Ep 169: Fighting For vs. Fighting Against

What if the thing you're rallying against is actually a signal pointing toward something you deeply value? In this episode, Marie explores how to reframe your energy — moving from fighting against what you don't want, toward fighting for the life, relationships, and work you actually want to create. With personal stories, client examples, and research from the Gottman Institute, this episode is a practical invitation to find your North Star and align your actions with it.

In this episode: 

• The road trip update: Marie recaps a Big Sur road trip with her 9- and 13-year-old, designed entirely by the kids — and why these trips are a deliberate practice in flexibility, problem-solving, and connection.
• The retro phone story: Marie accidentally orders a vintage audio guestbook instead of a landline. What starts as a mistake turns into a surprisingly magical idea for her upcoming Moxie Retreat — a live example of "the obstacle is the way."
• Fighting for vs. fighting against: The core framework: our brains are wired to threat-scan and focus on what we don't want. But when we flip the question — "What am I actually fighting for?" — we generate more motivation, alignment, and energy to act.
• The musician client: A session with a client who listed everything he wanted to fix. Marie redirects the conversation toward his creative vision — and the "problems" begin to dissolve on their own.
• The Gottman Institute research: Couples who focused on building connection with each other did far better than those who focused only on conflict resolution. What you focus on grows — in relationships and beyond.
• Applications across life: Marie walks through how to flip the framework in four areas: health habits, relationships, environmental/social concerns, and burnout at work.
• A personal story: criticism and clarity: When a trusted person criticized Marie's work, she initially wanted to protect herself. By asking "what am I fighting for?", she found her answer — and a firm, values-aligned boundary.

This week's invitation: Where are you fighting against something right now? Flip it. What are you actually fighting for? Articulate the vision — the life, relationship, health, or work you want to create — and let that become your North Star.

Mentioned in this episode

• Book: The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday
• Research: The Gottman Institute / The Love Lab — couples & connection studies
• Concept: Ikigai — Japanese concept of life purpose
• Product: After the Tone — vintage audio guestbook rentals
• Retreat: Moxie Retreat, La Jolla — sailboats, private chef, coaching (next one: October)

How to connect with Marie:

• On the Web | The Local Bloom
• Instagram: @the.bloom.coach
• All Things Marie on LinkTree

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

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 168 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. You know what's been so cool is the listenership, I guess you say, has gone up so much in the past few months, and it's been interesting to hear all the new people in the Bloom Room and all the new people in the Moxie Mastermind and other people saying, hey, I've been sending these episodes out to everybody because they helped me so much. And then really seeing there's like hundreds of new listeners in different countries and it's all over the world, and it's so cool. So welcome if you are new here. We are so happy to have you. This is work that we are so passionate about, and I am so honored to be your host and have you as a guest. I did not record a podcast episode last week because I was on a road trip with my kids, and I do this and I talk about it on the podcast sometimes or twice a year at least. I let my kids design a road trip where they choose the location, they design the stops, and we go for it, the three of us. Sometimes my husband flies out and joins us places when he can get away from his own work and world and music to do that. And then what happens is when things go wrong, you know, or not at don't go as planned, my kids and I solve it together. So we're kind of generating the tools of flexibility, problem solving, and all that good stuff as we have adventures along the way. We're super into Crazy Eights right now. So I have a nine-year-old and a 13-year-old, and we brought a deck of cards everywhere with us. And Crazy Eights was so much fun to play at every restaurant where we were waiting for food and in hotel rooms. We played it everywhere. We played it in the car where the while the car was charging. It was delightful. So we went to Monterey and we drove up Big Sur and stayed a couple three days in Monterey and did electric bikes in the aquarium. And then they asked to drive longer, which shocked me by going through Big Sur on the way back home again. So we did it twice. It was so fun. And they came home, and my husband said, gosh, the kids are so energized and happy and magnetic right now, just like full of love and energy. And it's so fun to hear that. And they're already asking about the next road trip, which is a two-week road trip that we take at the beginning of August. And I can't wait. I'll tell y'all about that one too. So today we're gonna talk about fighting for and fighting against. But before that, I'm gonna tell you another funny story just because it might inspire you. I have a retreat that is coming in a couple weeks now. It's actually two weeks from today, is the first start of the retreats. The Moxie Retreats in La Jolla. We are sailing on sailboats. We are we have a private chef, a private yogurt instructor. We're taking walks on beaches, doing lots of coaching, sitting by the pool in this big beautiful compound in San Diego. And I will do these retreats twice a year. I think my next one's gonna be in October. So reach out to me and get on the wait list if you want, because this one sold out quick. So fun. And I have to tell you about a funny thing that happened. So my kids don't have cell phones or smartwatches or whatever. We don't do screens very much in our house. We watch movies together sometimes, but they don't have their own personal things, screens. And we read a lot of books and we we don't do a lot of screen stuff. And so I have been focused on getting them a landline at the house so they can call their friends and talk to their friends, but not get into the whole, sucked into the whole, you know, texting social media dark hole of humanity. Too early. And so I asked my friend, hey, what phone did you get as a landline? And she sent me a link to this phone. And it was, I wanted like a retro old phone. And it was so cute that I just like saw the link and I was like, that's for me. I'm gonna get one too. So I bought this phone. Well, I thought I was buying it. It comes to my house, it's so cute. It's like an olive green retro rotary phone. You know, you have to like put your finger in the hole and then like find the number and let it spin back. And the I taught the kids how to use it. It was so exciting. Then we go to hook it up, and I realize there's no spot to hook it up. I go back to the website. It is not a phone, it's an audio messaging book. It's actually a refurbished old amazing phone that they rent out and that they send to you for events so people can record messages as a guest book for you at your events. Okay. I'm like, what? This is not what I wanted. I moved too quickly, and it was just because my friend already had the phone. I did not read the fine print. I was like, okay, she has this one. It works for her. I've talked to her kid on her phone. I'm gonna get it because I love it. Did not read the website. Party foul. So my kids are all excited about this phone. And I emailed the customer service team at this company. It's called After the Tone, if you're interested. Such cute phones. And I emailed the company and I'm like, hey, I need my money back. This is not what I thought it was. And I get these, you know, answers that are like, sorry, we can't refund you because we already spent the money to mail the phone out and record your voice memo, your um like voice memo on it, answering the for like the answering service. I don't know what you call it now. It used to be an answering machine. And I say, Come on, man, I didn't know what this was. And they say, sorry, but you can use it for an event if you want. And I'm like, all right. So I start thinking about, okay, well, the only event I have is this retreat. How could I use it for that? And then I had all these ideas for how cool this could be. So if I use the phone for this retreat, I could have people actually record messages for their future self that I send to them, you know, in like six months or something. How cool would that be? And then I could also have them record recognition for each other. Like I could record you a message that says, here's what I really appreciated about you in the course of this retreat. And then they could get these little love messages from each other. I could also use it to record their testimonials for me, like that I could promote my own coaching and retreats with. And so I started actually getting excited about using this. And then I got an email back that was from like a manager that said, Oh my gosh, I've been reviewing this case, and of course you can have your money back. I don't know what happened here. So amazing customer service at the end of the day. They were great. But now I think I'm gonna keep it. So if you've ever read any Ryan Holiday or any of his, you know, any stoicism, they this tool that I love, he wrote a book called The Obstacle is the way. And I love that book and I've recommended it to multiple people lately. But this is a very fun example of how an obstacle, you know, having this phone that was kind of expensive and having no event and being like, what am I doing with this? became it created a new possibility that wasn't there before that's gonna be kind of magic for this retreat. So here's a fun example of how if you just stick with it for a minute, things that seem to not work out can work out sometimes in a new and amazing way. I have another example of this I'm gonna tell really quickly, which is I had um in the last two years hosted the group of my son's class for a camping trip once a year because I feel like it's a beautiful, I've talked about this on the podcast before too. It's a beautiful way to connect as a community and the kids bond to other adults, and it's so great. So last year we did it for the first time. It was wonderful. And then this year we were gonna go to the same campground and a week before, and I'm talking like 10 different families, like 40 people. People are renting RVs for the weekend, all this stuff. The week before we're supposed to go on the camping trip, I look back at the website and I had spoken with them a couple months ago, and the website said we're closed for the season because of lack of use, and we're not opening till April 1st, which was three days after our camping trip. So it's a week till the camping trip, and people have spent money on non-refundable RVs, and all of a sudden we have nowhere to go. And in that same moment, I was like, okay, obstacle is the way. This is gonna lead to something better than what we had planned. I can't see it yet. I don't know how. And in that day, when I found that out, I also had back-to-back sessions with clients. I couldn't put my time into searching. So I just threw it out there to the community and I was like, yo, the campgrounds closed down. Let's start shooting ideas to each other. And then it ended up that one of the parents had like a bunch of acres on the top of a mountain in San Diego that is private, that we all got to go to that has a pond and had two houses on it. So we all got to wash dishes and sinks and use real bathrooms. And it ended up being so much better. So that's another example of how if you could just hold the faith, almost always big obstacles become a new way forward that's more amazing than what was possible before. Well, that is a very long intro. And so now let's get into the content for the day, which is fighting for versus fighting against. I'm all about having a cause. I am all about having a purpose for who you are and what you're spending your energy on and what you care about. This is just like, you know, we can have different versions of this. I think it's pronounced ikigai. Ikigai is uh a word that describes from Japanese culture having a purpose for life that actually gives your life meaning. And this can be like your work, right? There are also, you know, people that have a, they call it their life's purpose. There are people that have a spiritual purpose. There are people that are so dedicated to their family and their family is their purpose. I'm all about this. And the reason I'm all about having some kind of purpose, whether it's like temporary and it's your purpose for right now and your main focus and your main priority, or whether it's like a lifelong thing, no matter what it is, I always think we should have a North Star. Because when we have a North Star, we are focused on where we are going. And that place that we're going is in line with our values and what we want. And it helps us say no to the things that aren't that, and we don't live in reactivity to the world. And there are so many reasons for that that I'm not going to get into. Um, but the majority of them all support using your prefrontal cortex to decide how you're going to use the time and energy in your life. Now, sometimes the way that we identify that North Star is we decide what we don't want. And this happens a lot, and the brain is wired to do it. We threat scan, especially when we have unresolved, any unresolved trauma. The world is a threat and we're going to threat scan, but everybody's brain scans for threats and and has a negativity bias. So what happens is we find things we don't like, things that are a threat, things that are scary. And then we sometimes create a purpose that is to fight against those things. And that's good to have a purpose. And it's good to speak opposition to power. It is good to fight against harm. It is good to fight against things that you don't want to have happen. Like, of course, we need that 100%. And to be bold and to be making moves against the things that are hurting us, right? And we can always flip our mind from fighting against to fighting towards. So if we're fighting against oppression, what are we actually fighting for? Maybe we're fighting for equity, human respect, and dignity and a world where everyone is safe, right? When we fight for something, we align our efforts with our values and we generate good energy in our body. When we fight against something, we're focused on what we don't want. We're focused on what we what we have negative feelings about. And I see this in lots of different levels. So today is all about recontextualizing that strong, beautiful passion that you have and really defining what are you fighting for. So I'll give you an example. I was meeting with a client this morning, actually, and he so beautifully talked about the ex an example of what I was already going to talk about today. He was saying, Hey, there's so much I want to work with you on. I was like, tell me. And he was like, There's health stuff, there's relationship stuff, and my my, you know, energy spread all over the place with work. Um, he's an incredible musician. And he was saying, like, I'm not putting enough time in my into my music. I'm doing, you know, I've slipped in my habits. I'm like sitting and watching shows until late in the night instead of doing what I want, which is putting all my music out there and completing these collaborations that I've going on. And I heard him describe all the things he wanted to fix. And I was like, let's pause right there. And what I'd like to focus on with you is what you want to create. And I want to pause the like health habits and the staying up late work, and I want to pause the relationship work, and I want to pause this other relationship work and like home environment work. And let's instead focus on what's the vision that you're most passionate about for what you want to create right now. And then we worked on all of this stuff, like him putting out his own music, him completing the collaborations, him building a theory course for music. And by the time we had built all that out and plugged it into his calendar and created like a pathway for him, we saw that a lot of the other things are gonna kind of fade back and work themselves out. Because he's not gonna want to stay up so late. When he's excited about the music that he's playing, he might stay up late playing the music and writing his music instead of watching a show. He's not gonna have as hard a time setting boundaries in his relationships when he's already got his calendar set up to be focused on these things he's so excited to do. So this was an awesome example of turning the fight, the struggle into a North Star. And then next week, in the next couple weeks, we'll work on whatever is still there with the health step, the relationship stuff. But again, we will focus it away from what do I not want to be doing to what do I want to be doing. And it gives us so much more motivation, inspiration, energy to move towards than to move against. Because what we focus on grows. That is just a true thing. So if we're focused on what we don't want, oftentimes it makes those negative things grow. When we focus on what we do want to put in place of what we don't want, that grows too. So in relationships, when we're focused on what's broken, the Gottman Institute did this work on couples, and I think I shared this in the podcast about relationships. One of the podcasts, the latest one about relationships. But the Gottman Institute had this uh series of workshops. One was on conflict resolution, one was on like all the little daily ways to connect to one another. And the other one, the other last day was just focused on bringing it all together or something like that. What they found was the people, the couples who did all of it did best when they looked back at them a year later. The couples who focused only on how to build connection with one another did second best by far. And the couples who only did conflict resolution and focused on the problems by far did the worst. So a lot of information from the Gottman Institute, the Love Lab, says don't just focus on what's wrong, on solving conflict, focus on reconnecting to each other and focus on play. When you focus on what you want to build in your relationship, you go much farther and you have an easier time navigating the conflict and the hard stuff. So that's an example for relationships. In our bodies, when we're like, oh, I don't want to be drinking so much. We can work on how to eliminate that trigger, but we have to also give ourselves the reason why. I want to focus on a healthy body and a clear mind and relationships where I don't get into struggles because I have a glass of wine in my system. I've worked with people on that, right? So instead, we have to have a clear vision of what we do want and what could we drink instead of wine, right? Like what will bring us a wonderful experience that we can put in our hands and give ourselves what do we want? I want to drink water, I want to hydrate myself, I want to, you know, have my daily habit be this other thing. Same with the world when we're angry with, you know, something going on with the world, uh, you know, environmental stuff, environmental rules and regulations, for instance, being torn up and we're we're worried about the health of the world for our kids and uh, you know, national forest staff and all of this that that's eroding, then instead of fighting against the erosion, can we articulate to ourselves what are we standing for? We're fighting for a world and an environment that will serve our kids for generations to come. I'm fighting for the health of the planet. I'm fighting for the species of animals that are in danger. I'm fighting for flipping it in that way will give you so much more motivation and inspiration to talk to other people too. You can describe the problem and then describe what the solution is and why it's so important. Lastly, with burnout, we I often hear people struggling against working too many hours, struggling against working, uh feeling like they're so stressed. And what I have them do is articulate what do we want to create here? I want balance, I want boundaries, I want to leave my work there. I want to be passionate about my work, I want to do great work, but I want to build a life where I'm focused on my people at home fully and present with them, because this is what is aligned with my values. So, my request for you, the call to action from this episode is whatever you're fighting against, how can you flip it? And how can you articulate it as what you stand for? What you are fighting for. What is the vision for what you want and what you are creating in your life? Okay. One last example here. I had a personal story where I had my first kind of person that came and really criticized my work. I had written a few things and put them out there, and I had my first person that came and really ripped them apart and criticized them in a pretty mean way. And it was even someone that I know very well that I thought was a supporter of my work. And it's really sh like surprised me and made me sad. I had, I was like, oof. And I know that the more, you know, the bigger the arena you put yourself out there in, the more you put yourself out there, the more people will criticize you. But it always surprises me and shocks me because I it's not my nature. If I don't like something, I just don't follow it. I don't read about it. But I appreciate that everyone thinks differently and that people are, I just love that people put themselves out into the world, right? Unless there's something harmful that I want to stand up against. And so then I do what we're talking about today, which is to decide what I'm fighting for and take action towards that thing. But I'm always shocked by people that like troll and, you know, find really negative things about to say uh and hurtful things to say about people that are just putting themselves out there in the world. But what I did, instead of, you know, at first I was like, how do I protect myself? How do I like, you know, what do I need to do to stand up against people that might speak that way about my work? And I realized, oh, no. What am I fighting for? What I'm fighting for is a safe place for me to be able to do my work in the world because I am passionate about supporting women to make their ideas into real things. I'm passionate about helping women help the world. I'm passionate about people understanding the system of their mind and their body and create and you know, having that be clean so they can put their energy into good things in the world. And I'm passionate about women valuing their own voice and their own boundaries. And I hear myself saying that and I was like, there it is. My boundaries, my voice, and my solid, solid rule for myself is I don't let anybody on my email list, I don't let anybody follow me on Instagram if they aren't respectful. You can always disagree. Heck yeah. Dissent is so important, but respect, compassion, respect, love, respect above all things, respectful communication is really important to me. So when I realize Oh yeah, I just block people that don't respect me. They don't get to be a part of this work. They can come back, they can be respectful, they can repair and come back. And that is me fighting for putting energy into what I want. Safe environments that bring out the best in my work and in one another. So that's another example for you. So the call to action, the invitation today is to look at where are you fighting against and how you can turn that upside down and articulate that as what you're fighting for.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

That's what I've got for you this week. And I will see you next week.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

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