You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo episode 482.
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.
Hey, beautiful, gorgeous friends. It's one of those podcasts where I'm on my headphones again, so hopefully you can hear me okay. I'm out in the forest of the Hamptons in New York and it is gorgeous out here and I'm all by myself.
And one of the things that they tell you when you're hiking is that you should continuously make noise so the critters can hear you coming. And so I'm talking to a few thousand of my friends about money and getting rich and all the exciting things that go along with that.
So there's some things that have been coming up lately for me personally and some kind of debates that I've been having with my friends and challenges I've been having with my own psyche around becoming rich and being rich and being successful and how it makes other people feel and other people's opinions about an independent woman being extremely successful.
So I wanted to talk about it here, especially for those of you who may be having similar struggles. To give you my perspective on some of the socialization that I think happens without even people realizing it. And maybe you are one of the women that is part of this problem without even realizing it. And so I think it's worth the conversation. So the first part of this is really about what it means to create kind of a new pathway for women, a new avenue for success for women, and how much change that actually requires.
And if you look at the traditional jobs that women have had in the past, and you look at how they were paid compared to the typical male jobs in the past, you will see that women get paid less, and so as a life coach, as an entrepreneur, we have the freedom to set our own prices, which is a beautiful thing.
And often we criticize other women -- women criticizing women. I don't see men doing this, but women criticizing other women for charging higher prices than normally a woman would be paid in their career. And it could sound something like, “Well, how can you charge that much for life coaching when a therapist charges less?”
“How can you charge this much for teaching a class when typically teachers charge less?” And it's kind of like you aren't allowed to step out of the norm of what women are normally paid and you should not be getting paid any more. You need to stay in this little bubble. Now, I think that the people saying this are well-intended.
I think they're trying to keep things affordable, right? I don't think that there's this malicious intent, but I also don't think that they realize how much this is pulling us out of the trajectory towards equal pay and the trajectory towards creating jobs for ourselves that were traditionally not available to us and getting paid at a level that traditionally wasn't available to us.
And when I am told that I should make things more affordable or I should lower my prices, it makes me think about my customers and it makes me think about the people who traditionally buy from me, which are other women. And it perpetuates the concept that women don't have money and women can't afford it, and women don't know how to make their own free choice about what they should spend their own money on.
And when I think about it this way, and I think about the way that oftentimes we are critical of each other and of other women, it kind of makes me crazy. It kind of makes me irate to think about because as someone who is creating a tremendous amount of value in my work, and it is my life's work, and I work very hard at it, and I create a lot of value, and I charge for that value, and by the way, of course, I also give away this podcast, I give a ton of content away for free for the people that literally can't afford it. But there's many, many women out there that can afford it, that want to afford it, that have the money, that are successful, that want to use the tools that I've created to take them to the next level.
And I think it is degrading for us to assume, first of all, that they don't want to pay for the value and assume that somehow I'm taking advantage of them in a way where they're not able to use their own cognizance to make a decision for what they should or shouldn't purchase.
And so that's really my first point there is be careful in your criticism. Is it holding us back just because it's not something that's ever been done before? Just because women are making money in new ways, just because we're charging more then we have traditionally charged in the past, does not mean we're doing it wrong. In fact, I think it's the opposite. I think we're doing it right. We're finally claiming and creating at the level we deserve.
And I'm often told to stop talking about money so much. Stop talking about how much success you have. Stop talking about what you're creating because it makes other people feel bad, which I think is not actually the case when I get a lot of feedback from a lot of women about how much they appreciate how much money I've earned, staying at home with my kids and being able to create value for other women and not needing men to create money for me.
I don't need to have men tell me it's okay for what I charge. I don't need to work for a man in order to do that, and I don't have to sell to men. If I don't want to, I do want to, cause I love selling to men and I love that they're part of my program, but I don't have to. It's women supporting other women and creating for other women that seems to upset people because it's different.
I had someone say to me, "You know, it's only like 1% of people that are ever going to be that successful. So it's not really fair for you to be telling people that they can be successful."
I was like, seriously?
How do you think we're ever going to grow that 1%? How do you ever think that 1% is going to get bigger? Are we supposed to accept that statistic as the final destination for women? Or are we going to look at that 1% and be like, that's atrocious? That's not enough women who are successful. We need to grow that percentage.
And the way that I know how to help us grow that percentage is to show women what is possible. To show them what they can create. To show them that this truly is something that we can have for ourselves, we can create for ourselves, and we can win, period. We can win at doing this if we are willing to put up with other women criticizing us.
Do you see what a shame that is? It's such a shame that our main critics are other women who also, my guess would be, want to have this level of success in their own lives because they would like to have the freedom to be able to create at this level.
So let me give you some strategies. If you are a woman who wants to be incredibly rich and incredibly successful and contribute to making women more equal financially. I have some ideas for you.
And also if you are someone that wants to support women becoming more successful and having more equality with men in terms of financial pay, here are some things you can do to support the women that you love that are wanting to do that. Because I know that not everyone wants to do that, but it does take some of us to kind of forge through to expand that 1% so we're not in such a minority when it comes to success.
So the first thing really is that is someone saying that only 1% of people have ever done that, so therefore, you shouldn't even try. If someone says that to you, have compassion for them. They mean well. They don't want you to be disappointed. They don't think it's possible for you because we've never been taught that it's possible for us, and they don't see that it's possible for themselves.
And so their doubt is, I'm going to say, socialized, it's really something that they've been taught, something all of us have been taught. And so instead of getting frustrated and mad and calling them a hater and you know, all of that, just really understand where they're coming from and that they're part of the system that has really taught us that there's only room for a very few exceptional people.
And the second piece of that is, notice, do you explain away women who are very successful in a way that's degrading to them? Because if you are someone trying to support women being successful, just notice that, “Oh, well, she's successful because of who her mom was.” Or, “She's successful because of how pretty she is.” Or, “She's successful because she had this one opportunity.”
And even though that person may have had privilege, that person may have had a lucky break, that person may have had some coincidence happen that helped them, you can also find where they earned it. Because there's a lot of people that have a lot of privilege and opportunity that don't do anything with it. And when you explain it away in a way that discredits them, you miss the opportunity to be inspired by them.
So if you're someone trying and your success is being explained away and someone is trying to discredit you, “Well, you are only successful because of fill-in-the-blank.” Just know that that is part of what we've been taught. We haven't been taught to give women credit for what they create. It's insane, and you will not notice the same rhetoric as much with men. You won't. It's more expected that a man would be successful. It's more expected that he would create something.
My girlfriend was telling me about a stat that most millionaires are created with real estate, by investing in real estate, and most billionaires are created by business acquisition and creating businesses and acquiring more businesses.
And the only way that as women we can get to that level where we're acquiring businesses is to have incredibly successful businesses that have very positive cash flow and profit. And in order to do that, we have to charge what we're worth, and we have to market properly, and we can't be afraid to be bold and take risks.
And so that needs to be the focus. Rather than, "Do I have the support of the people around me?" I think one of the tragedies that we have as women is we are so communal and we need and want the support of our friends and the people around us and our communities. We really need the support of all of the people around us to really help us through navigating these new trails into new places for women.
And many of us don't have that support. We have the opposite of that. We have people telling us that what we're doing is a scam, or what we're doing isn't realistic or what we're doing is outrageous and won't work. And so if we understand that going in, we can make that better because the more of us that succeed.
The more of us that prove that women can do this, we can have these types of jobs, that we create for ourselves, that we can do it at home while we take care of our kids, that don't require 15 years of education and hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to be successful. And we don't have to work ridiculously long hours, it can be easier than it has been in the past.
And if we teach that and we share that and we don't be quiet when people tell us to be quiet and we don't stop talking about our success when people tell us it makes them uncomfortable. If we keep doing that, we can change this game. We can change literally the reality. We can change our generational wealth and we can change what's possible for not just us, but for all of the little ones that come behind us. And it's not just an education for women, it's an education for men as well. But I will tell you that I think the people that it makes the most uncomfortable are women.
Because of the way that we've been taught and it feels uncomfortable to us, and it feels like because most of the success in this country, in America, is typically men. Outrageous success is typically men. And some men doing things that we don't want to do, that we don't agree with. We associate our own success with that.
And what we need to do is not do that. We need to have our own path and our own success and our own way of doing it. And we need to tell each other that yes, it's possible, and yes, you can do it. And listen, you have no business, in my opinion, telling someone else what they're capable of. You don't even know.
Now, I will tell you that I think it's possible for you. I will tell you that I think you can do this. I will tell you the way that I did it and the path that you can take to do it too. But you have to tell yourself that you're capable. You have to believe in yourself. I won't be able to do that for you.
I won't be able to create that belief system. And you have to decide, are you going to believe the people around you that don't know because they've never seen it before, or are you going to be the one to prove it true to them? Are you going to make them a believer in what's possible in job creation, in success and entrepreneurship, and freedom in the ease of financial stability for women in this way?
We are just beginning, in my opinion, to open up careers to women where they don't have to sacrifice their natural way of working, their natural way of being, and the money that they want to have to take care of themselves and their families, and to have independence and freedom. We are just warming up.
This is not the time to slow down my friends. This is the time to speed up.
And third thing that I want to say. And this may be one of the most important things in the way that you can support yourself and support other people around you that are literally trying to change the world with our success, is that you are a legitimate businesswoman.
You are deserving of a place in this world where you can create, and you can charge, and you can build, and you can hire, and you can decide what you want to do with your own money.
That is, in my opinion, your birthright. It was hard fought by many people that went before you. And just because the rest of us aren't quite ready for it yet cause we haven't quite normalized it yet is not a reason to stop.
It may be a reason to be afraid and you may have to have a bunch of courage and you may have to go out there... But I want to encourage you to get as rich as you want to and as rich as you can and never ever apologize or keep quiet about it, or stop talking about it or stop doing it just because so few of us are. The only way that we expand that 1% is by encouraging our sisters, the people around us, to do the same. It is possible. It is hard, but let's not make it any harder than it already is for the people around us that want to do it.
It's okay if you don't want to, that's totally fine. But maybe just maybe that person that has that unrealistic dream, maybe they will achieve it. Then what? Does that make you feel excited? Does that make you feel the sense of that possibility?
I hope it does. I hope other people's success makes you happy and makes you encourage them, especially women, who want and deserve and can get as rich as they want. Never going to stop talking about it, my friends.
Loud and proud. Have a great week everyone. 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 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.
