Ep #72: The Self Coaching Model – A Review

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast where it’s all about real clients, real problems and real coaching. Now, you’re host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Hey, everyone. What is going on? My God, life is crazy. I don’t know what happened. I did some marketing on this podcast, not much but a little bit more than normal, I would say. I got a new website going and all of a sudden, everyone is going crazy. We have all but completely sold out our September training. We very quickly sold out a coaching group with me and have a very big waiting list of our next training which isn’t until January and a huge waiting list for my Stop Overeating Program that will start in September.

What is happening? You guys are crazy. Everybody is just really ready for this work. Everyone is really excited. We have people that are just really wanting to do what we’re doing and that’s really exciting for us. We love it when there’s a lot of demand for the work that we do. It makes us feel great, more excited. I apologize for anyone who wasn’t able to get into the group or hasn’t been able to join us but we are going to be offering more programs so don’t panic. We have a training coming up in January. We have an online training that will actually be, I’ve talked about it a little bit but it will be a very small and exclusive group that I’m going to be working with helping people lose weight.

The program that I’ve been doing, I’ve just been practicing it on my friends and family, and it is amazing, the results that we’ve been getting including myself, who I wasn’t even really focused on losing weight. I’ve lost so much weight. It’s like, what’s happening? Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I’m excited that you’re excited. We do have more programs coming up. We will have another training in January. You want to make sure you’d get on the waiting list for that. We’re going to open enrollment for that in November but we will have a waiting list.

Make sure you’re on it. Talk to Jody, she’s our Enrollment Happiness Specialist. Go to The Life Coach School site, make sure you have your application in. I don’t want you guys coming to me later and be like, “gosh it was so far away so I didn’t put my name on the list.” Make sure you get your name on the list if you’re interested in joining us in person. Today, what I want to talk to you guys about is the self-coaching model and I want to do a review. I have been doing webinars. I’ve done a series of three webinars. I did one, How to Coach Yourself, One How to Coach Others and the next one that will be next week will be the one, How to Make Money as a Life Coach but what I want to share with you is that in the past two webinars that I did, How to Coach Yourself and How to Coach Others, there were a ton of questions about the model. I know that most of you that listened to the podcast have a good sense of the model but when I actually started demonstrating and using it, it was more challenging for some of you. I want to make sure that I go over the details and you understand how the model works.

We obviously have some other model podcast that you can go to thelifecoachschool.com/podcast and scroll through and you’ll see that I have a couple more on the model. This will be a review of those. I’m going to try and do some other examples that maybe you haven’t done before so you can just have a general overview. I know some of you are coaches and some of you have learned this model before but it’s a good reminder. Here’s what you have to know. The most important thing about the model is that there is no problem that can’t be solved by the model.

That’s my favorite claim and that’s absolutely true. No matter what issue you’re dealing with, no matter what issue your client is dealing with, it absolutely can be handled with the model. First and foremost, you want to be able to separate out facts, circumstances from thoughts. That is the first order of business. When your client comes to you, they may be giving you a lot of thoughts. When you’re doing this work on your own, you may have a lot of thoughts in your head. I want you to make a list of those thoughts, right?

I want you to put them all down on a piece of paper and look at them, get them out of your brain. Some of those thoughts you are going to think are circumstances. You’re going to think that they’re facts when they’re really not. Just because you are making an observation about something, you still have your own thought mixed in on it. For example, if I look at a vase of flowers and I say there is a vase of flower sitting in front of me, that is a fact. If I say there is a beautiful vase of flower sitting in front of me, that is a thought.
As soon as I add an adjective, as soon as I add a opinion to it then it goes in the thought line. You have to be able to separate those out. The circumstance would be there are flowers in a vase on a table. The thought would be the flowers in the vase on the table are beautiful so any judgment about the facts. One of the questions I had on the webinar today was what if the circumstance is sad? The circumstance is never sad. Circumstances are always neutral. There is no judgment when it comes to a circumstance.

The example the she used was when someone dies. Someone dying is not sad until you have a thought about it, right? There’s someone that just died just now in a car accident. I’m not sad about that because I didn’t have a thought about it. I don’t know that person. Someone else may have a very different thought about it if that was a loved one for them. The act of the person dying isn’t sad. It’s the thought we have about it. Now, I get a lot of argument with this with people and I wanted to just clear it up. When someone dies, if we don’t know about that person dying, we don’t feel sad.

How was that possible if the person dying is what is sad? The reason why we don’t feel sad is because we don’t have it in our conscious awareness. We haven’t had a thought about it yet. I’m of course not suggesting that you wouldn’t want to feel sad. You wouldn’t want to feel grief when somebody died especially someone close to you but depending on your thought about their death is going to determine how you feel. Maybe someone dies that was suffering and had wanted to die. You’re going to have a very different thought than maybe a young person getting in an accident.

There are people who die and we are happy that they’re dead. I shouldn’t say we. Some people are happy that they’re dead. Some people that maybe have caused a lot of harm, maybe someone that was sentenced to death. Everybody has different feelings about it based on what they think about it. It’s really important to know the difference between a circumstance and a thought. The circumstance is somebody died, that is neutral. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s not sad. It’s not happy. Depending on your thought about it, that’s going to determine how you feel about it.

How you feel about something is going to determine what you do, the action you take. Of course, the action you take is going to determine your result. Now, when it comes to feelings, that’s going to be what is caused by your thought. The first thing you’re going to do is separate out the fact, which is a circumstance which is the top of the model from your thought which is a sentence in your mind. One is a fact. One is just a statement in your mind. That thought is going to cost a feeling. That feeling should be a one-word descriptor of how you feel. It’s a vibration in your body.

We like to separate out the difference between a sensation which is something that happens to you physically that’s involuntary. Maybe feeling cold or feeling hot or feeling hungry or feeling thirsty or feeling nauseous or feeling sick, right? Those are physical sensations. We separate those out from our emotional sensations, which were caused by thoughts in our head. If you think about something really sad and tragic right now, you’re going to feel sad. If you think about something super happy and exciting, you’re going to feel happy and excited.

Your thoughts you have in your head will determine how you feel. Try and put one word in the model there. Now, remember you feelings will determine your actions. All feelings drive actions, fuel actions. If you’re feeling lazy, if you’re feeling sad, if you’re feeling excited, frustrated, motivated, determined, those feelings will determine the actions that you take. That’s the A line. The A line is your action, your reaction or your inaction. For example, overeating, undereating, eating only when you’re hungry, eating past fullness, eating all day. Those are all actions.

Being kind to someone, talking to someone, not talking to someone, those are all actions in your A line. Not doing anything, sitting in front of the TV, an inaction. That may be in your A line. What you do in your life is going to determine your results. The way that this model is so elegant and is so helpful is that it shows us the cost of everything in our life. When we talk about causal coaching, we talk about determining the cause of our results in our lives, the cause of our actions in our life and the cause of how we feel in our life. It’s important to understand that we feel the way we feel because of our thinking.
We act the way we act because of our thinking. The results we get are because of our thinking, not because of our circumstances. Even though I explained it and show it to you intellectually, I’m working with a small group of people that signed up for my coaching that I’m doing online. Even when we put the model out, because we’re doing it on video, even when I put the model out in front of them, it’s very surprising to them to see the difference between a thought and a circumstance because even though you think you understand that intellectually, when you put it in a model, it’s a very different thing.

Make sure that when you’re doing these models that that C line has nothing but facts in it. You take full responsibility that the T, the thought that you’re thinking is optional. If you a have a thought that is I’m not capable, you may think that you’re just stating a fact. Let’s just say, I’m just not capable of doing a triple back flip. If I say that, you may say that’s an absolute circumstance. I’m not capable of doing that. You have to know that it’s not a circumstance because you may be capable of doing that. You want to put that in your T line.

Whatever it is that you have an opinion about yourself or about someone else or a judgment, you want to put that in the T lie. You want to ask yourself, is that a thought you want to keep on thinking and the way that you determine whether it’s a thought you want to keep on thinking is you see how the thought feels. Now, a lot of times a thought can sound really pretty. It can sound like a good thought. It can sound like something that would serve you in your life but when you actually ask yourself, how does that thought feel, it doesn’t feel good at all. When you have a thought like, I don’t really care that they didn’t include me, make sure you check how does that feel when you think it, when you say it, when you write it down how does it feel.

Because if it’s not true, it will feel terrible and that’s important to know if there’s a T in your mind, if you have a thought in your mind, if the thought is a lie, if you’re pretending with yourself, it won’t feel good and that’s how you’ll know. A lot of times we have thoughts that are like, I want to help her. That sounds really pretty, right? I want to help here but it doesn’t feel good. The, I want to help her, doesn’t feel good in your body when you think it. It feels like maybe resentment or frustration so make sure. The other way that I do this is I have my clients look at their actions like what they’re doing in their life and I tell them, hey, make sure you like the reason that you’re doing that.

The way that you can check, that’s your A line for your behavior, the reason that you’re doing it is to look at the T line. That’s your reason for feeling the way you do and doing what you do. Make sure you like your reason. One of my clients today was talking about how she always just likes to order what everybody else orders when they go to a restaurant because she feels more comfortable. She doesn’t want people to judge her. I said, that’s fine if you like your reason. Is that a good reason to make that decision?

If the answer is yes, then you move forward and if it’s not then you don’t. Just be really clear. If you want to know what you’re thinking, if you want to know what’s going on in your mind, the best way to do that is to look at your life. Your life is filled with Rs, results you have created all around you. Look at your relationship. Look at the money in your bank accounts. Look at the car your driving. Look at the people you’re spending time with. Look at the number of friends you have. Look at the number of friends you don’t have. Look at your education, look at the job you’re doing. Those are all results in your life and you get to own that you have created every single one of those results by the thought you’ve been thinking which have caused their feelings which have caused your actions.

For example, if a result is you don’t many friends then you can back it up, the reason you don’t have many friends. What have you done to get friends? What have you done to lose friends? Why don’t you have many friends? That will give you the action and then why did you take that action? Why did you take the action to not meet many people? Maybe you felt scared or anxious to meet people? Notice how we’re moving up the model from the bottom, right? You can ask yourself why were you feeling scared and anxious. Maybe the thought is I didn’t think people would like me so then you have the situation where you can see, the reason I don’t have many friends is because I have this belief, I don’t think people will like me.

As soon as you own, that you’ve created that result based on your thinking then you can decide if you want to change it or not. The same is true for the job that you’re in. Don’t tell yourself that he reason in your job is because you have to be in there. The reason you’re doing anything, the reason you have a result of the job that you in is because of how you’re thinking. You may be thinking, I have to have this job. I have to have this money. What is the thought that’s creating every result in your life? Look at the car you have, there’s a thought that’s creating that result.

Look at the body that you have, how much you weigh? There’s a thought that’s creating that result. All the results that you have created start with a thought in your mind. I think this is fantastic news. Some people are tempted at this point to start beating themselves up. They may say, I don’t like any of the results in my life and I don’t really want to beat myself up because of believing that the thoughts I have, have created it. Now, what I offer is you don’t have to beat yourself up for the thoughts that you’ve had created it. Just acknowledge that the reason why you have those results is because of how you’re thinking and that’s okay.

It’s not a big deal, okay? If you allow yourself to not be judged then you will allow yourself to have access to your own mind to your own feelings. You’ll start to really understand why you have those results. You don’t have to judge that for yourself. You can just be kind about hat to yourself. You can approach the model from anywhere. I just showed you how to look at it from results. If you want to understand your own behavior, you have to take responsibility for it. The reason why you do or don’t do anything is because of how you feel.

The reason why you overeat is because of how you feel. The reason why you undereat is because of how you feel. The reason why you don’t take action in your business is because of what you feel. The reason why create an amazing result in your life is because of how you feel. When you look at that action line, when you look at the actions that you’re taking in your life that you want to be taking, notice, how you can attribute it back to a feeling. Let’s use an example of brushing your teeth. Most people brush their teeth, okay? The reason why you brushed your teeth is because of how you feel. Most people feel pretty strongly.

Maybe we could use the word determined to brush their teeth every day and the thought is I don’t want my breath to stink or the thought is I don’t like the feel of my teeth when they’re not brushed or the thought is I want to take care of my mouth. I don’t want to get cavities, whatever the thought is, you can see how that creates the feeling and then the action is brushing your teeth. We don’t just brush our teeth without a thought first. We do it so habitually, you may not be something that you’re conscious of but you can go back and find it.

The same is true for anything you do in your life that you don’t want to be doing. For example, watching TV instead of working out. For example, going out to eat every night and spending too much money and eating too much food. What is the thought that drives that? You can start managing your mind by understanding that everything you’re doing starts first with a thought then you can get to the cause of everything. That makes behavioral change so much easier. When we try and change our behavior without changing our thoughts first, we’re working against ourselves.

You want to change your thoughts from the cognitive level first and then it would be so much easier to change from the behavioral level. The most important thing, I think is how we feel. Everything we do in our life, everything we wanted to do in our life, everything we don’t do is because of how we think we will feel. We go to work because we think it will make us feel better because we’ll have more money. We are kind to people. We treat people with respect. We take care of our kids. Everything that we do in our lives is because of how we think it will make us feel. The truth is all of our feelings really come from our thinking and we get to decide what we want to feel.

Many of us are trying to control other people and control our results in order to change how we feel. We totally have it backwards. We don’t have to change how anybody else is thinking or feeling or doing anything in order to feel better. We certainly don’t have to change any of our actions to feel better. In fact, the only way to change our actions in a consistent and long lasting way is to change how we feel first. If we want to stop overeating so we feel better about our body so we feel more confident, you can see how we have to feel more confident and feel better about our body so we’ll stop overeating.

We have to start with the feeling first. Think it to yourself, how do you want to feel? Is your current thinking getting you there? Your thoughts always create your feelings. Your feelings always create your actions. Your actions always create your results. There is no other way around it and there is no shred of evidence to the contrary. Had lots of people come to me and try to present it but I always show them, this is the way the universe works. This is the way all of my teachers thought me in a very different way and in different terminology but it’s all the same basic principle. It’s just like gravity, right? It’s one of those universal truths that our thoughts create our feelings.

It’s so funny, I think I told you guys this on the podcast before but I have a person in my master mind who isn’t really involved in my industry and he was laughing. He’s like, I think your videos are so funny because you just talked about the obvious about how our thoughts create our feelings. People don’t know that? I laughed at him when I said people don’t know that. I didn’t know that. I needed someone to tell me that. I think that’s the best thing ever is to know that that’s where my feelings are coming from because otherwise, I’m screwed. I have to feel whatever the world is offering me.

The truth is I don’t have to feel anything that I don’t choose to feel. I’m always just feeling my thinking. If I want to feel differently, all I need to do is go into my brain and change the way I’m thinking. The best way to start with that process is to separate out the facts from what I’m thinking. When I get that thought, I can ask myself, how does that thought feel? What do I do when I feel that way? When I do that, what result do I get? That result is always going to prove that original thought because that thought created that result.

If, for some reason, you aren’t getting this, this is really challenging and maybe this is the first time you’ve listened to this podcast, I want to recommend that you go to thelifecoachschool.com and you go to our video section. You watch, there’s a three-part video on the model. It shows you how exactly this works. No matter where you are in your life, no matter what problem you’re suffering with, the problem is either a fact that you’re making into a problem with your thinking because facts are never problems until we think about them. It’s either a thought you’re thinking, a feeling you’re feeling and action you’re taking, or not taking or results you’re getting or not getting.
You can start anywhere in the model and we will have a complete full model if you ask yourself the right questions. You want to know what’s causing all of it. It’s a thought in your mind. Your brain is the most powerful tool you have. If you don’t manage it, it will manage you. It doesn’t care about a good life. It doesn’t care about doing wonderful things. It doesn’t care about creating a contribution. Your brain only cares about being efficient. If you put something in there that’s negative and you’ve always got something negative, it will be very efficient at it and it will feel like it’s accomplishing its job.

Your job is to tell your brain what to think, to tell your mind what to think on purpose and not let it just be a default. Here’s the thing. We are the only species we know of that can think about thinking. We can think about our own brain. We can watch ourselves. We have a sense that we are ourselves. We can think about ourselves in that way. That is a gift. To be able to think about what you’re thinking is a gift. To be able to think on purpose to create what you want is about as good as it gets. I hope that is helpful for you guys.

I also hope that you’ve checked out my other podcast if you are a life coach called How to be a Life Coach and that is the business end of coaching and how to build your business. We’re going step by step over there. Make sure you look that up on iTunes as well and please give me a review over there. That would be great. I would love that. I also invite to opt in to the 14 Steps of How to Build Your Business over at The Life Coach School. Come over, say hello. If you have any questions for me, make sure you put it in the comments of the podcast.

Next week, we’re going to be talking about Q & A. One of the things that I want to give you guys all the heads up on is because of this huge influx of people that are interested in everything that we’re doing and we’ve had this huge demand all of the sudden and hopefully forever ongoing. We are going to move this podcast so it’s once a week, again for me, which will make it much easier for me to accomplish everything that I want to do for you all. We’re going to be doing this podcast back to every Thursday.

If you got excited sometimes about seeing us at other times in the week, that’s great. We’ll still send out a few bonuses here and there but you can always count on us on this podcast for Thursday. I hope you guys have an amazing wonderful week and I’ll talk to you next Thursday. Take care.

Thank you for listening to The Life Coach School Podcast. It would be incredibly awesome if you would take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes. For any questions, comments or coaching issues you would like to hear on the show, please visit us at www.thelifecoachschool.com.