Bloom Your Mind

Ep 110: Clarity Questions

• Marie McDonald

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This year, I decided to live a "Year of Zero Lies." Everything that I do or say, I commit to being 100% authentic.

In this process  of personal discovery, I have learned five simple, but incredibly powerful questions that have helped me gain a clear blueprint for what to focus on and what to change.

The clarity questions I offer will help you uncover hidden desires, find areas for growth, and make choices that feel authentic and aligned with your values.

What you'll learn in this episode:

  • Living authentically and truthfully, focusing on what truly matters to you
  • Five clarity questions to help you find your true desires and say no to demands that don't serve you
  • Why the biggest challenges in life are the most important for growth
  • The power of being deeply honest in every interaction and decision

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How to connect with Marie:

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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.

Hello, my friends, welcome to episode number 110 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. I am getting ready today for a photo shoot that I am holding tomorrow for the bloom room, and I have a crew of people coming to be in that photo shoot and I'm so excited. It is quite a thing to experience. 

Last time I was sort of uncomfortable and this time I'm just excited. But last time I ended up wearing a giant wig of flowers on my head and a bunch of flowers that were like a sleeve tattoo up my arm. So, we will see what comes of tomorrow. Get excited, I'll share that stuff soon and I'm sure next week I'll have a story about it. 

But also, this episode is coming out the day before my birthday and I love celebrating things. So, I'm going to tell you that January 18th is my birthday, so send me a thought that day. January 18th is my birthday, so send me a thought that day. I would love to have a little love beamed over to me from you that day and what I wanted to share about that that's kind of funny is that I love celebration. 

I love birthdays. Usually I am down, no matter how old I am, to have a party or, you know, do something special for my birthday and for everybody else's birthdays too. I love celebrating the passage of time and moments of life and the existence of people and all of it. 

And this year my husband asked me what I wanted to do. I asked myself what I wanted to do. I had some friends and family members ask me what I wanted to do for my birthday, and I was like I want to rest, I want to do nothing, and it's not from a negative place. 

I know people who refuse to celebrate birthdays, people who don't really care that much about them, people who care a lot about them. I tend to just use them as an excuse to be with people I love and do something fun. But this is my first year of being like I want nothing. I mean, I want to do nothing. I want to read a book. I want to have zero plans and not need to be anywhere at any time for anything. 

I want to spend the day asking myself what do I want to do now. Nothing, okay good. What do I want to do now? Oh, go for a drive, okay good. And I just want to be with my kids and my husband. And I just felt that super clearly. And so that's what I said. 

And there were, you know, a couple of people in my life that was like, but can't we do this? Can't we take you out to dinner? Can't we take you out somewhere? And I said I love you and we can spend timely unapologetic about their own authenticity. 

And that I just believe in so deeply because I think it creates lots of room for you to love without resentment and lots of room for you to just be present, because you're not distracted by doing things that you're not actually into, because you're not distracted by doing things that you're not actually into. 

I've also entered into this year to support my goal of clarity for the year. A year of zero lies Okay. So, like maybe you're saying, well, yeah, me too, but I mean zero. Like all year, I and so far, you know, I've just been trying to not say anything. I don't mean not add words of embellishment, not speak if I don't have something that I want to say. 

Think about the urge to text someone you know, words of support or, and just make sure it's coming from the right place. You know, never say yes to an invitation that I don't actually want to take. I mean deeply authentic, with zero things that I am doing or saying that I don't mean a hundred percent and it is awesome. I thought I was already doing that. 

But when you really, in my experience, truly, truly, truly committing to even body language, you know, anything being 100%, fully authentic has been really cool and a practice, and we'll see where that goes this year, but join me if you want to. It is freeing. 

So today I am going to give you five questions for clarity. These five questions are questions that I have just seen over and over with my coaching clients and with myself to create a bunch of clarity really quickly. I've coached a lot of people over the years, and I've recently been using these pretty consistently to see big changes really fast. 

So, if you're in a moment where you're trying to get an idea out into the world, where you're trying to make a change, or you're just in a moment where things are feeling too full or a little negative or too confusing, these five questions have really helped many of my clients have helped. Folks in the bloom room have helped me throughout the years. 

So here they are. I'm going to share each one and a little anecdote for each one, and at the end I'll share the five questions again. So, the first one is if I were to fast forward myself into the future and imagine exactly how I wanted to spend a day, how would it be the same and how would it be different than how I'm spending my days right now? That's number one. 

So many times, I've used this question, and a client has imagined themselves three months in the future, six months in the future this happened today in the bloom room, which was a beautiful example maybe a year in the future. 

And as they go through imagining exactly the beginning to the end of their day and looking at all of the things that they'd want in that day and the people around them, they open their eyes and they giggle and they say I already have that, that's what I want and that's what I have right now and there is no problem. 

It's just that I need to stop beating myself up. I already have the things that I want. My work right now is not to change my life. It's to be present in it and to stop being hard on myself, stop demanding so much perfection from myself. 

A different client, again in the bloom room, was feeling overwhelmed by all these wonderful things happening, just like all of these different areas of their life progressing and was feeling just like it was kind of like too much stimulation and didn't know where to put their energy. 

And the same thing happened. They envisioned themselves three months into the future, a full day, and when they came back to the present moment and they said, oh, oh, everything's going great. I'm just spinning out a little bit, I don't need to do anything differently. 

I'm going to continue to focus on one thing at a time, one day at a time, prioritize my energy into regenerative things, and everything's actually going pretty great. Then sometimes people have a different reaction where, when they fast forward into the future and they imagine it, it's really different than what they have right now. But what that does is it gives them a really clear blueprint for what things to focus on, to change. 

Either way, oftentimes we do find that there are parts of the lives that we have now that we're not fully appreciating. I like to practice every day something called nostalgia for now, which there's a podcast episode about many podcast episodes ago and I'll include it in the show notes. 

But it's just the practice of thinking about, if I were, you know, way down the road and looking back at this moment, what would I feel nostalgic for and how can I feel that nostalgia and that gratitude right now? 

The New York Times over New Year's actually published an article that was about how the number one thing that people recommend everyone does when they go for a walk there's one thing that they recommend is that when you go for this walk, when you go for any walk that you can do, that will increase your fulfillment, your health, your happiness, and that is to practice noticing things that fill you with a sense of awe. 

What gives you that sense of witnessing a miracle around you? The way plants are growing, natural phenomenon around you I experienced that a lot with man-made phenomenon too. How might you practice that nostalgia for now, that gratitude, that awe for what we have right now as we work towards what we want in the future? 

All right, that's the first question. If I fast forward myself into the future, what's different than what I have right now? Maybe it's nothing, maybe it's many things, maybe it's a couple things, but it generally creates a lot of clarity, and these are questions for clarity. The second question is the second question is what do I actually want? 

I was once I was once getting coaching from a pretty famous coach and I was telling her about how I had these beautiful goals for my business and what I was going to do in the world and the people that I was going to help by these retreats I was I'm doing and this mastermind that was. 

I actually have made a lot of progress after this coaching and am rolling out at the end of this year to help people start businesses and launch books and stuff. But in this moment of coaching last year actually, I was telling this coach that I kept setting these great goals for what I was going to create, and I was really excited about them. But then they kept getting interrupted by big challenges in life. 

People that needed my support, institutions that needed me to come in and help them, people just needed me to come and help. I kept getting all of these requests for support and I would stop my work and I would go and I would help, and I was talking to her about how this was a challenge for me because I didn't want to say no to people in need that were asking for support, but I also couldn't make progress towards what I was trying to put into the world. 

And she paused and she said you know, Marie, what I haven't heard you talk about at all is what you want. And it really stopped me, and I said oh, she said you know, you can continue to do this. You can continue to just stop your work and help people when they need it. You can. 

When people request your support, you can give it if that's what you want. Is that how you want to spend your days? Is that how you want to sort of approach your projects and your business? Or is what you want something different? Because if it's something different, then maybe that's going to help you see where to say no. 

And it really changed my perspective. It really helped me to see what I want and what I don't want and to say yes to some things and no to a lot more, and that I can help a lot more people or serve the world more through contributing what really brings me joy and what's in line with my passion, my highest contribution to the world. 

But the other thing about asking this question what do I want is that people in the Bloom Room pretty consistently have a hard time with this question Because many of us in our current day world are not accustomed to asking ourselves what we want. Maybe we ask ourselves how can I help. 

Maybe we ask ourselves what am I supposed to want when we really get down to asking, what do I want? It is an incredibly clarifying question that leads to more authenticity, less resentment, more joy, more fulfillment, us being more genuinely ourselves, both in the day-to-day and in the big picture of our lives. So that's the second question. 

The third question is how is this happening for me, or how is this perfect for me? The reason I like to use this question in my life in certain situations is because many times we are great at getting 10 years down the road and being able to look back at our life and see why everything happened. 

We can see the whole story because we can see the long-term view of it. But what if we can ask our ourselves a question to make sense of things right now, when there are circumstances happening that we're fighting against, even if we can't change them? 

Sometimes it can be really helpful to ask ourselves what might I learn from this. How's this happening for me? How's this perfect for me right now? That has really helped me in the past and I'm going to give you an example of it, but before I do, I want to say one thing. 

If you're in the middle of a trauma or something really hard that is happening, please do not use this question. This is not a question to use to gaslight yourself. 

Right now, in Southern California, there are a lot of fires going on and I don't want anybody to use to gaslight yourself. Right now, in Southern California, there are a lot of fires going on and I don't want anybody to use this question. That is a time when we are in the middle of a really hard experience or a trauma or traumatic event. 

That's a time to be in it, to get support, to be in our grief or the hardness of it and to validate the hardness of where we are. That's not a time to gaslight ourselves or anybody else. So please don't use these questions in those circumstances. If they're helpful to you, they have been to me many times when I make a mistake, and I think how's this perfect for me? 

Because what am I learning now? Or when something goes wrong, but I need to kind of I'm ready to problem solve and get on the other side of it. There's an example where my husband and I once thought we were in a really different financial situation than we were. We thought we were in a very bright financial position, we were getting ready to get a new house with lots more square footage and kind of size up and do these other things. 

And then we found out we were not in that financial situation, and we had to adjust quickly. And in adjusting, we cut our spending, we started budgeting and it was a beautiful gift. During that time, I asked myself these questions and they really helped me to see that it was perfect for me, because it really helped me stop spending money on anything that wasn't super valuable to me. 

Buying less stuff really helped me learn how it's easy to spend more when you make more. It helped me to spend more time at home doing simple things with my family and it just helped me save more and be a more responsible financial planner. So that's an example of a circumstance where that question can be really helpful. 

A fourth question in this type of circumstance that you can use is what does my future-self have to say so. Like I said, oftentimes in the future we're able to look back and say, oh, I can see that's where we learned this thing, that made sense because that led to these other opportunities when we're looking back and making sense of our past. 

But when we ask ourselves right now, okay, 10 years in the future, I'm going to imagine that I'm my future self. What would she say about this right now? Oftentimes, we can get a little perspective from our future self. 

She says oh, this is where you learn to budget, this is where you learn to stop overspending, spending outside of your means. Everybody's got to learn it sometime, and that can be really helpful. 

The Atlantic just published an article that talked about how our habits, the function of habituated behavior, is to make our lives a lot easier. We put things on autopilot so we can make things easier, but a lot of our habits are actually not helpful to us and sometimes not in line with our goals, the outcomes we want to create or even our values, because we put them all on autopilot, whether that's making a coffee in the morning, pressing the snooze, scrolling right? Overspending, any of those things. 

So, it can really be helpful to just pause and say how is this perfect for me? What do I actually want? How do I want things to change? Is what I'm doing? Is it all on autopilot? Right now? You can see a lot with these questions. So that is a fourth question and then the fifth I love, where am I being entitled? 

Someone was using the regenerative design process in the bloom room the other day and said you know, I was looking at the energy in, energy out, and these, this cycle in relation to all the different parts of my life, and I was looking at my marriage and I was looking at, you know, all the energy that I'm not getting out. 

And I was frustrated about that until I looked at the energy that I'm putting in and I saw that it's nothing. I'm actually not doing anything to nurture my marriage and all of a sudden it helped me to understand why it's not as fulfilling as I want it to be. And the answer's there, right in front of me. 

Now I need to look at exactly what is the energy I want to get back out, what are the things I want to get out of my marriage, and then she can work backwards from there. What does she need to do in order to get those types of fulfillments out of her marriage? So that's. 

The last question is where am I being entitled? We often find ourselves entitled to happiness, to health, to a healthy relationship, when none of us actually are entitled to anything. We deserve it, but when we stop practicing that entitlement and replace it with responsibility for our actions and gratitude for what we have, ironically the things we want flow to us much more beautifully and in a much healthier way. 

So that's what I've got for you today. Five questions for clarity. The five questions are if I fast forward into the future and I imagine living my day, what's different about that day than the day I'm living right now? 

The second question is what do I actually want of all of the things that are available to me? What do I want right now, truly, deeply? The third question is how is this happening for me? How is this perfect for me, not to be used to gaslight oneself or anyone else? The fourth question is what does my future-self have to say about what's happening right now? And the last one is where am I being entitled? 

May these questions bring you clarity. It's the word of my year and I've been using them with myself and in my coaching to bring more clear sight and clear speech and clear action, because we're all about that authenticity and that truth telling so. May they bring some clarity to you this week. 

That's what I've got for you this week and I will see you in episode 111.

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.