Ep #463: Awful and Awesome

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 463

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 most beautiful friends. Today we’re talking about the awful and the awesome. I am currently in Orlando. I just watched my son play golf and now I’m on an adventure. I’m on an adventure from kind of down the coast of Florida. I’m going to go hang out with my best friend, Tonya. And we’re going to play pickleball for a week. Then I’m going to go watch Christian play golf in Cabo. And then I’m going to go to Miami to do my event, Work Hard, Play Hard for all of the coaches.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time preparing for that event. It’s amazing how much information I have in my brain about business and I’m so excited to share that with all of my coaches. So the first half of the day we’re going to be talking about all of the components of business and what goes into creating an amazing business especially as a life coach. And I’m going to start off really talking about what it means to work hard and play hard and the difference between that and resting hard. Can you even do that, rest hard?

And then the topics that I’m covering are pretty in depth and diverse. I’m going to talk about how to be a better teacher, how to sell in a webinar, how to run a challenge week, how to write the best copy you can faster, what’s working with ads, what’s working with funnels, how to sell expensive things. And secrets to having a high-ranking podcast.

So I have been working on each one of these topics in workshops style so when I get with my coaches we can really get to work on their businesses and I can really share some of the success that I've had with my extraordinary business with them. Because as most of you know I get much more of a thrill when my students succeed than even when I succeed. So I’m super excited about that.

I’m having some amazing special guests come with me because after we work hard in the morning, we’re playing hard in the afternoon. And evenings, we’re going to go on a yacht and have some amazing activities and surprises and fun on the yacht. And then the next day we’re going to have a beach party. And my team has been working really hard to make sure that it is Life Coach School extraordinary style. So that's what's coming up. I have a lot, lot, lot going on.

I’ve been working really hard this week. We have done a challenge week this week for our Get Coached program and it's been really amazing. I always love coaching brand new candidates for the Model that haven’t been introduced to my work that don’t even really have any exposure to the life coaching work that we do and how mind blowing it is for them. So this whole week has just been so powerful. We have talked about the 10 things that I really think all humans should know.

And we spent the first day of the challenge talking about the Model and kind of introducing people to the Model. The second day we talked about the Possibility Formula and I introduced everyone to the Possibility Formula. The third day we talked about buffering. The fourth day we talked about making big money. And then today we’re going to talk about the power of making decisions. So if any of you happen to miss that, the replays are all inside of Get Coached so you can sign up for our Scholars membership program and get access to all of it.

So as I have been kind of travelling and creating and working and playing I've been thinking a lot about my friends and I've been thinking a lot about my colleagues that I work with. And I’ve been doing a lot of – I don’t know – what I guess I would call coaching on the side which is really fun actually. Coaching my friends, coaching my colleagues on the side with things that they kind of struggle with.

And I’ve also been doing a lot of coaching with my son, Christian, as he navigates this world of trying to become a professional golfer and what happens in his brain when he's out on the course and after the course and before the course and all of that. So it’s such a delight for me to be able to use the tools that I have created as my life's work to be able to help my son play professional golf. It's ridiculously awesome.

As I’ve been coaching, I’ve noticed that these themes are coming up with my students, with my friends, with my colleagues, with myself, with my son. And I’ve actually been coaching my other son, Connor, who’s still in college too and he’s rounding out his senior year of college and some of the stuff that’s coming up for him as he kind of embarks on the rest of his life as well. And one of the themes has been that I think it’s so important to embrace within ourselves those things that are awful and those things that are awesome.

I teach you all, and I have taught you all through this podcast, that life is 50/50. It’s a balance of positive and negative. We can't have the positive without the negative because the negative and the positive define each other and that’s how we create balance basically in the universe, in the world.

And once I had this concept in my head, my whole life changed. I was able to really understand the power of embracing negative emotion, embracing circumstances that I had negative thoughts about. And really allowing the world to be what it is instead of wanting the world to be all positive, instead of thinking that at some point we’re going to be able to make the world all positive. I recognize that there’s good and there’s evil and that is by design and that will never be different.

And our goal of trying to make the world 100% positive isn't going to work. We’re still going to have problems. We’re still going to have negative. They may have evolved, they may be different but it's always going to be there. It really calmed down my nervous system tremendously to have this realization in my life. It’s also all I think equally important to be able to understand that we have that all within us. When I teach it is very important that all my students understand that in my teaching I believe that every human being is 100% worthy by design.

The fact that you're a human on the planet is enough evidence for me to understand that you are a worthy human being. It doesn't matter to me what you have done, what you haven't done, what your transgressions are, none of that takes away from your 100% worthiness as a human being. I believe that when you are born, you’re 100% worthy and nothing can take that away. There’s no amount of trauma, no amount of pain in your childhood, no amount of mismanagement of you that can make you less worthy.

And then there’s no effect of that “mismanagement” of you - maybe by your parents or society or teachers or how you were raised - that will take away your worthiness. This doesn’t mean that you’re not responsible for your actions. This doesn’t mean that there are negative things that you might have done in your life that you should be held responsible for. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying it doesn’t touch the core of your soul, of your humanness and of your worthiness. That being said you also have the positive and negative within you and balanced within you in your emotions but also in who you are.

I believe that we are both awful and awesome, all of us. And so many of us are trying so desperately to hide our awful and trying to pretend it's not there, trying to push away from it, feeling shame about it that we don’t get to actually experience our awesome. So many of us are hiding our awesome, pushing it away. We don't want to have the attention. We don’t want to feel like somebody looks at us and calls us awesome because they may recognize that we’re also awful too.

And that's why so many of us have that imposter syndrome that we talk about because we think that they only see that awesome side of us. And the awful part of me negates that awesome part of me but it doesn't. It balances, it’s part of who you are.

So let's talk a little bit about that awful part. And I want you to open your eyes and consider that awful part of you. That’s all the mistakes that you've made, all the transgressions that you’ve made, all the attempts you've made to control other people and control the universe and control yourself. All that selfishness where you did something for yourself at the expense of someone else. All the laziness that you've experienced where you said you were going to do something for someone and you didn't. You said you would do something for yourself and you didn't. You had something that you wanted to do that you were going to contribute, that you were going to make an effort for, that you were going to create and you didn't, laziness.

Your lack of follow through, your procrastination, your ugliness within you, inside of you in terms of your feelings and your thoughts and the things that you think are ugly but also the judgments you make about the external part of you, the part of you that maybe you deem ugly compared to societal standards. Things that aren’t ‘normal’ that you have. Your reactivity, your emotionality, anything that you're not managing. I mean the list goes on and on and on.

When I ask you, “What is that awful part of you?” What comes up? For me sometimes I’m bitchy and short with people. Sometimes I have a lack of patience. Sometimes I’m too controlling. All of those things are kind of that awful part of me. Sometimes I’m dramatic, I create a ridiculous amount of drama around really little benign things. Sometimes I react to things that don't matter at all and I have a crazy reaction to them. And sometimes I snap at someone. All of those things are that awful part of me.

And one of the awful things for me is the emotion of anxiety, that I kind of have the chronic anxiety that I’ve dealt with my entire life I believe because of trauma in my childhood. It’s kind of the awful part of me that I used to try and hide. And so I used to feel so much shame about all of that. And I used to think it meant that I was wrong and unworthy and bad. And what I realized through doing this work through coaching is that those are all part of being a human being, part of the experience of being on this planet for me.

Now, for some people they don’t have that experience but for me I do. And when I can look at it as this is part of what it means for me to be human right now. And that doesn’t kind of let me off the hook or create justification for any behavior that I do not want to have in my life but it does allow me to stop resisting it and stop reacting to it. On the other side of the spectrum are the ways that you are awesome. What are the ways that you are truly awesome? Your accomplishments, your kindness, your generosity.

Where are you really organized and put together? Where are you beautiful? Where are you loving? Where do you self-love, take such good care of yourself? Where do you have extreme self-control and discipline and contribution and care? That’s that awesome part of you and it goes on and on. Where are you awesome at sports? Where are you awesome at your job? Where are you awesome at your skill set? Where you are awesome with your friendships? Whatever it is for you that you define as awesome.

Can you hold space for both of those things? Can you walk through the world and say, “Yes, I am awesome and I am awful. I am both. And that’s what makes me human and that's okay.” And I do want to be less awful sometimes but I understand that it’s most likely going to be part of my human experience to be awful in some ways, to sometimes react, to sometimes be lazy, to sometimes be impatient. To sometimes say things I wish I hadn't said, react in ways that I wish I hadn’t done, overindulge in things, maybe emotions, maybe in buffering.

Can I embrace who I am totally? And then there’s ways that we’re probably middle of the road. We’re not awesome in this thing and we’re not awful in this thing and that’s part of what bridges the gap between them. And that's what makes us who we are. When I say the sentence, we’re not supposed to be perfect. What comes up for me and what's so interesting about that statement is that most of us have an idea in our mind of who a human should be.

And we get this idea maybe from our religion, maybe from our upbringing, maybe from school, maybe from looking at other people who we admire and who we project perfectionism on to. And we start believing that there’s some standard of humanness that we should be meeting and we should be better at being that type of human. And we start comparing ourselves to this fake illusion in our mind. For example I should be this kind of mother. And the perfect mother would do this, this and this. And I am not perfect and therefore I am not normal and I am not a good human.

Versus understanding that, wait, maybe all mothers are imperfect, maybe all humans are imperfect, maybe that is the glorious experience of being alive, being able to appreciate both sides of the coin of who we actually are. I remember reading a David Whyte poem one time where one of the lines was ‘you don't have to be better than you are’. And I remember thinking, wow, I don't have to be better than I am. I am enough. I am as better as I needed to be.

And I tell you, when I really believed this, when I really heard this sentence so much of the tension of my life was released. I am enough just like this. I was created in this way on purpose. Nothing has gone wrong here. I used to study Abraham and they would talk a lot about how the contrast of life is what builds desire, is what builds evolution, is what builds growth. Without having the contrast, without having the negative we wouldn’t even have desire.

And that was another one of those moments where I thought, oh my gosh, there would be nothing to improve. There would be no growth because we'd already be perfect. We’d come to the planet and everyone would be lovely. We’d have teamwork and cooperation and kindness and positivity all the time but we wouldn’t even know it because there’d been nothing to compare it to so we wouldn’t even have an aspiration to be different, to grow at all. You don't have to be better than you are.

You’re already 100% worthy. You can be true as to you and evolve and grow. But it doesn't mean you're going to be a better human than you are now. You don't have to be better. You can grow into more of who you are but you’re still going to be awful and awesome all at once. It's not like you get rid of all your awful and become completely awesome and perfect and never make a mistake or a transgression again. That is not the goal of life. And that is not where happiness is. Happiness is not in perfection.

We have told ourselves that somehow if we could just be better we’d one day be perfect and then we would be happy. And we spend so much time being frustrated at the awfulness. We don’t want to have any ugliness. We don’t want to have any frustration. We don’t want to be struggling. We want it all to be easy especially if we've been working hard at it.

And one of the magical things that happens when you start accepting that life is both positive and negative and you are both awful and awesome you start looking at other people with that same insight, with that same compassion, with that same love. For me when I started looking at other people and understanding they're just going through their awfulness right now. This is the awful part of them being human right now. I have this too. I’m awful sometimes too.

As soon as I was able to do it I was able to drop the judgment and have compassion for them and be non-reactive, definitely not perfect at that. I definitely struggle with it sometimes but way more often am I able to look at someone else and understand what their awfulness is about. It’s not about them being bad. It's not about them being, put in any kind of swear word there to describe someone who isn't a good person. They were just being a human being.

I love to believe that we’re all doing the best we can and sometimes our best is awful. People are like, “You can do better. You can be better.” Really? Not right now. This is the best I’ve got. This is what is right now. This is my reality and yes it’s awful. And I will live into the awfulness of this experience and I will live into the awfulness of myself and I will allow it to be there without beating myself up.

It’s awful enough to have an awful reaction to something or have an awful transgression or have an awful mistake. I will not then in addition to that cause myself to suffer by beating the crap out of myself, I just won’t. And since I’ve been able to accept those both sides of myself and the both sides of other people and the both sides of life, I have peace. I have peace in the awfulness, I have acceptance. I have so much curiosity. When awful things happen I don't freak out and think, oh my gosh the world's going crazy. We're never going to survive this, everything's negative.

I’m like, “No, everything’s still half negative as it always has been.” When I look at it and focus on it, I acknowledge it I see the negativity in life but there is always the positivity too. There's always the balance and at any point I can shift.

If you're someone that’s been going through a period of your life where you feel you've been hating yourself and treating yourself poorly and struggling with yourself. Remind yourself, I’ve just been focusing on the awfulness. I could also focus on the awesome. I could focus on the greatness.

Christian just had a round of golf and he was focused on the bogeys. I said, “But don’t forget about the seven birdies. Don’t forget about all of the holes where you did really well.” It’s just as easy to focus on those as it is to focus on the other things.

So this podcast was really just to invite you to love your awfulness, to love your negative-ness, to forgive yourself for being a human being, to stop trying to be better than you are. And to know that if you're here on this planet right now you are worthy. You are worthy of love. You are worthy of acceptance. You are supposed to be here even with all that awfulness. And even with my awfulness I am meant to be here and I am worthy and I deserve love. And if we all understood that about ourselves and each other I feel like our evolution would be faster and easier. There’d be less tension, less self-judgment.

I want to encourage any of you, because I’ve talked to quite a few of you recently who are locked in to focusing on only the negative part of life, only the awful part of themselves that you get coaching, that you talk to another human being who understands your worthiness. Every single coach that I train is trained to know that everyone is 100% worthy, every human being deserves coaching and deserves to have their brain be heard in its awesomeness and in its awfulness.

So I want to invite you to consider that about yourself and if you need help to get help with it because at the end of the day it's pretty fun to know how awesome you are. And if you’re full of shame because of your awfulness you won’t let yourself experience your true self. Have a beautiful week everyone and I’ll talk to you soon. 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.