Bloom Your Mind

Ep 131: Idea Killers

• Marie McDonald

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At a party last week, someone asked what I do for a living…which led to them asking a second question. “What is the thing that gets in the way most, when people are trying to make an idea real?” 

What an amazing question. In this week’s episode, I’ll share the top six reasons that people fail at making their ideas into real things, and I’ll share a solution for each one to help you turn the obstacle that’s in your way, into a strategy for success. We’ll even do a deep dive into strategy #2, and help you understand the deeper why behind creating goals that are measurable and realistic. 

Did you know that we are 65% more likely to achieve our dreams with a coach or group to be accountable to, and that number jumps to a whopping 95% when we have regular check-ins and meetings with them. (Did you know that Bloom Room meets once a week?) Get over here and do the thang with us!

What you’ll learn in this episode: 

  • The top six things that get in the way of people making their ideas into real things 
  • Five new takes on an old way of goal setting 
  • How gratitude is productive and efficient 
  • What it means to fail ahead of time 
  • How nostalgia for now can save you from missing your life, AND can create the urgency you need to act on the ideas in your pocket 
  • The best tool to keep on track when life gets in the way 
  • How a learner’s mind is the most advanced tool in your belt 

Mentioned on this episode: 

  • Eacon

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 Hello, everybody and welcome to episode number 131 of the Bloom your Mind podcast. So last episode, I shared an episode called Rad Women, and it was all about this incredible population of women that is alive right now, living through their middle decades, and how wildly spectacular these women are in very specific ways, and I share my theory about why they're this way and what a beautiful moment in time we are living in, what we have to learn from them. So go back and listen to that, whether you are a rad woman yourself or not. Go listen to it so you can learn about these rad women. And at that party I was sitting outside.

Speaker 1:

Well, one of the things that's in that episode is a party that I went to and the rad women that were there, but these women have been around all over the place for my last year, but specifically at that celebration, which was an annual 50th birthday party how cool is that I sat around a fire with another couple that I was talking to, one of which was a rad woman, and she was sitting there with her partner. They're from the Bay Area and we were having a beautiful discussion myself, this couple and my best friend from kindergarten. She and I were both there wearing the exact same outfit. Can you believe that? We didn't plan it? We just showed up in the exact same outfit and so we're sitting around this fire, we're giggling, we're chatting, we are sharing stories, getting to know each other, and the gentleman there that we were talking to said so what do you do? And I shared it with him, what I do.

Speaker 1:

And he said well, tell me, what is the number one thing that gets in people's way when they are trying to turn their idea into a real thing? And I paused and I watched like that orange, orange firelight flicker on his face and on the landscaping, the plants that were around him and on the stones around the fireplace, and it was like dark, it was late at night, with this orange flickering fire, and I just thought about all of my clients, I thought about all of you and I shared with him the top things, couple of the top things that I see getting in people's way, and they are really crystal clear in my mind. When he asked me this, which, of course, I ask myself this question at different times and in different ways as I'm preparing to teach, as I'm coaching the bloom room, as I'm working with a client, I think about what's getting in their way, but it's so interesting to just be out in the wild and have someone ask me this question and see where my brain goes. It was crystal clear what gets in people's way. I have been doing this work for 20 years 15 years through leading an organization where we were helping educators and kids and administrators and leaders to turn ideas into real things. And now, five or six years running my own business helping people turn their ideas into real things through using the tools of cognitive reframing, hypnosis and design thinking to help people do this, and the primary tool of community to help people do this. It was crystal, crystal clear. So today I am going to share the six things that get in the way of people turning their ideas into real things, and then we're going to zoom in on the second to last and give you a new take on an old tool around goal setting.

Speaker 1:

So number six in the things that get in people's way as they try to make their ideas into real things is they don't have enough boundaries. They are trying to do everything Instead of focusing in on the one idea that they want to make real and prioritizing it over everything else, or prioritizing it in ways that will work over the other things that are also headliners in their life. Like for me, if I have an idea that I want to make real, it has to weave together and flow with my family life, with my husband, with my close friendships, with my need for exercise, with the things that I love to do. It has to flow among those things and it also has to be prioritized, because what I see people do is, when they don't prioritize it, their energy goes to all of the other things that are asking for the resource of their time and attention. These other things are other people's favors, are other people's requests, they are other people's priorities. Other people will use our time and our attention and the resource of our time and our attention and our energy. If we don't use them ourselves.

Speaker 1:

What happens in that case is we get depleted by giving of ourselves, giving ourselves to everyone around us, and there are parts of that that feel good and there are parts that don't. When we are constantly giving to everyone else's priorities. We are not living in a regenerative way, where we're giving. We are deciding intentionally what the most important thing is that we give our attention to focusing in on that thing and making sure that it is reciprocal, so we're getting energy back from it. So they're not giving enough of their time and attention to the thing that is the idea that they're trying to make real. So number six is not enough boundaries. Number five is not enough gratitude that gets in people's way.

Speaker 1:

What I mean is that we think that we have forever, we think we have unlimited time with the people in our lives, the places where we spend time, the age that we're at, the body, that we have the face, that we have the brain, that we have the health that we have right now. We take for granted what we have right now and then it's gone and then we're nostalgic for it. This also happens with ideas. We think we have all the time in the world to make our ideas real and we don't, for a couple of different reasons. Number one time passes by, and when we go back to our sixth reason, which is we give our energy to all kinds of other things, when we are giving our attention and time to other things. Our time is taken and time passes by, and so we don't ever make an idea real because we've put it off and put it off and deferred it until later. We've never made it the headliner, we've never made it the priority.

Speaker 1:

But secondly is ideas sometimes have a life spark. They are like living things. It's like they're floating around and they come to us and we're inspired by ideas and we have to grab them when they're there. I cannot tell you how many times I've had an idea for a podcast or an email or a group or a book or one of my many creations and I've written it down and I've thought it was going to be fresh as daisy. When I came back to it later and I look at my notes later and I'm like nah, I'm not feeling it. That idea is gone, it floated away from me and that, of course, is the sort of like inspiration for the idea. To me it is the life of the idea. Sometimes the time runs out on our ideas because the life runs out of them. They just leave us, they're not inspirational to us anymore.

Speaker 1:

But also sometimes ideas have a temporality in that like the people, the other people that would be involved in making the idea real are here right now but they won't be here forever. In making the idea real, or here right now but they won't be here forever. Or the time and place. I've heard a couple of people say I was the first one ever to have the idea for a taco truck, but now everybody's doing it. There's also that temporality right Like we might have an idea and then the market is right and the world is right and we wait too long and it doesn't really fit the world anymore.

Speaker 1:

So that's number five is not enough gratitude for where we are, for the people that we're with, for the idea that we have in front of us. And I call it gratitude because I'm saying like really feeling like this is a once ever happening thing that's right in front of us. But the other reason I say gratitude is because when we are in the middle of turning an idea into a real thing, the more grateful we are for every stage of that process, whether it's this person that we have in front of us right now, the place that we're in our age, our body, our face, our voice, our health, the idea we're working on, the part of the process that we're in our age, our body, our face, our voice, our health, the idea we're working on the part of the process that we're in turning that idea into a real thing. The more gratitude we have for every second of it, the more likely we are to make that idea real. The healthier our body is, the better our life is. You can never have too much gratitude. So, number five not enough gratitude.

Speaker 1:

Number four they lose their momentum. I see this happen all the time. People start with high levels of motivation and high levels of confidence when they start going into making an idea real. The natural arc of this is that is stage one. Stage two is a plummet downwards into a valley where you lose motivation and you lose confidence because you start to understand all the things that you don't know. And then there's a steady climb where you're building confidence and building motivation and momentum as you learn and as you try and fail and learn from it, as you take steps and see your progress, until ultimately you have more motivation, more confidence than where you started. But it's a journey.

Speaker 1:

So people start with high motivation and then, when they inevitably lose motivation at some point and lose confidence because they experienced their first fail, or they find out how much they don't know, then they quit. And when they're in the bloom room they don't, and when they're my client they don't. But a lot of times out in the world that is when people quit. That is one thing. And when people one of the things that happens when they take that dip into low motivation and low confidence is that they realize that life is going to keep happening. So we go into something with high motivation, making it our priority, and then life continues to happen. Things go wrong, things get in the way. Maybe we anticipate all the things that might fail in our idea, but we don't anticipate all the things that might fail outside in our life. Maybe we have a health problem, we get sick, someone else gets sick, there's a natural disaster, there's, you know, something goes wrong. Life will always have problems that pop up and life will always keep going. So when we plan for that, when we are in a group, when we are coaching, when we have accountability, then it helps us to move through those moments of life continuing to happen as we're making our idea real.

Speaker 1:

I once was in a group coaching program and I had two six month periods where big life things were happening as I was trying to make my idea real long ago and I was talking to this coach about them and I was like, oh, this happened and this happened and this happened and I'm struggling to try to like figure out how to prioritize working on on this project. And she just stopped and she said you know, I haven't heard you talk about what you actually want. And I was like what she said? I haven't. I've heard you say what's getting in the way, but maybe you want to work on the things that are in the way. Maybe that's what you actually want to be doing right now. I haven't heard you talk about what you most want.

Speaker 1:

And it was so helpful to me to remember that we still have to create the boundaries around life, to prioritize our ideas as we're making them real, as life keeps happening and we need to keep tapping in to knowing our why. So if we set the boundaries and prioritize our idea being made real, that strategy will help us to overcome number six, which is not having enough boundaries. If we have a gratitude practice and we practice nostalgia for now, that can become our strategy for number five, which is not having enough gratitude when we ask ourselves what we want and when we know our why, what is my why? What is the reason that it's so important to me to make this idea real? That is the strategy that we can use to overcome losing motivation and momentum. Okay, so that's three of the reasons, and here we go into our last three. So the third reason that people fail at making their ideas real is because they're afraid to fail at making their ideas real is because they're afraid to fail, so they fail ahead of time.

Speaker 1:

Fear of failure is so sneaky. It comes in so many forms. Sometimes it comes in being afraid of what people will think. Some people are afraid that everybody's watching them and they're going to judge them when they fail. The halo effect is real. We all think everyone is watching us way more than they actually are. When you think about how ironic that is, everybody else thinks that we're watching them too. Right, we all think everybody is watching us, but we're all thinking that. All think everybody is watching us, but we're all thinking that. So we think others are thinking about us and judging us much more than they actually are, and it's taking the wind out of our idea before we even let it sail. We are failing ahead of time because we are erroneously thinking that other people are thinking about us and we're just not even trying because we're like they're going to judge us. They weren't even thinking about us. When they are thinking about us, it's a projection of them. Anyways, if they're judging us right, it's not even about us.

Speaker 1:

It comes in other formats too, though, this fear of failure. Sometimes we're fearing failure because we don't want to fail in front of other people. We're afraid of what people will think Other times. We just think we need to be more ready. What does that even mean? We're never ready. Life's going to throw all kinds of things at us. We think we need to know how, how it's all going to work out every step of it. We literally cannot know how, until we're in it, we can prepare ourselves as beautifully as we can, and then we just have to learn how to do it. By doing it, I have prepared so thoroughly for things and then realized I was just preparing in the wrong way. I couldn't have prepared because I couldn't have really understood what it was like to be anything.

Speaker 1:

We have to learn by doing, and when we fail ahead of time to avoid failure, we are increasing the likelihood of our failure to 100%. There's a whole podcast that I recorded about this, about failing ahead of time. When we have a failure, you know, maybe our chance of failure is like 35 to 40%, so we just don't do it. We have increased that chance to 100% and just failed on purpose. Let's not do that. It's number three. And when we realize that we're about to fail on purpose, we can pull back the veil, see what we're up to and try anyway.

Speaker 1:

And the other tactic that we can use is to actually celebrate failure forward and to iterate and taught this in learning institutions, and learning is so amplified and success is so amplified when we fail. We have to fail multiple times to understand what doesn't work in order to understand what will work. So celebrate your failures and failure is only valuable when we learn something from it. So the second thing to do with failure is to do a retro. I have a podcast episode on failing ahead of time. I have a whole other podcast episode called. Retros Are Everything that will teach you how to evaluate your effort, evaluate your iteration, look at what worked, what didn't work and what you want to do differently the next time around, so that you're standing on the shoulders of your last attempt and not making the same mistakes. So in order to get past this third hurdle that keeps people from being successful at turning their ideas into real things, you just need to fail intentionally. Fail like you mean it, try, iterate, learn from it, do a retro, celebrate failures, because it means that you're out there in the world doing the thing, not sitting on the sidelines watching everybody else. You are being an actor in the world instead of a recipient of what happens to you. So that's number three.

Speaker 1:

The number two reason that people do not make their ideas into real things or they are unsuccessful when they start, they're unsuccessful at turning their idea into a real thing is that they do not create accountability structures. They either create a real, vague goal and are like I'm just going to try to go for this thing, and then they go it alone. They don't tell anybody. And when they don't tell anybody and they don't create any accountability structures, they are dramatically less likely. We are dramatically less likely to reach our goals when we don't have buddies. We are 65% more likely to reach our goal. If we have an accountability buddy and that number of 65% hold onto your butts, that increases to 95% more likely to achieve our goal if we have regular check-ins and meetings with our accountability buddy. 95% Isn't that wackadoodle? It's wild, right. So find an accountability buddy. The Bloom Room meets every week and it is very low cost and it's a whole community of people turning their ideas into real things. Just by joining the bloom room, you make yourself 95% more likely to achieve your goals.

Speaker 1:

That is the number two reason that people. The second most common reason that people don't make their ideas into real things and the first most common reason that people do not turn their ideas into real things is that they leave them really vague, they don't make them measurable, they don't make them time bound, they don't use a tracking system to track their progress, they don't make them specific and they don't make them something that is achievable and within their realm of control. I almost went into a whole description of this, but I'm going to make it a separate podcast so that you have them really easy and shorter to listen to, really easy as reference material. So I will go into this new take on an old tool of SMART goals. I'm going to tell you the data behind why SMART goals work and some different ways of thinking about this old acronym that we've all heard a million times and how we can refresh it in our brains and get the best out of it. So you can look for that on our next episode, so that your ideas don't stay stuck in your head but they actually get out there in the world and turn into real things. So that the next time that I'm sitting around a fire talking to somebody about what gets in people's way, maybe none of these things will apply to you, because the world needs your ideas. Nobody else can do it like you.

Speaker 1:

So let's do a quick review. The number one thing is that people keep their ideas vague. They don't turn them into measurable, time-bound, achievable, smart goals. Number two, they don't have accountability structures. They don't create an accountability system with somebody else which makes them 95% more likely to reach their goal if they are checking in weekly with that accountability person. Come into the bloom room. Let us be your accountability person. The third one is that they are afraid to fail. The fourth one is that they lose motivation and lose momentum. The fifth one is they do not have enough gratitude and they think they have forever taking things for granted. And the sixth one is that they do not have enough boundaries set, so everything is sucking their time and attention. Those are the top six reasons and really the only six reasons that I really see that people fail at turning their ideas into real things.

Speaker 1:

So next week I'll share way more about how to make your idea into a goal, how to break it down into milestones and get the thing done. I'll also have a special surprise announcement on next week's episode that relates to tracking your goals. So I will see you then. That's what I've got for you this week. See you in the next one. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you 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.