Bloom Your Mind

Ep 154: BIG NEWS & Outthinking the Motivational Triad

• Marie McDonald

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In Episode 154, we have some big announcements for new content, programs and courses. We’re also breaking down how to get ahead of one of the most important pieces of human wiring you’ll ever understand: the Motivational Triad.

This ancient operating system—designed to help humans survive saber-toothed tigers and harsh winters—is still running the show inside our modern brains. And even though it once kept us alive, now it keeps us stuck.

In today’s world, this default wiring creates a net negative in our lives. Because while it kept early humans from being eaten, it does nothing to help us build relationships, set boundaries, grow businesses, create art, change habits, or pursue dreams.

This episode helps you see where the triad is running your life—and how to upshift out of it using the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that can plan, align actions with values, and make intentional decisions.


What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • What the motivational triad is and why it no longer serves the life you want today.
  • How the triad shows up in modern life through people-pleasing, overworking, scrolling, sugar, avoidance, and staying small.
  • Why doing what’s easy often feels productive (like overworking) but is actually avoidance in disguise.
  • How to shift from your primitive brain into your prefrontal cortex to choose aligned, intentional actions.
  • A practical exercise to analyze your current goal through the lens of the triad—and design a plan that actually matches the outcome you want.
  • Real examples from my students this week: parenting pressure, overwork-as-hiding, holiday family dynamics, business avoidance, and behavior patterns we all fall into.

Once you identify where the triad is steering you, you can interrupt the pattern. You can decide how you want to show up and rehearse that response ahead of time—so when the moment comes, you’re already prepared.

We’re getting out of the cave.
 Off the couch.
 Putting down the Pringles.
 And building lives we’re proud of—on purpose.



Mentioned in this episode:

  • The Bloom Room — weekly application of these concepts, community, support and coaching 
  • Moxie Mastermind — high level experience for women turning ideas into real things 
  • Self-paced courses — access to it all on your own terms and timeline 

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_00:

Welcome to the Blue in 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 everybody, and welcome to episode 154 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. We have a packed episode today. We are doing three things. One is that I am gonna tell you about an amazing weekend that we just had. Two, I am going to share some big announcements for what is coming in the next few months. We've been working so hard in the Bloom team, and we have been making all kinds of new programs, recording a bunch of content, and we are unveiling a whole bunch of exciting new ways that you can get into the work and the play and the community that we offer through Bloom and Moxie. And I'm gonna give you an amazing tool that we I did with my students this past week to look into our brain's default operating mode and how it is showing up in our lives in ways that we're not recognizing and how it's getting in the way of what we actually want to do. So let's get rolling, shall we? That's a lot to get through. Okay, first, we just came back from a weekend in the desert. And the reason I wanted to just mention this, I know I've I've mentioned it in building up to this weekend before. I've mentioned it on the podcast, is it was an idea that my husband and I had that we just recently made real. And I talked at the last episode about problem solving unexpected challenges that came up before our weekend event. So we had a vow renewal. We've been together for uh 15 years and married for 10, and we decided to have a three-day love fest celebration in the desert. And then there was a huge amount of problem solving that had to go into it last minute. We did that problem solving, and I wanted to give an update on how amazing the weekend was. I just sat back, and my husband and I, Max and I, have been over the last week and a half just talking about how it would have been so much easier to not do that event. This is a little preview to what I'm gonna share at the end of the episode. It was not easy. We did not avoid pain by doing it. We did not pursue pleasure by pulling it off. It ended up being very pleasurable in the end. And there was a lot of joy that came out of a lot of the work. But it was really hard work. There was a lot of challenges to overcome. It took so much effort and planning. And so, by kind of motivating ourselves through all of those hard parts in the months going up to the event and working through challenges and problem solving our doubts about all of these people that were coming to it, we ended up pulling off this event that we will never forget for the rest of our lives. We came up with a ceremony that we had no blueprint for. Neither of us had ever been to a real vows ceremony. I went to one when I was eight, but I had no idea what actually you do. What does one do to renew vows? And so we made all of this stuff up. We created a whole ceremony, we problem-solved with the rain. People were flying in from all over the place. Some canceled, some came. What ended up happening was unbelievably perfect. The ceremony itself, by going through the creative process, having ideas, ideating, collaborating, letting some of the ideas go, ended up being exactly perfect for the amount of people that were there in the space we were in. Problem solving and flexing and pivoting with rain plans actually ended up giving us the opportunity to renew our vows inside, which we weren't going to do before, at a different space than we were planning to do it at, uh, in a different venue. And then gathering all the tables and chairs under an awning that we actually sort of built to protect from the rain in a way that was much closer together, much more sort of like better feeling and visually beautiful than if we had not had a rain plan. It didn't even end up raining. But because we had the plan for it, the whole night ended up better. So a few things I want to share from this. One, we had this idea that felt far-fetched and wild because we'd never been to one before. We put it out there to our community and we just went for it. We had no blueprint, but we pulled it off. And we are so grateful. We will never forget it. And we're getting so many comments and so much feedback from our community saying, thank you so much for what I got out of this. And that was our goal, that everyone would get what they needed out of this Love Fest weekend. We called it a Love Fest. Secondly, there were a lot of obstacles along the way. And by the end, looking back, we could see that the obstacles actually created a better outcome to the event than we could have predicted had they not come up. They really just like ended up making something more beautiful than what we had planned. Now, if you did listen to last episode about problem solving, you'll know that I tried to use an obstacle and strategy method for problem solving. And I told myself I was not ready for it. It was not the right tool for the situation when I was in the middle of the challenge. And I and I said to myself, and I told you on that podcast, I know that in a couple of days or in a, you know, in the future, I will be able to use that tool. And what's really amazing is that looking back at it, I can see exactly how the obstacle was a new path forward that created new possibilities, how everything that did happen that was challenging was actually perfect for the situation. But it's just a good example of how sometimes the tools work for us in the moment and sometimes they don't. We got to choose the right tool for where we are, where our nervous system is, where what we need that day. The tools almost always work in retrospect. You can look backwards and know how obstacles create new pathways forward. You can look backward and know what you learned from a situation. But sometimes those tools aren't the right ones just for the moment that you're in. You got to pick and choose. And lastly, it's just an embodiment of what we're gonna talk about in the third part of our podcast today, which is that pushing through what's hard, doing things that don't feel easy, and getting out there to try new things, pushing past that motivational triad ends up creating experiences that we would never trade in our lives. So you'll hear a little bit more about how you can reflect on that might be true for yourself in your own life at the end of this episode. All right, secondly, big announcements. We have completely restructured and redesigned our offerings in the bloom room, in the Moxie Mastermind, and in some new offerings that we have based on everyone's feedback. We have been iterating for two years running the Bloom Room. The Bloom Room has gone through multiple iterations. And with multiple rounds of feedback, we have improved all of the content in the Bloom Room. It all got really great feedback, and we tweaked and tightened it. The things that we've gotten more feedback around are about how people can most easily access the material that I teach and the stuff that I provide. So our announcement for the coming year is three different pathways for you to walk, three different ways that we have created learning materials, coaching materials, and group coaching experiences and communities that meet you where you are in your life and meet your needs. The first one is the Bloom Room. The Bloom Room has been a weekly coaching program that creates community. And the thing we hear most often from the current participants of the Bloom Room is that its biggest value is both the content that they get weekly in the actual live session and the connection to community. That it feels like every single week a place where they can come back to their best selves, recenter, learn one new tool per week, one new concept, and then learn as many more as they want because of the library of materials that are available to them. But the most significant thing that people get out of that bloom room membership is the actual community. So the people that show up there consistently every week are the ones that just love being there with other people. They consistently say that watching other people get coached in the bloom room is as valuable or more valuable than getting coached themselves, which they all do sometimes, but that both things are just as valuable, that being in a community of like-minded people, a supportive community that's always there and has their backs and always has a new, fresh thing to inspire their week is super valuable. So that bloom room next year is going to be available with the updated material, all of the foundational course material as self-guided content. So that's the first thing that's available in January. We are launching all of that new material. So if you are interested in getting in the Bloom Room, get in now so that you will be there for that initial launch in January of that new material. Bloom Room is meeting two to three times a month so that there's a little break, but is always available through a digital connection point. So that's the first announcement is this whole new updated framework, format, and content for the Bloom Room. The second update is that we are launching the Moxie Mastermind Experience, which is a six-month program for women who have an idea for how the world can be a better place that they want to make real. In this program, it's a six-month program that has this amazing material for how to make ideas real. You will learn the women who are in the Moxie Mastermind will be in a cohort of women, like-minded women, with weekly coaching, weekly digital support, an in-person retreat, one-on-one coaching a couple times during the six months with me, and the course material, access to all of the foundational course material, all of my other programs, but also the make ideas real course. The make ideas real course is the evolution of all of my work, and it is absolutely amazing. It is about how to turn an idea into a real thing and everything that your brain will do along the way as you try to do that. So I will guide everyone in the Moxie mastermind through that course material with support and in community and in-person retreats and touch points and coaching. So that program is for women who have a really solid idea that they want to make real. Now, if you know a woman who has an idea that they want to make real, get her in touch with me quick because we are lining up the first crew of Moxie Mastermind participants. We will have cohorts every six months, but this first group is really special with some really incredible opportunities. So send her my way. Or if it's you and you're a woman with an idea that you want to make real, come my way. One last thing is that if you know a woman that has a few different ideas but doesn't know which one, or if you are a woman with a few different ideas but you don't know which one you want to make real, come my way and I will help you figure it out and decide if it's time for you for the Moxie mastermind. The third exciting update that I want to share is because of a lot of feedback that people have given about wanting to participate in my programs, wanting to be able to access my material, but not having the time during their workday, during their week to be able to join the coaching program, or feeling like being in a coaching program isn't their favorite way to participate, where they actually prefer to work through things self-paced and join meetups every once in a while, but it's just not their bag to like be in a community every single week. I have actually created self-guided options for all of my courses. So if you're interested in the foundations course, which is the basic material to use your mind to work for you, use your cognitive thinking skills and your neuroplastic capabilities to manage your mind to work for you, not against you every day. That's the first skill. The second skill is emotional management, making your feelings and the processing of your feelings something that comes easily to you, that you know exactly how to do so your feelings don't overwhelm you, but they work for you and not against you as well. Thirdly, self-hypnosis, so that you can use your unconscious mind as a support system. Those are our three main tools that we use in the Foundations course. And then, secondly, the second part of it is that we look at your existing belief systems, your value systems, your true desires, and we look at the regenerative design of your life right now. What are all of the areas that your energy goes out into? And are they reciprocal? What are the ways that you're getting energy back from everything in your life? At the end of that course, you will choose three different areas that you want to make improvements in and you prioritize them. What's the first priority area, the second, and the third? And from there, you have the option to move into the Make Ideas Real course. That also has a self-guided option where you can just work your way through that course after the foundations course. So you get an email in your inbox once a week with your new video, your new instructions, your new assignment. And that teaches you how to make that idea for the area of your life that you want to make real into a real thing. I also have courses in relationships, in time whispering, in the art of self-loving, and in some a couple of other things that are coming out a little bit later next year that are all available to purchase and experience, all a carte. But if you're in the bloom room, you get access to some of those. And if you're in Moxie Mastermind, you get access to everything. So those are all the opportunities that are coming next year. There are three choose your own adventure paths. One is a community that has your back, that's always there to support you and inspire you week to week. This and to teach you the foundations, foundational concepts of emotional management, cognitive thought management, and self-coaching and self-hypnosis. And then how to really look at your belief systems, your values, your desires, and prioritize the areas of your life where you want to make a change. That's the first adventure. The second adventure is self-guided courses where you can choose the foundational course to work your way through on your own. The Make Ideas Real course, the relationships course, the time whispering course. You can choose any of those as they come out and work through them at your own pace. And thirdly is the Moxie Mastermind, which is a six-month mastermind program with an in-person retreat and in-person coaching for women who have ideas for how to make the world a better place that they want support and community as they make them real. So that gives lots of high-level support, any kind of tools, resources, budgets, work plans, all that stuff that folks might need as they're making ideas real. So those are all my announcements. Please send come my way. Let me know if you're interested in the Moxie Mastermind or any of these other opportunities and send your people my way. We are about to open doors on many of these things. And you will see if you are on my social media, if you uh are on my email list, you'll get the pings and know exactly when these things are rolling out and exactly what fun bonuses there are for different times of year and when you buy these things and when you participate in them. So those are the announcements I have. Now, on to our podcast content for today. We are talking about the motivational triad. When I talk about the motivational triad, this is not new, a new concept. This is actually a pretty, pretty foundational concept in psychology that our brains have an outdated operating system that prioritizes three things. The first thing is to pursue pleasure, the second is to avoid pain. And the third is to do what's easy. So that's the operating system that our brain defaults to. It exists this way because we evolved to conserve energy and propagate our species, to survive as the human species, right? And while this really worked well to get us to where we are today, a thriving human species in many ways, it our brains just never went through an operating system update to match the needs of our current world. We did survive, but there are many ways in which this outdating operating system keeps us stuck and keeps us from actually thriving. So, in general, this old operating system has a net negative impact on our lives. When we let ourselves default to that operating system and react to the world in general in these three ways: pursuing pleasure, avoiding pain, doing what's easy, we're defaulting to the motivational triad, it creates a net negative and it gets us further and further away from the dreams we have for ourselves and our lives and the ideas we want to make real. So let's break this down. First, our brain wants to do what's easy. Doing what's easy does not involve habit changes. Doing what's easy does not involve putting ourselves out there to date people or grow or evolve or try new things. It definitely does not support us to pursue dreams or chase goals. Doing what's easy includes staying inside, sitting on the couch, replaying our old patterns, doing things that feel safe and comfortable and that have no risk involved. The second thing, the second part of this triangle is to avoid pain. And when I say pain, I want you to think of pain as any discomfort. So this leg of the triad is the one that's responsible for things like people pleasing, doing whatever everybody expects of us instead of the discomfort of doing what's important to us, instead of the discomfort of believing in our dreams, believing in what we want, believing in who we want to become in our lives, and taking actions that risk other people's perceived or real disapproval, that risk being rejected by somebody in our lives or having them be confused about what we're doing or what we're up to. That avoiding pain is responsible for just staying stuck and people pleasing. Avoiding pain also is responsible for avoiding taking any action when self-doubt comes up. Anytime we do something new, we're going to have self-doubt. That is 100% expected and part of the process. That avoiding pain, part of the triangle, also is responsible for keeping us stuck because when we're going to try new things, some things will work, some things won't work in our attempts. We will iterate, and the brain might see that process of iteration, which is in actuality natural and very, very necessary in order to make any idea real, in order to make any change, in order to make any progress. The brain will instead of seeing that as natural and necessary, the automatic brain, the motivational triad, will see that as painful. Any kind of iteration, any kind of, you know, trying, noticing what doesn't work and trying again. The automatic brain, the motivational triad sees that as a horrible thing. So it will keep us stuck. It will not want to iterate. It will not touch a want to risk trying something that does not work, even when we know nothing works 100% right away. So that avoiding pain also will keep us from changing our habits, our relationships, our communication style. It will keep us from setting boundaries. Because all of those things can feel a little hard, can feel a little tricky. The third part of the motivational triad is to pursue pleasure. So that's like doing anything that gives us a dopamine hit, like social media scrolling, watching kitten videos, getting likes on our posts or our stories, eating sugar, drinking alcohol, watching Netflix, watching shows, anything to get that dopamine hit. Sometimes the dopamine hit comes from like freaky stuff, from reading the news, but it gives us a little hit of something. So you see, when I say the motivational triad used to help us survive, you can see how it did. It kept us safe in a cave, eating enough to keep us in to keep it to help us survive, keep us procreating, avoiding things that would get us in danger. It helped the human species make it through the eras where there were real predators and we were the prey. But that's not the era that we're in, right? Right now, it has a net negative impact. And you can see that, right? Because I don't know about you, but zero of the end of life stories that I read talk about people who were proud of a life where they sat on the couch. All of them say they wish they had taken more risks. They wish they had followed their dreams. They wish they had built relationships and stuck with them through the ups and downs, spent more time with their people, done the hard thing of saying no to something so that they could prioritize being with their people. All of them say they wanted to live a life that was true to them. They wish they had been more true to themselves instead of meeting everybody else's expectations. They wish they had done less people pleasing. None of those things can be done from the couch with a bag of chips in a remote. None of those things come from the motivational triad. So today we're looking at how they might be showing up for you. So think of a goal that you have or something you're trying to create in your life, something you're trying to change, something you want. This could be a project, it could be personal or professional, it could be a habit or a relationship change or some growth you want to go through, you want to find a relationship, change how you communicate. Could be a big move or a little move that you're making in your life, a community you're starting, anything that's a goal for you. What is the outcome that you want? Let's call that your intended outcome. So if you think about that goal, what's your intended outcome? Really do that work of thinking about it right now. Once you have that intended outcome in mind, what do you want to have happen? Now answer three questions. Where are you avoiding pain? Where are you doing what's easy? And where are you pursuing pleasure? And how is that getting in the way of that intended outcome? So, how is your motivational triad? Welcome to being a human with a human brain, because we all have one. We all have a triad back there trying to take the wheel. Where is it showing up for you? Because it's one thing to know these concepts, but it really doesn't help unless you apply them to yourselves. So, where is that motivational triad getting in the way, creating a block between you and your intended outcome? So, we talked about this with my students this week, and I thought I'd give you some of the examples that were true for them. They really loved this exercise. One of them said that motivational triad is getting in the way because when she travels and she's with extended family, she gets really nervous about meeting other people's expectations of her parenting, that she gets a little overaware of other people's judgment, whether that's perceived or whether it's real or not, whether she's making it up in her head that everybody's judging her, or whether they actually are. She gets really focused on that instead of focused on her actual child. Another student said they were hiding from some areas of their life that feel hard right now by being super productive in one specific area that feels safe. I love this example because sometimes doing what's easy can kind of masquerade as something really positive. This student was doing something that felt positive and was like, you know, meeting a goal in one area of their life. But they also realized they were being overproductive in that area and using that to hide from everything else, which was actually just avoiding pain and doing what felt actually a little easier. So overworking is an example of how that shows up for a lot of people. For another student, it was eating sugar, falling back into that old habit that they'd overcome really successfully in the past, but in this stressful time, they were falling back into that easy thing, pursuing pleasure, eating sugar. Yet another student experienced this and saw that she was serving her current clients, doing lots of work, giving away free content, and serving her current clients instead of doing outreach to do serve more clients, instead of doing business development because it felt hard. So focusing on the thing in front of her felt easier. She was avoiding the pain of doing something new, doing something that felt harder by doing the thing in front of her that felt easy and good. And lastly, some of my clients were seeing family during the holidays, and they were doing what was easy by going along with passive aggressive behavior. And instead of being direct about it, and instead of stating and holding their boundaries, they were kind of going along with it. And it created a net negative impact. They were exhausted and bummed and kind of really stressed out by the end of the holiday season because they didn't hold their boundaries and they didn't speak up when there was passive aggressive behavior going on. So those are some examples. What is it for you? What is that intended outcome? And how is the motivational triad getting in the way for you? Because once you see how it's getting in the way, we can upshift into your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that can think about things in advance and plan different ways of acting that are more in line with your priorities. So once you see how avoiding pain, doing what's easy, and pursuing pleasure is getting in the way of your intended outcome, then you can rewind and imagine yourself facing the same circumstances you're facing now. And instead of facing them by letting your motivational triad lead, come up with a plan for how you want to act that's in line with your intended outcome instead. What could you do? How could you feel, think, and act that will lead to the outcome that you want instead of having this net negative impact on your life? A method that matches your intended outcome. By doing that, you will prep your brain to actually act in that way, to actually meet the circumstance and handle it in a way that leads to your outcome. So, some examples of what my students came up with were for the one that was avoiding doing business development and doing marketing and outreach, she planned into her calendar selling her programs a few days a week and did some habit stacking so that she could do something that she enjoyed right next to doing the selling. So she could start to develop some good associations with a selling and make it easy for herself. The student who was eating sugar and defaulting to that old habit put a put a reminder on their fridge that was kind of a joke that made them laugh. It was a funny drawing. And every time they went to open the fridge and they would see that, it was a reminder to drop down into their body and notice what feeling they were avoiding that was having them want to eat sugar to get present with whatever was going on instead of avoiding that feeling with eating sugar and getting a dopamine head. The student that was avoiding the judgment and perceiving judgment around her when she was uh kind of thinking about her parenting style during the break. Came up with a strategy of talking through the parenting plan that she had with her actual child and her partner. She also planned in a self-care routine in the morning so that she would get exercise and meditate and prep and prime her brain to remember that her kid is her priority, that she can't know what other people are thinking, that it's none of their business anyway, that whether they have judgment or not, anybody else's judgment of her parenting is only a reflection of them. And that she gets to be in charge of her own parenting and her own kid. It's none of her business what people think about her. So think of your intended outcome. What is a plan that you can put in place now to handle the circumstances that are coming up in the coming weeks in the way that you want to? Instead of doing what's easy, avoiding pain or seeking pleasure. Once you have that plan, envision yourself acting that way. Put in anything that you can into your calendar to actually execute on that plan. How can you remind yourself to react and act in that way? One of my students put a note to themselves on their lock screen of their phone. Somebody did a drawing on the fridge. Somebody set up a calendar event to remind her to meet with her partner. Somebody else put little blocks in her calendar to do the business development. Somebody else, both a couple of students, use habit stacking to support these changes. What are the ways that you can set yourself up for success to act, think, and feel in ways that support your intended outcome? Let's get out of the cave, get off the couch, set down the Pringles and think from our pre-frontal cortex so we can live lives that we're super proud of. Because the world needs you, the world needs your idea. We invite you to come on in to the Bloom Room, to our self-paced courses, to the Moxie Mastermind. We are all about helping you get your unique ideas out there so that the world can be a better place. So reach out, ask your questions, join one of our programs, and enjoy your reflection on the motivational triad this week. That's what I've got for you this week. And I will see you next week. 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.