Bloom Your Mind

Ep 161: Thinking Yourself Into Better Relationships

• Marie McDonald

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Relationships are not actually about other people.
They are about the thoughts we think about other people.

And that is incredible news.

Because it means that even when another person doesn’t change, even when circumstances don’t shift, even when history is complicated… you still have agency. You can change the entire emotional climate of a relationship by changing the way you think, feel, and show up inside of it.

In this episode, we explore why it only takes one person in a relationship shifting their inner world to transform the dynamic between two people. And we walk through exactly how that works at the level of thoughts, emotions, nervous system, behavior, and connection.

You’ll learn why:

  • Thoughts create our body language, tone, and the emotional safety or distance in our relationships
  • How all of that becomes contagious in relationship
  • We break down how negative thought loops become self-fulfilling prophecies
  • How those thoughts quietly shape our body language and the other person’s subconscious response to us
  • How thoughts gather more evidence that looks like them. 
  • How people who believe they are liked tend to be more likable
  • Couples who believe their relationship is special tend to create relationships that actually are
  • Take responsibility for your side of the street
  • Practical tools for cleaning up our side of the street in relationships, so that we have have more love, connection and joy

Relationships are everything, and you have far more power in them than you were ever taught.

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 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. Hey everybody, welcome to episode number 161 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. I'm super excited about this podcast, both because it is the start of a series that I am doing on relationships. It is about to be February and everybody's mind is on love. My mind's on love all the time. Let's get real. But I really coach a lot of people on relationships because no matter if what people come to me for, we're all in relationships. And eventually, whether someone is building a business or making a big move in their life, whatever it is that they're doing, they want coaching on their relationships. And I have tons of people come to me and ask me to coach them on relationships or actually to coach them and their partner. And uh so I do it because I love it and I study it a lot, and my relationships are the most important thing to me in my life. So I practice my tools a lot in those relationships. So I'll first just say that next month I am running a program that is a class on relationships. It's four classes long, and it is called Love and Moxie. But what's really cool is Moxie is like an XO in the middle. You like it? Can you picture it? Moxie, it's actually an OX, but you know, like kisses and hugs. So fun. So if you're interested in taking that class, reach out to me. You will see it on Instagram, um, available on Instagram next week for purchase. And then it is free to people in the Moxie, and it's actually free to the Bloom Room too this time because they love the relationships content and I want them to have it. So if you're interested in the relationships course, um, you'll see it on Instagram and I will send something out via email. So if it's you're on my email list or Instagram, find me there. And if not, try to get in touch with me and let me know because it's gonna be good. And if you can't make the time, they're all gonna be recorded and sent out. So no big deal. Also, good news. I I worked out for the first time in weeks this morning. I am, if you've been listening to me for a while, you know I work out every morning during the weekdays, five days a week, and I've done that for years. And then after my husband and I renewed our vows in November, it was just like thing after thing. So that was the last week of November, and we, you know, were running all over the place that week, and then Thanksgiving happened, and then it was the holidays, and so much stuff was happening. Everyone got sick, travel, and then January hit, and it was travel, travel, travel, birthdays, all the things. So the weirdest, wildest thing is I haven't worked out in like five or six weeks. That's not normal for me. So I did it this morning, and here's what I wanted to say. I didn't make anything out of the fact that I hadn't worked out in six weeks. No big deal. It's not like this is a rut to get out of, it's not a big hole. I didn't do any of that, which made it a lot easier to get out of it. And the hack that I use, someone in the bloom room was just asking me about this this morning because she wants to get up early and she's like, I always talk myself out of it. And I'm like, I feel you. And what I say to myself is when I wake up at five, I'm like, oh, this is gonna feel so good in an hour and a half. I'm like, you love it when you get up. You love it because I meditate for like 40 minutes or something instead of like five, and then I work out and it's the best. It's like my favorite part of my day, except for of course seeing my kids and my libs. But it's really good. And so that is the thought that I use that you can steal if you want to. I basically fast forward an hour and a half and tell myself or an hour and 45 minutes and fast forward to that feeling that I'm gonna have upon completing it, which is like, yes, that feeling of like, mm, this day's gonna be awesome. I like got all my systems in line to be great today. So that's the thought that I practice. And also, if it's really hard for you, just get up. Like, don't, you're like, yeah, you're making that sound easy. No, this is what I mean. Don't tell yourself you have to get up and work out and meditate and and and just get up and just make a cup of coffee or tea. Like, make getting up the goal. Because most likely you'll end up, once you're up, doing one of those things, working out a little bit, exercising, whatever your goal is for the morning, journaling. But don't make yourself do all of it at first. Just say the only thing I have to do is get up, make myself coffee, go be cozy. And either that will stack and your habits will start habits stacking, and you'll be able to pile up on top of the coffee, maybe a little meditation, exercise, whatever, or you'll get up and you'll tell yourself all I'm doing is making coffee, and then you'll end up doing something. Anyways, those are my tools. All right, today we're going into relationships. Right now is a very exciting time. There's that relationships course coming, and also the moxie is kicking off in a few weeks, and the bloom room just started a new round of stuff. You can join anytime, but just let me know if you want in on any of that. We are doing big work in the world. All right, so relationships, my friends, are truly only one thing. They are the thoughts that we have about the people in our life. What? Yes, I'm serious. Today I'm gonna tell you all the reasons that this proves itself to be true. Why all relationships are our thoughts about other people, and why this is great news because it gives you so much agency over relationships that maybe you thought were like a lost cause or out of your control or spinning out of control, whatever, sliding through your fingers. The truth is that it only takes one person in a relationship, changing themselves and their approach, their energy, their thoughts, and it can totally change the whole relationship. It really I've seen it time and time again. I've experienced it myself. It really can generate from one person, doesn't have to take both. And I'm gonna give you simple practices at the end to kind of double-click on what you're thinking about the people you love, check it out, see if it's what you want to be thinking. Once I share with you how this all works, once you see how your thoughts about the people in your life are truly what your relationship with them is, your relationship is just your thoughts about them, and how to make some simple shifts that can open up so much love and connection in your life, because that is what I want for you. So when I say that our relationships are really just our thoughts about someone, what do I mean? Let's look at this, shall we? So, thoughts are the thing that you experience about a person. That's it. They're walking around out in the world, doing what they do, being who they be, and we have thoughts about them that impact our whole system. So we're gonna look at how that works. But the cool thing is that we have total agency over how we're thinking. The thoughts that we are thinking about the people in our lives are creating some results in our relationships that maybe we don't want in some of our relationships, and that we can absolutely change. We tell ourselves that we can't feel any differently unless the person acts differently, but logically that is just not true. We know that because our thoughts create our feelings, and our thoughts are up to us. So we can't control the way someone else is acting or what they're saying, but we can control our thoughts just because we think it, it doesn't make it true, and we can change our thoughts because thoughts are subjective. We know they're subjective because we know this, because we don't all feel the same way about people. I mean, let me take an extreme example to illustrate this. Take a political figure. We might feel really differently about that person than someone that we know. I know you got someone on your mind, and we are both experiencing us and that other person, we're experiencing the same political figure, the same person. The way that person acts, the thing they say, what they look like, those are all just circumstances, those are factual. But we feel totally differently about that same exact person because we're thinking different thoughts about them than the other person is thinking. Do you feel me? And that is true of everyone in our life. Every person in our life is a neutral entity. They just exist. We interact with them, we experience them, we observe them, and we have thoughts about them. What happens next is those thoughts create how we feel. And how we feel determines a lot. With that political figure example, we feel really different things when we think about them than somebody else feels. We might be filled with dread when we look at the same political figure that fills someone else with hope. Those are like opposite emotional experiences, and that's because we're having opposite thoughts about the person that they are. Okay, so our thoughts create our feelings, and our thoughts are our relationship to that political figure. That's how we experience them. That's it. Our relationship with that political figure is just our thoughts about them. So, in a less extreme and perhaps less polarizing example, we have thoughts about everyone in our life. So, based on the thoughts we think, we have feelings about those people. What's funny is that we often think the way we feel about someone is necessary because of how they're acting or what they're doing, what they're saying. Like we should feel angry with someone when they act out of line in our perception. Like that's what their action deserves. They deserve that we they deserve our anger. And what's funny is that the only person who ever experiences our feeling is us. Our feelings only happen inside our body. Our experience is our feeling. They never feel it. So if we're angry at them, they don't feel anger, only we do. So if you feel love, you get the benefits. If you're grateful for someone, that's a payoff for you. If you feel compassion and set boundaries with someone instead of staying angry at them, that benefits you, not them. It probably benefits them too, but mostly it benefits you. If you're angry, you get the cortisol, the spinning mind, the sleepless nights, all of it. Your anger only negatively impacts you as an emotion. So whatever we're thinking about someone leads to the feeling inside that we experience, and that impacts our health, our physical mental well-being, in the moment, our focus, our productivity, all of it. Which leads us to the next reason that our relationships are really just our thoughts about another person. So thoughts and feelings create how you act. So if we think that someone's being really inconsiderate and out of line, for example, because they're grumpy, we'll feel frustrated, and that will lead us to act either inconsiderate and out of line towards them or towards ourselves. Whereas if we think that they seem like they're having a hard day, that's our thought. And they could use some gentleness, we'll feel something like compassion or curiosity and we'll act really differently. So our thoughts about somebody else lead to how we act towards them. And how we act opens us up to connection and closeness with people or the opposite. It closes that down. So if we want connection and love and closeness, we have to act in a way that invites those three things. In order to act that way, we have to choose to think thoughts about the people around us that create feelings and actions in us that lead to connection. Are you with me? So we're gonna talk about how to do that in just a minute. But first, let's look at a little bit more of the can of worms of how our thoughts tumbleweed into what we're creating in our relationships. All right. So negative feelings give us body language that communicates that we're not open to connecting. So if we're thinking a negative thought about somebody and we have that negative feeling, that is more likely to give someone else that we're in a relationship with an automatic thought in reaction to how we're acting. Whether conscious or subconscious, it's gonna give them that automatic thought that they should back off or that we're not interested, or we're not safe, or we're angry. And so whatever we're thinking creates a circumstance that makes it more likely that they're gonna disconnect. Okay, it's like a tumbleweed. And a lot of that happens on the subconscious level because our 75% nonverbal communication is talking to their 75% nonverbal communication, and we're having a whole conversation subconsciously that's like an animal conversation picking up on each other's body language and tone, and that is not happening in words. We might not even be aware that it's happening. We just feel funky, something feels off. We're picking up on a vibe. So if we clean up our thinking, and we not only clean up the way we feel and the things we do and say, but also the things we're saying nonverbally that we might not even realize, that will create much more of an opportunity of an environment that invites connection with our people when we clean up our thoughts. Because if we're thinking negative things about people and just faking it and acting in a way like everything's good, they will pick up on all that on a subconscious level. So we gotta clean up our thoughts. Have you ever had uh the experience where you're like someone as like, Are you okay? And you're like, yeah, and you realize you were making a weird facial expression you had no awareness of. Your negative thoughts translate to your facial expressions, your tone, your vibe, your body language, and it communicates for you. And when that happens, somebody else picks up on it, sees it, and it gives them a negative thought that creates a negative feeling in them, causes them to act in a way that matches that negative thought I'm feeling, and it's we're bouncing off of each other back and forth like a terrible Badman game. Another wild thing is that thoughts are like tumbleweeds that gather more thoughts like them to their side. So a thought creates a feeling in our body that ignites a neural bundle in our brain. Okay, and that neural bundle is like associated with that emotion. I like to think of it like a magnet. It then, if we're feeling that negative emotion, that negative emotion is gonna collect things, pulling those things towards it. So the feeling, what it's collecting is it's it's collecting more thoughts that will keep us in that feeling. Especially if we go there easily, if it's a familiar negative feeling that's triggered easily. So let me give you an example if you're not understanding what I'm saying. Okay, so you walk into the house and you're like, it's a mess in here. The people that live here are so inconsiderate. Maybe it's your kids or your partner or your roommates. It's a mess. They're so inconsiderate. Two things are gonna happen. That thought, they're so inconsiderate, it's gonna make you feel a certain way, maybe frustrated, and you're gonna think a bunch of other thoughts that keep you in the feeling of frustration. Yeah, and they didn't turn the lights off last night when I was going to bed. And they're not only inconsiderate but messy. What slobs? Who lives like this? You're gonna think a bunch of other thoughts. They're probably late too. That makes you feel frustrated. That's what the neural bundle does. It wants to stay in that emotion, especially if the emotion is familiar. But not only that, our brain is also magnetic in the way where it's gonna look for all of the supporting evidence for the thought. So if we tell ourselves they're so inconsiderate, we're gonna look for all of the evidence for them being inconsiderate. And it might come from a long time ago. Like, remember that time a year ago when they forgot to leave my car keys out for me? See? I told me so. So inconsiderate, right? Do you do that? Can you relate? You know, our brains like really go on a rampage and just keep ourselves in that zone. Our brains and our bodies want to stay in the feeling and and gather all the evidence. But hey, hey, hey, the same works for good thoughts. What if we're like, ugh, that sweetheart, they're so special, they've got a lot going on right now. Maybe we like feel some love instead. And then there's a cascade of loving thoughts. They're working so hard, they're so special, they care so much, they're working so hard. They probably left the house in a hurry. I want to make some changes here to how we keep the house. But I'm gonna do that in a gentle way because I can tell they've got a lot going on, right? We can get the same result by thinking they're probably working so hard. They're probably doing their best and they're probably working so hard that it created this mess instead of they're so inconsiderate. If we're thinking they're working so hard, we're gonna think like thoughts to that. Oh, they are working hard. They did me so many favors recently. Look at all the other ways they're working so hard. Look at all the laundry they folded or the calls they've been on. I wonder how I'm maybe not noticing what's going on for them. So we can just still ask for change, but we'll do it from a much more connected place that creates more of what we want in our relationships. Last thing I want to show before we head to the end here is that thoughts create projection in relationships. If we're thinking that person is so cold, we're probably gonna act, they're so cold, we're gonna act whatever, turned off, resentful, and we're gonna act cold towards them. We project coldness on them when we're thinking that about them. If we think they don't like me, we might shut down and avoid them, which makes we're acting like we don't like them, and we don't like ourselves very much. So that's why relationships are like mirrors, right? Is because whatever we're thinking, we're acting out all the time. And what we act out then becomes the environment that's cultivating our relationship. It's how we're treating the other person and what's inspiring their treatment of us. All right. So I've really laid a case out here for why relationships are really just your thoughts about another person. You think I want to touch them and you touch them, but that starts from a thought. You think they're so funny and it makes you laugh. That's a thought about them. Everything in your relationship is all about your thinking about that person. So let me show you a couple studies that show some other ways this is true. So I've mentioned this article before, but I loved it because it's so illustrative of these things that I teach. There was a study in the Atlanta called Super Friends, and it studied what made the people that make friends the easiest, what they all had in common. And it was that they believe it's easy for them to make friends. It's just a thought they have about everybody. Everybody's a friend I haven't met yet. So they act like friendly. And curious and interested, and they're not all up in their head. So they make friends really easily. One of my other favorites is one study showed that couples who last the longest, one of the like three core components is that they think they're special. They're like, we have something special here. And so they end up with something special that lasts a long time. They treat it like something special and so it lasts. They end up having something special because they think it's special. How cool is that? All right, we can think of all the ways that this is true. How our thoughts become prophecies in our relationships because of all the things we talked about so far. Think about these examples. My mom and I are not close. You can take that through the loop of how that makes someone feel and act to create a lack of closeness. What about this one? My business partner doesn't think I'm good at this, right? I want you to imagine how this loops for every single one of them. This is like the application part where you apply what I've taught you. Apply it. We're having trouble right now in this relationship. Okay, how does that become a prophecy? How does that make someone feel and act? Avoidant, combative? We're having trouble. Try to focus in on the problems to fix instead of on having good times together. I'm not doing a good job as a mom. Oof, I see that one all the time. Parents get hard on themselves and then they are impatient and they don't show up as the parent they want to be. We're growing apart. Oh my gosh. How does that manifest itself? That person and I don't get along. He just doesn't see me. They don't want me around. Can you see how all of these are self-fulfilling? And the opposites can be true. I've told this before on the podcast too, but my sister-in-law once said to me, We're just really close, you and me. And I was like, Oh, we're really close. And then we got really close. Like she said it, and then it became my reality. Our words create realities for other people. So because of that projection, the things we've covered, which is how we project what we're thinking on other people, we act like it when we're thinking it about them. How our thoughts create our feelings, our actions, and then the results actually prove the thought true. They're like thought prophecies. How contagious our thoughts and feelings and actions are, both because of our nonverbal communication and because of those thought cycles that create how we act and then inspire action and thoughts, feelings, and actions in other people. And then through that evidence collection cycle and the like thought magnets, where the neural bundles are collecting more negative thoughts, right? Or more positive ones. But hey, we can choose some alternative ways to go. So first, take responsibility for your side of the straight in the relationship. Take responsibility for the space between you. Go first. All you can control is what you can control. That means your thoughts, your feelings, your actions. Remember, thought prophecies and think. Is what I'm thinking what I want to come true in my relationship? Is like the thought that I'm having that's so negative? Is that what I want? Because I can't, I've already gone through all the reasons why it's gonna come true if I keep thinking it. Is it what I want to project on them? Is it what I want to make contagious so we're acting like this? Is it what I want to manifest in my relationship? If not, let's pause and reframe. You can do that by looking for what you like. It's the simplest, easiest thing. I'm gonna look for what I like. What do you like in the other person? No matter how messy the house is, what do you like about what they've done recently? You can measure by the gain. Look how far you've come. Instead of looking at the lack between the present moment and perfection or what your ideal is, refocus on all the gains that you've made in the relationship so far that will help you ask for what you need in a clear, clean way that focuses on compassion. What about this? What would your person deserve to be thought about if they were being thought about? Like if you had this perspective that's like, I love them so much, what do they actually deserve in terms of the way that their partner thinks about them? Or like, what if you were their parent looking at this beautiful child? Like, what would their parent think of them, or their best friend, or some benevolent person that saw the best in them, or assumed the best intention and assumed that they're doing their best? What would that person think? Be that person. My favorite is that I feel like it's a tremendous responsibility to love the people in my life because I've got a front row seat. So if it's my responsibility to love them, what perspective do I want to take right now? And then of course, if it was me, how would I want to be thought about? Or lastly, so simply, what would love do? How would love look at this situation? From there, when we really reframe our perspectives, we can make clean requests, set clean boundaries, clearly differentiate between what's ours and what's theirs. Relationships are everything. None of us exist outside of them. So let's do our best to create what we want. All right, love and Moxie XOXO is coming in February. A four-day course, good for any relationships, relationship basics. So sign up next week. It's at 9 a.m. Pacific, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday of the second week of February. But you can sign up next week and get in on that course. It's gonna be super fun. It'll be sent out. If you miss it, we're gonna start with the basics for setting up a love fest in your relationship. The basics for just setting yourself up to succeed. Second, we're gonna talk about how to keep your side of the street clean. Third, we're gonna do a whole day on conflict resolution, not a day, an hour on conflict resolution. And then lastly, we're gonna wrap up with the daily habits and practices to bring the Moxie back and keep it fresh. All right, that's what I've got for you today. 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.