Hey, just a quick note before we get started. If you go to the LifeCoachSchool.com/love, there's a video that we've put up there commemorating the last eight years of Scholars. Underneath the video, we have a place where you can comment, or, as we're calling it, sign our yearbook, if you've been a part of Scholars, if you've been a part of Get Coached.
If you've been in there for the last eight years or even just for one month, we would love to have you comment underneath the video and let us know any of your thoughts, any of your successes, anything that you've done with the material or the coaching that you've received in there, I will read every single one of them. Okay, let's get started.
You're listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 530.
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, my beautiful friends. Gosh, it's so crazy to be here at the end of this year. It has been such an incredibly emotional past couple of months for me as Self-Coaching Scholars is coming to an end, and Get Coached is coming to an end.
And it's just been such a huge outpouring of love that I have received from my students and anyone who's been in Scholars, that I wish for every human on the planet to experience this level of true humbled joy from having made a contribution to the world that has impacted so many people in such a positive way.
It has just been so emotional. It's like every night after I coach a call or get an email from one of you all who have been through this program, it is just mind boggling the changes that you have all made in your lives from these tools. And most of you who come to me found me through the podcast.
And so it is such an emotional moment for me to have this be the very last podcast that will be previously scheduled. I'm going to keep podcasting. I'm going to keep podcasting, I'm going to keep randomly posting here and sharing, but I will not be podcasting on a regular schedule anymore. I will not be required by myself to do a podcast every Thursday or every month, which is what I've been doing for the past six months.
And that's mind boggling to me. We're 10 and a half years in on the podcast and eight years in on Scholars and Get Coached. And this is like the end of a chapter in my life and an end of a chapter for many of you in your lives, as you have told me that many of you have been listening and have listened to every single episode. So that's 530 episodes of us being together.
It's really interesting, I met a friend here recently in San Diego, and it's amazing to me, like it's so fun to meet her and she has worked for me for a while, but I've never met her in person. And I was telling her a little bit about my life because she's a new friend to me. And she laughed and said, just so you know, I've been in a relationship with you for a long time. You haven't been in a relationship directly with me.
And I know that that's how so many of you feel. And I have felt that way with so many of my teachers and so many of the podcasts that I've listened to and so many of my mentors whom I've never met. I feel like I have a very intimate relationship with them.
So I know for many of you, that's what it's been like. We've been going on walks together every Thursday. We've been connected through all of your life's changes. Many of you have changed jobs and made unbelievable amounts of money and found true love and healed relationships and started businesses and become incredibly successful. So many of my students are now going to surpass me in what they're creating in this world. And it's just mind-boggling to think that this podcast has had such a huge part of that impact on the world.
And so I've just been emotional about it. I've felt so much pride and so much love and so much accomplishment for the past 10 years of my life. And there's 10 years before that that I was coaching. Before I even had the podcast, before I even had all of the technology that we had through the membership and through Scholars and the team that I had, and the journey that I've been on has been amazing.
And it's very ironic to me. I happen to be right now in El Dorado Hills, California, and I am here to visit family for the holidays. And I'm staying at the hotel where I did my first live certification to 10 people. My very first live certification that I ever did was here and I'm here right now.
And I did one certification this year, but for all intents and purposes, I didn't really do what I have normally done for the past 15 years, which is train coaches. I did one in-person training at the very beginning of the year because I wanted to make sure that they had the whole year to get the benefit of the calls and the mastermind and the alumni benefits for at least a year of me live after they had that. But since then, I haven't done any live certifications.
So to come here is just incredible. And it's so crazy because this hotel, when we first started, it's the Holiday Inn Express, which we could never have an event here now because we have way too many people. But it was only 10 people when we first started. So it's a Holiday Inn Express and the hotel is so old now and it was brand new when we first started doing it.
And I was laughing as I was like, I'm like, this hotel, I don't know that I'd ever do an event here now just because the hotel is kind of older and not as pristine as it was. And everything's kind of grown up around this area. There wasn't a lot here when we first started.
It's crazy because when I moved here, my kids, I think I didn't even have Connor yet. I just had Christian. We moved to this area into our house and it's kind of fun to come back home and to see my friends that still live here and to see this area and just be nostalgic.
Those of you who have followed in my journey, right, you know that I was here and then I moved to Texas from here. And basically the second half of my kids' lives through high school was in Texas, but a big majority of it was here and this is where I started first doing the podcast and first doing certification. So I have come beautifully full circle.
And I was walking around, there's like a little lake here and I was walking around, or pond I guess, walking around the little pond just really thinking about how far we went from just 10 people to thousands of people that we were training and teaching. And now to have my son become this pro golfer and to have his dream, like he's just starting his dream. He's just starting his big career. It's just, there's so many just amazing moments that are happening in my life. And to be able to talk to everyone about their experience through the work that I've done has just been mind boggling.
Many of the questions that I have received over the past couple months is, what's going to happen? What are you going to do? How are we going to make it without you? And I don't know, if I can't talk to or be on the certification calls or be on the scholars calls or listen to the podcast, I don't know what I'm going to do.
And I did record a podcast about this very topic about moving from student to leader, and so many of you are so ready for that transition. And so many of you are just doing such magical things in this world and in the world of life coaching. And to watch you all kind of grow at the rate that you're growing and to build your businesses and to have the impact that you're having.
To me, it just feels like, oh my God, it's like in many ways my students feel like my kids too. Like I've raised so many of my students who are now kind of going off into the world and doing just incredible, amazing things.
So this is what's going to happen, for the next year I am going to be selling classes that have already been recorded. I will be selling all of my legacy classes through the website. So for new people that are just finding me and want to take a course from me, for people who maybe haven't taken all the courses in Scholars and want to be able to access them individually, they will be for sale on my website for one year.
And that will be the last year that they will be for sale on the website in their current form. So this is really the last opportunity, in 2025 is really the last opportunity to access those classes.
Over the next year, I will be traveling with Christian and attending every single golf round I can possibly attend, but I will also be working on a course. And I haven't wanted to talk about this course before in too much detail, and I'm not going to go into too much detail here. But the course is called Life.
And I read this amazing book called Strength to Strength, and it was recommended by a friend. And in this book, it talks about how the human brain changes as we get older and how our ambition changes and our intelligence changes. And I would say that book and also the book Die With Zero, those two books have had the biggest impact on me over the past, I would say three years in helping me really transform my vision for my life for the second half of my life, which is magnificent.
Those of you who are going through the change as we speak through your fifties, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Kind of being halfway through your life and having so many kinds of chemical changes happening, but also so many emotional and intellectual changes happening.
And one of the things that he talks about that is, I think, really impactful is the idea of different intelligences and how in our twenties, thirties, early forties, we have a ton of what he calls fluid intelligence. And then as we get older, we move more into crystallized intelligence. And you can read his book to get the full details with all the references of where he gets this information. But the concept is super helpful, even if you don't want to analyze the science behind it.
But the concept for me was like an aha moment. And what he talks about is how in your twenties and thirties, this fluid intelligence is really helping you in creating new ideas and new concepts.
And if you have been with me a long time, you know that throughout this podcast, I have created new tools and new concepts and done a lot of super thinking and taken a lot of ideas from different sources and incorporated them with my own knowledge and made what we call idea babies and made new tools and new concepts. And as soon as I've come up with these concepts, I've jumped on the podcast and I've created classes and I've taught them to you.
That has been my career is basically creating concepts, teaching concepts, applying concepts. And the way that I've done it personally is anytime I had a challenge or anytime I had something that I really wanted to change in my life is I would dive in and study it and learn as much as I could.
And then I would apply it to my life and implement change and then create new tools for you to be able to implement that same change in your life. And it has been the perfect formula for me to be able to create a very successful life coaching practice that has influenced and contributed to so many people's lives.
And I would say that about the time I turned 50, and it's so hard to say what the catalyst was, and I think reading this book just really helped me understand that it's part of an evolution of one's life to have these changes happen. So for me, a lot of things happened all at once.
So I got a divorce from my husband of 20 years. My kids both went away to college and I moved, right, because I moved out of my family's home right after my kids had moved out. And so there were so many things that changed and all of a sudden I was single and living the most successful wave of my company. Like insane, having so much more support in terms of employees and executives within my company and being able to deliver to so many more people and growing the business.
Just so many things going on all at once that what I noticed was that my typical morning changed. And I used to, for as long as I can remember, I used to wake up in the morning and read for about an hour-ish and then I would go on a walk and listen to an audiobook. And come back from that walk and then journal and create and take notes and create concepts and create content.
And I wrote several books, and this podcast, and several classes, and several presentations based on that whole kind of process of inputs, creations, outputs, inputs, creations, outputs. And around 50 years old, I noticed that I wasn't reading as much. I had less interest in voraciously consuming material and creating.
And I was spending a lot more time focusing on the ins and outs of my business and not focused so much on creating. And so at the time I think I thought like, I need to get back to creating more because I'm spending so much time focused on building my business. But my desire to do that had changed.
And I didn't understand exactly what that was about until I read this book that really kind of explained it, that we switch from kind of this creation, idea, fluid, intelligent production level to more of a crystallized intelligence, or the way that he describes it is more wisdom. And that just felt right to me. I was like, yes, that's exactly how I feel.
And over this past year, as I have been teaching my students, I've been teaching money classes and business classes to my alumni, and I've been coaching them. I really wanted to put a lot of effort into them because I knew I wouldn't be doing another certification next year. So I put a lot of effort into them this year to make sure we had a solid year of all this content. And then I was also the only one teaching in Scholars.
So I have just been teaching like crazy and the feedback that I've gotten and what I've heard and what I've felt is that my teaching has gotten so much better with every single year. And part of the reason is because of that crystallized intelligence, because now I have 20 years of my own references, of my own tools, of my thousands and thousands of hours of coaching people. I now have that and own that as wisdom.
It's not just fleeting intelligence. It's not just new concepts. It's not just new ideas. It's tried and true and practiced wisdom. I'm not just inventing a tool and teaching it to you and trying it out anymore. I've proven all those tools. We know that they work. We see the effect on them. We've measured them with all of our students, thousands and thousands of students that have gone through our programs. I mean, literally thousands.
And that's just not the thousands of people who I've talked to on the podcast. On the podcast it's millions. Millions of you have listened, which is what? Millions of downloads. It's just wild to even think about.
So I want to take all of my ideas now, this is what I want to spend the next year doing. I want to take all of my ideas in their current form. So that would include all of the podcasts, all of my lectures, all of my courses, all of my content and live events, all of it, and I want to create a course called Life. And I want to turn it into the lessons that adults need for their life.
And I am so excited that all of my life's work has cumulated into this moment at the very same time that AI can be the tool that I need. Because AI can access all of my material and organize it in a way that will help me produce it into a legacy course. Into the best course I've ever created, into my life's work on steroids because now I can teach it in a way that's more impactful, that references every other piece of it. It takes it all that's now kind of separate and will put it in a cumulative lesson.
Now, my certified coaches have received this material through our certification programs in a much more kind of cohesive, linear program because they've all learned everything from beginning to end within a shorter period of time. But the rest of you have not had that course delivered in quite that same way.
And so I want to take everything. I want to include all my certification knowledge that I've learned from certifying students and from what they've learned from building businesses and working with their students. I want to pull all that knowledge together and create the ultimate life course.
And I'm going to be delivering that course in 2026. And it will be the most epic course that I have ever created. It will be next level. But I want to take an entire year to create that course and I want to be able to take my time and I want to be able to work with curriculum experts. And I want to work with graphic artists and I want to work with curriculum organizers to make sure that the course is delivered in the easiest way to consume, in the fastest way possible with the best exercises and assignments so all of this work can be integrated in the fastest way possible.
Now, for those of you who have been on this journey with me for 10 years and you've kind of created and learned along with me, there is some nostalgia and some beauty to that intimacy that we have. But I want you to think about new people that could get that same knowledge that we all got over the past 10 years, the past 20 years for some of us, that they could get it in one year. They could get all of the knowledge and all the applications in one year.
Even when we did the program in Scholars and we had one year to integrate everything, right? One year at the beginning of Scholars, one year program, most of us did it another year, and another year, and another year. But what if I could create it now at this level so the impact after one year would be even greater?
What if the impact after one year could be 10 times what it's been? 100 times what it has been? And that's what I'm excited about creating. I feel like I need to tap into my new found skills, my new found desires.
I feel like with my fluid intelligence and with my ambition and with my desire to succeed and my hundred million goal and growing a business and growing my family and all of that energy, there was a sense of momentum to that that was so exciting, that was so extraordinarily energizing. And there was a pace to it, a quickening to it. So I was able to create and deliver so much.
Like my life's work is insane when you look at the amount of content that I have created over that time and the amount of people that I've coached and the amount of courses that I've created. Especially because I've done it with a very balanced life, meaning I've only really worked solidly for three days a week during that entire time. I had a very good work/life balance. I was very focused on my kids and still produced so much freaking content.
And so this energy that I have now, this shift is more pensive. It takes more time. It's more thoughtful. It's more patient. I'm not in such a hurry to get it to you. Like, oh my God, I need to teach this to the people immediately.
When you think about the promises that I made to myself, it's like if I figure this out, I'm going to share it with the world. I'm going to share it with the world immediately and make sure that I can help them.
And I have. I've delivered and over-delivered and then created a new course and created another course. And so many of you have taken all my courses, taken all my programs, been involved in all of it. And now I'm at this level with my content where I'm really ready to refine it and to professionalize it in a way that it hasn't been before, and still keep it fun and exciting and energized, but from a wisdom perspective at a higher level, refined.
It's like, I feel like I've been making everybody nourishing food that we've eaten that's like really gotten us through. And now I want to make it a more refined dish. And so that is the project that I'm going to be working on over all of 2025. And I'm not going to be requiring myself to create any other content or to do any other coaching or any other teaching during that time.
And I'm very excited about being able to be present for my sons, both my sons, for a year. One of the things that I've been really thinking about is what can I do now? And this is one of the things that book, Die With Zero,
really helped me refine too. What can I do now that I'm not going to be able to do in 10 years?
And one of the things that I can do now is spend a lot of time with my adult kids before they have families of their own and are really wrapped up in their lives. Like I can hang out with Christian. Like I just spent all summer with him touring Canada and I'll be able to spend all year with him touring America this year.
And there's nothing I'd rather do. I want him to live his dream and I want to watch him live his dream. And I have the ability to do that because of how hard I worked the whole time he was a kid. And the same with Connor, being able to travel with him like I have and be able to be present with him like I have. Before he has his own kids and a very separate life with his own family we're going to do as much family stuff as possible. And so this year is also about that for me. And that's been my priority.
And my ideas are incubating inside. And then I also have a whole other business that I am going to be doing. And I'll be updating you and teaching you and telling you all about everything that I'm doing through the podcast, but it'll just be sporadically. And if there's something that I learn that's new that I want you to know, I'm definitely going to put it out here on this podcast.
But for those of you who are like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? If you're a student of mine that has been through certification, you will have your entire alumni site with all the trainings for the past eight years in there that you'll be able to access and all of the mastermind recordings and all of the courses that I've created and all of the certifications that I've created are all in there.
If you are not a certified coach through me, but throughout next year, you need some type of Brooke pick-me-up or some kind of help, just go to the website, thelifecoachschool.com, and buy one of the courses. And take the course from beginning to end and do all the exercises in the course.
Do the fundamentals, do the how to feel better, do the one on buffering, do the one on money. Do it in a different way than maybe you have before. Because there was so much in Scholars, just doing one course at a time might be the way for you to stay focused and to stay connected to this work over the next year.
And then get ready because I am going to invite you all to take my course, Life, in 2026. And it's going to be epic and amazing and exciting. And it's going to cover all of the important pieces of living an adult life, which is really understanding your circumstances and what they mean to you in your life and how much they matter and don't matter. And then really understanding your consciousness and your thoughts and how the meta skill of understanding your own thinking and being able to think about your own thinking and to be able to be conscious of your own self and the way that us humans are is the most profound thing that we can do to live our lives on purpose.
And the class is really going to talk about feelings and how feelings are the experience of being alive. And the balance of positive and negative emotion and how to utilize that to create the life that you want and how they really are the secret to confidence and creation and success.
And in this class, I'm going to talk about your behavior and how your behavior and your actions can lead you towards yourself and who you most want to be or away from yourself and why. Why do we do these things we don't want to do? And why don't we do the things we most want to do? This is the ultimate question, right? And so I want to really dive into that in this next course on life and make sure everybody has the knowledge that you need in order to control your own behavior in order to obey yourself.
And then we're going to talk about the possibility of results. And what are the results that you really want to create in your life when you think as big as you've ever thought? And how do you want to blow your own mind in terms of what you're capable of and what you could do in this one precious life.
Something so cool about coming back here to El Dorado Hills and looking at what I have already done with my life and feeling the sense of impossible accomplishment. And I want you all to know how I did that and how you can do that too.
And then we're also going to talk about relationships and how we mess up our relationships so badly because we don't have this knowledge that we need to have. And then we're going to talk in the end about evolution and your evolution as a human being and your evolution and contribution to this world.
And so it's going to be an epic class. I don't know exactly the format yet. I do know that there will be materials. There will be textbooks and workbooks and there will definitely be a lot of me. But I want to teach it in a way that's very engaging and very entertaining and very fun and delivers all the best of the best of what I've taught.
So that's Life. That's like a summary of my life and what it's been like for me over the past couple months and the past decades, past two decades, what it's been like for the past decade on this podcast and what it's going to be like moving forward. So this next year will be quiet from me. There'll be updates on the podcast, but they're going to be spread out and we'll see how often, but I will keep you updated.
And then I am going to come back with so much excitement and so much energy and we're all going to scream when we see each other and be like, oh my God, it's been so long. How have you been? That's what's going to be like in 2026 and we are going to get after it with a class, an epic class called Life.
I hope you all have the most beautiful holiday. I hope you end this year with so much love and so much caring for yourselves and for each other. And I wish you the most beautiful 2025. I'll talk to you soon, my friends. Take care.
