You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 341.
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. I’m excited about today’s topic; desire. I have talked a lot about desire in the past in many different ways. But I’m going to try and pull the whole concept together into one podcast so we can kind of evaluate it from all the different angles.
First, I want to tell you that, from my perception, our desires are very, very important. Our desires are the map to follow to our best life. Paying attention to what we truly desire is a very good practice. It’s a very good hobby. It’s a very great thing to do.
The issue with it is that often, what we think are our truest desires, often what we think we want is convoluted by societal expectations and family member expectations and programing. So, it’s not a simple practice to simply ask yourself what you want and listen for the first answer. Because often, that first answer is that false desire.
So, I want to review some terminology before we get started that I documented and created based on the work that I have done that I think will be useful for many of you. Desire, I put it in the F-line. It’s an emotion. It’s something that you feel. It’s that longing. It’s that awakening for more for something.
A lot of times, when I’ve read the philosophies that I really enjoy, the Eastern philosophies, Zen, a lot of what they talk about there is the desire that causes pain, the desire to be anywhere other than where you are, to have anything other than what you have, to be attached to something.
And I think this is a very valid argument, but I want to make sure it’s not used against desire inappropriately. False desires and desiring from lack are two of the most common forms of suffering. To believe that there is a somewhere other than here that is better, to believe that there is a person that is you, that is more whole and complete and worthy than you are right now is suffering.
And to want something that makes you less of you through buffering, those false desires, will cause suffering. But true desire, desire that we find in the F-line that is generated from conscious thinking and conscious awareness towards a life that evolves us, towards a life that makes us bigger, towards a life that creates the potential that is us and manifest it, that is one of the most important things we can focus on.
So, we have to be able to distinguish between the two so that we know that we’re moving in the right direction. So, testing your life by your desires is one of the most beautiful ways to move forward.
So, the terminology that I want to talk about is, first, let’s talk about false desire. False desire is the desire for something that will alter your emotional state. So, a false desire is – the example I’ve used the most of, that I’ve talked the most about was my false desire for alcohol. And before that, it was food.
And I know that many of you can relate to this in terms of food and alcohol and porn and social media. Any of those desires that feel compulsive, any of those desires that, when you satisfy them, make your life worse, those are false desires.
Those are tricks of the mind, tricks of your neurochemicals making you think that somehow you are giving yourself pleasure and that you’re moving in the right direction. But really, it’s just your primal programing that has been misaligned now that we’re in a different culture that provides for those things so abundantly.
The way that you know if your desire is one worth acknowledging and pursuing is you play it all the way out into the future, “If I pursue this desire, if I satisfy this desire, will I be more of who I want to be afterward? Is this desire, which is a feeling which generates fuel towards action, is this desire going to lead to the action and the result that I want?” It really is as simple as that.
So, when you feel a desire for cookies or a desire for sex in a way that feels compulsive or a desire for alcohol or drugs or social media, any of the social media activities, videogames, whatever it is for you, when you play it all the way out, does it enhance you and make you more of who you want to be? If the answer is no, that is a false desire. That is a desire error. It’s well-intended. It’s literally from your primal programing to help you survive. But it will not serve you.
One of the ways – and we talk a lot about this in the work that we do in Scholars, one of the ways that we manage and overcome our false desires is by allowing them to be there, not trying to get rid of them, not trying to punish ourselves for having them, not trying to discard them or ignore them or repress them, but by allowing them to be there and understanding them.
When you can be present with false desires without acting on them, you develop a discipline. You develop a connection with yourself that puts you in the power of your own life.
So, if you are someone with false desires, I want to encourage you to utilize the experience of those false desires to make yourself stronger and more connected. There is nothing wrong with you if you have false desires. It simply means that your brain is wired correctly for survival. And you can understand that and you can overcome that.
My desire for alcohol was so intense. I have so many vivid memories of just wanting it. Like, it felt like I loved it. it felt like I just loved a glass of chardonnay. I just really enjoyed it.
And I couldn’t imagine not wanting it. I couldn’t imagine living in a world without alcohol. I know it sounds crazy to those of you who don’t drink. But to those of us who do and to those of us who have gotten hooked into false desires, you can relate to this. A life without candy, a life without pie, a life without cakes seems impossible.
And to me, I remember sitting on the floor of my bathroom and just saying, “I want to not want this.” My desire was to lose my false desire. I knew that that false desire was robbing me of my truest desire. And here’s how that works. When you’re living a life that isn’t your highest desire, it’s actually painful. It’s frustrating. It’s stagnating.
And in order to tolerate it, many of us give into false desires to tolerate our undesirable life. We replace our true desire with our false desires. But when we learn how to allow for those false desires, and therefore let them go, what we are left with is back to our undesirable life.
It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with that life. It’s just not what we truly most desire. And when we’re left with that undesirable life and no false desires, the desire starts to bloom again for the life that we do want.
Instead of utilizing all of our desire for falseness, we start desiring more. We start desiring true desire, our truest desires, our truest wants. And that provides that guide to where we can go.
When people say to me, “I don’t know why I want. I don’t know where to go,” I know it’s because they have too many false desires. When you remove your false desires, you will be left with an aching, a longing. We, as humans, are designed to ache for more.
And I’m not talking about aching for more from a place of not-enoughness. But I’m talking about aching for more from a place of expansion, from a place of growth, from a place of seeing how we can fill the space of our lives with ourselves, to be the fullest expression of who we can possibly be. It is the sweetest most amazing aching longing for more of us, for more goodness, for more accomplishment, for more expression.
So, the first step with desire is to get rid of the false desires, to notice where you’re desiring things that don’t serve you, and to allow for them to be there, but also, don’t let them rob you of your true desires.
What many of you will notice when you start doing this work, what many of you have already noticed and talked to me about and what I noticed when I went through this work is that when I removed my false desires – and they came off in layers, right? So, I went first, I removed the desire for food, for overeating. And then I removed the desire for alcohol.
And as I removed those desires, what I found was dormant desires; desires that had been there, that were there, aching to be heard that were no longer dormant. They woke up. When I allowed space for there to be a vacuum, when I allowed space for there to be space, that genuine desire became known to me.
When I quit drinking, my desire to build my business the way that I’ve built it bloomed. All of that desire. Now, here’s what happened. This is how the process looked if you were watching it from the inside or the outside.
I started allowing for false desire, which was excruciatingly painful because what happened was, I was feeling desire for things that I was not fulfilling. So, I was desiring alcohol, I was desiring food, I was desiring all of the things that I thought would make me feel better, but I wasn’t acting on them. So, it created this very painful space for a temporary moment. An emptiness where there was no genuine desire.
But once I was able to release that false desire, the new desires, the true desires, the dormant desires woke up and fueled me with a power, with an energy, with a motivation that I had never experienced before. The same motivation and energy that I was putting into going to the bar and getting a glass of wine, that powerful pull, was now put into something much more important, much more useful, much more expansive for me.
And with all that energy and all that motivation, I was able to create at a level and a pace that I had never been able to do before. I spent time acknowledging and finding and honing and listening to my true desire. What did I really want?
And for me, that has been the answer to creating my life as it is. So, for me, I wanted to create a business that was fun. That was nonnegotiable. It wasn’t about money at the expense of fun. It was, “Everybody needs to be having fun or we’re not doing it. It doesn’t matter how much money it pays. If it’s not fun, we’re not doing it.”
I had to be able to have balance and space in my life, or I wasn’t doing it. I had to be able to be an example of what is possible, to show, when you manage your mind, what you can do with your life. It had to be life-giving to me and every customer that came in contact with me, to my employees, to everyone around me, or I wasn’t doing it. That was the genuine desire.
The desire for money was a desire for expression. How can we play this game of life and show how extraordinary it can be when you manage your mind? Never at the expense of myself and what I really wanted.
So many of my students come to me and they tell me that they want something, but I can tell it’s a false desire. They want to do it because they don’t feel good enough and they think having money will make them feel better about themselves. They want to do it because they feel inadequate or scarce. And you can’t be driven by false desire and get a good result. You have to be driven by the truest desire.
And I want to tell you how it feels different, it feels so different, it feels peaceful. There is no rush. There is no hurry. There is no anxiety. It is a peaceful unfolding. It is a desire that you enjoy being fueled by so much that you don’t need to get to the end point quicker because the process is so fun.
So many of you have dormant desires, desires inside of you that you don’t even know that you have. You don’t even know that they’re creating that longing, that expression, that unique offer to acknowledge and live into. You can’t hear you because you’re not paying attention.
True dormant desires do not sound like comfort. In fact, they’re very inconvenient, these desires. They require you to be uncomfortable, to grow, to expand.
And when you understand the concept of the 50-50, that you’re going to be uncomfortable anyway whether you’re growing or not, you start to realize that you’d rather be uncomfortable in a way that moves you forward. You’d rather be uncomfortable in a flowing stream versus a stagnant one. And so, you keep saying yes to all of your desires, to the desires that are dormant, to the desires that maybe you’re afraid to see or show anybody else.
For me, this has been an explosion of desire, for me to acknowledge what I want in my life, to acknowledge what I want for this season in my life. One of the examples that I’ll give you is I decided that I wanted to have more friends, more in-person friends. I wanted to build a family of in-person friends.
I have so many beautiful, wonderful friends virtually all over the world. But I wanted some friends that I could touch and be with and laugh energy-wise with. And as an introvert, I’m not very skilled at this, at meeting new people. I’m not really skilled at going out there and making friends.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people about how to do this. It’s very uncomfortable for me to be in the world in that way. It wasn’t something that I had done. And so, I started doing it in a very intentional way. I started honoring that desire in a very intentional way.
And what that looked like was asking women for their phone number. Asking them if they wanted to be my friend. I recently sent a text to a woman that I had met and I asked her if she wanted to pursue a friendship with me. That’s a risk, right? That’s my desire. It was showing it to her in a very vulnerable way.
And she could have said no. She could have said, “This is weird.” She could have responded like that. And instead, all I received is yes, yes, yes. I’ve had the most magnificent falling-in friendships, falling in love in my friendships, in my new friendships. It’s been such a powerful compounding experience over these past several months to meet new people and literally fall in love with them, to fall in love with the women and the friends that they are and to claim them as my soul sisters. It’s nourishing.
By acknowledging that desire and not ignoring it and acting on it, I have created and expanded my life in a way that I didn’t even know I could do.
My friends that I’ve been friends with for a long time are like, “Who are you? You’re going to parties. You’re going out with people. You’re meeting people for lunch. What is happening?” And I love it. I feel alive with that desire; so alive. And that was a dormant desire for me. That was a desire that had been dormant as I focused on other things.
So, what are your dormant desires? When you get rid of all your false desires and you stop giving in to those and you really start to listen to yourself, what is it that you most want? When no one else is looking, when no one else has an opinion, what is it that you want for you in your life and are you willing to generate and allow for the desire that is there to fuel you into taking action?
A lot of people get stuck. A lot of people feel limited by the world. And I think that is because we haven’t opened to the energy that will flow through us when we acknowledge our true desire.
Many of you have heard me talk about manufacturing desire, creating desire as one of the most powerful emotions. As you know, in my teaching, I teach that we can create emotion by changing our thoughts. If we are wanting an emotion that we’re not currently having, we can generate it. We can manufacture it by believing new things and thinking new things and practicing new thoughts.
But I want to distinguish between these two things. I want to distinguish between generating desire, manufacturing desire, and allowing for desire that’s there. It’s an important distinction because one is much more powerful than the other.
When you allow desire that is already there, it’s almost like, for me, what it feels like is I open up to a portal of energy that isn’t my own. It’s an energy that flows through me and with me and into me because I’ve simply opened the door to it.
Desire is so strong that it keeps me up at night. It keeps me thinking about it. It keeps me working through the problem and overcoming the resistance and overcoming all the obstacles to create and manifest that true desire.
Now, often, I can’t access that portal. I allow for and want and feel that desire. But sometimes, my awareness isn’t there or I can’t get all the obstacles out of the way in order to allow it. I do not judge myself for this. I do not get mad about this.
And instead, what I do is I manufacture desire. I create desire with my mind because that is the fuel that I want to use to create the positive results in my life. And the way that we do that is by living into and from our future. What would our mind be thinking? What would we be believing if we already had accomplished this, if we already were the fulfilment of the desire that we want?
And that desire that we create, that we manufacture, can give us any result we want. If there is something that you want in your life that you’re struggling with, you can work on your mind to crate fuel for yourself.
If you’re writing a book and the last thing you want to do, the last thing you desire is writing, you can manufacture that desire. You can manufacture that energy. And by having both of these options, allowing it and getting access to the portal and being able to manufacture desire, you have the only two tools you need to be able to create the life of your true desired dreams.
There will be moments where you have access, you have inspiration, you have a flood of love and desire coming through you that everything will feel completely effortless, that you will feel like time doesn’t exist, that you can create things and say things and generate ideas and get work done in a way that makes no sense in this physical world.
But unfortunately, many of us use that experience against ourselves when we don’t have it. and what I want to offer is, when that comes, you ride that wave. You feel into that. You pursue that with all your heart. You allow for it. You access the portal. Nothing else is more important.
But when you don’t have that, you get to work and generate that desire yourself. You work for your desires when they’re not flowing naturally. You go to work for yourself because you’re worth it, because your desires are worth it, because they matter, because they’re important.
And when you feel that tug to go to the false desire, when you feel that tug to give into the compulsion and abandon your true desires, stay aware. Notice. Choose. Make a decision consciously. No mater what, don’t best yourself up. No matter what, don’t make yourself wrong or unworthy. But get better at finding that moment where you can redirect your energy back to what is true, to the deepest truest desire that is you. That is what’s inside of you.
We can use our desires to create. When someone asks you why you’re creating something, the appropriate answer is, “Because I want to.” Why are you building this business? “Because I want to.” Why are you friends with this person? “Because I want to be.” And feel that want. Feel that desire in the deepest way you know how.
One of the most powerful things you can do to practice desire, to practice the energy of desire is by wanting what you already have. This is a very different energy than gratitude. Gratitude is a beautiful thing. Gratitude gets us in the energy of, “I am thankful for what is, for what I have, amen.”
Wanting what you have will stir more desire. There will be no period. You want it, you want what you have, and you want more. It’s an energy that builds upon itself. “I love this. I want it. And I want more. I love this. I want this. And I want more.”
I know for sure, if I get more, I will not be happier. I will not be better. I will not be more worthy. I know that is true and yet, I still want to grow. I still want to go. I still want to have momentum, just because it’s fun. It’s the most fun.
When I look out into my world, I want to see what I feel. I feel a hugeness. I feel abundance of emotion. And I know that I am a match to that in the world. Can I manifest it and attract it and produce it in a way that other people can see and be inspired by?
That is the purpose of my life, to not just be content, to not just be appreciative, to not just be loved, but to create it visibly. To be it and to create it. To be able to point to it. When you generate this emotion, this feeling, this energy, this vibration, the action of creating it becomes inevitable. That’s what I want to teach and that’s what I want to show. That’s what I want to invite you to do.
Think about yourself as a treasure trove of desire; your desire. You can’t be flooded with desire from source. You can’t be flooded with the energy of source for someone else’s desire. It doesn’t work. So, if you are living your life constantly manufacturing desire based on what you think someone else wants you to do, namely your mother or your father so they’ll approve of you, you will be exhausted. You will be in the hustle energy.
But when you tap into what’s true just for you, your true desire, your treasure map of where you’re meant to go, inevitably you will tap into that energy that created that desire. And it will be a flood of energy like maybe you’ve never known. And it will allow you to be courageous and strong and resilient and it will allow you to have more fun than maybe you’ve ever had. It is a wild ride when you tap in.
So many people talk to me about how I show up at the Life Coach School as a teacher. It’s a crazy combination of tactics and math and business and strategy that’s in my A-line. But the true source, the true magic is always in the F-line, always the feelings.
You can have a very big result. But if your F-line isn’t right, you won’t even get to experience the magic of what you’ve just done. If you want to know that you’re doing it right, learn what it feels like to have true desire. Open yourself up to that and feel the flood of energy that comes from it. I want that for each and every one of you.
One of the ways that I help or I try to help many of you generate that is showing it to you, showing it manifested. When I get a student on the phone and they say to me, “I just love you.” What I want to tell them is, “You love the possibility that is you that you see reflected in me. You see me living out my desire and that is what you long for. Don’t mistaken that for me as a person, you loving me as a person. You love the possibility that is you. You see that through my work. You see that through my manifestation.”
And the way to fully realize that, to have it requited really, to have it come full-circle for you is for you to do that as well. That is my deepest wish. Not just for myself, but truly for everyone who comes into contact with me and everyone they come in contact with.
It sounds so cliché that we can change the world, but we really genuinely can, when we acknowledge how important it is to be aware of what’s important to us. I love each and every one of you. Have a gorgeous week. I’ll talk to you next week.
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