Money, Coaching, and Building a Bigger Life: What Brooke Castillo Made Possible
How Brooke Castillo Made Ambition Feel Expansive
I had already been a life coach for years before I found The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo, but when I finally heard her, it felt like it arrived right on time. I was not new to coaching. I already understood the power of questions, mindset, self-awareness, responsibility, and transformation. Still, there was something about Brooke’s voice, her certainty, and the way she spoke about life, money, her business, and raw power that reached a part of me I did not even realize was waiting for permission.
There are teachers who give you information, and then there are teachers who give you permission. Brooke Castillo was the second kind for me. She did not simply teach life coaching concepts. She made coaching feel less like a little side hustle, or a small helping profession tucked quietly into the margins and more like a serious body of work capable of changing lives, creating incredible wealth, building an empire, shaping language, and leaving something great behind. Her work is inspiring and empowering.
Some of the first episodes I remember hearing from Brooke were about money. She talked about money so openly and just laid it all out there, like I had never heard before. It was a stark contrast from others in the industry who often build walls up, not wanting to share what brought them great success. Brooke invited me, the listener to learn and become better. To dream for ourselves but also share in her dream of making $100,000,000 a year- Yes, that’s not a typo 100 Million Dollars a Year! It reminds me of Gary Vaynerchuk AKA GaryVee’s goal of becoming an owner of the New York Jets. These are two massive goals! And they both play with the idea of what’s possible, and really going for it. When you have a goal that large you change your daily behaviors and mindset to try and reach it. You start to be a person that shows up as though it has happened. As you read further I want to encourage you to create a goal for yourself that feels a bit bigger than anything you have dared to dream before. Don’t push it so far that you don’t believe it can happen but just enough to thrill you a little- it should feel bold and take some bravery. This will cause you to have fuel in your tank for it.
But back to Brooke, her goal of making 100 million a year was something I was excited to see her achieve. She had already had multi-million dollar years which was so extremely impressive and helped countless people. I knew that money would be able to help even more. But Brooke wasn’t always met with enthusiasm, some mocked her goal and questioned her for dreaming so big… Yet I have never seen anyone do the same of Gary. Sexism? For many most likely. Jealously? No doubt. Which makes me support her courage to break the walls down and make her vision a reality. Brooke, is the special type of person that calls her own shots, plays life by her own set of rules and burns brightly in the world…. And without apology. Not in a way that felt like she was trying to impress anyone. She talked about money as a tool, a teacher, an invitation, and a mirror.
In her episode “Money Beliefs,” she said-
“I want everyone to have millions of dollars,” and connected that desire to more fun, more contribution, and more capacity to help people. She also said that aspiring to more money asks us “to be more of who we genuinely are.” -Brooke Castillo
That kind of language was rare in the coaching world I had known. So many coaches were still treating money like a dirty secret, as though wanting to be well-paid somehow contaminated the purity of the work. Brooke speaks about money as possibility. She speaks about it as expansion. She speaks about it as something that could call us into a more honest, responsible, creative version of ourselves. Listening to her, I did not feel pressured or shamed. I felt called to so and be more.
It was as though she was saying to me, and to every other coach listening: rise up. Meet me here. Play bigger…
This thing called life is not meant to be tiptoed through.
In 2022, The Life Coach School publicly celebrated a major business milestone with the episode “50 Million Dollars.” In the episode description, Brooke framed the conversation around “building a 50 million dollar business,” including the challenges, growing pains, and steps involved in bringing that dream to life. That matters because the number itself is not the only point. The deeper point is imagination. Brooke showed a generation of coaches that our ideas could become assets, that our frameworks could become intellectual property, and that our work could scale beyond one-on-one sessions.
As someone who has always loved creating custom coaching materials, worksheets, teachings, and transformational tools- some of which You Can Find Here. I recognized that part of her immediately. Brooke was not only coaching people. She was building containers. She was building models people could return to again and again. She helped me see that a coach’s words can become a curriculum, a podcast can become a movement, and a framework can become a doorway through which thousands of people understand themselves differently- Coaching is powerful and life changing work that I geek out on regularly.
One of Brooke’s concepts I loved hearing about was the 90-Day Relationship. The idea was simple but daring: create a defined container for a relationship, use that container for growth, honesty, emotional intimacy, love, and conscious commitment, and then reassess at the end of the 90 Days. In the episode “The 90 Day Relationship,” Brooke described wanting to use dating and relationships “as a way to further my growth as a human being” and to explore love and emotional connection, not just physical connection. Mentioning that she would “highly recommend” a 90-day relationship to anyone who wants to use relationships for growth.
I didn’t do it exactly like this but I love the concept. It felt heart-led and rational at the same time. Romantic, but not reckless. Committed, but not trapped. Aspirational, but not vague. It was one of those Brooke ideas that made me realize she was not simply accepting inherited rules. She was willing to design life and put herself out there to ask what might happen if we stopped sleepwalking through inherited structures and started creating containers for ourselves.
That is one of the things I appreciate most about Brooke Castillo: she has always seemed willing to experiment out loud. Whether she is talking about money, dating, business, coaching, goals, or identity, there is a quality of active design in her work. She does not just ask people to feel better about the lives they already have. She invites them to question the architecture of those lives and decide, on purpose, what they want to build or do next.
One of Brooke Castillo’s most famous frameworks is The Self Coaching Model. It’s one of the clearest and most practical tools in the world. It takes something that can feel invisible- our inner world -and makes it easier to see, understand, and change.
The Model has five parts: Circumstances, Thoughts, Feelings, Actions, and Results.
A circumstance is the neutral fact. It is what happened. It is the part everyone could agree on if they were watching the same scene on a video camera. A client did not renew. Three people signed up. Someone did not text back. The bank account showed a number. Those are circumstances and facts.
A thought is the sentence in your mind about the circumstance. This is where most of our power lives, and also where most of our pain begins. The circumstance might be, “Three people signed up for my program.” One thought could be, “No one wants what I offer.” Another thought could be, “This is the beginning, and I am now learning how to sell.” Same circumstance. Completely different experience.
A feeling is the emotion created by the thought. If I think, “No one wants what I offer,” I may feel embarrassed, discouraged, or defeated. If I think, “This is the beginning, and I am learning how to sell,” I may feel curious, or willing to learn. The circumstance did not create the feeling directly. The thought did.
An action is what we do from that feeling. When we feel defeated, we may hide, stop posting, avoid making offers, or convince ourselves we are not ready or worse, quit. When we feel willing, we may keep showing up, improve the offer, ask better questions, serve the people who did say yes amazingly, and keep growing.
A result is what our actions create. If I hide, stop posting, and avoid making offers, I create fewer opportunities for people to work with me. That result then becomes “evidence” for the original thought: “No one wants what I offer.” But if I keep showing up, improving, and serving, I create a different result- and I begin building evidence for a more useful thought.
After studying the work of the amazing Louise Hay and Byron Katie, I was well primed for this work… But the way Brooke laid it out and made it so accessible was such a gift. I hope I am explaining it’s power well enough for you to see the benefit and if not please listen to Brooke lay it out in a little over 5 minutes- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnWfkWaNQuA
My biggest takeaway from the model was my thoughts are creating my experience, and rather than blaming myself for how my thoughts got me where I am, I could use new better thoughts to create an expanded and better life.
If I believed my coaching had to stay small to stay pure, I wouldn’t be able to help as many people. If I believed wanting more money made me greedy, I would undercharge and then could use my exhaustion as proof that coaching could not really support me. If I believed my ideas were not valuable enough to become books, courses, tools, teachings, and communities, I would keep treating my deepest and most fulfilling work like a side project… and then it would not become a massive part of my life.
The Model gives us a way out of that loop. It invites us to pause and ask: What actually happened? What am I thinking about it? What feeling does that thought create in me? What do I do when I feel that way? What result am I creating? And is that result becoming evidence for a thought I no longer want to practice?
That is why Brooke’s work is so useful beyond coaching. You can use The Model in your business, your relationships, your money, your creativity, your leadership, and your dreams- anything! It is not just a coaching tool. It is a way of becoming conscious and then deciding what you want.
And for me, that consciousness changed the way I approached my work.
Brooke also introduced me to Alex Hormozi’s work. Through her, I found $100M Offers, which gave practical language to something many coaches need: how to create more value, communicate that value clearly, and build offers that actually serve people well. That introduction mattered because it connected the inner work of coaching with the outer work of business. A coach can care deeply about thoughts, feelings, healing, identity, and emotional responsibility while also caring about offers, pricing, sales, delivery, leadership, scale, and intellectual property. Those things do not have to compete. Done well, they support each other and fuel each other.
Through Alex, I also found Leila Hormozi’s work, who is his brilliant and funny wife. Her directness, standards, operational clarity, and the way she talks about leadership, business, and relationships without overcomplicating them. Brooke, Alex, and Leila each have helped me and I hope sharing them with you helps you as well. It’s like a chain of work that we are all building on and creating more of. When done well, we coaches, authors, and entrepreneurs inspire and help each other because we know there is enough to go around and that we will help more people in doing so.
This is just some of what Brooke Castillo made possible for countless coaches including myself. She helped me take coaching seriously not only as a calling, but as a craft, a business, and a body of work. She now is able to be with her son traveling around the US and world with her son show is going pro in golf. It’s amazing what creativity, self belief and serving others can do. I continue rooting for Brooke and I am rooting for you. Use The Self Coaching Model in your life and see what happens.
If you want to learn from Brooke Castillo, start with The Life Coach School Podcast, especially her episodes on The Self Coaching Model, money, business, relationships, and possibility. You can also explore her work through The Life Coach School, her books, programs, and current teachings. For anyone building a coaching business, I would also recommend reading Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers and studying Leila Hormozi’s content on leadership and operations. Together, these bodies of work offer a useful combination: inner clarity, better thinking, stronger offers, and more disciplined execution. Their work is highly ELECTRIC! There is so much to be gained from learning from these successful people and deeply integrating tools like The Self Coaching Model.
-Kaden James