You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 146.
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, hello, hello, my friends. This is my last podcast of 2016. Can you believe it?
This is also my first podcast for my self-coaching scholars in a series on resilience. And let me tell you kind of how I have designed 2017 in terms of my podcast. Every month, every four episodes within the month, I will be doing an episode on a theme.
And so for the month of January, we're doing resilience. Now, in this case, what we're doing is I'm starting a little bit early because we are going to get to episode 150 in January. And that, my friends, is going to be an episode you don't want to miss.
First of all, it's 150 episodes. Are you kidding me? It's so exciting.
And it's also such a special, awesome treat. And I can't wait for you to get to that one. But this episode is the beginning of what I have created for the Self-Coaching Scholars.
I created them a study guide to go along with my podcast as they go through each month and each year. So it doesn't matter when you sign up for Self-Coaching Scholars, you will get the next month's worth of podcasts in a study guide. So instead of just listening to the podcast, we're going to actually do the study guide that goes along with it.
Included in that study guide are my notes that I use to create the actual audio that you're hearing. I always make notes before I do my research and make notes before I record the podcast, and so that's actually included in the study guide. Then there's some questions that you write out to engage with the material instead of just listening to it.
So I actually did the questions before I started recording, and it's amazingly exciting because the topic that we're talking about, the overall topic, is resilience, but this one is a compelling reason. And so one of the things that I've learned is that one of the strongest indicators of success is resilience. And so I really started to think about this.
First of all, what is resilience? If that's the indicator of success, and it says resilience isn't a character trait, it's the effect of a compelling reason to complete something, to evolve. So I was having this conversation when all of my coaches get certified, when they go through my certification in-person program, which is separate than the self-coaching scholars, it's when I train someone to be a coach.
And I've been getting that question a lot lately. What's the difference between self-coaching scholars and the certification program? And I'll just tell you briefly that the self-coaching scholars is when you sign up for me to be your coach, you're in a group coaching program, and the certification is where you sign up for me to be your teacher to teach you how to be a coach and to run a coaching business.
So they're very different programs. But once you become certified as a coach, you enter into this Slack group with me, and that's where we have many discussions. And so over this weekend, I was talking to my coaches about success and about why some people are successful as entrepreneurs and why some people aren't successful as entrepreneurs and what they thought was the difference between people that are successful and people that aren't.
And I was really clear. I'm like, I've been in this business 10 years. I know that it's not marketing, because when I first started, I'd even have the marketing tools that we all have now, and I was still successful.
And there's so many different marketing paths that people can follow. I know that that's just information. So what is it with some people?
And I can actually tell most times when someone's going to be successful. And so we were talking about all the different things. My coaches were all weighing in on what we thought might be that difference between being successful and not being successful in a coaching business.
And we talked about three main things that I think are really important as they apply to this topic today. We talked about desire. We talked about belief.
And we talked about commitment. And commitment and resilience go very close with each other, I think, because resilience is the effect of a compelling reason to complete something. And commitment is the start of that compelling reason.
So, I'm going to explain this to you. I've talked about this a little bit on the podcast before, but I want to reiterate and I talk to my students about it like this. When your life is on the line or if someone's life were on the line, that would be the most compelling reason.
You wouldn't be worried about your feelings getting hurt. You wouldn't be worried about rejection. You wouldn't be worried about how much time and effort you have to put into something.
All of that becomes irrelevant. And you become very clear and very focused on that end result because you have to save your child's life, right? And that's a very extreme example, but I think it clears up how important that compelling reason is.
So resilience is not something you either have or you don't have. And I used to think this, right? I used to think, okay, there are resilient people.
There are successful people. And I do think that is true, but I think we label that after they've demonstrated it in their lives. And it's not like we started out with success and then we just demonstrated it, right?
We definitely started out with thoughts of success, but when we call someone a successful person, it's typically based on what they have succeeded at. So I like to think about it in terms of where is your level of commitment when you start, and that will determine your success before you've even finished. And I think that's a crazy way to look at success.
When you can tell how successful you're going to be before you start something, that's when you know that you have the ability to create the results you want. So a great example of this is I have students who will tell me that they don't know whether they can lose weight or not. They don't know whether they can build a business or not.
And I'll say, well, why don't you know that? What is the reason why you're doubting yourself? Well, I've never been able to do it before.
So we look to our past to try to find evidence of our success. When that doesn't determine our success, what determines our success is our level of commitment. And our level of commitment will determine our resilience, and our level of commitment is determined by our compelling reason.
Okay? So when you know that someone has a very compelling reason, you know that they are going to stay committed. When their reason is burning deep inside of them, you're not going to question their commitment.
If their child's life is on the line, you're not going to be like, well, I hope they're committed, right? You know they're committed. So this work on this podcast, what we're going to do, and for those of you who aren't in self-coaching scholars, I'm going to give you some questions and you can just write them down and do them on your own.
This is definitely something I want to encourage you to engage with and really think about, especially as we're going to move in to 2017. What is it that you want to create? Have you decided what you want?
That's really important. Don't look and see what you want. Decide what you want.
We're going to talk more about that in another podcast as well. That's a really important distinction that I've been trying to teach my students lately, is they'll say, well, I just notice what I want or don't want. And I'll say, no, you have to decide what you want.
And I'll tell you that you have to decide that because a lot of times you're going to have competing desires and you're going to have to decide what do you want to want and what do you decide it is you want. Do you want health or do you want indulgence? Do you want success or do you want procrastination?
You have to decide what you want ahead of time. So let's talk about what makes us compelled to commit to something. So I want to go back just a minute.
And we were talking about how there's that want, that desire. We're talking about how there's the belief and then we're talking about commitment. So I'm going to give you an example of a student who will come to me and want to start a coaching business.
And their desire is at a 10. They're so excited about the possibility of having their own business, of being able to help people, of being able to work from home, of being able to create their own hours and do what they love for a living and make way more money than they're making in their current job. The desire is huge.
For many of them, the belief is there. because we give them the pathway, we show them this is how you build your business. They believe that they're capable of it.
And so, you know, we have lots of desire and we have lots of belief. And so many times I have students come in with double doses of those. They're thrilled.
They're so excited. They believe in themselves. They're so confident.
And I wonder about that commitment. And so I will ask them often, like, how committed are you to making sure this happens? And they'll say, I'm so committed, you know.
I'm 100% committed. And I'll say something like, okay, well, if you haven't, you know, done this, what do you want to do within a year? And they'll say, I want to have at least 10 clients.
I'm like, okay, if you don't have 10 clients in a year, will you give me $50,000? And they're like, what? No.
What do you mean? Of course not. And I'll say, but wait a minute, I thought you were totally committed to making this happen.
You're not even $10,000 committed. You're not even $50,000 committed. You're not willing to go all in and put that on the line.
That's what commitment is. Commitment isn't like, oh, I'll do that and see if it works out, or I'll try and get that done. Commitment is, I'll do it no matter what.
So when I say, we give me $50,000 if you don't, of course. Like if I said to you, hey, you're going to go to the grocery store this week? And you say, yeah, say, give me $50,000 if you won't.
Yeah. If you don't, yeah, of course. I'm going to the grocery store.
It's a done deal. So this happened to me, and I talked about this a couple of podcasts ago. This happened to me when I was trying to decide the direction of my business and how much energy I was going to put into my new program, Self-Coaching Scholars.
Was I going to be doing a lot of other programs at the same time, or was I 100% committed to just doing and just focusing on this for the next several months? And I'll tell you, I wanted to do it. I totally believed I can do it, but I was sitting there talking to my friend, and I wasn't fully committed.
I was still kind of weighing other options. And I'll tell you what, that was a huge moment for me. It was a huge moment because I felt the difference in that decision.
because here's the difference when you're fully committed to something, you remove all other options. So I was trying to decide whether I was going to offer another program during the first quarter. At the same time, I was offering self-coaching scholars.
Was I going to bring on another master class? And I liked having that as an option. I liked knowing that I could do that if I wanted to do it.
But I know that fully committing means, nope, I'm going to just focus on this one thing. And so, and my girlfriend that I was with was like, why don't you just commit? Why don't you just go all in?
And I felt like this thrill and terror all at the same time. And it really made me understand that difference between wanting something, believing something and committing to it. In that moment, I was like, okay, this is the difference.
I see this in my clients that are fully committed to losing weight and the ones that aren't. I see this in my clients who are fully committed to cutting back on their drinking and those that aren't. I see this in my students that are fully committed to building their coaching business and those that aren't.
So I decided, and I talked about this on the podcast, like when you put something in the R-line and then you commit to it no matter what, that you can rise to almost any occasion. So here's what happened. So I made this commitment, okay, I'm going to go all in, I'm totally going to commit to self-coaching scholars.
I have so many great ideas, so many people I want to work with, so much coaching I want to do, I'm all in. And then I met with my financial officer, and he let me know about unexpected tax bill due to a math error, and that how it was going to affect my books. Now, when I think about my finances, when I think about my cash flow and my income for my business, I'm not thinking about money that I'm going to spend.
I'm thinking about the people that work for me. I'm thinking about the overhead. I'm thinking about literally the amount of money that needs to be coming into the business in order for us to pay everyone and make sure everything's running smoothly.
And so it really put me up against that commitment. And what I noticed was my mind immediately wants to go to options. Oh, but you could always do this, and you don't have to just do self-coaching scholars, and you could offer these other programs, and you could do this opportunity, and you could try that.
And remember, this person called you and wants you to do that book deal. You know, and it's this much of an advance, and there's like all these things, you know, what about advertising on the podcast? There's people that want you to do that, and there's all these other things.
And so all these other options started presenting themselves, just in that one moment with my, you know, talking to my financial guy. And I noticed this happens with my clients when they're committed to eating a certain type of food. And then they go to an event or something unplanned happens, then all of a sudden they have all these other options.
Well, I could just eat this once, or I could just work out tomorrow, or I could just, you know, I could change this other thing that I was going to eat. And all of a sudden, this really clear commitment, this really strong focus has now sprayed to all these other options. And there's no precision, and there's no clean lines, and there's no discipline.
And so I immediately told myself, no, this doesn't change anything. My commitment is still to myself coaching scholars. My commitment is still to keep my focus here.
Now, the truth is, I could run self coaching scholars and do four other programs. I really could. I could, you know, the amount of time that I'm devoting to that course, I could do that and do other things.
But I don't want to, right? I want to put all my energy into one area, and I want to focus and commit to that one area and really work with you guys that you've listened to my podcast and you've been trying to apply everything that I teach. And so I'm like, okay, now I know what being committed is really like.
It removes any other option no matter what, even if you're truly justified. Well, you know, who could have anticipated this tax bill that I have to pay? I'm for sure going to do something else now.
And no one, including myself, would argue. But I see that that's a symptom of my fear, a symptom of my doubt, okay? So your commitment is the stance of knowing what you will do regardless of what happens.
Knowing what you will do regardless of what happens. So I want you to think about the power in that commitment. No matter what bills come my way, no matter what challenges I face, no matter what problems I encounter, I am focused and committed to this goal, to this result, to 12 months of creating the best program that any life coach has ever created for anyone ever.
That is what I'm committed to doing. And my reason for that is what makes the commitment easy for me. My reason for that is I've always wanted to be an example of what is possible.
And I went to a Tony Robbins event years ago. It was called Date with Destiny, and it was in Fiji, and it was in his island in Fiji. It was crazy.
We landed on a grass knoll on an airplane that had like a rope on it. It was crazy. One of the most amazing experiences ever.
And I remember writing that in my book, writing that my goal in life is to constantly being an example of what is possible, and always being all in with anything that I do. And so that is what this program is for me. It is to be an example of what is possible, to show every one of my students that goes through, that listens to my podcast that goes to this program, is that we can really uplevel our lives.
We can evolve beyond where we are. I think a lot of us try to get out of suffering. We try to get out of this space of suffering just to like land and grasp on to mediocrity.
As long as we're not suffering, like I'm not going to rock the boat. I'm just going to hold on to comfort. But I feel like that's just the first step, right?
I get so many students, so many clients are like, I'm so much better than I used to be. At least I'm not suffering so much. But I'm like, that's great.
But what are we going to do for the next 30 years of your life? Now that we're beyond suffering, let's make your life amazing. Let's blow your own mind.
Let's see how good you can get at creating the exact result you want in your life. Let's focus on what you want. Let's decide what you want.
Let's focus on believing you can do it, and then let's commit and go get it. And that's what I want to do with all of my students. I'm so excited about that.
And I know that the way to do that is by managing the brain. And I feel like the model is the tool that can help us create whatever result it is we want in our lives. And, you know, I think our ability to create our own results is a true reflection of how well we manage our mind.
So whatever you want to put in that R line, I mean, knock yourself out, put something crazy in there, put your goal weight in there, put the weight you were, you know, when you were 18, and then go about creating that for yourself. You might figure out your teeth, and you just gain a little weight back. However much money you want to make, put that in the R line.
However many people you want to reach, the contribution you want to make in the world, put that in that R line of the self-coaching model, and then get to doing the work, commit to doing the work of creating a brain and programming your brain in a way that delivers that result to you. So in order for you to commit, your reason has to be compelling enough. Committing to anything immediately invites risk, which is unlike believing or wanting.
I can believe I can do something, I can want to do something, and there's no risk involved in that. As soon as I commit to doing that, I've opened up myself up to risk. But your reason will make that risk worth it.
I've noticed with some of my clients that their desire and their belief is inconsistent. It wanes, right? It seems to come and go based on results, energy level, how much fun it is.
But commitment is consistent. It drives massive action even when the desire wanes and the doubt creeps in. And that's the difference, right?
For me, is I notice like I commit to doing this one thing, and then all of a sudden an issue comes up, and all of a sudden this doubt immediately comes up for me because of my thinking. Immediately disbelief comes up. I'm not going to be able to do it.
My desire wanes because this is going to be so much harder than I thought, right? Notice immediately. But my commitment is what keeps me going through that, okay?
So we need to have commitment in order to have resilience, because resilience will keep us moving forward. Resilience is what has us pick ourselves up after we fall down. So think about what it is you really want.
And then ask yourself why you don't have it already. It's really important. And I'll tell you the answer is that your compelling reason is not strong enough.
And your conflicting desire and your reason for not doing it is too strong. Okay? So for some of you, it may be safety.
For some of you, it may be the avoidance of discomfort. For some of you, it may be that you're afraid and so you want to hide. And that is much more, you believe that it will be too much work.
You believe that it will be too hard. You're afraid of putting yourself out there in the world and being vulnerable. When you pick something specific to do, you have to recognize why you don't have that already, because that is going to be distracting.
Your current pattern of thinking will be distracting. Remember, your brain has to decide what information to filter out. It has to decide what's important to pay attention to.
The only thing my brain needs to pay attention to is everything it needs to do to make Self-Coaching Scholars the best program any life coach has ever made. That is my only focus right now. My brain wants to tell me, you know, how much work it's going to be.
My brain wants to tell me how hard it's going to be. My brain wants to tell me that I don't need to do that, that I can just relax. All of those things.
None of that is relevant to my brain, because I've told my brain what I'm committed to. Okay? It removes all the options.
Options present themselves, they are not relevant to me, because I have a commitment. Okay? And my job is to stay committed.
And my resilience is about recovering from those difficulties that I will inevitably face as I move towards that commitment. But remember, my commitment is what drives my resilience, and my compelling reason is what drives my commitment. So if I don't have a good why, if I don't have a good reason for doing what I'm doing, then I'm going to be in trouble.
So a lot of times people will say to me, I don't think my compelling reason is good enough. And I'll say, then don't do it. And they'll want me to come up with their compelling reason for them.
I'm like, I can't do that. You have to dig deep and figure out what it is. You have to find out what is really important to you.
And you have to make sure that it's compelling to you. Like a lot of my clients feel like, oh, I want to lose weight. I need to have a reason that's bigger than I just want to fit into my clothes.
And I say, no, it doesn't have to be an ethical, amazing, impressive reason. It just has to be compelling to you. So if you're very compelled by fitting into your clothes and that really excites you and really matters to you and you're willing to commit to that, then that is a good enough reason.
It doesn't have to be some noble reason. It doesn't have to be some morally astounding, wonderful reason. It just has to be a compelling reason for you.
We need to make sure once we commit to that compelling reason, once we commit to what it is we want to accomplish, we don't use our setbacks as evidence that it won't happen. We use our setbacks as an opportunity to increase our resilience. And when we become more resilient, we also become more confident.
So I can sit here today and tell you, hey, I have a result of creating this program and doing it for the next 12 months, and having that be the main focus of my business. And I know that I will face difficulties, and I know that I will be challenged. And so not only will I accomplish that goal, but I'll tell you what, I will become more of who I am.
I will become a better person. I will become more evolved. I will become more resilient, more committed and more successful because I honor that commitment.
So that just adds to all those compelling reasons, right? It's not just I'm an example of what is possible, but it's all the strength I'm going to gather along the way towards that commitment. Now, right now, I'm right in the middle of the holidays, right?
So it's December 18th with my students who are trying to lose weight. And a lot of them, I would say, 20% of them solidly are really struggling with the holidays. There are so many treats and so many cookies and so many drinks and so many opportunities that they are feeling like they really need to plan.
They really need to have decisions made ahead of time when it comes to going to parties and being in environments where all of this food is there. And I'm always telling them that when they make a mistake or when they overeat or when they struggle, that is not the time to give up. That is not the time to say, Well, I showed up late on Monday, so I might as well take the whole week off.
In fact, it's the opposite. That's when it's time to double down on your commitment. It's time to remember your compelling reason, to honor your relationship with yourself, and to double down on the work.
You are going to have to say no to yourself if you want to accomplish anything great in your life. How do I know this? because your brain is always going to tell you, seek pleasure, avoid pain, and expend as least effort as possible.
That is the exact opposite message you need to hear in order to evolve at this stage in our development as human beings. Our brain has not yet evolved past the point of survival. It doesn't know we're safe, we're comfortable, everything's fine.
So basically, you have to be prepared to manage your brain. You have to be prepared to hear yourself say no to yourself. Now, one of the things I just told all of my students is I said, listen, when you say no to yourself, suffering is optional.
Plan on the no, and plan on that making you stronger, making you better, right? When you tell a toddler no, when they're acting crazy, it makes them better behaved. Telling ourselves no makes us better behaved.
It makes us get better results for ourselves. So if you're going to commit to something big, if you're going to blow your own mind, you're going to have to hear your own no. And my suggestion is you don't use it as an excuse to suffer.
You use it as a reason, as a way to increase your own resolve, to increase your own resilience, to increase your own confidence in yourself and your ability to create the results you want. It's one of the most important things for me when I'm training master coaches. How good are they at creating the results they want?
because creating your results in your life is a demonstration of how well you utilize the model. I have a lot of students coming to me that are very academic, who understand the model conceptually and intellectually. They can explain it to me, they actually do it better than I do.
But I'm only interested in that to the extent that they can utilize it in their own lives. Knowledge, I think, isn't useful, especially the model isn't useful if you're not applying it. The magic of the model is not in understanding it.
The magic in the model is applying it and creating killer results in your life, results that literally blow your mind. You do things you didn't think were possible. That is the most fun.
You do things for other people. You create things. You make a contribution.
You help other people. Then you blow your own mind in the process. And I love that term, blowing your own mind, because that is the work I think that we are being asked to do.
To make our brain evolve, we have to ask more of it than it's already doing. And yet our temptation is to stay where we're at, to stay safe, to hide, to seek pleasure, to expend as least of our energy as possible. But if we listen to our primitive brain, we will stop evolving.
We have to evolve beyond our current brain. And that's what a commitment can do. That's what a compelling reason can do.
That's what telling yourself no can do. So here's how to do it. Number one, you have to refuse confusion.
Refuse it, it's always a lie, okay? And that's where most of you are gonna start. I don't know how.
You won't commit because you don't know how. That's the worst reason not to commit. I was just talking to one of my other coaches about this, and we were saying a lot of people don't commit because they need to see the math first.
They need to understand exactly how they're gonna do something. And I was telling her, I'm like, but a lot of people commit to a marriage. They commit to having a great relationship.
They don't know exactly how that's gonna look, but they're willing to commit to it. And so I think that's where we need to be able to commit to the result and then make as many mistakes as we need to make to learn how to do it to get the result we want. We don't have to already know exactly how to do it.
We're just committing to figuring it out. We're committing to getting it and taking any steps we need to. So number one is refuse confusion.
Number two is make a decision to commit. Committing is a choice, and you have to put a line in the sand and make a decision. I'm going to commit to this no matter what.
I'm not gonna give up. Write your commitment down and your compelling why. What is your compelling why?
That will drive your commitment. Rewrite it and change it until it's compelling enough. Make it better.
And if you're in Self-Coaching Scholars in the workbook, in the Resilience Workbook, I take you through these steps and I ask you these prompting questions. So you'll be able to keep developing your answer as you go. Document all the reasons you don't have it yet.
What is the competing desire and why do you want the competing desire? So example, if you're trying to lose weight, your competing desire is overindulging in food. Why do you want to do that?
And what would make your desire so strong that you wouldn't even consider overeating? Keep working until you can change the desire and the motivation in your mind first. Commitment means a willingness to be uncomfortable and it's not negotiable.
You have to be willing to tell yourself no and be uncomfortable. You will have a feeling of certainty. You aren't pretending there aren't obstacles.
You're just certain you can handle them. And the last step is you don't give up. You take massive action until the result is achieved, no matter how much failure that requires.
That's what makes my commitment so strong, is I know that I can create that result. I don't know how much I'm going to have to fail first, but it doesn't matter because I'm going to fail as many times as I need to fail in order to get the result I want. I won't use failure as an excuse not to get my result.
I'll use failure as a way to build up my resilience, build up my commitment, and build up my confidence. And that's what I'm asking of you. Okay, that is the whole work that I am requiring you to do on your compelling reason and your commitment.
So make sure you don't just listen to this. You might want to listen to it one more time, but do the questions, do the workbook. If you're in my self-coaching scholars class, open up to page 8 and sit down.
I just did this. It took me about 15, 20 minutes. Sit down, go through each of the questions, right?
And then one of the things you might want to do is the next day, look again and see what's there, all right? And revisit it. Now, the next three podcasts, we're going to build on resilience, okay?
This was the first in four sections. So this one, we're talking about your compelling reason. In the next one, we're going to talk about quitting and how that slows us down.
I know that sounds funny, but truly, a lot of us, we feel like something's not happening fast enough until we quit. And I love the quotes, it says, quitting doesn't make it happen any faster. We're going to talk about mind over matter.
So how you have to create the results in your mind before you produce them as matter in the world. And then in the last one, we're going to talk about how all of this work produces so much confidence and how confidence begets even more success and helps us to make even more commitments to the other results that we want to create in our lives. So that is the series coming up.
And then remember, we're going to do episode 150, which is, I promise you, is going to be an amazing treat. You guys are going to love it. I can't wait to share it with you.
So get busy on doing this work. This compelling reason work for anything you want to create in your life will take you out of any stagnation, will take you out of any gripping to mediocrity in order to avoid suffering. Many of you are so afraid of the suffering you've experienced in your past that you literally don't want to move forward because you're afraid you're going to suffer again.
And I promise you that by doing this work of pushing yourself towards the next version of yourself, you will get further and further and further away from the suffering you're so afraid of doing. So I cannot wait to talk to you all in the next session, which is on quitting and how it slows you down. But it will also be our first week of January.
And one of the things that I am really excited about offering on the podcast in 2017 is a feature that I'm adding at the end of every podcast that will feature one of my coaches teaching you a tool that they use in their practice. So I will teach my entire podcast. You will even hear my outro.
And then it will go in to one of my coaches who has submitted to me a supplemental podcast that you can then listen to and get even more great information from the people that I have taught who have created their own amazing versions of these tools as they've learned the foundation from me and then broadened it into their own lives. Many of you will love the work they're doing and you'll wanna work with them and you'll wanna learn more and read their blogs and get their content. So I'm really thrilled to start offering that next year.
And the very first one is coming up in the very next session. Happy New Year, everyone, and I look forward to working with you next week. Take care, 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 thelifecoachschool.com/join.
Make sure you type in the, T-H-E, lifecoachschool.com/join.
I'd love to have you join me in Self-Coaching Scholars. See you there.
