Ep 174: Three Ways to Get Present, No Matter What's Happening Around You

What if the secret to your best work isn't trying harder — it's allowing more?

In this episode, Marie shares a personal story from a recent retreat where she made a counterintuitive choice: instead of preparing by drilling her content, she prepared by protecting her energy. The result? The best coaching of her life. And it happened because she got deeply, radically present.

This episode is a practical toolkit for getting present — no matter how wild and chaotic the world around you is

What you'll hear in this episode:

• The retreat experience that changed how Marie thinks about preparation, performance, and presence — and why she coached better by trying less
• Why presence isn't about turning off your brain or your expertise, but about partnering with the parts of yourself you can't logically name
• Three tools you can use anywhere, anytime — whether you're in a hard conversation, a chaotic day, or facilitating a room full of people

The three tools:

1. Grounding A quick practice (can take 2 minutes or 10 seconds) using breath and visualization to root yourself, release what you don't need, and invite in the energy you want. Great for clearing other people's noise out of your system and filling back up with your own vibe.
2. Focus Out When self-consciousness or self-doubt creeps in, the answer isn't always to go deeper inward — sometimes it's to become a field of presence looking outward. Curiosity. Observation. Loving awareness. 
3. The Body Anchor Learn the physical sensation your body produces when you're truly present — that specific buzz, that particular feeling — and use it as an anchor you can return to anytime. Your body has its own language. This tool is about learning to understand it and learning to speak it.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Moxie Mastermind + the Moxie Morning Routine (where Marie teaches her full meditation practice)
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau

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, my beautiful friends, and welcome to episode number 174 of the Bloom Your Mind Podcast. Well, this weekend, my husband and I got to go to something I've mentioned a couple times before, which is my friend's annual 50th. She does it every year now, and it is so much fun. And I'm mentioning it here because my husband and I got so much out of it, and I keep hearing this from other couples. Either I hear these pings about how much they need it, or I hear how good it is when they do it. And that is to not only step away from children together, but to step away in the context of an environment where everything's taken care of for you, and you don't have to do a lot of operational work together. So you're stepping away from kids, you're stepping away from the operations of life and the responsibilities that you carry together. And specifically, I think it's really phenomenal when you step into a space where pretty much everything's taken care of for you. And so just like this evening where someone else is hosting this event and it could be a long period, and we got sit an overnight sitter and had a whole overnight. So we got almost a 24-hour experience together. And every time my husband and I do that, it's just so good for us. And that I hear this from other couples because we get to just be ourselves and enjoy each other. And we get to not worry about anything. And we we get to like have this experience of watching each other float around and meet people and watch each other be ourselves instead of watch each other get a bunch of shit done and organize details and communicate about them. And we just get to have that energy where we see each other across the room and we're like, it's you, my best friend. So fun. And so I whether you are in a love relationship or not, how might you use this as an invitation to reflect on getting yourself away, right? Into an environment, a vacation, a sitting someone else's house, like any kind of time either by yourself with your favorite people, with your favorite friends, with your the person you're dating or with your partner, with your family member that you love, whatever, in a space where you can just enjoy each other, be humans in bodies, enjoying the world. It does not have to be a week-long trip. It can just be an environment where you're kind of like popping into a place where you have no responsibilities. You don't have to play a role, you don't have to organize things or spend a lot of money. You just get to experience life. Experience yourself, experience the world, let it be an invitation. I hear so many of my clients just needing this little space away. All right, that's what I've got for a little intro. It was, by the way, we both dressed like disco balls. It was a silver and white shimmer party, sparkle party. I had just a rhinestone shirt on with nothing underneath, and he had on this disco ball jacket, and I had on these sparkling rhinestone shoes and a white skirt, and it there were disco balls everywhere, and so we literally just looked like them. It was so much fun. So I'm coming off of that weekend, and what I want to talk to you about today is something that people keep requesting that I share about. I know that I talked to you in the last couple episodes about the retreat that I led. One thing that I did not talk so much about is my own experience of preparing for that retreat, which ties into exactly what I'm gonna teach today. So normally when I'm leading a workshop, facilitating an event, doing a public speaking event, facilitating a retreat. In the past, I have focused a lot on preparing myself to remember the content that I've created, organizing myself in terms of agendas and times, really thinking through my audience what they need, who they are, how to connect with them, and creating content that will deliver. And for me, the goal is always to over-deliver on whatever I've promised them. So that's, you know, I laid everything out, I created the agenda, I organized everything, food and, you know, um, entertainment, the home that we had, and then the content that I wrote for the coaching that we did. The way that I prepared was different than anything that I have ever done. Instead of focusing in on preparing myself for my content by remembering everything I was supposed to say and in what order, instead, in the weeks ahead of it, I really guarded myself from any stressful energy or exchanges or tasks that I needed to take on. I cleared the last couple weeks before the retreat so I could stay in my own energy. I meditated every single day for even longer than I usually do. And during the retreat, my primary focus was on keeping myself in a clear, clean, open, neutral energy. So that instead of focusing on pulling from my logical brain around the coaching that I was doing, I was partnering with the, I don't even know exactly how to describe it, but partnering with the world, with the space underneath everything else, with the people in front of me and whatever the energy in the room was, and becoming more and more and more present to have my natural instinct around what was needed, what needed to be said, what needed to be brought, having my instinct lead. And it felt less like I was doing it, and more like I was in partnership with everyone else that was there, with the universe, with whatever, like the part of my brain that I can't even access and name and don't even know what's happening down there. It was like there was a partnership between me and what I could not logically name that was coming through me to kind of coach. And I cannot tell you it was an entirely different experience. I coached better than I can ever remember coaching. The experience that the women had was unanimously, they loved the coaching in all the surveys. They said, I love the coaching the most. I love the times we spent together in the circle the most talking. And I felt better because I was not, I love coaching, by the way, and I love my brain and I love logic and I love all of that. And of course, that's always gonna be there, and it's always gonna be a part of it all, all the research I do. And it felt so amazing. I had such endless energy because I wasn't trying so hard. I was more allowing things to flow through me. So this experience has really had me reflecting because I've been reading lots of books on meditation, lots of books on accessing different parts of our brain that we don't know that much about, accessing our intuition, our gut feelings, the things that we know and that oftentimes we ignore. And there are a few different ways that I have found to become very, very present when even if life is chaos, even like if you're walking through it just a total shit show in a day, there are a few tools that I have used more and more and more for myself that I would like to offer to you that I teach. And I teach the entire process of meditation for the morning that I use every single day that has gotten me just into better and better and better states in my own life the more I do it. I teach that in the Moxie morning routine and my meditation that I teach the Moxie group. And I am gonna teach this little snippet of it today. So the first thing I want to say is that I think that you can learn things about meditation and about presence by reading books and by listening to podcasts, by doing what you're doing right now, or listening to me tell you about it because I am very, very practiced with meditation. And I am a big proponent of everyone trusting their own experience of it more than anybody else's description of it. I have found so much value from reading other people's ways of accessing deep meditative states and intuition and gut feelings. And the core of what I do is the same exact thing that I did when I was six years old. I remember when I was six years old sitting on my bed in my room and having this, closing my eyes and having this moment just kind of like fall on me where I was picturing this tube of blue light that was going around me up into out of off the planet and into space. And it was like this buzzing energy that was coming down into me and circling around my body. And it was six years old, right? This little girl, like, whoa, what is this? And I remember giggling and opening my eyes and being like just appreciating the beauty of the room around me and how a piece of paper curled up off the wall that I had taped on the paper, like just this presence and bliss in being alive. And I remember the buzz of that energy and how it felt in my body. When I meditate now, that's the same thing I pull into my body, that buzz. The same buzz. So I believe that our bodies speak a language to us that we need to learn by dropping down into our bodies and getting super present, learning the language that our bodies speak to us. And I believe that each one of our bodies is different. Like it's different for me than it is for you, what it feels like to be in a deeply meditative state. So instead of shoehorning yourself into someone else's way, how can you learn your own body's way? Some people don't like visual. I love visualization. Some people can't access that. What can you access? Maybe a walking meditation instead, maybe like uh audio meditation or verbal words in your head instead of visual, right? Like speak your brain, your body's language instead of trying to do what somebody else does. Having said that, I love learning from books and trying different things on. It's all about trying them on, like outfits and deciding what you like on your body, in your body and your mind. So, a couple of tools that I'm sharing today, three ways to be in your presence no matter where you are. So, the first one that I like to teach, I learned from an energy teacher a while ago for it's just grounding practice. And I do this oftentimes in my groups just as a quick way to ground ourselves. What you do is you ground yourself in space, you sit in a chair or wherever you are, and you feel your body supported in space. This is the first way. And you imagine, you let your eyes settle closed so that you can limit that visual stimulation. You breathe. I like to breathe and sort of like create tension or like flex my body all the way up, like from my pelvis all the way up through my abdomen and my chest all the way up through my throat in the top of my head as I inhale. And then I hold that breath way up the top of my head for 10 seconds, and then I release it. I do that three times in the morning when I'm dropping into meditation. And then what I like to do is imagine a beam of light going from the base of your spinal column down into the center of the earth, grounding you, and then allow anything that you want to let go of just go down that beam of light. Just let it go. Let it go, let it go, let it go. Other people's energy, other people's words, negative thoughts that you have, negative energy you have, anything you want to let go of, just let it go. We don't want to focus on what we don't want. We want to focus on what we do want. We want to cultivate the feelings of love and gratitude and goodness in ourselves, continuously helping our brain refocus away from the negative towards what brings us joy and peace. Then imagine a beam of light coming up from that earth into the bottom of your feet, making a U-turn at your belly button and going back out down into the center of the earth, carrying with it anything you don't need. Just let it go. Let go of anything else that you don't want, any stuck energy, any pain, anything. And then invite that loop to just keep going in the background for as long as it will. For the next 24 hours, for longer, let it go. Then imagine a beam of light coming in through the top of your head, bringing in fresh, wonderful energy, however you want to feel, whatever energy you want for your day, making you turn at your belly button and shooting back out the top of your head, branching off into two beams of light that go down your arms and shoot out your hands, and allow that to keep going in the background as you move through your day, bringing in clean, wonderful, energizing, inspiring energy. So you have this grounding practice with these beams of light bringing in this energy, grounding you, and you can use that anytime you want. Another thing that you can do is fill yourself up from the bottom of your feet all the way to the top of your head with 100% of your own energy. Oftentimes we take on other people's, I like to say being in someone else's model. So we take on other people's thoughts or feelings or negativity. It's kind of contagious. So we can remind ourselves to kind of push all of that energy out of us or let it go down that beam of light into the earth, and then fill ourselves all the way up with our own vibe, our own energy, and choose it. Choose the feeling that you want, choose the vibe you want, choose the energy you want, and then you can focus your presence in the middle of your head, up a little bit, back a little bit, right behind your eyes, and open your eyes. So that is the first sort of set of tools. That's number one, as a way to create presence anywhere you are, anytime. Now, what I just described to you might take me two minutes to do. It could also take me 10 seconds. I could just use the beam of light from the base of my spinal column down into the center of the earth. When I am in a group setting where there's like a lot of wild energy, a lot of stuff I don't want, I will do that to just ground myself, ground the room. It makes me feel peace, calm. You can try it right now. Beautiful practice to bring presence in wherever you are. The second thing you can do is to focus out. Sometimes when we're too focused in, this is not me saying always focus out. I am an absolute proponent of being a bringing awareness to where you are. What's going on in your head? How are you feeling? This is like a primary thing that I teach on this podcast. And sometimes when we become self-conscious, we lack confidence, we're full of self-doubt. Sometimes the best way to become present is instead of focusing more on what's going on with ourselves, it's to drop down into our body, turn down the volume on the thinking mind from wherever it at is right now to zero, drop into our body and just focus out. Instead of being you, change to just being curious. Be curiosity. Instead of being you with your name and your body, just allow your mind for a moment to be a field of presence, a field of awareness. Can you even be a field of loving awareness? Looking out at the world and noticing, being curious, looking for what you like. When I do this, it always grounds me. Any kind of self-doubt or self-consciousness goes away because I'm not there anymore. I'm here to observe the world and the people around me. It always reminds me of Thoreau. He wrote Walden Pond, and I saw this drawing of him as a giant eyeball walking around on legs. I don't know if he drew that or if somebody else did. I can't remember. But I just think of that. Like I'm not a person with a name or an identity. I'm just a presence of love here to get curious and observe the world around me. Focus out instead of focus in. When whatever is happening involves another person, you can add into that. How can you look into their eyes and instead of their identity, just see the animating presence behind their eyes? No matter what you believe, use the word that you like, see the animating presence, see God in their eyes, see the universe, see the presence, the spark of life in their eyes. What is that? What can you see there that lights them up? Can you ask yourself, what's going on for them? Instead of how do I feel about what they're saying? Just what's going on for them? I wonder, I wonder. What's their model? That focus out is number two. Being an open field of presence, observation, curiosity, and love. That's number two. Now, number three is my very favorite tool, and it comes from having a meditation practice in the morning, but it can be from any moment. So for me, it comes from the meditation practice. For you, it can come from that if you meditate, or it can come from any moment when you feel totally present. What does that presence feel like in your body? So for me, in my meditation, I meditate for about 20 minutes, half an hour, more if I can. And when I am very tapped into this different level of my mind and complete loving presence and no thinking, what it feels like in my body, the physical sensation, is a buzz in the back of my neck, across my shoulders, down my spine, and up above my head. It's like this whole buzzing-tingling feeling. It's the same thing I had when I was six years old. And the newer part of it is that my chest kind of opens up. To me, it feels like a satellite dish. It could be like a flower, it could be like whatever. It just kind of opens. So I can just, it's like more awareness, more receptivity to what I'm feeling around me. And that I can just respond to that. So that's what anchors, like what the physical sensation in my body feels like at the height of my meditation. So this third tool is learning the language that your physical body speaks to you and anchoring what it feels like in your body when you're in a very present state. How can you describe the physical sensation of what your body says to you when how do you know when you're very present? What does it feel like? When you have that really strong anchor of that physical sensation, it becomes much easier in the day when all kinds of stuff is going on. We're wherever, we're whenever things are chaotic, things are hard, we're in a hard conversation. It gives us an anchor to tap into in that moment. Reminds me of the language of like power poses, where you're like, Oh, if you do this pose, you're gonna feel powerful. For me, it's like this oh, when I do this, my body knows. Come down, be present, be here, be open, be a field of love. Get out of your head. No self-consciousness, just be here. And so I can start to build that buzz in the back of my neck and my shoulders and open my chest, and it allows me to just be present. So, what is the language that your body speaks when you're super present? What does it feel like? I call it an anchor, this third tool. How can you use that anchor throughout the day to bring you into this moment? I was speaking at the party that my husband and I went to. There were some incredible people there. And I was talking to someone about this. She also leads retreats of a different type. And there is this guy with her that leads retreats of a different type. And I asked them this question because they kind of related to the experience of instead of trying to come from the logical brain when you're facilitating large groups or speaking, how might you just become really present and allow whatever is necessary to kind of come through you instead, to flow through you from the parts of your brain you can't access or from wherever it comes from, depending on what you believe, right? And I said, What does it feel like in your body? And she said, For me, my spine is very straight. I take a moment, even if I tell the people I'm facilitating in the group, I tell them I need a moment. I take as much time as I need and I straighten my spine and my mind goes away. So for her, that's it. For me, it's this buzz, right? What is it for you? And if you're like, dude, I don't meditate, I don't know what you're talking about, just ask the question when you feel super present, when your mind quiets down, when you're so calm and you're like, yo, this life is awesome. When you feel love, when you feel gratitude, when you feel presence, the joy of being you. What does it feel like in your body in that moment? That's your anchor. That's number three. So today we covered three tools to bring yourself into presence anytime you need it. The first one was a series of tools for grounding the beam of light from the base of your spinal column and these other tools I shared. The second one is to become a field of loving presence where you're focused. Focusing out instead of in, becoming curious, becoming an observer. What is it like? What am I seeing? What am I feeling around? What am I noticing around me? What is it like for them? I gave you some tools to relate to others through this field of presence. And then the third one is this anchor feeling. How can you speak the language of your body that anchors your most present presence as a thing you can tap into anytime? All right, my loves, that's what I've got for you today. And I would love to hear anything that comes out of this. You know I love it. Text me your anchor sensations, DM me, email me, whatever you've got of mind, send it to me. I love hearing what it's like for you. I love you all. That's what I've got for you, and I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time.