Ep.3 Brooke Castillo and The Model

[CFM COACH ASSISTANT AI ]: Foreign. You're listening to the Money's not your Problem podcast with Madeline Strasberg. Episode number three. Welcome to the Money's not your Problem podcast where it's all about real clients, real real problems and real coaching. And now your host, Certified Coach instructor Madeleine Strasberg. Hello my dear friends. How are you? I'm here in beautiful Provo and I'm starting our episode just like Bru Castillo has done since April 2014. You might ask Strauss, who's Brooke Castillo? Well, I'm glad you asked. Brooke Castillo is the CEO and founder of the Life Coach School. She started her career as a weight loss coach after studying and applying mind management tools that completely changed her weight. After seeing the success with her body image and weight struggles, she realized she could use those same tools to improve other aspects of her life. She was able to get out of a cold. She improved her relationship with her mother and developed stronger self esteem which led her to develop romantic relationships, eventually leading her to marry and become a mother. She then used the tools to set goals, grow her business and bring financial abundance and prosperity into her life. Since then, her goal for herself and for her company has been to be an example what is possible meaning using mind management tools and the model to create anything that you want in your life and that you could be the first one to do that. So she's setting the example. She began coaching in 2006 and found a life coach school in 2010. She has coached thousands of clients to improve their lives, their weight, businesses and careers. Before becoming a life coach, she got a psychology degree thinking that that was the path for her to be able to understand herself and to help others. While in school she noticed that they mainly discussed abnormal psychiatric conditions of usually non function people and how she could help patients within the realm in medical model, not people with regular problems. What do I mean by regular problems? Well, people who suffering and negative emotions can be mitigated and dealt with through conscious awareness, questioning and reprogramming of the negative thoughts coming across. A life coach on TV showed her the path she had been looking for and since then she has provided the way to so many people. Those who feel called to help others as coaches and those who just want to use life coaching tools to feel better in their lives. The main tool that she started to use constantly is what she calls a self coaching model or the CTFAR model. Why the CTFAR model or because of the elements that make the model? The model helps us organize the aspects of our lives so we can analyze our results, decide if what we're getting is given what we want, and then create what we want on purpose. All aspects of our lives are categorized into five things. Circumstance, thoughts, feelings, actions and results. Thus, ctfar, there's nothing in our lives that cannot be put in one of these five categories. And it helps us to have this framework to be able to understand those parts of our lives. Once we see how these things are categorized, how they fall into one of these five parts, we can very quickly determine how our interaction with them will determine the whole of our lives. How we think about things determine how we feel about things. How we feel about them determines what we do. What we do or don't do creates our results. And the sum of the results create our lives. Simple. Like this. Now of course this is nothing new and she does not claim to be the one who discovered it. This framework is just how life works. She only emphasized that using this consistently can improve our results. You might probably have already heard this before. Books like the Power of Writing it down by Alison Fallon or the Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eaker use the same approach to work with your brain to produce different results in your life. Our thoughts create our lives. They are important sentences in our brains and I encourage you to pay attention to them. Now you might be thinking this is going to be easy, but it's not easy. This would be much harder than you think. So many of our thoughts we have been thinking for such a long time and they've been there for so long that we think they're true. And so we don't recognize them just as thoughts. We think they are just blank truth. That's where the self coaching can come in and help us out. So here's how we define the five categories. Well the first one is the C is the circumstance. Circumstances are the things that happen in the world and we cannot control. So like the economy, even money, our family, our friends, any other person actually what the government does, those things we cannot control. Then we have the thoughts. The thoughts are the sentences in our brain that happen in our minds. And this is where we self coach. Then we have the feelings. Our feelings are one word description of the vibration in our bodies. Our thoughts and our circumstance cause them. We always think that other things create how we feel, but it's not, it's what we think about those things, right? And sometimes it's funny when we're working with people and my clients and I ask them what does a thought make them feel? And they say I feel like this, this, this this or I feel like this. So notice that they're not telling me their feelings, they're telling me another thought or other thoughts. Because the feeling would be happy, sad, angry, mad, and sometimes just have like, oh, we're feeling, I feel fine. Right. So let's try to be more specific in that type of description. Why do I feel happy? Do I feel content? Do I feel peaceful? Right. Those help us determine what are the actions are coming from that feeling. Right. Because feeling excited will lead me to do different things if I'm feeling serene. Right. All right. The next thing will be then the actions which, these are our behaviors and what we do and what we don't do in our lives, only in the world. So the actions and inactions, sometimes let's say if you're feeling depressed, you might stay in bed all day, you might cry. So these are things that you're doing, the things that you're not doing. The inactions would be, I am not working on my goals, I am not getting out of bed, I am not going to work. Right. So those are the things that's preventing you from doing so. Those are the inactions that also play a big part in the results that we have. Both actions and inactions are going to lead us to our results. So the results are the consequences of our actions, plain and simple. But because our actions come from the feelings that are created by the thoughts that we have, you see that the results are going to be evidence of the original thought. So what we see in our lives are the results of the things that we've been thinking. It's the evidence. So if you think that you are a loser and you feel defeated, then you're going to be self sabotaging. You're not going to be taking new opportunities. You're going to be saying talking bad about yourself, putting yourself down, judging yourself. And that is going to create the result of you being a loser because you're not winning at the things that you want to do in your life. And you might have heard the term according to definitions find in the Go Go's A self fulfilling prophecy is any held belief or expectation that leads to behaviors that ultimately prove the belief or expectation to be true. So if you think about something, if you believe about something, that's you're gonna make the actions that's gonna lead to get those results. So elder Dean Larson spoke at a BYU fireside in 1976 when I was born about the strong correlation between thoughts and who we can become. Thoughts have a great deal to do with how we live, whether we're enthusiastic or depressed, whether we enjoy success or experience a degree of failure, whether we enjoy spirituality or suffer from a lack of it. Modern behaviorists have indicated that the human thought process is very much like the operation of a computer, where the conscious and subconscious mind is concerned, the input we take into that process. So what we put in has much to do with the output regarding attitude, mood and behavior. So what comes out? The Lord has recognized the great power of thoughts. And he warned those whom he addressed in his sermon of the mountain against the influence of evil or negative thoughts. Proverbs tells us that as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Proverbs 23:7. To paraphrase that slightly, I think it would be very accurate to say that as a man persists in his thinking, so he will become. That is the kind of power in thoughts. Very powerful statement, huh? As we use the self coaching model and work on our thoughts, we will assume the position of what she calls the watcher, the observer. Doing this work is the best way to become aware of our thought patterns and beliefs, challenge them, and choose what we want to think on purpose. As the watcher, we become more aware of who we really are. Someone who is not at the mercy of unconscious thinking. It allows us to look at our thinking without reacting to emotions. So it's like you're looking from the outside and you're just looking at those sentences without feeling that emotion, that being hijacked by the emotion. Right? We're able to be curious and really decide if we want to keep those thoughts and if they're serving us. The power of this process is in first recognizing the thinking you may not be aware of and understanding how we're creating our own experience with our own thinking. So first you recognize the thoughts, you decide if you want to keep them, and then you can look at the total of your life and decide what is creating this and how am I creating this? How am I responsible? It takes the ownership back to your life. And you don't let just the automatic thoughts just run your life. Because if you don't pay attention and if you don't recognize what you're thinking, whatever pops up in your head, you're just gonna keep going with emotions. And you're not necessarily creating what you want, but you're getting what you're thinking about. After identifying the thoughts that are not working for you, for us, we can then consciously decide on our own terms what we choose to think. We don't need to believe everything that Our brain offers us all those negative thoughts running around in our brains like wild animals can be understood, acknowledged, corralled, released, and or changed even before you do a model, Brooke recommends becoming more conscious of your thoughts by doing what she calls a thought download. A thought Download is a 5 to 10 minute free writing exercise in which you end empty your brain onto a piece of paper, one sentence after another, without editing. So grab a piece of paper and a pen and just go for it. Write everything that's in your mind. You can do a topic thought download. So if you're going through, let's say you're paying off debt and you have all these thoughts about debt, you can put everything down about your money and everything. Or at the end of the day, you can just download everything that's in your mind at that point of the day and then go through each one of those sentences. The purpose of a thought download is not to stop your negative thoughts from coming up, but to get all of the thoughts on paper and for you to become aware of what you're thinking. With 60,000 thoughts per day, most of them are unconscious, you will uncover dozens of negative thoughts. It helps you identify what is causing you pain and even challenge them. I like to disprove each unproductive thought during this process. So what I do is I write everything down and then I go sentence by sentence and I try to see how can I contradict that statement, how can I prove that statement wrong? So let's say I do everything always wrong with money. Well, is that always true? So I try to think, no, I make mistakes sometimes, or I'm learning how to use my money right? So I always create a thought, a different thought to prove that, to combat that, the automatic thought that's in my brain, I do that with every single one of them. You don't have to. You can just write everything down and then pick the one that gives you the most pain, because that's the one you're going to use. The model. The way I do it, I end up already creating the thought that I want to replace. So that helps me get a little bit of more a head start on my intentional model. You might wonder sometimes after doing this kind of exercise what you've been doing wrong with your life if you have that many negative thoughts. But in reality, there's nothing wrong here. The brain's just functioning the way it's supposed to. You have a human brain, and one of the main functions of our brains is to identify threats and danger. So it's trying to Keep us away from things that might hurt us or if it requires something that needs extra work. The brain doesn't like to spend extra energy. The brain likes to be efficient. And if you've been thinking for the longest time that you're not good with money and now you have to change that thought, you, it's going to require an intentional process. It's going to require you to be intentional. So the brain doesn't like that. So think about this process like your house, right? No matter how well you take care of your home, it still gets dirty, it needs cleaning. It doesn't matter how refined it is or how big it is, it still needs daily maintenance and a deep cleaning once a week or once in a while. That's the same kind of care that we should have with our minds. So keep an eye on it and clean it up. Your thoughts daily and then every week. It's always wise to bring someone from the outside to help you see things that you cannot see. Sometimes we're so caught up in ourselves that we don't see something, right. We have a little blind spot there. So having a coach, wink wink, could be very powerful in helping you with this process. You know, doing this process is really cool too, because sometimes we have thoughts that we think they're lovely and they're really nice, but they're not indeed helpful or helping you achieve what you want. So, for example, if someone thinks money is the root of all evil, right? Because either they don't have money or because they think that money, you shouldn't be looking for money to have money in your life, right? So while that person might think that shows how spiritual or humble they are for not caring about the financial resources, one, the scripture is wrong. We know that's not money. That's the root of all evil. It's the love of money. The love of money. It's the root of all evils. And two, it creates that cognitive dissonance in your brain because you need money to start an emergency fund or to pay off your credit card debt. So that thought does not support your goal. So let's say your goal is to pay off your credit card debt, but you think that money is the root of all evil, then you're not going to work against your belief that money is bad. And then what's going to happen? You're not going to get that money that you need because you're not going to do the actions necessary to bring that money in to pay off your debt. So you see that doing a thought download either on a specific topic or in general with all the thoughts that are going on in your mind at the time. It's a wise practice before you use the model. That way you can use the thought that's creating you the most pain and see what is creating in your life as you put it in an unintentional model, right? The automatic. From there, you can create your intentional model, focusing on the result or the feeling that you want to get. After we paid off our debt, I could not understand why S2 had so many debilitating migraine crisis episodes throughout the month. What is really great about this process, and I want to point that out to you, is that you see that it's not the circumstance that's creating our problems, it's how we think about them. And you might not believe me, but sometimes what is a problem to you is not a problem to me. Last night I flew in from Washington D.C. i was in the airport and they canceled our flight four times for me. It was great. I needed a time to work on my podcast, to do my, my ads for my Facebook account and all that. And other people are going crazy because the flight kept being delayed. So you see that the problem was not that the flight was delayed, it was what they were thinking about that situation. I thought it was a great opportunity for me to catch up on work while other people thought that was an inconvenience, a problem. And I understand some people lost their connections to other flights and all that, but it's how we look at it, right? So after we paid off our debt back in 2017, I still can understand why I still had so many debilitating migraine crisis episodes throughout the month. I blame my disruptive students. I blame Common Core and cpm, the administration choices, the state policies on school discipline, the Internet, its influence on my kids, my teenager and her choices. I blamed everything. I was trying to find why I was having so many, so much stress in my life. And this ongoing blaming and victim sentences in my brain created stress in my body, which manifested itself in my migraines once I started to use the model consistently along with my medical treatment. Of course there is the biological component of my migraines, right? And my genetic component. But along with my treatment, I was able to reduce the amount of crisis I was getting dramatically from 25 days of barely making to the end of the workday at school. Ended the day in a dark room away from everybody. Rely on my girls to take care of each other until my husband would get home from work to now I have one or two days maximum of migraine crisis where I have to completely shut down and be done for the day. You might be skeptical, and that's a good thing. That shows that you're listening and decide if this information resonates with you or not. Questioning again is a good thing as a sign of critical thinking, right? Don't believe in everything other people say to you as well. But if you are a little skeptical, I just invite you to try it out, Give it a chance to do in a thought download. And there is evidence, research evidence that shows the positive effects of just writing stuff down, right? There's a lot of people talk about journals and all that, but I invite you to try out this process in doing a model and doing a thought download and looking at your brain that way. Try it out and see if it works for you. If it doesn't work, it took you 15 minutes to get that process done right? But I invite you to do it consistently. Do it like for a week and see if you start seeing those things change in your life, how you see the results and taking ownership of what you're getting right now. Now, to complete our discussion on the model, I want to share with you the reasons to use the model. So one of the reasons would be to feel better, to create the results that we want to become conscious of, how we think, to think more deliberately. So choose the thoughts that we want to think to create what you want in your life. Well, look at your results. Are those the results that you really want to become aware of? Negative thinking and emotions? Again, we are not trying to get rid of all the negative thinking. We already talked about how negative thinking, it's a part of the brain and it's. It could be good for us, right? But we can not let that run every day, every operation of our lives, and to create positive thinking and emotions on purpose so you can change how you're feeling in a certain state of your life or your day by doing a quick thought download. I remember Cassine saying that she would use the back of receipts from the grocery store when she was out doing things to look at her thoughts and see what she was feeling. And I've done that myself. I have used the model for all these reasons before. And I am grateful for this tool that brought me physical relief and mind awareness. I think that mind management, along with the gospel, has given me such a great way to live my life. It has helped me take me responsibility for my behavior, my relationships, and create many opportunities in my life. So if you haven't heard from Brooke Castillo. I invite you to check out her podcast, the Life Coach Podcast, and how she would end them. Have a beautiful week, everyone. I will talk to you soon. Bye.