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 everyone and welcome to episode number 69 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. Here I am, sitting in my house with the rain torrentially pouring down. It has shown up like four different times today, all of a sudden, and it's very fun. My children are giggling and running around in the rain, and I am here with you.
I met with a brilliant podcast editor, my podcast editor last week. If anyone wants to start a podcast, I have an editor for you. She's brilliant and she told me that she loves my storytelling, and she loves the way that I connect stories to the topic that I'm teaching and that I sort of make it all make sense with storytelling, and that she loves my stories.
So today I am bringing you three stories to illustrate my point. Today we are talking about mood boosters because when we are turning ideas into real things, as we move about our day, as we do all the things that we're passionate about and those that we're not so passionate about, we have these elevations in mood, and we have sort of these moments where our mood sinks.
And while I am a big believer in generating the emotion that you want in order to create the result that you want in your day, in yourself, in your own system and in your life, I also like to really find little hacks, little ways of hacking our own system, to make it a little bit easier to show up for ourselves. So, one of the things that I love to do is hack my emotional state by generating little elements of joy, and I also love to do this for the people around me. Joy, and I also love to do this for the people around me.
So, I have always loved ambiance. I love it. I used to manage restaurants in my twenties, and I loved setting the light at the right level to create the mood that matched the energy I wanted. If it was a brunch, I was going to have it brighter. If it was an evening, I was going to dim the lights.
I loved matching that with music and with clothing and attire right, like creating this feeling that would boost whatever mood I wanted in the room. Now I do this at home. I wake up before my kids and I usually put on some music that will help them to feel calm but awake, and I might light a candle or a diffuser If I think they're extra sleepy.
You know, I'll do little things to boost their energy and their mood, and to do that for myself, right, I do that. For anybody that comes over to my house will notice that the lights will be dim. I love task lighting where there's multiple sources of light that each kind of generate a mood. I love music to accentuate the space.
I love these little ways to feel the way I want to feel, at whatever point it is in my day, in my own space. My husband teases me a lot about it, but it's really fun for me. It's a really fun way of walking through the world. And so, I want to share three things this week, three stories that sort of hotwired the mood in these different environments that I was in, for the people that were around me.
And here's the other thing that I want to say about this for these mood boosters is that we as human beings yes, we can get into a great mind state, we can meditate, we can you know future trip, we can do future meditation. We can manage our thoughts and create the mood that we want in ourselves and throughout the day. Like little ping pong balls, we're going to be bouncing off of other people's energy, and everybody else is going to be where they're at right.
They may or may not have meditated that morning or have shifted their mindset into something that feels helpful and good, right, and so it's really important for us, in my opinion, to maintain that sovereignty over our own mood in ourselves. We're the only ones that are responsible for it. No matter how someone else is acting, we can maintain our own sovereignty over how we're thinking and how we're feeling.
So, when someone else's sort of like erratic behavior or more volatile behavior arises in our day or in our projects, it's so easy to make that contagious and to, when someone else is in a grumpy mood, be like, fine, I'm grumpy too, right, and that will take the wind right out of our sails.
This podcast is all about turning ideas into real things, and one of the things that is most needed to carry something from an idea into reality is consistency, and when we're always reacting to the moods around us, or when we are sort of at the mercy of whether we feel inspired or motivated in a day, we are much less likely to see our ideas through and bring them into the world.
We are much less likely to change our own habits or relationships with them in the world. We are much less likely to change our own habits or relationships. We're much less likely to sit down and write that chapter of our book or figure out how to have the business license we need or set up an invitation list for the community that we're gathering together when we really don't feel like it in order to do all of those things, to have resilience.
In order to do all of those things, to have resilience this combination of strength and flexibility, this resilience that we need to see any idea through we have to be in charge of our own mood, and so generating mood busters can make it a little bit easier.
In general, I have other topics on podcasts such as your feel are your superpower and the tool that changed everything, and many of the other podcasts that I've put out there to help you generate your own mood.
Today, I'm going to talk about how you can accentuate it and hotwire it. So, we've talked a little bit about music and lighting, environmental factors really just fundamental physical things that you can do in your day to lift your mood. What I'm talking about today is how you can also lift the mood of the people around you.
How you can do that to create the environments where everybody's ready to collaborate or where people are ready to have a wonderful time.
And the first example I'm going to give you is that of a seven-year-old. So, my son is in the little league, and this is his first year in baseball and the first couple of games that these kids played they're really little and in terms of the league right, they're not the tiniest t-ball team, but just above that. So, most of them have never played before and so they're playing their first game.
Sometimes you get them out there and I'm helping to coach. His team made them a team banner and I'm out there coaching them, and they'll sort of like they'll hit the ball and then they'll run to first base and then they don't know if they should still run or not. Some of them didn't know which way second base was in the beginning.
So, it's real cute. They'll get the ball and, like all the kids, run to wherever the ball is Right. So, we've made a lot of progress over the first few games. They're starting to learn the rules of baseball, feel a little bit more confidence, but still, it's kind of a lot right for seven seven-year-old kid to go out on game day and bat in front of all of the parents on both teams.
So, I noticed the first couple games the kids didn't feel super successful in their games, and I noticed some of it was not knowing what to do and some of it was just feeling confidence. Yes, and I noticed that some of the other teams had music on when the kids walked out to the mound and so I texted all the parents on the team, and I said yo send me your kids' favorite song.
I'm going to make a playlist and we're going to play every kid's favorite song when they walk out on the mound to bat. So, this past Saturday we got a PA system up there and I got up on the mic with my playlist and every kid that walked out their song. I'd play their song and I'd announce their name here's this player and what their number is, right, coming up to bat. Whatever their favorite song is would play really loud.
And all of a sudden y'all I saw this swagger like they would hear their song. They'd make eye contact with me like waiting for the song to come on and then I'd play it and I'd turn the volume up and they would just strut out to that mound. Oh my gosh, the seven-year-old strut little boys, little girls, so flipping, cute y'all.
And then they'd get there, and they'd tap the bat on the home plate and just the energy shift in these kiddos hearing their song. It generated confidence for them. So that is my first example of a mood booster is just noticing what was needed. These kids needed a little confidence boost.
Knowing it's going to be a little different for each kid, and then coming up with this idea to give them each their own song gave them the mood boost that they needed, and they had the best game yet y'all 12 points, so much fun and you really just felt the shift in the energy. So that's my first example.
My second example is at my kid's school, and this is a group of parents. My kid's school is the most wonderful place, and we needed a little mood boost this week. There had been kind of some tricky decisions that we had to make over the course of the last year around budget and changes on the campus and stuff and the school's amazing and the community is so supportive of one another, and I had seen this Instagram post of this. I will actually put him in the show notes.
I can't remember what his name is off the top of my head, but I'll put them in the show notes.
This performance artist who he had gone into a public square and put a big bouquet of really beautiful flowers and he put a sign up. He tied these flowers to a post like a lamppost and he put a sign up that said need a little happiness in your day, take a flower.
And then he recorded this beautiful experience of these people like taking a flower and giving it to a loved one, hugging and smiling, and it really touched me. So, I reached out to a few couple parents, and I sent them this post, and I was like what do you think about doing this at the school? They said, yes, this thing got so much energy behind it so fast.
All of these parents brought hundreds and hundreds of flowers. We all showed up at seven o'clock am. We got our kids out of bed. They came with us.
We drew on chalkboards, we tied flowers to all these posts, we put them in vases in front of the school and, as parents drove by that morning, we handed them a flower in their window and you just saw these parents, just like, you know, like, rolling out of bed, getting their kids to school who knows what kind of moods, who knows who's got coffee spilling on them.
You know, like, just trying to cover all your bases as a parent is pretty gnarly sometimes. And I would just see them, you know, roll down their window, thinking there was going to be some question that they needed to answer or something they needed to do, or maybe someone was going to tell them they're parked in the wrong spot, that they needed to answer or something they needed to do, or maybe someone was going to tell them they're parked in the wrong spot and instead we were handing them a flower and they just had this like release of tension in their faces, this big smile and this oh my gosh, thank you so much.
And the kids and the parents just walked around on their walk into school with these big smiles and all the teachers like, oh my gosh, what is this? What's happening this morning? Because we didn't tell any of them it was going to happen, and it just was this mood boost in a moment where the school really needed it.
The community needed a little dash of love and a little pick me up and each one of us got to take that little boost home with us into our own lives, into our own work, into whatever we were doing that day. Each one of those players on the baseball team got to take that little mood boost home with them, into their family, that little swagger home with them. This stuff is contagious too.
And then the last mood boost I wanted to tell you about was that I was leading a retreat yesterday and it was for a group of women who are philanthropists, who are trying to create some grant funding for their town to help marginalized populations, whether that is a population of young people that are working really hard to make ends meet, either who are graduating from high school or who are under 25 or 30 and who are working so much that they don't have time to create community in that transition between high school and adult life.
Or maybe it's transgender and gay populations in this small town that they want to support and advocate for. Other groups are seniors who need extra support, who don't have their support and advocate for other groups are seniors who need extra support who don't have their families living around them. Other groups are military families who have just been. You know, have been moved to this little town, don't know anybody yet and maybe their partner's deployed and it's like a single parent with the kids.
And other ones were intimate partner violence victims like how do we create a network to support people that are the victims of intimate partner violence? So we were ideating on all of these areas, all of which were areas that we could get really excited about doing some good work in the world, and in order to decide which area we were going to focus on, get consensus there, we used a consensus building tool which is called gradients of agreement, and, for anybody that wants to, I'm going to at the end of this episode. You can stay on, and I'll tell you how to use this tool.
For anyone that doesn't want to, you can just listen to the stories. But it's a great tool for generating consensus in groups and I find in partnerships too, it's a great tool to just say, hey, where are we each at in relation to how much we agree with this decision or this change or these choices that we have, and then teaches sort of how to come to a better understanding of each other's opinions. So, I'll share that at the end of the episode.
But my point here is I was about to teach this tool gradients of agreement that I wanted them all to be able to use. My brilliant mother actually introduced me to this tool, and I was introducing this tool, but we were talking about such big, heavy, important things that I wanted to let them not experience the learning in that heavy way, and so I wanted to lighten this up.
So, in order to teach the tool that they could use to really talk about these heavier topics, I made it really silly and fun, and I use these examples of like choosing what mascot they could have in this little town for their group, what mascot could represent our ministry in this community that we're serving, and they got so silly with it and they laughed so hard and they just generated all these ridiculous ideas and none of it is something we're actually going to do right.
But it was a way to get them to connect to each other, to get them to connect to get them to connect to their creativity and their lightheartedness by boosting the mood with this silly example. And I taught a second tool in the same way.
When I taught gradients of agreement, I taught them that by saying, hey, guess what? There's surprise funding. All of you are going on a trip to bond you as a team. Now let's talk about using gradients of agreement whether we should go to Vegas, Rome, Ireland, Bali and they had this hilarious discussion about it weighing whether they want to ride on mopeds and be in bikinis or whether they want to go to an Irish pub and drink whiskey. It was just so delightful. So this mood booster in this situation was introducing play to a heavier conversation and it really changed the day.
So my offering to you today is as we move through our lives and we do hard work and good work, as we move through our lives and we form communities and we have hard conversations that are important, where are the areas that you could introduce something to kind of hotwire the mood, to create a little more peace, a little more joy, a little more love? Is it music? Is it silliness? Is it storytelling? Is it something entirely different that I mentioned here today?
My question for you is where do you need a little mood boost? For yourself, for your family and your people, or for your community? And what can you think of? How can you be the catalyst for a mood boost so that everyone can be a little more open, a little more receptive and you can keep on track to making your ideas real. That's what I've got for you today.
So, hop off now if that's what you came for and if you want to stay on.
Here's how gradients of agreement work. You take whatever the different options are that you're trying to discuss, either with a partner or as a group. Maybe there's two options, maybe there's five and you have each person rate their level of agreement with each option. A one being a hundred percent, I'm on board.
A two being I'm on board, but I have a couple of questions. A three being ah, I could get on board, but I have a couple of questions. A three being ah, I could get on board, but I have some significant reservations. I want to talk through Number four. I will do it if everybody else in this group really decides it's right, but my hesitations are very significant.
And number five totally opposed to this have everybody rate it, and I like to do that to avoid the bandwagon effect, which is when one person speaks their mind and everybody else is influenced by it. I like to have everyone rate it and then turn their paper upside down, so they already know what they think. Then we go around, we hear everyone's rating and then we put them on a scale so we can see them.
And then we go around, and each person gets to share why they gave it that rating. After everyone has spoken, we go around and have everyone rate it again. We see what's changed and we do it again, have everyone speak about what has changed, and after that you may or may not have come to the thing that everyone agrees on, but generally people will be a little bit less lodged in their own opinion, opens up minds and hearts a little bit.
It allows people to speak their own mind and check in with themselves and what they want, if they're used to kind of following someone else's lead, whether they know it or not, and it also passes the mic whether there are introverts or extroverts in the room, whether there are highly influential people that talk a lot. This gives an opportunity for each person to not only say what their opinion is on level ground, but also say why and that is gradients of agreement.
Maybe you'll use it, I don't know. Reach out if you have questions. I love you all 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.
