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 everybody and welcome to episode number 71 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. So happy to be here with you.
I was just on a trip during spring break in it with my two kids. I abducted them away from our home, my husband worked during the week, and I took them on an adventure with mama. It was delightful. The goal was to drive up the California coastline, which is so beautiful, and take them to see Big Sur, California. Big Sur, in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful places. It's like right up there with the Amalfi coast in Italy, like you know, Tuscany.
So just some of the most beautiful places that I have been. There are these plunging cliff lines, brilliant turquoise water sort of crashing against the sides of the cliffs and this winding highway that drives up in between really thick, beautiful trees and dark earth. There's seals and sea otters, all of these creatures to experience and it's just peaceful and beautiful, and I was so excited to take my kids there.
We had planned this trip together, which I love to do. I said, okay, here's the blank slate of our week. We're going up the coast. What do we want to experience? Where do we want to go? Which I always like to do with anyone. I'm going on a trip with you, co-create the experience together so everybody is bought in and has some skin in the game for the trip, right, not just following somebody else.
So, they were excited. They'd come up with some of the stuff we were going to do and as we pull away from the driveway, I've got the car all packed up.
We're going to be gone for almost a week and I kid you not, we are 15 minutes out the driveway, seven in the morning. Kids are in the back, all bundled up, they're in their jammies. I got my coffee, and I got a call from my parents this is April 1st, okay, and they're both on the line. Hello, it's both of my parents, my mom and my dad and they're like, hey, how's it going? All joyful. And they said we just want to tell you.
We're sitting here at our computers reading the news, as we do in the mornings, and we saw that the whole coastline of Big Sur is closed down. It had been raining a lot the last couple of days and it got closed down because of mudslides. And I'm sitting there, I'm quiet for a minute.
I'm like, seriously, they're like, yeah, we just wanted to make sure you knew, because we know you're on your way up there with the kiddos and I'm thinking like what are the chances that 15 minutes after I leave to take my kids for the first time ever to Big Sur, I haven't been there in years and years and years. This is the time, this is the morning, that it's closed down. And I'm like, yeah, right, you too. It's April Fool's Day. Seriously, this is your humor.
And they both start cracking up. They're like we wish it is April Fool's Day, that's right, we didn't even realize. But like we wish it is April Fool's Day, that's right, we didn't even realize. But like yo, for real, we just read the newspaper and we weren't that on it with our April Fool's game. For real, big sirs closed down.
So, I'm like, okay, interesting, and I pull over and I check it and, sure enough, and I remember the voice of this person that was a mentor for me in my life. His name is Glenn Tripp. He's actually. He was the CEO and founder of an innovation summer camp for kids where I worked for 15 years, and he just is this brilliant man and he told me once a long time ago it's really important with kids when before I had kids he had a couple of sons he said I'll take them on trips and it's a really great teaching tool.
When stuff doesn't work out the way you want it, it's really amazing for them to see their parents roll with it and say no big deal. What are we going to do now? And I thought about obstacles and strategies and how every obstacle is a new possible you know, create space for a new possibility that wasn't there before. And so, I looked back at my kids, and I was like yo guess what? This is going to get wild.
We get to totally re come up with our vacation because we can't go where we thought we're going to go, and so we roll on up the coast. We were in an electric car, so we didn't have any gas fees, so that was not stressful. We had hotels on points that we could just transfer, so it was a really low cost, low risk kind of vacation. I have to say it's harder to do when you've got more sort of financially on the line when things change.
It was not a big hit for this big sur to get shut down, but it was a beautiful moment to be unattached and to say, kiddos, guess what? We get to totally create this from scratch and we had a blast. We went up to Monterey. We went to Canteray Row and to the aquarium, bike riding and hiking Beautiful, beautiful hikes. Beautiful, beautiful hikes. Went to some beach areas. We went to San Luis Obispo.
We just kind of rolled with it and I thought it would be cool to tell the story in the podcast and to pass that along, because it really helped me in the moment to remember what Glenn Tripp said to me and to just know that was a possibility. It didn't even have to be a negative thing for our plan to be completely changed right at the moment and the kids laughed.
And because I didn't even have to be a negative thing for our plan to be completely changed right in the moment and the kids laughed, and because I didn't think it was a negative thing, they didn't think it was a negative thing, and now they're going to carry that on with them. Maybe we can only hope, and we'll see how I do next time.
You know it doesn't always go that way, but that was this past week, and now I'm home and today we are going to talk about compliment tolerance. What am I talking about? Let me tell you.
We have talked a few different times on the podcast about criticism and feedback and I've given you a couple of episodes about how feedback is data, how it's always up to us, what feedback is sort of applicable to us If the person who is giving feedback has earned the right to give us feedback on something and that's more related to sort of the hater vibes and cancel culture that's out there.
It's always important to receive anything that we can learn from feedback, but when something is just sort of painful or traumatic, we don't even have to listen to it. We can shut it off right. And other than that, painful or traumatic, we don't even have to listen to it, we can shut it off right. And other than that, when it's not harmful to us, there is always something that we can learn.
Even when someone has a really sort of like aggressive tone or says something in a way that's hard to hear, we can always not react to the tone and just look for content and see what are we meaning here. We can listen to understand what they experienced and then consider it as data. We don't have to agree with it, but usually there's something in there that's valuable to us.
I want to talk today about the same aspect of compliments and the reason this is so important I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to tell you four different kinds of offer you four different angles to look at this from.
That are just my philosophies on compliments. And then I'm going to talk to you about how we can have the resilience to enjoy compliments that we experience, but not have them be a measuring stick for how we're doing, and not have them redirect the main direction of our dreams and our possibilities and our desires, but rather just inform them and help us make tiny tweaks.
So, I want you to think about walking along a beach with the sand in between your toes. Unless you don't like sand, don't think about that if you don't like sand. I have a friend that really doesn't like sand. So, this is a choose your own adventure. You can be walking on grass at the beach. It's up to you.
I like sand, so I'm going to imagine walking on the sand and hearing the waves crashing next to me, maybe hearing some seagulls, the wind, the breeze going through my hair.
You can imagine the humidity, perfectly, perfectly humid, that sweet spot that you love, the temperature just the way you like it, the sun warming your face but not too hot, and feeling that sort of inner peace, that calm, that exhale, that lovely, grounded, peaceful calm that comes to a lot of us when we walk along the beach or along running water, maybe a river.
And I want you to imagine seeing a stone there on the sand, one that's so beautiful, so smoothed by tumbling in the surf, right rounded edges, a beautiful, vibrant color. Choose a color that you just love and then pick up that stone and feel the weight of it in your hand.
Just imagine that perfect heaviness, kind of pressing down, helps you feel even more grounded in that moment. And maybe you put that rock in your pocket, that stone in your pocket, and every time you pull it out it reminds you of that peacefulness, that calm, that grounded-ness that you get from being at the beach and hearing the crashing waves.
I want us to think about compliments like that. The stone is lovely, it's so nice to hold, it brings us so much pleasure to smooth our thumb over the surface and feel how silky the stone has become from being tossed around in the waves. But we want to be able to have that feeling of calm and peace that we get from the beach, with or without the stone. The stone is lovely, but we don't need it, and that's how I want to offer that.
We think about compliments today, so I'm going to give you a few reasons why. First of all, the first reason is that, unchecked, we know that our lizard brains want all the compliments all the time from all the people.
Right, we are pack animals, and our lower functioning brain is just running around looking for validation from everybody, because it used to be that if we didn't get validation from the people around us, it would maybe mean death, it would mean we're stuck away from the tribe and with no access to shelter and protection and food all of the things that came from being a part of a tribe.
So, because our brain hasn't evolved, we still think that we need everybody to like us all the time, and we have a desperate need for that if we're not managing our mind. So, most of us really, really want approval. And the second reason is that most of that approval that we're looking for matches up with things, things that we believe about ourselves based on our childhood.
So anytime someone criticizes you, it will only hurt, really, if there's some little part of you that believes it, if there's some little part of you that has a belief that matches the criticism. If someone said, hey, your tail is really ragged and you need a brush and you need to wash that tail more, you'd be like what are you talking about?
I don't have a tail, right, it would not land because you don't believe that you have a tail. And so, anybody that didn't like your tail you would just say that's your bag, I don't believe that you have a tail, and so anybody that didn't like your tail you would just say that's your bag, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have a tail, right?
We have to, on some level, want the compliment a little bit, because there's some piece of us that wants that validation. Or on some level, we have to believe the negative thing about ourselves a little bit if criticism is actually going to land and hurt us.
And so just knowing that compliments and criticism are reinforcing old belief systems can kind of help us back away from the power of them a little bit. Say, okay, okay. Well, if I'm in charge of what I believe about myself, I'm going to take this in my own hands a little bit more. So that's the second reason. Number one, we know that our brain is designed to want validation.
Our brain is designed to hunger for compliments and to shy away from criticism. And number two we know that our old programming from where really, really little, is going to reinforce that too, and that's not our most powerful place to come from. The third thing is that compliments are always a mirror. People just like criticism. People find things to judge that match things that they're judging about themselves.
Most of the time, people will compliment you on things that they find a lot of value in themselves, which is great, it's beautiful. It doesn't detract from the importance of that compliment at all. It just means it means a lot more about them than about you. If someone is walking around complimenting beauty all of the time, they probably really value aesthetics.
They probably really value beauty. If someone is walking around and complimenting philanthropy all the time, right, they're like wow, I really appreciate and I notice when people are spending their time in philanthropic pursuits, that means that's probably what they value and there's no right or wrong in terms of values. If someone tells you you're really great with kids, they probably really, they value.
And there's no right or wrong in terms of values. If someone tells you you're really great with kids, they probably really value children and working with kids. Right, this is neither here nor there, but it's just the third reason that compliments shouldn't be the thing that we're measuring ourselves against, because they really are more about what the other person values than they are about us.
The fourth reason that compliments shouldn't make or break us we should sort of develop some compliment tolerance is that most compliments will reinforce cultural norms. They will reinforce the things that we're socialized to value, because everybody else is socialized to value those things too.
But if we want to be able to follow our own hearts, to do things that are different in the world, to break cycles, to create new ideas, to make change in the world, we have to develop the tolerance to take compliments and positive reinforcement as a piece of information, to experience the pleasure of that smooth stone. It feels great to have a compliment, but not to follow it. To not let that be determining what we do more of all the time.
So, these are all reasons why compliment tolerance is really important. And the other piece of information around this is that when someone gives us a compliment, it's one data point. When two people give us compliments, give us positive reinforcement, it's representative of those two people's opinions.
So, if you think about an organization, okay, let me take an example. I remember when I was working in these summer camps for kids, these innovation camps for kids, and I was young in my career, and I would hear a parent that was giving strongly worded feedback that said the music is too loud.
In the morning, when I dropped my kids off, there would be staff members out there that were all dressed up and so happy, dancing around, high-fiving every kid that came in with music. That was just beautiful, that was just high energy. And I would hear from one parent strongly worded feedback that said this is terrible, it's too loud, it's too jarring. That is one person's feedback, one person's experience.
Unless we hear it from multiple places, we don't know that it's everybody's experience. It's like we multiply sometimes one person's experience to make it mean that everyone is feeling that way.
And so a compliment when we follow it, we allow it to lead us in a certain direction is us being swayed by one person's subjective experience, but when we consider that compliment or that positive piece of feedback as one piece of data, then it's really helpful, because if we hear from two parents that the music's loud, or from three or from four parents that the music's loud, it's much more representative of how a lot of the people that we're serving feel and it might drive some change.
It's like if you're cooking a recipe and you hear the compliment from somebody that the soup is perfectly salted, the person sitting next to them might feel like it's way under salted and the person sitting next to them might feel like it's over salted. Each person's having their own subjective experience and that, whatever their experience is, you can understand but use it as a data point. So, these are all the reasons why compliment tolerance is really important.
What do we do then? How do we use compliments in a constructive way? First of all, we take it all as a piece of data, so we're not chasing the dragon of always looking for more and more validation and only being able to continue on in a certain direction when we're getting positive feedback.
We never want to create that for ourselves, so we just want to listen to anything that we can learn and take it as a piece of data. Ultimately, the only thing that compliments should be is data. Is a stone that feels great in our hand is something that feels great, but it should.
Compliments and positive feedback shouldn't be a measuring stick for progress. Progress should always be determined by where we want to go, who we want to be.
We're sovereign over our own experience and when we know what our values are, what our ultimate goal is for who we want to be, what we want to create, the idea we want to put into the world, the change we want to make in the world, then all of this data either reinforces that change and says, hey, I'm heading in the right direction. It's data. People like what I'm putting out right now, it's landing right.
That can be data when we hear a lot of it. It can be great data that what we're working on is fitting a need only can be that affirming when we know that what we're doing is also in line with our own values, our own purpose and who we want to be.
Ultimately, remember, we always want to be creating that feeling of peace and grounded-ness and harmony that we get at the beach, with or without the stone that we're holding in our hand right. We want to be able to create the motivation, the determination, the ability to continue on and move towards our goals, with or without the positive affirmation of other people validating us all the time, because it's so addicting and our brain is wired to want it and our brain is wired to want it.
So just as important as developing tolerance for criticism is the flip side of that coin developing tolerance for compliments and knowing that, whether someone tells you you're amazing and wonderful and you're on the right track, and they like your idea and they like the change you're making, whether they say that or not, you can feel all of the feelings of being on the right track and being amazing and heading toward your dreams, because you can create those feelings.
It feels great when people give us affirmation, when people validate us, but we don't need it to keep moving toward our goal. We never want other people's validation to be the measuring stick of how we're doing in life, because it's arbitrary and it can lead us way off track. So, compliments feel wonderful.
Let's keep observing the world, seeing the beauty, speaking it out loud and creating reality through these wonderful things that we're saying and any compliments that we receive. Let's develop our compliment tolerance by thinking of them as a pleasurable experience, a smooth, silky stone.
That's a color that we love, that we get to experience, that we get to hold, that reminds us of the crashing of the waves and the feeling of peace that we have, but that never is the reason that we're doing what we're doing. It's never something that we need to keep going. We can hold it in our hands, we can experience the pleasure of it, but ultimately, we always know how to get to the beach.
Ultimately, we're the reason that we're moving in the direction that we're moving, because it's what we believe in and because it's who we are now and who we're becoming.
That's what I've got for you today 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.
