Ep 171: Stop Taking Yourself for Granted

In this episode, Marie shares a behind-the-scenes look at preparing for her very first Moxie Retreat in La Jolla — and a realization she had mid-workout that cracked open today's topic: we apply hedonistic adaptation to ourselves. We celebrate other people's wins, build gratitude practices for the world around us, and then completely skip ourselves. Marie explores what hedonistic adaptation is, how it shows up as constant gap-chasing, and why turning your gratitude practice inward is one of the most powerful (and most overlooked) things you can do for your health, your productivity, your presence, and your relationships.

What You'll Learn

• What hedonistic adaptation is and how it quietly shapes the way you see your own life
• Why your brain's negativity bias keeps you focused on the gap instead of the growth
• The health, creativity, and presence benefits of a gratitude practice aimed at yourself
• How recognizing your own work makes you more likely to keep doing it
• The ripple effect: how appreciating yourself trains your brain to appreciate the people around you
• A simple weekly practice for noticing where you've been taking your own awesomeness for granted

This Week's Assignment

Look at where you've been taking your own awesomeness for granted.

• Where have you been taking yourself for granted?
• Look back at yesterday, last week, and as many weeks before that as you can.
• What are you grateful for yourself about? What have you accomplished that you're proud of?
• Take a moment to recognize even the tiniest things.
• Notice the ripple it creates across your life and the lives of the people around you.

Memorable Quotes

"I take myself for granted. And I watch my clients do this day in and day out."

"That vision for what we are creating and who we are becoming is never a measuring stick."

"If I don't notice it for myself, it's gonna go unnoticed."

"As we train our brain to look for what we like… we're going to do that with other people too."

"When we see and acknowledge the unique, special people in the world around us… it creates reality for them."

Mentioned in This Episode

• The Moxie Mastermind — next round starts in September. A special perk is being announced Saturday for anyone who signs up by next week. DM Marie on Instagram or reach out directly 
• Related episodes:
  • Look How Far You've Come — on measuring progress against where you started, not against the ideal
  • Retros Are Everything — on building reflection into your iteration process

How to connect with Marie:

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

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!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 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 171 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. I am about to lead the Moxie retreat. On it's Thursday, my Moxie Mastermind women all get there, and we are gonna have a day that's just us. Then a whole bunch of other amazing women get there for two days of retreat with the big group, and it's all in La Hoya, and we are doing so much fun stuff. I'm so excited. And uh I have just like let myself go kind of wild for this retreat. We are going sailing. We have a practitioner that is coming to teach yoga classes and self-care rituals and uh including guasha and lymphatic drainage and teaching us how to make body butter and facial oils. We're doing tons of coaching. We have private chefs, beach walks, just like all of this fabulous programming and then some incredible coaching content. But I have also allowed myself to do the thing that I do, which is my primary love language, which is make people things. I've done this for so long. I was recently in the Bloom Room and someone held up a painting that I did for them, like years and years ago, that I forgot. I was in the Moxie Mastermind the other day, and someone held up a painting I did for her a long time ago. I used to just randomly do paintings all the time and give them to people uh to honor them and people keep them. There are like hundreds of them out there. I used to do this all the time when I led this company to recognize people. So for this retreat, I have hand stamped journals with a leather stamp and painted them. I've gotten custom hats made. I have gotten these candles made for everybody. I've just done so much that I don't know if I'll be able to do as this retreat gets bigger and bigger throughout the years. But it has been so fun to pour all my love and energy into this retreat, and I am so happy going into it. I have led hundreds of retreats before, but I've never led a Moxie retreat for the Moxie mastermind that's all about women coming into their Moxie, and it's just really fun. I've had so much fun with it, and I have a story to tell you about our content today related to that. But before I do, I wanted to mention that we have at the end of that retreat a signing like incentive for the next round of the Moxie Mastermind because the earlier I know how many people are in it, the more successfully I can book stuff up in advance for the next retreat and other events that are in person that we're doing throughout the year. And so if you are interested in the Moxie Mastermind, reach out to me as soon as you hear this episode. DM me on Instagram or in whatever other way, uh, reach out to me because we have an amazing perk that we are announcing on Saturday for people that are interested in the Moxie Mastermind. So if they sign up by next week for this for the round that starts in September of the Moxie Mastermind, they get this incredible perk. So reach out to me if you want to know what that is. If you're thinking about it and interested, we have an amazing group of women already enrolled for next round and more joining all the time. So excited about that. Today we're talking about how we have this hedonistic adaptation as human beings that we actually apply to ourselves. And I want to start describing this by telling you a story, and then I'm gonna tell you a couple things that happened with coaching clients as examples of this and give you an assignment for yourself. So I am running this retreat, and the last couple nights I've been printing all these agendas that I've created, all of the answers to surveys that I've sent out, all of the uh just many, many tools that I've created for this retreat. And I was thinking about it this morning. I get up at five, I do my meditation, and then I do a workout in the morning. And as I was working out, I had this thought, oh my gosh, I have done so much for this retreat. The thought was I created so much. I did all of the operational planning, spreadsheets and lists of all the groceries we need, and all of the permissions and the waivers and health history and emergency contact forums, the agendas for participants, the agendas for the operations team that's putting it on, the surveys to gather information, all of these, all of these systems that I now can use over and over again for all of my retreats. But it hadn't occurred to me that that was such a kick-ass thing to do. Like that that that so much has been created and to recognize myself and celebrate how much work I just put into this because I take myself for granted. And I watch my clients do this day in and day out as I'm talking to them, where we have a level of adaptation. So if you're not familiar with the term hedonistic adaptation, it's this idea that we're always wanting more. That as soon as we have what we've been wanting up until this point, we acclimate to having it and then we want more. There's lots of different ways of thinking about this, right? Keeping up with the Joneses is like this phrase about how, you know, we want everything that we see next to us. Hedonistic adaptation is how we adapt to what we have in our own lives and want more and more. It's very in line with ideas around internalized capitalism and how it changes the way we think about ourselves and our lives and abundance in what we have. So I want us to just think for a moment about this idea of hedonistic adaptation with ourselves. So as we accomplish more, as we create more in our lives, as we grow and learn, our brain, I always talk about the negativity bias that is inherent to our human brain, we are constantly seeing what is next to work on. We look at ourselves and we see the gaps. We see the things that we haven't perfected yet. We see the gap between where we are right now and where we want to get eventually. And it is so important to have visions that we are working towards, a vision for who we are becoming, for what we are creating in our lives, for the ideas that we want to put out into the world and make real to make the world a better place. And that vision for what we are creating and who we are becoming is never a measuring stick. You can listen to the episode Look How Far You've Come if you want to do a deep dive on this concept of measuring our progress against where we started instead of against the ideal. So that's very important. And as we're moving along, for so many different reasons, we can practice a gratitude practice around ourselves. And there are so many benefits to this. It will counteract that hedonistic adaptation, which is very counterproductive. Hedonistic adaptation always creates a gap that we're fighting against, right? We want the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and we can counteract that by congratulating ourselves, by feeling grateful for the ways that we're showing up for ourselves. We can celebrate the things that we did yesterday, the things that we did this past week. And there are so many benefits to this. If we practice a gratitude practice for the progress we're making, for the things we're doing well, we are more likely to continue doing them. We are less likely to get into a negativity spiral in our brain that actually takes the wind out of our sails. We are more likely to progress and succeed and come up with beautiful visions for what's coming next. But also at the same time, we will enjoy the ride. Having a gratitude practice for what we are accomplishing, for what we're doing today and what we did yesterday, and last week, and last month, and last year, and all of the years up until now will actually create more health in our body because it fills us full of all of the hormones that give us access to health benefits on a very physical level, but also access to our prefrontal cortex, which will allow us to be more creative, more empathetic, more innovative. So it gets us into a beautiful, productive mindset. It gives us health benefits, and it allows us to enjoy the moment that we are living in. Instead of continuously reaching forward towards the next thing, and then finally one day realizing where have the last years gone. I wasn't present at all for them. Practicing this gratitude for what we have been accomplishing and how we've been showing up in the moments when we most want to actually gives us access to being in the moments of our lives, slowing our life down, allowing us to be in the part that we're in right now. And so much of the time, what our brain automatically does is it catches up to everything we've accomplished and it looks to what's next. Then it's we get stressed out about what we haven't done yet. We skip ahead, we're so focused on the future and the past that we don't actually notice the moment that we're in. And we beat ourselves up for any little things that have gone wrong, for the 1% that we didn't do right. These are all of the mechanisms that our brain is going to do if left to its own devices. So it's our job to look for what we like. It's built into the retro process. And you can listen to that episode, Retros Are Everything, if you want a reminder about how retros work. It's built into our process of reflection as we iterate to look for what we like first. What did I like? What went well, and do that before we look for what didn't go well and what we want to do differently. And we know all the benefits of a gratitude practice. And oftentimes my clients, when I'm working with them, their gratitude practice extends to the world around them, the people around them, but rarely to themselves. So my invitation for you today is how might you get all of the productivity, health, presence, joy, benefits of applying that gratitude practice to yourself. And here are some examples of how this has shown up recently. I talked to you about the retreat and how I all of a sudden realized, wow, I pulled this thing off. This is amazing. I did this. I've been dreaming of this for years and years and years. I pulled it off and I built all of these tools that I didn't even notice I was building. Good job, Marie. Like, nobody else is gonna notice that, right? If I don't notice it for myself, it's gonna go unnoticed. So it makes me so much more likely to continue to do retreats because I'm enjoying the process. I'm having good feelings. I'm recognizing and feeling, I'm recognizing my own work, recognizing the impact I'm having on other people's lives, and I'm giving myself the good feelings of recognition for those things as I progress along the way. I'm in the moment. This is the part where I created all these tools. I'm not so ahead of myself mentally, where I'm looking to the retreat or thinking about all the things that have yet to be done, but taking a moment to say, good job. Look at all these things I created. The other day, I felt really good about all of the steps, the conversations, the ways I had been being with my kids that day. And I told myself, damn, I killed it with parenting today. And I paused and I realized, wow, I don't tell myself that that often. I definitely will hone in on the moments when I don't show up the way I want to as a parent. But how often do I actually tell myself, good job momming today? Damn, girl. And I started doing that. I love doing that now. It reinforces something that is bananas that I don't do regularly, that I didn't do regularly before, which is acknowledge myself for something that is one of the biggest priorities in my life, which is showing up as an amazing parent to my kids. But I never congratulate myself for that. I never even notice that I'm doing it. I only notice when I'm not doing it. Right? So that's one way that I've been practicing this consistently is by telling myself, hey, good job with that conversation. Hey, that was a hard one. Good job. Good job not freaking out when everybody was so stressed the other day. Good job keeping the calm. Good job showing up for holidays, whatever it is, giving myself a little recognition keeps me going. And I want to share the other benefits that this has on your relationships. But first, I'm gonna tell you a couple more examples. I had someone in the bloom room that is an incredible chiropractor and also a mentor to others come back from teaching a workshop that she had flown to go teach. And we were just taking a moment to recognize how impactful that is, how much it is to pull that off, how the domino effect and the ripple effect of having gone to teach that workshop, how it has created so much beneficial energy in the world for other people, every chiropractor that learned from her and all of their patients. There was another one of my clients that was advocating for her daughter in such a significant way and hadn't even stopped to recognize how lucky her daughter is to have that advocacy, to have a parent standing up for her. It made me tear up when I was talking about it. There's another person that has turned around their schedule and he's making all of this music. He was focused in on the parts that are hard and the things that he hasn't accomplished yet. But when we started looking at how much he has introduced discipline into his creative practice, there was so much to celebrate and so much to see. One of the parents in my group said, I put veggies in my kids' lunch. And you know what? Good job, because that's hard. I had to wash them, I had to chop them. It would have been so much easier to do lunchables, and maybe I'll do lunchables tomorrow, but like, good job for veggies today. There's another person in the bloom room that leads a preschool, and we were talking about the impact of Picture Day and how seriously she took Picture Day and how those pictures are going to be in those humans' lives for who knows how long. They're going to be sent out to relatives. Like those photos and taking it seriously and doing a beautiful job and making it meaningful impacts so many lives. So the last thing I want to say is when you get better, as you get better, at recognizing your own impact in your own life, at looking down past yesterday and last week, but looking all the way into your past and seeing all of the ways that you've shown up for yourself, you will not only have all of the benefits that I talked about today, including health benefits, productivity benefits, and joy and presence, but your relationships will flourish because you're exercising the tool of looking for what you like, of being your own biggest fan. And what that does is it translate translates across other relationships. As we train our brain to look for what we like, as our train, we train our brain in gratitude practices, in appreciation, in speaking out loud what we appreciate about ourselves, we're going to do that with other people. And when we do that, it has wonderful positive benefits for our own relationships with those other people, our own feeling inside ourselves as we think good thoughts about other people. And also it has a ripple effect of creating reality for the people around us. When we see and acknowledge the unique, special people in the world around us, contributions, efforts, skills, all of the things, and we speak it out loud, it creates reality for them. It creates a ripple of positivity and a ripple of goodness that we experience the benefits of and that they do too. So your assignment for this week is to look at where you've been taking your own awesomeness for granted. Where have you been taking yourself for granted? And how can you look back at yesterday, last week, and as many weeks before that as you can to notice what you are grateful for that you've done? What have you accomplished that you're proud of? Look at how far you've come. Take a moment to recognize even the tiniest things and check out the ripple that it has across your life and the life of the people around you. That's what I've got for you this week. And I will see you after the retreat with lots of stories and lots of fun things to share 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.