Ep #483: Create Your Work for the World

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo episode 483.

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 so happy to talk to you. I am in Bermuda right now and it is pouring rain and gorgeous. It is such a beautiful country, such beautiful landscape, and tons of rain. And I’m working all day today so I’m in this beautiful villa that we’re staying in, and so excited to record this podcast for you.

I have this tiny little mic so I know the sound quality probably isn’t typical of what you would hear from me if I were at home, but hopefully you can hear me okay.

Today, I want to talk about creating your work for the world. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I’ve been going through my body of work and the work that I have created over the past 20 years, and asking myself the question, what do I have yet to offer to you? What can I teach that I haven’t yet taught? What can I coach that I haven’t yet coached?

And one of the topics that I came up with and one of the courses/workshops that I came up with is this one, and it’s called Create Your Work for the World. And I wanted to share it with you on the podcast, first of all, in case you’re interested in joining the workshop, but also because I wanted to give some insight on what it takes and what the process is for creating your work in this world.

I want to start off with saying that I think every single person on this planet has an offering. They have something inside of them that the world needs. And your education and your experience and your brain and your personality creates something new that has never been created before. And I think it’s very important that you know that, that you understand that your offering is only created by you. It hasn’t ever been created by anyone else.

So a lot of times, what I hear is people saying, “Well, I’ve had the same education as someone else, or I’ve gone to the same school as someone else, or I’ve learned the same content as somebody else, so for me to teach that content doesn’t make any sense. It’s just me copying it.”

And I totally disagree with that. I think you have to take into account that it is your education mixed with your experience, your brain, and your personality that creates a new recipe. It’s like a new seasoning, a new offering, a new meal for the world. And it will be attainable and consumable by a brand new audience that could only hear it from you, that would only consume it from you.

If you think about the number of, let’s say for example, weight loss books. My very first book that I ever created as a life coach was a weight loss book on the mental and emotional aspects of losing weight. Now, if I would have looked out into the world and said there are so many weight loss books already, there are so many people teaching about weight loss, there are so many people talking about the emotional component of weight loss, I never would have created that book.

And if I hadn’t created that book, thousands of people wouldn’t have freed themselves from the tyranny of diets and weight loss that have because they have read that book. And also, I’m going to talk about this more later in the podcast, I didn’t just create a book. That was my first content but I repurposed it into so many other avenues.

I created a day-long workshop from that book, I created a six-week course from that book, it was a six-chapter book. I created six podcasts from that book, six different episodes. So it’s not just that initial creation that’s for that audience. It’s also all the different formats that you create that are able to be consumed by different and new people. And it matters that you do your work.

And you know, if you’re listening to this podcast, you know if you have that desire to create, if you have that inkling that you have something to say that matters that you want to offer to the world that I believe you absolutely have a responsibility to do that.

I think if every person on this planet was encouraged to produce their work for the world, we’d have a much better world. We’d have a much more evolved world. We’d have more ingenuity, we’d have much more progress. I believe that with all my heart.

So what is the reason why most of us don’t create our work for the world? Why is so much of the human wisdom and the human ingenuity locked away inside people’s brains that isn’t expressed, that isn’t taught, that isn’t created, isn’t put into a format where other people can consume it?

I think there’s two reasons why that is. I think the main reason is lack of confidence. I think most of us have this fear that we don’t have anything valuable to say and that nobody will listen, and that we’re not any different than anybody else, we’re not special, we don’t have anything new to offer the world. And that, my friend, is a lie.

It is a lie. And if you don’t believe me, look at all of my amazing students who came through my school and learned the basic tenets of life coaching, learned the basic tenets of the Model, and have taken those out and created brand new offerings for the world that are very different from mine and have impacted the world with the basic same information in a brand new way to brand new audiences.

There are hundreds if not thousands of people that we can point to and say they are creating new work in the world with the same education. And it’s because going through the School and doing this work gives us the confidence to believe in our own wisdom and our own offerings and what we have that is valuable.

The second reason why I think most of us aren’t putting our work into the world is a lack of motivation. Going through the process of creating, painstakingly creating our work for the world is challenging. It’s uncomfortable. And if there’s no motivation to do it, if there’s no reason to do it, most of us won’t.

This is why I really believe that all of our offerings, if we have a desire to create content, if we have desire to create an offering, that there should be a way for us to charge money for them. For creating value for the world, we should and can charge money for that value that we’re offering. And when we don’t believe that we can make money and we aren’t taught that it’s okay to make money by creating value for the world, we don’t have any motivation to do it.

So one of the things that I want to teach you here on this podcast and also in the workshop is that you deserve to have your voice heard. You deserve and your people deserve to be helped by you. And it makes complete sense that you would charge money for the work that you create for this world. And charge money in a way that you are overdelivering way more than what anyone would be paying for your content.

So my first point, you have an offering, it matters. Your offering will by definition be different than anybody else’s offering because you’re the one offering it and you’re mixing it with your brain and your potential and your capacity and your ability and your personality, which will create something brand new.

And the second point is that there’s two things probably holding you back from doing that. It’s probably a lack of motivation because you don’t believe that you could make money off of it, and a lack of confidence. And we need to talk about both of those things in detail. We need to have debates about the importance of your ingenuity.

There’s a lot of messaging that says things like, “Well, that’s nothing new,” or, “Someone else has already done that,” or, “That’s silly, you can’t make money off of doing that,” or, “How are you going to be different than somebody else?” As if you aren’t already different than somebody else by the mere fact that you’re alive as a different human being.

And so we need to be aware of those messages and we need to make sure that we’re not letting those messages run our lives. And the third piece of creating your work for the world is having a process to get it out. And that’s where I have spent the past several months refining and creating a course, a workshop, that teaches this process, and I’m going to share a portion of that work here with you today in this podcast.

The phases and steps that it takes to pull out your own wisdom, to pull out your own work, and then to create it on a consistent basis. If you look at my body of work over the last 20 years and the amount of content that I have created inside of my courses, inside of my memberships, it’s insane the quantity and quality of what I’ve created. And there’s no way I could have done that without a process to kind of extricate it from my own brain, to pull it out of my own brain.

And again, it’s a combination of all of the education that I’ve had, the books that I’ve read, the courses that I've taken, the school that I’ve gone to, and mixing it with my own personal experience, my own analysis, my own thought process, and my personality to create something brand new.

If you think about the process that I’ve talked about on the podcast before, the process of creating what we call idea babies and superthinking, these are two of the main concepts that we talk about when it comes to creation.

And an idea baby is basically taking a concept from one discipline or industry or education topic and mixing it with a completely unrelated industry or person or topic and putting those two ideas together to create something brand new. And then superthinking is when we spend time connecting all of those things in a new way.

I would say that some of the best work that I’ve created has been thinking about a concept that maybe I learned in a book and mixing it with an experience that I had in my life to create metaphors and stories and ideas where I can teach the same concepts in new ways that new people will understand, that new exercises can be created.

And that’s a process of creation. This is not something where you have to be extraordinarily intelligent to do. I got a DM recently from one of my listeners of the podcast and she was from France and she was talking about how much the podcast had impacted her and how much it had changed her life, but she had some contention with me.

One of the things she said was, “You always talk about how everyone can create and everyone can have this amazing life, and everyone can create value and get paid for it in the world.” She said, “But what about people who aren’t smart?” And she said, “You’re clearly very smart and I know that there are a lot of people that aren’t smart.” And I’m hoping that she wasn’t referring to herself.

But unfortunately, I think she was. And she said, “Can people who aren’t smart still have the same opportunities?” And my answer is yes because how you define smart is not objective, right? Because if you look at someone that does well in school, or someone that passes a high IQ test, you may say that that person is smart but that person may not necessarily make their contribution to the world because they may have a lack of confidence.

And that person may not be exposed to the ideas that I’m teaching and be able to have the motivation to go out there and create content for the world. There’s a lot of very, very smart, scared people that keep all their wisdom inside.

So I don’t think the question is do you have to be smart? I think the question is do you have the motivation and the confidence to create what you are meant to create? And maybe it’s not the concept that you’re creating, maybe it’s not super sophisticated. I feel like a lot of my ideas that I teach that help people change their lives are very simple.

They’re very clean, elegant ideas that don’t come from a lot of deep intelligence but just come from observing the world in a curious and interesting way, and then teaching what I created in my brain in a confident way because I have lots of motivation to create content and value for the world.

So this process that I have documented and created this whole course around really goes through some steps and I’ll share the phases of creation here with you. And of course, if you want to dive deeper into this with me, I really want to encourage you to join me live for a course that I’m teaching called Create Your Work for the World.

And it will be taught in the month of August of this year, and it’ll be a workshop. So it’ll be very interactive and we will be talking about your work. I’ll be giving you feedback on your work and how to help you create your work and what interferes with you being able to believe in yourself and create the work in the world.

So here are the phases of creation. The first phase is what I call the confidence identity, and we have to go through the process of making sure that you identify yourself as a creator of something valuable. And that sounds very simple but that is deep work that we have to do.

A lot of us have some pretty traumatic experiences in our own education systems, maybe with our families of origin that have convinced us that we don’t have that value, that we’re not smart enough, that we’re not creative enough, that we’re not awesome enough to be able to add value to the world. And that is completely untrue. All of you have value to create.

One of the things that’s really important to remember as we go through this workshop and as we go through this process is that your own wisdom oftentimes is unrecognized by you because it seems so obvious to you. There are things that you know how to do very easily. There are things that you have created very easily that you haven’t even noticed that you’ve created because they’re so obvious to you.

So one of the things that we do kind of in this first phase is identify where you already have been a creator, where you already have knowledge that other people don’t have, where you already have experience and education and where your personality gives you a unique advantage in a certain area.

I’ll give you an example of this. When I was recently vacationing with my kids, Connor and Mason, my bonus kid Mason, and we were talking about their experience in grade school and both of them were teased and bullied and isolated and had very difficult experiences in school, especially in middle school.

And getting through that process for them was very challenging and scary and painful. Very painful. And whereas they may not see that as skill, they may not see that as a special talent that they have, they may not see that as education that they could offer, they’re completely wrong. I told them both, I said, “I want to do a course and we are going to do a course together, we’re going to do a podcast together on bullying and how to get through it.”

And because they both got through it and they’re both very confident young men now, I think they have so much to teach and so much to offer based on what they’ve learned and their experience and their personalities on how to get through it. And I think they could help a lot of other young boys and girls who may be struggling with the same thing, and maybe help the parents who are parenting these children that are going through that.

That’s an entire body of work that we will be able to create based on something that they may not have even recognized as work that they could create that’s of tremendous value for the world.

So that’s phase one. It’s really your confidence, identity, and creating your confidence as a creator, and we’ll go through some exercises and I have some ideas on how to help you see yourself that way. So hopefully that example that I gave you with Connor will get you started in thinking about yourself in a way - what do you have to offer that maybe you’re not recognizing?

Phase two is really focusing on who you’re creating this content for and what it is you’re creating for them, why it matters, and what results they can get from it. And this is work where I like to write a love letter. I have some really cool kind of brainstorming exercises for us to get in touch with who it is our customer is, who it is we’re creating for, who is our muse.

For example, you all are my muse. And when I’m creating this class, when I’m creating this workshop, or even creating this podcast, I’m thinking about what you need to hear, why it matters to you, how I can best help you serve it.

And the more I know you, the more I understand you, the more I hear from you, the better I’m going to be able to create for you. So that’s phase two, really going through the process of understanding the muse, the person you’re creating for.

The third phase is really the creative phase. It’s the phase that a lot of us maybe struggle with getting started doing. And I have a lot of techniques to help you focus. And if any of you have been exposed to Monday Hour One and my calendaring process and how I teach you to stay on track on your calendar, I’ve created a system where you can do that for your own creation.

And to give you some ideas here, there’s the brainstorming process that may not seem to be that productive. It may not seem to be like you’re actually creating a result, but it’s an imperative part of the process. By the way, just as a side note, have you all seen Daisy Jones & The Six?

First of all, great show. I think it's on Netflix. You have to watch it. It’s so good. That last episode, amazing. But one of the things that you’ll notice in that show is they are songwriters and they’re collaborating on writing songs.

And through the whole day where they’re trying to get motivated and inspired for a song to write, they’re swimming and they’re talking and they’re dancing and they’re playing music, and they’re doing things that look pretty unproductive, but it’s all part of the process of brainstorming and being creative and getting new ideas out there.

And a lot of us aren’t taught these creative ideas because we’re taught that they only apply to the fine arts. Maybe if we’re painting a picture or creating a bowl or designing a house. But this kind of creative processing and brainstorming is also very useful when it comes to writing or creating podcasts or creating maybe a YouTube video, or any other type of content that you’re trying to create.

Maybe it’s a Facebook Live. Going through these brainstorming processes to understand your own brain and how it relates to the content that you have consumed maybe in your education and to create new idea babies and to be free in that creative process is all part of the process of creating your work for the world.

I believe the next step really strongly in having a solid structured outline that isn’t in the format that you learned in school but is just in a list format to kind of hold you within a structure of creation. Every single time I do a podcast, I’m looking at my outline right now of what I’m going to talk to you about. Every time I wrote a book, every time I create a course, every time I create a workshop, anything that I do, I always have that outline that comes out of that brainstorming process.

And then the next phase is always what we call the crappy first draft. We always do a first draft that we’re not going to judge and that we just get it out of our brain and out of our mind and on to the paper, and we don’t judge it and we don’t give in to urges to throw it away or to ignore it or to stay away from it, but we engage with it. And that’s a whole process.

So for the sake of the podcast, you want to brainstorm all your idea babies. You want to give yourself the freedom and the timeframe that you need to add to your education, to think about your experience, to superthink on how the things integrate together. That’s kind of that first brainstorming process. Then you want to give yourself the structure of an outline. And then you want to give yourself that crappy first draft of the entire thing that you’re creating.

And in this workshop that we’re going to be doing in August, we are actually going to create that rough draft. We’re going to create that first rough draft of whatever it is that you want to create for the world. And I’m going to demonstrate as I’m creating my own course with you so you can see how that process happens.

The fourth phase of the process is the edit. I think this is one of the most overlooked and most important parts of creating your work for the world. Your edit is really your gift to your customer. It’s you taking all the information that’s available and you editing it down into the perfect meal.

The way that I like to talk about it is groceries. A lot of people, when they try to teach us, hand us a bag of groceries. And we’re the ones that have to put all the ingredients together and make it taste good. And I think the best educators, the best content creators, are the ones that actually unload the groceries and clean all the vegetables and clean all the produce and chop everything up and put it in the pan and actually create and hand the meal to their student, to their client, so the client can experience the education in a way that is effortless to them.

They can absorb the ideas, they can absorb the content, they can feel the power of the creation without having to dissect it and figure it out. So I get a lot of feedback that people love my podcast and they love the way I educate because it’s so simple and there’s not a lot of fluff, and I boil it down to the very important pieces, and I have a process for that edit.

And one of the things that I do is I basically look at all of the content that I’ve created in that rough draft and I think about how can I teach this in the fewest words possible, in the easiest concept possible. And we go through a process of just basically shaving away anything that isn’t absolutely necessary.

So if you think about most of my podcast topics are 20 to 30 minutes. They could easily be three hours, but I try and distill it down so it saves you time. It takes me longer to create because I have to distill it down, but it takes you less longer to consume because it’s so easily accessible because I’ve edited it down.

So phase four is really knowing how to edit your work and making sure that you do it relentlessly. Phase five is really putting your work out into the world and that sounds easy but it’s very difficult to put your hard-earned work into the world and to be able to receive feedback and to be able to see how it affects people, to see if anyone reads it, anyone pays attention.

And there’s a whole process to making sure that you’re putting it out into the world in a confident way so as many people as possible can see it and give you feedback and learn from it, and you can use all of that information to make it even better.

And then phase six is really repurposing that content, refining it, and then just repeating. When you can take one piece of content and turn it into seven different offerings, that’s when you really can create the most value for the world.

The example that I gave you is I created a six-chapter book and then I made it into a six-week course, and then I made it into a six-hour course, and then I made it into six different podcasts. And I could make it into six different video series. Once you have the content, repurposing it and using it in ways that help the world and help you create value, and therefore make money and therefore increase your confidence is what gets the creation ball rolling.

Once you know this process, then you’ll have it for your whole life. So just to review, the process is creating your identity of confidence. Phase two is really knowing who it’s for, what it is, what the result you’re going to create for the person, and why it matters to them.

Phase three is the brainstorm outline and rough draft process, phase four is the edit, phase five is putting it out into the world, and phase six is really repurposing, refining, and repeating.

And this is an example of that. I’ve created a podcast here called Create Your Work for the World, and I’ve given you a lot of valuable content that you can take from here and go out and create more content. But I’ve also created a month-long workshop that you can take, which goes into this deeper.

And it’s actually us doing the work together and applying it together and going through the process of scheduling time to sit down and create content and create this work and to believe in yourself and to find that motivation.

So it’s the same information, Create Your Work for the World, but it’s taught in two different ways. One is taught in a half-hour podcast, and one will be taught in a month-long class. And I could easily turn this class into a year-long course. I could turn it into a mastermind. I could turn it into a TV show. I could write a book about it. All of this information that I have for you.

I have pages and pages and pages and pages in my journal that have gone through this process just to create this course. I’ve brainstormed and I wrote the rough draft, I wrote the outline. I’ve gone through every single one of these processes to bring this content to you.

And you, my friend, can do this for your content. Don’t overcomplicate it. Maybe it’s just that you were bullied and you know how to teach about that. Maybe you went on a trip to Paris and you can teach about how to go on a trip to Paris. Maybe you’ve raised a couple kids that had special needs or maybe they didn’t have special needs, it was just a certain type of kid. You have that knowledge.

You have something inside of you. I will help you find it. But you don’t actually need my help to find it if you trust in your own wisdom and your own confidence and your own ability to know that you have wisdom inside of you. You have something to offer this world.

So I want to invite you to create your work for the world. If you want to join me for this very special workshop that I have coming up, I would be delighted. I am going to be in San Diego teaching this course from a beautiful home that we have rented there for the month of August.

I’m going to be completely focused only on you and this workshop and giving you feedback and helping you create your work for the world. If you are interested, please go to TheLifeCoachSchool.com/create. TheLifeCoachSchool.com/create.

You can find out all the information about the course and how to get enrolled and how to get signed up and we will start working on your work, my friend. Your work for the world. I’ll see you then.

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.