Entre-Talk: My Recent Talk with Brooke Castillo

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, Entre-Talk: My Recent Talk with Brooke Castillo.

This is Better Than Happy, the podcast where we study what the healthiest, most successful people in today’s world think, feel and do. And we leverage this knowledge to create our best lives. Are you ready, little bird? Let’s fly.

Hello everybody, welcome to Entre-Talk. I have a really fun episode in store for you today. I recently reached out to Brooke Castillo, who has been my primary teacher and coach over the years. And we are pretty close friends. And I said, “Brooke, can I just hop on the phone with you really quickly and have you help me get my head straight?” I don’t get to talk to her very often anymore. And she agreed and we had about a 30 minute call. And there were so many nuggets and gems. I keep telling my close friends and family about the things that she said and everybody’s like, “That’s so good.”

And I thought, why don’t I share that with all of you here on the podcast. So I want to back up and tell you just a little bit about my history with Brooke Castillo and working with her. She is the owner of The Life Coach School, where I know many of you are also certified coaches or at least follow and learn a lot from Brooke. She has an amazing podcast, The Life Coach School Podcast. She is how I first discovered coaching even back before I was certified.

I started following her blog at the time and read her book and just soaked in the way that she puts all of these concepts and tools together and teaches them for me, just completely lands. It makes total sense to my brain. It feels powerful and invigorating and inspiring. And yet feels like something that I’ve always known but just sort of forgot until she said it in the way she did. So I have so much love and respect for Brooke. I went through Life Coach School training. I became a certified coach back in May of 2014.

And Brooke was my teacher there and then I worked with other coaches of her team to get better at coaching and become certified and things. Brooke is very generous in that she gives us certified coaches a lot of support after we’re certified in the form of virtual classes and coaching calls, live events, different classes and things. So I have always been very active in The Life Coach School community. And over the years have soaked up all of the things that Brooke has offered. Sometimes they have to do with coaching practices.

A lot of times I would say, 80% of the time it’s our own personal development and growth that we’re focusing on. In 2018, I went through a program called Master Coach Training that The Life Coach School offered back then. And the way that master coach training has always been set up is it is meant to be a deep dive personal transformation. And so it looks very different for everyone that goes through it in terms of what the focus is. Because the focus needs to be on the area where you’re going to have the most opportunity for growth, which usually means the most uncomfortable area of your life.

And you get a say, you participate in creating what your experience is going to be. But for me it wasn’t really focused on my business. It was focused on my own relationship with myself. Getting deeper with my spirituality. Really understanding how I want to think about spirituality when it comes to my religion and outside of religion, just my personal relationship with God. And sometimes it had to do with my issues with food and body image. So all of those kinds of areas for me were where I had the most potential for growth. So I went through that experience.

Again, Brooke was my teacher in that program, but I worked with other coaches as well who helped to guide me and that was transformative. And then finally I was able to be in a mastermind group, a small group mastermind with Brooke as our leader and teacher, that was focused on business. And this was the opportunity that helped me go from making 300,000 to making a million and beyond in my coaching practice.

And it was that small group of women that I talked with regularly and Brooke’s coaching that really helped develop me so that I could make the impact I wanted to make. So that I can make $1 million worth of impact and put a $1 million worth of value out into the world to achieve that goal. And that was again transformative and growth inducing and amazing and painful. But I don’t know what your perception is of what it’s like to work with a coach like Brooke or to work with, every coach has their own style and their own strategy.

But I’ll just tell you that the way that coaching has served me is not that I’ve sat down with Brooke and that she’s told me what to do or even that we’ve talked very much strategy. We very rarely talk about strategy. And by strategy, I mean, what marketing should I try? What should I call this thing? How much should I charge? How long should it be? How am I going to sell it? How am I going to? That’s what I mean by strategy. There’s very little discussion.

Sometimes there’s a little bit of brainstorming around that, but there’s never direct answers because Brooke doesn’t claim to know that. She doesn’t know that for my business. She’s always even trying to figure out for her own business. None of us actually know that. I heard Seth Godin recently. I was listening to his book Linchpin. So good. At any rate he’s like, “People all the time say that entrepreneurs say, “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”” And it’s true, you don’t know. It’s just an irrelevant statement. It’s irrelevant that you don’t know. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know.

You’re just going to go try stuff anyway. Nobody actually knows until they try something and figure out what makes the impact they’re trying to make. So anyway, Brooke very much understands that. And that’s why we don’t spend much time on the strategy piece. She really has, for me anyway, pushed me in terms of growing my mindset, growing my abundance view of the world, growing my capacity to try things that may or may not work, growing my comfort with discomfort.

That’s really primarily both through her example and through just the feedback that she’s, either given me directly ,but most of the time it’s actually come from me hearing her talking to other people even. And that is how Brooke coaches but it’s been the most phenomenal way for me to be a student and a recipient of the value that she puts into the world.

So at any rate, I recently, like I said, reached out to Brooke and said, “Can we hop on a quick call? I think I need to get my head straight for a minute.” And she said yes. And this is just a quick reminder that we need coaches or I do. I like to have a coach. I like someone to call me out on my BS. I like someone to say, “Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. It’s time to get up and go or to point out to me where I’m thinking about things in a way that isn’t serving me.

I like someone to call me out on that stuff because when I see it and I know they’re calling me out. Because they care so much about me and because they believe in me, not out of shame. I’m not talking about so much shaming you. But someone that can be like, “What are you thinking? You’re amazing and this is as good as done. Why aren’t you seeing that?”

That’s what Brooke has always been for me and honestly I need a coach and a mentor, a teacher. As Brooke’s business has grown and as my business has grown, I don’t get to talk to her very often anymore. I don’t get to see her anymore the way I used to. So I need to find who is going to be the next mentor or coach, teacher that’s going to push me in that way. If you have suggestions, send them over to my DMs. I’m all ears because I’m looking for that at the level I’m at now and it’s not an easy thing to find.

Here’s though, what Brooke and I talked about on the phone. First of all, she reminded me that it is time to get more creative. I’ve been running my business now for almost 10 years and it’s been phenomenal. And that’s not to say I’ve been doing the same thing over the last 10 years. But I’ve been able to make small adjustments and small tweaks and play in a certain realm of how to run a successful coaching practice that’s worked really well and it still works fine.

It’s just if I want to go next level as Benjamin Hardy teaches, if I want to 10x and not just 2x my results. I’m going to have to get way more creative. I’m going to have to consider things that I’ve never considered, maybe things that nobody has considered. Sometimes we look around at what other people are doing and we get ideas about things to try. And I don’t think that’s wrong.

But there are other times when you have to stop looking around at what everyone’s doing because it’s keeping your mind in a certain box. And you have to start thinking bigger, which is another thing that she said, by the way, that almost every time I see Brooke Castillo, she reminds me to think bigger. She does it with this little, almost like a wink. You guys who know Brooke, you know what I’m talking about. She gives you that look and she’s like, “And make sure you think big.” And she’s like, “No, I mean, really big.”

And then she just often walks away after saying something like that. She calls this a possibility drop. She’s done this a few times in my life where she just drops it like, “Think big.” And she doesn’t tell you what she means by that. You don’t have any discussion about how you might achieve it or even brainstorming ideas. She just leaves your head going, “What?” Which I love. I want a coach that will do that for me. So get creative. Consider things maybe no one else is doing. Think bigger.

Here’s the next thing that we talked about that I keep coming back to that I think was really necessary for me to hear. Maybe it’s going to be necessary for you to hear. Is that when we’re doing something like building a business and maintaining a business or growing a business or whatever stage you’re at in your business. It’s a lot like riding a bike. And when we first get on the bike we understand we’ve got to pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal.

And then we get to coast and that’s pretty fun but if you coast for too long, what happens? The bike starts slowing down or it feels like you’re going to fall off and you will eventually at some point. So then we have to pedal, pedal, pedal again. And I don’t know about you but pedaling in the beginning I’m okay with because I expect that I’m going to need to pedal. But after I’ve been coasting for a while, my brain’s like, I don’t really want to have to work hard again.

Now, let me clarify what I mean by pedal and what Brooke means by pedal. We’re not talking about working super long hours and getting up at the crack of dawn and staying up late and hustling and grinding. That’s not what we mean by pedaling. Pedaling means, though, that some of the things that you’ve just been doing on autopilot, I don’t know, maybe you keep doing some of them. But instead of spending the majority of your work day just in the same routines of the things you’ve been doing, you’re going to go back to more focused strategic creative thinking.

To coming up with new ideas. Coming up with new ideas doesn’t have to take a long time. It just requires more focus, more courage because you’re going to have to be decisive at some point, more creativity. So it’s like operating from a different part of your brain for more of the time and not just being on autopilot. Not being distracted, more focused during your work time. That’s what we mean by pedaling. It’s more prefrontal cortex type work. So your brain won’t like that, the resistance won’t like that.

Resistance is so real, you guys. Resistance will pop up and try to keep you from doing any of this. Resistance isn’t as powerful when you’re just coasting and doing the same things you’ve been doing. Resistance comes up when you’ve got to get into the prefrontal and be more creative, more strategic, more focused. But you can overcome resistance, you can. And for me, sometimes it’s just I’m just opening up my notebook and I’m writing one through 75 and I’m going to brainstorm ideas for this, let’s say program, maybe I’m trying to create.

I’m going to come up with 75 ideas. Most of them are going to be bad. Maybe they’re all going to be bad. And then I’ll just come up with 75 more. You’ve got to have a lot of bad ideas to get into the idea generating part of your brain. Don’t be looking for good ideas, just look for ideas, most of which will be bad. That is where you will find the good ones. So it’s time to pedal again, maybe. I feel like it is for me because I feel like I’ve been coasting long enough and I want to reinvent some things. I want to freshen up some things in my business.

I want to 10x things. I’m tired of just little bits of growth, I want to have exponential growth, alright, so time to pedal. Who’s with me?

The next thing that I talked about with Brooke that I wanted to share with you today was we talked about some of my previous goals that I had abandoned. Now, I want to be clear that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with abandoning goals. Sometimes we have a goal and as we start moving towards that goal and pursuing that goal, we realize we actually don’t want to achieve that goal. We don’t want it enough to do the things that would be required to achieve it. And there can be all kinds of reasons for that, and I think that’s totally fine.

You could just change your mind anytime, you can do whatever you want. That’s the beautiful thing about having your own business. You can decide, I want to do this thing in my business. And then as you get closer to it, you can decide, actually I don’t want to do that. I do some things once or twice and then I decide I don’t want to do that anymore and we just stop doing it. So you can abandon a goal. It’s not wrong to abandon a goal. What we want to do is check out your reasons. We want to understand why.

And this is the conversation Brooke and I had is there were a few goals that I’d sort of abandoned over time. And she asked me, “Why do you not still have that goal? Does it not sound fun? Or if I was like tomorrow you get to go teach that workshop or you get to tomorrow’s the day you reach that goal, whatever it is. How would that be?” I’m like, “That would be awesome.” I totally want to do it? I believe in the goal. I love the goal. I love the idea of achieving the goal.

I just abandoned some of them because it started to feel too hard. I didn’t know how. And I didn’t want to, again, get into that part of my brain that is creative and comes up with ideas and has a bunch of bad ideas. The resistance won out in the end. And when resistance wins out, we simply counter it by going, “No, we’re totally going to do that.” And it’s best if as you try to achieve the goal, your progress isn’t happening as quickly as you thought it would. The way you thought you were going to get there isn’t the way or it’s not happening on the timeline you thought it would.

That’s when the real powerful work happens, when you cannot give up on something even though it seems like you’re not going to get there or you don’t know how, you’re going to come up with a whole new way. Then you are forced to do the work on yourself of building your relationship with yourself. Of being there for yourself even when you don’t succeed at everything or even when things are tough. And that’s a valuable skill to sharpen.

So we want to use these kinds of experiences, these goals in our business to sharpen all of those really useful things about ourselves. And so for that reason, whatever the goal is for you, I’ll tell you what Brooke said to me, which is, “I totally want you to hit that goal then. And I want you to do it in a shorter timeframe than you even told yourself.” Again not because you have to hustle, not because it matters whether or not you achieve the goal. But because of what it will require of you in terms of your own personal growth and development to do it.

Now, the final thing that she said and Brooke often, if you’ve heard her coach before, she often as she’s coaching somebody through a goal like this, follows it up with, “But only if it’s fun. Only if you can have fun along the way. And only if you’re having fun doing it.” And by the way, she also says, “It’s not your goal’s job to be fun. It’s your job to make it fun.” But we want to keep a lightness around our goal. We want to try to enjoy the process. And I know that feels contradictory to pedaling. How is it fun if we’re pedaling harder?

No, it is because it’s super fun to see what’s possible and to be a woman alive on planet Earth who has a laptop and a microphone and access to the internet. And people who want to hear what she has to say. And people whose lives are being impacted for good. And strategies that we try that don’t work and strategies we try that do work. And all of it’s just kind of fun. If you can keep that lightness and that fun energy around doing challenging things, that’s when your life explodes. Your business explodes and your life explodes and it all is actually really, really fun.

So that’s the reminder, when you start stressing yourself out and you start creating too much pressure for yourself, you’ve got to back up from it. You’ve got to lighten up your reasons why you’re doing things. Alright, you guys, so again, a huge shout out to Brooke Castillo, who has been such a key mentor to me in my life. I’m so grateful to her. I hope that some of these nuggets helped you today as they helped me. And thanks for joining me for Entre-Talk. I will see you next time. Take care.

If you are a coach, healer or expert who is not yet making six figures, or not sure you’re set up properly to grow to seven figures and beyond, go take my free training. It’s at jodysfree-training.com. I’ll see you there.