You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo episode 301.
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, welcome to 2020. It’s a brand-new decade, my friends, a brand-new clean slate out there in front of you. It doesn’t matter what happened yesterday, because you know, for some of you, you were just hungover all day. I see you up in there.
It doesn’t matter what happened last year. It doesn’t matter what happened previously in your life. You have a brand-new year, a brand-new decade out there in front of you to create whatever you want and to make your future way better than your past.
So what I decided to do for this podcast was to share some of my personal accomplishments for last year, some of my fails for last year, and then talk about what I want to do for this upcoming year. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, a lot of processing.
I’m really excited for the next episode, where I’m going to talk about midlife and what happens in midlife with one of my coaches. So make sure you look out for that one, even if you’re not going through midlife. You don’t have to be – what am I – 47 to be going through this. You can be going through it at any transition in your life.
I’ve been going through it a lot. I’ve been going through what I would call an identity crisis. Although I don’t see it as a crisis. I see it as an opportunity. And it’s been challenging and a struggle, and also super exciting.
So, as many of you already know, we will for sure hit our goal of 25 million. In fact, I think we may get closer to 27 million by the end, when all is said and done. And that’s a huge accomplishment for our team and for our business and for me personally. That was one of my impossible goals two years ago and now it is simply just done.
And there is a huge sense of arrival for me in terms of really being an example of what is possible with the Model. And I feel like anyone who says, “The Model doesn’t work,” is cray. How can you possibly say that?
I had someone email me and tell me that I shouldn’t tell people that I’m making $25 million because it’s not realistic. And I asked, how can something that’s real not be realistic? And they said, “Well it’s not realistic for everyone. It’s not realistic for other people.” And I couldn’t disagree more.
I know who I am. I know what I’m capable of. And it’s not any more than what anyone else is capable of. And I know that people don’t believe me on this. They think I’m some kind of special unicorn with some kind of special talent. But that is not it.
There is nothing that I have done in my life that isn’t teachable. There’s nothing that I’ve done in my life that I haven’t learned, that someone else can’t learn, that I’ve learned from amazing teachers. I didn’t come out of the womb with the capabilities that I have now. I had to learn them.
And, of course, it’s realistic. In fact, I think the possibilities for what we can do right now, we just have to catch up with, with our brains. I think the world has provided us with all of the opportunity that we need to surpass our own limiting beliefs in our brain, we just have to be willing to do it. we have to be willing to fail enough.
So, I share how much money I make. I share my business details. I share all of it with all of you because I know how important it is to know what’s possible. When we all think talking about money is gauche and we don’t want to brag and so we don’t want to talk about money or we want to act like money isn’t important or it’s not like we do what we do, we miss out on the opportunity to inspire an entire generation.
As some of you know, I’ve been working on a book, and one of the most important things that I think we can do, with young girls especially, is ask them, “How much money do you want to make in your career?” That is a question that does not get asked to people.
We ask, “What do you want to do? What would you enjoy doing?” You know what most people would enjoy doing? Paying all their bills really easily and not being in debt. So why don’t we start there? How much money do you want to make? And then what do you want to do and how can you make that much money doing what you love doing? And are you willing to do stuff you don’t love doing?
I listen to my kids talk to their friends and they talk a lot about what they’re not willing to do. And I’ve tried to explain to them, hey, it’s all 50-50. Half the stuff you do in your job and your business and in your life, you’re not going to enjoy doing, and you can’t reject that because if you do then you’ll miss out on the half that you love doing. You have to be willing to take both.
So, I feel my success in my life is not just something I enjoy doing. It’s my responsibility. It’s my purpose. I want someone listening to this podcast, I want a college-age woman listening to this podcast to believe that it’s possible for her to make $25 million a year. I want her to consider that as a possibility for herself where maybe she never would have.
Maybe she never would have thought, “Oh, I can make as much money as I want to make doing something that I love doing half of the time.” That’s why I do what I do. And when people send me emails and tell me how I should behave and tell me what I should be saying and telling me that I shouldn’t be bragging – which I think is so hilarious.
Bragging? What are we, in third grade? I’m not bragging. I’m not saying I’m better than you. I’m saying the opposite of that. I’m saying I can do this and so can you, let’s go. I’m just doing the hopscotch first so you can see how it’s done. That is it. I’m just a little bit older, probably. That’s what I’m doing here.
I’m not trying to make you think how great I am so that you feel bad about yourself. I’m making you understand how great we can all be, and that is the most sincere thing I can tell you. And I will not stop.
People get mad at me about it. I don’t care at all. This is what I’m doing with my life. You can do whatever you want with your life. You can keep how much money you make to yourself. You can keep it a secret. You don’t have to tell anyone.
But here’s what I want to suggest; if you are out there doing well in your life, share that success for other people to be inspired by. Talk about it. We need to have inspiration. If Amy Porterfield hadn’t talked about how much money she was making a year, I wouldn’t know to dream that big. I will always be grateful to her.
It’s kind of fun because Amy Porterfield really inspired me to make a million dollars. And then if you listen to her podcast, she coaches with one of my coaches, Corinne Crabtree, and she’s also in Scholars, and the last month of the year, we always write an impossible goal.
And I know that Amy Porterfield talked about her impossible goal of making $10 million. And I texted with her recently and she told me that she’s going to way surpass that goal. And when she wrote it down, she couldn’t even fathom it.
Isn’t that amazing, like the inspiration that’s just weaving back and forth between all of us and the way that we’re inspiring each other? This is what’s kind of cool to think about. Had I not been exposed to Amy Porterfield I may have never made a million dollars when I did. And maybe if Amy Porterfield hadn’t been exposed to the Model and the impossible goal work that I do, maybe she wouldn’t have made $10 million this year.
I mean, there’s no way of knowing for sure, but I love the idea that we’re just building each other up. Amy Porterfield didn’t talk about making a million dollars so I would feel bad about myself because I wasn’t. she told me that she made a million dollars because she wants us all to know what we can too. Why not?
What do you mean it’s not realistic? How can you say that it’s not realistic? It’s real. She did it. Why not me? Why can’t I do that? I will do that. And then I did.
So listen, I get it, I’m not for everyone. Buti am going to talk about my success. I am going to talk about how the Model has helped me create what I want to create in my life.
Let me tell you a little bit about some of the things that didn’t go right too. So, we surpassed our 25 million goal. That went right. That was great. I continued to build my team last year and continue to make lots of mistakes in that area. That is the area where I still needed the most growth and that’s when I really started to create systems and processes and hiring and I really got good at learning how to hire and fire and manage people.
And it was excruciating. It’s one thing to learn how to do something when it’s just me, when I’m just failing and stumbling and struggling in my own right. And that’s what I’ve done mostly, with the support of my husband and business partner Chris, for the past 10 years is really I’ve just been on my own figuring this out.
The last couple of years, hiring a team and trying to get the right team in place has been much more painful because it’s involved other people and other people’s lives and other people’s work that I’ve had to learn how to do. And so I did a lot of things right. I got a lot of great team members on board and I’m so proud of myself for that and I’m so proud of the team that I have.
And I did some mis-hires too and we had some struggles and we had some crazy people come onboard for a while. Not that I’m not crazy, because I am, but you put two crazy people together, that is not good. So some of that was really challenging and exhausting for me. And I had to do a lot of work to kind of pull that together.
So for this year, my dream and my fantasy is that I’ll be able to back off of that work. I have hired a COO. Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve hired a COO. I’ve hired a lot of people as the COO, CEO, to do trials, and none of them have worked out.
And I want to say that mostly it’s because of me. Mostly I was the wrong fit for the job that we were just trying out or it was that I wasn’t quite ready to know what I needed that person to do. I’m really ready now and I’ve hired a person that I really think is going to be extraordinary.
And so my goal is to really step back from that role in my company and focus more on the things that I’m the best at, which is being the visionary and creating the vision for my company and believing big for my company and creating content and coaching my clients. Because of this, I have decided that, this year, I want to be a non-growth year.
And I think this is important for many of you to understand because I think it’s confusing. I’m a huge proponent of growth. My business wet from one million, to two million, to five million, to 17 million, to 27 million. Like, it’s insane how much growth my business has had.
And I love growth and I love making things bigger and being an example of what is possible. But I’m also really aware that you can grow too fast. And I’ve studies a lot of businesses and a lot of business books and there is this space where you can literally grow broke. You can outgrow your own self if you’re greedy and if you’re not careful.
And so what I want to do this year is really maintain our level of income for the next year and stabilize all of our systems and all of our processes and all of our management. I want to give my new COO an opportunity to really dive in and take over the daily operations of the company and I don’t want to be doing a lot in terms of growing or pushing or hustling.
As many of you know, we changed form Scholars 1.0 to Scholars 2.0 and so this next year will be really about creating content and focusing on Scholars 2.0 and making that the best possible program we can make it. we’re also redoing all of our materials for certification.
Now, what I mean by that is not that we’re changing any of the content, because the content is fire and solid and perfect. We’re just changing some of the design and some of the readability. We’re changing the website that we teach certification on, so it’s much more up-leveled and professional and awesome.
Everyone’s like, “It’s already awesome.” I’m like, “Oh yeah, but it’s going to be even more awesome.” So those are the kinds of things that we’re working on, making sure that everything is solid and systematized and really making sure we have a huge foundation that we can build to 100 million on.
I think we’re close, but I want to give us some time to really inspect underneath the cushions and really look around the corners and make sure we’re not missing anything. I also really want to give myself some space and some time this year to do a lot of self-discovery.
As many of you know, my children have gone away to college and my business shas changed so it’s not a dependent anymore. It’s like I had three kids graduate this year; Christian, Connor, and The Life Coach School. They’ve really become very independent of me. They’re not my whole life anymore.
And one of the things that Chris and I, whose been my business partner for the past 10 years, have talked about is that he wants to go on and work on other things. The Life Coach School was something that he joined me to do to really support me and really to grow a foundation for our family and a business and really help me achieve my dream.
And I have achieved my dream and I’m continuing to achieve my dream. But he wants to go and achieve his too. And life coaching and the Model, that’s not his passion. That’s mine. That’s not his purpose. And so I’m literally going to buy him out, which all that means is on paper I will be the owner of The Life Coach School. It doesn’t change anything financially for us as a family or anything like that. It’s more of kind of a mental line in the sand that we’re doing with each other.
So I’m going to take back over full responsibility of the business and he’s going to pursue some other passions that eh has. And I’m going to kind of turn the tables and support him in growing what he wants to do. And so I’d like to be really available to him for whatever he chooses for that to be.
I also am very dedicated to helping many of my students reach the $10 million mark, the eight figures. I have a handful of students who are on track to do that, who are ready to do that. And I want to help them. I want to focus on what they need to do in their businesses, really dive in, in our masterminds, to help them achieve that next level of success.
I have some students that I really think are going to be extraordinarily bigger than I am. And what I mean by that is more famous, more popular, more of household names, and more revenue. And I can’t even tell you how, for me, that is my ultimate dream.
Because a lot of what I’ve done in my career is listen to people tell me that things aren’t possible and listen to people tell me that it’s only possible for me because I’m different. And I think people mean that as a compliment, but I don’t think they understand what they’re really saying is, like, basically, “You’re different than the rest of the human race, Brooke, so you can go out there and be dynamic and be talented and create.”
And what I want to do is I want my students to surpass my level of success so I can show that it’s not me, it’s the Model. It’s the work we do. And I want to help them in any way I can to get them to pass the $25 million mark, to get them to the $100 million mark, if that’s what they want for their businesses. So I’d like to focus my energy on that as well.
I have a handful of students who are really close to getting to a million per year and I want o help push them over the edge and do what I can to mastermind with them. And then I have even more students who want to get to the 100K mark per year and I want to be able to focus some energy on helping them.
So my focus this year is not going to be so much about growth for The Life Coach School, per se, but more focused on growth for the students in their businesses, more focused on the coaches that are working within my company too.
I know that I’ve talked about this before, but one of my visions for my business is to expand the reach of life coaches. I’ve talked about how, when I was first running my company, I had tons of people coming to me that wanted to become life coaches and wanted clients. And then I had so many clients that wanted me to coach them.
And I just felt like I was the middleman. I was clogging that connection. And so I’ve tried many different ways to help my coaches connect with my clients so they can coach them, but the best solution I’ve come up with is hiring those coaches to work for The Life Coach School, training them in my practices and holding them to a level of ethics and professionalism where they can represent the school.
So we have a ton of coaches working for us now, contracting to coach our clients. And the feedback we’re getting is extraordinary, not only for the coaches who are loving being able to coach and not have to have their own business, but they can coach all day every day using the tools, but also for the clients who are able to get more affordable coaching through The Life Coach School and at the quality and level that they have come to expect from me.
So, the more I can grow my base of coaches, the higher quality I can have with my base of coaches, the better it is for the industry. And so I want to focus on not only helping my students who want to grow their businesses, but also helping my students who want to become coaches for The Life Coach School work with us and be able to coach fulltime without having to have their own business. That’s like a win-win-win.
It’s a win for me because I’m able to give back to our industry. It’s a win for the life coach because they get to coach all day. And it’s a win for the client because they get really extraordinary coaching at really great pricing.
So that’s really what I want to focus on next year. I want to be able to give a lot more to my students who want to grow, now that I’ve kind of shown what’s possible, I want to help them make it possible for them. I also am spending a lot of time with my husband and we’ve been having a lot of long, in-depth conversations about what we want our relationship to be like now that we don’t have the job of raising kids, that we’re not going to be working together, that we have more money than we ever dreamt possible and we have more freedom than we ever dreamt possible.
We have been dropped kind of into this part of our lives with so many more opportunities and so many changes that we’re really trying to come together in a way where we’re conscious about our future and we really think about what it is we both want, how we can both support each other. Where do we want our lives to go from here? And I want to have space and time to not rush that and just enjoy it.
Some of my friends and coaches, people that coach me and some of my friends have kind of warned me that because my business has so much momentum, that I should keep growing as fast as I can, that I should keep my foot on the pedal, that I could probably get to 100 million within a couple more years.
And here’s what’s true; I believe that that’s true. I believe that I could get my business to 100 million by probably 2022 if I wanted to. But I’m not in a hurry, y’all. Like, I don’t feel like I need to get to 100 million to prove anything.
I know that getting to 100 million will really be a pinnacle of showing that I’m an example of what is possible, but I never want to do that at my won expense. And that’s what I teach everyone in my mastermind. When we get together, if I look at one of my students and they don’t look like they’re having fun or they don’t look like they’re sleeping or they don’t look like they are managing their mind properly, I genuinely boss them and tell them, “Do not make any more money.”
Because here’s what happens, you all; what you grow increases. So if you’re stressed, that’s going to increase. If you’re not sleeping, that’s going to increase along with the other things. So for me, I feel it’s really genuine for me right now to feel like I want to kind of pause and breathe and look around and be conscious and think through some things before we just take it all to the next level. And I hope that you’ll use that example.
We’re not in a rush, my friends. I may be 47, but I feel like I’m just halfway. I feel like I’ve got the rest of my life to do all the things and I want to make sure I enjoy every moment and that I’m here and available to the people who I really love and care about and the people that don’t quite believe in themselves yet, that I can hopefully offer some support in that area and believe in them as much as they need to believe in themselves.
So that’s my plan for 2020. It’s not as sexy as my plan was when I went from five to 17 million. And it won’t be quite as a rush. But I think it will be amazing and good and solid and it will give me kind of a chance – I don’t know if you guys can relate to this, but I feel like I kind of need a minute to kind of catch up with what’s happened, with what I’ve created, with what’s true about my life.
There’s so many parts of it that are so many parts of it that are so surreal. Like, I cannot believe my kids are gone. I can’t believe that I’m done having them in the house every day. It’s the most surreal experience. I can’t believe that I have this huge team that manage – and huge is 12 people, but that manage everything in my business and that I can go on a vacation and my business can still function at a higher level than it was when I was doing it.
There’s a lot of things I just kind of want to sit back and be in awe of, and I want to be in awe of my students and the success that they have had. So that’s really my plan for 2020 because I feel, in so many ways, that I have taken massive action hard enough and long enough to really realize the result. And I want to just pause before I ramp it up again.
Now, for some of you, you’re like, “That sounds good, I’ll do that too,” but you haven’t gotten to your goal yet. I want to discourage you from doing that. I want you to keep your foot on the pedal, I want you to keep working until you arrive at the place where you’ve achieved the result you want and then take that pause.
I want you to be able to look at your own life and be proud, not because you are willing to give up and just appreciate your life for what it is. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s also not as good as having achieved the thing and then taking the pause, in my opinion.
Now, the alternative is not beating the crap out of yourself and hustling so hard and not having any fun. It’s can you stay focused on yourself and your life and your dreams and love yourself all the way through that process? I want to help you with that.
One of the really cool features that I’m adding to Scholars this year is going to be like The Life Coach School Underground. I’m basically going to share all of the backstage details of how I run my company. And I’m going to record my team meetings and share them in Scholars. I’m going to record like our in-person retreat meetings and share them in Scholars, our weekly meetings, our vision meetings. I’m going to share meetings that I have with my COO. I’m going to give you all the secrets, all the behind the scenes, al the details of what we do in our company.
One of the things that’s really important for me to let you know is that what I teach in entrepreneurial management is what I do in my business. And if you watch this kind of Life Coach School Underground, you’re going to see me utilizing, you’re going to see my COO and all my employees utilizing all the lessons that are in entrepreneurial management. You’ll be able to see them.
And that’s going to be at no extra charge. If you’re already in Scholars, you’ll get that automatically. And it will be featured in our study vault and you’ll be able to really study that I do, like, walk my talk and that it is possible.
A lot of times, people think, “That’s nice in theory, but it’s not applicable.” But it is. What I teach is applicable. What I teach in coaching is applicable. But also, what I teach in business is applicable. So I’ve had a lot of emails from people, high-level executives and high-level entrepreneurs who aren’t in my industry want me to help them with their businesses.
And I want to tell you all something kind of publicly here that I do not want to work with businesses that aren’t in my industry of life coaching. I want to take all of my energy, my mentoring energy, my one to one energy, to help the life coach school industry. That is my passion.
I love talking business. And if you’re running a furniture company or you’re running an online business on how to make money in business, those sorts of things, I want to support you, but you’re not my target market. You’re not my passion. You’re not my people.
So the best way I know how to help you is to give you a behind the scenes into my business because my business principles can be applied to your business principles as well. So there will be a lot more of that, a lot more of kind of supporting those of you who are kind of in the race behind me a little bit, maybe a couple of paces back and kind of showing you the way, showing you what I do to handle the challenges that may be coming up for many of you as you grow your businesses. That’s what I’m most passionate about.
And of course, I’ll be here on the podcast. I’ll be sharing all my learnings with you. A lot of what I’ve been studying lately, with my husband Chris and with some other friends of mine, is relationships, and relationships in midlife and marriage and what it all means and what we want it to mean and how we want it to look.
And so I’m going to be sharing a lot of what I’ve been learning about my relationship with myself as I get older, but also my relationship with my husband and my children and my friends and my life. And so I’m really looking forward – I created a whole lesson around connection and friendships and relationship circles and wants, needs. It’s going to be in Scholars and it’s the work that I’ve been doing and so I’m thrilled to be able to spend a month working on it with you all.
So, if you’re not in Scholars, what the heck is happening? Get involved right now. And if you are, let’s go. 2020 is going to be amazing. Let’s do this. Talk to you next week, everyone. Bye-bye.
Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out Self-Coaching Scholars. It's my monthly coaching program where we take all this material and we apply it. We take it to the next level and we study it. Join me over at the TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. Make sure you type in the TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in Self-Coaching Scholars. See you there.
