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 73 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. I'm excited to give you some tools today that I use every day with my clients and very often with myself.
But first I just got back from Arizona Prescott Arizona, in fact and this is special and fun for two reasons. One, because of my own contextual history that mostly happened in my brain around Prescott Arizona, and second, because of what we were doing there. So, first of all, since I was a little girl with lots of freckles on my face and a brown bowl cut on my head and semi buck teeth, have I ever told this story on the podcast before?
I used to suck my thumb when I was really little, and so I pushed my two front teeth out farther than they normally would be, and so whenever I smiled, I smiled by pressing my two front teeth against my bottom lip, and it looks very much, when I do it, like that emoji that you can send to people that has the glasses and the two front teeth. It's like the nerd emoji, so that's my favorite face to make, because I used to smile like that, always with my teeth, before I got braces when I was little. Well, ever since, I was that girl smiling like the nerd emoji.
I heard my parents tell stories about the wild adventures that they had when they were younger. They both had somewhat traditional, like environments that they grew up in. My mom went to a lot of Catholic, had a lot of Catholicism and Catholic schooling in her upbringing and my father had some military roots and so each of them growing up in the sixties or hitting their hitting their young adulthood in their sixties were like wildlings by the time they got there and have some really fun stories of ditching society and all of its expectations and getting wild and living in Morocco and backpacking, living in Austria and backpacking through high mountain ranges and crossing the country on motorcycles and lobster fishing in the Florida Keys and just all kinds of wonderful stories.
And one of them was that once my parents took off in their van to Prescott Arizona to Prescott Arizona where they started a firewood company and I've always had this question mark in my mind when I look at the map and I see Prescott Arizona because I've heard these wonderful tales of what their life was like in Prescott Arizona, where my mom was chopping firewood with an axe and got all muscular and my dad was hocking the firewood from one place to another and they sold, you know, built this little business. This firewood business is to tell me about the little restaurants they'd go to there and the house they lived in. So, when I was invited to lead a retreat in Prescott Arizona, I was a hell yes to lead a retreat in Prescott Arizona. I was a hell yes because I've always wanted to see that place. So, my partner and I, my beloved partner Maggie Roach Black and I went out there.
Aside from this podcast and my bloom room and the coaching that I do with individuals, she and I love to partner together and go into organizations to support clear-minded communication and people-first like whole human-led organizational leadership. So, we go, and we lead workshops, we do coaching for executives and leadership teams and then we love leading retreats. So about once a month we do an offsite somewhere. We travel to the Bay Area or, in this case, Prescott Arizona. We travel all over. I've been to Canada, all different places to go meet with teams and help them out.
We love it because we laugh a lot together, so traveling is really fun, and we laugh while we travel and then we go do really wonderful, important work with organizations. So, we sat down with this team who is doing great work to support veterinary practices and we got to do work for them to help them clarify their mission, their values and their vision.
And the reason I'm bringing that part up is both because this team is so fun and wonderful and also because it reminded me of some of the fundamental work. It maps on to some of the fundamental work that I think all of us as people should do, in whatever way works for us, and that is to figure out what our life's purpose is and what our pillars are, our main values. To figure out what our life's purpose is and what our pillars are, our main values, and what our vision is for the future. And what really struck me on this trip was that, oh my gosh, this maps directly onto the work we do with organizations.
We have organizations come up with a sentence that is their mission and that really makes or breaks organization, because it helps them always have a North Star that they're steering towards and that is directly in line with individuals having a sentence that describes your life's purpose, because it becomes your North Star, your purpose. What are you here for? What gives your life meaning? What are you all about? And when I see that organizations that have that are so much more successful, it tracks People that have a purpose tend to be a lot more grounded and oriented and motivated and consistent.
Secondly, we developed a vision. A vision is elaborating on the mission. What would success look like? What do you hope to have accomplished in five years? And that's what I do with folks when I'm coaching them or in my groups, when I have them develop, turn their idea into a goal, articulate it as a goal. We say, by this date I will have accomplished this thing, and this is what it will look like and feel like and here's all the details of it.
And when we have that, when an organization has a clear vision, everyone is aligned on what to say yes to, what to say no to. They're hell yeses, they're hard nos. Everyone is aligned on how to prioritize their time and their work and their energy, on who to hang out with and collaborate with, who to hire right, because we want the people that we spend time with, to be in support of where we're going and who we're becoming.
Same thing with the individual rights. When we have that clear vision, it helps us determine how to spend our time, what habits will help us get there, who we want to surround ourselves with, what we want to fill our brain buckets within terms of books and influences. And then, lastly, we came up with the values for the organization, which directly map onto the work I do with individuals to define their pillars. So, the values of an organization would be, in my mind, three to five words and you could have more, but I like to keep it short three to five that are like the table legs for the organization's mission.
In order to accomplish this mission and this vision, we need to behave in line with these five values, which is directly related to what I do with individuals in order to live out my life's purpose and accomplish my idea articulated as a goal. These are the five pillars that are like the table legs that will hold up the table of my life's purpose, of this goal, and those pillars, or those values, help us make decisions in the day-to-day, help us understand when we're acting in line with our values, help us make decisions in the long run makes everything more clear, and the organizations that have a very successful culture where everybody's aligned and everybody's on the same team because they know what's expected and everybody has similar values is directly it maps directly onto what I see really working for individuals who are trying to live purposeful lives and become more and more of the person they want to be pretty cool, right.
Little side note here. It also works for families. It can be really cool for families to do more of a vague, sort of softer version of this, but to be like who are we as a family? We love each other, we lift each other up or whatever it is. That's kind of like your statement for who you like to be as a family and what are the values that everybody lives by.
That is where I will leave that, except for one other tidbit about Prescott, Arizona. My partner and I were having dinner after leading our first session. So, before we did the mission, values and vision part, we did a strengths finder session for the organization where they took a test to identify the things that each individual is strongest in, what strengths come most naturally to them, to learn about each other and what things don't. We did that and then we went out to dinner and we're sitting there, and we looked up at the sky and the sky was electric blue. In Prescott, Arizona, the sky is electric blue, the most beautiful. It was like neon blue. And we I'm elaborating on that work by talking a little bit about blending.
So, when we are turning an idea into a real thing, we are going to experience all different emotions if that idea or that goal is something that's tricky, is something that's new, is something that's challenging for us. I have a mentor and a teacher that says oftentimes the way that she'll coach me or others, when I have a goal, something I want to accomplish, she'll say what feeling are you going to have to allow in order to get there, so that you know if I have a big goal? You know, when I started my brand and I did a photo shoot for myself I don't usually do that, I'm not used to dressing up and being the person that all the pictures are taken of it I don't know. It's not something that I've done in my life except for on my wedding day.
So, I had to allow a feeling of discomfort, a little feeling of like. Was this like egoic or I don't know? Having a bunch of pictures taken of me, some old school, like you know, I don't know people pleasing, stay hidden, stay small, you know, don't bring attention to yourself in this way. I had to allow some of these self-conscious feelings in order to be at the center of a photo shoot and like go wild and have a, have a wig made of flowers, and I'm so glad I did.
I identified that those are the feelings I'm going to need to allow to run through me and that will allow me to do this. So, when I am doing anything new or different, I think that what are the feelings I'm going to have to allow? I'm not going to shove them down. I'm not going to act them out. I'm not going to pretend like they're not there. I'm not going to buffer and just distract myself by doing something else or drinking or eating something. I'm going to allow them.
This will come up all the time for us when we're turning ideas into real things, when we're changing a habit in our life, when we are trying to change who we are in a work environment or a community, when we're doing something new and creating something in the world, changing a relationship and creating something in the world. Changing a relationship, we're going to have to allow uncomfortable feelings, and feelings might pop up that are real, wild and that flood us.
This has been coming up in the bloom room a lot in a lot of my individual coaching sessions, and I also had my own experience with it recently. So today I'm going to give you three tools for how you can go deeper in allowing a feeling and not merging with it or blending with it, which is one word from the field of psychology that they use and therapy that they use to describe when we have a feeling that sort of overwhelms us. We blend with it, which means like we think we are that feeling, basically, and that really happens for us, for all of us.
I'm sure everybody has that experience with a feeling when you're triggered or when you have a really strong emotion. One way to describe that is through blending, and I am not a psychologist, I do not have a degree in counseling, but I will point you towards some resources for people who do so. One of the things that we can do is to do just that.
My favorite is to just practice bringing awareness to the feeling. So let me give you an example. If we're mad, we're like I'm so mad right now Some language that's very helpful for me to use is to say I'm aware that anger is present and just in saying that it reminds me that a part of me is angry, but I am not my anger. And this practice comes from Eckhart Tolle, who wrote a couple of amazing books the Power of Now and A New Earth.
I actually referenced him in the last episode, but he's relatable here as well, and that he says anger is visiting. I'm aware that anger is present right now. I'm aware that happiness is present. I'm aware that happiness is present. I'm aware that jealousy is present, and what that does is it allows us to not judge the feeling and not act it out and not be it, but to remind ourselves that who we are is not the feeling.
We're feeling, we are our awareness. I'm my awareness and I'm witnessing and observing that anger is visiting, or anger is here. Anger is present. That's the first tool that I will share by Eckhart Tolle, and I love that one and I use it with my kids. Say oh, anger's here, anger's visiting us. What does that anger have to say?
Which is the second tool that comes from Richard Schwartz, who is the creator of internal family systems. He has a really wonderful it's called IFS for short, and he has a really, really incredible body of work that is so impactful and powerful where he so impactful and powerful where he. You can actually research him by going to IFS Institute and if you click on about us and click on Richard Schwartz, you can read all about him and sort of the background of his work.
He has some really beautiful anecdotal stories, and he does lots of speaking. His research has found that we all have lots of parts within us based on our lived experience. And when we can remember that our feelings, overwhelming feelings, come from a part of us, we can kind of begin to work with those parts. And I'm not going to get too deep into it because, again, I am not an expert, but I use his work on myself with myself, because, again, I am not an expert, but I use his work on myself with myself, and very, very lately I don't use it with my clients, but I, you know, we remind ourselves that it's just part of us feeling a certain way.
So what I like to do is and which is the second tool that I'll give to you from him, from the IFS Institute, is when we have a strong feeling just asking what does that part have to tell me, what does that feeling have to tell me and what does that feeling need? So, I use that with my kids a lot too. What does that need? That feeling of anger that's here, what does it need, what does it have to tell us and what does it need us to know? What does it want us to know? So, even for my little ones, that helps them kind of remember that they are not their anger, but they can witness or become aware of their anger or their sadness or whatever it is and check in to see what it wants us to know. And in that moment, they stop acting out of it and they start communicating about it, which is what we want.
When we're turning an idea into a real thing, when we're changing, when we're making big moves and we're overwhelmed by feeling we don't want to act it out, we want to see what it needs to tell us. It's data for us, and I'll backtrack a little bit to say we know that if we're left up to our natural devices, we're going to do three things. We're going to avoid feeling bad, we're going to chase feeling good and we're going to do what's easy.
And that means we'll chase after dopamine hits, avoid conflict in any hard conversation and not do anything hard, and we'll stay kind of hidden, usually doing things that aren't that great for us, like scrolling or doom scrolling or Netflix binging or eating a lot or drinking a lot or shoving down our feelings. So, if we can follow that first tool of identifying the feeling that we're going to need to allow in order to do something hard, and then we can use the second tool, which is to generate some awareness around it I'm aware that I have this feeling when it's showing up, I am not my anger, but I'm aware that anger's here and then we can use the third tool, which is to check in with it.
What does the feeling have to tell me? What does it need? What does it need me? To know? What's the information I could get from this feeling? Was the information I could get from this feeling? And I'll just remind us that even the feelings that are like the worst are bad, bad feelings. There are no bad feelings. Every single part of us, every single feeling. We have to allow it and embrace it, or it will just get bigger. And so, for me, through my journey, I've noticed that resentment and bitterness are two feelings that I just don't feel.
For a long time, I was like, no, I just don't do that, I don't have those feelings. And when I learned, oh, I could allow feeling of bitterness to be there, everything in me wanted to avoid that. But when I did it and allowed the feeling of bitterness or resentment to come up, it just went away. So, this is just a plug that all feelings, the rainbow of feelings, is present in every single person. And having compassion with the feeling instead of judgment is always better. So, if you're have compassion, that feeling of fear is there to protect you, it's all good. Have awareness that fear is there. What does it have to tell you? What does it need?
How can you allow it to be there so you can do the hard thing you're trying to do? And then the last tool is called the metaphoric two-step, and this comes from Melissa Teers, who lives in New York. She's a hypnotist. She trained me in working with, in self-hypnosis and hypnosis and in working with the unconscious mind, which is one of my certifications as a coach, and she trained us in the metaphoric two-step, which is when you have a big feeling in your body this piece she didn't train me in but first go in and check in.
This tool is to check in where is it in my body? Allow the feeling by noticing where it is in your body and then asking some questions about what it feels like. What color is it? What shape is it? Is it moving? Is it hard or soft? Is there a texture? Is it bright, is it dark? Is it heavy, is it smooth, is it light, is it breezy? That's how you allow a feeling is to see where it is. And then the metaphoric two-step that Melissa Teers teaches is to say if it were something, what would it be and what would that thing need to be in order to change?
So I had a person recently that was really, really upset and the feeling was in their stomach and in order to change, she needed to let that feeling come up and out of her and it plopped out as like a little snail on the ground and it crawled across the ground and went out the door and for somebody else, she had a feeling of tightness and stress and anxiety and worry in her chest and it was like a hard teal diamond and when I said what does that need to change, she said it just melted. The diamond all of a sudden turned into liquid form and melted and it just kind of seeped through the cracks and disappeared.
So, this last tool, number four, is if you are a visual person, or if metaphors and visuals help, which, honestly, I've never worked with a client where they didn't help, although I do think they help certain people more than others. If you're more visual, they tend to help. More. Using this can be very helpful when you have a strong emotion. What does the emotion feel like in your body? And if it were a metaphor, what would it be? And in order to change? What would that metaphor need in order to change? If it's a tree that's dark and twisted, maybe it needs you to pour some water on it and it grows a bunch of leaves and it blossoms and it becomes a tree that you can sit under. So that's the fourth tool is the metaphoric two-step.
So, we talked about how we're going to, in order to do anything new and different and big, turn any idea into a real thing. We're going to need to be able to allow our feelings, which does not come naturally to the unconscious mind. We want to avoid feeling bad, pursue feeling good and do what's easy. We talked about four tools. The first one is to bring awareness. I am aware that the feeling is present. The second one is to ask it what it wants to tell you. What does it need? What information, what data does it need to give us? We talked about compassion always being more effective than harshness, and we talked about the metaphoric two-step, which is asking what is this feeling as a metaphor and what does it need to change?
So I hope those four tools help you when you're turning an idea into a real thing and feelings pop in that you're not ready for or that feel overwhelming, because they do for all of us, and if we can just bring a little compassion to them, for all of us, and if we can just bring a little compassion to them, we can remember that our feelings are data.
They can always help us understand what's going on in a moment and, at the end of the day, if a part of us is having an overwhelming feeling, that part's just there to protect us and we can always have it sit shotgun and take back the wheel so that the wise, grownup, adult, grounded, centered part of ourselves that is truly who we are can drive the bus and keep us moving toward our goals, so we can make our ideas into real things that bloom the world.
That's what I've got for you this week, my friends 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.
