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.
Hello everybody. Welcome to episode number 18 of the Bloom Your Mind
Podcast, in which I will share the tool that has made the biggest difference
in all of the work that I have done on myself. And the tool that I use every
single day in the morning for a set period of time, but also throughout the
day, and all day.
And the tool that I use every single day in almost every session, with all of
my coaching clients, that totally changes things for them. Today is the day
that I share this with you, and I'm just going to give a shout out to one of my
clients that I will not name directly, who I told I would make this episode for.
You know who you are. I hope you're smiling right now. Do you think this
song was written about you? It is. All right, y'all. So first of all, my brilliant,
amazing, delightful, beloved mother was a marriage, family, and child
counselor, a licensed therapist, for a couple of decades or more. And when
I shared this tool with her a couple of years ago, when I was first introduced
to it, she was mind blown.
We had such a good time geeking out about this tool. And we talk about it
all the time since then. It's very fun to play with. It's insightful to use, and in
my mom's words, it is elegant. It is a very elegant tool that takes a lot of
thinking that has been done for decades and decades, probably centuries,
around psychology and human behavior and how sort of cognitive
processes interact and lead into somatic experiences, body experiences
that we have, and then actions that we take, and actually creates the lives
that we have and the results that we have in the world around us, the world
that we experience. So, this tool that I'm sharing today was developed by
someone named Brooke Castillo, who is also a very brilliant, incredible
human being that I have studied with and got certified through.
So, if you want to check her out, do it. And without further ado, I'm just
going to start with a story to sort of illustrate the tool and then I will talk
about the tool, share it with you, and then give you a daily practice that I do literally every day and that you can do. And I'll give you an invitation, as per
ushe, for how you can share what you're figuring out with me.
Because that's what I love, for us to be in conversation about all this. All
right, so I used to have my middle child-ness show up a lot in how I was in
relationships and how I was life-ing—I like that as a verb—how I was life-
ing. And the way that it showed up was not maybe how you would
anticipate.
I was a middle child with two brothers. I am a middle child with two
wonderful brothers, an older brother, a younger brother. And all boy
cousins, actually. Is the way I grew up. Lots of boy vibes around me, which
taught me to run faster, and jump off higher things into colder water. Like,
you know, I really enjoyed a lot of my experience with that.
And also, it created in me sort of a left-out-ness, right, as I grew up, where I
was the only girl, and I didn't have other girls around me. And I often would
try to insert myself in what the boys or the boy cousins were doing. And
then, oftentimes, sort of felt left out growing up. So, that is a story, as often
happens with many of us, that got embedded in my head and then became
something that I could see in how I acted later on in life. But I didn't
become aware of it until later in life and it showed up in a funny way.
It wasn't so much that I felt victimized by being left out or that I was
thinking, "Huh. They don't want me around." Like, in a way, that felt victim-
y. It was more that I was sort of oblivious to the fact that people did want
me around. And that was just as destructive, I found eventually, in my life.
So, here's what I mean. I would… in college, everybody would hang out. I
would be—this is undergrad. I would be… I was at UCSD. I would be sort
of going to hang with everybody. An unbeknownst to me, in my brain, what
my unconscious mind was telling me was that people didn't care if I was
there.
Not so much that they don't want me there, but that they really didn't care if
I was there or not. And so, I would show up late to things, thinking no one
would notice. I would leave early, thinking no one would notice. And I
remember people saying to me, one of my best friends saying to me, "I haven't seen you in a while. Where have you been?" Or "Why did you
come so late?"
You know, I didn't really think anything of it. And then later in life I moved
cities, and I left some of my primary relationships. I'm talking like siblings,
best friends, people I'd known my whole life, my mentor, who really taught
me—this incredible man—taught me a lot of leadership and just many,
many different things that I learned in my life, who later went on to marry
my husband and I to each other.
I left all of these different relationships and sort of like did not stay in touch
with my primary relationship people. And it was not because I didn't care
about them. Much the opposite. I adored them all. It was because I had this
brain that was telling me that it didn't really matter to them, you know. Like
their lives were the same with or without me, and it didn't really matter if I
was there or not.
And later on, I heard from some of them like, "Where did you go? That
sucked. You disappeared." You know? Not all of the people, but some of
them sort of shared that with me. And then I just noticed that I did
disappear on everybody, and it was for the weirdest reason. That I didn't
think it mattered to them if I was there or not.
And I started seeing that all over my life. And I still see it in ways, in little
subtle ways, and I can catch myself now in that. So, this is an example of
how The Model that I'm teaching you today really helped me to create
awareness around how I was thinking, and feeling, and acting, and how
those choices of how I was thinking, and feeling, and acting showed up in
my behaviors and in the results that I was getting, the relationships I had
and how they impacted other people around me in ways that I was not
intending.
And it really helped to catch myself and change those thoughts, change the
feelings that I had, and change how I was acting, to give me really different
results in my relationships and in how I was impacting other people and in
my life. So, there are five parts to this very simple tool. We will call it The
Model.
That's what Brooke Castillo calls it, and I learned it from her, as I said in the
beginning of this episode, and it's called The Model. The Model has these
five lines, and I'm going to start out by defining these lines.
The first line of The Model is a circumstance. So, there are all kinds of
circumstances that happen all day long around all of us, and circumstances
are… they are things that we cannot control. They are things that are
factual, which I've talked about in a prior episode. 100 percent of people
would agree on these things 100 percent of the time. They would be
provable in a court of law. So, my name is Marie McDonald. This is a
circumstance. I am in San Diego right now. This is a circumstance.
I paid taxes. Is a circumstance. These are all circumstances. What comes
next is the human mind. We have thoughts about these circumstances. We
create stories. We create meaning. But this second line, we're going to call
thoughts. We're going to define thoughts as sentences running through our
mind.
Now, I have said this in a prior episode again, but I will remind us we have
over 60,000 thoughts. And 95 percent of them are automatic. Meaning, like,
you heard about in my ridiculous story as a middle child. It's like many of
them are just replaying old patterns, really habituated ways of thinking and
feeling and being from long ago. From environments we grew up in, from
roles that we've been taught to play, from relationships that we've had, from
the ways that we see ourselves, from our identity.
All these thoughts just on repeat. We have neural pathways that have been
created in our minds that are like these, like wrinkles in our brain that we
snap back to. Like roads in our brain that we snap back to, that are
thoughts we've had over and over and over again. And so, many of these
things sort of come up.
Many of the ways that we think come up in patterns in our life. So, if we're
thinking that there are circumstances—that first line of The Model out of
five, number one—there are circumstances. And about these
circumstances, we have thoughts, and those thoughts are a sentence in
our mind. I want to just differentiate that you can tell the difference between
those two because if there are any descriptive words, or adjectives, or
qualifiers in a sentence, it makes it a thought, not a circumstance.
So, if I say taxes are expensive, you might think that's true. But that is a
thought because not everyone would agree on what's expensive and
what's not. So, you can start to see that those thoughts really trick us. We
believe our thoughts are real so much of the time, both because they're
automated and they're happening in our unconscious mind, in the
background, and replaying old patterns that we've been used to thinking a
lot. But also, because they sort of trick us. Like they feel very true.
And then you can see what happens next. Whenever we have a thought, it
generates a feeling in our body. So, a feeling, I'm going to define as a one-
word emotion. Like scared or happy or joyful or hungry or like, so hungry.
That's tricky. That could also be a sensation, right?
The feeling of hunger. But if you're feeling hungry for something, right? The
feeling of feeling hungry for a relationship or hungry for a change in your
life. That could be an emotion. So, you get it? A one-word emotion. And so,
let me review. Number one, there are circumstances happening in the
world. And then we have thought about those circumstances that create
feelings in our body. Those are the first three lines of this model. And the
fourth line is that, depending on how we feel, we take action, or we remain
in inaction. So, for instance, if I have a thought that something is really
scary and I feel fear, I will act really differently than I will if I think
something's really exciting and I feel excitement. If I feel anger, I will act
really differently than if I feel compassion.
And how we act always directly gives us the results that we experience in
our life. So, let's go back to my example that I started out this episode with.
If I move cities and I have the thought, "I am not important to other people.
It doesn't matter if I'm here or not."
And I have the feeling of ambivalence, or maybe a little bit of sadness that's
in me. And then the actions that I take, because I have that thought, "it
doesn't matter if I'm here or not; doesn't matter that much to people," and
I—that thought is creating sadness. Let's say a little bit of sadness. And
then I will probably not reach out to them.
The actions that I take from that sadness might be to not reach out to them,
to not stay in touch, to not invite them up to see me in the new city that I
live in, to just focus in on building new relationships. Maybe when I come home to visit, I don't reach out to connect as much as I would if I had the
thought, "this person's important to me," right?
And if I'm thinking, "it doesn't matter if I'm here or not," and I'm feeling a
little bit sad, and I'm not reaching out, what ends up happening is it really
doesn't—it gives me the result that it really doesn't matter if I'm here or not,
because those relationships become more and more distant, and I create
that reality.
And also, I give them the impression that it's not really important to me
whether they're around or not. Ew, right? Oh, my gosh. That's the opposite
of what I feel and what I wanted! But you can see how my idea about how
important I am to them creates a feeling or my actions that show them how
important they are to me.
So, this is the example of the circumstance of me moving cities. The
thought that it doesn't really matter if I'm around or not. The feeling of a little
bit of sadness. The actions of not staying in touch. And the result of those
relationships becoming more distant and it not mattering that much if I'm
here or not.
So, that is an example of how The Model works. Now let's take that in a
little bit of a different context and say, I, you know, I move cities and I want
to make sure that I stay in touch with the people that are most important to
me. I think these people are so important to me, and I feel love, and I feel
determined to stay in touch with them.
Then I take the actions of staying in connection with them. Updating them
on what's going on for me in my life. Reaching out when I'm in for a visit
and making sure I'm seeing all of them, asking what's going on in their
lives, making sure we're staying connected through phone calls, and
inviting them up to see me.
And what ends up happening is our relationships are stronger, and they
know they're important to me, and I am important to me because I'm
valuing how important I am to other people. It creates the result in my life of
really valuable, important relationships where we're mutually supportive
and caring about each other. So, these are two examples of how The
Model can show up.
Here's a few other things I want to say before I give you a practice that you
can do this week if you would like to. So, when you have a thought, that
second line—So, I'm going to remind you. There's the circumstances (the
first line). The second line of this model is that you have a thought about
the circumstance that generates a feeling in your body, which is a one-word
emotion. That third line. And then that determines how you act or don't act,
what you do and do not do. And that's the fourth line. And then the fifth line
is that you always experience the results in your life because of how you
act and don't act.
I'm going to tell you a couple different things about this. If you want to use
this tool to look at what's going on in your life, you can start anywhere. You
can start by putting five lines down: circumstance, thought, feeling, action,
result, and then putting in how you're acting or how you're not working in
the fourth line, in the action line. And then ask yourself, how am I feeling
that's making me act like that?
What am I thinking that's making me feel this way and act this way? Or if
you have a big feeling and you want to understand where it's coming from
and why it's there and what it's creating in your life, you can start there. You
can say, I'm feeling angry. And you rate that in that third line. And you
think, "What am I thinking that's making me feel angry?" Put a sentence of
what that thought is in the second line and the circumstance, the neutral
fact that you're having the thought about, in the first line. And then you can
fill in: how are you acting when you're thinking and feeling this way?
How are you not acting? What's the result that it's giving? So, you can start
anywhere, and of course you can start with your thoughts, which are my
favorite place to start. I like to write out every morning for five or ten
minutes a page of everything that's in my head. I call that a thought
download. And then I underline like three to five thoughts that I want to put
into a model to see what they're creating so I can just be more aware of
what I'm creating in my life.
Why am I feeling how I'm feeling? Why am I acting the way I'm acting?
And the most magical thing about this model is that the result will always
prove the thought every time. If you're really looking at one clear snapshot
of a thought that creates a feeling that creates action or inaction, and that gives you your result, that result will always prove your thought. It is amazing.
And what that does is it shows us how our thoughts become prophecies for
what we're experiencing in our lives and how much agency we have over
how we're thinking. Because we can't control other people. We can't control
the facts of the life that we're walking around in, right? The things outside of
our control, like the weather and our past and, and the news and what
other people say and do.
But we can control our thoughts, our feelings, and how we act. So, this
model can give you a window into how you're thinking, feeling, and acting,
and to give you more awareness and more choice. The last thing that I
want to say about this is if you're starting to use this tool and do some
models, if you're having a thought about someone else, for instance, that
person's such a punk, almost always the result will be that you will act like
a punk.
It's projection, my friends. So, almost always, when we have a thought
about someone else, it comes true in how we behave. And the result that
we experience, either for ourselves—if we're thinking that somebody else is
being punky, it's being cheeky, we will end up probably either being cheeky
to ourselves or to them, or to both.
So, that is what I have for you today. And what I'd love to offer you is that
practice of either writing all of your thoughts out in the morning and playing
around with these five lines of this model or writing things out right before a
big event or something you're about to do, and just seeing what you're
thinking about it, and then putting some things into The Model. Or taking a
feeling that you have, a really big feeling, and putting it into The Model.
That is what I will offer you to do this week and just see what happens.
And, my friends, please direct message me, text me, email me, whatever,
and tell me what comes up. You can even take a snapshot of your model
and direct message it to me on Instagram or Facebook, or email it to me,
and I'll tell you what I think about it.
This model changes lives and it is truly amazing in becoming more aware,
more awake, more evolved, and conscious about how you're thinking, feeling, and acting, and ultimately how you're creating the world and the life
that you're walking around in. That's what I've got for you today, my friends.
So, excited to share my favorite tool with you, and I will be back with you
next week to talk all about big, big feelings.
Use this model to turn your ideas into real things or to check out the world
that you're putting those ideas into the world that you're creating. Have fun
with it. And I will see you next week.
Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you
want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and
give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, then send this episode to a
friend. See you next time.
