Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.
Well, hello my friends, and welcome to episode number ten of the Bloom Your Mind Podcast. Why is that so exciting to be ten episodes? That's pretty fun. We've done this ten times. What are you liking? What are you not liking? What do you want to hear about next? Let me know because I'm working on your next ten, so reach out, give me some feedback for number eleven and beyond.
All right, so I'm excited about what we're talking about today. We're going to start some conversations around beliefs. But before we get there, I want to share with you a really wonderful experience I just had. A few nights ago, I had the opportunity to watch my dad get a lifetime achievement award from the Chamber of Commerce in the community where he's lived for a few decades. Many decades. A breathtaking experience.
I got to watch him get up on stage and accept this award, which was really an affirmation of the values he's had for a long time and his life's work. A few episodes ago, or right at the beginning of these episodes, we talked about having a mission for your life. What do you want your life story to be about? What are you directing your life toward? All these moments of your life?
And this was really one of his: sustainability, sustainable building, and environmental activism. So, I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts I had in this experience. One of them is just that this lifetime achievement award is the recognition of many, many small moments of his life that were directed toward what he cares most about, right?
So, like the rudder of a ship. When we know what's most important to us in our lives and what we want the story of our lives to be about, all of these moments that we have, the gifts of living, then we tend to be able to direct our life more and more in that direction. So, for instance, growing up, I remember I have so many memories of my dad going to planning review group meetings and design review group meetings, and having mural project meetings, and creating bluegrass festivals, and all of these things that he did in the community where he lived.
But each one of them happened in one night or on one phone call. My mom was supporting, taking care of the kids in each one of those times when he chose those actions to take. So, all the moments of our lives line up to create the story. And sometimes we discount that. How cool is that? The accumulation of all of these little lion-hearted choices that we make day in and day out. For him, it ended up in a lifetime achievement award, and that was pretty cool to see.
The other thing I wanted to say is that my mom was the one that submitted him for this award. He didn't expect it. He didn't even really think about it. She recognized that it was an opportunity for him to recognize all of this effort that he had made over the years. Once I sat down with my dad a couple years ago and I was like, "if we tallied up all the volunteer hours that you've contributed, what would it be?" And we found it was like in the high hundreds or thousands. It was like having a whole second career aside from being a design builder. And all of it was just given time.
So, my mom knew this, and she submitted him for the award. And I've talked before about really celebrating your own bigness, celebrating your life and your achievements, and this just reminded me of how we have this incredible honor of witnessing the people that we love in our lives as they do their thing in the world. And what an opportunity. How might we be able to recognize ways that they can be celebrated, things they might not see themselves?
The last thing I just wanted to say is something I keep in mind a lot. We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short run. We make a lot of plans for big things that we'll do real soon, and we tend to underestimate what we can accomplish in the long run. I always like to question my plans, both for the short and the long term, knowing that this is a human tendency.
So, I offer you those three things. One is the accumulation of all of the moments that you live. They're all small, but they become big when you put them together and when you aim them at something that's really important to you. Number two, how can you recognize ways to celebrate the people that you love, the people that you see in ways they might not see themselves? And number three, how can you beyond yourself when you're overestimating what you might do in the short term and underestimating what you're capable of in the story of your life?
All right. Those are my thoughts on that. On to beliefs. Now, beliefs can be like a can of worms. I'll probably do a few episodes on these, but today we're really talking about one aspect of beliefs.
But to illustrate what I mean by how important beliefs are, I am just going to give you a really ridiculous example. As per uzh [us(ual)]. So, this example is just aimed at showing that we don't question our beliefs, and some of them really serve us and some of them really don't. And even the very same beliefs might serve us at one point in our lives and maybe not in another point or a different situation.
So, this ridiculous example is about myself as a parent and my son. So, don't judge me as a parent or do if you want, because this is probably pretty telling of my parenting style. My son is six, and he has experienced a lot of social anxiety over the past year… and couple years because of some different social dynamics that he's happened to be in, and friendship dynamics. So, we have had lots of conversations about his brain and his body, what his brain tells him, how feelings are in his body. And we've been working through it for a good year or more now. So, we've made a lot of progress. He's doing great and we still are making progress.
And I mean, I say he is doing great and that we've made progress, but let me just stop and say it has been hard. I don't want to blow over that. It has been incredibly difficult to walk my child through this. Nod to the parents out there. But I also just, you know, we have made progress and we're at this point where we still do work on it, and it comes up in less extreme ways now.
Well, I just went to Taos, New Mexico and I loved that place. One of the things that I brought back with me were these two little glass vials full of something that you spray that has flower essences in it. I recently learned about flower essences. It's sort of like herbology. It's like the study of different flowers and how they might impact our mood when we inhale them.
And so, I bought these two. I really enjoyed learning about it, and I bought these two vials. One of them helps you have deep dreams, incredible dreams, and the other one sort of helps you have just, like, a calm, grounded, energy and to be really present. Like that's what the flowers are aimed to do.
So, I got these two and I've been using them with my kids. So, at night I'll be like, "All right, sweet dreams. I'm spraying you with dream spray." And the kids close their eyes. My husband will even let me spray him, and then we go to sleep. And so, I was lying with my son the other night and he said, "Mom, is it real? Is this spray really going to get me good dreams?"
Which opened up a great conversation about how well, sure, that flowers might have elements that intrigue your mind, that waken up your imagination, or that help you fall into a deeper sleep. For sure. And it all depends on how much you believe it'll work. So, if you believe you're going to have amazing dreams, you are much more likely to have them.
And I basically was talking to him about the placebo effect. And then, in the mornings I've been giving him this little spray of this spray of—both of my kids, my husband, myself—we all take a little spray that will just help us have a calm, grounded, wonderful day where we're tapped into our spirit and ourselves.
And so, I'll do this spray. And we've been enjoying that. And yesterday we were driving to school, and we were running in hot. Lacing up the shoes as we're running out the door and throwing over the backpacks, over our shoulders, getting out to the car. And we're driving to school, and I look in the rear-view mirror and my son looks up at me and he says, "We forgot to have a good day spray!"
I was like, "It's cool. It's all right. We'll do it tomorrow."
And he said, "But mom, now I'm not going to have a good day."
I said, "Why? You get to have a good day if you decide to have a good day."
And he said, "Well, because there are some friends at school that might not let me play with them." And shared some other examples of how other people might impact his day. And it opened up this great conversation about how, oh, spray yourself with these flowers. They might be helpful, but all that really matters is what you believe. And let's not give that much power to a flower or any people on the playground over our days, right? You get to decide whether you're going to have a wonderful day, not flowers, and not anybody else.
But my point in sharing this, of course, is that what he believed served him so much in one moment. "This spray is going to help me have an amazing day."
And it created a belief in him. He had an amazing day. And what he believed in another moment, that happened automatically, was that now "I'm not going to have an amazing day because my mom didn't spray me with flower power."
Ahhhh, ridiculous.
So, here's this silly example to talk about how important beliefs are and how so much of the time they just happen under the surface and we're not aware. We're treating them as facts, right? These beliefs that many times are very old. So, let's define a belief is a thought that we've had over and over and over again.
And most of our beliefs are built from the environments that we've grown up in, the teachers that we've had, whether those are teachers are parents, or social groups, or social media, or media images on television. And these beliefs, many of them, are attached to the roles that we play in our life. So, by roles, if I'm listing the roles that someone might associate themselves with, we might think of ourselves as playing the roles of mother, daughter, son, husband, leader, teacher, entrepreneur, raver, musician, artist, whatever that is for you.
We tend to think of ourselves, whether consciously or subconsciously, as an accumulation, a whole bunch of roles that we play. And those roles are all interwoven with our beliefs, how we believe we should be. But who invented these roles? Like let's look at this. Think of eight or nine roles that you play in your life.
You can either pause this right now and write them out, or just think of them in your mind. Eight roles that you play in your life. Eight words that describe who you are. And now just think of one of them and think of what feeling comes up for you. How do you feel when you think of the title of that role? So, for example, when I think of the role of mother, of Mama, as my kids call me, I feel love. A big old wave of love.
When I think of the word thought leader, I feel a feeling of excitement. So, what are the feelings you feel when you look at that list of eight or nine roles that you play? And then I want you to ask yourself another question: says who? So, this exercise is based on the work of Trudi LeBron. Who I will add her website to our show notes.
She does a lot of work in the space of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is a coach and a consultant, and she goes into organizations to help them become more inclusive and to be more value-based. And she taught this exercise. So, you look at the roles. You ask yourself how you feel with each one of them, and then you ask yourself, "says who?"
And what we mean by that is like, who was the one? Or where did I get this feeling that I'm associating with this role? Maybe it was a teacher, maybe it was a parent. Maybe it was a community. Maybe it was social media. Maybe it was a whole bunch of different things. But ask yourself that, like, "Who says that I should feel proud because of this thing?"
So, let me give you an example. One of my roles is the role of wife. I used to feel, when I first got married, like, sort of proud that I had this role now. And I don't know if I was super aware of that, but I was like, yeah, I got married. And when I looked at that, I think there were a lot of cultural sort of training mechanisms in TV shows and all of the adults that I saw when I was growing up that were married, and married to one person, and married in a hetero relationship, and married over a long period of time in a closed relationship… these were all my role models in many different ways, and so I did that. But over time, I really realized that wasn't in line with my values. And even the little bit before that, my husband and I weren't sure we were going to get married, but we knew we wanted to be together. But now I've really dropped that.
When I think of the role of wife, I just feel honored. Because it doesn't have to do with being a wife. It has to do with being the wife of my person, my husband, who is an extraordinary human being. And it is an honor for me. I truly feel that when I think of him, it's an honor for me to be the witness that gets to see him over the years, and day in and day out, and be his person and have him be mine.
So, says who? Well now "says me!" But it really helped me to look at where that definition of that role came from and decide whether it was in line with what I believe and what I want. Because not only do these roles that we play create our beliefs, that we measure ourselves by all day long… Like, am I doing this well? Am I not doing this well? Do I look like what I should look like? Am I acting like what I want to act like? But they also help us, yeah, make decisions all day long about how we want to spend our day, what our big goals are, what we want to create, how we want to focus our lives, how we approach even a singular project.
So, like, if you start a project of writing a book or starting a business, many times we will look to the examples that already exist to define what we should look like, and be like, and feel like, and speak like in that project. And so, we are measuring ourselves against these ideals for roles that other people have defined. Other power structures, other groups of people. And we do that for really good reason.
It's because when we are exposed to information that is not in line with our belief system, that conflicts with our beliefs, we either move on from it really quickly, or we don't even notice it, or we discount it and turn away right away. Our brain is designed as a very efficient machine. Not only to have cognitive bias, which we've talked about in other episodes, which is to find all the evidence of the thoughts that we already have, but also to create cognitive dissonance when things don't match what we already believe.
So, our brains are designed to turn away from things that create discomfort because they don't match what we believe. So, if our beliefs are sort of like leading our life all day, and throughout the years, and throughout our lives. And our beliefs are based on roles that other people decided for us, and our brains are going to work helping us match those roles. You can see how that can be problematic.
So, what I offer for you this week is just to start looking at what the roles are in your life. What are the roles that you play? How do you feel when you think about that list of roles? For each one of the roles, how do you feel? A one word feeling. And then when you experience that feeling, ask yourself, "Says who? Who says I'm going to feel like that about being in this role? And is that how I want to feel?"
So, to close us out, I'll just offer you a list of incredible inspirational role breakers that I've been working with throughout the last year. So, one of my clients has decided, as a wife and mother, that she is moving her entire family of three kids onto a boat to sail around the world for two years because that's how she's going to wife and that's how she's going to mother. That's how she's going to family. Doesn't match what she saw, but it matches what's in her heart.
I have another client who decided no more over obligating the family on weekends. Sundays are only about family game days, making delicious food together, and talking about the week we just had and the week ahead of us. This, of course, has its roots in a lot of different cultural practices and spiritual practices. I started doing it with my family and I love it. We played charades all day on Sunday, and we laughed real hard instead of just getting things done.
Another one of my clients has decided she only looks at her phone for one or two hours of the day. Even though other people that run businesses are on their phone all day, that's not how she's doing it. Uh-uh. That's how she's running her business.
Another client jumps into freezing cold water every single morning because that's how she does her life. That's how she has her body, right? She decides that's what's healthy for her body.
Another client has decided, as a friend, she doesn't buy into the role of friend as going on girl trips, and going out to expensive dinners, and spending a lot of money. For her, she's going to inhabit the role of friend by doing things at home together, going on hikes, experiencing nature, but making sure it doesn't require spending a lot of money.
And lastly, one really inspiring client has decided that he realizes part of the role of dad has been defined for him as someone that doesn't express emotion. And he's really questioning that. He doesn't think that's how he wants to be with his daughter. So, he not only is helping himself to experience and express more emotion as a dad, but he is starting a social media channel to talk about that and encourage other dads to be in their fields.
So, there you go, my friends. Some inspiring examples and a practice for this week. Notice what roles you play. How do you feel about that role? And says who? Because y'all, you get to decide. That's what I've got for you today. Enjoy your week and I will see you next week.
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