You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number one. Woohoo!
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.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast. This is our first podcast that we've ever done. And I was going to spend this whole first podcast giving you an introduction to The Life Coach School and me and what we're all about.
But what I decided to do is just give you something that you really genuinely want, which is a lesson. I mean, you've come here to learn something that we have to offer at the school. And so what I'll do is I will intersperse our story throughout all of the upcoming podcasts.
So you will get a sense of who we are and what we do and why we do it. But let me just preface all of this by saying that The Life Coach School was created because of our love for life coaching and for weight coaching. I co-founded it with my husband, Chris Castillo, and he handles all the back-end customer service, technical part of our business.
And I handle the teaching and the coaching, and I think all the fun part of it. So it's amazing owning this business with my husband. We have just an amazing time together.
So we really decided to do this podcast because I have so much to teach and so much to offer. And we really want to give you a chance to get to know us before you ever sign up for a training. And we hope this podcast will do that for you.
So let's start with the topic, which is today, which is why you aren't taking action. I would say that constantly I get emails. And even when I'm talking to clients and talking to people, one of the most frustrating things for them is their seemingly inability to take action.
They have all these dreams and ideas and things that they want to do. And they try and try and try to do them, but they just can't get themselves motivated to do it. And they always want to ask me, why is it that I can't, you know, eat only when I'm hungry?
Why isn't that I can't exercise? Why isn't that I'm not building my coaching business? Why is it that I'm constantly angry and I can't be kind to my kids?
And it all comes down to the same answer, which I think is great to know. One of the tools that we teach, our main tool that we teach at the school, is called the model. We call it the self-coaching model.
And it's a model I created based on all of my teachers and all of my mentors and all of their ideas that were so brilliant. I'm heavily inspired by Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle and Abraham and many of the forward thought thinkers of our generation. And what I noticed with their work is although I loved it all, I couldn't find a daily practice that really resonated with me.
And so I decided to create the model as really a way to coach myself through my own thinking. And the basic premise of the model, which I did not invent, it is the basic premise of how the world works is this. There are circumstances in the world.
Those are the things that we cannot control. Everything that happens outside of us is a circumstance. Okay?
And that's just a given. There are so many things that we can't control. We can't control other people.
We can't control our past because it's already done. We can't control anything that happens out there in the world. Okay?
And those are all of our circumstances. And really, those are the only things that we can't control in our lives. The rest of the components of the model include our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, and our results.
And all of those things are within our control. Now, we forget that often. We think that everything is either in our control or nothing is in our control.
And it never is that way. It's always that circumstances are not within our control and everything else is. So again, circumstances are other people.
Other people are not within our control. I'm sorry, but it's true. They're just not.
And the world out there is not within our control. And our past, even though we keep trying to change it, it's just not within our control to change. But everything else is and everything in our present experience is within our control.
What we decide to think, what we think about the conscious thoughts that go through our head are completely within our control. Now, we forget this. We don't remember that everything's within our control.
We think that our thoughts are not within our control. And in fact, most of us don't even know what we're thinking. We're responding to our thoughts that we aren't even aware of.
Now, why does this matter? It really, really matters because our thoughts are what create our feelings. Okay?
And everything you do in your life is because you want to feel a certain way. Every single thing you do is because you want to feel a certain way. That's just really good to know.
And if your feelings are caused by your thoughts and everything you do in your life is in order to feel better, wouldn't it be important to know what you're thinking? It absolutely would. And the problem is nobody teaches us this.
They don't pull us aside and say, okay, here's the deal. Everything you want in your life is because of a feeling, the feeling that you think you will have in getting it, or the feeling you think you will avoid in not getting it. So if feelings are the most important thing, don't you think they should teach us that all of our feelings are caused by our thoughts, and maybe we should learn how to think on purpose so we can create the feelings that we want?
But that would have been amazing. I really wish someone would have pulled us aside. Freshman year, freshman year, the misery of freshman year and taught us this very thing.
So our thoughts create our feelings. Now our feelings are also important because they drive all of our actions, okay? They are the fuel for our actions.
So when you ask me the question, why am I not taking action? It's because of the way you feel. Or why are you taking an action?
You don't want to be taking. It's because of the way you feel, okay? So your feelings are driving your actions.
And then of course, your actions are always going to create the results you want in your life, or you don't want in your life. Your actions create your results. So let me summarize this again.
Your thoughts, those sentences in your mind, are what create your feelings. Your feelings are what drive your actions, and your actions create your results. Now this is a very clean and simple way of looking at the world, and it is 100% accurate.
I have not found any examples where this is not the case. Everything you learn in all the cognitive thought work that you'll ever study. I have a degree in psychology.
I studied at Santa Clara University. Everything they teach you is about your thinking, and your thinking creating your feelings, and your feelings driving your actions, and your actions giving you your results. Now, what determines what we think?
That is the next logical question. If my thinking is driving everything, if it's creating my feelings, if it's creating my actions, if it's creating my results, then I need to know what I'm thinking. And I also need to know how to change that thinking if I want a different result in my life.
So, most of us have never been taught to witness our own thinking, to compassionately observe our own thinking. And it's a practice that takes practice, really. So, what I mean by that is the process of watching your mind think requires you to separate yourself from your own mind.
And most of us don't make that separation. We don't even recognize that there is a separation there. So, in order to go into that observer mode, we have to separate ourselves from our mind in order to watch ourselves think.
And this is what a lot of meditation is based on, right? And I've never been one that could just sit and meditate for hours and hours, but I can sit and watch my brain think. And I can be in that space of recognizing my own thinking.
And once you start doing that, once you start noticing what your own mind is thinking, you might be a little flabbergasted. And you might also say to yourself, oh, well, that totally makes sense. When I've learned that my thoughts create my feelings and my actions and my results, and then I look at my mind, I can see exactly why I'm getting the results I'm getting in my life.
My mind is creating them. That's where it's all starting. So a lot of students will come to me and they'll say, okay, so I've had a look inside my mind and I've observed it, and I don't like any of it, and I want to change it all immediately.
And this is pretty common for all of us, right? We start looking at our mind, we start being more conscious, and it's amazing the number of negative thoughts we have. We have like 60,000 thoughts per day.
And if you've never directed your mind or never told your mind what to think, it may be thinking old thoughts from childhood, it may be on a negative spin cycle, thinking a lot of negative thoughts. Who knows? It's been an unsupervised toddler, basically running rampant.
You know, I like to picture the mind when it's unsupervised as like a two-year-old left in the house unsupervised. It may have sharp objects and may be running around with them. And, you know, once you turn the light on in your mind, you may be tempted to turn it right back off.
And I've had this happen with a lot of people that I've coached. They start looking in their mind and they start recognizing how much pain they're in and how much negativity they're creating. And they just don't want to deal with it.
And that's totally fine. But it really denies you of all of your power and all of your ability to change. If you change in your life without understanding this, it's much more challenging.
And let me tell you why. Most of us try to make change from the action piece of our lives. So if you think about this, remember what I just taught you.
Your thoughts create your feelings which drive your actions. Now, if you try and change your action without changing the thought or the feeling that's driving the action, you're going to have a struggle because you're going to have to work against that feeling and that thought that's creating that feeling. Right?
So that's why for so many of us, change is so frustrating because we try to change how much we're eating, or we try to change exercising, or we try to stop procrastinating without changing the thought and feeling that is driving that very thing that we're doing. And when you can instead really get a hold of why you're not doing something or why you are doing something, then it will reveal to you the thought and feeling combination that's driving it. When you change the thought and feeling, the changing the action becomes so much easier.
That's why a lot of people will, for example, smokers will be chain smokers. They will have tried to quit many, many, many, many times, and they will have been unable to quit. And then they'll get a diagnosis.
This happened to my mother-in-law. They'll get a diagnosis of cancer or of something else that has been brought on by their smoking, and immediately they'll be able to change their action. They'll be able to quit smoking.
Well, what's changed? The only thing that's changed is their mind. They were told something that switched that thought in there and made it so the feeling and the feeling driving that action were completely changed.
And therefore, the ability to quit smoking became easier. People that had been unable to quit for years immediately and cold turkey stopped forever. This has happened over and over and over again with my clients.
When they start to understand why they're doing something or why they're not doing something, they understand they're in action or they understand why they can't take action because of a thought and a feeling that's driving it. And they decide to change that thought pattern and change that feeling pattern. They are able to change the action so much more easily.
And that's really what coaching is all about. It's about finding the cause of our habits, the cause of our patterns, why we do what we do. And when we discover that change is so much easier.
Okay, so let me give you an example. So you might be able to play this out in your own life because understanding this can change everything. And when you first hear something like this, you might be like, what the what?
What is she talking about? That I don't know. Or maybe this is obvious to you.
I mean, I've taught this to people who are like, well, of course, that's how the world works. Well, isn't that amazing that you've known that? Why didn't you share it with us?
Right. I mean, oh my gosh, I wish I could have learned this so many years ago. So when you start to understand this, you can think about something in your life.
And you know, my background is in weight coaching. I started off as a weight loss coach, and I spent many years just coaching clients who wanted to lose weight. So I'll use an example there.
And actually, this example is also found in my book. If I'm so smart, why can I lose weight? And you can get that on Amazon if you would like to.
And it just basically covers all my tools for weight loss. But I want to give you an example to demonstrate how this, why you're not taking action works. Okay, so I had a client who really wanted to start exercising.
It was really important to her that she lose weight, she wanted to be healthier, and so she wanted to start exercising. She wanted to start taking that action, and she just could not get herself to do it. She would write it all out.
She would set reminders. She would get it on her schedule. She would plan it.
Nothing. As soon as it came time to do it, she wouldn't do it. So I asked her to remember what I had taught her about how all of our thoughts drive all of our feelings, which drive all of our action, reaction, or inaction.
So in this case, it was inaction. She wasn't exercising. And so I asked her, I said, well, what do you feel when you don't exercise?
And she said, right before I decide that I'm not going to exercise, I just feel apathetic. I feel no drive at all. And I said, okay, well, what are you thinking that's causing the feeling of apathetic, right?
So remember, our thoughts cause our feelings, cause our actions are inaction. So I knew that her feeling was apathetic. I knew that apathetic was creating this inaction, this lack of exercise.
So I needed to find out what was the thought creating apathetic. And what we found out was that she was thinking it wouldn't matter anyway. She had exercised before.
She hadn't seen any results. She didn't really want to exercise. She didn't see it as something that she enjoyed doing.
She was telling herself that she had to do it to get results. And yet her thought was, it's not going to matter anyway, which created the feeling of apathetic, which of course drove in action. It drove her not to exercise.
Now, typically when a client discovers something like this, they want to immediately change it. And what I told her is I said, hold, let's just understand this with some compassion. You know, so many of us spend so much time beating ourselves up.
And it's one thing I don't allow any of my clients to do. I tell them, listen, hey, we're not going to beat ourselves up today. We're not going to beat ourselves up ever again if we can help it.
What we're going to do, though, is understand with curiosity and fascination why you do what you do. Because I believe that everyone has a really good reason for why they do what they do or why they don't do what they don't do. And if we don't take the time to really have some compassion and be curious with ourselves, we won't reveal our truths to ourselves.
So when she discovered this pattern, when she recognized that she was creating her own apathy, she was the one creating the emotion that was driving her in action, she started to get mad at herself and, oh gosh, I can't believe I'm doing that. And I said, no, no, let's wait a minute. Let's have a look at this.
You know, if somebody told you that they didn't think something mattered, wouldn't you want to listen to them? Wouldn't you want to understand why they were saying that? And let's have that same compassion with ourselves.
And that's really what I think the most important piece of coaching is. It's really revealing ourselves to ourselves and developing that relationship where we can trust ourselves. So, she decided just to notice it.
She decided to pay attention to it. And I asked her not to change it. I said, I think for you to fully understand it, you need to be patient with yourself and fully understand the pattern and why you're thinking that way.
And as she was able to watch this pattern in herself and see it with compassion and understand why she was doing it and literally not doing it, she understood. And from there, once she understood, like, of course, this is what you're thinking. You're exasperated with all of the things you've tried to do.
You've been beating yourself up. You've been putting yourself on these crazy diets. You've been making yourself for years, do crazy exercise regimes that were punishing and painful.
And now, of course, you're apathetic towards it. And when she was able to kind of connect with herself and give herself really her due to like understand that the reason why she was thinking that made sense, like of course, that's what she was thinking from there. She could really decide whether she wanted to change the way she was thinking or not.
But you can't really change your thinking until you understand it. And so in the upcoming podcast, we're going to talk a lot about how to change your thinking and how to think deliberately and how to create emotion that you want to create. But I purposely don't want to go into that in this podcast, because one of the things that I want you to understand, really to know, is that you must understand yourself before you can change yourself.
You must be in a place of compassion and understanding and love. And from there, you can ignite yourself to change. You cannot struggle yourself into change.
You cannot beat yourself into change. It will not be permanent, and it will not last. Whether you're trying to lose weight, or you're trying to do something in your life, or create something in your life, you can't do it with force because you will buckle under the pressure.
And you can't do it with willpower because you are against you. You're trying to defeat your own mind with your own mind. And the mind loves to repeat itself.
It likes to look for patterns and it likes to be efficient. So once the brain and the mind have been thinking the same thought over and over and over and over and over again, because it's been unsupervised and it has you haven't even been aware that you're thinking these thoughts, to change it requires practice and skill. And if you're trying to change it without understanding it, you're going to be in a battle with your own mind.
And of course, when it's you against you, you're going to be the loser. So I really want to emphasize that once you understand that your thoughts create your feelings, which create your actions, and that's why you're not taking action or that's why you're doing something you don't want to do, that you take a breath, understand the pattern and not beat yourself up for it. The other example that people always are coming to me with is overeating.
Now, remember, if you're overeating, that's an action. It's fueled by a feeling, which is created, that feeling is created by a thought. So you have to back it up.
What is the feeling that I'm having when I'm overeating? And most people will say anxiety. Most people will say resistance.
You know, for some, it's frustration. For some, it's apathy. For some, it's hostility, loathing, whatever it is.
You need to not just try to stop overeating because you probably have, and it probably didn't work, right? You need to look at that action that you're taking and understand it. What is the feeling fueling it?
And if it's anxiety, okay, then what is the thought that's creating that anxiety? Right? And when you understand what you're thinking and that that thought is creating anxiety, you know, for, for example, one of my clients was having the thought constantly, I'm going to miss out.
There's not going to be enough and I'm going to miss out. And that's what she was constantly thinking. She wasn't aware of this at all.
This was the thought she'd been thinking since she was a little kid, but it wasn't serving her as an adult. So when she discovered that she was having that thought, she was like, well, that's ridiculous. Why am I even thinking that?
That's so dumb. I'm just going to stop thinking that. And again, I told her, whoa, slow down the train.
Let's understand this thought. Let's understand this pattern before we just jump on, you know, beating ourselves up over it. Like, let's really see if it makes sense, because usually everything we do, even if it seems illogical on the surface, we usually have a very good reason for it.
And so if we take the time to be curious and fascinated with ourselves, we can find that answer. And for her, you know, as a child, there wasn't enough, right? There wasn't enough love and there wasn't enough food.
So as an adult, that pattern, because when she was a child, when she thought those thoughts, they created really strong emotions in her. The same thing happened to her as an adult. As she thought those thoughts, it created a lot of emotion for her, and that drove her overeating.
And so even when she tried to stop overeating, and she tried to replace it with, there's plenty, if there's so much food, it'll be fine. She wasn't going to be able to do that until she understood what the cause was. And once she did, then she could comfort herself and be kind to herself without using food.
And without the anxiety that she was creating, she didn't have the need to overeat. I've seen it thousands and thousands and thousands of times. When you take the time to really understand why you do what you do, from there, you can start to change it.
It doesn't mean you have to go back into your past. It doesn't mean you have to sit on a therapist couch and talk about any kind of anything that happened when you were a child. All you have to know is that the thought you're thinking now and that you might have been thinking since you were a child is what's causing your pain.
You don't have to understand exactly why you're thinking it as an adult. You just have to recognize that you are and be kind to yourself in that recognition. So let me just summarize what I taught you because I gave you a lot in this first podcast.
And I know for some of you who haven't been exposed to me before, this might be kind of mind-blowing for others of you. This might seem very basic, but I want to take you through the process and really make sure that you understand that every action in your life is because of a feeling, and every feeling in your life is because of a thought you're thinking. So step one is to really begin to look inside your mind and see what you're thinking, to become conscious of your thoughts, to ask yourself why, when it comes to anything in your life, if you ask yourself why you are doing something that you're doing, why you're feeling the way you're feeling, the answer that you give yourself will always be a thought.
And that is the best way to get to know what's going on inside your mind, because what's going on inside your mind is what will determine how you feel, act, and the results you get. So practice this. If you look in the show notes, there will be an example of this model, the self-coaching model, so you can see it visually.
So you just need to go to The Life Coach School forward slash one, which will be the first episode of the podcast, and you can go there and look at these show notes and get a sense of this model. And there's also going to be a blank sheet there where you can kind of practice with something that maybe you're doing in your life that you want to change or something that you're not doing that you want to change. Remember to be patient.
Give yourself a chance to really understand yourself. And only then can you decide if you want to change. So that's enough for the first session.
I hope you enjoyed it. It has been my pleasure to be here with you and to begin this process of teaching you what we teach at The Life Coach School. Until next time, I'll talk to you soon.
Bye.
Thank you for listening to The Life Coach School Podcast. It would be incredibly awesome if you would take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes. For any questions, comments, or coaching issues you would like to hear on the show, please visit us at www.thelifecoachschool.com.
