Ep #457: 5 Questions To Ask Yourself

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 457.

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 am recording this podcast in Austin. I haven’t been here in so long. I am in Austin right now preparing my house because I had leased it out, my penthouse. I had leased it out for a year, and it’s on the market to sell for next year. And I needed to come and get all my personal items out and to get it ready to rent. And then I’m on my way to Miami for my girl Tonya’s birthday and to speak at Aprille’s event.

So, I wanted to record a podcast and share some questions that I’ve been asking myself lately that I think you should all ask yourselves as well. It’s had a profound effect on me, and it’s also made me realize a lot of things about my life that I want to make sure you all realize about your life.

I know that some of you are wondering what happened with Christian in Hawaii. He qualified, he did the first round of qualifying, got through. The second round of qualifying, he missed it. He still played extraordinarily well. He’s doing so great as a golf player.

He’s going back after his break to play. He plays for Arkansas. He’s going to play for them and then continue his efforts to go pro. But I’m telling you, that boy is on fire right now. So, keep an eye out; Christian Castillo is coming to ESPN for sure.

Okay, so I think I’ve been keeping you all up to date in terms of what’s been going on for me emotionally and mentally, especially as I’ve been achieving these amazing milestones in my life, these goals in my life. Making $50 million this year, 51, almost $52 million dollars this year, was pretty astounding. Pretty exciting. And also a little bit jarring, right? I had a little bit of cognitive dissonance like whoa.

There is no doubt in my mind that you really can create your own reality with your mind. There’s no faking this. I have been doing this at a sustained level for a long time, and I can see how the effect of my thoughts play out in my life so clearly.

So, one of the things that happened that I didn’t really anticipate as I got richer, and I just taught a class in Get Coached, in Scholars, called How To Use Your Beautiful Mind To Get Rich. And so if you haven’t participated in that class, you should join and make sure that you listen to that class.

But one of the things I talk about in the very last class of that session is that there is an adjustment in your identity when you become wealthy. And especially if you didn’t grow up wealthy, or as wealthy as you are now, there’s an adjustment to kind of identifying yourself as one of the top earners that can produce at that level, and also as someone who has that much money.

We were just talking about, I think someone won the lottery. My friend was telling me someone won a billion-dollar lottery. And they could either take $750 million upfront or $45 million a month. And if you take $45 million a month, you get – I can’t remember the exact number, so forgive me. But if you take $45 million a month for 30 years, you end up getting more money in the end.

But I was making the argument, I think it depends on how old you are, whether you take that lump sum or not, and also what you really want to do with the money. Because the lifestyle, and this is crazy when you’re talking these numbers, but this is really true. Having $45 million a year versus $750 million at once is a completely different life. A completely different identity.

Somebody who has $750 million lives a different life and has different options than someone that has $45 million a year. And I think when I wasn’t making this kind of money, I just thought, well, once you have a certain amount, isn’t it all just the same? No, it’s really not. What you’re able to purchase, what you’re able to do, the options that you have are totally different the more money that you have.

And so one of the things that happens as you get more money and more disposable income and more access, then you have so many more options in life of what you can do, where you can go, where you can live, and what you can buy. And for many people, this is very overwhelming and freaks them out.

And this is why a lot of people win the lottery and lose all their money, really, because they can’t identify with their newfound wealth as a person who is wealthy and behave in a way that serves them where they can preserve and maintain their money.

So I think it makes the assumption that if someone wins a lottery, they should keep their money, maintain their money, and have their money. And that’s not necessarily true if it’s a conscious choice. If somebody wins a lottery and wants to spend every dime of it, then they should, in my opinion.

But I think what happens for a lot of people that I’ve seen interviewed about the lottery is that they lost the money, they have no access to the money, and they didn’t even enjoy spending it. There was a kind of an unconsciousness to it because of that cognitive dissonance.

So it’s a really cool class if you want to listen to that last class. But one of the things that have been coming up for me that I’ve realized is I have to be super clear with what I want. And here’s what’s true about this, when you have limited options, it’s not as important to know exactly what you want. And as I’m saying this, I’m like, Brooke, I disagree with you. So I’ll talk it out with y’all.

It’s not as important because if you really want something, you can’t necessarily have it right now, right? You can’t have that thing that you really want. But once you get to the point where you have enough money to have basically anything you want, go where you want, and do what you want, it’s important to understand what it is you want because you aren’t limited.

So the reason why I caught myself there is I think it’s important for us all to understand what we want, even if we can’t have it right now. But oftentimes, the constraints of our lives, the limitations that we have on our lives because of having less money, actually make us less overwhelmed. We’re not thinking about all the possibilities of what we could be doing with our life because we got to get up and take care of our kids and go to work tomorrow. You know, we’re not, “Well, should I go to Paris or Dubai?”

So I’ve created a life for myself now where I can travel as much as I want. I have more money than I will need in my life, for sure. And I have the freedom because my kids are grown. I’m not taking care of them anymore. And my job is I’m able to travel and do it remotely pretty much anything that I want to be doing with my life. And that is astounding and exciting and amazing and overwhelming sometimes.

So I sat down, and I was really thinking about the question of time. And I mentioned this in the class that I taught that I’m reading this book called Die With Zero. And basically, my friend Alex Hormozi, told me to listen to it. And I have been profoundly changed by the theories in this book and the concepts in this book and how he presents ways to live with our wealth.

And as you can imagine, he has a theory that you should spend your money before you die on experiences because it’s more valuable for you to use the money and create memories with the money than it is just to have the money. And so he’s talking to an audience who has already developed wealth, so you want to make sure that when you’re hearing these messages that you can’t spend money that you don’t have, obviously.

He’s speaking to people that have a lot of money and tend to save a bunch of money for retirement, then have this huge nest egg that they don’t ever spend within their lifetime. And then they leave it to their children. And just for the note on the book, just to be clear, he’s not saying you shouldn’t leave money to your children.

He says you should leave money to your children when you’re alive so you can experience them enjoying it. And you should leave money to them when they’re young so they can utilize it when they most need it. I just think so many of the ideas in this book are so good.

So I want to tell you five questions that I asked myself, and I’ll kind of share my answers with you, and five questions that you can ask yourself that may help you create some self-awareness and may help you decide what it is you actually really want. Because so many times when we’re coaching people and I’m asking them what they want, they’re saying they don’t know.

And I think partially because they don’t think it’s possible. They haven’t learned how to dream big. They haven’t learned how to access their own desire. But also, I think sometimes, when we don’t have self-awareness and we don’t know who we really are, and we’re constantly looking outside of ourselves for solutions and opinions and judgments about our lives, we don’t know how to access our own true wishes.

And I actually think these questions really helped create some constraint for me and some understanding. Now, you don’t have to do anything that these questions say to do, right? You don’t have to do anything with the answers, but just tell yourself the truth when you’re asking these questions.

So, the premise of the five questions starts with if I had one year to live, okay? So we have created a constraint, an arbitrary constraint on our life, to pressure the brain into understanding what is most important to it and to create some self-awareness.

So question number one is if I had one year to live, what would I stop doing? And it’s really interesting what becomes a priority when you’re focused on a year because you want to make sure that’s one year that’s the best year of your life. And so, I am committed to making 2023 the best year of my life. And so I have thought about it being the last year of my life in order to make it the best year of my life.

So my main answer to this was I would stop delaying travel. I always have reasons why I can’t travel, and I can’t travel for too long, or I can’t travel alone. And so I’ve kind of made excuses. Now, I travel. I definitely travel, and I travel around the United States a lot. And it’s not that I don’t travel. I do.

But I’m talking about serious travel, like going abroad and going to countries that are going to challenge me, and challenge my jetlag, and challenge my biases and my perceptions and my views and cultural norms, and that sort of thing. And so that was a really big one for me. I would stop delaying travel.

Now, for many people, when I ask them this question, they answer they would stop working, or they would stop working so hard. And one of the beauties of this question for me was really realizing that even if I had one year to live, I would keep working.

I love my work. I love helping people. I love coaching. I love doing this podcast. I love creating a legacy. And so I really, I don’t know, I feel a sense of pure joy about that and knowing that and knowing that I have that inside me, that desire and that ambition inside of me.

Now, that’s not to say that further down in the questions I came up with some different answers about how I would work and what I would focus on. So if I had one year to live, what would I stop doing? I would stop delaying travel is my main answer.

Now, I will tell you that I’ve gone through this process many times before, and there are a few things that I stopped doing years ago because of this question. And one of them is worrying, and one of them is people pleasing. And so I think it’s very important, and one of the things that gives me kind of this freedom, I think, in my life now is because when you ask this question, all of a sudden, you become the center of your life because your experience on this life is now limited.

Now, the truth is, your experience in this life is limited. You’re not going to have full access to this life forever. So by condensing it to a year, it brings up your values and brings up what’s really important.

Okay, the next question, number two, is if I had a year to live, what would I start doing? I just recently asked myself this question, and I was like, what do I love doing the most? And the two things are hiking and my new love is pickleball. I love playing pickleball. And all my friends do, too. Everyone’s obsessed with pickleball right now, so we’re all totally getting into it. So I would play more pickleball.

Now, many people say they would start living their dreams. They would start saying how they really felt to people around them. They would start creating a body of work and creating a legacy, and putting down what they know. And I will say that for me because I’ve done this work before, I have already been doing that.

Everyone in my life, I could die today, and everyone in my life knows how I feel about them. Everyone knows how much I love them and how I care about them. I tell them all the time. And I shower people with my love as often as I can. And I would never have something that went unsaid because I make an effort to tell people how I feel about them. And so I think that’s very important.

I started creating a body of work. I started creating my own content, my own contribution a long time ago. So that’s not something. And I started living my dreams a long time ago. So what comes up for me of what I would start doing is really playing. Pickleball, hiking, enjoying. So that’s amazing for me.

Question number three, if I had a year to live, what would I no longer care about? And my answer to this is I would no longer care what anyone thought about my life in terms of judgment. That includes myself. It’s so crazy when you think about walking on this earth, knowing that you have a year to live it, how fewer effs you would give about what people thought about you.

And I feel like there is so much freedom in that. If someone gets mad at you for being a bad driver, or someone gets mad at you for cutting in front of them in line on accident or something, you’re just not going to give it any time. You’re just not going to give it any energy. You know, the whole idea is, if someone should be unhappy about your life, it shouldn’t be you. That’s the whole concept, right?

And another piece of this that has been really important to me is I would trust myself with my own financial decisions. I’ve talked about this before, but as I get more and more money so many people are telling me what I’m doing wrong and what I should do differently, and how things should be. And I’ve gotten this my whole life on how I run my company, and how I show it for my clients, and what I charge and over deliver and offer and everything.

And I just trust myself so much. At the end of the day, I don’t want to be like, “I should have listened to myself more.” I just listen to myself, and I do the things that I want to do. And that is with my money too. And I think reading this book kind of gave me this freedom around it, too that’s just been amazing. So I would say for the past, say, five years of my life, I’ve really been living the life I genuinely want to live. And can you say that too? I think you should at least ask yourself the question.

Question number four, if I had one year to live, what would I care more about? And this brought up a lot for me. I think I would care much more about making sure that my work and my business can stand alone without me. I feel like my kids are launched. I have so much faith in them.

I feel great about my kids being independent and having learned all the lessons that they needed to learn. And I just, I mean, obviously, I’m here, and I’m still going to support them. But I feel like I’ve really given them the tools that they need.

I also feel like my business is my baby. And my business isn’t really able to stand on its own without me in terms of management and kind of the functions inside of it. And we’re really working towards that. My CEO, Erica Royal, is working on taking over some of those responsibilities for me.

So that is definitely something I care more about is making sure that my work is preserved and setting up my business to function without me so my work can carry on. I’ve talked about this before. I want to be involved in coaching. I want to be involved so much in support of the content but not so much in the day-to-day running of the company.

So the last question is, why do my thoughts and feelings and actions change if I give myself less time to live? I think this is a really important question. I don’t have the answer to this question, but I think it’s a really important question for us to ask ourselves.

If we condense the amount of time we have left, why are we more confident? Why do we care less about what other people think? Why do our dreams become more important to us? Why do our connections with other people, why do little things matter less when we condense the amount of time? Because the truth is, my friends, none of us know how much time we have left.

I think so much about my little guy Rocket. My son, my puppy son, Rocket. And what a limited life he had but also, what an extraordinary life he had. It was almost like he lived knowing that he had less time than the rest of us. He wanted to get it all in in a short amount of time, and he lived such a big, vibrant, exciting life.

And I try to live like this could be my last year on this planet. And if that is the case, how do I want to live my life? And why does it change if I only have that? I think a lot of times our thoughts are I’ll get around to it, or that doesn’t matter yet, or that seems too hard right now.

If you lived your life really knowing that this is it, and I think a lot of us think that if we only had a year to live, we would be more reckless with our lives. And I actually found that to be the opposite with, I talk about her a lot, Nancy, my mother-in-law. When she found out that she had cancer and immediately quit smoking.

She’d been trying to quit her whole life and immediately quit smoking. Immediately started focusing on her health and taking care of herself, even though she had less time to live than she thought she did just the day before when she learned about it.

And so I think a lot of times, we just cut out the things that aren’t that important to us, and we really start focusing our lives on what is important. So what if we lived every single year, not as a cliche, but to really live every year like this might be our last one? Because one day, we’re going to be right about that, right? What if this is your last year? What do you want to stop doing? What do you want to create? How much confidence can you generate for yourself?

If you knew this was your last year on earth, would you really care about that thing? Would you make that phone call? Would you tell them that you loved them? Would you stop holding back in your relationships, in your life, in what you want to do? I know for me, it’s absolutely true that with a condensed amount of time creates the intensity of who I truly want to be in this world.

So I want to encourage you to ask the five questions. If you had one year to live, what would you stop doing? If you had one year to live, what would you start doing? If you had one year to live, what would you no longer care about? If you had one year to live, what would you care more about? And why do your thoughts, feelings, and actions change if you have less time to live?

For me, I think this has been a game-changer. And now, after reading this book, Die With Zero, I really feel like it’s on a whole other level. I want to become the best teacher and the best coach I can so I can help the most people. I want to help you all, and I want to help myself, and I want to help every single person who I literally can help while I’m alive. That is the purpose of my life, to be an example of what is possible by being the very best version of myself.

I hope these five questions serve you well. I hope they increase some awareness and maybe give you some aha moments. And I hope you all have a beautiful week, and I’ll talk to you next week. 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 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.