Ep

 #154:  Apathy  
 

 
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With  Your  Host  

Brooke  Castillo  

The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real
clients, real problems, and real coaching. Now your host, master
coach instructor, Brooke Castillo.

What's happening, my friends? Yes. Good day. Here's what

happened. I recorded this entire podcast already, no mic on, but you
know what? It's always better the second time. I just finished doing a
behind-the-scenes video with my son. As part of Self Coaching
Scholars, each month I send out a behind-the-scenes video, and I
had been getting a lot of requests to share exactly what I eat, and
how I prepare my food, and how I grocery shop, and all of that. I don't
know if you know this about me, but I do not like grocery shopping,
and I do not like spending a lot of time cooking food, preparing food,
recipes, that sort of thing. Instead of having a chef or something really
fancy like that, I prefer to just eat really simple, boring food and make
my life super exciting. When I go out to eat, I have less boring food,
but food is no longer the highlight of my life. I spent many years
where food was the highlight of my life. It's no longer the case.

Anyway, so my son went with me and videoed me grocery shopping,

videoed me preparing some food, unpacking groceries, talking about
food, and then he edited the whole thing, so it's amazing. He put
music to it and everything. I also, in that behind-the-scenes video, I
took the phone and turned it on while I was on my hike with the dogs,
which I do every day, and shared a little bit about my process and
what I do on that hiking. If you're in Self Coaching Scholars you will
enjoy that, and if you're not, what are you waiting for? Let's go! It's
amazing!

The other thing that's going in Self Coaching Scholars in March is the
money bonus. A lot of people like to ask me about money, and
making money, and creating money, and spending money, and
earning money, and I don't talk about it too much in the podcast, and
I don't coach on it in the way that I do on most other topics, so I
decided to do a whole training. What I did is…I was just going to do
one bonus video and then I decided to do four, so I will be releasing
those throughout the months as I continue to create them. Amazing
stuff.

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Money is one of those amazing things. If you really work with your
mind on money, you will really be able to change your life. Having
money in your life solves a lot of problems that other things can't
solve. It's interesting to think about how we live in a culture where
money creates things and we have the ability to create money. Make
sure you check out that series. Amazing! And that's within Self
Coaching Scholars, so if you want to join, go to
thelifecoachschool.com. Make sure you join Self Coaching Scholars.
Come on, already!

All right. Today we're going to talk about apathy. Woo-hoo! Sounds
like fun. The reason I wanted to talk about apathy is because I see it
in my clients. I see you. I see you guys slip into apathy and I don't
even think you notice that you do it. The way that we define apathy is
lack of concern, like “screw it.” You start basically with these great
hopes, and these great ideas, and these big goals, and these things
that you want in your life and you get really excited about it and you
start working, working, working, working. The next thing you're like,
"Screw it. I don't want to deal with this." Then you go into some level
of lack of concern and indifference for a temporary period of time.
Then you come back out of that place and you're like, "Oh, why did I
do that? I wish I would've just kept working. I wish I would've just kept
creating," and you end up feeling like you can't get ahead because
you're always slipping into apathy.

I want to bring it to your attention and I want you to bring it to your

own attention when you do this, because this is I think one of the
biggest dream stealers. A lot of people don't pay attention to their
own apathy and they find themselves just slipping into default mode.
See, here's the thing. You've set yourself up, most of you, in your life
where you can just default, right? You know who you are. You can
just keep riding the momentum of the first 25 years of your life. You
don't have to do much just to survive. Because you're programmed to
survive, you're programmed actually once you're in safety, is to go
into apathy. What I'm suggesting is that you consciously pay attention
to this programming and you choose the opposite.

One layer of this is buffering. This is where you're actually overeating,

and you're overdrinking, and you're over-ing whatever it is you over,
and you continue to do it because you go into a place of apathy.

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Some of you what it looks like is “oh, well I've already done it now, so
I'm just going to turn off my consciousness. I'm just going to go
indifferent and just eat whatever I want for the rest of the week.” I
often say to my clients, "It's not like when you show up late for work
on Monday you decide, well, I already blew it. I'll take the rest of the
week off," but that's how most of us do when we have optional goals
in our life.

This is where the problem lies. The whole time we've evolved as
humans, our survival wasn't optional, right? It was literally live or die. I
mean, dying was optional, but not for a human being. That's not a
viable option, but now we're in the situation where our dreams are
optional. We don't actually have to create a great life for ourselves.
We don't have to actually evolve to the next version of humanness in
order to survive. We can just be apathetic. We can be born into this
world and be apathetic our entire lives and still survive. Didn't used to
be that way, but it's that way now, and that's why it's such a problem.
We go into this state of just simply avoiding pain and being indifferent
to the potential of our life, being indifferent to our dreams, being
indifferent to our biggest desires.

We do this because we think somehow that it's keeping us safe, and

it is in the sense that we're never having to risk any kind of failure. If
you just go into default mode and putter around with your life, you
never have to risk anything. You never have to put yourself in the way
of the most intense emotions that may occur to you if you put yourself
out there in the world. If you never write that book that you're
dreaming about writing, you never have to worry about getting the
rejection letter. If you never stand up in front of a group and try and
teach them something that you know would help them, you never
have to risk their rejection. You make it optional to not do those things
and slip into apathy, and then apathy, which is indifference to
yourself, really becomes familiar, and it actually becomes
comfortable, and it feels like normal.

Now, if you're wondering if you're a person who's in apathy, where

you've just basically given up on yourself and given up on your life,
the way that you know is look at the last five years of your life. What
have you contributed to yourself for yourself? What have you given
yourself in terms of an incredible life? What options have you taken?

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What have you risked for yourself? See, when you love yourself you
take a lot of risk for yourself. When you're indifferent to yourself,
you're in apathy. You don't do anything for yourself. You don't take
action in the world.

Now listen, some of you, I want to be really clear about this…the way
that you measure your level of apathy is not the new things that
you've learned, the new things that you've consumed, the ideas or
the insights you've had. You can be very apathetic and keep
consuming information. A lot of you consume information as a way to
buffer, as a way not to take action. The way that you understand if
you're apathetic in your life is what have you done in the A-line? What
have you created in the world that wasn't there? When you think
about your life of possibility and creating experiences for you in your
life, what have you created, and how much did you have to risk in
order to create it? I'm not talking about planning an experience like a
vacation or going out to dinner. You don't have to risk to do anything
like that. I'm talking about putting yourself on the line to accomplish
something for yourself so you can feel proud of yourself, so you can
feel like you have more in your life, more experience, more exposure
in your life.

If you look back on the last five years and you don't see anything
there, if you don't see anything tangible that you can grab ahold of
that you've created, then you know that you're indulging in apathy,
you know that you're in a place where you are being indifferent to
yourself and to your life. Now, nobody else may notice this, because
you have a pretty good life. You're pretty accomplished. You get up.
You go to work every day. You take care of your kids, but you know.
You do know when you're being apathetic. Here's another way that
you can look at it. Think about your potential. Think about the
possibility for your life. How much energy, how much thought, how
much creation do you devote towards that? If the answer is zero, or
less than five out of ten, you're being apathetic about you, your
potential, your possibility. You're being indifferent to what could be
your life.

How many of you are indifferent, apathetic towards your future? You
just want to stay on this train wherever it happens to go. How many of
you are just the passenger on the bus? You're not really caring where

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you're going or who's driving. Just easier to sit and look out the
window than go take ahold of the wheel and decide where to go and
drive and take responsibility. So, so many of us. How many of you
are just exhausted and therefore uninterested? You spend so much
time worrying, and stressing, and buffering, and hating yourself that
you don't have any energy left to be interested or concerned in what
is possible for you in your life.

I deal with this a lot with my clients. They go from a place of complete
motivation to a place of complete apathy. “I don't really care right
now. Screw it. Oh well.” Commitment to apathy is actually a dance. I
have a client who eats clean and focuses, and then completely
indulges and doesn't care, seeking pleasure at her own cost, back
and forth. I'm interested. I'm not interested. I'm committed. I'm not
committed. I give in to indifference because it feels familiar. It feels
safe. I don't have to risk anything. It's an actual lack of concern for
yourself, for your goals, for your life. It's neglect.

There's a great quote that says, "The opposite of love is not hate. The
opposite of love is indifference." I often think that I'd rather be hated
than ignored. Neglect is the worst type of abuse. We tell ourselves we
don't have the time or energy to care for our own feelings, for our own
lives. We are often desperately trying to get our own attention to no
avail. Our attempts go unanswered. We can't even muster enough
energy to care that we are upset. We just avoid, and ignore, and run
away, and escape, and hide. Apathy is the suppression of all of those
emotions. Complete discipline is the answer, commitment.

Now, with some of you, when I say discipline, you think that what I
mean by that is you have to be mean to yourself, and stringent, and
be a drill sergeant. That's not what I mean. I mean that you hold
yourself in the highest regard with no exception. You do not give in to
apathy. You wouldn't do that with a small child, or an infant, or a baby
under any circumstance. You would never neglect them. You would
never neglect what's important to them, and what they want, and
what their needs are, and yet we so easily neglect ourselves. We say
things like, "I don't care about my weight. I don't care about my
relationships right now. I just don't have time to think about my job or
money. I'm just trying to get through the day. I don't care about
making a contribution. I don't care about growth."

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Think about this. How much energy, how much concern, how much
time do you put into your emotional health? Most of you put more
energy into cleaning your car and your house than your mind. We are
not taught to make our emotional health a priority, and yet our
emotional health is what drives every single other thing in our life.

Often, apathy is disguised as self-care, and I just want you to know

that the way that you can tell the difference is by how you feel. One
feels like love, and one feels like avoidance. It feels dull. It feels
empty. Think about, in a perfect world, how you would care for your
life, for the potential of your life, for the possibility of your life? Most of
us can hold the possibility of our children's life more than we can hold
the possibility of our own life. We're so focused on our past we're
apathetic about our futures.

What I'm asking you to do is to care about your future, to not avoid it,
to not neglect it, to not be indifferent about it. That means the
thoughts you have about your future, that means the feelings that you
have all of the time, that means the actions that you're taking. When
you feel apathetic you don't take any actions. You don't create
anything in the world. You don't move towards your possibility. You
just stagnate. Extreme self-care and discipline is what allows for
growth. It's not confining or controlling, and it's not punishing. It's the
difference between a control freak trying to control the world, and
someone with complete self-discipline caring for themselves. This
distinction is important or you may not commit to extreme self-care
and discipline.

Giving in to apathy often feels like relief initially, because it doesn't

require anything of you, but the cost is so high. When you give in to
apathy, you're not exercising self-responsibility, which is the most
empowering thing you can do. Self-care, self-discipline, structure,
organization, and love, these are all the things that make us stronger,
be able to live into our own potential. When you're unhappy and you
turn to apathy as a way of dealing with it, this is what can lead to
depression. Instead of embracing unhappiness as part of the human
experience, and moving within it, and feeling it all the way through
without resisting it and understanding it, when you avoid it and slip
into apathy, you miss the opportunity to literally have a life where you
are connected and alive.

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We often have apathy for things we believe we cannot change, but
the truth is we can change our lives when we take responsibility. We
can always change how we are experiencing something by how we
think about it. Now listen, so many of you hear me talk about this, but
when it comes to actually applying it, doing the work, filling out the
workbook, to doing the daily exercises that I give you, many of you
neglect yourselves when it comes to doing the work. You make
excuses for not doing it, for not paying attention to what you're eating
or how you are in your relationships. I just want to offer that you are
the one that will benefit from being diligent and vigilant.

I want to remind you that it is your opportunity to live your life

however you would like. You can live in default and you can be
apathetic about the possibilities, or you can be willing to be
concerned and care for what really matters for you and make sure
that you deliver to yourself. Do not accept apathy as an option.
Remove it as an option. If you indulge in too much apathy, you could
end up in depression, indifference. Indifference. Indifference leads to
depression, and it's exhausting. I want to suggest that you notice your
desire to go into default, you notice your desire to say, "Screw it," and
go into apathy and you take a stand to move in a different direction.
It's a shift in your mind to commit to something different.

Okay, my friends. That's all I have for you today. If you're in Scholars,
make sure you do the exercise. Do not just think about this cerebrally.
Don't just think about this in your brain. Don't just think about this in
your brain. I want you to think about this, and apply it, and do it, and
live it. You have no space for being apathetic. That's what happens
when you die, right? That's where indifference may have a place, but
not in your life. Have an amazing, gorgeous, beautiful week
everybody. I want to encourage you all to stay on after the outro and
experience the amazing, wonderful Jody Moore. Most of you know
her. All of you will love her. Please enjoy.

Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check
out Self Coaching Scholars. It's my monthly coaching program where
we take all this material and we apply it, we take it to the next level,
and we study it. Join me over at TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. Make
sure you type in the "the" TheLifeCoachSchool.com/join. I'd love to
have you join me in Self Coaching Scholars. See you there.

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Podcast Feature: Jody Moore

Hey, everybody! Welcome. My name is Jody Moore. I am a certified

coach, certified through The Life Coach School, and I own a business
called Bold New Mom. I work with stay-at-home moms who want to
find peace, and fulfillment, and joy in the midst of raising kids. Many
of my clients are members of the Mormon church. That is the space I
know best, and I'm super excited to be here talking to you today. I
want to teach you a concept that I call clean parenting. This can
apply, of course, not just to moms, also to dads, and in many aspects
of life, so even if you're not a parent, you will find some useful tips
here, I believe…but my expertise, like I said, is in working with moms.

What is clean parenting? Well, we hear a lot about clean eating, right,
nowadays, getting rid of the preservatives, or the harmful chemicals
that are in our foods. We know that this is important because those
things can have long-term effects on our overall health, so we want to
do our best to eat clean so that our food will do the job it's supposed
to do of nourishing our bodies, and keeping us healthy, and fueling
us. Now, when it comes to our health, there are other factors that are
outside of our control. There are no guarantees that clean eating and
even if you add exercise, and drinking plenty of water, and all the
other things that we know to do, there are no guarantees that you
won't get sick or injured. There are things that can happen that are
outside of our control, but certainly we want to do our best to be
responsible, and take care of our bodies, and take care of our health.

This is the same way I want you to think about clean parenting. Clean
parenting means that you, just like it says, clean up your thinking. If
you are a fan of The Life Coach School Podcast, then you're familiar
with Brooke Castillo's model, which helps you to clean up your
thinking, and that is exactly the work that I do with clients and what I
want to talk to you about here today, because cleaning up your
thinking will help you to do the best possible job that you can to raise
your children the way you want to, to really be there for them, and to
know how to hold them accountable, and teach them, and nurture
them without enabling them.

Of course, your kids get to make their own choices, even down to
deciding whether or not they're going to be happy. They will make

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mistakes, and they will make bad choices, and they will screw it all up
at times, right? That's outside of our control and in fact, it's supposed
to happen, but clean parenting means that you have peace of mind
over doing the best possible job that you could as a parent. The
aspect of clean parenting that I want to teach you today has to do
with our two core fears. I teach my clients that every one of us has
two core fears and I want to begin by explaining that to you.

The first core fear that we all have is the fear over whether or not
we're good enough. You might call it shame, right? This voice in our
head that questions whether or not we're enough is actually normal
and healthy for humans to have. In fact, you may know Brené Brown
teaches that only sociopaths don't have shame, so that voice speaks
up to varying degrees and at varying times for all of us, but every one
of us has that, and certain events can happen in our lives that trigger
thoughts for us that light up that fear.

The second core fear that we all have is the fear that we might be
missing out on something. This one is a little bit more vague, but it's
where thoughts like, "This isn't fair. It's not right." It's where
resentment lives, resentment over things that we feel we've been
made to do, or things that we've missed out on that we should get to
do. The fear of missing out has to do with your overall life experience,
and this fear that maybe it's not what it should be or what it's
supposed to be.

Here we are, human beings with these two core fears, navigating the
world, and now enter a baby, or several babies, right? When you
have children, I don't have to explain to you, that your heart is
attached to theirs. I love the way Shonda Rhimes in her book Year of
Yes describes that you have these little kids and then suddenly now
your heart is walking around outside of you and it's held hostage by
these little people. These little people, our children, have those same
two core fears, of course, that we all have, and you still bring those
fears with you into your role as a parent, but now you also take on
those fears for your child to a certain extent. This is the natural
course of things anyway, right?

First of all, you don't question, in most cases, we don't question our
child's worthiness. We already know that they are amazing. We think

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that they are perfect and everyone should see what we see, right?
What we worry about is that they are going to have to feel that fear of
unworthiness. We don't want anyone else to make them feel bad, or
hurt their feelings, or question that they are fantastic exactly as they
are, so that's where that fear plays in for us, the fear that we know
our child has the fear of unworthiness, and a part of us really doesn't
want to see that triggered for them.

With regards to the fear of missing out, we do tend to bring this fear
on. We don't want our kids to have to experience anything painful. I
wish I could just lock my kids in a room and make them happy, and
fulfilled, and to know that they're amazing all day long, but it just
doesn't work that way. We hate to see them get a bad teacher at
school, or to be treated unfairly by others, or to miss out on
something that we think they should have. All of this will trigger our
child's fear, we realize, and then it also triggers that fear within us. If
my child isn't going to get into the college that we think they should
go to, it can trigger this fear.

This double fear trigger at times, my fear and the fear that I'm taking
on for my child, can make having kids be a really emotionally
exhausting experience. Then we complicate it all even more, are you
ready for the next layer, because our kids trigger our own fears within
us at times, especially as they get older. The worthiness fear comes
up because we wonder “am I a good enough mom? Am I really doing
the right thing? Am I going to be able to parent them the way I
should?” We have all kinds of fear around “I don't want them to think
about me the way that I thought about my parents at times.” We all
have those experiences that we carry with us, and we say, "I'll never
do that," right? So this worthiness fear gets triggered easily by our
children. We worry about other people judging us as parents. That all
falls under the worthiness fear.
What's interesting is that usually our fear over our worthiness as a
parent, “am I a good enough mom?” triggers also that fear of missing
out for my child, because if I'm not a good enough mom, now maybe
my child whom I love is not going to get the experience I want him to
have in this life. In addition, our own fear of missing out for ourselves
gets triggered. Every time I clean the house, I spend a long time
getting everything put away, and then I dust, and vacuum, and mop,
and get everything clean and shiny, and then my kids come along

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behind me and destroy it, my fear of missing out is triggered big time,
right? Because it's not fair. I just did that. Now I'm going to have to do
it again. Somebody came along and messed it up. It's not right. I'm
not getting the life experience I should have to have.

Every time I feel that I have to make dinner, or I have to do the

laundry, or I have to take care of all these people who need me, that's
again, building resentment and it falls under the bucket of fear of
missing out. You see how complicated this whole parenting thing is
and why it feels like you're on an emotional rollercoaster all the time?
It's totally normal. I'm right there with you, don't worry. I want you to
just have awareness of that and now I want to give you a few things
that you can do to help.

Step number one, like I said, is to clean up your thinking. Of course

we use Brooke Castillo's model to do this, but what I want you to
keep in mind is that what is not going to serve you or your child is for
you to project your fears onto your child. The only way you know if
you're doing that is by noticing and paying attention to your beliefs
and what meaning you're adding to things happening around you. I
can usually tell when I need to do that by how I'm feeling and how I'm
behaving. Let me give you some examples here, okay?

First, before I do, I want to give you the analogy that I really like.
You've heard the airplane analogy before probably where we say the
reason that on an airplane the flight attendant says that if we lose
pressure in the cabin oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling. Please
secure your own mask before helping your child. That's a great
analogy to illustrate how we need to take care of ourselves so that
then we can take care of our children, but I want to switch up the
airplane analogy on you a little bit.
I want you to imagine that in the airplane analogy you are the flight
attendant, okay? On the flight there is going to be turbulence,
because on most flights there's at least a little bit of turbulence.
Turbulence equals your child making mistakes, your child disobeying,
your child being unhappy, or scared, or worried, or any number of
things that your child will go through. When there's turbulence and
the captain says everything's fine, it's just turbulence, if you're not
sure, you're a nervous flier, or it's really severe turbulence, who do
you look to? You look to the flight attendant, right? If she's sitting

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there calmly reading a book, then you feel reassured that this is just a
little turbulence and nothing to worry about. If she's panicked, which
thank goodness I've never seen that happen on a flight I've been on,
but if she was, we might be nervous. So you are the flight attendant
and your child is the passenger going through life with turbulence and
wondering if this is okay or if something's terribly wrong.

His or her fears of unworthiness or of missing out are triggered

already by what he's experiencing, by what he's thinking of course
about what he's experiencing, and he's looking to you. If you can
calmly read your book and just be there for your child, you will serve
them so much better. Okay? The way you do that is you remember
that both of those core fears, while again, it's human nature to have
them, but really they both are irrational and unnecessary in the end,
because none of us has to worry about our worthiness, ever. We are
all amazing. I like to think of a newborn baby, how you look at that
newborn and you just know that he's perfect or she's perfect, and you
just can't get over, in fact, how perfect they are. Yet, they haven't
done anything brilliant. They haven't accomplished anything
significant. They haven't developed. We don't know yet I should say
what their personality will be like. We just know they're perfect, and
that level of perfection, in terms of what an amazing creation you are,
doesn't change throughout your life.

Of course, that's an irrational fear. Nothing that you do or don't do or

that happens to you can touch your worthiness or your child's. The
second fear of course is also irrational, the fear of missing out, but for
this one you have to remember things and decide what you believe.
For some people, it's a belief like the universe is always conspiring in
my favor. Everything that happens, all of my experiences, good and
bad, easy and painful, are all happening for me. The same is true for
your child. The experiences that we have in this life help us to reach
our potential, to become who we're meant to become. As a parent, I
want you to remember that you can run around and protect your child
from a lot of hard things in this world that we live in, but I try to
remember that if I protect my child from a lesson that he or she needs
to learn, then that lesson will show up again and again until they learn
it, and that the older they get, the more severe the lessons become,
and the harder they are to learn.

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I want them to learn them while they're young, and while I'm right
there, and while they're open to hearing what I have to say. My kids
are going to gain a lot of confidence by doing hard things. They're
going to grow by doing hard things. For example, when my child…a
couple of years ago my daughter was assigned to be in a classroom.
She was in first grade, and it was going to be a kindergarten/first
grade combo class. It was a new teacher to the school, and a lot of
parents were really upset about it because it was a scheduling
nightmare. The kindergartners were only there a half a day. The first
graders were there all day. There's a big change academically from
kindergarten to first grade, and again, the teacher was new. People
weren't sure about her. There was just all kinds of reasons why
many, many parents said, "I want my child taken out of that class.
That is going to be very hard."

Again, that fear got triggered within me too, like “this isn't fair.” Why
does my daughter have to go through this? But when I clean up my
thinking and I remember that there's a lesson she's going to learn
here, and that in fact I want her to experience some hard things right
now while she's young, I said, "Oh good. This will be hard for her.
This will be really good for her. I can be here to make sure she still
learns to read and still gets the things that she needs in first grade
and help her navigate this hard situation," but I really want more hard
for my kids, because we live in suburbia America. It is very easy, and
the people I see that evolve, and grow, and become confident, and
contribute the most to the world don't have it so easy. I think being in
a K1 combo class, if it's a little bit hard, might be great. I want to keep
her there.

All right. You can run around protecting them from all kinds of hard
things, but they're going to miss out on the opportunity to build
confidence, and to grow, and to learn, and to evolve, and to become
more compassionate, et cetera. When my three-year-old is having a
tantrum, I have expectations around how he's allowed to behave in
our house, but I don't try to talk him out of how he's feeling, because
my fear is already triggered, and so what I naturally want to do is yell
at him and tell him to stop yelling. Isn't that great how we do that? But
that is not me parenting from a clean space.

The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo

Clean parenting means I stay calm and peaceful, and I say, "I know
you're mad, and frustrated, and upset, and you can be. It's fine. What
you're not allowed to do is kick and scream in the living room. You'll
have to go in your bedroom if you're going to do that," and then I take
him into his bedroom if necessary, "but you can be mad." Just allow
him to feel that way, and I know that I'm in charge of how I feel. He's
not. He's not in charge of making me feel better. He doesn't need to
stop screaming so that I can feel better. He needs to stop screaming
because we don't scream in our home, and then he can feel however
he wants, right?

If your 18-year-old son comes home and says, "I decided not to go to
college anymore. I changed my mind," then all the fear and worry that
will come up within you, you can just allow it to come and notice it,
and process it a little bit, and then I want you to clean up your
thinking. He is on his own journey, and I want to give him space to be
on that journey, and so my only job is number one to love him, which
I can always do, and number two, to be really clear with him about
what I'm willing to do to help him, and what he needs to figure out
and do on his own.

Are you willing to let him stay at home and live with you? Do you want
him to get a job? What are you willing to offer him in terms of I would
say especially financial support, and then you love him, and then you
allow him to make choices. These are your options and I love you no
matter what. You may want to teach things as well, right? Of course
we want to teach our kids this is what I believe. These are the values
that I live by that serve me really well, and here's why, and here's
some options I can see for you, but your child has to go on their own
journey sometimes. Sometimes it's not the journey we would pick for
them, unfortunately.
My kids are probably really sick of hearing me say this, but when they
get upset, I say, "You can feel that way." They'll tell me, like my
daughter when she was five years old, I remember her saying, "Mom,
I hate you," because of something I wouldn't let her do. I said, "You
can hate me, and I still love you. Now, in our house, we don't tell
each other that we hate one another, so you're not allowed to say
that anymore. If you do, you'll need to go to your room, but you can in
your head hate me all you want, and I still love you." Clean parenting
means that you do not need your kids to provide you with the

The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo

emotions that you want to feel. You keep the credit for your emotions.
You manage your mind. You have some core beliefs that counteract
your core fears, and then you parent from that place of peace.

Thanks so much for joining me today, you guys. I hope that you found
some useful tips here that are going to help you as you do this
important work of raising children. I want to mention to you that I have
put together a clean parenting toolkit, because if you're like me,
you're listening to this podcast while you're driving, or walking around
Target, and when you need it in the moment, it's not going to be easy
to go back and find and review, so I already put down everything I
talked about and much more in what I call a clean parenting toolkit.
It's absolutely free for you.

It has links to a couple of other podcasts I've done on this topic, but
also some quick one-page cheat sheets about what to do when your
child is struggling and not feeling good, how to help them process
emotion, how to coach yourself ahead of time so that you're showing
up in the way you want to, and some additional, what I call leadership
parenting skills, because good leaders and good parents are the
same. All you have to do is go to boldnewmom.com/clean and you
will get immediate access to that entire toolkit. Thanks again for
joining me, and thank you so much to Brooke for allowing me to be
on her podcast, which I love, so I appreciate this time and your ear.
Talk to you soon. Bye.

The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo