Bloom Your Mind

Ep 106: Stepping Out of the Box

• Marie McDonald

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Have you ever noticed how we often approach new things with a fixed idea of how they should be? Whether it’s a trip, a project, or even a conversation, we tend to follow familiar patterns. But why? 

In today's episode, I'll share with you a perfect experience last weekend to illustrate that when we let things flow and let go of expectations, our experiences become more magical. I'll also give you some questions that you can ask yourself, that might help you step outside the box of same expectations or patterns.

Join me in this episode as we explore how to embrace the unexpected, and create experiences that are truly yours.

What you'll learn in this episode:

  • How to embrace and find joy in life's unpredictability
  • Strategies for unleashing creativity by reimagining spaces and situations
  • How to work with the flow rather than resist it
  • Questions to ask yourself to think innovatively and outside the box to create extraordinary experiences

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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.

Well, hello everybody, and welcome to episode number 106 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. 

It is the winter, we are in the last weeks of 2024 when I'm recording this, and it is in that winter push where in between for me anyways, wild, wild elephant all women's parties and supporting my husband's company party, and so many school activities that are so precious you don't want to miss any one of them, because my children will only be this young today and all of the gift shopping and planning and all of the things I am also preparing for a bunch of travel during the break. 

At some point during the break, we are leaving, and we are going straight out to the desert to celebrate with a community that is so dear to us that we gather with twice a year, and then straight from there driving to the snow to enjoy some time skiing together, and then straight from there to see some family. 

I'm thinking about all the things I need to pack and be prepared for, from gifts to snow, to desert. It is wild but like I'm in the middle in of work and life right now, so there are so many things pulling on my brain and as I talk to the people around me, I hear them saying the same and I hear them saying I crashed my car and I knocked off the rear view mirror, or I left my keys somewhere, or I booked my vacation for the wrong dates, or for me I'm leaving water bottles and coffee mugs places. So, we can tell in our lives. 

Some of us I don't know if this is you, but many of us can tell when we are feeling overwhelmed in our lives or when there is too much on our brains, because we start to see the evidence, little pieces of things chipping off around us, be they a car or a calendar or whatever. So here is your little nudge to slow down. In times of great stimulation for our brains and our bodies and our nervous systems, when so many little things are dangling off of our minds, we have to slow down. 

In productivity theory, this is called mind like water. When we have so many dangling things off our brains, we cannot think clearly, we overreact, we underreact, we back the car up into something. So slow down, lean into your productivity systems, where you write down the things on your brain and you take the time to plan when you're going to do them, so that you can keep your body safe and you can enjoy this beautiful season, or whatever season you are in. 

Speaking of backing things into things and losing your way a little bit, I have stories for you today. I like to record this podcast through narrative. I like to tell stories, and I had this content planned for today that I ended up having a perfect experience last weekend to illustrate it with. So I'm going to go into that story, but before that I wanted to share something kind of funny that maybe was a product of this season and having so much on my mind. 

Well, I was at my husband's company party. He has a company called MaxWood Co. and they have recently, as I've talked on the podcast before, doubled the size of their business and rented a warehouse that is twice the size of CNC machines and finishing machines and edge banders and all this incredible technology and machinery to bring ideas for furniture and for custom brand environments, to make those ideas into real things, to bring them to life. And it's spectacular. 

And sometimes my kids and I go to the shop and we roller skate because it's a giant cement warehouse and I mean it's begging for it, right? So, my kids will skateboard, or roller skate and I will roller skate and it's super fun while we're waiting for Max to, like you know, do something in his office or whatever on a weekend when he needs to run to the shop. We did it a lot during COVID. 

We roller skated all over the world of San Diego when we couldn't approach other people or get too close, and we needed some exercise. We got really good on the skates and so I'm pretty confident on roller skates. I like to like spin around in circles and I don't really fall very often. 

So, we were putting on this party and my husband and I we like to have fun, we like to make things unique, and I don't know a little bit worse, we're fun, we're silly. I mean I could say we're funny, we're funny to ourselves, but we're silly, we like to joke around, we like to create humor. So, we're thinking how can we make this party fun? And last year we randomly bought a Santa outfit on the side of the road in Del Mar at like a pop-up sale, and so we were like, well, you should definitely wear that at some point. And I was like, what will I wear? 

And we thought about, you know, an elf costume. I wasn't really into it and so we decided roller skates, because I wear those all the time. So I was in these glittery, bright pink pants I mean, they're like basically like a pale pink, but they're very, very shiny and a see-through lace top and I had roller skates on and we decided that I would have roller skates on, and then I was going to roll around the shop with a Polaroid camera so that I could take pictures of people and give them to them. This is my life; this is how I approach things. 

And we were really psyched about these ideas. And so first he and I you know there's like 70 people there we were walking around picking up raffle tickets. Everybody got to write their name on a raffle ticket, and we put them in, and we were like, what should we do? That would be funny. We looked around the shop and we're like, oh, let's use a dustbin. So, we clean it out and we use this dustbin and we're having everyone write their names on these slips of paper and put them in the dustbin for the raffle. 

So here, we are walking around. You know, it was a way in these big events where you know everyone, it was a way to really like say hi to everyone and cracking silly jokes to people. So, we're going around, we're hanging out, we're getting everyone's raffle tickets and then we decide, okay, it's time. So, we get Max into his Santa outfit, I put on my skates, and we go up to the front of the room and our friend is DJing, he's spinning records, and we stop him and we're like asking for the mic. All these people that we know are in front of us. 

We have the dustbin, and my husband had max had made all these cutting boards. He glued up a bunch of beautiful hardwood and made these cutting boards and an end table that we were going to raffle off for the guests there. They're beautiful, right? So, there we are. 

I get the mic, I say something, a few words. I get everyone's attention, I'm telling them we're going to do the raffle, and I hand the mic to Santa, and I skate across in front of everyone, across this cement floor and of course you see where this is going. There was some you know, wood glue or something that I didn't see on the ground, and I straight up eat it in front of everyone. 

I feel that forward lurch, the world goes into slow motion, and I fall forward like flipping a pancake and I belly flop on the ground like on the concrete in my really sparkly pink pants, face first on the ground like a disco ball, falling in front of the world. You know it was pretty wild. 

Here's what I learned. First of all, that stuff doesn't really hasn't really happened to me before, like I have been in speaking engagements where all of a sudden I forget what I'm going to say, and that doesn't really happen that much anymore because I just joke about it If, if I can't remember, it doesn't bother me, and so much of that is just nerves, right. But I haven't had those moments where I don't know I, you know, had a fender bender in front of people. 

I've never had that or forgotten my pants. I don't know what these embarrassing moments are. I've never had a really embarrassing moment like that, or potentially embarrassing, where there's a public moment where you just really eat shit in front of everyone and this is what happened. And so, it's like kind of cool that I got to experience this. And here's what I learned I'm like falling forward into space, I slam onto the ground. 

Usually I wear pads when I roller skate and of course I wasn't this night because I was in my sparkle pants and I'm lying on the ground and I look up at everyone and I realized the falling isn't really bad and I actually don't think it's embarrassing and bear like I don't know, give people fall whatever. I mean. 

Yes, maybe it was stupid to wear roller skates at a party where your brain is super stimulated and of course you could fall at any time. But I don't know, I'm not really embarrassed by that because I like having fun and that was a fun thing to do. 

But the most significant part, the thing that causes the embarrassment, I think, is the look on everyone's faces. So, I look up at everyone's faces and some people's jaws are hanging open with this expression on their face of like horror, like oh my God, are you okay? Or oh my God, I can't believe that just happened. 

The look of shock on people's faces was so spectacular that it really amplified my own experience, because I'm sitting there and I'm like I just fell, whatever. And I look up and I'm like, oh, is something else wrong? You know, I see the expressions on their faces and then I just shake it off and get up and I make a joke or whatever and I start doing the raffle again. 

But I was talking to people afterwards and especially the people who had these big looks on their faces. I was kind of like joking with them and I was like, oh my God, I looked up at you and this is what your face looked like, and they were cracking up. They weren't aware of what their faces looked like, and it reminds me of everyday life. 

This is what I coach so many people on and I experience in myself, and I witness in others is that we allow our perception of what someone else is experiencing in their interior world be completely driven, as if we are factually understanding their experience by what is on their face. Their facial expressions will be in the middle of talking and, because of whatever we interpret their facial expression to be, we actually have a whole story in our head of what they're experiencing and we change what we're saying, we change what we're doing, we create a narrative about what they're thinking and it really is not accurate because we're allowing whatever their unconscious response to whatever is happening. 

We're allowing that to be the leader. If we're playing follow, follow the leader here socially, all the time, we're letting this unconscious response lead us be line leader right. Unconscious response lead us be line leader right Because in this situation we're talking to someone. 

They make a horrified expression that they have no idea that they're making and maybe is a fleeting experience or feeling, or maybe is, um, actually not how they feel, or maybe is because they have an itch on the back of their knee, like, who knows, maybe they saw someone behind us with style that they really didn't like. 

Who knows why they're making that face. But in that moment when someone makes a face maybe it's a subtle one, we change completely change directions, and then they see us change directions and they interpret that right. We have this whole unspoken dialogue underneath the surface and I'm telling you this story to remind you, when I got back up off the roller skates, I could have told myself everyone thought I was an idiot. I could have told myself I saw on their faces that they think I'm a dork and I and I need to go hide in the office, right? 

But instead, I was like, let me tell you what your face looked like and made jokes about it to people so that they could laugh about it with me, and it really eased everything, like nobody felt awkward, everybody laughed about it. It was great. 

But I just think about how that happens in the day-to-day and how, when we can be conscious of how we follow the leader here in people's expression, when we can pause and realize that we're making an entire narrative out of what we perceive someone's facial expression or response to mean, and pause and continue on with our energy leading, instead of starting to play this subconscious badminton game where we're bouncing off of each other's weird reactions, everything goes so much more beautifully because that expression becomes something that passes and instead they follow our lead in the way we had originally intended. 

It keeps us connected, it keeps us focused on a productive way, it keeps us on track. We can trust what someone is speaking to be their reality, instead of playing the subconscious follow the leader game where we're interpreting each other's body language. That's what I have to say, because it really reminded me of how many people talk about facial expressions and interpretations and how much this messes with people, and also because don't you want to know that I ate shit on roller skates in front of a bunch of people? That's funny, right? Which leads me to what our actual content is for today, which is about the earlier part of the party. 

So, I got into the party and my husband said oh my gosh, a bunch of things happened this morning. There are four hours until everyone walks in the door, and nothing is done. Can you help me? And I walked inside, and I looked around and they were cleaning the dust, but there were very few decorations I had gotten. 

I had asked him if he wanted me to get a Christmas tree, like at CVS, like a you know $40 fake Christmas tree, just we had something there and I'd found some evergreen, like some greens that were going to get tossed in a green waste bin at my kid's school, and I'd taken a big bag of them because I knew there was a party. So that's all that I had. And I walked in the door and my husband said help, can you turn this place into a party? 

So the reason I'm talking about this and using it as an illustration of what I wanted to talk about today is because many times when we approach an event, a project, a trip, a hangout with someone, a project we're designing, like a book or a business that we're building a home, that we're building a conversation, that we're building a conversation that we're having. We tend to think in terms of how we've seen these things go before.

 What is it supposed to look like? No-transcript. If we think of platonic dualism, we think about how. You know, Plato said there's this cave, and in this cave in our mind, we have the ideal of the way everything should be, and we're walking around comparing everything in the world to this ideal, the set of ideals we have in this cave in our mind. That's Plato. 

I don't know if any of you like Plato. That's me geeking out on philosophy. I love it. I don't know if any of you like Plato, that's me geeking out on philosophy. I love it. But this is this really happens for us, right? We like compare the thing in front of us to what we think it's supposed to be. 

Now, if I had done that in my husband's woodshop, I would not have been able to make, come up with any ideas to make real, because the woodshop didn't look like a normal place to hold a gathering and it also had no materials that were normal materials to make an incredible atmosphere out of. 

So what we have to do when we are, or what is available to us to do to create amazing results, is that when we have something ahead of us that is an idea, a project, a relationship, a conversation, any of those things that I said, I'm going to give you at the end some guiding questions that you can ask yourself to create something that is unique and special. 

Because who wants to see the same thing, experience the same thing, be the same things that we've seen a million versions of before? When we ask ourselves what's unique about a place, a person, an object, a situation, what is unique about ourselves, we can come up with incredible ideas that stand out from the crowd. 

When we allow ourselves to be ridiculous at first, when we allow ourselves to think what's special about me and this place and this situation, we come up with brilliant ideas. 

So, in this example, I walked around the shop, and I was like, okay, how do I make this kind of fun? Well, what if all the decor is based on the fact that this is a wood shop? What if all the decor is based on the fact that this is a wood shop? 

And what I ended up doing was running out to my car and I had some flowers that I had bought at the farmer's market for my own house. I took the flowers, and I made vases, because there were no vases at the shop. I made them out of plastic tape tubes. So, packing tape rolls there were, like you know how they come in like four to six of them stacked. 

I used a tiny Dixie cup and put water in it and hit it in the middle of the stack of those tape rolls and I made the tape rolls the flower vase and I made flower bouquets that were small but really fun and beautiful out of these stacks of tape rolls. 

Because it's a wood shop and it's a wood shop party, I put evergreens around them. I went to the corner, and we printed snowflakes on the CNC machine, and I created centerpieces for all of the tables by using a wood glue clamp and putting it at the base of the snowflake so that the snowflake stood up in space. 

And with the wood glue clamp and putting it at the base of the snowflake so that the snowflake stood up in space, and with the wood glue clamp, I put evergreens around the bottom, and they were the coolest centerpieces. 

And then I went over, and I set up this beautiful table with a tree on top of it and I looked at the cutting boards and they're just a big stack of wood. 

And I looked around me and I took the packing materials that they wrap their furniture in to make sure it doesn't get scratched, and I made bows like these, you know, like gift bows, out of these packing materials and I wrapped each one of the cutting boards and the end tables and the things we're auctioning off with these packing materials and I put them under the tree, you know, and I kept riffing. 

I made an evergreen path that you walk down on the ground and the cement, and we had an hour and a half, and all of this happened in that time period. We made a little kid zone, and we strung, you know, ropes across the ceiling and used wood glue clamps to clip all of these snowflakes up that the kids could decorate. 

By the end of the night the whole place looked way better than if I had gone to Party City and bought a bunch of party decorations or whatever. 

Right by asking myself what's so unique about this place, what are the gifts of this place that I can bring out to create a unique and special environment? The party was so fun and not stressful either. It was like an improv game, right, it was so fun. 

We used the dustbin for the slips of paper, and we made it really fun for the raffle and we made it really fun. We used the dustbin for the slips of paper, and we made it really fun for the raffle and we made it really fun. 

So, here's some questions. If you have something ahead of you that is a project that you're working on, that is a party you're throwing, that is a date day with someone, or an event with someone, a book you're writing a business, you're starting something that you're working on for a trip, for a home, for a club, a book club, whatever it is, here are some questions that you can ask yourself, that we can ask ourselves. 

That might help us think outside of the box is the phrase that's often used. So, think innovatively about what's in front of us so that we can do something special and unique that's never been seen before, that honors the people, the place, the culture, the environment that we are in, like a tape roll flower vase. So, here's some questions. 

What is unique about me that I want to bring to this? What is unique about the setting that I'm in? It's different than other places. What is unique and special about the people that will be involved in this, whether they're consuming the thing, whether they are authoring the thing or attending the thing? 

What's unique about the participants? Who is here? What do they care about? How can we make this fun and not stressful? How can we make this fun and not stressful? How can we take ourselves a little less seriously? 

So, when we look at whatever we're working on from a place of witnessing the unique special qualities about us, we see it differently, or the unique special qualities about the thing itself. When we ask ourselves, how can we take it less seriously? How can we have a little more fun with it, our brain opens up. 

When we ask ourselves who's here, what is here, what's unique about the setting we're starting to see, instead of thinking about what we're supposed to do, we start actually seeing the thing in front of us as it exists, as the once-ever thing that is happening right now. 

Here are two more questions. How can I be ridiculous at first? Let me just think of all of the ideas that I could have about this thing and let myself get as ridiculous as possible. I'll introduce constraint later. I'll let myself, you know, get real later about what's realistic or what's what I want to do and not. But let me be ridiculous at first. 

How can I be a channel and not a dam? So, this is a question that I use with kids all the time, with adults too, in conflict resolution, with projects. How can I be a channel and not a dam, meaning how can I direct the flow of water, the energy that is already here, so that I'm going with the momentum and with the flow and accentuating what is, instead of fighting it? 

How can I be a channel and not a dam? All right, my friends, let me know what comes up from you thinking outside of the box, being a channel and not a dam, designing, creating ideas, creating relationships and events, time spent with others, based on what is unique and special about you, the people you're with and the places that you go, the things that you do, the things that you create. 

Can't wait to hear about it and I will see you next week.

If you like what you’re hearing on the podcast, you've got to come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts, and we apply them to real life. In a community where we have each other's backs, and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real, one idea at a time. 

I'll see you in the Bloom Room.