the processes that you would take a client through. So especially when you’re a brand new coach, if they’re struggling with a certain thing, you will be trained in that certain thing to solve it with a tool, with a process, with a worksheet.

So let me just tell you a few of them. We’re going to go through these in detail and you can ask questions on Thursday of next week in Become a Coach Week. But here are some of the things that we teach you.

We teach you basically how the world works in terms of the Model, and how the Model works, and how to coach yourself with it. We talk to you about the difference between stories and facts. We do a huge education on the tool of holding space and being present. We also talk in the Coach Training about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And we talk about racism and dealing with that when you are coaching clients. And recognizing that everyone’s going to come to coaching with a different perspective and a different experience in the world, and how maybe your experience will be different than their experience, and how you can acknowledge that and respect that while still holding non-judgmental, beautiful space for your client to uncover their own belief systems that may be holding them back in their life.

We talk about how to ask questions and how to do a 45-minute session, and how to set up that 45-minute session if that’s how you want to conduct your sessions with your clients. We talk about feelings and how to help your clients process feelings, and we teach you the tools of non-buffering.

How to process pain and stop overeating and stop overdrinking and stop over-anything with your clients if they come to you and they’re struggling with doing something too much that they don’t want to be doing, they’re over-ing something. We have tools that you can use with your clients to help them stop doing that.

We talk a lot about being a trauma-informed coach and we have a whole class that goes through that. We teach you about how to really conduct a coaching session, the phases of a coaching session, the goals of a coaching session, and how there are certain questions that you can ask during a coaching session that will provide your client with self-awareness and progress within the session.

One of the questions I get a lot is, “What if you’re heading towards the end of that 45-minute session and your client just uncovered something, or they just started crying, or something just got going?” We give you all of the tips and answers for how to handle that.

But you’re also maybe asking, “What if I’m having a hard time getting my client to really participate in the session or open up? What if they don’t have anything that they want help with?” We teach you how to guide and lead the session so your client doesn’t have to be responsible for that.

We teach you about emotional childhood and emotional adulthood and the differences between them, boundaries, unconditional love, and of course, the manual. We talk about lovability and worthiness, relationships, urges, and allowing. We talk a lot about your own self-worth and the self-worth of your client.

And we have a whole section where you can just ask questions to our instructors. One of the beautiful things about The Life Coach School is we have more tools than you could ever use in your life. We teach you about decision making and impossible goals and the possibility formula. We talk about outcome and goal cultivation, how to get it done, Monday Hour One, how to organize, self-confidence.

We have all the tools that you could possibly ever need to use with your client. They’re all in our curriculum and all in our books that you get. So if you want to learn more about the details of what tools you need and what tools you can have as a life coach, we’re going to be talking about that on Thursday in Become a Coach Week.

And then the last day, we’re going to talk about how you get trained. What is the process for getting trained as a life coach at The Life Coach School, and how we’ve set it up for you to win. We have made The Life Coach School a school that you can take at your own pace.

Now, that does not mean that you take it alone. In fact, we set it up so you can create it at your own pace, but you have one-on-one instruction. And the reason why we decided to do that is we want each one of our coaches to be able to be served at the level that they are.

We have some people that come into life coach training brand new beginners. Brand new. They just are learning the Model, they’ve never been in Self-Coaching Scholars, they’ve barely listened to the podcast. They’re going to need a little bit more help and support.

We talk about how people come in that are much more experienced. They’ve been coaching, maybe they have a coaching certification from another organization and they want to get coached by the school and they want help. Maybe they are therapists and they need some different kind of instruction to become a life coach.

And so we have set it up so you get private one-on-one instruction and practice. The way we set up the school is we teach you the concept, then we demonstrate it in an example of our coaching, and then you get to practice it with live feedback.

I’m going to talk about this all in detail. You can ask me any question that you have about it. But it is the best coaching program we have ever had. The way that it is set up, it’s completely customized and personalized and it is producing the highest level of coaching I believe in the world.

I’m going to talk to you about how each of our students have their own success coach to help them process what they’re going through and get through the curriculum and get the feedback they need in order to get certified. And I’m going to talk to you about all the alumni support you get, the mastermind, the monthly classes, and I’m going to talk to you about the awards because they’re my favorite.

Having people come up on that stage that have made $100,000 in a year, that have made a million dollars in a year, that have made $10 million in a year as a life coach is some of the most mind-blowing experience I’ve ever had. And it is true for everyone in the audience, watching all these people be able to really be at the highest level of this industry because they’ve learned the Model and because they’ve gone through our coach school is such an amazing honor.

So on Friday of next week in Become a Coach Week, we are going to talk a lot about that as well. We’re going to talk about what it is to be trained as a life coach through The Life Coach School. And I know that some of you aren’t life coaches. Some of you are hiring life coaches, some of you are coming through Self-Coaching Scholars.

And so I hope that this episode really helped you understand what it means to be a Life Coach School coach so if you’re working with one of us, you understand the training that we’ve been through and the focus that we’ve been through, you understand what I’ve been through as a brand new baby coach 17 years ago getting laughed at until now, as someone that is really leading this industry and setting up the best coaching literally in the world.

So please, if you’re interested in becoming a coach, if you want to have this be your career, if there’s a part of you that has this desire, let’s turn that desire into a decision and decide right now to join me for the next five days next week. Become a Coach Week, Monday through Friday, maybe, just maybe you’ll learn enough so you will want to become a coach at The Life Coach School.

I truly hope that’s exactly what happens. Have a beautiful week everyone. I’ll talk to you soon. 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.