You are listening to the Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 531.
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.
What's up? How are you, my friends? Long time no talk. It's so nice to have the microphone back out and be thinking about you guys. I've missed you. I am currently in my new home in Lake Tahoe. And we just spent like the last 10 days with the whole fam. I had Christian was out here with his girlfriend, Connor was out here with his girlfriend. We had the adopted kids, the borrowed kids, the bonus kids. The weather was insanely gorgeous. This is like the best place I've ever lived in my life.
We live in a forest, basically. Beautiful trees everywhere, on a golf course, so Christian can golf. Pickleball, beautiful restaurant, beautiful lake, beautiful opportunities to hike for hours and hours and hours. I am in pure heaven here. This has been one of the best decisions I've ever made in my entire life in terms of where to live. And for those of you who have listened to me for a long time, you know that I move around a lot. I love this idea of increased experience, and I have a whole podcast on it, talking about how you can live several lifetimes within one lifetime if you're willing to change, you're willing to move, you're willing to experience new things, expose yourself to new opportunities. And sometimes those opportunities don't work out.
I moved to Miami for about 6 minutes, and I hated it there. That was not a good choice for me. But I'm glad that I didn't feel like I had to stay, didn't feel like I had to commit because I had made a decision to live there. As soon as I moved there and I hated it, I sold my place, and now I love where I live. And I'm so excited to be where I am. So, it has been an amazing summer so far.
It is 6 months into the year, and that's the last time I recorded a podcast. That's the last time that I did any active work that I was actually publishing. But behind the scenes, I have been writing a new handbook and creating a new program for next year. And I'm very excited to introduce it to you. It's going to be starting in the beginning of 2026, and it's going to run through the whole year, and it's going to be weekly.
One of the things that I notice for most everyone that I've ever coached and worked with is that once a week is really the perfect amount of time to go in between cleaning out your brain. Right? At least once a week. There needs to be a daily practice of, you know, it's just like a house. There needs to be a daily practice of keeping it up, clean, but at least an hour once a week to really dive into some mental health, to really focus on your brain, to really do some reprogramming.
And I know for many of you, you've been dependent on the podcast to provide that insight to you once a week, and we will be starting that up again in 2026, for sure. So, I'm excited for all the things that are to come.
In the meantime, I wanted to record a podcast for you on potential. It's something that I have been thinking a lot about lately. And I think part of it is because I now have children who are young adults. And so they are really embarking on their lives. They're independent, successful lives in their own right. They're no longer dependent on me, dependent on their dad, dependent on us to, you know, house them, take care of them, feed them. And they're exploring what is their potential to be, to have, and to create in this world.
And it's got me really thinking about potential, not just for young people, but also for myself, and also for all of you. And how do we gauge our own potential? How do we know what we're capable of, what our capacity can be?
One of the biggest mistakes you see people making when they're talking about potential is they start to shift from thinking potential is something out there in the future when they're young, and thinking about what they could learn, what they could study, what they could practice in order to succeed. And they switch to start looking back at the past and focus on what abilities they've already created, what abilities they already have to determine their potential. And I think this is a big mistake that people make. They shift from a future focus to a past focus without even realizing that they do it. And when you do that, you diminish your own potential without even realizing it.
You diminish what could be true for you by not even considering possibilities because you're only looking to what you've already learned, what you already know, what you're already capable of to determine what you could do in your future. And I really want to make sure that you never make that shift into exploring your own capacity from the past and that you're always exploring your own capacity, your own potential from the future.
Before I start talking about this in too much detail, I want to introduce my caveat, which is every person is born with potential. Every person is born with potential of creation, potential of contribution within them. We see that in small children very easily. We know that they have the potential to learn new things and to learn how to speak, learn how to walk, and learn how to run and socialize and do math, right? We see all of that and believe in all their potential before they're anywhere near being able to do it.
And eventually, once children grow up and once adults become adults, for some reason, we stop doing that. And we start believing that somehow unused potential is somehow making us less worthy. And I just want to say that is never, ever, ever, ever the case.
Your worthiness is absolute. Whether you fulfill potential, whether utilize potential or not, that does not affect in any way your worthiness as a human being. But what I believe that it does affect, and what I believe you should consider, is that utilizing your own potential is the thrill of being alive.
Evolving into what you could be capable of is just a really good time. It's a really interesting life when you do that. And that's what I want to recommend that everybody consider and be curious about and attempt to fulfill your ultimate potential within you because it's a really great time.
I want you to think about the last time you did something that you didn't know you were capable of. Surprised yourself, delighted yourself. How that felt, right? Oh my gosh, I was able to write a book. I was able to learn how to play pickleball. I was able to earn this amount of money. I was able to graduate from this. I was able to go on a date with this person. Right? All of the potential that is unrealized, when you realize it is so much fun.
And it makes your life so much more interesting. And not only that, it gives you an opportunity to be an example to other people of what it means to evolve. When we evolve ourselves by accessing and utilizing our own potential in the world, we are quite literally making a contribution to humankind by evolving our own personal selves and being an example of that evolvement to other people.
That's as much as it takes to make that contribution. You don't have to influence tens of thousands of people. You don't have to be an influencer. You just have to look into your own life, look into your own self, explore your own potential, and utilize it into the world in order to make your contribution. So, what are the steps to doing this? How do you even consider your own potential? And the first step is really just being curious about it.
I believe that your potential is accessed through your desires. So, you start thinking about what you want. Now, some of you have no idea what you want. No idea. And you need to find out. And the way that you find out what you want is by trying things, trying lots of different things and exploring whether you're actually enjoying trying them.
Here's the thing: you won't know what your potential is in a certain thing right away. Make sense, right? We can't look at the first result somebody has and make a conclusion about their potential. Think about this with like little children. If we looked at their very first step that they take, it's always a fail. The very first word that they try to say, no one can understand what they're saying. They're just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if we looked at people, we looked at a baby when they're first trying to talk and they're terrible at it, we're not going to go, "Yeah, I don't think they have much potential for this.
They don't look very naturally talented at speaking from the beginning. So, I don't know, the potential's low." That's what we do to ourselves. We do that on anything that we have the desire to do. Maybe I'd like to learn how to play this game, but I'm terrible at it so far, so I'm probably never going to get good at it. Most people live their lives like that.
I watch people do it all the time in business, right? They attempt to do something in business and they're not very good at it in the beginning. Of course, they're not. They're terrible at it. They lose a little bit of money at it. They fail at getting clients, they fail at their investments, whatever. And then they give up because they're like, "Oh, I must not have the potential to do this because I'm so terrible in the beginning."
That is the biggest defeater of your own potential. So, once you explore and are curious about what you want to do and what you want to try, then the second thing that you have to do is develop some skills to overcome adversity, to develop some resilience, to manage your mind enough that you can keep going long enough to see what your potential may be.
Your potential is not determined solely by natural talent. Your potential is determined by how hard you are willing to work at it, how much time you're willing to put into it. How much energy are you willing to focus on something to really see if you could be good at something.
Think about anyone in the beginning of something being terrible. You only find out how good you could be, not by exploring your first 5 minutes doing it, but seeing how you are after a good solid year of consistent hard practice. Then you start to reveal to yourself your potential. Then you start to see what could be.
And your potential is not just your potential to succeed at something. Your potential is also your willingness and ability to utilize what you have to try to do something.
Every single one of us has the potential to learn a new language. Right? It's just lying dormant inside of us. Very few of us will go through the process to actually learn a new language as an adult. Right? That potential that we have that could be utilized, that could come to fruition, will in most of us lie dormant.
Some of us will start listening to the tapes and start reading the books and start listening to the TV shows and practicing on YouTube and going to the country and learning the language and become fluent. That potential will come alive, and we will make that contribution to our own lives if we learn that new language. And you think about what are all the other things that I have the potential to do, the potential to be, that I am not willing to put the work into.
There's so many, right? There's so many different things that we could all succeed at. We could all go study to become lawyers. We could all go study to learn how to play the piano. We could all go learn how to skydive. Right? We have all of that potential within us. But the truth is, we don't want to fulfill all of our potentials.
We want to fulfill the potentials that match our desires. You know, we talk about having want matches. We want when the potential meets the desire, that's when we can explore our true potential. We can see what we are capable of. We don't want to lose potential that we would rather explore, that we would rather have come to fruition.
So once you become curious and you start practicing and you start seeing what you could be, then you develop your resilience to overcome failure and the skill to get past all the discomfort and the skill to be extraordinary.
And what I often have to remind people of is if you are going to be someone who fulfills a lot of your own potential, it means that you're going to be extraordinary. You are going to be different than most ordinary people. Most ordinary people do not have the skills to be resilient long enough to achieve any extraordinary success.
And it's not their own fault. It's that most people aren't trained to be resilient, aren't trained to be courageous, aren't trained to be able to manage the emotional roller coaster that is one of living your life at the highest level and living your life on a constant dose of self-created discomfort in order to achieve in the highest way.
And when I look at my own life and I look at my own potential, my potential had always been the same from the moment I started, right? I had the potential to be successful. I had the potential to be a life coach. I had the potential to create and write books and create courses and help people and train people, right? That potential was always within me. And I realized that potential with a lot of hard work and a lot of self-belief and a lot of curiosity and a lot of desire.
But now I'm at this point in my life where I am curious about what other potentials I want to realize and I want to go after, and I want to delight myself with seeing what I'm capable of, because I know that I have so many opportunities to overcome discomfort.
And here's one of the tricks, I think, to being able to do this and to be able to have a life that just delights you constantly, is not looking at your life and comparing it to other people who you don't think have it as hard as you. Right? Looking at your own life and recognizing that your challenges are meant for you. Your disadvantages are meant for you. Your shortcomings are meant for you in order for you to learn the skill of resilience, in order for you to learn the skill of feeling negative emotion and overcoming it anyway.
So, to start with this curiosity about yourself and asking yourself, what do I have the potential to do and to be? And what do I actually want to be? And then developing the resilience and the courage to actually put yourself out there and to learn from that, to understand that every failure is an opportunity to learn something and to keep going.
And that when you do that for yourself, you develop the skillset that you need in order to fulfill your potential, not just in one area, but many areas. And this is the piece that I think a lot of people miss out on when they're in the struggle, when they are, you know, 2 years into an adventure and they still haven't seen the fruits of their labor yet.
What they don't understand is the skillset that they're developing in their ability to struggle well, in their ability to work hard in a way that doesn't defeat them, but in a way that inspires them, is once you've done that in one area of your life, once you've achieved an extraordinary result in one area of your life, all of those skills are transferable.
You can take all of the skills that you have that you applied to becoming a doctor, you can use those same skills and apply them to becoming a chef. Right? It's not like you're starting from scratch again. A lot of people say, "Well, I don't want to give up this current career because I don't want to start at scratch." No, you won't be. You've already learned the skill of success.
You've already learned the skill of resilience. You've already learned the skill of overcoming. You've already tapped into and realized so much of your potential that being able to do it at another event, at another idea, another career for yourself is so much easier because you've already developed the skills of emotional capacity, mental capacity, behavioral capacity.
And this is why I'm always encouraging people to set big goals because how will you ever know what you're capable of if you don't try something new? So when you think about what do you want to be capable of? "I want to have my own business. I want to get married. I want to be an amazing mom." Maybe those are things that you want to think about.
And maybe you're full of doubt, maybe you're full of fear, maybe you, you know, you're full of discouragement from so many failures. These are not reasons not to access your potential. These are not reasons to give up on yourself. These are actually the reasons that you need to overcome in order to see how strong you are, in order to develop your ability to expose yourself to the world.
Expose yourself to ridicule, expose yourself to negative feedback, expose yourself to failure and keep going. How much potential does one human have? And I think a lot of you will agree that when you meet a successful person, they aren't just successful in one area. They're successful in so many areas because they know how to be successful.
They have taken that potential within themselves and made something extraordinary. I like to give metaphors in terms of being able to understand how you are such a ball of amazing potential right now. It doesn't matter how old you are, it doesn't matter how healthy you are, it doesn't matter how smart you think you are. You are a ball of unused potential.
And if you think about it as maybe an amount of money having potential. Like you look at what is the potential of $10,000. What could $10,000 do? I think we can all agree that the potential of that is huge and could be huge, depending on how it is utilized.
And I think that's true for us. I think that's true for human beings. Our potential and how our potential is utilized, there's a myriad of ways in which we could do it. We could invest that money, we could buy something amazing with that money, we could throw an amazing party, we could have an amazing vacation.
But what most people do with their own potential is they take it and they put it under the bed because they're afraid. They're afraid of losing it. They're afraid of people making fun of it. They're afraid of what other people might think if they spend it or utilize it or invest it, they keep it a secret. That's what so many of us are doing with our own life's potential. We're tucking it away and hiding it from ourselves and from the world.
And I want to offer to each of you that I see in you potential, the same type of potential that I see in small children. The ability to create whatever your dream is, to me is so obviously within you. And when I coach people, that is what I share with them. I share with them the potential that I see, and I believe in what is possible and what they are capable of in their own lives.
And that is sometimes all we need is just someone to see and believe in that potential. And I will say that people will say to me, "It's not fair to tell people that you see that potential in them because what if they don't ever achieve it? And what if they try to do it and they can't?" To me, that's the point of life.
The point of life is to try and use yourself up to see what could I do with this life, with me? What can I do with it? What am I meant to do? And when you look at the potential that is within you and this playground that we have that is the world, and we realize that we're co-creating with it. We're co-creating the potential of results.
You understand that is how we have evolved. We have taken the potential of human beings and those human beings have interacted with the world and created things that have never been there before. That is what has perpetuated ingenuity. That's what's perpetuated innovation. That's what's perpetuated evolution.
And if every single person that was ever born was afraid to express their potential, we would never evolve. And I want to offer that I think that there is more of a chance of people's potential being diminished or extinguished or underutilized now than there ever has been.
And I think it's because as we've evolved as human beings, we are less and less forced into exploring our potential. When back in the day, our main goal was survival or death, our potential was necessarily exposed, necessarily needed. We had to figure out, "Am I capable of creating food? Am I capable of protecting my children? Am I capable?"
I don't know, but I'm going to go find out because the alternative is unacceptable. Right? And so you would learn back in the day if you were capable of fighting, capable of protecting your family, of creating a home, whatever it was that you needed to do to survive, you saw your own hard work, your effort and your potential come alive because you were forced into that.
I feel like in the world that we live in now, that is much less necessary. We can survive with accessing very little of our potential. We can create our life, a mediocre life for ourselves without ever really having to tap into the best and most delicious parts of ourselves.
And that's okay, but it's also not going to evolve you, and it's not going to delight you, and it's not going to excite you as much as it could if you created situations where you willingly explored your potential. Maybe you're not being forced to go fight an animal to see and learn that you're capable of defending yourself. But you could go out there and create something and show yourself that you're capable of creation, you're capable of contribution, you're capable of helping people at a huge level that maybe you didn't realize before.
What could be possible for you within the potential that you have? And one of the ways that you will know if you have been holding yourself back is when you look at what you think your potential is and you compare it to what you think other people's potential is, and you notice a huge discrepancy.
A lot of people can see a tremendous amount of potential in other people. They could see what they could do, what they could be capable of, especially our children. But when you look at yourself, are you undermining what your own potential is? What could be created with all the ingredients that you have?
I'm always telling you that I believe that your number one asset is your brain. And your brain becomes a more valuable asset the more you educate it. And the way that you educate your brain is by learning from other people, learning from other people's experiences, but also by your own experience.
The more experience you create in your own life, the more things you try, the more effort you put in to trying things and failing, the more knowledge you will have inside of your brain. And not only that, the more you fail, the more resilience you build. And resilience is what will get you to the edge of your potential.
The biggest potential diminisher is fear. We'll never know. Like just imagine if you just give up when someone's trying to attack you and your family, you'll never know what your potential was to fight that predator off. You just gave up. Right? Your potential will die inside of you.
And it doesn't mean that you're going to save the family every time. It doesn't mean that you're always going to win. It doesn't mean that your potential is always going to meet the demand of the minute and what you want. But you'll never know if you don't give it a chance, if you don't put yourself out there, if you don't explore your own potential.
You don't want to one day look back and say, "What could I have been? Where is that potential that I could have utilized? Where has it gone?" And it does. Opportunities pass us by, especially as we age. But new opportunities come with experience. Potential isn't created by your past ability, but your potential in the future may be enhanced by your experience, your knowledge, what you've learned.
So when you think about your age, especially those of you who are at midlife in your 50s like me, think about my potential now is so much bigger in so many areas than it was when I was younger. Because I have so much knowledge. I've built the asset of my brain to explore my own potential of where I could go.
I mean, I could potentially build something that's bigger than I ever imagined in a completely different career. I could build my health in a way that I never have. I could play a sport in a way that I never have. Right? The potential within me is brimming. So much potential.
And that's what we did in all of our reinvention courses is really explored not just what the possibilities were, but the possibilities that we really desired and where they met our potential. Do you have the potential to be that thing that you want to be? And I'm going to say the answer is yes, you do.
You have that potential. And don't let that potential die inside of you. If there's enough desire to fuel it. Maybe you don't have a desire. You have the potential to learn another language, but maybe you don't have the desire. But where is your desire enough that you're willing to do the work to learn the new language, to learn the new skill, to learn the new business so you can make all your dreams come true? Because when your potential and your desire meet the world of opportunity, that's when all your dreams come true.
So, this is just as much a message for my young sons who are just embarking on life in the world. Christian who's embarking on being a professional golfer and Connor who's embarking on his online business. And me, who is entering into the second half of my life and exploring what is my potential, what is next for me, and what can I explore in terms of what could be true for my life?
What am I capable of? What is my capacity? And what am I willing to put the effort into? I hope you're all having the most beautiful summer. I hope you will explore your own potential, your own capacity, your own capability, and show up in a way and expose yourself to the world in a way that maybe you wouldn't have the courage to do otherwise. Because we need everybody to show up as much as they can.
If every single person was brave enough to express their potential in the world, we would evolve so much faster. And not because we need to, but just because it would be so much more fun. It just creates more delight. The discomfort, the pain, the negativity is always going to be there. But why not increase the possibility of seeing what we're made of? Seeing what your potential is.
I hope you'll do this. I hope that you will spend some time really thinking about it. I miss you guys. And until next time when I'm going to be talking about my new program and inviting you to join me, I hope you have the most beautiful summer. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
