Bloom Your Mind

Ep 127: Jumpstart your Thinking

• Marie McDonald

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We’re all thinking of ideas to make real all day every day, though we often don’t realize it. Ideas for what we want to do with an afternoon, how to theme a party, what relationship or health habits we want to tweak, or the big obvious ones like what career change we want to make, where we want to travel, or what we want a creative project to be based on.

And then…we get stuck. 

Ever get stuck finding your next step?
Or figuring out what approach to take? 

Maybe you get caught up in thinking about what you SHOULD do, or what you’ve seen before, or what everyone else is doing. 

We all do, because our human brain is designed to fit in; not to stand out. 

In order to be truly creative and authentic with our ideas, we need to help our human brains break out of those boxed up ways of thinking. 

Based on the design thinking practices, futurist processes, improv, career search specialists, and my own processes for ideation, today’s episode will teach you five different practices to help your brain think in new and different ways. 

What you’ll learn in today’s episode: 

  • How combining your favorite things can make the next step easier than you think  
  • What futurists do to expand their thinking, that you can do anytime, anywhere 
  • The difference between having many ideas, and many types of ideas 
  • How to use improv to spice up your idea
  • 4 questions to ask yourself to shed the fear and unleash possibility 
  • How we can remember to balance presence of positive qualities with familiarity

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 get into it. Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 127 of the Bloom your Mind podcast. I have the most exciting thing for you. Well, it's exciting to me and I offer you to join me in my excitement, which is that, after four years of running my own coaching business and coaching practice that's, it's more of a practice I finally built a website and it's so gorgeous. I'm so happy with it because I had a brilliant, brilliant collaborator and designer, and I am going to send that out to you if you are on my email list, and if you aren't, you should get on there, because it's so cool, it's so beautiful and if you ever need a web designer, I have someone for you.

Speaker 1:

So I'm going to talk today about how to jumpstart your idea, or find an idea, or jumpstart your thinking around things, because I keep hearing people get stuck in either trying to come up with an idea or, you know, like trying to think through how they should approach something, and a lot of times they're. You know, I use this word idea a lot, a lot of times they're not thinking about it as their idea, it's just something they're working on. I think of everything as an idea, but I hear a lot of people getting stuck because they have a mentality that's fixed in a few different ways in comparison with other people, or comparison with manifestations of the thing that they're trying to do that already exist in the world, right. So they can only think about the thing in the forms that they've seen that thing exist in before, if that makes sense. So if we're trying to think of a book, we can only think in the genres that we know books already exist in. It's hard for us to think of a genre that's outside of the genres that books already exist in, for example. Or if we think of a party, we tend to think of a type of party that we've been to before Maybe I'll have this type of party or this type a party. We tend to think of a type of party that we've been to before Maybe I'll have this type of party or this type of party rather than thinking about something that we've never seen or heard of before.

Speaker 1:

We also get stuck in this comparison with the people around us. So the first thing is sort of thinking in terms of what we've seen before. The second one is comparison with others. So we think that if we did something in a different way, what would everybody else think? Or what is expected of me when we see it in these other people, it sort of becomes the definition of the boundaries of what's possible for us, which leads to the third.

Speaker 1:

We often think about what we should do. Well, what am I supposed to do in this situation? What is acceptable? So all of these, of course, are related and kind of a Venn diagram. Right, what should we do? Overlaps with what we've seen before and comparison. They all kind of overlap.

Speaker 1:

But people get stuck, we all get stuck, I get stuck, you get stuck, we all get stuck in these ways of thinking that constrain our idea unintentionally. So creative constraint is a valuable tool when we have intentionally decided on design constraints, the rules of what we're designing within. But oftentimes we give ourselves constraints without meaning to. So today I'm going to give you five different ways that you can think outside of the parameters that you usually think in, think outside the box, and this can be not only for a big idea. You know, I mentioned something like a party or a book, but it can also just be about how you're thinking about your life, relationships, what you want to do with your time, changes you want to make to your home. It's anything right. Our brains are human brains and they are very confined, unless we intentionally break them out of their boxes.

Speaker 1:

But before that, I want to just mention this other thing that I've been thinking about, which is I have been noticing something that I noticed periodically in life, but I've been noticing it a lot lately, about how we have this quote that many of us have heard familiarity breeds contempt, and I've just been seeing so many examples of this, of how, specifically with relationships, the longer we know someone, the more their faults are visible, yes, but the more we allow their faults to define them in our minds. So just think about the people around you, the people you know and love, and the way that you thought about them when you first knew them, and then the way that you think about them now. Maybe this doesn't apply to you, but I've just seen it with many people around me, with many examples. I've seen how we allow our perspectives on other people to become tarnished over time, which is, you know, human and okay, we don't have to be hard on ourselves about that and we can polish that tarnished perspective. We can make it shiny again. We can train ourselves and put effort into assuming the best intentions, into looking for what we like, into believing in the people around us.

Speaker 1:

And if you listen to episode 126, what's your Story? That one is based off of intentionally looking at what parts of a person or a thing or an experience you choose to share so with people around us. What are we choosing to talk about? So this is just my little question for us, as we know people more deeply and for a longer period of time, and see them more fully and allow their imperfections to be visible, how might we remain as aware of the wonderful things about them, their good qualities, their perfections, how can we stay as aware of those things and interact with those things as much as we focus on their imperfections? All right, you ready for your five ways to jumpstart your idea? Okay, way, number one.

Speaker 1:

As per usual, I'm going to give you some examples. So we talked about how. First of all, the context of this is that we often get stuck when we're thinking about anything thinking about ourselves, thinking about other people. We're thinking about something we want to do. We often get stuck, getting caught up in comparing what is possible to what we've seen before, what we should do and what's expected of us Right, and what is directly around us in comparison to others around us. So in order to break out of those, I have five different tools you can use. The first one is to compile your favorite things. Okay, this is a thing that I just made up.

Speaker 1:

Oh God, this was like 10 years ago when I saw this call for museum installations and I thought you know, I've never even thought about doing a museum installation, but my daughter had been born a couple years ago and I have a couple art degrees and I love ideas, I love making things, I love theory, and I was like I could throw my hat in the ring. But what would my concept be? What in the world would I make a museum installation about? So I was sitting there and I started, just. I decided to start by just writing down all the things I loved and that were really inspiring to me. Right then I wrote down humpback whales, which I've always loved. I wrote down Japanese fishing balls, because there were these big, bright glass balls that I found in Half Moon Bay, and then I had just been thinking about a lot that you know fisher people using these balls and the balls kind of floating on the top of the ocean, and I was really just kind of enchanted by these objects. So I listed that.

Speaker 1:

I listed this concept of the lonely crowd, which you can also see my podcast episode about, and the antithesis to the lonely crowd, which is people being connected to each other. So that's what I listed. From there I wrote kind of a story, a narrative about human beings being stuck inside all of our lonely crowd environments and cars and traffic, apartment units right next to each other. You know headphones in as we're walking on the sidewalk, little cubicles, all these ways where we are a lonely crowd sitting right next to each other, all these ways where we are a lonely crowd sitting right next to each other.

Speaker 1:

And I created this whole narrative that one day all these fishing balls appeared on the beaches of this shore of this continent and it brought everyone out of their apartments on this evening and they all went out to see the phenomenon of all of these fishing balls that had washed up on the beach. People from all different walks of life. All walked out there to find these fishing balls and no one could explain. No scientist, no news outlet, no politician, no, nobody could explain or understand why these fishing balls had all washed up on the beach at the exact same time. But what happened was all these people from all these different walks of life started talking to each other and laughing together and connecting in person, walking the beach, fantasizing around why these fishing balls all washed up, laughing together, telling stories, and what ended up happening in this narrative was that every Sunday, after that weekly, there became a tradition because people were inspired by the way that they felt.

Speaker 1:

After connecting to one another and experiencing this mystery and walking the beach in the natural environment, every Sunday, they decided to walk the beach and it became this tradition where everyone came out on this continent and up and down the coast. They walked the beaches and laughed and talked about mysteries and life. And then, at the very end, you saw these whales out on the horizon and none of the people noticed them because they were too far out, but they came up. And you saw these whales out on the horizon and none of the people noticed them because they were too far out, but they came up and you saw their eyes kind of surface and peek over and notice all the people walking the beach and then they just submerged back under the waves. So that was the story and I created this whole museum installation, submitted it and got a call back, just like this inspired call by this museum director that said you know I see some holes in this proposal, but I am so interested in talking to you and I would really like to take this to the next step. Here's my suggestion to you. Here's my suggestion to you If you're stuck in an idea for anything in your life, write down five things that you love and see how you can.

Speaker 1:

Longing meets the world's deep need, and I think this actually has like religious origins. I will look it up and put it in the show notes, but I do no matter what you know, you believe and whether you are religious or not. I love this concept and I bring it up a lot to folks who are looking for what they want to do with their life the idea of where your heart's longing meets the world's need. In innovation circles, in design thinking, this might be translated into who is your audience and what is the problem that you're trying to solve instead of the world's deep need. So you can frame it as those two questions design thinking we might. What is the problem we're trying to solve? And who is my audience? What is the historical context here? But I like to add to that the second half, which is what's my heart's deep longing, what am I passionate about? What do I want to do with my time here on earth? So that's number two. Number one combine your top five favorite things. Number two find where your passion meets the world's need. And number three is to get wild. And number three is to get wild Practice generating ideas. And you can look back at my podcast episode, blue Sky Thinking, if you want way more information on this.

Speaker 1:

But at the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto they do all kinds of futurism thinking and they have this concept be ridiculous at first. And in the Bloom Room we use it all the time. We love it when any big idea should sound ridiculous at first if it's worth anything. Because everything, if you look around you that truly solved problems and changed things sounds ridiculous If you think of it not existing. Yet. I'm looking at my eyeglasses right now. The first person who said let's put two pieces of glass that float on our faces and are held by wire around our ears. Like what the heck? That probably sounded really weird the first time someone said that idea. But have you ever thought of eyeglasses as weird? Maybe, but probably not Right. Like then we take this idea of telephones sitting in different places across continents and talking to each other at the same time. How weird does that sound, right? Light bulbs, all kinds of inventions.

Speaker 1:

So when you really want to generate ideas that are new and different, how can you be as ridiculous as possible, generate ideas that are new and different? How can you be as ridiculous as possible? One year my daughter and her friend wanted to do a joint birthday party and one of them wanted the theme. I think it was their 10th birthday party, maybe ninth wanted the theme to be Greek gods and the other wanted baseball. And we were being really ridiculous at first and we're like let's have a Greek gods baseball party. And the more we thought about it, the more we're like that is an excellent idea, let's play baseball in Togas. And the whole party was delightful. So our third way to mine for ideas is to be ridiculous at first and get a little wild.

Speaker 1:

The fourth one is to practice a tenet in design thinking, which is that you might you know, we all look for a quantity of ideas. When we're brainstorming it's like, okay, what are all the different ways I could do this, and that's great to come up with as many different approaches as you possibly can before you choose one that expands your horizons in terms of possibility thinking and also there's something called fluency in ideation. So ideation is basically brainstorming, right, and there are two different types of ways we look at ideation. One is what's the quantity of ideas and the other one is what's the fluency of ideas. Quantity is how many can we come up with. Fluency is how many different types can we come up with? How can our ideas be as different as possible from one another?

Speaker 1:

So, for instance, I was coaching someone to come up with a side hustle and at first we were thinking about all different ideas that are a lot of a large quantity of ideas, but that were sort of in all in the same vein. They were all desk based and computer based. When I gave her the assignment to think of as many different types, a large fluency of ideas she came up with dog walking. She came up with, like telehealth, in this new field that she wanted to invent, she came up with working at a nursery, I mean, she came up with so many different things, things that required her to live in different places, and among all of those things, she generated the ideas that she actually ended up going with, which were never going to show up on our list if she hadn't tried to think of as many different types of ideas as she could.

Speaker 1:

So how might you apply that to different kinds of relationships, to different kinds of health habits, to different places you could live, to different topics for your book, different types of parties, whatever it is that you might want or wherever you might be stuck in your life? So that's number four fluency in addition to quantity. And number five is the tried and true yes. And this is a practice that many of us know from the improv world, where we take an idea and we never say, but we never say no, we always say yes and and then we build on the idea. How might you yes and a starting idea as many times as you can. You can do this with a partner, and that's really fun, where you build and build, and build and build until your idea feels ridiculous and you've really walked all the way around the thing and seen it from all the angles. Right. This generates a huge amount of creativity and is a really fun way to get unstuck.

Speaker 1:

So our five ways are to combine your top five favorite things, to think of where your heart's passion meets what the world needs, the problem you want to solve. Number three is to get wild and be ridiculous at first. Number four is to think about quantity as well as fluency. Number five is to practice yes and and.

Speaker 1:

Then you can always just think to answer these questions what would I never do, what is totally just like, not me at all, something that just doesn't seem like me? Once I bought a pink watch and started wearing it every day because I thought that's just not something I would do, and I ended up loving that pink watch. That's a pretty ridiculous example. But hey, answer the question what would I do if nothing was at stake here, if I had nothing to lose, if I was afraid of nothing? Those are all some ideas to get you unstuck. That is what I've got for you this week 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.