The Life Coach School Podcast · Brooke Castillo

#532: Take a Break

June 26, 2025·44 min·4 clips

Brooke Castillo explains why she took a break after hitting her goals and feeling less enjoyment in her scaled business.

Brooke Castillo, founder of The Life Coach School, returns to answer listener questions and advocate for a planned, extended break from one's primary work and responsibilities. She frames this as a proactive, midlife "sabbatical" distinct from a crisis-driven escape. Castillo shares that she personally took a year-long break after three years of planning, triggered by turning 50 and achieving her major goals. She explains her business scaling required skills she enjoyed less, like corporate management, shifting her daily work away from her core loves of coaching and content creation. A friend, Joe Polish, inspired her by successfully taking a year-long sabbatical from his own demanding business. Castillo outlines strict requirements: the break must be a minimum of three months with absolutely no work contact, thinking, or decisions to fully disengage the subconscious mind. She admits the first two weeks were challenging and identity-disrupting for someone accustomed to constant work. During her break, she focused on spending unstructured time with her adult sons, Christian and Connor, including following Christian on the golf course. She engaged in personal organization, meticulously sorting finances, bills, and passwords she had previously delegated. Castillo read fiction and memoirs instead of her usual nonfiction, watched TV, hosted friends, cooked, and played pickleball. A significant project involved scanning and organizing decades of family photos and re-reading childhood journals, which she found emotionally powerful. She emphasizes the break is for "dreaming and scheming" without pressure to decide anything, allowing true desires to surface. Castillo reveals she realized she loves both working and not working, and her core passion remains coaching clients directly. She mentions receiving a $200 million offer to buy her business, an event that contributed to her period of re-evaluation. The host is engaged to her partner, Elijah, and plans to marry next year, integrating him seamlessly with her ex-husband and children. The tone is intimate, confessional, and instructional, blending personal storytelling with direct life coaching advice. Listeners seeking inspiration for a career pivot or life reassessment will find concrete steps and personal validation. Those content with their current trajectory or unable to envision a prolonged break may find the concepts less immediately applicable.

As heard by us

A thoughtful case for stepping back, reflecting, and re-deciding on purpose.

Brooke Castillo uses listener questions to frame a talk about taking a break from work and life long enough to re-evaluate what comes next. The episode is at its best when it turns toward midlife reflection, folding mistakes, wrong turns, and misjudgments into a single life…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you need a reset that feels deliberate, not indulgent.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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