Ep #442: Power Sentences

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode 442.

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.

Hey friends. What’s up? I’m so happy to be home in Scottsdale and I just had my place completely refurnished and it is so gorgeous, and the weather is perfect. I’m sitting in my new office and I can’t wait to talk to you about what’s been going on in my brain.

One of the things that I get asked a lot is how I’ve been able to have such staying power in my industry and in my business. And one of the reasons why I’m still here, still kicking, still number one as The Life Coach School is because I’m constantly learning and evolving and taking all of my tools and my ideas to the next level.

And we are doing an event coming up in November, a virtual event for all of you at home called Life Coach Live. And this three-day event is going to be the cutting edge of all my latest work on life coaching, and basically just building on the tools that I have always had and always been using, but they keep evolving.

One of the reasons our tools keep evolving is because I keep applying them to myself and I keep evolving, but also all of our instructors and all of the students and everyone that works at the school keeps evolving too. So we get different ways of experiencing the tools and better ways of teaching them and better ways of understanding them.

To give you a little bit of background for me, this year, we reinvented our coach training so it could be a more customized training for individuals, where each person could come in and have their own customized training, their own personalized instruction, and a connection with a success coach to take them through the training.

And so we retaught the entire curriculum. We rebooted it and retaught the entire curriculum, and it is insane. If you’re already a certified coach, you will get access to this, so do not worry. We got you covered. And if you’re not a coach yet, now is the time to sign up for coach training if it’s open right now because this material is so good and the way that we’re teaching it is insane.

It’s so high-touch and so personalized that you can take the training for any reason and get what you want from it. So if you want to take it just for a personal transformation, or you want to go work for someone else, or you want to start your own business, we have it set up for you to learn all of that.

So I’m telling you all that because as we went through and recreated the training, I spent a lot of mental hours really thinking about how we can teach this material even better. And we did. We taught it way better. And one of the things that - and I think this is important for everyone to understand is that the best teaching is the teaching that simplifies it and makes it the easiest for your student to understand.

A lot of teachers that are out there that are coaches, that are teachers, feel like they want to give everything to their students so their students will feel like they’re getting “a lot.” And what I call that is giving your clients the groceries. And groceries, when you hand big bags of groceries to your clients, it seems like you’re giving them a lot. But then they have to put the meal together.

They have to decipher through all that stuff to get to the bottom line. The way I teach is I provide you with the finished meal so you can experience the finished meal, and then know how to make that for your own client. And so as I went through that, I really started to get excited about how much more accessible this work can be to people who aren’t even exposed to life coaching.

One of the most hilarious things that people tell me is that the life coaching market is saturated. And that’s usually life coaches who are in this industry, who are saturated with each other. So we’re following each other, we’re talking to each other, everything is life coaching.

And I always laugh, I’m like, “Okay, let’s go out into the football stadium and see how many people are life coaches, and let’s go to a rock concert and see how many people are life coaches.” There’s very few. And in fact, I looked it up and there are 23,000 life coaches in the United States, and there’s something like 315 million people in the United States.

And there’s a million doctors in the United States, and there’s 23,000 life coaches. So that stat was really helpful for me to kind of come back at people who are thinking - and I think we’re making excuses. We’re saying, “Oh no, I can’t become a life coach, I can’t follow my dream because there’s already so many life coaches.”

Nobody says that about being a doctor. No one’s like, “Oh my gosh, there are so many doctors, I can’t become one.” It’s okay to be afraid to be a life coach, but just don’t make the excuse be that there’s so many of us because there’s nowhere near enough of us.

And because of that, because I want to get us to a million life coaches, we need at least as many life coaches as we have doctors. I think every single person on the planet should be having regular life coaching. They should be working on their brain and on their life in a positive way.

And so I want to reach more people. And as I think about my business and growing my business to $100 million and reaching more people that aren’t already exposed to life coaching, I know that I have to teach this material in a way that is really accessible and really powerful immediately.

And what that means is that someone can take this material and apply it to their life immediately so they can feel the experience of managing their own mind. And for those of you who have listened to the podcast and you understand the Model, you have felt that power.

But it takes a minute to kind of understand the Model. It takes a minute to apply it and understand it. And so what if I could get that down from a minute to 30 seconds, to 20 seconds, to 10 seconds so someone could feel the power of the Model quicker than I have been teaching it?

So that has been my mission for about the past five months. That’s what I’ve been really focused on in creating the curriculum for Life Coach Live. And for all of you who are attending Life Coach Live, you will be hearing me teach in a new way.

Now, we will be doing the Model and the coaching like we always do of course because that’s so powerful and entertaining and awesome to watch. But I will be teaching the material in a new way. And so I kind of wanted to go over some of what I’m going to be introducing and the way that I’m going to be introducing it.

Another side note that I want to offer for anyone who has been on the fence about joining Life Coach Live is you get to join from the comfort of your own home, and it is ridiculously inexpensive. You’re welcome. The reason why I kept the price so low is so I could attract a whole new audience to be exposed to my work in a whole new way.

But for those of you who are already my audience, I don’t want you to think that this is material you’re already going to know. I’m going to teach this in a brand new way. And I’m also going to be offering a retreat program that I am creating called Work Hard, Play Hard.

And at this retreat, we are going to spend the first half of the day working on business. And I’m going to teach you all the cutting edge business material that I’ve been studying and learning. And I’ve also been noticing what you all need some help with.

And one of the things you all need some help with is being good teachers and good explainers and good webinar producers and good video sales letter producers. So we’re going to spend the mornings workshopping and I’m going to be teaching you all about that and talking about money and how to approach your clients, and how to create value in return for extraordinary amounts of money.

One of the things that’s so great about our industry is we create an extraordinary amount of value for an extraordinary amount of money. And that’s what I love about a service industry. Any of you in a service industry that can grow in that service industry is the more money you make, the more impact you’re making. And that feels amazing to me.

So I haven’t taught new business concepts in a long time so I decided I wanted to do this two-day retreat. So in the morning we’re going to work on all of the latest business stuff, and I’m going to have you guys workshop it, I’m going to give you feedback, and we’re going to talk about copy and writing copy and speaking copy, and how important that is, kind of giving you the guidelines and the structure to doing that at the next level.

And then in the afternoon, we’re going to play hard. So the first day, we’re going to all get on a yacht and go play in San Diego. And then the second day we’re going to have a huge beach party. So if you want to join me in Work Hard, Play Hard, you have to be enrolled in Life Coach Live because that’s the only place I’m going to be offering it.

And I know that it’s going to sell out really quickly because I rarely offer stuff like this, and it’s going to be so good. Oh, there’s one more thing I want to tell you. I’m just giving you all the updates. All the updates on The Life Coach School and what’s happening.

But I like sharing these with you so you can see how I think at this level with my business and how I’m approaching. We have a program called Self-Coaching Scholars. It is one of the best programs for coaching in the world, in my opinion. And we are going through a process, we’re going to rebrand it.

It’s still going to be Scholars, it’s still going to be the amazing program that it is, but we’re going to rebrand it to be called Get Coached. And the main use of Scholars, Self-Coaching Scholars now has been the weekly coaching.

So there is an extraordinary offer in Self-Coaching Scholars where you get to have one-on-one coaching once a week with a private coach, just the two of you, in a coaching session once a week. And all of that is included with the group coaching, with the Ask a Coach, with all of my classes, with all of the new classes that we add. It’s all included for $297 a month, which is extraordinary.

But one of the most impactful things for our students in Self-Coaching Scholars, one of the things that has made them grow the fastest has been the one-on-one coaching. So we want to change the marketing to expose more people to being able to get coached and get coached one-on-one weekly for a month for $297.

So as we make these changes, we’re also really thinking behind the scenes and really trying to understand, how can we convey the power of a coaching session to someone who’s maybe never had a life coach and never been coached properly by someone who understand the Model?

And all of our coaches who are in Scholars now, who are in Get Coached now, all of our coaches that are doing the coaching are high-level Model coaches. So they are able to coach to the Model in a very extraordinary way.

And so the amount of change that someone can experience in a week and in a month is extraordinary. And we’ve had so many crazy success stories and so many people coming in and having such an impact in their own life, we want to make sure that we get that opportunity to more people. That will help us grow our influence and grow our business, grow Get Coached, and help more people in the world.

So we’ve had a lot of approaches to trying to get the word out, so to speak, and let people know what coaching is and how we do it. So a lot of times, we’re trying to expose them to the Model and we’re trying to teach them the Model. And people are like, “What? I’m so confused, I don’t get it.”

So what we’ve decided to do is change the introductory and even some of the long-term backend teachings to be focused on this idea of sentences. So some of you may have seen my ads where I say one sentence changed my life.

And the truth is it’s always a sentence that changes anyone’s life. No one’s life ever changes until their sentence changes, right? So now it may be a circumstance that changes in their life, but then a sentence changes. So then they feel different, and then they can act different.

So when I think back to all of the major changes in my life, there’s always a sentence associated with it. There’s always a sentence that caused a decision to be made or an action to be taken based on a feeling.

And you can do this in your own life as well. If you think about every major change, every major improvement in your life, there’s a sentence that goes along with it. This is also true for any negative downturn in your life. When you started maybe moving towards taking actions that didn’t serve you, all of those started with one sentence.

So when you are completely unaware that your thoughts create your feelings, another sentence that completely changed my life, just that one sentence, your thoughts create your feelings. When you’re completely unaware that your thoughts are determining your feelings and your actions, you are functioning unconsciously with a main sentence driving your life.

So for those of you who are new and you don’t know the Model yet, you can try this out. There is a sentence at the base of your life that drives all of your actions. We’re calling these power sentences. And they’re power sentences because they’re very powerful in your life and they usually have a lot of sister and brother sentences associated with them, and you may not even realize it.

If you’re not living consciously, like I wasn’t living consciously before in my own mind, understanding my own mind, so I didn’t even know that thoughts were running me. And many of the thoughts running our lives are unconscious, negative, pre-programmed, and inherited.

So, many times we won’t even change our sentence that’s driving our life until something significant happens in the world or there’s a circumstance, and then we change our sentence. But we don’t even realize what’s happening.

We’re not like, “Oh, I had this one sentence and now I’ve changed it to this sentence.” We just think life has changed. We just think circumstances have changed, but really, our mind has changed. The main sentence in our life has changed.

And you can look at your main sentences in all different areas of your life, and there’s a really cool way to uncover them in what I’m doing, it’s called a sentence audit. And that is something that I’m going to be teaching in Life Coach Live. On the virtual program, we’re going to go through this workshop of how to uncover what are the sentences that maybe you haven’t even thought about thinking about what they are. I’m going to help you find them.

And I’m going to help you find the main one that is currently driving your life. Now, it’s not the one you want to be driving your life. It’s not the one you wish was driving your life. It’s the one that actually is.

So for a big portion of my 20s, I would say that my main thought, completely unconscious that I didn’t even know was there was, “I’m not good enough.” And I was constantly spinning with this thought, “I’m not good enough,” under the surface of my mind and trying to outrun it, and trying to outperform it, and trying to escape from it, and trying to buffer against it, while at the same time always making an effort from a place of scarcity to be better than I was, from a place of rejection of who I actually was.

And I was extremely negative in my own brain towards myself and I had a really hard time sustaining any success. And had I known that this was just a sentence in my mind driving me, I could have fixed it a lot earlier. But I just thought I was trying to create a life for myself. I just thought I was trying to do my best. Really, that’s what consciously I was thinking. But really, there was this underlying thought, “I’m not good enough.”

And what we do when we have these underlying sentences that are driving our feelings and our actions and result is we are inadvertently creating evidence for these very thoughts. Because think about this; when you have a sentence in your mind, you feel that sentence. You act that sentence. And when you act that sentence, you create that result.

And then you look at the result and you look around at your life and you’re like, wow, this sentence is true. Look at all the evidence I have. I’m not good enough here, I can’t lose weight, I can’t keep this job, I can’t keep a boyfriend, these people keep treating me terribly, I keep treating me terribly, I’m not good enough.

And I had so much proof, which just kept cementing this unconscious belief in my mind, this sentence that was just running in my brain that I had picked up when I was very young and had been programmed into me. And then also, when you have this sentence in your mind, it’s almost like glasses you have on.

So everything you’re looking for in the world is looking for evidence that you’re not good enough, and I found it. I found so much evidence. And I kept proving to myself that I wasn’t good enough. And the main way that I did this, the I’m-not-good-enough belief had a sister belief that was, “I can’t lose weight.”

And I just kept spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning. I was escaping my negative emotion from my negative thought by overeating and then trying to lose weight, and doing that spin of anxiety over and over and over again, and just being so exasperated with myself. I wasn’t even good enough to lose weight is what I kept telling myself.

My body wasn’t good enough to be seen, it wasn’t good enough to be healthy, I wasn’t good enough not to overeat. Constant barrage into my own brain.

So what we need to do with all of the people in the world who want change in their lives but don’t understand how powerful their own sentences in their brains are is we have to help them uncover these sentences so they realize that they’re just optional. They’re just optional sentences in their brain that they can choose to change.

Step one is always awareness. And when you find out the difference between looking at a thought that you believe is true and looking at a sentence in your mind that’s optional, that’s when your life changes.

So it’s one thing to discover that I don’t believe that I’m good enough. If I discover, oh, I’m not good enough, that’s what I think about myself, I’d be like, “Yeah, for good reason.” I believe that for good reason. That’s just part of my belief system, part of who I am, that’s part of my identity.

But when we approach it from, wait, sentences in our minds are simply optional, they’re just pre-programmed scripts, they have nothing to do with what’s true and what’s real, they only are what we’re putting into the oven to cook, and we can put in something different.

And that distinction is everything because if we discover that we don’t think we’re good enough, that is something that we would want to hide. I don’t want people to know that I’m not good enough, instead of I don’t want to have this sentence that’s running in my brain, “I’m not good enough.” You see the difference? It’s a huge difference.

So once we’ve uncovered that and we truly understand that it is just a line of text that we can hold in our hand, that we can write down, that is not something that we’re required to keep thinking or that we must keep thinking, or that’s true beyond a shadow of a doubt so therefore we have to keep living into it, we can see it as an optional input, an optional script that we can change, that’s when the magic happens. That’s when the epiphany can happen for people.

We can help them see that you can choose a new sentence that you want to believe instead. And when you give yourself that choice back to choose from that place, I want to believe that I am worthy, I want to believe that I was born worthy and there’s nothing I can do to be more worthy, and there’s nothing I can do to be less worthy, and that is just a given, and that I’m good enough for the life that I’m meant to live, and the way that I find out what the life I’m meant to live is by paying attention to my worthy desires inside of me.

And when I change to the power thought, “I want to be an example of what is possible,” that’s my power thought, my whole life changed. Now, that’s step three. We find it, and then we change it, but then we have to believe it. And how do we believe and live into a new sentence that we’ve programmed into our brain?

Can it really be that simple though? We need to build evidence and legs for that one sentence in order to change our lives. Is it really that simple? If we believe that sentence, will we feel that sentence? And if we feel that sentence, will we act that sentence? And if we act that sentence, that will be the result.

When I look at my extraordinary life and I look at my life now being an example of what is possible, I can trace it back to that one sentence. From changing I’m not good enough to I’m going to be an example of what is possible.

And all the space in between of how to believe in that new thought, how to live into it, even when I made mistakes, even when I failed, even when it didn’t make sense, even when it was so hard to believe, that new power sentence pulled me through to a new life.

I just recently did a week called Become a Coach Week and I spent an hour a day coaching students who wanted to become coaches, they had the money and they had the time, but they were afraid. They were afraid to enroll because they didn’t think that they could be successful coaches, confident coaches, helpful, serving coaches because they didn’t think they were good enough.

It was client after client after client after client I coached over this belief system, “I’m not capable, I’m not worth investing in, I’m not an extraordinary person, I can’t do this like other people.” These underlying unconscious thoughts that people were letting run their lives.

And all I did was help them see that they were optional, that they’re just sentences, that they don’t have any power if we don’t attach them, if we don’t live them, if we don’t believe them. They’re harmless in our lives. And we can discredit them and disprove them once we’re aware of them.

And the extraordinary thing to me is most people who are unaware of their own brains are running on negative, negative sentences. And I’ve been trying to really study. I’ve been spending a lot of time studying why I think that is.

Why do most of us walk around believing that we’re not good enough, we’re not capable, we can’t do extraordinary things? Why, when we believe that we can do extraordinary things and we believe that we can be an example of what is possible, why are we in the top 1% of producers success wise?

I was talking to my friend Ryan, I’m like, “If we could increase that 1% of people to 20%, imagine how the world would change.” If we had 20% of the people functioning at 1% of the level in terms of mindset and creativity and production.

Because when you think about this - and it makes me genuinely sad to think about this. If I believe that I’m not good enough, I’m not going to bring forth what I have to the world. I’m going to stay hidden, maybe in a job that I hate and a life that I hate. Not producing, not showing up, not serving because I’m blocked with a belief that I can’t and that I won’t.

But what if we could reach more people and help more people believe in their own desire, their own decision, their own contribution to the world? And everyone started doubling down on the value that they could provide the world, which means they would get paid more, but it would also mean that the world was benefitting from their value.

That is how I believe we change the world. Because everybody has something to give. Everyone has something to bring. And we all know people who aren’t living into their capability because they have a negative attitude towards themselves. They’re blocking themselves. They’re living in confusion and doubt and worry instead of in courage and excitement and determination.

This is my expertise in the world. There are a lot of things that other people can do to help the world, but this is my little way. I want to help people literally change the sentences in their brain from one to the other, and to believe and live into those new sentences.

So for you, as a start, especially if you’re new, uncover your sentences currently running your life. And you’ll know if you have the right one because you’ll see the result in your life. It’s not the thought you want to believe. It's the thought that’s currently producing the results in your life. What is that thought?

And if you want to really make sure you have the right one and start going through the process of a full audit and changing that thought and then learning how to believe into it in the shortest amount of time possible, make sure you join me for Life Coach Live.

Because those three days, I am going to be covering the curriculum that I have just produced on how to do this in the quickest way possible. In a way that takes the simplicity of a sentence and changes it to literally change your world, and ultimately, the bigger world. That is not an exaggeration.

So we are going to do full audits on all of the areas in our lives where we’re having power sentences and we’re going to talk about what we want to change them to. And then we’re going to explore beyond what we ever thought we could think for ourselves.

We’re going to open up our minds and look at the possibility of a new thought you haven't even considered thinking, and then we’re going to turn all of your desire into a decision. And that’s going to motivate you to take the action and motivate you to show up in the world in much bigger, brighter way.

And I wanted to do this before we started the new year. We’re doing it in November so we can prep for 2023 with a new mindset and a new focus and a new way of thinking, and some new regular coaching. Hopefully many of you will join Get Coached and Scholars so you can get that regular coaching throughout the year.

But this will be the jumpstart. Think about what your sentences are and what you want to change it to. That’s going to be the focus. That’s going to be the focus of not just Life Coach Live, but that’s going to be the focus for me all through this next year, reaching as many people as possible, helping them find their sentence, and helping them change it.

And a fun thing that you can all do is look out into the world at super successful people and see if you can guess what their sentence is. And look at people who are failing and see if you can guess what their sentence is. And look at the people in your immediate life and see if you can figure out what is the sentence that’s driving their results in their life.

And then one of the things that I’m super excited to do is create a mini book, a booklet of the most powerful sentences that people are using to change their lives so we can borrow them and practice them and use them, so we can reprogram our brains in more positive sentences instead of the unconscious negative ones that are pulling us down unnecessarily.

So try this out. Go out there and inspect people’s sentences. And also make sure you sign up for Life Coach Live. You can go to TheLifeCoachSchool.com/LifeCoachLive so you can do this live with me over three days in November.

Let’s uncover, audit, change, and then start taking action towards the new lives that we want. Have a beautiful week everyone. Take care.

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.