Hi there. Before we get started today, I wanted to make a quick announcement to my Scholars and to anyone else who wants to join Scholars. I have changed the topic that I had regularly planned for April to a topic called Complete Mind Mastery During a Crisis. I want to use this time as a deep dive into mind management and no other time has it been more important to manage our minds and use the Model.
We are going to be the examples to everyone around us, we must lead. We must show the way, we can do this. Game time. In the spirit of mastery and complete commitment to each of you managing your minds through this crisis, I'm going to be coaching and teaching three days a week in scholars and it is my goal to fill your brain with ideas that serve you. And we'll learn how to use the challenges that we're currently being faced to make you stronger.
I'm going to be teaching a live class on the topic and covering the following. I'm going to talk about circumstances versus drama. I'm going to talk about corona brain because a lot of us have it. I'm going to talk to you about leading change, mastering uncertainty, business worries, money worries. And May will most likely be another round of acute coaching on a similar topic because I think we're going to be at this for the next couple of months and I want to make sure that your minds come out of it stronger.
I will also address how to reduce buffering. Some of you are trying to use food or buffering to get through this. I want to show you that there is a different way and this is a perfect opportunity to implement it. So I want to invite you to join scholars if you aren't already a member, if you are a member, I want to really encourage you to show up to the classes live. I want to encourage you to schedule your one-to-one coaching sessions.
We need to have enough mind inspection by other people so we know how to separate our facts from our thoughts. So I really want you to be utilizing those. We're at home, we're working on our brains. Let do this. All right, here we go.
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 have fun things for you today. I have serious things for you today. Let's go. First thing I want to tell you is that we were built for this. This has been my thought, for me personally, for us life coaches. If life was a sport, this is our Superbowl. This is what we trained for, neutral circumstances and thought management. Game on. Ready, go.
Just watching some sports documentaries and I'm so inspired by the training that goes into playing sports at that highest level. And I feel like for the past decades I have been studying the mind to practicing the mind and working on the mind and there is no better time for me to get out on that field and work as hard as I can in this game called life and offer as much help as I can. I was built for this, but also so are you, even if you're not a life coach.
My girlfriend Chris is obsessed with the show Outlander and she's been trying to get me to watch it and I don't normally like period pieces. It takes place in the 18th century Scotland. I usually don't like anything that isn't real, there's some fantasy stuff going on in the show. But I want to tell you how crazy it was for them to live then, in the 1700s. Holy craziness. The way that our ancestors lived way back, they were some tough mothers. Literally.
We're freaked out if we don't have toilet paper, right? We're freaked out about it. Humans can handle life without it, humans can handle life without a stock market. Humans can handle life without a job. How do I know this? That is what we have evolved from. We come from humans that lived that way, that used their brains to create this life we have now. So we're not only going to make it, we are made for this way beyond anything that we're going to experience in the next three months, we have been built for it. We have evolved for it.
Our brain is very aware and we are very capable of handling this. We were built for this and if we don't lose our minds, it's important to keep our minds, find our minds and not lose our minds. My goal as a life coach is to help everyone find their mind because in finding the mind we get all of our control back. I want to give you all a tip and I'm going to do it at the very end of this podcast and it's going to change your day, I promise. It's something I did yesterday and it was super fun and it's a text you can send out to your friends.
So I wish you were here to remind me to do that at the end and hopefully I will remember. If I don't, a pop up will remind me. What do I want to talk about first? So many ideas. So I want to tell you something that brought me a tremendous amount of certainty and I want you to know that certainty is just a feeling we create and we create it with our thoughts. The world doesn't create it for us, the stock market doesn't create it, jobs don't create it. People out there in the world don't create it.
We create certainty in our own mind by what we think. And I was listening to a podcast that was reviewing all the pandemics that we've had in the history of the world. And it was oddly comforting to hear about how pandemics come and go and that they have about a three-month life cycle with a peak in the middle of them. So right now, people feel like, "I don't know what's going on. It's the end of the world." And you can think that and you can also think this is no big deal.
And I think either one of those feelings may serve some of you. But for me the thoughts that are serving me is a pandemic is a three-month thing and we're doing everything that we can to reduce the spread of it, to take care of the relatively small percentage of people that die from this. And yes, there's a lot of unknowns, but I like to think about like we are some bad asses. We are not just going about our business if you get it and die, well, tough luck.
We are looking out for each other in so many ways and that's how I choose to think about this. I also have been very interested in seeing what goes on in our economy and what goes on in people's minds when the economy changes. The stock market goes up and down. If you look at the history of the stock market, we have had lots of bull markets, lots of bear markets going up and going down. And sometimes they're super severe and sometimes they're more slow and gradual and we recover, the stock market recovers.
And when you look at the cause of what's going on here, I could get very reassured that there's nothing going on in terms of something that's affecting the creation of value right now. There's no shortage of value creation. Now we have to shut everything down in some ways. Some companies have to stop creating their value temporarily, but as soon as we're able to get back to value creation, it will boom again.
So all the money that people aren't spending right now, they'll be able to spend. All the businesses that shut down will be able to open back up after they weathered the storm. And so looking at life, you guys know that I look at life as 50/50. I look at it as 50% amazing and 50% awful, and we're on the other side of 50 for some of us. For some of us, this is where we dig in. We dig into that other part of life.
I want to talk about value though, because I think it's really important to understand even if you don't understand economics and you don't understand what's going on in the stock market and why it's falling, I want to be very clear that value is not determined and the production of value is not determined by what is happening out there. Unless you shut down because you're afraid, there's no reason why you can't produce value because value is produced in the brain.
Let's go back to the 18th century in Scotland. They didn't have a stock market yet, we created that with our brains, with our value, right? The value is coming from what we were thinking and what we were producing. So even though the effect is showing that the value of some of our stocks have gone down, the value of what we are producing doesn't need to go down. And in fact, that is the beauty of humans in crisis. That is the beauty of humans and problems.
We are evolved to solve problems, we are evolved to create solutions. The bigger the obstacle, the bigger the solution, the more problems, the more solutions we're going to create. So even though we're turning awful lot of things right now, we can turn on our brains in terms of value creation, in terms of ideas, in terms of production, in terms of helping people. One of the best things that you can do right now is to produce value. The kind of value that only you can produce, the kind of help that only you can offer.
If you are a life coach, that means all hands on deck right now. We are in real need of life coaches. Our school right now, we're hiring life coaches. We are coaching like crazy. We are starting a coach training. This is because we're an online business and because we're not affected by things being turned off, it is very important for us to keep creating value because we are able to. And in fact, we need to double down. We need to 10 times it. We need to go all the way for it. We need to clean up anything that has been getting in the way of us being able to produce value.
It is very good for you as a human to be productive and to produce value and to utilize any kind of energy or anxiety or frustration to churn that, to process that and then put it into an energy that will produce value. I'm so proud of so many of my coaches putting themselves out there and helping people and teaching them the model and showing them how to get ahold of their minds and we have so many coaches that are providing virtual classes for organizations that are freaking out.
If you are an organization that is having a hard time figuring out how to help your people, to manage your people, to talk to your employees, we are here for you. We will help you and we will help everybody calm down in your organization by helping them understand that there are facts and there are thoughts and the thoughts are the only things that really freak us out. And if we can manage those, because we can control those, we can't control what's going on in the world, we can calm down and we can turn this in to productivity.
My suggestion to you as a manager, if you're a CEO running a company, which I am, is that you encourage high level production. If you have virtual employees, even if you've sent employees home to work from home, you encourage them not to see this as a vacation, not to see this as a time to go away from production. I don't think that that is the answer here. I think we need to keep producing at the highest level, not from stress, not from panic, but from value creation, from wanting to create value.
I think it's times like this where your value can be increased. And I think it's such an interesting concept when I talk about this, people sometimes misinterpret. And so I want to be clear that your value is not the same as your worth. Your worth is already absolute, 100%, there's no increasing that. There's no decreasing that, that's an unnegotiable, that's done. But the value that you can create in your brain and produce in the world is variable. And so I feel like this can be a time for us to increase value.
So I was talking to one of my coaches who just got certified, so she just graduated from the first part of her six-month certification program and she's like, "I have so much more value to offer now that I've learned all these tools." And she goes, "And it's so amazing to be graduating right at this time where they're most needed and I can put them to use immediately." Right? And for some of you in the careers that you're in, maybe you're not a life coach, maybe you can become more valuable in, hey, how do companies handle recessions and layoffs and downsizing?
How can I help make sure that that is something that I can contribute to and contribute ideas to? And how have companies handled this in the past? And who do I want to be with this? And how can I help the people in my company and what can I do to offer help? We start going into our panic brain and we forget to ask other people, especially bosses and people above us that are responsible for maybe keeping the business alive, how they're doing.
We're so worried about how we're doing in our families, but how are they doing too. I think is important to ask, how's it going? How are you feeling? And to have those moments of conversation. Is there anything I can do to help? And listen, maybe I was in Starbucks or in the Starbucks drive through yesterday and the barista was telling me that it was eerie, right? Because they've closed down inside of Starbucks so you can't go in, which of course makes sense.
And he was just saying it's kind of eerie and I wanted to tell him, "Hey, what are your ideas here? How's your boss doing? How's your team doing? How can you contribute? What can you do?" Even if they close it all down and you guys go home, how can you connect and come up with ideas and what can you do to add value to the situation? Because every single person can, every single person could add value in their way. So your value is going to grow more based on what you've learned and what you create. And you can help in direct proportion to the value you create and contribute.
At this time more than ever, you need to be a creator and a contributor more than a consumer. We have too many consuming information, too much information is making the brains have too many thought. The brains are flipping and they're not able to function at their highest level when they're in fight or flight mode because they're consuming danger all day long. So I want to encourage you to switch that and to become a contributor and a creator.
How can you add more value? How can you help more people? How can you add more value into your brain? How can you become stronger and more skilled? Here's something I want to offer to you and I want you to offer this to every person you can. As humans, we are wired for survival, which means we are wired for short term vision. What are we going to do today? What are we going to do tomorrow? This is why people panic and sell all their stocks. This is why people panic and start hoarding toilet paper.
It's because the brain is trying to protect you. It's trying to take care of you. One of the best ways to get out of fight or flight and to get out of the panic mode that you're in is to have a long-term vision. For many of us, it just needs to be four months, right? The pandemic is going to peak in the middle of three months then it'll come back down and then we'll have... What will we be doing in four months?
When things get turned back on and people start going back to work where will you be in four months in terms of the value that you've created for yourself, how you've taken care of yourself, what you've done in your families, what you've done in your relationships? You could say that was one of the best things, was the best circumstance for me to be able to become more of who I am.
Listen, being who you are when the world isn't, what you want it to be, is the call, right? It is what we are built for. It's what we're called to do, is to not succumb to circumstances and our thoughts about them, but to rise above them and to connect with our highest selves. And that's our highest self spiritually, but it's also our highest selves in terms of our minds. What are you utilizing your mind to do right now?
Are you utilizing your mind to create and add value or are you using it to panic and freak out? And here's what I want to say. Let's give a nod to every single one of our ancestors that went before us that didn't just succumb. They didn't just give in to all of the pain of sleeping on rocks, of not having heaters and air conditioners and Starbucks. We freak out when they take our WIFI away, we lose our minds when we don't have WIFI. These guys didn't have cleanliness, they didn't even know what a germ was. So fascinating to watch.
In fact, it's not a bad show to watch if you wanted to get some perspective. Like what would it have been like to live like that and the violence and the famine and what they experienced and how they lived? And also, the beauty of it too, even though they didn't have WIFI, what they did have. The most involvement that we ever have is always going to come from obstacles. If we came to the planet and everything was perfect all the time, we wouldn't have to grow, we wouldn't have to evolve. Just lay around eating apples, right? Enjoying the sunshine and nature.
I mean, the obstacles are what make us evolve. This is how the planet has always been, how it's always going to be. And I think a lot of times we think the planet should be good and there shouldn't be disasters and they shouldn't be challenges and there shouldn't be viruses and there shouldn't be layoffs except that it's how it's always been and always has been that way, so we'll probably always should be that way because that's how it is. We can't argue with it and we make peace with that.
Then we go, "Okay, now what?" Kind of like this woman Claire in Outlander, she just got popped back into the 1700s and she was like, "Excuse me, where's my hotel room? What's happening? What's going on here?" And she could have either been like, "No, heck no. Where's my phone?" Or figure out your new normal and get to work, right? Be who you are in that circumstance that has now changed. I want to talk briefly about the people who have been freaking out about dying.
I have my coaches, some of my clients that have been afraid of getting the virus and dying. And I think it's important to remember that dying has always been on the table for all of us, every single day of our lives. And it's always been on the table for our kids and it's always been on the table for our elderly people. It's always been on the table. We just can't function if we're thinking about it all the time, right? If we wake up every morning and we think about that we could die today, which we could, all of us could every single day.
If we think about it all of the time, it would be very hard to function. If we thought that our children could die any day, which they could, it would be very hard to function. But yet so many of us are trying to function with those thoughts now because we're talking about the number of deaths and the number of people infected. It's front of mind. Even though it's always been there, people are dying every single day, right?
150000 people die every single day across the world. On a normal day, 150000 people according to the Googles, according to Wikipedia. So if we woke up every day and thought that 150000 people are going to die today, every day, we would not feel great if we made that mean something negative. Doctors are dealing with hundreds of deaths every day, right? Especially doctors that that is their job to be dealing with people who are in acute conditions or are dying, 150000 people.
So statistics can scare us if we make them mean something has changed. So I just want to remind us all that death has always been there. It's always been a possibility; we've just thought about it differently than we're thinking about it right now. And so it's very important for you to look at your thoughts about that. Look at your thoughts about illness and sickness and infection and make sure they're the thoughts you want to be thinking. 150000 people will die today, that's nonnegotiable. That's just the way of the world. That's what's going to happen.
There's a lot of ways that people can die. And so we have had to find a way to make peace with that so we can move on. We've had to find a way on some level to make peace that we could all die at any moment, right? And if we think about it in a way that panics us and we spend a lot of time thinking about it, we won't be able to function. So look at your thoughts. If you're really struggling, talk to someone about it that isn't thinking about it all the time.
Get a life coach that isn't panicking about this, that isn't freaking out about this and talk to them or a friend or just someone that you notice isn't having a hard time with it. Talk to them. What are your thoughts? And see if he can borrow some of their thoughts so you can move on. I want to talk little bit about money and how people tend to go to the extremes when it comes to money. Money's a very charged topic for us and it's very all or nothing and there's lots of scarcity around it.
And so just as much as I want you to look at your thoughts about dying, I also want to look at your thoughts about money and how the amount of money in the world hasn't changed. So here's a simplistic thought that I was thinking about. When you look at the stock market, it doesn't exist on its own, right? It exists with all of us. And the reason that the stock market goes down is because people sell their stocks and take cash out of the stock market.
So if I take money out of the stock market, it's not going to show up on the Dow, right? It's not going to be on there. The value is going to go down and it's all based on perception. But if I sell a stock, which I haven't, because I'm in for the long run, and I shouldn't say that I haven't because I have people managing that for me. But for me, I've always taken a long-term perspective and that's given me lots of peace so I don't react out of emotion.
But I just want to say the money that's coming out of the stock market, people selling that money is going into those people's bank accounts. It's a very simplistic way of thinking about it, but it's important for those of you who think that money has disappeared somehow, who think that money is just simply gone. And when you take a long-term vision, especially for your money, because you could look at your account and be like, "Well, it used to be here and now it's here. That money's gone forever."
Or you could say it's just a temporary downturn and that's what the stock market does. And I know that that's what can happen in the stock market and I'm willing to have a long-term vision for this and I believe in the ability of the stock market to come back and the years that it will take to come back is fine and I'm at peace with that and I'm going to go create some value now. If you sit and look at what is happening with your portfolio and you start making that mean lots of very scary things, you're going to have a very hard time producing value.
And yes, there's value in your bank account and there's value in your stocks, but there's way more value to be had in your brain. And you may not be able to create a lot of value in the stock market right now. Although let's be honest, these people who know how to bet on the stock market going down are so rich right now. I think, it's like shorting the market. I don't understand any of the stuff, so please don't even listen to me. But those people are making crazy amounts of money and it's important to think about them too because it's so easy to think about, everyone is really struggling.
The FedEx guy who said that he's making triple the amount of money that he's ever made. He's working triple as hard because of all the people at home that need their FedEx shipments. And so it's interesting to look at the other perspective for people that this is affecting in a different way too, right? So be careful with money and thoughts about money that seem like facts. Nobody's going to have any money.
This recession is going to be terrible for people's money. Nobody is going to be spending money, no one's going to be buying anything. It's simply not true. Lots and lots of people have lots and lots of money and they want to spend it. Spending money is what will keep the economy going. There are areas where we won't be able to spend it, right? We're not going to be able to go into Nordstrom and buy the thing that we would have bought anyway, but we will be able to go online and purchase things.
The value of the internet and the value of being able to still get what we need through the internet is magical in so many ways to me and looking at it that way. I want you to really think about where you can find it within you something that maybe you wouldn't have been able to find at any other time. I think these kinds of times give us an opportunity to look inside and to see what's there that maybe we wouldn't have taken the time to notice before.
What do you want? Maybe this is a great reset for you. What do you want in your life? What is the purpose of your life? Are you living it or is this a good opportunity for you to be like, "Let me think about this.”? What is my brain focusing on? What am I creating value for? What is the value that's going into my brain and is that what I want it to be? Shake off the thoughts that you're having that are scaring you. Sit down and make a plan.
How can you add value today? How can you create a life that is valuable? Think about a year from now, two years from now, write that vision. Spend a lot of time there in your mind. Spend time in your mind talking to your future self who is a couple of years ahead of you and is way past this. My future self says to me, "There's no need to hurry. There's no need to try to get to the spot where this isn't happening anymore. Relax." You were built for this. You were made for this.
It is your time, your time on earth as a human and this is one of the obstacles that you get to utilize in order to evolve. I almost forgot, but I didn't. I just remembered, here's my tip. Send a text to five of your friends and have the text say, tell me something awesome. I did this yesterday, sent five texts, tell me something awesome and then I anticipated awesomeness. I went into my Slack with my coaches and I said, tell me something awesome. I said just one sentence and people were having a hard time with one sentence.
They have a lot of awesomeness going on and so much of the awesomeness was just the experience of being human and being alive and blossoms in spring and so many of the awesome posts were because of what's going on in the world right now and the opportunities to be home with family and to be home with the kids and to be spending time that we hadn't anticipated with them and with each other. And for some people it was being away from work and for some people it's working twice as hard.
But send that text out to the people in your life because it will help you. It'd be so fun to get those back, but it's also super good for them to think about what is awesome and to shift their mind to that, which is awesome. I want to share what one of the replies was from one of my customer service managers and this is kind of a nod to all of my coaches and a nod to the model and to what is possible.
As you know, I had an event scheduled for last week that I had to cancel and a lot of people had already made it to Dallas before I canceled it, so they had flown in and they were in the hotel because I had to cancel it the day before. And some of them arrived to find out that it had been canceled and some of them came from very far away to be there, to be with me and to be with each other. And one of the women that had come is a woman that isn't a coach yet and she hasn't done the work yet, but she wanted to come to this event because we're starting next week.
Our next enrollment for life coaches, which by the way is our biggest enrollment yet. It's so interesting, isn't it? And so exciting, isn't it? That this is the time for life coaching. I've been doing this my whole life and the need for it is so clear now in so many ways, right? In the ways of what we have to offer and the ability to be flexible and the ability to work from home. All of it is just really becoming clear.
But this woman had already enrolled, but she had come to the event and the event was canceled and so she was looking around and there's all these other coaches. And she wrote us this letter, which first of all, this letter is so beautiful. It just is a reflection of this woman and who she is right now. And she sent this to us yesterday. This is where her mind is at and I love this letter for every single person who was at that event and had it canceled and for how you showed up.
“Hello, I'm joining coaching certification this month and now I'm doubly excited to do so. I am currently here in Plano, ready to fly home to California this afternoon. Before I leave the city, I want to express to you all that you should be so proud of with your coaches. I'm still somewhat of an outside observer as I'm not a coach yet, nor do I have any training in your program. But let me tell you what I noticed. I noticed coaches who were processing the disappointment and turning it into something wonderful.
I noticed coaches who stepped up to offer breakaway sessions for learning. I noticed women who were gathering together to discuss coaching businesses in ways that they would have never been able to do if they'd been sitting in a ballroom listening to presentations. I noticed and was a part of new friendships building and people reaching out to help each other with rides, flight arrangements, meals together and networking and contact building. I noticed an energetic exchange of ideas and a willingness to share information and a room full of love.
I did not notice complaining, speculation and gossip. This non-conference, this canceled conference was beautiful and I'm so grateful I was here and then it happened exactly the way it did. All of you should be so proud of what you're creating, it's magic. So holy crap. The whole time I'm reading that I was trying to hold it together. I never would have received that letter had we not been going through this. That's what creating value is.”
All of you, the woman that wrote this letter added value to my life and to every one of you who gets to hear it and to all my coaches. And my coaches created value by the way they showed up under a circumstance that certainly wasn't ideal. This is magic time if we let it be. Huge love to all of you, prayers to all of you and your family and to anyone who's sick. I'll talk to you guys 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.
