You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode 162.
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 friends. How are you guys doing? Me?
I'm doing amazing today. I'm having an amazing day. I just had the most incredible walk with my dogs.
I was on vacation for a week, and I missed them terribly. You know how I'm obsessed with my dogs. And I came home and was just so excited to have a day where I could just go and walk for as long as I wanted to walk.
And they were crazy wild. It was really fun. I just got back, and I'm so excited to talk to you all.
I want to let you know that I have some free trainings coming up. So if you're listening to this live, if you're listening to this, you know, within a couple weeks of me recording it, then you will be able to participate in some of these free trainings. You just need to go to thelifecoachschool.com and look in that Hello Bar, which is the bar that's at the top, and it'll show you the most recent training that I'm doing for free.
And you need to make sure that you keep checking there to see which training I'm releasing. Make sure you get on for free, because they will be taught live, and then they will go away. So I'm going to teach a training called The Three Secrets to Feeling Better.
That's going to be an epic training. I've spent a lot of time creating that. I have a lot of stories, a lot of my history of how I have changed my life from basically feeling negative emotion all of the time to actually embracing negative emotion and turning towards experiencing the whole range of emotions, which actually has allowed me to have a lot more positive emotions.
So I'm going to talk about the three secrets to feeling better. I'm going to talk about in another different training, I'm going to talk about making $700,000 on one emotion. And I swear to you that is the truth.
I changed one emotion in my life and made $700,000 from changing that one emotion. And I'm going to tell you how I did that. And I'm going to talk a little bit about money and our ideas about money in that free training.
And then the last training that I'm going to offer is called the 15-minute relationship fix. Upcoming in May in Self-Coaching Scholars, we are going to be talking about relationships. And so everything that we are focused on, and the way that I've set it up in the training for May is that each week, we're going to go in depth into one of our personal relationships.
And I want to give you kind of the quick start version of that in a training. So those three trainings will be coming up over the next two weeks. Make sure you keep going to my site to see when they're being offered to make sure you register for them.
If you're on my email list, you will get notices that they are upcoming and you can register for them as well. They're going to be very good. I just want to tell you, for some reason, this year has kind of been a cumulation year, cumulation year.
I don't even know how to pronounce that, but like, everything's like coming together for me in terms of my knowledge and my experience and my understanding. I feel like I'm making epic leaps in terms of my own personal development, because I really am starting to apply and have things click that I've been studying for the past 10 years. And because of that, I feel like I'm able to teach it in a way that is better than I've ever taught before.
And most of my students are agreeing with me. They're like, you are on fire right now. The way that you're teaching this material, the way that I'm learning it, it's just getting better and better every single class I take from you.
So that's kind of fun to hear. But I also kind of sense it and feel it within myself. I feel like everything's kind of coming together.
So these trainings are absolutely 100% free. So please join me if you would like to learn a little bit more about money, relationships, or feeling better. This episode, we are wrapping it up with time management.
And we've been talking about time management a lot in Self-Coaching Scholars this month. And people have made such huge changes in their lives because it is our most important asset, time. And we don't spend enough time really focused and really being careful with managing it.
And so I feel like this month, really being able to focus and stay committed and planning and being really deliberate with time has made a huge impact on so many of us that are in Self-Coaching Scholars. And so I think one of the most important habits that we need to change is procrastination. So many people that I work with have procrastinated their dreams.
And you can procrastinate your dreams right to your death. And I want to offer to you that you have your dreams for a reason. And that reason is not just because of your own selfishness.
That reason is because you're supposed to evolve yourself to the place where you can create them. So a lot of you will say to me, well, I don't have a dream that's about serving the world. And what I say is, if you are evolving yourself to accomplish an impossible dream for yourself, you are serving the world.
The world needs us to evolve. Humanity needs us to evolve, to go to the next version, the next level of ourselves. And not in a way that causes us to burn out, not in a way that causes us to punish ourselves, not in a way that causes us to beat ourselves up or overwork or any of those things, but in a way so we really do manifest the best version of who we want to be.
Not the best version of who anyone else wants us to be, but the best version of who we want ourselves to be, because that internal drive, that internal knowledge is our humanity pushing us forward. So it's not just like, oh, it would be nice for me to write a book. It would be nice for me to make more money.
It would be nice for me to start a family. Those things are not just about it would be nice for you. If you have that compelling desire inside of you and you really like your reason for why you want something, it is, in my opinion, your responsibility to go and get it.
And so I'm pretty tough with my clients. I'm pretty, you know, like, let's go get it. Like, let's stop thinking about it.
Let's stop berating ourselves about it. Let's stop second guessing it and let's go get it. Not because I want you to be successful for success sake.
I just think humanity depends on it. I think we have to keep looking forward. We can't depend on other people to do it for us, right?
We can't depend on, hey, someone else come up with a great idea, someone better than me. I think we all have to do our part, and our part, we can only know what that is by paying attention and being conscious to our own desires. So it's really important.
So procrastination is the opposite of that. Okay? Procrastination is putting off because we're either afraid or we're feeling lazy or we're feeling overwhelmed.
We're indulging in some emotion that's preventing us from creating something. Whenever you hear yourself say, I don't feel like it, I want you to remember that that is normal, but it's not a legitimate reason to not do something. You will not always, and in fact, most of the time when you are evolving into the next version of yourself, you will not feel like it because evolving is uncomfortable.
Discomfort is the currency to your dreams. So you will feel the opposite of feeling like doing it. And that's when you know that you must move forward.
And that's why having time scheduled to do it, and knowing that it's not negotiable is the best way to follow through on those things. Because if you are constantly only doing what you feel like doing, you are going to be moving backward. Now, I don't know how many of you have listened to my three-part video series on having an extraordinary life.
But in that video series, I talk about, you can get that on my website, by the way, I talk about the motivational triad. And I talk about how we have evolved to this point by seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and exerting the least amount of energy possible. That is how we have survived.
But we have survived to the point where that motivational triad is no longer serving us. And in fact, it's preventing us from evolving if we keep honoring what got us here. And it's such a metaphor for our lives in terms of business, in terms of personal development, in terms of our entire life.
What got us here can't get us to that next level. So you actually have to reverse the motivational triad to evolve beyond survival, which means you have to pursue discomfort, which means your brain will be terrified, right? Because it's like we should just be seeking pleasure, which served us when we were living in a cave.
It's not serving us now when we have Safeway and Starbucks down the street. We need to be willing to experience emotional pain. It's not being forced on us so much anymore, so we have to open ourselves up to it, and we have to be willing to exert more energy.
Not the kind where we're stressed out and freaking out and shoving ourselves around, but the kind where we're allowing energy to flow through us and produce the work we're meant to produce in the world. So notice that when you're doing your best work, it doesn't always feel like unicorns and butterflies. I think sometimes we feel like our inspired work should feel like flow all of the time.
And it does sometimes. And I think that's the worst part because I think we want it to feel that way all of the time. Now the more emotional management and the more emotional responsibility you have, the less you will procrastinate.
The more you recognize that you are the ones creating your emotions, the less you will use them as an excuse not to create something. So often the clients and students I work with who procrastinate are self-called perfectionists. And what I tell them, and so basically what they're doing is delaying their work, delaying putting it out there, delaying doing it because it's not perfect yet.
And what I always say is perfectionists are scared people, right? They're scared of making a mistake. They're scared of failing.
They're scared of rejection. They're scared of someone finding a typo, heaven forbid. It's a vicious cycle.
Perfectionists are scared of being judged. If you don't complete something, you won't ever be judged on it. Delaying it temporarily prevents the judgment.
Delaying it pretends to give us time to make it perfect. But if you are a self-called perfectionist, you know that this doesn't work, right? That work doesn't get done.
And if it does, we're so exhausted by it that we can't create anything else. So I'm always encouraging every one of my students to do a rough draft and to put it out in the world, to do B minus work. We're trained that A work is the only thing that matters.
So we either do the A work or we drop out of class. What I want you to do is just keep going. Even if you're getting a C minus, keep going.
Keep putting your work out there in the world. Don't drop out of class. When it's something with a deadline, we get to the point where the pressure of completion and incompletion becomes more critical than the need to make it perfect.
Incompletion is imperfection when there is an expectation of completion from a boss, etc. So this is why so many of my students get into so much trouble when they start their own businesses. Because we are used to having an authority figure driving our work.
So for example, those of us who would wait to the last minute to get our work done, would do it because there was a boss expecting it, because there was an authority figure or a teacher expecting it. And so then it became more important to get it done than it was for it to be perfect. And so many of us don't have that anymore.
So we have to be that for ourselves. I don't know if you guys can hear my dogs, but they are of course going completely nuts while I'm recording this podcast. I just took them on an epic two-hour walk too, and they're just going nuts.
Okay. So this is why people will say they do better when they complete things in the last minute. They also have an explanation for themselves as to why the product isn't perfect.
This is one of the worst parts of being a perfectionist. Most of the harsh judgment comes from the self. So what is the solution to this?
You will often hear me talk about doing the B minus work. Complete is better than nothing. Showing up is better than nothing.
Completing the class is better than dropping out. I promise you that this is true. And some of you cannot, even when I say turn in B minus work, and I'm just talking about your own blog post or something, people can't even fathom doing B minus work.
If it's not an A, they're unwilling to do it. And the issue is, when there's no reason for finishing something, procrastination often leads to incompletion when there is no accountability, when no one is demanding it. And especially in the beginning, when you're recording podcasts and recording blogs and writing blogs, and nobody's paying attention when you're a brand new coach, or when you are procrastinating, going to the store to take care of yourself physically, or procrastinating money, whatever it is that you're doing, procrastinating, completing, not offering value to the world, many times it doesn't even get done in the last minute, because there is no pressure to get it done, right?
And if there's no pressure to get it done, and that's the only way you get things done, is the last minute pressure, then you end up with a lot of incompletes in your life. One of my teachers, Dan Sullivan, taught me that you can focus on getting the first 80% of any project done as fast as possible. This has totally changed my perspective.
So instead of I have a paper due in two months, so I have plenty of time, you say I have a paper due in two months, I'm going to get the first 80% of it done in the next two weeks, right? Instead of wait, it's like procrastinating backwards. So instead of waiting until two weeks before to feel the pressure, you give yourself two weeks now, and you get it done as fast as possible.
So you add that pressure to yourself. And you're not worried about it being perfect, because you know you'll have many weeks to perfect it, but you give yourself as fast as possible, get the first 80% done. What is counterintuitive is that the faster you work, the less effort it actually takes to complete a project.
What?
Does that even make any sense? Asking yourself to work as fast as possible removes all options for distractions, delay, questioning, and time wasting. It also eliminates the option of perfectionism.
You can't work as fast as possible and have the luxury of making something perfect. Many think working fast is stressful, but when you try it, you will realize that working fast doesn't have room for stress. It requires a steady and relaxed focus that keeps moving.
This is why people think they do better when they wait till the last minute, because they don't have time to be distracted. They don't give themselves that option, and so they're able to work more productively. And what I'm suggesting is that you learn the skill of doing that ahead of time, as fast as possible.
So you schedule chunks of time, and you say, I have to get this done within this time. Now, it doesn't have to be done perfectly, but it has to be done. It's a game changer, you guys, I promise you.
So like when I'm sitting down to write books, or I'm sitting down to write articles, or I'm sitting down to prepare for a podcast, and I give myself one hour to get it all documented, I do not ever let myself get more than an hour in. Right? It has to be an hour.
And so I keep looking at the clock, I keep paying attention, I keep writing, I keep writing, I keep going. And I will tell you, you do not make room for daydreaming when you do that. It's really, really powerful.
What is interesting is that people who say they perform better when they procrastinate because they're forced to do work fast, and they only have the option of B minus work. And what I'm suggesting is that you do this ahead of time, you create this short timeframe and insist that you work within it to get your work done to a B minus ahead of schedule. Then if you want to obsess about it for the next five weeks and correct it and fix it or whatever, you have the luxury of doing that.
What most of us do is we're perfectionists ahead of time. So we anticipate making it perfect instead of actually trying to make it perfect, right? We're thinking that it's not going to be good enough, so we wait till the last minute where we don't have that option.
And it makes so much more sense if you are a perfectionist, to give yourself some time to try and make it so there are no typos and that the grammar is correct and that everything's, you know, up to the A-plus range that you want. But it's so ironic that most of perfectionists don't do that because we're scared, right? We're freaking out the whole time.
And so we go to the last minute and then it's so stressful to want something to be perfect and to not have the time to reread it or process it or anything. So we're just shifting that all ahead of time. And this will increase your momentum, your capability and your confidence.
It's the same exact amount of work and time, but the result is very different. The feeling fueling it is everything. Notice the difference in the thoughts.
When you procrastinate, you spend the first half of the time. So like, let's say you have a month to do something, you spend the first two weeks thinking about doing something and thinking about how you aren't doing it. This causes stress.
It's like hanging over you. It's burning up priceless energy. So instead of having all that anticipation and all that stress and then doing it the last two weeks, just switch it around.
When you work under pressure first, then you skip that whole part, you get the work done ahead of time, and then if you want to spend the rest of the time refining, do that. You have to be your own accountability partner. You have to have authority over yourself and your motivational triad and your brain.
You are the one. But once you get a hold of it, and once you start working like this, it's so much more fun and enjoyable. Think about this, you guys.
Think about when you get something done ahead of schedule. Think about when you complete something, how great that feels, and you still have time and you're like, here, this is a couple weeks early, versus waiting until you're rushing at the last minute. It's almost like on a smaller scale, when you have somewhere to be, and you procrastinate leaving the house, and then you're rushing to get there, and you're rushing, and you're apologizing for being late, it's so much better to arrive 10 minutes early, and then you can just chill.
Or you leave 10 minutes early, and you hit a little bit of traffic, it's no big deal, right? You still are going to arrive on time. You're still going to be calm.
We burn up so much of our time and so much of our precious energy, worrying and stressing and mismanaging our time by procrastinating. I really want to encourage you to learn how to do it backwards. Get the first 80% done, B-
ahead of time, and then spend the rest of the time enjoying that it's done and refining it, and make sure it's completely done early, so you can enjoy the integrity, you can enjoy the capability, you can enjoy the confidence that comes from that. All right, you guys, I am really excited to see you on my live trainings over the next two weeks. I look so forward to seeing you then, and I'll talk to you next week.
Oh, and hey, make sure you stay on after the outro to listen to Jerry Gibbons. She is one of my coaches and she's going to talk about ripping off the emotional band-aid. Really good stuff.
Enjoy. 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 thelifecoachschool.com/join.
And make sure you type in the thethelifecoachschool.com/join.
I'd love to have you join me in self-coaching scholars. See you there.
Hi, everyone, I'm Jerry Gibbons. I'm a life and weight loss coach who helps smart, savvy, professional women with more than 50 pounds to lose and their struggle with weight and body image issues. And I'm delighted to be here on The Life Coach School Podcast.
We will be doing a podcast to talk about ripping off the emotional band-aid and telling yourself the truth about overheating. So, removing the band-aid is a great metaphor for thinking about change, and specifically about going beyond one of the popular diet programs to really understand why you're overeating and create lasting change in your life. In order to lose weight permanently, one of the things I think you have to do is tell yourself the truth.
And I'm not suggesting anybody out there's being consciously dishonest with themselves as much as perhaps being a little evasive. I do know that if you're overweight and you're anything like I was, there are some things you don't want to know. For starters, facts like what you weigh, what your health indicators are, how much you eat.
And the big thing that we all really don't want to know is why we're overeating to start with. But the truth really does set you free. I meet way too many women who are afraid of the truth about themselves and why they overeat.
Because once you bring the truth out into the light, you can't hide from it. And dealing with it, acknowledging your weight and health issues, feels overwhelming. But here's the truth.
If you don't know why you're overeating, everything you do is a band-aid. And you know this is true because if you're like me, you're a serial dieter. But food isn't the problem.
And if food was the problem, all the diets we've been on would have worked. The problem is we hide from ourselves, and we hide the truth about why we're overeating. And without the truth, many of us are destined to live lives in emotional pain, to overeat about it, and ultimately not live the life that we want.
So here's the scenario. You're in pain because you're overweight, and you're hiding from the reasons about why you're overweight, because you believe they're painful. I found Glenn and Doyle Melton put it perfectly and beautifully in her book, Love, Warrior.
There is pain in hiding and pain outside of hiding. The pain outside is better because nothing hurts as bad as not being known. Bam!
Did that hit you as hard as it hit me? If so, maybe it's time to rip off the band-aid and tell yourself the truth. It will hurt a little.
And then you'll feel amazing, because the truth really does set you free. So are you ready to find out what's behind your band-aid? Let's talk about how you remove it.
The band-aid, which is of course overeating, has a purpose. And its purpose is to block out negative emotion or emotions. But do you know specifically what emotions are there and why?
How do you find out what the band-aid is covering? So many of us don't know. We're overweight because we've chosen food instead of some feeling we believe is too painful, a feeling that arose from a thought about something in the past.
I didn't know. I worked really hard most of my life not to know. I was actually an excellent, epic not-knower, and the proof was all over my quiet, safe, uneventful life.
Proof was in the scale, in my absence in family photographs, my lack of dates and relationship. My life was a testament to my Olympic caliber not-knowingness. And I don't want yours to be like that one minute more, but you've got some steps to take, which I'll walk you through.
To rip or not to rip, that's the question. First of all, ripping the band-aid off at all is a choice, and it's a decision to be made. The more uncomfortable you are in your present circumstances in terms of weight, health, mobility, social life, the more likely you are to make the choice to look underneath the band-aid.
The more pain you're in, the more you begin to consider that there's nothing worse than what you're feeling at your present weight and in your present life. When you choose to rip, how do you do it? All in one go, like leg or bikini wax?
Dear God, that's painful just thinking about it. But how then? I'll tell you how.
Gently. Really gently. You remove the band-aid with as much care as you would the band-aid on a child's owie.
Because that child is you. Your real, tender, vulnerable and whole self. So be compassionate and be caring and take your time.
You start to remove the band-aid by treating yourself with love and kindness. With a random acts big little of self-love. That means kindness about your current circumstances, about your weight and your health and your dress size, whatever it is that's driving you to change.
But here's the rub, right? Looking beneath the band-aid requires treating ourselves kindly, gently and compassionately. But about the same time we're ready for that change, we're too often coming from a place of blame, shame and discomfort.
And it's pretty hard to beat yourself up and be compassionate with yourself at the same time. And this is why the first step I take with my clients and the one they find often surprising if they're new to coaching is to have them listen to what they say to themselves, listen to their own negative thinking and turn it around. And that's why coaching is so different, I think.
Because we're not leaping into new food plans or workout regimes until we know how we got where we are to begin with. I was driven to change because I didn't like the sight of myself, and I wasn't showing up in the world. But I heard Brooke on a webinar about the time that I was at the tipping point of change, when I couldn't face another diet program.
And I thought anyone who wrote a book entitled, If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight?, knew something that I needed to know. And she did.
I always tell this story, and I probably always will about the beginning of my journey when my coach said to me, she said, Jerry, you're going to have to like yourself a whole lot more before you begin to lose weight. And all I wanted was weight loss right then and there. And I thought, I'm screwed.
But my coach did something for me in those one-on-one coaching sessions that were fundamental to my transformation. She held space for me, and holding space is really important when you're doing this kind of deep transformation. Why?
Because one of the reasons we keep a lot of our feelings of shame and other negative emotions to ourselves is that we worry what other people will think, say, or do if we reveal our truth. So holding space means I create a virtual, safe, spiritual place where you can unload your mind and in return receive honest and objective feedback and perspective. I'm the person who can listen to anything you say without an opinion.
You can act out your negative emotions, tell me your negative thoughts and secrets, but the space I hold for you is unconditional, where thoughts and emotions can be looked at with curiosity and fascination, unraveled and understood. It means the discussions that you have with a coach like me will not resemble the conversations that you have with your girlfriends. This is the most important part of my job as a coach.
So when you can't be gentle with yourself, find someone who can hold space for you while you remove the band-aid until you can be. Any good coach will give you a free coaching session to see if you're a good fit. I have a great blog post right now on how to find a coach and determine if it is the right fit, and you'll find that at my website.
Certainly, I will give anyone on this podcast a free mini coaching session, and you can find my contact details in the show notes. So the next step when you found someone who will hold space for you and you're ready to rip the band-aid off is you need to be kind and gentle and loving with yourself. But so many of us find that incredibly hard.
We can love everybody else, but we don't love ourselves. And if this is you, here's something to consider, something someone once said to me. If you're a person of faith, you believe God loves you unconditionally, right?
And a very wise priest I knew while living in Boston once put it to me when we were talking about forgiveness and love, that if God could love me unconditionally, if he or she could forgive me anything, wasn't a little arrogant of me to withhold that love and forgiveness from myself, and to suggest that I knew better than the Creator, gave me a lot of pause and a lot of food for thought over the years. And if you're not a person of faith, the question of self-love becomes one of why not? Is hating yourself for being overweight serving you in any way?
Like choosing to rip the band-aid off, loving yourself is a choice. Loving yourself unconditionally is a choice. And from that choice, dealing with negative emotions beneath the band-aid, beneath the weight, becomes that much easier.
I've said it before, you can't hate yourself thin. Brooke has said it. Now let me add to that.
If you choose to rip the band-aid off and discover why you're overeating, you're choosing love. And when is choosing love ever a bad idea? So loving yourself is fundamental to beginning any weight loss journey.
Because if it's ever to become permanent, you have to look under the band-aid. And it's not easy. But remember those wise words from Glennon Doyle Melton.
If you're interested in hearing more from me, head on over to jerrygibbons.com where you can subscribe to my email newsletter and receive a copy of my 5 Mindset Secrets for Weight Loss and a link to perhaps the best Love Yourself Feel Good Girl Power playlist ever. Sending you love and an invitation to talk privately about these issues on a one-on-one coaching session soon. Take care.
