You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 526.
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.
Hey, beautiful friends. I am on my headphones, so Pavel is dying. He doesn't like it when I record this low quality on my headphones, my earbuds podcast.
But many of you have said that they're your favorite ones because they're more casual. So we're going to compromise for this. I am currently on a walk in New Brunswick in Canada and in a town called Fredericton.
And they have a beautiful trail right along the river, and it's sprinkling. We're on a rain delay for Christian's tournament, for the first day of his tournament. So I was going a little stir crazy.
I needed to get out. It's beautiful out here. And I've been thinking a lot about you all, thinking a lot about my students who have been with me for many years.
As most of you know, I announced that I am closing scholars, and that I'm not going to be offering live certification anymore. And there's been a lot of coaching happening around this inside of my coaching programs. And I wanted to kind of address some of the themes that I see coming up, and some of the broader kind of lessons that I think can be learned from our struggles, and from what we go through as things change.
I think for a lot of us, change is difficult because our brains don't like it. They don't like things that aren't predictable and things that aren't certain. And one of the things I know for sure is that I've had a very long career with a lot of loyal students, and a lot of loyal clients that have been with me over the past 20 years.
That is a long time. That's a significant part of many of our lifetimes. And a lot of you have listened to my podcast religiously for the past 8 to 10 years.
And many of you have been inside of scholars for all 8 years. And so when I announced, and I gave kind of a year of notice, because I knew it would be a transition, when I announced that I would no longer be doing live classes, for some of you, it's been really challenging, and scary, and worrisome, and upsetting, which I totally understand. And I also want to offer that there is perfect timing for change.
There is perfect timing for your evolution, if you allow yourself to see it that way. So I have been and still am a student, in many ways, with many teachers. And there are, I would say, many teachers where I graduated from their class.
And I see so many opportunities for so many of my students to kind of take the torch, right? To step into the leadership position that I have held for such a long time. And for them to become the leaders in those positions, them to become the example of what is possible, them to become, you know, the teachers, the coaches of this industry.
And as many of you know, I am very focused right now on golf. And golf is very much, I think, a metaphor for life. And it's also a metaphor for business.
So I see a lot of correlation. And as I spend all this time with Christian, coaching him and talking with him through this next phase of his career, I just see so many of the opportunities for him to up level and for him to take himself from a student in many ways to a leader, to being his own teacher. And I was recently coaching one of my clients and I was talking to her a little bit about her concerns about not having me on the podcast every week and not having me to coach her every week and that she was afraid she was going to feel lost.
And one of the things that I told her was I believed that it was time for her to step into that role, that she's had me in kind of ahead of her as a teacher, someone kind of showing her the way, and for her to become that leader for herself and for many other people that she could help, either through her example or through her direct coaching. And what was fascinating for me is I don't think that she had considered that, and I don't know if she would have considered that had I not been kind of moving into this next phase of my life. It kind of opened the door for her to step into that.
And it makes me wonder for how many of you that are ready, but aren't even acknowledging that you're ready for the next phase, the next up level of your life. I think in many ways, if you don't like change, if you allow your brain to settle you in this uncertainty and comfort, you may miss out on opportunities for growth and opportunities for leadership. And I think that opportunities for growth and leadership are actually the point of our evolution, actually the point of our lives.
As a teacher, it is one of the most amazing things as a coach to see your students surpass you, to do more than you ever did, and to show up in ways that maybe you couldn't, to make more money, have more students, create more content, win more goals, impossible goals. And I think every student, if you think about it, every student should surpass their teacher. And here's what I mean.
Not that they should, it's not like a requirement, but they could if they wanted to. And I think sometimes because of the way that we're raised in the school system, it's kind of like teachers are authority figures that we're always supposed to look up to. They know more than us and they're better than us in some way.
They definitely have more authority. But I think that instead of seeing teachers as someone that teaches us to be as good as maybe just we could be, they teach us so much more because of the leverage that they're creating. So if you think about it, all of my teachers had a certain amount of success that they earned, and that they created through their experience and through their lifetime, and through what they learned from other teachers.
So the idea is they're able to condense that knowledge. They're able to distill that knowledge from me, and I can learn from the lessons of their life much more quickly than they did. Right?
Because of all the learned experience over many years can be taught to me in the last time that it took them to learn. Right? So it's like, might have taken them, what might have taken me 20 years to learn in detail, if I'm a good teacher, I should be able to teach that to you, if you're a good student and you're applying what I'm teaching you in a couple of years.
So for example, I'm 52, I'm learning and have learned stuff over the last 20 years, that if I can teach a 30-year-old student or a 25-year-old student, all those lessons within two years, they have so many more years to bounce off of my experience to excel. And that is what I think evolution is about. I think that's why we make so much more progress, so much more quickly when we see ourselves as utilizing our teachers for just short periods of time to learn the lessons that they're there to teach us, to grow from them, and then to move on.
So as much as I love my students and I want to keep my students forever, and I love seeing their progress, and I love checking in with them and seeing how they're doing, I also have always had a perspective as a coach and a perspective as a teacher, as someone who only wants to work with my students for a short period of time. I remember when I first started learning about coaching, there's other philosophies that are different from mine that are about, hey, you know, get clients for life, and get clients that you develop an accountability relationship with them, so they're always being accountable for you and they're always depending on you, so you'll always have them as a client, you'll always have that relationship. And I do see that there can be benefit on that, but for me, I've always been very wary about any sort of dependence.
I just don't think that it's healthy, and this is from like my personal experience with teachers, I don't think it's healthy to depend on a teacher more than you depend on yourself. And I don't think it's healthy to think that a teacher has more talent or more, you know, worse in any kind of way than you do, right? It's, they may be further along the path, and they may have leverage for you to benefit from.
But the point is for you to use that lesson, those learning, those courses that you take from them, and to boomerang right past them. And so for me, I think the message I kind of want to impart to anyone who's ever been my student, including all my podcast listeners, is I hope that you will see that in yourself. I hope that you will take everything that I've learned about my own life and shared with you and everything I've used to create truly a dream life for myself, that you can utilize what I've learned and show us all the next level of what that is at the highest level, right?
And so, I often say this to my new coaches who are just learning, you know, how to be in business, you know, just learning about coaching. And a lot of them will be concerned. They'll say, you know, I don't know if I'm able to coach someone on weight loss because I haven't lost all my weight yet, or I don't know that I can coach someone on business because I'm not at my goal income yet.
And I always say, like, you don't need to be where you ultimately want to be to help someone else get to where you are. You just need to be a little bit ahead of them. And the hope is that they will blow by you.
I'm talking to one of my best friends about this, and most of her clients are, you know, making more money than her. And it's amazing because that's what you want, right? You want to have a high caliber client that is able to utilize what you're teaching them to reach the highest levels of what is possible and what their truest desires are.
And when you see someone else, when you see another teacher kind of above you or ahead of you, and you have some kind of like reliance on them, that can be such a secure feeling, right? That can be such an amazing kind of touch point. And also, I want to encourage all of you to also see your teachers as springboards, as opportunities to learn and then to go on to the next, and to become your own teacher and your own leader, and to seek out other mentors and other opportunities.
One of the things that when I was first starting the school, I really wanted to kind of impart on everybody, is that this is the school where you come and you learn and you leave, right? It's kind of like going to college, right? You go, you learn what you need to learn, you practice what you need to learn, you get some support afterwards, and then you carry on, right?
It's not a place where you necessarily stay. And one of the reasons why I thought that is I do understand the value of community, and I do think community is important, but I also have a controversial approach to it in that I think communities can become bubbles and they can become very limiting and myopic. And so I've always encouraged, and this is why I don't really run like an online community of people where I manage, because I think it's important to be around a wide variety of communities with a lot of different input.
One of the benefits that I have had that's been so helpful is really being in both industries in terms of my growth and business, being in the online business industry, and then also being in the life coaching industry, two separate crossover industries. And in all of my exposure and all of my teachers with internet marketing, I've been exposed to so many different types of businesses, and I've learned so much and had so many idea babies and so many different perspectives, that I've been able to create something that's brand new, that's very different than what anyone else had created before me. And I think when we're in the same community with the same people, talking about the same things, and we all have the same teacher, for too long, you can start to get into this same thinking.
And heaven forbid somebody starts having negative input, because that will catch on like wildfire, right? The brain loves to pay attention to that. And so I think it's like when one thing isn't, when one technique isn't working over here, I was able to go to like another business type and ask them, hey, what are you doing?
We'll go to another industry and be like, hey, what do you go? And I was able to do like a lot of crossing over of ideas with people selling products and people selling online events and people selling in-person events and people selling brick and mortar, retail shops. I learned so much from that variety.
And I also learned so much from having so many different teachers and not just having one. Listen, I've always said for me, I'm going to teach you what I believe, and I'm going to teach you what's helped me. But only take what is useful to you.
Only take what resonates with you, and throw everything else out. So if you get a couple of ideas that you really like that change your life, that's successful teacher-student relationship. I never in a million years think that you should believe every single thing one teacher teaches you.
Or feel like you have to throw it all out if you don't believe in all of it. Each teacher might have one gem for you. Each course you take may have one gem.
Each, you know, three-day event may have maybe two or three insights that you can take. And it's that mixture, right? It's that combination of insight, a combination of teaching with you and your wisdom and your insight that makes your life unique and creative and interesting and evolving for you.
So I want to encourage everyone, whether I'm your teacher or you have other teachers, to branch out, to graduate teachers that you've had for maybe a long time. I think that the best kind of teachers have these levels to what they teach, right? So it's kind of like there's the introductory level at the life coach school, where you're just learning kind of the basics of the tools.
And then there's like the mastery level where you're kind of diving into deeper concepts and applying the foundational tools to more complex areas of life. And then there's our certification program that really takes you into not just being able to understand our tools, but to be able to teach them to share them with other people. And once you've kind of reached that point, you know, several years of kind of evolving through the tools and having time to work with them, I truly believe then it's time to really start creating your own stuff, and really start learning from other teachers, and really start becoming the teacher that you are.
And when I look at my most successful students, my students have seen the most fulfilled, the most evolved, the happiest. There's a lot of stuff that they've left behind that I taught them, right? It was kind of like the training wheels that got them going.
And now they're really on to, you know, more complex ideas that they've created and that they're leaning through. They used kind of my teaching as their springboard for their life. So I'm going to continue to coach anyone who wants it on all of your feelings around scholars' ending and certification, live calls, ending, all of that.
I want to coach everyone. I want to make sure everyone's in a really solid, good place. But I also really want to encourage you all to use this, too, as an opportunity to become the leader that you are, to become the teacher that you are, to step in that next version of yourself, to trust what you've learned and how to apply it, to know that you can always come back to the recordings, you can come back to the podcast, you can come back to your notes, into the books, and revisit the basics.
But every time you do, you'll do it with fresh eyes and a new perspective, and maybe be more discerning about what you want to apply and what you don't. And I want to be not just like your cheerleader to encourage you to go and be everything that you could possibly be, but also just a little bit of that foundation, that springboard that helps you get there. Right?
And that any one thing that you learned from me, and maybe combined with something that you learned from someone else, and mixed it with you, became a new tool, a new product, a new offering for this world. To me, that is the magic of this work. That's the magic of all of our work, right?
And that's why we show up to add value. In fact, for those of you who are coaches, it's important to remember, you don't have to help someone change their life completely with your teaching. And even though I've done that many times with many of my students, it's not ultimately the point.
The point is, can I offer you something useful? Can I be useful for you to believe in yourself more, to access your own wisdom more? For those of you who are kind of facing what some of my students are facing, and you feel like maybe there's an era of support or an era of teaching, it's changing or that's complete, I just want to encourage you to have some sense of graduation from that.
Instead of feeling like it's more, and I think some of my students have been thinking about it this way, more of a loss or an ending, it's more of a graduation. It's more of a next leveling. It's more of a moving on.
Even though we wish high school could last forever, or we wish college could last forever, it's time to go out and become ultimately the offering and the usefulness and the teacher that you are in this world. I want to encourage each of you to do that, and maybe to enter into the next education, into the next mentorship, into the next teacher. I have found that so many of my students become teachers for students that have been previous students of mine, because they've taken the work to the next level.
We had a whole like mastery level of instructors that came and offered certifications beyond my certification, right? I have kind of that base certification and master certification, but they have very significant offerings to this industry, where they were able to create additional certification to what I offer. And that is my wish for everyone.
There's no like base curriculum that then you learn and then you're my student forever, right? That's not the point. The point is, take what you can and become the leader that you are.
I talked to one of my students. She said she never saw herself as a leader, never saw herself as someone that would get in front of the room and be the teacher. And that I had helped her maybe consider that for herself.
And I want to encourage all of you to do that because there are people that you can help, and there are people that need you. And I do feel like when we teach and when we lead, is when we get mastery over the material and over ourselves. So we're going to be working hard the next six months here in Scholars for all of the new students that just joined.
We had a huge, biggest launch we've ever had for the last six months. So I'm so excited about all the new students. I'm so excited about all my Diamond members who are already in there that are really digging in and taking this to the next level.
And we'll be talking about this much, much more. So carry on, my friends. Continue.
Do not get discouraged. Do not get depleted. Take care of yourself and truly become the version of yourself.
That you most want to be. Have a beautiful month, everyone. Have some bonus episodes coming up, so stay tuned.
