Bloom Your Mind

Ep 18: The Tool That Changed Everything

• Marie McDonald

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It’s not too extreme to say this episode might be the most important one you can listen to. Today, Marie shares the incredible tool she learned from her coach, Brooke Castillo, and how it impacted everything about her life. She uses it every single day. She uses it with every coaching client. She's convinced her family and friends to use it.

The Model, as it's called, is both deceptively simple and elegantly profound. It incorporates centuries of work in psychology, human behavior, somatic experiences, and cognitive processes, and yet you only have to know five pieces of it. Listen in and learn how The Model can change your life.

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

  • The incredible tool that Marie uses every single morning to re-orient her thinking, behaviors, and life
  • How a circumstance is different from a thought
  • Why a thought is not the same thing as a feeling
  • The most important thing you have control over that directs your entire life

The Model 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. We can't control other people, our past, the weather, the news … but we can control our thoughts, our feelings, and how we act. With practice, you're going to discover a whole new world.

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How to connect with Marie:

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We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

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.