You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo episode 400.
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 beautiful friends. Episode 400. That’s 400 weeks that I have been sitting here in front of this microphone talking to y’all. Every single week. We haven’t missed a week showing up and doing this thing.
And I wanted to take episode 400 to be proud of myself and to teach y’all how to be proud of yourselves. There’s a huge lack of this going around. Feeling good about our accomplishments, feeling good about what we’ve done, feeling good enough. Worthy enough. Acknowledging all that we have put our heart on the line for.
And so as I was contemplating this and thinking about it, I was wondering why that is. Why is it that we have such a hard time celebrating ourselves privately, just within our own heads, but especially publicly with other people? And telling other people that we’re proud of ourselves.
I very rarely hear my students, my friends, the people around me talking about how proud they are of their accomplishments. I was recently just hanging out with one of my friends who is doing well over a million dollars this year and I said, “Are you celebrating? Are you happy? Are you acknowledging? That is a huge top 1% accomplishment. How proud do you feel of yourself for doing that?”
And I think for so many of us, we achieve our dreams, we achieve goals and then we diminish them. Well, it won’t last, well, I had help, well, I had some luck. We don’t really fully embrace what it is we have done in our lives.
There was an exercise that Jack Canfield who wrote The Success Principles had me do when I was reading that book. What was basically going through and writing down all the accomplishments of my life.
And he said start with you learn how to walk and you graduated from third grade and you got over that first heartbreak and you got your first job. All the accomplishments. Anything you can dig up. And just make a list and just keep acknowledging what it is you have done and what it is you’ve done to survive and what it is you’ve done to thrive and what you’ve created.
And so I’m at a point in my life right now where I’m kind of looking at it as a halfway point for myself and I’ve been talking about this a lot, my midlife. I’m going to be 50 years old next year and I kind of see that 100-ish is going to be what I live to, then I’m kind of in that midlife space.
I’m creating a version of myself that I’m calling Brooke 2.0. And it’s just the beginning for me. I feel like a lot of people look at me and think I’ve reached a mountain top and I think I’m halfway there. Halfway up the mountain and I’m so happy that I have - I love to hike. Got my dogs.
So happy to have this 2.0 version of myself that gets to start halfway up the mountain and gets to start with all the strength that I’ve built and everything I know from having climbed that first half of the mountain and acknowledging that.
And what I thought would be really fun is to take episode 400 and just pause and look at what I have done, look at the accomplishment that has been my career and has been my podcast and my business and my team that I’ve created and the student body that I’ve created, and to really just acknowledge the work that we have all done in terms of affecting the world with more love, more positivity, less negativity about negativity in our minds.
That has an impact. Such a ripple effect on literally our world. When I teach something in the podcast and you learn it and you affect the people around you because you were living it, that affects them, which affects their circles, which affects their circles, which affects their circles.
And the more we can step into the best versions of ourselves, the more we can affect the world. And one of the ways that we can be light in the world is by celebrating ourselves, is by acknowledging ourselves, is by hooting and hollering about what we have done so far.
When we have our own approval, our own acknowledgment, our own celebration, it motivates us to do more, to show up in a way that energizes us and adds to our life and fulfills us. Not in a way that depletes us and beats us up.
So if I died today, I would be proud of the life I have lived. I grew up with an alcoholic dad, a depressed single mother, and abuse. I did the work to heal, to forgive, and to become stronger.
I studied life, myself, others. I suffered. I felt pain, I grew. And then I shared what I learned. I committed to a life out loud, out front, in the vision of people. People to have a say about me.
It took and it takes courage. And I am so proud. I decided to serve, to make a contribution. Not to just take my money and run in the cave and live in some hedonistic pleasure, but to do stuff I didn’t want to do, that I was afraid to do, that took courage to do in order to make a difference.
I accept my shortcomings. I don’t pretend that I’m better than I am. I’m tough and I’m scared and I’m loving and I’m demanding. I’m deep and I’m shallow and I’m committed to the truth. The truth of what I actually think and feel. Not what I wish I would think and feel. I’m a creator.
I took a minute to reflect on my creations. My two best creations of course are my kids. My marriage to Chris was an incredible creation that we had for 22 years that is complete, but that was a beautiful creation, creation of our family that is still very much connected and filled with love.
And those two kids that I literally created in my body, with a little help from God and the universe. I just sat and reflected on the work that I did as their parent. How I show up for them, how close we are, how they reach out to me for help and fun and connection, and how much I genuinely enjoy the people that they are.
They are good, wonderful, hilarious, obnoxious, irreverent, funny people. And as I’m going through this and kind of talking about my acknowledgment here, I want you to think about yours as well. Going through the list of things that you have created in your life, things that are here that were created that couldn’t have been created if you weren’t here.
My children would not exist had I not shown up and created them, literally. They would not be who they were if I didn’t parent them and show up for them and be there for them and talk to them and teach them. I mean, breathe that in.
That’s insane. That’s incredible. That’s so exciting. How often do we take a minute just to acknowledge and be proud of that? I looked at my life in terms of the life I’ve created for myself inside of my brain.
I looked at the work that I had done on my brain, on my life, on my physical body, on my spiritual journey. And I am so proud of how far I’ve come. I started with a lot of self-loathing, survival instinct, trauma response. I did a lot of work to find my way to forgiveness and unconditional love and self-love.
I have done thousands of models and thousands of thought downloads and a tremendous amount of apologizing and showing up differently and working harder and giving back and making mistakes and failing and comforting myself.
Mostly, I have committed to having my own back and telling myself the truth. Telling myself the truth to myself. Never lying to myself. Refusing to believe lies about myself.
When people come at me and disagree with my life and my choices and who I am, I have my own back. I stand up for who I am and what I believe and who I want to be. And I am so proud of myself for that because that shit is hard. It’s hard to do that.
When I look upon my career, I’m so proud of what I’ve created. I’m so proud of my students and the student body that we have all over the world. I can’t not be thankful that I created the Model. And truth be told, the Model just is the truth. It’s not something that I invented as the truth. It just exists and I talk about it in a certain way.
Many other people talk about the truth in a different way. I just find the Model the most useful way for me and many of my students to traverse through this path that we’re going through on our lives.
I’m so proud of that creation. I’m so proud of the way I’ve taught it, and I’m so proud of the way it’s been received, and I’m so proud of all the debates we’ve had about it and all the lives it has changed.
I own that accomplishment. I own that contribution. I own that creation in the deepest part of my heart. If they were going to wheel me away today and say this is the end for you, I would breathe easy. I would feel amazing. I would feel like I showed up and had the courage to do what I want to do.
Now, I don’t want to die today. I want to keep going. But I feel accomplished. I feel as if I’ve acknowledged myself enough and I want you to think about this for you.
Do not compare your creations to other people’s. Your creations aren’t supposed to be other people’s creations. Don’t compare is my creation as big as Oprah, is my creation as big as my neighbors. No, your creation is meant to be yours.
Your little piece that affects your people. The people around you in your life. Have you acknowledged yourself for that?
When I look at the three components of my career since I started the podcast, the podcast really is a huge accomplishment for me and I’m very proud of the work that I’ve done on the podcast, I’m very proud to refer people to the podcast, I’m so happy that is stands the test of time and stays relevant.
And that when my kids miss me when I’m gone, they can listen to it. My grandkids could listen to it. It’s an amazing thing to have, to have my teachings and my experience and my life recorded publicly, and to have done it 400 times is amazing to me.
I’m so happy to have done that for myself. I’m so proud that I’ve shown up, even when no one was listening. I kept showing up in the beginning. When I look at Scholars and the program that I created that is Scholars, I see that Scholars is really the cumulation of all of the work that went before it.
If you look at what is included in Scholars, if you look at all of the courses in there, it is my life’s work. It is everything I’ve created. How to have an extraordinary life, how to feel better, stop overeating, stop overeating masterclass, stop overdrinking, how to make money, how to double your business, Five Pounds Stronger, Eight Pounds Down.
All of the work in there, it goes on and on, how to feel better, all of it is my life’s work in that arena. That container. For you. The fact that you can get coaching and that I’ve trained enough coaches and that we created a program that trains coaches that can then coach everyone once a week and teach classes in there.
That we have people in there to answer questions all the time, everything about that program, the design of how beautiful that program is, going in there and just marveling that that would not exist without the work that I had done. That is a creation. It’s a co-creation with my team, but I also helped create my team.
And all the work that’s in there, and the Model that runs through all of that work. And I know that so many of you here have created value in your jobs. You’ve created value in your businesses.
And I want you to take a minute, maybe you’ve worked at a job for a year. What have you done at that job? What have you created? You could blow your own mind if you look at it as a whole, if you look at all of the things that you’ve created within a certain amount of time at that business, at that company, that wouldn’t have been created in the way that it was created because you are there.
It’s so fun to look at what we’ve actually done. When I think about certification, it blows my mind. When I think about how I used to teach certification to such a small group, just 10 of us in a room, not that long ago.
And I remember thinking there’s no way I could teach this to more than 10 people at a time, there’s no way anyone else could teach this but me. And then we started to realize that everyone else taught it much better than me. It is not my expertise to be working in small groups and practicums with new coaches.
I’m good at creating the material and teaching the material. But I look at how many coaches we have trained and the businesses that they’ve gone on to create and the people that they have gone on to serve, and it makes my mind explode.
The other day I was looking for a podcast and I found it. I found a podcast on the topic that I wanted it to be on. And I realized that the woman doing the podcast was one of the coaches that I had trained. And she was now providing me with material that I needed to understand to get through something in my life.
It blew my mind. I went on a date with a guy recently and he was saying that one of his best friends was a coach and I said, “Oh really? I wonder if I know them.” And he texted her and said who’s your coach? And she replied, The Life Coach School.
I mean, come on, it was so awesome. He was like, what in the actual heck is happening? It was really fun. But it’s like, oh my gosh, I have created so much opportunity here by showing up, by doing the work, by giving other people the Model and the tools that I have created.
And I’m like, patting myself on the back and people are like, “Oh, I knew life coaches are so self-indulgent, all they do is think about themselves all the time and think that they’re so great.” Yup.
That’s right because the alternative is terrible. The alternative is you never think about yourself. You’re always just doing for other people. You’re not acknowledging yourself; you’re not celebrating yourself. No thank you.
I think it’s funny when people are like, when you celebrate yourself, isn’t that narcissistic? I’m like, I don’t know, if you could be narcissistic when you have to work on not hating yourself every single day. When that’s the challenge so many of me and my students are dealing with is how not to hate ourselves and why the brain automatically wants to go to the place of we’re not good enough and we’re not worthy, imposter syndrome, all of that. That is the work that we’re trying to do.
So when we come out and say we love ourselves, that is not an easy thing to do. That is a difficult thing to do. When we say we’re proud of ourselves, that’s against our own grain. And that’s why I genuinely force myself to do it as much as possible. I demonstrate it as an example.
People say, “It’s obnoxious, you talking about how great you are and how much money you make and how great your lifestyle is, it’s obnoxious.” I’m like, but if I was talking about how much I hated my life and wasn’t making any money and was doing terribly, you wouldn’t think that was obnoxious.
So fascinating to me. I want us to celebrate us and everyone else. Nobody’s better than you. No one’s better than me. Why can’t we celebrate what we’re doing and celebrate what other people are doing too?
But the work that I need to consistently do and the work that you might need to consistently do is acknowledge yourself and be proud of yourself. When I look at the relationships I’ve created in my life, the friendships that I’ve created, the connections, the love that I have in my life, I am filled with gratitude for myself for showing up.
I obviously am filled with gratitude for my friends and how they love me and who they are, and my chosen family that I’ve been able to cultivate and create for myself.
I stand up sometimes and I’ve said this on the podcast before and I walk through my house and I have pictures of my friends all through my house. And I just feel so proud of those relationship and the energy that I’ve put into them and the connection and the time that I’ve put into them.
Those are my people. I look at my team, when I look at all of you, I feel so proud of you and me. So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to have your own podcast like this where you’re acknowledging yourself.
And whether you write it down, or you put it on a record, one of the things that I want to really encourage you to do is acknowledge it to yourself, but also to at least one other person.
Maybe it’s your best friend, and just say, “Hey, I want to tell you how proud I am of myself. Are you down?” Maybe you could do an exchange with someone. I want to hear how proud you are of you. It’s a very intimate exercise to do with yourself.
It’s a very vulnerable place to be when you share it with another person because of what they may think about you thinking so highly of yourself, you being so proud of yourself.
But here’s the truth. I am ridiculously proud of 400 episodes on this podcast. And I am incredibly grateful to each and every one of you who have downloaded it, who have listened to it, who have changed your life, and other people’s lives because of it.
There’s nothing anyone can say to me that’s going to change that. One of the freedoms I have as a human being is I get to choose what I want to think. And I want to think that I’m proud today.
This is a good day. Proud of myself. Showing up, for doing this podcast, and even more proud that I’m going to do another 400 episodes. I’m going to keep showing up. I’m going to keep delivering. I’m going to keep coming up with content, I’m going to keep growing myself so I have something to share with you all.
I feel like being proud of myself is such a relief from the hate I used to feel and the beatdowns I used to give myself. The freedom I’ve given myself from buffering, overeating and overdrinking and over-Facebooking and over social media, all of it.
That freedom I’m so proud of. I’m proud that I can walk through my life living the life I genuinely want to live because I’ve put in the work. I’ve overcome my internal obstacles to have an inside that can be reflected on the outside and I can be proud of.
This is my mission in life is to have my life be an example of what’s possible, to show that we can do hard things and we can create amazing results in our lives.
One of the results that I’ve created on this day is a podcast that’s very highly rated with 400 episodes. Good job, Brooke Castillo, I’m proud of you. Thank you everyone for being a part of this journey with me. And here’s to 400 more. Have a good week everybody.
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.
