Bloom Your Mind

Ep 124: Give Yourself a Freshie

• Marie McDonald

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Have you ever needed a fresh perspective so badly, that you just started over instead? Maybe it was by getting a fresh relationship going, or getting into a fresh job or home setting, or starting your life over in a fresh new place. 

No matter how many times we change our external setting, we know that eventually we’ll meet the same challenges there, too. 

In today’s episode, we’ll learn the idea of giving ourselves a freshie every day. About treating our mental perspective, our belief in our ideas, relationships, and ultimately in ourselves as a discipline that requires as much consistency and attention as diet, exercise, communication, or even caring for a living thing that we’re responsible for. 

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

  • Why we look for external change to help us re-motivate. 
  • How hedonistic adaptation causes us to eventually meet the same challenges in new situations. 
  • How friendships, coaching relationships, and other support systems serve the purpose of freshening our belief in ourselves and our ideas, and why that’s not enough.
  • Examples of how the moment we stop trying is the moment things stop working
  • How we can use that reality to motivate us to believe in ourselves, our relationships, and our ideas day after day
  • A “freshie” practice we can normalize and use daily to build the skill and resilience we'll need when things get hardest. 
  • Three examples of how we can support the fresh perspectives of the people around us, through the examples we set and the things we share.

How to connect with Marie:

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
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!

Speaker 1:

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 Well. Hello everybody, and welcome to episode number 124 of the Bloom your Mind podcast. I am coming to you for this recording from Sun River, oregon, which is right outside of Bend, about half an hour, and I'm sitting in front of a series of red neon signs. They say things like checks, cash, wi-fi, triple X. It's a whole series, dvd, whole series of these red neon signs that are part of the design of this incredible vacation rental that I'm staying at Belongs to a friend of ours, a dear, dear friend, who my husband grew up with his best friend, and they own a series of homes that they rent for vacation rentals that are in Oregon, and we're staying in one. They call them the stay away If you'd like to look them up. They're so inspiring because the couple that owns them, as well as being incredible human beings, are masters at turning their ideas into real things. They are two creative directors, designers. One is a designer at Nike who sort of designs outdoor adventure apparel and is a lead designer there, and the other is a designer and a leader at a company called Wild Fang, which is an incredible apparel, sort of gender fluid apparel company, and they not only bring these incredible passions that they have into their careers, but they bring them into these creations that are vacation rentals that they have, and what they have created here are spaces that are so incredibly unique and so their own these homes. There are rooms that have wallpaper that are covering the walls, the ceiling, that actually make up framed art with wallpaper that matches them, that have bedding that is done with the same pattern as the wallpaper. It's like these incredible design environments that you can stay in, and the reason I'm describing this is just that it is such an incredible example of turning ideas into real things. They are so unique and so incredible, and my kids have just loved being in these environments. They have been making movies like trailers and advertisements, just making movies in these homes.

Speaker 1:

And we celebrated Easter here my kids know I'm the Easter bunny, so they just call me the Easter bunny and we spent Easter day off-roading in this big truck and hiking around lava fields and then we went actually to a lava cave that is like leftover. It's like a quarter mile, I think of underground cave, really cold, really dark, made by this lava that was there at one time. There's all these rocks lava rocks left over, and my husband and I put on headlamps and we walked down these stairs and hid what it was actually like candy wrapped in bright tissue paper, but hid the Easter eggs right All around this underground lava tunnel and the kids went around with headlamps on and found all of these eggs. So we created this incredible fun holiday experience out here in Oregon and that is where I am coming to you and I love kind of sharing these examples because to me they're so inspiring.

Speaker 1:

When I have ideas that I want to make real, it's always really inspiring to me to hear what other people are up to. And while we were here, my husband and I went out into Bend and as I was walking out of a gelato store, I heard my name yelled out. This voice called out my name, the name I went by in high school, if you know. You know, and I turn around and this woman is standing there with this face that I recognize but I haven't seen for 20 years, and she shrieks and she says it's you and we give each other this huge hug and it's a friend that I had in high school. So here we are in Oregon. We grew up in this little town, ramona, in California, southern California, and we see each other in this gelato store and we sit down and we start talking and she says to me, among many other beautiful things, you know, she says that she's this is just providence, it's just synchronicity that we're running into each other, because she said to me you know, you're one of the people that I always wished I had a friendship with and we never quite had one. Right, that was super solid. And now we're running into each other. And this is just a time in my life where a lot of things are changing. I'm separating from my husband and I've been listening to your podcast and that's helped me in that separation, and I just had this moment of like. I got chills. I had no idea that this beautiful human being from my past history was in any way being served right in her experience by the work that I do. And here we are running into each other and it's so inspiring and so beautiful.

Speaker 1:

And I had another interaction with another friend here in Oregon that I hadn't seen for a long time and we had a similar conversation where I said to her hey, you know, I always tell my husband you're the one that got away. You know you're the friend that I always thought if I lived close to you, you and I would be really close friends. And I just mentioned this offhand. When I saw her and she got all these tears in her eyes and she said that is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. And she gave me this big hug and she was so surprised and I thought what? I just mentioned this because I was just kind of laughing about how much I love her and I wish we were close. You know we lived closer so we could be together more, but it meant so much to her. And so I mentioned these things too to you, because in many of my episodes I say to say things out loud.

Speaker 1:

I say when you feel something, when something is special to you, say it out loud, speak it. And in episode two of the podcast, in episode one, I kind of talk about these things, about how incredible it is to speak, the unique perspective that you have from walking around with your mind and your set of lived experiences, seeing the parts of the world and the moments of the world that only you see right. And these are these two examples that created something really meaningful for myself from someone else and for a different person from me right, speaking, just an experience we had of the other person. For me, right, speaking just an experience we had of the other person. So here in Oregon, there've been these beautiful, inspiring experiences that I've had with other people, and in one of these conversations, our close friend was talking about this concept, this idea of when people start over, how he likes to call it a freshie, and he was talking about you know, you get a dog. He has a puppy that was staying here with us and he said it's a freshie. You know, this is a freshie dog, and we were laughing about it.

Speaker 1:

And I've thought about it a lot since then, because the number one thing that I coach people on day in and day out, week in and week out, year in and year out, is me supporting them on giving themselves a freshie, a fresh perspective, whether that's new belief, a fresh belief in their own idea that they're trying to make real, or even me just giving them permission to believe in themselves over and over and over again. That is the most significant thing that we do for each other in coaching and friendships is we sort of like revive our motivation, our inspiration, our belief in ourselves and our ideas and what we're trying to make real. All these examples that I just gave in the introduction, these beautiful homes that we're staying in, that are the creations of these really imaginative minds that are making their ideas real. The Easter egg hunt, right, which is this random idea I had that we made real and created a magical experience for my kids. And then these two experiences with friends where we had these moments where we spoke fresh perspective to one another. All of them are about inspiration, right. They're all about speaking something or creating something or saying something that breathes new life into another person or another group, that creates an environment or creates an idea, a new perspective for someone else. It's a freshie.

Speaker 1:

And what's wild about this idea that the number one thing that I offer to people is this renewed belief in themselves. What's interesting about this is that for exactly zero of the people that I coach, for exactly zero of any of us, is this the first time that we're needing to have belief in ourselves. Right, at some point we all believed in ourselves, whether that was when we were a tiny kid and we didn't know any better than to think we could do anything and be anything right. I think we should still believe that now. Right, but before we had any of the layers of voices or lived experiences or belief systems or social programming that told us you can't, you can't right. At some point we all believed in ourselves, and most of us go through these cyclical experiences of like I believe in myself and I lose ground. I believe in myself and I lose it a little bit. But what's interesting is that when we give each other permission when I give one of my clients permission to believe in themselves, to believe in their idea, right, because they need somebody backing them up, somebody saying, hey, this is a good idea, you got this. It's never the first time, and so I love this idea of just looking at it as a freshie.

Speaker 1:

It's available to us at any time, and what we tend to do is we look for external things to give us a fresh perspective. We get that freshie from an external place. We get a new relationship to freshen things up, believe in ourselves again, believe in love again, believe in partnership again, believe in a business partner again, whatever that relationship is we get a new job it's a freshie. We go on a new diet a different one it's a freshie. We have a new house, we move to a new city we get a freshie right. And all of that helps, of course, to start from scratch, and it helps usually for a while. And then we bring all of our own practices, our own ways of thinking, our own habits back into the lives that we're in. That freshie becomes old, right, and it's up to us to give that to ourselves, without needing that external environment to always freshen up our perspective in our life and that's what I'm talking about today is that that is available to us any time.

Speaker 1:

But what I notice is that we think about freshening our perspective differently than we think about any other disciplines, because we know that when we have a house plant or we have a pet, it needs a freshie every week or every day. You know you got to feed an animal, food and water every day. You got to water your plant every week, every other week, depending on what it needs. You need to freshen up its access to sunlight, like it doesn't ever stop needing those things. We kind of know that about fitness too, right? There's not a point where we don't need to freshen up what we're eating, our exercise. There's not a point where we just we call it good right. It's a practice that we have to keep up with all the time. If we get off track, if we go on vacation and we eat all kinds of crazy stuff, we got to get back on track right and clean up our diet and start exercising again in order to keep our bodies healthy With relationships.

Speaker 1:

The minute that we give up on them is the minute when they stop working. The minute that we give up on taking care of something around us our home environment, the things, the living things that depend on us, our garden, our plants, whatever the minute that we stop taking care of things is the minute that they stop working. And the same is true for our perspective. But for some reason, we tend to think about this differently. We tend to think that our perspective is going to take care of itself, and it's just not that way. And so I just want to offer this idea that you can give yourself a freshie, and you should give yourself a freshie every single day, if you can. This fresh perspective, this permission to believe in yourself, permission to believe in your idea, no matter what has gone wrong, no matter how big of a fail you've just experienced. Permission to know that right now is the perfect time to start again.

Speaker 1:

The people that I know that are best at making idea after idea real in the world, the people who are most successful at creating the lives and the relationships that they most want, are the ones that are good at giving themselves a freshie, taking care of that mental discipline, of framing their perspective and their belief in themselves and their belief in their idea again and again, and again. So what is it to give yourself a freshie? It's giving yourself a fresh up on knowing that you can do it, that you deserve to keep moving forward, no matter how many people around you say that you're bananas. For believing in yourself, for believing that things could be different, for believing you could make your idea that they've never seen an example of real. All that matters is your belief in your idea. All that matters is that you've got you, and it's up to you to freshen that perspective up every single day.

Speaker 1:

I was watching my kids ski on these mountains and I was just blown away by how dependent the experience they have skiing is on what they're thinking. If they're thinking they're tired, they start losing their focus and they start having making mistakes, maybe definitely not having as good of a time. If they start thinking that they're learning new skills, they're changing, they're moving from their pizza or their snowplow into parallel skiing and they're thinking that they're doing really well, that confidence actually translates right into the experience that they have skiing. The perspective that we frame in our mind is directly correspondent to the success that we have in our day, creating what we want, the success that we have making our ideas real. So it is entirely up to us to frame our perspective every single day, because we are the only ones.

Speaker 1:

Well, there will always be. You know, always be there for my kids when they call me, and I'm going to be there in those moments, skiing next to them and saying you got this Whooping wildly. I cannot help myself, y'all. I whoop so much when we're skiing. It's just like one of my favorite things to do and I whoop wildly.

Speaker 1:

And while they will have that noise as backup right when we're on the ski slopes, reminding them that they're doing an incredible job, I'm not going to always be there and while sometimes in our lives somebody else carries us right, reminds us to believe in ourselves. When we lose, we falter a little bit, we lose belief. Somebody is there to say no, your idea is good, keep going, keep going. You know, hearing that friend say your podcast really helped me in these hard parts of my life. It makes me want to make more episodes.

Speaker 1:

It's true, we can lean on each other like that and, at the end of the day, my kids they're not always going to have me right there next to them. I definitely don't always have somebody right there next to me telling me I'm doing a good job. None of us will ever always have somebody there to back us up right At the end of the day. We are the one that is guaranteed to be there at our lowest moment. We are guaranteed to be the one that is there when shit gets really, really hard. So the better we get at giving ourselves a freshie right now, every day, lifting up our own perspective, reminding us to believe in ourselves, giving us permission to believe again in our own idea, the better the chances are that we'll be there to pick ourselves up in that darkest, darkest moment.

Speaker 1:

That's what I've got for you today. I hope you enjoy these wild stories and I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta 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, thank you.