Handling Chaos 3

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.

Well hello my friends. Welcome to another daily podcast with me. Very exciting. So today is a much better day and I'm going to tell you, for me, getting coached by really smart coaches is the difference between literally brain death and brain life. I know that many of you have reached out and want coaching, and I'm adding a lot of coaching in scholars. If you don't have a coach, get a coach, hire a coach, join scholars, whatever you need to do, listen to this podcast. But you need to have someone coaching your brain during this time. I couldn't emphasize how much of a priority that needs to be for all of us right now. We're at home. We're alone with our thoughts and our children. We need each other. We need to coach. We need people who are thinking positively. That's what I'm going to do today.

I'm going to offer you some insight. Today we're going to talk about money and scarcity and the economy and business and not freaking out because it's all beautiful. It's all a beautiful thing and abundance is everywhere, and it's available to all of us. So I want to share with you my thoughts about scarcity. One of my coaches had pointed out to me in our Slack channel that I had never done an episode just on scarcity. I talk about it a lot through all of my podcasts. It's a theme in there, and I talk about it and scholars a lot, but I haven't ever done a full podcast on it. I think that one of the things that she said in her post was that so many people have slipped into a scarcity mentality feeling like it's necessary and that it's not serving us at all to be thinking that way and how if we stay in a very positive, abundant, grateful mentality, we're going to have so much more than we even did before this happened.

Here's what I mean by that, that I think it's really important to understand is that abundance in an abundance mentality and creating abundance in our lives is not something that happens out there in the world. It's not determined by what's happening in the world. When you look at so many of the successful businesses that are those behemoth businesses, it's so fascinating to learn that most of them started in a recession. I was just listening to Russell Brunson talk about this, and I was totally fascinated by what he was saying. By the way, I've just think putting all the good input into my brain. I got some great coaching. I did some great coaching on myself. I've been putting all the positive input. Yesterday was a really deep work processing feeling day and because I opened myself up to that and didn't escape it and really managed myself there, I feel like today I have this like renewed energy and a clean mind.

I want to make sure that you all see that as a responsibility for yourselves, is to seek out all the positive information that you can, even though your brain is going to be constantly seeking to be startled and to find out the latest, scariest thing. Make sure you balance that out with positive stuff. It's made all the difference for so many of my clients, and it'll make a huge difference for you. So make sure you attend the calls in scholars. Make sure you ask to get coached, and make sure you get your one-to-one coaching. This is a priority right now because we're at home and we have time alone with our brains, it's also the perfect opportunity to get stronger. So I wanted to read her post real quick, and then I have a lot of really cool things that I want to share with you today, some thoughts for you to consider.

So Danita, she says, "I think scarcity mentality is the biggest problem at the moment. Scarcity of access to food and toilet paper. Scarcity of the ability to be with our children more than we're used to or ability to be with our emotions. Scarcity of information. What are the latest statistics? Scarcity of money, the stock market fall, economic fallout. Scarcity of time to work when our kids are home. Limited time with our high-risk family members. Time to show up and serve everyone we want to in this tough time. Scarcity of work if things shut down and scarcity of trust in ourselves. Ultimately scarcity of control."

She says, "I'm sure you will touch on many of those topics. I think it's interesting to point out that none of your podcast episode titles mentioned scarcity as a topic. I've listened to them all, so I know this topic is woven throughout all your episodes, but now might be a great time to address this head on. I have to say it's been interesting watching my husband claimed that he's not stressed, but then going to the grocery store shopping five times in five days and watching myself just think I will always have my needs met and continue my life in a calm way."

I love that. I think that we can take precautions and we can take action from a calm place. It may be the same action that the person next to you is taking from a panicked place, but taking it from a calm place is always going to give you the result of more calmness, more wisdom, more ideas, more creativity. I have found that when I welcome obstacles, when I bring in the idea that life is full of obstacles on purpose to turn us toward strategies and that every obstacle has the seed in it to bring contribution and healing, then everything has a completely different perspective.

Instead of running away from it, we can move towards it with calmness and with leadership and with our own internal guidance. So let's talk a little bit about business. I obviously coach a lot of entrepreneurs, and I coach a lot of clients who are worried about money. Although life coaching industry in these times doesn't get affected negatively, the clients that we coach often have brick and mortar businesses and large companies that will be affected and we want to be able to coach them from a place of abundance. We want to be able to coach them from a place of not freaking out, but from a place of no matter what, everything's going to be fine. No matter what, everything's going to be fine. I love money and I love making money and I love having money and I love spending money and I love paying my employees with money.

I love all the things about money, but I also understand that wealth, true wealth isn't dependent on money. You've heard me say lots of times if you take it all away, I'm totally fine. I think times like this really test that for many of my clients, like the hoarding of the money and the gripping to the money and the worry about the money is of course going to create more scarcity mentality. Those of us who have money in the stock market that see money going down, we'll make that mean lots of terrible and horrible things.

But if you step back and you understand that the market goes up and it goes down and it goes up and it goes down and everything can be considered temporary and we have a long-term vision for ourselves, then we calm down. When we use our tools from the life coach school and we focus on the future 10 years from now, we focus on the future five years from now, our pulse slows down. Our heartbeat slows down, right? We get to go into the place where possibility and our thoughts about possibility are calm. Now, people will say to me, "Oh, but we need to be realistic. We need to think about what's going on right now." But here's what I want to tell you, and this is super important.

Most of you aren't thinking about what's going on right now, because what's going on right now is you're at home, warm house with food and a bed and your family. For most of you, everybody is still healthy. We're being preventative. We're taking precautions against not spreading the virus. But most of us are already in our future. We're already in our imagination, anticipating scary things. So what I want to say is that if you're going to go to your future and imagine things, be deliberate about it. If you're going to go to your future and create stories and create visions, make sure that they're visions that you want. Make sure you're not having the Coronavirus in your mind.

You may not have it in your body. You may not be sick with it, but you may be sick with it in your mind, if you're obsessing about it and anticipating horrible things within your mind, there's no upside to that. That is not protective. You can protect yourself from a place of a positive vision. That's where we can create and contribute from a place of abundance. One of the easiest and fastest ways to do this is to focus on what is right now, the incredible abundance that is right now, the smart, amazing doctors who are working on this. I have so much confidence. I have so much love. I have so much respect for the people who are dedicating themselves to studying this, to understanding it, to explaining it to us. I have so much respect for the people who are putting plans in place to try and protect us.

I feel cared for. I feel protected by that. Now some of you may be thinking they don't know what they're doing or they're doing it wrong or whatever, but here's what I want to tell you. That is not serving you. That is not helping you. You'll have to look at your thoughts one by one and say, is this adding love, contribution, protection, healing to the world? If it isn't, do I have another thought that I could think of or believe instead?

When you think about the economy and you think about money and if you have your own business or you're worried about your job, I want you to think about the tools that I teach that apply to anticipating obstacles, and I want you to look at your goals that you have for yourself and for your business. I want you to anticipate the obstacles that may be new obstacles, that may be obstacles that you hadn't considered before, and within every single obstacle, there is no exception, is a strategy for growth, is a strategy for strength, is a strategy for getting better at your mental work, at your mind work.

I like to think about the world as a playground, as a curriculum, as a way for me to evolve myself and my brain for the time that I'm here. I don't know how long I'm here, but while I'm here I am going to utilize what I have to be the best version of myself. No matter what is happening with the people around me and no matter what is happening in the world. When I accept and embrace the world as it is, as 50/50, as waves of good and waves of bad quote unquote, I'm able to utilize what I have to grow.

When I think about my own business and I think about the economy and I think about the timing of all of this, I was just talking to one of my friends and she was just saying, "Oh my gosh, to be able to be in your business where you're offering online work opportunities to folks that want to be able to work from home and want to have job security," I think about this like in a way like, yes, that is amazing, but also look at what's happening in the world that could end up being amazing.

I was listening to Russell Brunson talk about this with colleges and with schools, with everyone coming home like Zoom. It's so interesting, right? Because Zoom, which is like our video technology, their sales are through the roof, right? Because they're trying to figure out how do we teach people at home? Well, those of us in online, those of us in this industry have been doing this for years, right? That's our grind. We've been doing this. We understand it. There's so many people in the world that they haven't been doing this online. They haven't been doing the video connection. They haven't been teaching online, and so they're all kind of coming into this world that we've been in for a long time and understanding how powerful it is.

I think when we teach remotely, we understand how efficient that is, how good that could be. It could make us better. It could make our education system evolve. When you look at some systems that are kind of stuck and it's still delivering information and still delivering education the same way they were a hundred years ago, and you see that sometimes an obstacle can be the upheaval that is needed to take it to the next level. We can have optimism about that. We can be excited about that. We can understand that.

Then also we can look at worst-case scenarios. We can anticipate worst-case scenarios. So it's so interesting to me that people think that life coaches are just like airy fairy in the sky, just always thinking everything's going to be great, but that's not what we do, right? We are willing to embrace the ugly, and so we're able to anticipate those obstacles and plan for them.

My business and the way that I've set my business up is very lean and clean. I have taken really careful measure to make sure I can protect my employees no matter what happens in the economy, make sure I have plenty of money to be able to weather any storm and to have that money to be able to take care of all of my clients who are depending on me. I think about this, my business and my coaches are going to be needed more than ever. It is my responsibility to run a business that can stay in business and help people when it is most needed. I feel very proud of that. That's not because I'm like, "Everything will be great all the time." No, it's because years ago my husband and I thought through what is the most conservative, lean, efficient way we can run our company. Now that's much harder than it is to just spend like crazy and go into debt and get funding.

It's much harder, but it makes that solid feeling, that conservative feeling now gives me so much confidence. When I have students that are coming to me and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm just starting my online business," or "I'm just making money," or "I'm worried. I'm worried." I'm like, "Listen, this is our time. This is our moment to see what our brains bring to us."

My brain has brought me a lot of crazy stuff. I was sharing some of my thoughts with Kara the other day. She was like, "What dusty corner did you pull that thought from"? Right, like what comes up in our brains is like amusing in some ways. It's like, no, it's the end of the world. Here's what you should do. And like its suggestions make no sense, right? But when you understand your own brain, you understand what it's doing and you have compassion for your brain because it's designed for a different time, then you can be calm about it and you can lead your brain to where you need to go.

So I want you guys to consider your obstacles, whether you own a business or you work from home or you don't work from home, or you're in an industry that is being temporarily affected by this. One of the things that I love that Russell Brunson was just saying was that he has a friend who is in a business that has already been incredibly affected by what happened in China three months ago.

So they had shut down all their manufacturing, all their production. So this guy's business was affected really severely, and everything was shut down. But now in China, they've gotten to the point where they've turned everything back on. So it was this temporary boom. It was a temporary pause, a temporary consideration, and now it's coming back. So to be able to think about it that way, to be able to think that it's viruses will come and then they will, right?

It could be a temporary thing, and how long temporary is we don't know. But we can respond if we keep our heads with us, right? Our life may change like it's never changed before, but that's okay. Our lives three months from now may go back to exactly the way they were, right? Maybe not. Because our brains will have changed. We will become stronger if we do it right. We will go to the next level if we do it right.

Our challenges or obstacles can make us stronger and we will be better because of it. So to think about this as a wave, to think about, and this is coming and how are we going to utilize this and how can we stay abundant? Listen, it's easy to be abundant when everything's going the way you want it to. It's easy to stay positive when everything's great, when everything's glorious, right?

Can you do that when you have some challenges? And the answer to you is yes you can. If you make it a priority, if you make it the most important thing to keep your head straight, everything else will fall in place. I promise you. People will understand better after this, how important it is to be able to manage your mind. Here's the thing, and this is what I teach all of you, right?

So when you're trying to control the world in order to feel better, you get a false sense that you're powerful externally. We all know that we can't control the world. If you didn't know that before, you know it now. You can't control the world. So it brings us home. Literally, we come to our homes. We come to our internal homes in our own brains, and we find out what we can really control.

Right now, more than ever, we have a responsibility to control our minds. We have a responsibility to embrace the abundance that is. Look around your home. Look at your children. Look at your spouse. Look at your friends. Look online. I appreciate everybody that is serving on the front lines of this. All the people that have it, all the people that are healing from it, all the people that have lost people from this, all of the humans who are living the human experience, we wouldn't trade it, right? If the alternative is living in a world like this or not living, we'll take this one, right? We'll take this one, with all of its viruses, with all of its dangers, with the complete other half of life that is the negative half. We will say yes to it because we don't have a choice, and when we say no to it, we suffer.

Think about everything that you have. After you've written down all your obstacles and you've created strategies that inspire you and motivate you, the next thing that you want to do is to consider everything that you have. Everything that is, I mean toes, thighs, eyelashes, Aspirin, doctors, news in small doses but let you know what's going on, ideas, research, understanding, solutions, people working on this. Make a list. Keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.

If you feel full of anxiety, if you feel full of scarcity, going to a place of gratitude, going to a place of noting and writing down what you do have will change it for you, and then be an example of that. Be an example of we still have trees. Animals are okay. There's still green grass. Weather keeps happening. There's still snow, right? All the things, like the littlest things. I'm looking out my window right now, and we planted bulbs in our yard and I would say of 10 bulbs that we planted, nine of them were eaten by the bunnies, but the ones that survived those bunnies are extraordinary. They made it, right? They're beautiful.

This is the truth. This is our time. This is our opportunity to have faith in whatever it is you believe in, in terms of your spirituality, but also faith in humanity and in yourself, and in the abundance of what is. You can focus on what you don't have right now or you can focus on what you do have. If you continue to focus on what you do have, what you will realize is that you have an amazing brain that can solve problems, that can anticipate obstacles. You can find your way through. You can do this. I have complete faith in you, and I'm very excited for this pause in our mental health and our opportunity to breathe and the opportunity to make yourself smarter and stronger. This is a season for learning.

Please do not sit around and watch the news. It's not serving you. Use this as an opportunity to dig in, to learn, to take the time to make yourself mentally stronger. You will come out of this stronger and better for it. We'll look back on this in five years and be like, "That was my opportunity to dig into myself, to turn away from being outside in that external world and turn into myself and make myself stronger and evolve my brain." Use it as an opportunity. Focus on what you do have. I love you guys so much. I love the humans. I love all of us. I'll talk to you tomorrow.

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.