You're listening to The Life Coach School podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 529.
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 friends, how are y'all doing? It has been such an amazing week. We have done some coaching in Scholars that is like, I don't know, mind-boggling to me. The amount of effort people are putting into their work this year. I think a lot of people joined this year, knowing that it was the last year of scholars, and they have been doing some life altering work.
And it is just such an amazing honor to be a witness to it. It's exciting. Today, I want to talk to you all about satisfaction. And I want to talk to you about it in a way that kind of conflates three of the concepts that I've taught over the years. It's really interesting to be moving into this position where I have this huge body of work now that I can reference and that I can pull from.
And I have an episode coming up next month, where I'm going to talk about a course that I'm working on that I'm creating, and how it's such a deep reflection of the work that I've already done. And the difference between kind of the fluid intelligence and the crystal intelligence that I'm kind of moving into. It's really exciting. I can't wait to talk to you guys about it.
But for the sake of this podcast, I want to talk about these three separate ideas that I think all contribute to our life's satisfaction. And the three concepts are, and if you're a long-time podcast listener or you're in Scholars Get Coached, you are very familiar with these ideas. But I haven't ever talked about them all together and how they interrelate to each other in a podcast. So I want to do that here.
So the first concept is the idea of deciding again. Now, if you go back through the podcast, there are so many different podcasts where I talk about decision making, I talk about decision debt, and I talk about the power of making decisions, and I talk about decision fatigue, right? There's so many angles where we can talk about decisions. But the main thing is decisions are our point of power in our life. They are the steering wheel, so to speak, of our life and of how we relate to our own selves in the direction of our lives.
And so deciding again is a concept that I encourage all of you to participate in, which is every single year you decide everything in your life again. You decide who you want to be. You decide your goals. You decide where you live. You decide the clothes that you wear, the hair that you have, everything, because it will keep you fresh and it will keep you alive and it'll keep you on the right track post-evolution.
So I believe if you're living your life in a way where you're trying to grow and evolve, you will become different every year, maybe every month, if you're having a high growth year. And so you want to always reconsider without any burden what your future will be, what the next year will be.
And it's very challenging not to be run by your past decisions, by your past self, and by your past identity. And I think this is one of the biggest ways that we thwart our growth and ultimately our success by living through the habits and the patterns and the identities of our past. So it's a really powerful exercise to own your life by deciding regularly and not by living in default. So that's the first concept.
The second concept I've taught a lot about is the idea of wanting what you have. So I have this exercise that I introduce in How to Feel Better inside of Scholars. And the concept is to write down every single thing that you want, okay? And I have a minimum of 25 things, and it can be little things and it can be big things.
And one of the things that has happened over the past 20 years of coaching people and helping people figure this out is I've run into a significant number of people who have no idea what they want. They have no idea who they are because they don't know what they prefer.
And this happened to me when I was much younger and I was trying to figure out how to decorate my own house. And I didn't know what kind of flowers that I liked. I knew what kind of flowers I thought other people liked. I knew what kind of flowers I thought would be impressive. I knew what kind of flowers that would please my mother, but I had no idea that if no one else was going to see these flowers, and I was just buying them for me, what is my favorite flower? I did not know.
And so this really put me on this journey of discovering the things that I want, the things that I want to learn that I want and how much I didn't know what that was. What I wanted was always based on pleasing other people and not on myself. And so I have been on this amazing adventure of wanting what I want and finding out what my desires are and wanting them from a place of freedom and self-knowledge and excitement.
And once I have my clients do this exercise and once I did it for myself, I noticed that the whole list of wants that I put on there were things that I didn't have yet. When I thought about what I wanted, I was constantly thinking from a place of scarcity, from things that I didn't have yet.
And so I decided to continue the list and to list everything on there that I really wanted that I already have. And it blew my mind because the feeling that I had from that was desire and not gratitude. They're very similar feelings, but the experience was very different. To want from a place of abundance created desire and dopamine within me. And gratitude is being thankful for what you have, which is different than wanting what you have.
And so I realized I really want this life that I've created. I really want this freedom I have around food and around alcohol. And I really want these friends that I have. And I really want this relationship that I have with my mom. And I really want this relationship that I have with my kids. And I realized that so many of the things that I want, I already have.
And so this second concept is really wanting what you already have and doing that actively. Now this doesn't take away from wanting what you don't have. You still want to do that for sure. But wanting what you have is an extraordinary thing to do. And it relates back to deciding again, because what you may discover is that you have a lot of things that maybe you don't want anymore or you never did want. And so deciding again to not have those things or to have those things that are very closely related.
And then the third concept that you've heard me talk a lot about is goal cultivation and cultivating extraordinary, impossible, amazing goals that invite you to grow and evolve and to become deeper into your own capacity. And I've talked about this in a lot of ways in terms of letting your own dreams delight you. Letting your dreams be a source of energy, be a source of contentment and excitement and joy and inspiration. Never to use your goals against yourself, never to use them as a reason to discount yourself or doubt yourself or treat yourself poorly because you haven't achieved them yet.
And so when you think about how do you have a life that is truly satisfying, right? How do you have a life that is truly satisfying? How do you have a life where you feel like, I like the idea of feeling sated, where sated is like how you feel after you've eaten, right? After you've eaten a great meal. What is that like? What is that feeling like when you feel satisfaction? It's a fulfillment, right?
It's how do you have this fulfilling life? It's like you've met your own expectations, your needs. You are complete in some ways. You are full in some ways. And I like that they use the word satisfaction when they're talking about like paying off a debt. You have satisfied your obligation. You've satisfied your obligation to the debt.
But also satisfaction comes from having accomplished something extraordinary and that you wanted, that you put out there. And I think when I think about this word, when I was thinking about prepping for this, I was thinking about there's two types of satisfaction, right, and this is something that I think is controversial in my work sometimes. It's if you're already satisfied with what you have, why are you setting all these goals?
Because isn't the goal satisfaction? And if you start from satisfaction and you're only going to end up with satisfaction, then what is the point? And I first want to say, if you start with satisfaction and you end with satisfaction, you are doing it right. You are doing it beautifully. You are understanding it.
You are understanding that your whole life and the growth and the discomfort and the involvement can all be from a place of it being ultimately satisfying and accepting what is accepting the darkness and the light and the beauty of all of it along the way and so when you want what you already have you generate a sense of desire from a sense of abundance, from a place of already being satisfied. It's kind of like grocery shopping after you've eaten or planning a meal after you've eaten. There's no feel of intense hunger that is needed in order for you to calmly pursue the life of your dreams.
So when we want what we have, and when we decide again what we want and what we have, then we can go into the process of goal cultivation. And when you think about many of the concepts that I've talked about in The Last Word on Power and the idea that sometimes you have to give up who you are in order to become who you want to be.
You need to give up a winning strategy that has gotten you this far in order to adopt a new strategy to get you to the next place. And many times the people in your life that have gotten you and helped you and supported you up to a certain point are not able to come with you on the ride to that next version of yourself. And having that be the norm, the deciding again, the evolving again, the letting go, the accepting of the new, and wanting new while also wanting what you already have is the deepest level of satisfaction. It is the most fulfilling.
And I've watched so many, mostly my colleagues do this, is they want something from this place of scarcity and they want it so badly. And then they get it and they just want the next thing. And instead of redesigning, do I still want this thing or do I want more of this thing? Or even do I want the next step of this thing? I have now become a new person having achieved this. So I need to re-decide and then I need to evaluate and think about what I have that I already want.
And then and only then do I think about the things that I don't yet have that I also want. And when you do this, the rub is that you will set a goal, you will achieve it. And then at some point you may decide you don't want it. Something that you wanted, maybe it was to get married, maybe it was to get a job somewhere, maybe it was to move to a certain area, maybe it was to collaborate with a group of people, whatever it is, you may have wanted it so bad and then you get it and you feel some sort of obligation to honor your past desire for it and to honor the sunk costs that went into it. And nothing will make you feel more stuck than that.
And I want to give you permission to redesign what it is you actually want. And to maybe not pursue that goal in that same way after you've satisfied it after you've achieved it. True satisfaction comes from consciously living your life on purpose, not based on other people, and not based on your past, but based on who you are right now, your consciousness in this moment, and what you are being driven to consider.
Now, one of the things that I'm always kind of wiggling around with my clients is this desire to identify themselves as they've always been. So they'll say something like, well, I've always been this way, or this has always been difficult for me, or I've been doing this my whole life.
And I like to say to them, so what? It doesn't matter that you've always struggled. You don't have to continue to struggle. It doesn't matter that you've never done it this way. You could try to do it this way. It doesn't matter that you've never considered it or nobody's offered you the possibility of it. You can consider it now.
So if you are someone, as you're listening to this, you're like, oh dear, this feels scary to me. This feels like I could blow up my life if I do this process. I feel like there's a lot of things in my life that I don't want, that I have, and I need to re-decide about.
I just want you to know you don't have to change anything. You can live the way you've been living, but at least tell yourself the truth. I want this, but I'm not pursuing this, and this is why. Really powerful. I'm deciding again to do this thing that I'm telling myself I don't want, but I'm deciding to do it again because obviously, I want it more than I don't want it and make that conscious.
And then please spend some time wanting what you already have, wanting clean drinking water, wanting electricity, wanting windows, wanting a car that works, wanting laughter, wanting for me chicken noodle soup, wanting my boyfriend, wanting the time I get with my kids, wanting the privilege of getting older, wanting my cell phone and my computer and my desk and the tree outside on my property and lemons and wanting deeper things, wanting the growth that I've earned and wanting the money that I've created and wanting the generosity that I have and wanting the strength that I have and wanting the ability to accept the parts of me that I don't love so much being in that space.
And then once you've done that, my friends, you've re-decided and you've wanted what you want, then I want you to consider wanting what you don't yet have and open yourself up to the possibility of having all of it and living in the space of that possibility, doing a possibility drop and being in the moment of having it and what that would be like and let your body tingle with the accomplishment of it long before you ever get it.
Be in the joy of the experience of it long before you ever give it. Live in the beautiful satisfying space of anticipation. Anticipation doesn't exist with things we already have. Anticipation begins and we experience with things we don't yet have. And so feeling anticipation instead of scarcity, feeling anticipation instead of doubt, feeling anticipation and delight with what it is you want versus the things you wish you had and you don't.
Think of wishing that you had them and will. That, my friends, is what is going to create a life of pure satisfaction for you without having to accomplish one more thing, without having to take any more action. You can do this in this moment. And I really encourage you to do it over the next 6 weeks as we're preparing for the new year. Really setting yourself up to be fully satisfied with this life in this moment.
None of us know how much time we have left. And so living within satisfaction by re-deciding, wanting, and setting goals is the best way I know how to do that. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your month and I'll talk to you next month. Take care.
