You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 343.
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. How are you today? I’m so good; so, so good. I’m back in Austin. The weather is so incredible here. I have been making so many friends. All my friends that I’ve had for a long time don’t even recognize me anymore because I’m so social now.
I’m going to all the events, seeing all the people, making all the new friends, asking people for their phone numbers and asking if they want to be my friend. It is so much fun. I have met so many cool people, established so many new relationships in this city. And I’m just having the time of my life.
I have so many things I want to share with you about what’s going on for me personally. And I’m going to be sharing that over the next couple of podcasts. And it’s exciting because what I usually do is, I create content based on my personal journey.
So, when I go through something, I learn through that process and then I create products for you all to benefit from my learning and what I did. And there is no exception here. What I am going through in my life, from the mid-life crisis that I’ve had, which is a beautiful thing, the identity crisis, which I always encourage my clients to release old identities and embrace new ones. That’s been happening for me. I want to share that process with you.
I want to share what it’s been like for me to kind of reestablish myself as a single person with no kids at home and wanting to establish a new sense of community and friendships and what that’s been like. And then, of course, my whole dating life.
My staff told me I should start a podcast called Brooke on Bumble. Because we are having some epic adventures over here, folks. So, we will not be doing that. We will not be creating that podcast. But I will be sharing a lot of the personal work that I have been doing on myself in terms of relationship.
And I’ll be sharing with you a program that I’m going to be creating where I’ll be doing some personal coaching on relationships and sharing my personal experience of what I’ve been going through. So, I’m looking forward to all of that coming up soon.
Now, this podcast today is a podcast on asking the question, answering the question, “Do you know how to be yourself?” Do you know what it is like to truly be you?
Now, the podcast I did last week was on desires and I feel like understanding your own personal desires, knowing that you want is one of the most important steps to honoring your relationship with yourself and being authentic in that relationship with yourself so you can be guided by authentic and true feelings of worthiness and moving towards understanding that with yourself.
You’ve heard me talk a lot about getting to the point where you understand that it’s not better there than here and that you’re not going to be more of yourself when you arrive at a certain place and you’re not going to love yourself more when you arrive at a certain place. But it does make it easier to love yourself when you are being yourself.
If you are lying about who you are, it is very challenging to love a lie. And you know when you’re lying. So, if you want to feel that intimacy with yourself, that connection with yourself, to have that loving relationship with yourself, you must be yourself first.
And so, then the question becomes, how do we be ourselves? How do we find out what it’s like to be truly us? When you’re asked the question, “Do you know who you are?” do you know the answer? Do you know who you are? Are you being her? Are you being him? Are you in that space of being yourself?
One of the indicators of being yourself is there’s no restriction to how you show up. There’s no second guessing. There’s no questioning. There is simply just being and telling the truth to yourself and to others about who you are with very little regard of whether someone’s going to like you or not.
Now, remember my whole concept about peaches, right? It’s not my concept. I actually saw this on a Pinterest post and it’s changed my life. If someone doesn’t like peaches, we don’t blame the peach. We don’t even blame the person for not liking the peach. We just accept that some people don’t like peaches.
It doesn’t matter how juicy the peach is. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the peach is. It doesn’t matter how plump it is. It doesn’t matter how ripe it is. That person just doesn’t like peaches. There’s nothing that peach can do to make that person like it.
And the peach is not upset that somebody doesn’t like it for being a peach. The peach doesn’t try to become an apple so more people will like it. Peach just is what it is. Peach just shows up and says, “I’m a peach. And if you don’t like me, I’m still going to be the best peach I can be.”
So, are you being your full expression of you as your own peach? And are you walking through the world saying, “I’m a peach,” and not being offended if someone doesn’t pay attention to you or if someone doesn’t hire you, someone doesn’t want to date you or marry you or be in your space?
When you make that decision to be your full self, to be the peach that you are, then you get to love yourself on a much deeper level. You get to understand yourself on a much deeper level. But your intimacy with yourself, the love for yourself will perpetuate within you.
So, first, the peach has to get to know itself and understand what it means to be a peach. And it has to look at itself and say, “Am I trying to be an apple? Have I been trying to be an apple?”
How many of you are peaches trying to be apples? Because apples are better, just look in the magazines. People like apples better. They’re more common. They’re used in more metaphors. They’re used in more texts. They must be better, so I’m going to try and be an apple.
Come on, you guys, how many of you are doing that? Your best friend is an apple and you think, “Ah, that’s what I need to be.” Or the person you admire is an apple, or your mother thought you should have been an apple, so you’re trying to be the best apple.
Listen, if you’re a peach, you are never going to be a good apple. You’re always going to suck at being an apple. And then, you’re going to blame yourself for not being a good apple. How messed up is that, y’all? You’re going to spend your life being mad that you’re not a good apple, you miss out on being a peach.
So, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to find out what it means to be ourselves. I’m going to take you through some exercises that you can do, some questions you can ask to understand who you really are and what it means to be you.
So, the first thing I want you to do is I want you to think about the people who you think really know you the most. What have you shown them that makes them know you the most? What have you shown them that you don’t show other people? What have they seen that you don’t show other people?
That’s a really good first place to start, to look at the parts of you that make you feel known, “This person really gets me because they know this.” That is who you are. That is your authentic being. That is your peachness. The truth about you. What people know about you, what you show people that you may not show other people is your truest.
Because when you go out to the other people, those people that you’re trying to make an impression on, you might be trying to show up as an apple. We don’t care about any of that. That’s not going to help you get to know yourself. Who you’re pretending to be is irrelevant. The appleness of the peach is irrelevant. We want to only know the peachness of the peach.
So, the second question is, do you understand your full 50-50? Now, remember the concept of 50-50; life sucks half the time and is amazing half of the time. There’s that balance between positive and negative. It is one of the concepts that I teach that has helped me live my life in so much peace, that I don’t try to fight the negative. I don’t try to fight against the negative emotion.
So, there is that 50% part of me that feels, quote unquote negative, that shows up in a way that isn’t peachy. I apologize. I apologize. It just came to me.
Okay, so it’s kind of like – a lot of people call it the shadow, your shadow side, the part of you that maybe you have shame about or isn’t polite or doesn’t show up in a way that is socially acceptable or has opinions about things that other people don’t approve of, or maybe you lose your temper or you have addictions, those things. Like, all of those things that are part of you, part of your experience, part of your life, the truth about who you are that you maybe haven’t embraced yet.
So, truly being yourself means also embracing the part of you that you would prefer to hide. Maybe it’s a part of your body. Maybe it’s part of your experience or a part of your history or thoughts and feelings. It can be anything that represents that negative 50-50 side of you. You need to bring that up and have a look at it and stop judging it because you can’t fully embrace who you are if you don’t see that part of you.
The third question is, do you know what you most love and desire? And are you willing to honor that? I’ve had so many experiences lately, like such intense experiences of gratitude that have been so overwhelming that I just sob in gratitude. I cry in gratitude.
So much of the gratitude is for myself. I’ve always wanted a ring that was a pink diamond. And I’ve been looking for pink diamonds to buy. And I hadn’t been able to find one. But I went to a fine jewelry store and found the most beautiful pink stone that wasn’t a diamond but it looked like a diamond. And it was in a beautiful ring setting that had lots of diamonds around it.
And I bought it for myself. And I gave it to myself. This sounds so corny. But I did this process. I gave it to myself and I said, “I love you, Brooke Castillo. Thank you for being so courageous.”
I have a relationship with my past self and my future self and my present self. It’s kind of the trifecta of a relationship. You’ve heard me talk about how thankful and grateful I am to my past self because she certainly hooked me up for my present self.
And I have so much love for my future self that I’m hooking her up now. I’m taking care of business now so my future self will benefit later. And so, we all trust each other. We all have such a beautiful relationship with each other. And I think in so much as you love your past self, can you love your future self, can you develop that relationship.
And so, I really have struggled through my life to honor my true desires and to honor them in a way that may upset or hurt other people because I’m such a people pleaser. I’m such a liar when it comes to people pleasing and trying to make other people happy.
And so, some of the decisions that I’ve made have required me to not please other people. And it was really challenging for me. And in doing it, I have really honored myself and I have really stepped into being who I really am at the next level.
And so, I bought myself this ring and I gave it to myself in a way that I was kind of in ceremony. I told myself, “I love you, Brooke Castillo. This ring is for you because I love you so much for having the courage to follow your dreams and your desires and to be who you are. You haven’t let us down,” is what I say to myself.
And I know I sound schizophrenic and like I have multiple personality disorder. I get it. But I don’t care because my relationship with myself is so solid and so strong that it matters only to me what I think about my decisions for myself. And that is not narcissistic at all. That is true genuine love for myself. And not at the expense of anyone else, because I do it with love and care and truth.
So, do you know what your true honest desires are and are you honoring them for you? Or are you selling yourself out and not being your true self? Are you trying to be something that you’re not for someone else?
Because listen, you will know and you will be pissed about it. You will be pissed at yourself for yourself selling yourself out. I did it for a long time my friends. I’ve done it many, many times, in small situations with strangers and in big situations with my family of origin. I’ve done it all. And I just don’t want to do it anymore.
I almost said I didn’t do it anymore, but I still do. I catch myself doing it. But I really try not to because I try to listen, “Brooke, what do you really want?” Because you know what? When I ask myself that question, I know that I am a good, generous, caring, giving person. So, when I ask myself my own opinion, I can trust what I say will be from a beautiful heart-filled place because I have developed that and honored that within myself.
So, I want to encourage each of you to develop a relationship with yourself where you can ask yourself for your own opinion and trust and respect the answer. You know you’re not going to let yourself down. You know you’re not going to sell yourself out.
The fourth piece is more simplistic but equally as important. Do you know how to dress your authentic self? Are you dressing in a way that represents yourself? Are you just throwing on sweats and a t-shirt and calling that your authentic self? Are you being thoughtless about the clothes you wear and saying that represents your authentic self?
Or have you really thought about, “What does it mean to me when I get dressed? What does the house I live in mean? The car I drive?” Is it trying to get other people to think a certain way, or is it for you?
One of my friends, Alex Hormozi is like – he’s like my bro. We’re so close and I always laugh because he and his wife are like my best friend. I say, like, my best friend as a couple. And it’s so great. The three of us go out to dinner all the time and, like, best-friend chat about all the things.
And one of the things he said to me, he was like, “I just love the way you dress up because I can tell that it’s just for you.” Like, I’ll be dressed up here by myself. Like, right now, I’m totally dressed up. I’m not talking to anyone today. I’m not being with anyone today. I don’t have any classes to teach today. But I’m looking at myself because I show up for me and I dress for me and I know what I like. I know how I want to feel.
I’m very fancy when I dress up. And that’s not to say you need to be fancy. You may not be a fancy peach. I’m a fancy peach. I just want it to be conscious. I just want you to listen to yourself. If you could dress any way that you wanted to, how would you dress? Have you thought about it? Is this how you want to show up? And if the answer is yes, fantastic. If you want to change it, great. I just want it to be conscious for you.
The food you eat, are you feeding your authentic desires, your authentic self? Or are you feeding the false pleasures? The places you go, the places you live in, are they representing your authentic self?
Listen, this doesn’t take money. You don’t have to go change your house. You don’t have to move. Just look around you. Is there you there? Do you know who you are enough to know that your house represents you?
There’s a difference between having a really beautiful house and having it decorated and cleaned and all of that in order to impress other people. This is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about your house impresses you. It inspires you. It makes an impression on you when you see it. Not when anyone else sees it.
Does your job suit you? Does it feel like you? And I’m not talking about just paid jobs. I’m talking about the work you’re doing in the world. Are you being yourself in your job? Are you showing up as you? How do you know? Because it doesn’t feel forced. You don’t have to control it. You’re not trying to control anyone else’s opinions. You’re just being you, fully, truly.
The fifth thing that I want to say about this is so many people tell me they don’t know who they are. And I just want you to know that that statement will never serve you.
You know who you are on the deepest of levels. Now, you have been socialized and programmed to not pay attention to that, to not recognize that. But you do know who you are, deep down. You might have to wade through some BS, some false creations to control other people’s opinions. But you will find what’s true.
I remember, I had this moment. I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, but I think it’s appropriate here, where I just realized I didn’t like little kid birthday parties. I didn’t like social events with little kids and I had little kids.
And I was pretending to like them because I wanted to be a good mom and I wanted everyone to think I was a good mom and I wanted my kids to appreciate me and I just finally decided, the truth is, I just don’t like them.
So, instead of going and talking about how much I don’t like them, I’m just not going to go. And Chris was like, “I’ll take them. No problem.” It worked out great. But it was like that moment that, “Oh, this is what’s true.”
Ad I’ve talked also about looking at flowers and trying to decide what flowers I wanted to buy if I was the only one going to see them. I’m the only one that’s going to see the flowers in my apartment. What flowers do I want? These are just for me.
And this is a practice that I’ve actually done unto this day. I always have fresh flowers in my house, even if no one’s coming by. It’s just me looking at my own beautiful flowers. I have the most beautiful bouquet right now on my desk that I will be the only one to see. And that’s enough because it’s for me and it’s what I want.
Okay, so number five is don’t tell yourself that you don’t know. You do know. You have a deep knowing. You just have to uncover it. You have to wade through all of the garbage and programming in the way.
So, here are some suggestions of things you can do to help you get to know yourself better. Spend time alone with yourself and listen. Stop talking to yourself and start listening to yourself. Notice what you’re drawn to and why. Ask yourself, if you lived alone, if you lived on the planet alone, what are your personal preferences? What would you want just for your essence, just for who you are? What would you want? What would you do? What would you be attracted to?
The second one is meet new people. Every time you meet a new person, you kind of get to reinvent yourself. You get to present and show them and talk about new things, specific things.
I told Conor when he was going to college, I said, “It’s so cool. You can go and be whatever guy you want to be. You can show up differently than how all your friends see you now. You can just be that guy that’s always doing this thing or that thing.
I feel like I’ve done this a lot in establishing my new friendships here in Austin. I’ve shown up so differently than I have in the past in terms of making friends. I’ve reinvented myself to be exactly who I want to be with no people pleasing. It’s so awesome.
So, meeting new people and showing up as you truly want to show up will help you become more of who you are and to recognize it and to know what it’s like to be truly you in a relationship.
The third piece here is ask yourself, why are you the way you are? Why do you have certain people in your life? Why do you have the job you have? Why do you dress the way you dress? Why do you have the car you have? Why do you have all of it?
Ask yourself, how are you running? Are you following your heart and your true desires and moving towards your north star? Or have you been an actor in someone else’s play? Have you been an apple when you really are a peach?
And if you find out the answer is yes, I don’t want you to go changing your whole life. You don’t need to do that. You just need to tell yourself the truth. And changes will come from that organic slow loving process place.
And the last piece of this is the truth that you get to decide who you want to be in this world. Your worthiness cannot change. It cannot get more. You can’t find more worthiness. You can’t be more of you. You’ve always just been 100%.
You may not be recognizing it. You may not be showing up for it. But it has always been at the same level. Your whole life, your worthiness has been. Who you are is already complete. It is already intact. It is already perfect. You just haven’t noticed. You haven’t listened.
You haven’t paid attention to that specific imprint that is only you and honored it with the truth, honored it with action, honored it with showing the world that so you can see it reflected back.
The reason we’re on this planet is to play with who we really are in relation to the planet. The point is not to hide it away, to hide your spirit away, to hide that part of you away. The reason I think we’re here is to display it, to show it, to let it have an effect. And you won’t know the effect of you on the world if you’re lying to yourself about who you really are.
You’ll have some false impression of yourself because what you’ll see in the world won’t reflect back to you and you won’t feel the magic of what it means to show up authentically and be in a world that will display that to you, that will show you your power and your strength and your capacity.
When you’re an actor in someone else’s play, there’s no power there. There’s nothing primal, organic, amazing about it. When you think about a peach trying to be an apple, there is no expression of itself to be appreciated.
Who you really are isn’t about you. It’s about what created you. The way that I described it to a friend recently was like, “God gave me me to play. This is my gift to you; to be.” And I’m like, “Well, I feel like we could have done a little bit better on the thighs. Can we think about that? I feel like you maybe made a mistake on how this looks. I’m not sure how loud the laugh is. Can we work on that?”
That’s what we do. We negotiate with the gift that is our life. And then we judge it as not good enough. Can you imagine those of you, like whether it’s God or universe or spirit or just the experience of being alive. Can you imagine, you’re sitting down, you’re like, “I feel like you didn’t quite get this one right. This gift you gave me, I just don’t really like it. Thanks, but no thanks.”
How do I know that’s what we’re doing? I talk to you guys all the time. I’m coaching you all the time and that’s what I hear you say, “I’m not good enough.” And when we say that about ourselves, that’s what we’re saying to that which created us, “Your creation is not good enough. No thank you. No thank you, creator. Try again. I’d like a refund.”
But what if we were just in awe of the gift of being us, the opportunity, the honor, the privilege of being wo you are? Like, who you are, every part of it, your body, your mind, your parents, the whole experience of being you is a gift. And you’re either going to enjoy it or put it in the back of your closet and pretend it doesn’t exist and not enjoy it.
I want to suggest that you just accept it, receive it, and then be it. Because it’s the purpose of your life, to be who you are. And when you live into the purpose of being who you are, you recognize and delight in and enjoy your worthiness.
My really good friend Ryan and I went on a walk earlier this morning. And I asked him this question – I hope he doesn’t mind that I share this. I love you, Ryan.
I asked him, I said, “Hey, do you think I love you more than you love you?” Because I’m so in love with Ryan Moran as my friend. A lot of people think we’re dating. We’re not. We’re best friends. We’re not attracted to each other at all and we don’t take that personally from each other. It’s just not there. It’s just zero. But we are in love with each other as friends. We’re very close friends.
And I asked him, I said, you know – and he’s like, “I don’t like the question.” He’s hilarious. He’s like, “I don’t like the question, let’s move on.” And I said, “The only bummer for you is I get to delight in you more than you delight in you.”
And I told him, I said, “When you love me, we get to delight in me together. When I love you, you’re not onboard as much as I am.” I delight in my friend Ryan so much; everything about him is so amazing. And he misses a lot of himself because of what we do as humans, which is judge ourselves and think that we could be better.
And it’s just a choice. It’s just a decision to delight in all that is you, even the part that you think God got wrong. I’m pretty sure my ass shouldn’t be this big. Can we check with the creator and see about getting that fixed? I’m pretty sure my metabolism should have been faster. Was there some confusion when I was made, that maybe I should have been naturally thin and be able to eat whatever I want? No, nobody?
But what if you include all the 50-50? You include all the things and you’re like, “Yes, yes, yes, thank you for the gift of being me. I shall delight in what it means to be Brooke Castillo. I will be the full expression of this gift that is me that you have given me. And I will use this human experience to expand myself and evolve myself and give as much as I can to all the people that I love and to love them as much as is humanly possible.”
It’s a very selfish thing to do, when I love my friend Ryan, I feel amazing. I delight in the person that he is so much. But I had to do that for myself first, right? Listen, if I can love me, I can love anybody because the amount of self-loathing and hate I used to have for myself, for me to overcome that, to love myself as much as I do, people think that’s selfish and so self-involved. No, it’s not.
Because when I love myself this much, all I do is go out and love myself. I love you all. All of you podcast listeners, all of the people that come up to me in the street, all of the people that take my classes, become certified through me, all of my friends, my employees, my suppliers, everyone, I have so much love to give them because I have focused first on the skill of loving myself.
It’s the opposite of being self-involved. Being self-involved means you negate the gift that is you and you’re constantly obsessing about how you and everyone else aren’t good enough, or the false self-esteem where you think you’re better than everybody else. That is not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about embracing the gift that is your life and fully embodying it and loving it and then being able to share that love with everybody else, the people close to you.
Do you know how to be yourself? If the answer is no, you should make it your number one priority to figure it out. Being yourself is the most important thing you'll ever do. Have a beautiful week, everyone. I'll talk to you soon.
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