Bloom Your Mind

Ep 151: Teaching People How to Treat Us

• Marie McDonald

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In this episode, we talk about the powerful truth that we are constantly training people how to treat us. Not through lectures. Not through convincing or explaining. But through the boundaries we set, the behaviors we allow, and the way we show up in our own lives.

Often, the patterns we feel frustrated by — being the go-to problem solver, the emotional container for everyone else, or the one who says yes more than we want — aren’t “just how things are.” They’re patterns we’ve participated in, usually because we were socialized to be helpful, agreeable, accommodating, or endlessly available.

The good news? If we trained people into the pattern, we can train them out of it.

 With love. With clarity. And with zero drama.


What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • How we unintentionally teach people to expect more than we have capacity to give
  • Why overgiving or overaccommodating often comes from subconscious beliefs about worth
  • The difference between setting a boundary and trying to control someone else’s behavior
  • How to shift patterns without guilt, resentment, or emotional explosions
  • A simple sentence for kindly and clearly retraining expectations
  • How choosing your needs doesn’t disconnect you — it creates cleaner, more honest, more loving relationships
  • How the way we talk about our ideas sometimes matters more than the ideas themselves

Every time you say yes when you mean no, you’re training someone to believe your needs don’t matter. Every time you say no with love, you’re training someone to treat your needs as real and important.

You don’t have to become someone tough or closed to set boundaries. You don’t have to push people away. You simply have to tell the truth about what works for you — and stay consistent — so the relationship can reorganize in a healthier shape.

And every one of those things is true of the ideas we’re trying to make real. We are training people how to think about the things we create. We are creating reality with the words that we say and the energy we say it with. 


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SPEAKER_00:

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 151 of the Bloom Your Mind Podcast. I have been filming my buns off over the last few weeks, and I have three more film days scheduled coming up. Here's what I have to say about this. It is so delightful to collaborate with people that you're a good match for. I found my videographer, his name is Tone, and we met each other through some friends, and he just mentioned that he does videography. We got talking about it and I mentioned some projects. He was really excited about it. And I really like this guy. I just got along well with him, enjoyed being around him. And so we started our first day, and we had a pre-production day. We had all these things happen go wrong in the first day. We laughed through it. We tested equipment. We made jokes the whole time. We had such a blast. And now we've been through our third day, you know, one after another, and we're in this flow. And I just remember these moments in time where I found people to collaborate with that where everything was just easy. Conversation was easy, retakes are easy, right? When things don't work, we laugh, we problem solve, we iterate. And those types of partnerships are so special. I have this partner that I'm going to interview on the podcast soon that I have worked with for over for almost 20 years. And we were laughing about how one of the reasons that we work together at all, like that we even have our business, is we just really like each other and we love collaborating. And so we invented all this stuff to do together so that we can keep working together. Because like the 12 years we had in an organization was not enough. So we just keep going and going. And uh it is such a delight to find people to collaborate with who bring you joy. So who do you collaborate with? Who do you love to collaborate with? Maybe it's like cooking together or ideating together, philosophizing together. Maybe it's actually working together in a work environment. Maybe it's uh collaborating on projects with, on music with, whoever it is. Tell them, appreciate them out loud because it's a special thing. All right, today we're talking about something that comes up for me all the time in my coaching of people around me. And I just notice it socially and with myself and with others all the time as well. And I've actually been meaning to make a podcast about this for quite a while. It's about how we train people and how to act toward us. Now, the evidence of how this is true is one of the biggest changes that I've seen in my own life as a manifestation or an effect of the work that I do. I am so, so, so grateful that I am a coach because my whole job is to like figure out how to be a better person, how to like figure out the tools and resources that can help us all feel healthier and happier as human beings, with emotional regulation, with mental management and cognitive work, with as parents, as partners in relationships, as friends. And it it's really amazing. It's a gift to do this work because I get to think about it all the time. I get to teach my kids all the time. And as an effect of trying all these things on myself all the time, trying to improve myself, I have seen some real changes in the way that people treat me. One of the biggest things that I chose to do is I started being 100% honest. I started telling zero lies. I've talked about this on the podcast before, like no lies, meaning not with my body language, not staying in conversation that I'm not interested in being in, like not saying yes to go to an event when I mean no. I just don't. I started using regenerative design, my theory around this, to only put my energy into the things that give me energy back. Only put my energy into the things that create what I really want in my life. And I've held myself to that. I use my own tools religiously, and it has created the most beautiful life. And the results, too, as I did this more and more, is that I started respecting my own time so much more. I don't stay and stick around if I don't want to be somewhere. I don't say yes to things I don't feel comfortable with anymore. I don't spend time with people who don't value and respect and love me. Even if they do love me, if they don't act that way, I don't spend time with them. And the more I treated myself like that, the more respect other people treated me with as well. So this is this amazing domino effect because we are constantly teaching other people how to treat us. We're training them. I was recently teaching a course in uh failure tolerance, and I was talking about how people follow our lead in this area. So when we fail, right, which is a thing that we as human beings are so afraid of, which is absolutely bananas and bonkers and upside down because we absolutely must fail. I have multiple podcast episodes about this. I worked in iteration in the field of innovation for 15 years, trying to flip this on its head for us, right? Like everything we do must go through multiple iterations. And we have this weird societal perspective that things are supposed to be perfect. So we tend to apologize when we make mistakes or fail or don't do things perfectly or things don't work out. We sort of apologize with body language, we excuse ourselves, we're self-deprecating. And when we say that, if we say, Oh yeah, I totally failed, I face planted, it was really horrible. Not only do we experience the negative emotion of saying, you know, I suck energetically, but we train our brain to see how horrible it was that we failed. Not only that, though, we also teach whoever we're talking to in that moment how to think about it. They might think, oh, that sucks. I feel bad for her. I'll avoid the subject. She seems like she's having a really hard time right now. She's like really down on herself and she's failing a lot, you know. Alternatively, if we talk about the exact same scenario, something that we tried and that didn't go well, and we say, hey, you know, like, and someone says, How did it go? Instead of saying, I faceplanted, I failed, it was horrible. We could say, I learned a lot from my first try. I have a whole new idea for the next go-round and the improvements I'm gonna make. I'm excited to try again. Can you even begin to feel how much better that feels in your body? Can you imagine the thought cycles that happen in our body if we do that? Our brains are gonna go out and collect evidence of how exciting our next try is gonna be and how we can't wait to try again and see the improvements. Instead of our brain collecting evidence of how horrible it was and how everyone thinks it's horrible and now we failed and we're a failure. By speaking it, we create it in our own brains. And both things are like subjective, right? Neither is true or false. It is more true that we could just try again, that failure, it is more like factually true that failure is a silly thing to get upset about because we have to know what doesn't work in order to know what does. Like we just have to. But either way, it's a choice how you're looking at it. And so we're creating these thought cycles where our brain's collecting evidence of how we're excited for the next go round, how we can't wait to see improvements. And then the person we're talking to, they're like, let me in on that. I won't be there for the next go round, you know, instead of thinking, oh, this is this is messy. I'm gonna avoid it, right? And we get all those good feels in our body, all the chemicals that go with the excitement and the anticipation and the creativity. So let's like think about this as we apply it to different areas of in life of our life. So if we apply this to people pleasing and setting boundaries, let's say if you let someone cancel over and over, if we let someone cancel on us, or we let them show up late over and over without holding them accountable, they learn they can do that to us. They don't need to be on time. She doesn't mind. Oh, it's fine if I cancel, she'll she'll do something else. Maybe it is fine, but maybe it's not. If we let someone raise their voice at us or use sarcasm or passive aggressive language, they learn that that's okay. They learn they can do that. But we can always train them. They cannot do that. That is not okay, and we don't even have to be a jerk to do it. We could just say, hey, I'd love to hear what you're saying and I care about you, and you're important to me, but I need you to talk to me in a different way if you want to keep talking. I don't like people talk to me like that. We're training people all the time around what we will put up with. And it's really reflective of our own sense of self. How we feel about ourselves inside, how we feel we deserve to be treated. If we only say yes when we really want to go to things, people know that we're there because we mean it and we want to be and we're present and happy. When we always accommodate other people's needs and don't advocate for our own, other people think they don't need to make space for our needs. And it doesn't even have to be a malicious thing or a negative intent, right? They might just think we're super happy just puttering around and taking care of things. Maybe they think we're already filling our own needs and we're just taking care of them because we have the bandwidth. We're training them. Whatever we do, we're teaching the people around us to interact with the current version of ourselves. What about what about body language? What about how we carry ourselves? When we're rushing our speaking, try not to take up space. We're teaching people they don't need to make space for us. When we're taking up the whole conversation, all the space in the room, we're talking and talking and talking, we're teaching them not to want to collaborate with us, maybe just like not wanting to be around us because we don't make space for others. When we introduce ourselves with qualifiers, like, ah, you know, this probably won't make sense, but or I don't know if this is even the right time to say this, but or I don't really know what I'm talking about, but or when we explode with emotions, we're teaching people we're not a super stable emotional presence. We're constantly teaching people how to interact with us because of how we interact with ourselves. And what I'm not talking about here, what I'm not trying to say is that we need to be guarded and artificial and think through all the things we say or do or how to act. What I am saying is that I see a lot of people feel confused by how others treat them. And a really good place to start is to look at how we treat ourselves because they are following our lead. I know this because I've lived it. I used to make so much space for other people's anger and volatility and blame. I learned to do that growing up and I just kept doing it. People learned that if they needed a vent or freak out or have an anger explosion, I was down to listen. I wasn't gonna stop them. Then I changed it. I started being true to myself. I started saying no to anything that did not feel good to me. I retrained myself. I started treating my own time and myself with love and respect, and I saw the rest of the world change to fit that. I was retraining the people around me and how to treat me too. So whatever your idea is that you're trying to make real, you're giving off cues. You're teaching people how to interact with you and with that idea all the time. I created um a podcast episode where I referenced this book, The Culture Code, where the author, Daniel Coyle, he talks about how they studied this group of angel investors who were all being presented to by entrepreneurs. And the angel investors thought that they were assessing the entrepreneurial presentations based on merit, on the actual merit of the idea. And when they actually did the study, the angel investors were reacting to the body language that each presenter had. So it's our body language and it's our words and it's our actions. All of it is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves inside. So if we're trying to make an idea real and we get to that point where we've created the idea and now we're trying to get it out into the world, we gotta take all those actions to get our idea out there. We are training people in how to interact with us. We are training people in how to interact with our idea, whether we realize it or not. So all I'm saying here is to put a little thought into it. So here's the assignment for this week. How are you training people in how to treat you with your words? How are you training them in how to treat you with your actions? What about your body language? Do you like how you're training them? Do you like how you've trained them? Anything you want to change? How might this impact your ability to turn your ideas into real things, to make what you want in your life happen? What do you want to change? It's an inside job, baby. Change happens from the inside out. And man, does it feel good when it does. That's what I've got for you this week, my friends, 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.