Bloom Your Mind

Ep 07: How to Do Brain Magic

• Marie McDonald

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We know that in order to stay physically balanced, we need sleep, water, nutrients for our body. It ensures our survival. But what we really don't learn are the fundamental ways we can make our brain thrive every day. 

95 percent of the work the brain does is subconscious. Automatic. Efficient. What's happening, though, is that our brain is repeating thoughts and ideas over and over. Sometimes it's helpful … but often it is not. We don't stop to see which of these thoughts running through our mind are true and which we're making up. So, the way to bloom our minds is to watch what it's doing.

What you'll learn in this episode:

  • Marie's single, most helpful technique that changed her life
  • Why all those thoughts running through your brain aren't true
  • A trait that people who are successful in relationships have in common
  • Two powerful questions to ask every day to bloom your mind 

Listen in to lucky episode seven and learn the one special technique that Marie uses every day; one that changed her life from the inside out. Once you incorporate it into your day-to-day, you'll find just how easy it is to choose to live successfully.

Featured in the this episode:

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.

What is up everybody? Welcome to lucky number seven of the Bloom Your Mind Podcast. I love the number seven and so I chose my favorite topic for today, which is brain magic. It also happens to be that this episode is coming out on my birthday. So, by the time you listen to this, I will be in Taos doing one of my favorite things, which is skiing with my family.

So, what an exciting day and a rad episode to be sharing with you. This is one of my favorite topics. It is the tool and practice that has changed my life the most, so I'm excited for this concept. And I'm sharing it now because I'm getting a new certification right now that's sort of an advanced understanding of neurobiology, and neuroplasticity, some hypnosis, and some somatic techniques to sort of add to my practice and offer to you all. So, before I get into any of that new, wonderful stuff that I am gobbling up, I really wanted to share this, this magic with you, which is the brain magic.

So, today I'm focusing our chat together again on the single, most helpful thing I've ever learned in this work. So, I learned this one thing, and it changed my life on the outside; it changed who I am on the inside, and it really sort of fundamentally changed what I'm capable of. I use it every single day with my clients. I'd say that this tool and this way of thinking knocked down a lot of what challenged me, and really amplified my ability to pull anything off, because I understand how my brain and body are working underneath the day-to-day of my life.

So, I'm going to share it with you today, and then I'm going to build off of the foundational concepts of it in the next two to three episodes with some other bombshell ideas that changed my life. So, here we go! And then at the end of today's episode, I'll give you a daily practice that you can do that's the single practice that makes the most difference for me. And a question that you can use every day to bloom your mind. So, the reason that this is so powerful is that once you understand how your mind and body are working, truly, you can use them to do anything. So, let's get rolling.

We know that in order to stay physically balanced, we need sleep, water, nutrients for our body that on their own, our bodies will exist, but in order for them to feel amazing, we've got to treat 'em right. And that requires us to sort of, like, watch what they're doing and give them certain things to make them thrive. We learned that about our bodies, like, I don't know, in third grade science or something in the US public school system. But you know what's not a part of that curriculum? How to have a brain. I think this is bananas.

We really don't learn the fundamental ways that we can make our brains and our minds thrive in the day-to-day. So, this tool today that we're learning is about the Mind Bloom. Because our minds are going all day long. They're just running. They're spinning with thoughts. We have up to 60,000 thoughts every single day, and we'll define that.

We'll define a thought as a sentence running through our minds. Like this little thing running across this screen of our minds. We have up to 60,000 of those every day, and our subconscious mind is responsible for 95 percent of our brain's processing power in order to keep us able to function and efficient. We have 95 percent of those thoughts that are automatic, which leaves 5 percent for our conscious, critical mind to process on a daily basis. So, if 95 percent of those sentences running across our mind are automatic, I mean, they don't have a babysitter, they're just going, right? And most of them are based in old programming, so we're not really aware of those thoughts that are going through our minds.

And many of them are repeating things we've thought about again and again, like sort of ruts in our mind. We are thinking over and over about the things that we learned when we were young. Or beliefs that we've been taught because of our culture that we've up grown up in, or are in environments we've been in, or our family units, or lived experiences that we've had.

These have created thoughts that now we're practicing over and over and over. Some of those thoughts are great and helpful, and others are not. But we can't know which is which until we start watching what they are. I like to think about it like having a pet dog. I have a dog, so it's like a helpful metaphor for me. Like, if we walk the dog, and train the dog, and give it good things to focus on, and play with, and entertain it, then it's our best friend. But if we just leave the dog alone, untrained in the house, it's going to bark at every person that walks by and eats the couch. And our brains, that's what they do. They create a lot of drama, or they really limit us, or they do both of those things until we start becoming aware of what's going on in there.

So, we've covered that we have a lot of thoughts, up to 60,000, and we've covered that 95 percent of them are subconscious. The third thing I want to say is that most of our thoughts are not actually true. They're optional. You can tell the difference between something that's true and not true because something that's a fact, that's categorically true, would be agreed upon by a hundred percent of the people a hundred percent of the time and could be provable.

There's not going to be any adjectives, or descriptive words, or subjectivity in a sentence that is true. The sky is above us. The ground is below us. My name is Marie McDonald. A hundred percent of people would agree on these things. And when we really slow down our minds and look at what we're thinking all day, there aren't actually a lot of facts in there. Most of those 60,000 thoughts that we're thinking every day, or up to 60,000? We're making it up. They're mostly subjective. They're mostly optional, but we don't realize that. We don't stop to see which of these thoughts that are running through our mind are true and which we're making up.


So, our brains are going wild all day long with a combination of facts, lots of old programming, and subjective thoughts, but we're treating all of those thoughts as the same thing. Most of the time, the facts are all jumbled up with subjective ideas like a big old fruit salad. Our brains aren't treating facts and made-up thoughts any differently. They're treating them both as facts.

And then our cognitive bias kicks in. So, cognitive bias is an incredible thing to understand. And here's what it is… our brains like efficiency, right? So, we already talked about that. They like efficiency. That's why most of what we think is automatic. And when we have a thought, whatever it is that we're thinking, whether it's factual or totally wackadoodle made up, our brains are going to start finding evidence of what we're thinking all around us. So, if we're thinking something that's not true, totally optional, our brains are not going to know the difference between that and something, that's a fact. It's just going to find information that supports that thought being true.

I'm going to find evidence of it everywhere and then they're going to treat that evidence, and that whole sort of like glued together set of thoughts that are that original thought that we had, that's automatic, that's maybe true, maybe not, and all the evidence that we've collected to support that thought, we're going to treat that bundle of ideas as reality. And we'll base how we're feeling and acting on that story that we made up without realizing that it's made up. So, the way to bloom our minds is to watch what our brains are doing.

So, just like training a dog, if we want to pause the behaviors that the dog is doing that aren't helpful to us, that's what we want to do with our minds. We want to pause the thoughts that aren't helpful to us, to recognize them as optional. And then to reinforce the ones that are helpful to us to train our brains, to give us more of what we want in those thoughts that help us to be the person we want to be, to have the type of relationships we want to have, and to create the results that we want in our lives.

So, I know that was a lot of sort of concepts about what's going on in your mind, so let's break 'em down. The first thing I can say is, if you want a way to think about this, you can just think about it like a radio station. So the radio station is playing in the background all the time. All of those thoughts are spinning through your mind all the time, like a radio station.

And so sometimes you tune into them and sometimes you don't. But they're always there in the background. So, we can tune in and listen to something, listen to one of those thoughts, pick that thought out, and pay attention to what it's creating in our lives. And I'm going to give you a couple of examples because I know y'all love examples.

I have three of them for you to really illustrate what I'm talking about here. So, The Atlantic put out an article called "Super Friends." They were examining the traits that people have in common; who are really able to make friends wherever they go and build strong relationships. This article is wonderful, and I will link it in the show notes.

I loved it, but what was fascinating about it is there's lots of good information in there, but the core piece is that people who are really successful at relationships are thinking that they will be successful in relationships. And that is the common factor. So, when they go into a social situation, they assume that everyone's going to like them.

They assume that they're going to connect with folks. They assume that they're going to make friends and that these are their people. And when they do that, they have a warm affect. They have an inquisitive mind. They share, but they share a relevant amount of information. They don't over share. They ask great questions, and they connect.

So, by thinking the thought that they're going to have great friendships and that people are going to like them, they find evidence of it everywhere around them. It changes how they behave; makes them more warm and connectable. And then it creates that reality like a prophecy. It's called the acceptance prophecy. They create the prophecy of acceptance by having that thought on repeat in their minds without even knowing it. So, that's an example of one of those thoughts that's really helpful and that we can train ourselves to have.

So, the second example that I have for you is from one of my clients. He has an incredible business. He is changing the world, and he wanted to build that business through networking. So, we realized he was having kind of a hard time in the networking events because we realized he would go into them thinking, "this is going to be awkward. I've got to try not to act awkward. I've got to… I really have to try not to be awkward."

And when he would have that thought, he would feel anxiety, and then he would, like, move his hands around a lot as he talked. He would sort of feel like he was bothering people when he walked up to them, so he would be awkward, and sort of stumble over his words. He said his hands would get really sweaty, and he'd, like, move them around a lot in his pockets. He would put them in his pockets and then kind of move them around. He would just basically not act like himself. And then he made it come true for himself. He felt awkward because he was telling himself that he was going to be awkward. And then as we talked about it, and we saw that was the thought that was going through his mind, we paused it and we reframed it. We decided, instead, for him to focus on what was true for him, which is that he believes in the change that he is making in the world, and he's really excited to give that gift of the incredible business that he was running that was just making kids and families lives better. He was going to focus on helping people become aware of that.

And when he focused in instead on, like, "wow, I have this incredible thing to offer." He was natural, he was articulate, he was connectable, he was warm, he asked questions. Becoming aware of that thought, the automatic thought that was running through his mind, gave him a choice, and he was able to have a totally different experience that was much more successful for making connections and building his business.

And then the last example that I have is from another one of my clients, and it's a really powerful one. She was at a work event at an offsite, and there was a person at that offsite that passed away. And when she experienced that on the evening of it, it shook everyone up that was working there together. She started feeling anxiety when she heard about it. She was shocked and terrified, like everyone was.

Everyone was going through this very traumatic event, and she started to feel guilty because the last interaction that she had had with this individual was not a good one. So, she was feeling guilty and self-conscious, and she started, her mind started thinking, "Oh my gosh, everyone's going to know that I had this terrible interaction with this person, or that I didn't have a good relationship with this person."

And because of our work together, she had started to watch her thinking. And she saw the way she was feeling, and she paused, and she said, "What am I thinking right now? Oh my gosh, I'm making this about me. This is not what is important." And instead, she said, "What I am going to look for now is how I can be helpful. How can I support the people around me? I can be a support system for all of these people experiencing this trauma." And when she refocused her mind on that, she became clear and confident, and had an incredible evening of supporting all of these individuals around her in a way that she felt proud of. She showed up to an emergency, to a trauma in a way that was full of love and openness and helped heal the people around her as they went through this really hard thing.

So, those are the three examples that I have for you about how automatic thoughts running through our minds filter in to create the reality that we're experiencing in the day-to-day, and how when we become aware of what those thoughts are, we have choice. We can choose more easily and successfully how we're showing up. So, that is what I have for you today. And I am going to end with giving you an exercise that I do every day.

In order to bloom your mind, you need to see what's in it. So, here's the daily exercise. Sit down in the morning, or before an event or a situation that you're really thinking about a lot and write down everything that's in your mind. Just free-write. Don't judge it. Just get it out of your mind onto a piece of paper. Once you have that piece of paper, once you've journaled in the morning, or you've written about the thing coming up that you're going to experience, look at it. Underline the sentences—so, remember, we're defining a thought as a sentence that runs through our mind—underline the sentences that are facts so that you can separate those from the ones that are optional thoughts. And spoiler alert, you're not going to have very many of them. Some people have no facts in their thought downloads, and some people have very few.

So, the next thing you're going to do is you're going to underline the thoughts that you want to take a closer look at. The thoughts that may be helpful, may not be helpful, but you want to take a look at what's in your mind and you want to check it out. Once you've underlined those thoughts, here's the question to ask yourself:

-       Is the thought true, provable in a court of law, a hundred percent of people would agree on it a hundred percent of the time?

And if it's not true, ask yourself the second question:

-       Is it helpful? Is it helpful? Is it true? If this is a prophecy that's going to determine what happens in your life, or your project, or the situation coming up, is that the prophecy you want to live out? Or would you rather choose something else?

Go out and watch your mind this week, my friends, and as always, reach out and tell me how it goes. I love you all. Have fun with your brain magic. 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.