My business and weightloss success aren’t a coincidence.

I had to let go of shitty ass thinking and BECOME a version of myself that allowed me to be successful.

Brooke Castillo is one of the women who showed up in my life in a powerful way and right on time while I was building my weightloss business. In today’s podcast episode, I’m sharing the things I’ve learned from her that I’ve used to change my life.

From keeping my weight off to challenging myself to go after big dreams, I’m sure you’ll find something in today’s podcast that’ll help you change your life, too.

Listen to Episode 325: What I’ve Learned from Brooke Castillo today.

00:00:00

You. Hello, everybody. Welcome back. So today I have a special episode. It’s a little bit on the personal side.

00:00:09

I have been very blessed to have powerful women in my life when I was growing up. If you haven’t heard my story. I was born to a mom who was 17, and then she had my brother at 19, and she was a single mother all her life. And I got to watch the powerful example of a woman who she was not educated. She barely graduated from high school.

00:00:38

She went to a very small county high school in northern Alabama. But I got to watch her show me work ethic.

00:00:51

I look at myself today and I think about, why do I work so hard? Why is that? And I know it’s because of my mom. I just watched her all of my life. Self sacrifice put us before her own needs.

00:01:08

Now, a lot of times, people say, like, oh, that’s not a great example. Like, shouldn’t we be doing the self care and everything? I think it just depends on how you look at it. Like, when I look back as an almost 49 year old woman and I look back on my mom, I think about what it taught me when it came to raising my own son. When Logan was diagnosed with autism, I needed to be able to put him first, and I had that role model.

00:01:36

Working hard was going to be a requirement to make sure that that baby had every opportunity that he could. So I had my mom, and then I also had my granny. A lot of you like, I have a lot of people who write in and say, you shouldn’t be cussing. Your mouth is not classy. Well, my granny was a voracious cusser.

00:02:00

She loved to tell the dirty jokes. She had double D natural boobies. She liked high heels like me. Before, high heels were, like, really a thing. I remember her telling me how, like, in the 50s, she had a wig of the day.

00:02:16

She had these five wigs. She took them in on Saturdays. They set her wigs, and then she had a different wig that she would wear every day. And if you don’t know me very well, you know that I have had my hair every way, every color, extensions and lengths. So my grandmother, she was one of the first women to go to college for accounting.

00:02:40

She moved to Nashville all by herself, figured out how she was going to be an independent woman back in the day. She also spent her entire career working at car dealerships in the accounting department, running the accounting in a male dominated industry. So my grandmother was always strong. She didn’t take shit off nobody. She said exactly what was on her mind.

00:03:05

She was a decision maker, and she was a leader. So I’ve had these powerful influences. And today, as much as I love my granny and as much as I love my mother. And the amazing, like, when I think about who I am today, they really shaped my life in terms of being bold, saying what’s on my mind, being myself and being authentic, not apologizing for it. If you like my clever sayings and you like my potty ass mouth, you can thank my mama and granny for both of those.

00:03:40

But the big thing I want to talk about today is another powerful woman that came into my life, and her name is Brooke Steo. And I want to talk about it today because she taught me four things that my granny and my mother didn’t teach me. Not because they didn’t know how or because they were lacking in some way. Probably they didn’t know how. But Brooke was one of the first powerful women that came into my life that I would say shook every belief system that I had.

00:04:12

So just a little context back in 2005 is when I started losing my weight. When I lost my weight, all the things, 100 pounds. And I started a business to help women in 2007 to do the same. It was called fit and fat. Back in the day, I wore pink camo.

00:04:34

I had bandanas that I bedazzled. I had a look like no other. And so for years, I was working with people in a very small membership. I had about 100 clients. I loved them dearly, many of which are still clients to this day.

00:04:55

This is how long a lot of people have been with me. They found me on Weight Watchers message boards back when I first started wanting to help women lose weight. I didn’t know where to find them. And this is in 2007. We didn’t have Facebook and the social media and all that kind of stuff.

00:05:11

If you wanted to help people, you had to go where they were hanging out. And almost every woman in the world was doing Weight Watchers at the time, and they were on their message boards. So even though I wasn’t doing Weight Watchers, I went on there to find like minded people like me, people who wanted help, people who wanted somebody who had already lost their weight. So from 2007 until about 2015, I ran old Fit and Fat, and I spent my days every day in our little forums talking to women about their problems, about what was getting in their way, cheerleading them, trying to tell them what to do, just being there for them. I think at the end of the day, some of the best weight loss coaches, we don’t always tell you exactly what to do, but we’re there for you.

00:06:03

And we’re there for you in the moments when life sucks. To me, that’s why you want a real weight loss coach. You want someone that’s going to help you through those sucky ass moments. Well, in 2015, I’d been doing it for a while, and what I realized is so many of my clients, like, I could talk about food all day long and I could talk about exercise and stuff. But the ones that were actually losing weight were the ones that I talked to about their lives the most.

00:06:33

So I knew something had to change and how I was helping people with weight loss. Well, here comes Brooke Castillo. She’s got a podcast. And my best friend at the time, Jane. I know you all heard me talk about Jane a thousand times on this podcast.

00:06:49

She called me, and Jane never calls me. We have always been texters and stuff, but we didn’t talk on phone much. And she called me and she was like, stop what you’re doing. You’ve got to listen to this podcast. It is so good.

00:07:03

And it’s like everything that you teach, but it just is like in a methodical way. So I fire up the life coach school podcast. I am blown away. I’m like, oh my God, this shit makes so much sense. So if you like me and you like all this mental shit that I teach you, I highly recommend you go and listen to her podcast.

00:07:26

Start in the beginning. Don’t start at the end. Start at the very beginning. Just like Corinne did. Episode one, I start listening.

00:07:36

Next thing I know, she’s saying, hey, I’ve got a coaching program. If you want to learn how to do what I teach on the podcast, come to California. You can learn from me. And so I called Jane and we’re like, we’re in. We’re going.

00:07:52

So me and Jane and my friend Amy, we all decide we are becoming weight and life coaches. This is the modern era, and we’re all here for it. So we pack up, we go to go off to California for eight days. And I’m going to tell you all, it scared the shit out of me. I’d never done anything like that to me.

00:08:19

I didn’t go to college. I didn’t have education. I went in scared as fuck, thinking I’m going to be the dumb one. I’m the one that’s going to fail. This is not going to work.

00:08:31

All the things, we show up and on day one, like a dumb ass, I raised my hand first. She asked, who would like to get coached. I didn’t even know what the fuck coaching was. But I’ve always been the kind of person that when I do anything, like, if I was ever taking a class or doing anything to learn something, I’m always going to go first. Mainly because I don’t want to sit there and be uncomfortable.

00:08:59

I want to get it over with. Number two, I am so weird about money, y’all, I grew up so broke that I am going to get my money’s worth no matter what. So I was like, I’m going to raise my hand. Because I had paid a lot of money to go at the time. It was, big fucking deal.

00:09:21

Time for me to go do this. I can’t even explain how outside the comfort zone it was for me. Raise my hand to get coached. Next thing you know, I’m bawling. I’m crying.

00:09:32

I’m arguing with her. I think she don’t know shit about what she’s talking about. I’m like, what the fuck is this? Then I just relax into the whole week. I’m paying attention.

00:09:43

I’m listening. And it changed my life. I started on day one thinking she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, that I had wasted my money. I don’t know. And then on day eight, I’m sitting there, and I’m working with another powerful woman that has played a huge impact in my life, bev Aaron, who’s my personal coach to this day.

00:10:09

And we’re writing my future self letter. And for the first time in my life, I am believing things that I could do had never believed before. And this is after I’d lost all my weight. I still came into that group feeling very insecure, like that weight could come back at any moment.

00:10:35

If Chris died, I’d be homeless. I had so much fear, and by the end of the week, I was believing in myself. I was thinking about my future. I was leaving there ready to change the world. Before I went, I didn’t think I’d ever changed the world.

00:10:59

I was happy if a few people would just listen to me. I was having fun with my clients, but I didn’t believe that I could impact people. I didn’t believe I could change people’s lives. I believed I could work hard, and I needed those lessons from my mother, my grandmother. But what I really needed was someone to shake every belief system I had for the good.

00:11:28

And that’s what happened that week. I want to teach you today a few things that I’ve learned from Brooke Castillo. I’ve had the pleasure of not only going through certification, but I kept going back. Anything she offered, I signed up for it. That first week was so good.

00:11:48

I was like, whatever she offers, I really think it’s going to make a difference in my life. And everything she offered, I doubled down on it. I asked the questions. Even if I was afraid I’d look foolish, I did anything. Like, if she said to journal on this, you better believe I was journaling on it.

00:12:11

I just decided, whatever she says does, I’m going to try it. And if my life changes, great. And if it doesn’t, at least I tried. And after two years so I went to certification. In 2015, she has a yearly Mastermind.

00:12:32

I went back in 2016. I decided to sign up for her master coach training. I spent a whole nother year working with her and some of my dearest friends in business. Jane went through it with me. We did a full year of Master Coach training, where, I swear to God, I felt like my skin was burning off all the time.

00:12:53

She yelled at me constantly. She pushed me hard, but she taught me such valuable lessons. She never told me what to do. She just highlighted broken ass thinking that I had and asked me to change it. She showed me possibility, and then I became someone who I went to all the events.

00:13:15

Anything that she did, I went. I took the notes, I watch all the calls. I still listen to the podcast. And I’ve just learned so much from her. And the reason why I want to tell you all this today because I know a lot of you view me like I view Brooke as a mentor, as a guide, and I want to tell you my best lessons from her today.

00:13:37

And then I want you to think about what are your best lessons you’ve learned from me? Are you doubling down on them? Are you going all in on them? Are you just passively listening to the podcast and hoping it works? Are you just listening to it because I’m entertaining?

00:13:54

Are you listening to it like your life depends on it? Are you listening to it because you want a whole new life for yourself? I invite you to start listening like that. Start looking for the things that are going to change your life. Because as great and magnanimous and life changing as Brooke can be, she didn’t do a shit for Corinne.

00:14:23

And I think she would agree with me. All she did was present, like, here’s how you think. Here’s another world out there a whole new perspective. What direction are you going to go in, girl? She opened up possibility.

00:14:43

She was the first person to show me that I had choices in this life, that I did not have to do what I was told, that I got to decide if what I was told is good enough for me anymore. So all of you who keep listening to me, I want you to start listening to me like I listen to my mentors when I’m listening to bev my mother, my grandmother, Brooke, whoever your people are, are you listening like you’re going to change your life? Are you listening like somebody that just hopes it all clicks one day? Don’t do that. You’ve heard me say a thousand times, we don’t do opium in no BS.

00:15:29

That is a weight loss drug none of us need. We are going to make our changes. So the first thing that Brooke taught me is that I was just wrong about my possibilities. Like, everything that I thought my life was going to be like or that had to be she’s like, what if you’re wrong about that? What else is possible?

00:15:52

If you didn’t think it had to be this way, what could it be like? The thing about possibility is when she started asking me that, the first thing I would say is, but in the past, but I’ve never been to college, but I’ve never had a successful business, but I’ve never kept my weight off. And she was like, Why you keep going to the past? That is not where your future is created. Your future is created by looking forward to who you want to be and what you’re willing to do today and tomorrow to become that person.

00:16:34

Why not focus more on that? Why are we taking our eye off the prize of where we’re going to sit and cuddle fuck what the hell’s happened in our past? One of the things, like when she taught me that one of the things that I started teaching my clients that I think is important is the past is a teacher at best. It is not your fortune teller. When we go to the past, we only want to go because we’re going to learn some lessons on what we can do differently tomorrow.

00:17:05

It is to access wisdom. It is not to beat ourselves up, scare the shit out of ourselves, and to convince ourselves that we can’t have anything. So one of the first things that she taught me was that there are possibilities. And the best way to make those possibilities come true is to think about what you’re going to do to go get them and what you need to think in order to go after them and to stop fucking around in your past. The second thing that was so important to me, and I have worked on this for a long time because I think all of us do this, is she asked a question one time to me about it was a business question.

00:17:49

I won’t even go into it because this is a weight loss podcast. But she said, Cryn, what’s the downside to just believing in yourself that you can do it and that it will happen? I was like, what? Honestly, I was like, the downside? And I said, well, the downside is that if I believe in myself 100% and I go all in if I don’t make it, I’ll feel terrible.

00:18:17

And she said, you’ll only feel terrible if you talk to yourself like an asshole. But if you go all in on believing yourself and you give yourself everything and you don’t make it, you at least have set yourself up to learn how to stop being disappointed in yourself and start being proud of yourself if you’re going for the things you want in your life. Earth shattering news to me. I think a lot of us think that it’s like, Well, I want to hedge my bets. I better not get too excited.

00:18:50

So I’m not as disappointed. What I started realizing is that every time I did that on the pursuit to get what I wanted, I held back a lot. I couldn’t enjoy it. Like, it’s so much fun to work for a goal when you’re cheering yourself on and you’re daydreaming and believing in it, you also get more shit done towards it. You know what’s not fun?

00:19:16

Being terrified of your goal. Telling yourself not to get too excited and dragging yourself down into the muck day after day while trying to get there. It’s like slapping on a 50 pound vest and then somebody saying, now run as fast as you can towards your goal. You make it harder when you don’t believe in yourself. You make it harder when you don’t allow yourself the freedom to just be like, I am going to pretend like this is happening all the way until the end.

00:19:43

And at the end, I’ll know. And what most of us for me, what she taught me was that my biggest problem in life was that I had never really learned how to be there for myself on my worst days. I had gotten pretty good at celebrating myself on my best days, at appreciating things when they went right. I had not learned how to be somebody that was there for myself on my worst days who didn’t just assault themselves and tear themselves apart. And that was such a valuable lesson because when I really started looking towards my future, deciding to just believe it can happen, putting my energy and effort into it, and then making an agreement with myself, let’s say it doesn’t work, let’s say it doesn’t happen, what do you want to tell yourself at the end?

00:20:43

Are you okay with being disappointed? I remember having a conversation with myself in my journal about what is the difference between disappointed that something didn’t happen and being disappointed in you. Brooke taught me those kinds of things and I will be forever grateful for it. Those are the conversations no woman had ever had with me.

00:21:07

The next thing that she taught me was that taking care of myself impacted people in a positive way. I watched my mom’s self sacrifice and it was a valuable lesson that you can work harder than you believe you can, that you can put other people first. It is not the end of the world. She really taught me how to love a child so much that you will give up all kinds of things. And I needed that lesson with Logan.

00:21:42

But somewhere in the mix, taking care of me became a guilty pleasure. It got morphed into selfishness. I didn’t realize that when I took care of myself that others could have a better experience. And Brooke taught me that. We were talking about how I needed to stop feeling bad because I was going to care for myself, that I was going to take days off my coach, bev.

00:22:15

One of the things that she said to me early on I’ve been coaching with her for almost four years now, maybe five. One of the things that she said to me early on, when I was having extreme guilt because Logan often wanted to talk to me in the afternoons, I was just tired. Tired after working all day. If you ever listen to my podcast, I frequently get up at 05:00 A.m. And start my work day.

00:22:41

I like to work during the part of the day that I’m my freshest and I stink at 203:00 in the afternoon. Because I work for myself, I arrange my day to be off around three. Well, once Logan was in his teenage years, this is like in 2018 and 19. The second I’d get off work, he’d want to talk to his mama, and he’d want to talk to me about all kinds of just shit I’m not interested in, to be honest. And not only shit I wasn’t interested in, but I was tired.

00:23:13

I just wanted silence. And I remember crying and talking to my coach, Bev, and saying, I feel so bad. What kind of mother sits there and doesn’t want to talk to her own child? What kind of mother sits there and says, I’m just going to need a break? And she said, an honest mother, a good mother, a mother who’s willing to have a relationship with their child based on trust and honesty.

00:23:45

And she said, like, we were talking about it. And it reminded me of several conversations or coaching sessions that Brooke and I had where when I take care of me, I can show up better for other people. I can make a bigger impact in the world when I’m dragging myself through it. That’s never going to happen. And I remember Bev saying all of its mothering, Corinne, it’s mothering when you’re tired and you’re saying, I need a break, that’s part of mothering.

00:24:21

She said, it’s also mothering when you’re sitting there listening to your kid talk and you’re not interested at all, but you listen because you’re the kind of mom that will it’s also mothering when you tell your child the truth. I just felt bad that I would tell Logan the truth until I started thinking about it. It’s like Logan probably needs because he’s on the spectrum. He probably needs to learn that. What are body cues when someone’s tired?

00:24:50

How do you not get your feelings butt ass hurt? When somebody doesn’t want to spend time with you in that moment, it doesn’t mean like, I remember having conversations with Logan saying, baby, I’m just tired. I love you so much, and I love you enough to tell you that I need a break right now. And I need you to know this has nothing to do with how much I love you. Mommy just needs a break.

00:25:15

And so between Bev and Brooke, I really learned how to cut myself some slack. And to me, the ultimate self care has not been massages and manicures and panicures and all that kind of stuff. I think Brooke and Bev taught me that the ultimate self care happens in my mind, cutting myself some slack, not spending my days beating myself up over and over again the next lesson that Brooke told me was that successful women are needed in this world. I will be honest. Ever since I’ve become successful in the weight loss industry, this podcast, swear to God, it’s got 50 million downloads.

00:26:06

I never thought that that day would ever happen. I never thought that a million people would take my free course. I never thought that. I’d have so many members. I have 14,000 of them in my weight loss group.

00:26:21

I am by no means a celebrity, but I am a successful woman. She taught me to not be ashamed of your success only or less than 1% of the women in this world will have ever built a business like I have. My business is an eight figure business, which I don’t talk about on this podcast very often. I built it myself.

00:26:56

It has been going for 15 plus years. And then starting in 2017 was when it really became something that changed my family’s life. And Brooke, for a while, I was very ashamed of that. I just had a lot of shame around being successful. Like, I shouldn’t talk about it.

00:27:20

I don’t want other people to feel bad, blah, blah, blah. And she said, you don’t want women to feel bad? Here’s what we are all going to think. We need more women who are successful breaking generational curses of obesity and wealth, and they need to talk about it all the time so other women can see their possibility. They’re feeling bad because they can’t do things.

00:27:50

They don’t see enough of themselves and other people.

00:27:59

For me, it was some of the biggest lessons she ever taught me, was how to enjoy me, how to be proud of me. I thought that losing 100 pounds would do that. I had some pride and stuff, but I’ve genuinely, since I’ve lost my weight, kept it off and built a business, I’ve learned how to embrace the success successful women are needed in this world. You need to see more of them. Those of us who are successful, those of us who are doing it, we need to tell our daughters, our nieces, our sons.

00:28:46

We need to tell our sisters, our friends. We need to tell everybody who will listen. This does not mean to go brag and do things. We are not going to be arrogant. We are going to set an example.

00:28:59

We are going to normalize the conversation around little girls deciding that they get to feel they get to be any size they want. They get to play the sports they want, they get to make the money they want. Wouldn’t it be an amazing day in the world if every little girl it was normalized for her that she had unlimited potential, that she got to be proud of herself no matter what, that she didn’t have to look outside of herself for pride anymore? That’s the shit all of us moms have to start teaching. And it’s going to take more of us who are successful telling the world that it is okay to love yourself, to be proud of yourself, and to fucking talk about it.

00:29:49

And the last thing that she taught me is that if you were going to love yourself in this moment, what would you do? And say, this was really important for me because I’ve always been kind of a little bit of a self loather, grew up self loather. My mama was a self loather. I got it honest from the family tree. And I remember one day her asking me that question.

00:30:13

She probably doesn’t even remember it. She didn’t even know I’m doing this podcast.

00:30:19

I was probably belly aching. I just remember the question, and I am sure that there was something in my life going on that I was just 100% sure that it was a game change. Like you don’t understand. This brick in my load is worthy of feeling like shit over. And she was like, well, why does it feel like shit?

00:30:43

And the reasons I was giving her was that something was wrong with me. I’m all about, like, there are hardships in life. I get it very often there are things that happen in the world, and I think, like, yeah, that’s hard. This is a lot. But in those moments now, what I tell myself is, I understand why you’re upset.

00:31:13

Sometimes those things are disappointing. But you’re okay. You’ll figure this out. I think about my strengths, my resiliency. I give myself compassion.

00:31:27

I used to not do that. If something bad happened, I made it mean. I’m dumb. I’m not good enough. See, everybody hates me.

00:31:37

There’s something wrong with me. And I remember her asking me one day, because this question has been pivotal for me, if I was going to love myself in this moment, what would I say and I would do next?

00:31:53

And I hope that this podcast has been helpful for you. What I want most one, I just want to thank Brooke. Like I said, she doesn’t know I’m doing this podcast, but I’ve told her several times how much she’s changed my life, and I don’t know if I even want to tell her she’s changed my life anymore, because I don’t want any of you thinking, I’ve changed your life. I think the new Power statement is, she showed up in my life in a powerful way that I could never thank her enough for. And I want to thank me for taking all of it in, for listening, for wrestling with it, arguing with her, crying over it, taking the notes, doing all the things.

00:32:44

And I hope that’s what you all do with this podcast. I hope you wrestle with stuff I tell you. I hope you take everything that I’m telling you and you think on it, and you let it wrinkle your brain. But at the end of the day, you make your change, whatever change that is for. You.

00:33:04

And I will just tell all of you, if you ever want deeper help on all this, if you want to be in a group with me where you’re supported, this is the kind of shit we dig into all the time. Join the no BS weight loss program. I’ll help you lose weight. But I’ll also help you change your life, like Brooke helped me change mine. Talk to you next week.