Ep 175: The Triumvirate of Belief

You can have a bulletproof work plan. You can take massive action every single day. You can believe in the impact your idea will have once it's out in the world. And you can still stay completely stuck — or keep repeating the same frustrating patterns without understanding why.

In this episode, Marie introduces one of her favorite client exercises, rooted in the regenerative design process: the Triumvirate of Belief. It's a framework that examines the three essential parts of bringing any idea into the world — you, your idea, and the people who will receive it — and surfaces the hidden beliefs that are quietly running the show.

In This Episode

Marie digs into why belief work isn't just about believing in yourself — it's about examining what you believe about all three players in the regenerative design process. When any one of those beliefs is off, sneaky, or sitting just below the surface of your awareness, it will find a way out. It will sabotage your action, stall your momentum, or keep you spinning your wheels in confusion.

This isn't abstract or theoretical. Marie walks through how the Triumvirate of Belief shows up across the real areas of life where we're most often trying to make change:

• Relationships — and the ideas we have about how to improve them
• Business, entrepreneurship, leadership, and careers — and what we believe about the ideas we're putting into those spaces
• Habit change and personal health — and what's really running the show when we can't seem to make a change stick

Then she shares the exercise itself — a simple, practice you can apply anytime, to any idea, in any area of life. It's the exercise Marie's Moxie Mastermind students recently called one of their favorites, and once you try it, you'll understand why.

The Three Parts of the Triumvirate

1. Beliefs About Yourself What do you actually believe about who you are, what you're capable of, and whether you deserve to put this idea into the world? These beliefs set the ceiling — or the sky.

2. Beliefs About Your Idea How do you really feel about what you're creating or pursuing? Is it good enough? Is it ready? Is it worth people's time, money, and attention? Your hidden beliefs here will show up in how — or whether — you share it.

3. Beliefs About Your Audience What do you believe about the people who will receive, use, buy, or be changed by what you're putting out? Do you trust them? Do you believe they want what you have? These beliefs shape everything about how you show up for them.

The Practice

A belief that lives under the surface doesn't stay there. It sneaks out and undermines everything you're building — in your relationships, your work, your health, your leadership. The only way through is to look directly at it.

This episode's exercise is simple enough to do right now and powerful enough to change everything. Once you can see your beliefs clearly across all three areas, you can start replacing the ones that aren't serving you with thoughts and perspectives that actually move you forward.

Mentioned in this episode

• The Regenerative Design Process — Bloom Your Mind Podcast
• Regenerative Thought Cycles - Bloom Your Mind Podcast 
• Bridge Thinking — Bloom Your Mind Podcast

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

0:08

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) 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 175 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. This is the triumvirate of belief. I am making this episode because it has been requested by many people for me to put this out there. I teach this tool, I walk people through how to use it in the Moxie mastermind when they're working on something that they're putting out there in the world, an idea that they're making real, and they've asked me to have a resource available that they can use. So remember that you can use this not only on a big idea that your brain tells you is worth it, like starting a business or making a big move or something or writing a book, but you can use it on anything, which is something that is kind of interesting. I'm going to give you lots of examples of how that is true, how you can use this to really reflect on what you believe about this triumvirate of topics related to anything. So before we get into the content, I always like to tell you what's up with me. I came back from a three-day weekend that felt like a 10-day weekend, not because it was so relaxing, but because it was so full of stuff, fabulous, wonderful stuff. My kids are at that age where we went from a Friday night where I picked up all the seventh graders from school, the eighth graders, not all of them. I picked up a group of them. I was volunteering at the school that day, and then I picked them all up, drove them back to my house, got them all glammed up with hair and makeup, curled their hair, fed them dinner, got them ready for the seventh and eighth grade dance, and brought them back to the school, and then chaperoned the dance and danced outside the doors with other moms. It was so fun. Y'all, sometimes the door would swing open and we would peek inside. Don't you see this dance move? I think it's called the sea lion. We peered in and they were doing this move. It's unbelievable. These other parents and I, we were sitting out there and chatting outside this dance, chaperoning it outside, not inside the dance. I had the best time chatting the whole time for hours. But we would see the door open. We'd peek inside, and all of these kids are on the ground on their bellies holding their feet with their hands. I do that as a yoga pose. I think it's called a half wheel maybe or something. When you stretch, it's for your back. You grab your ankles and then you kind of pull your feet and your arms up in the air, so you're sort of like a boat. You're lifting up, but instead of that, they're doing that. They're holding their ankles and they're all lying on the ground and they're bouncing up and down to a beat, all of them at the same time on the ground on their bellies. Again, I think it's called the sea lion. If you haven't seen it before, you should look it up on whatever, YouTube or TikTok or whatever you have. But it was so unbelievable to see, and especially when you're looking in the door of this dance expecting to see kids on their feet, milling around, talking to each other. No, they were all on their bellies doing the sea lion. It was one of the most amazing things. We all just burst out laughing and decided that we would probably hurt ourselves if we tried that, so we did not try it. The next day, I took my son to Universal Studios as a guest to one of his friends, and he and his friend were head to toe both dressed up as Harry Potter, and it was so delightful to see them get to spend the whole day with another fabulous mom chatting and chatting and delighting in each other. Then on Sunday, kid birthday parties, and at one of them, me and another mom ended up going down the water slide in our jeans and our clothes just fully dressed, because you only live once in this life, and that was really fun too. Barbecues and pool parties on Memorial Day. We saw new movies. It was just a full, full weekend, and I'm ready for a nap, but I've got a head full of so many good memories. What about you? How was your weekend? I need to buckle down and do some laundry and stuff now, because it was so much fun. So that's my weekend. Today, we are talking about a tool that I use all the time with my coaching clients who are running businesses, and I've now adapted this tool to use in partnership with the Regenerative Design Cycle. The Regenerative Design episode is one of the most highly listened to episodes on this podcast. I know a lot of you use it. I have an entire course that takes all of my Regenerative Design content, and it's interwoven with my 15 years of experience leading a company in the innovation field. So I take all the thinking that people in the innovation world use to make an idea into a real thing, and using the Regenerative Design Cycle, we make those ideas real in a way that replenishes our energy, that does good in the world and brings back good vibes in the ways we most want them in our own lives, whether that's financially, in terms of health, in terms of love and relationships and companionship and community, whatever that is. So we use that cycle, because when we're doing this, we can work our plan. We can take massive action. We can create a blueprint and research everything that we're going to do. We can create milestones along the way, so we can track our own progress toward our goal. We can do lots of work around what our why is, why we're committed to the goal, and we can look at the impact that our idea, our goal, is going to have on the world. So I teach all of this in-depth in this course, in the Make Ideas Real course and in the Moxie Mastermind. All of the work around planning and belief cycles and all of the work on whys and obstacles and strategies, many, many things. Blue sky thinking, I teach all of it. And if we don't look at what we're thinking and what we believe about each of the three parts of our idea getting out into the world, it will stop us in our tracks, or it will either stop us or we'll continue making the same mistakes over and over again and not knowing why, because we're doing things the same way out of repetition of old belief systems, getting the same frustrating results, staying stuck or making the same mistakes and we don't know why, unless we look at our triumvirate of belief. So today I'm going to teach you this tool that I use all the time, use it in the Moxie Mastermind and the other day I used it with my clients in this group and they were like, oh my gosh, my mind is blown. And they said, please make a podcast episode about this. So they were talking about how amazing it was to look at their thoughts and the way that I taught them to do this is to take a piece of paper, because I like to make these podcasts really applicable and easy for you to apply to your own work, your own life. So you can do this along with me here. Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of it. Then create three sections, the top, the middle and the bottom section. In the upper left hand corner, you're going to write me. And in the upper left hand corner of the middle section, you're going to write my idea. And in the upper left hand corner of the bottom section, you're going to write the world. And what you're going to do is work on what we call the triumvirate of belief on this paper. When you're putting an idea out into the world, we have to look at what beliefs we have about ourselves as the person doing it, creating whatever the idea is, about our idea itself, and our beliefs about the world that is receiving our idea. Who are the people? What are the communities? What is the culture? Who is receiving this idea out in the world? And what do we believe about them? Because often we have really limiting, really counterproductive beliefs about one or more of all three of these, and we don't see them. And when we have beliefs running in the background, which we all do all the time about everything, if you've listened to even one or two of my episodes, you know that the ideas that we have, our thoughts that we have about our ideas, all of our beliefs that we have about our ideas, or our thoughts about anything in life are going to turn into the results we're walking around and experiencing. So if we don't see the thoughts and beliefs that we have, they're going to limit us incredibly. They're going to limit what we are actually capable of doing, what we take action on, how we talk about our ideas, and how we communicate about what we're working on, how we present our idea in the world. And all of those things will impact how people receive it and how opportunity shows up for us. So we're going to break this down because you might be working on creating change in a specific area of your life. Some of us are working on relationships. Some of us are working on businesses, work environments. Some of us are working on a creative project like a book or a musical album or a project in the house. Some of us are working on a habit change. So today we're going to look at how your beliefs about the three components of what you're working on might show up in any of these scenarios. So the exercise to reiterate is that you're going to write everything down that you believe about yourself, about your idea, and we're exchanging that word idea for whatever you're working on, and then about the world itself, the world that is receiving your idea. And we're going to write those existing beliefs down in the left-hand column in those three sections. Then the second part of the exercise is that you get to look at those beliefs. Now that they're out of your head and they're down on the paper, you get to look at what you believe about those three things, those three areas. What is the triumvirate of beliefs that you have about yourself, the idea you're trying to put into the world, and the world that is receiving your idea? Once you have all those down there on the right-hand side of that paper, on that right-hand column, you're going to do some thought swaps. You'll look at the thoughts that are not helpful, the beliefs that are not helpful that you have in the left-hand column. You're going to think, if those beliefs were prophecies that were going to come true, and again, if you've listened to the Regenerative Thought Model or many of my episodes, you know that our thoughts create our feelings, which lead to our actions, which lead to our results. So if the thought is the root of the results that you get, it is a thought prophecy. If the thought is there and you're thinking it, it's going to show up in the results that you have in your life. So I call those thought prophecies. So if you're thinking about something that's not very helpful, if you're believing something that's not helpful about yourself, or about your idea, or about the world, you want to swap it out for something that is more helpful, that will give you the results that you actually want. And when we switch those thoughts out, we'll look at all the thoughts that we have on the left-hand side, and we'll choose thoughts to replace them with that create resonance in our bodies. Not toxically positive ones, not blowing sunshine, not swapping out this is never going to work for this is 100% going to work. Not trades like that. We want to create thought swaps that trade out a really unhelpful thought for a thought that's true for you, but is more helpful. So it's still true, you still believe it, but it's a much more helpful way of thinking about yourself, your idea, and the world. So you have a couple of options here. You can listen to the Regenerative Design episode, you can listen to the Regenerative Thought Model episode, and you can listen to the Bridge Thoughts episode if you need help with a background on any of these. We've covered a lot of the basics in the other podcast episodes. So you can always reach out to me if you have questions about some of this background knowledge or need advice on which episodes to listen to. But at the core, even if you've never heard one of those episodes before, you're welcome and you can still do this exercise by writing down all the existing thoughts and beliefs that you have on the left-hand side and swapping them out for something more helpful on the right. Alright, one more thing I want to say before we get into some examples about how your beliefs might show up, your beliefs about this triumvirate of topics, you, your idea, and the world, is that when you're writing down what your beliefs currently are, you have to suspend judgment. You've got to be loving with yourself and compassionate, a compassionate observer. That is another episode you could listen to, the Compassionate Observer episode. So here's how to think of it. Just like a little kid who's had his hand in the cookie jar, maybe she pulled out a cookie and she already ate it and she has some chocolate on her face and you say, did you eat a cookie? She's not going to admit that she ate it if she thinks she's going to get busted. And you won't show yourself your own true thoughts and beliefs if you think you're going to get busted. So you have to be cool with yourself. You got to be gentle. You got to be compassionate with yourself. I suggest using humor when you look at the thoughts that are there. Like you can just look at those thoughts and be like, what the heck? That's not helpful. And then you can trade them out. You can just think I'm going to swap that one out, but it's okay that it's there because we're not here to judge ourselves. We're not beating ourselves up. We are compassionately observing what's going on in our brains, catching the thoughts that are not helpful and swapping them out for different ones. Okay? So this is how we look at the triumvirate of existing belief that we have about any change we're trying to make, anything we're trying to create in the world, any ideas we're trying to make real. And we're going to see how we're stopping ourselves with our own beliefs in our own brain. Once we see it, we have agency. We can change how we're thinking to be something more helpful. So let's look at some examples. The most common example that I coach on is when people are in a position of leadership. Women are in a position of leadership. They're in a startup or they're trying to switch careers. They're scaling a business or they're working in a work environment where they're in a position of leadership community where they're leading. So what we'll do is we'll look at their beliefs about themselves in that position of leadership. What is their self-concept? And they'll write out all beliefs. They'll look at their beliefs about their idea. So let's say they're an entrepreneur. They're in a position of leadership in their own entrepreneurial journey. So what are your beliefs about yourself as an entrepreneur? The idea that we would look at in this scenario is the woman's belief about the things that she's building, about the business itself. What are her thoughts about the business? And then we'll look at in that third section, what are her beliefs about the world, which would be the clients that going to receive this idea, that are going to buy it. The people who are going to be a part of the business, the clients who are going to show up there, the people in her market, the population of the market. So for instance, when you write down your thoughts about what you believe about these three, you see things like, for instance, if we're looking at her beliefs about herself as an entrepreneur, she might believe, I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm no good at selling this. I'm a kind of a hot mess with a business. And if any of these thoughts or thoughts like this come up for you, you're going to want to look very carefully at them because they will show up in how you run your business. They'll show up in the confidence with which you talk about yourself. Now, if you think about the business itself, which is in that middle section, and the ideas and beliefs that you see is, I don't know if people really want this. This idea is half cooked. I don't know if this is going to work. I don't know if this is valuable. If that's what someone believes about their business, if that's what you believe about what you're offering the world, that is going to come through in all your marketing, not only in how you talk about your business, but also how you write about it and how you describe it. It's going to come out in the product itself. It's going to come out in how you lead in the business. You'll be more hesitant, less confident, or in what you think about the people that are purchasing your product, the clients, the people you're serving, the patients, whoever they are. If you believe that they don't really want what you're giving, or they think it's too expensive, or they don't really need it, any of those thoughts that are hidden under the surface are going to undermine your work in successfully bringing your business to life, so you've got to work on them. Now, some of them, when I say we have to work on them, some of them require problem solving. If you really believe your idea is half cooked, cook the rest of your product. Cook it up. Do some work on it. Make sure you feel like you're in integrity before you sell something. Some of those beliefs will point you to work that actually needs to be done, and a lot of these beliefs come from insecurity. Actually, the work that needs to be done exists on the mindset side, so look at all of your thoughts. Look at what you believe if you're running a business about all these three categories, yourself, the business itself, and the people that are in your market, and notice what is mindset work and what are beliefs that actually require some tweaking for you to feel like you're in integrity and ready to go. So that's an example about beliefs that might pop up about a business offering. Another thing that I coach on a lot is relationships. People have an idea that they want to make real, and they're like, why is my relationship suffering? I have this idea that I want a beautiful relationship, but it's really not working. Everything I try isn't working, so we do the same exercise. We look at what their beliefs are about themselves as a person in the relationship, then about the relationship itself, and about their partner. So it's you, your idea, the world. What are your beliefs about yourself? What are your beliefs about your idea? What are your beliefs about the world? In this example, you is yourself in the relationship. Your idea is the relationship itself, and the world is your partner. That's the person that's out there in the world that's the other part of this. So if, for instance, you believe things about yourself like this, that sounds like, I do everything in my relationship to make it better. Or if you believe, I'm carrying all the weight. I do everything all the time. I'm showing up and my partner's not. If you have that type of victim mentality, those beliefs are going to show up in your behavior. You won't be open-hearted. You think you're doing all the work, so maybe you'll be a little entitled. You won't recognize the things that they're doing. Maybe you won't communicate in a productive way when you ask them to take on more. Now let's think about the middle section. If we're looking at the triumvirate of belief in relation to a relationship, what are the beliefs that someone might have about the relationship itself? I often have people want their relationship to be better, to feel wonderful, to feel playful, but their beliefs that are under the surface might sound something like this. We're so stuck, we're in a rut. We used to love each other so much more than we do right now. We're never going to get out of this. They're sneaky, right? They're under the surface. And if that's what someone believes about their relationship, they are not going to show up with excitement and joy and a sparkle in their eye and a desire to have fun and play together, which are the most important things to make a relationship bring its spark back is to play together, to find joy together. Solving problems and creating strategies to navigate conflict are really important too, but less important than sharing connective time together. It's more important than working through conflict is to create wonderful joy together and experiences of play and joy. But if we have those underlying thoughts, we're not going to show up in a playful, joyful way. So we want to switch them out. We don't have to switch them out for thoughts that are like, you know, we are obsessed with each other and we are madly in love with each other. That's not going to feel true. If the existing thought is we used to love each other so much more and we're falling out of love or we're in a rut and we'll never get unstuck, but we can trade the thoughts out for things like we're learning who we are again. I'm excited to learn who he is or she is. We're finding each other again after time has passed. We can do this. I'm committed to knowing him or her. I know we can create situations where we can play together. You can switch out for thoughts like that, that are believable, that create resonance in your body, that feel doable. All right. So in our last example, let's look at our beliefs in the triumvirate of belief about habit change, because a lot of us are making changes to our habits around health. So let's look at one of those. So what are your beliefs about you in this example, the person that's making the changes to your habits around your health? What are your beliefs about the idea, which are the habits that you actually want to take on and about the world, which is in this case, your body. If we're looking at health habits, it would be your body because that's where the idea comes to life and we see evidence of the habits, right? We see evidence of the change. So your ideas about yourself, let's look at them. If they sound something like, I'm never going to be able to do this, or this is going to be so hard, or I've never done this before. I've always fallen off the wagon. That's probably what's going to happen again. If that is what you're thinking, you will fall off the wagon. You will not keep showing up. You will not see every challenge as an opportunity to start again. You won't celebrate small incremental changes. You won't be supportive of yourself. You will easily let go of the habit change that you're trying to make. Secondly, we can look at the beliefs that you have about the actual habit that you're trying to engage in. If they sound something like, this is incredible for my health, that's a good thing. But if it sounds like, this is such a big sacrifice, I hate doing this, that is not going to keep you on track. So we want to change those out for something like, I'm committed because in the long run, this is exactly what I want. It might not be the thing that tastes the best, or it might be hard to wake up in the morning, but I'm going to feel so great after I do it. So we're looking at the beliefs about the things that you're actually doing, the changes to your habits, because if you don't embrace the habits and have beliefs and think thoughts about them that get you excited about these new habits, the habits won't last. So lastly, in the triumvirate of belief about a habit, a habitual change, in this example, we're looking at a health habit. So what are your beliefs about your body that exist right now? Do you have gratitude for the body that you're walking around in? Do you have love for it? Do you treat it with love and respect, like this incredible gift, like every tiny little cell inside your body is alive and all these living things are in your care? Or are you really hard on your body every time you look at it? What are your beliefs? So once you write all of those down on the left-hand side, they're probably a mix of the good, the bad, the ugly, right? Who knows? Once you do know what's in your mind, then you have agency. You can see those thoughts. You can see the beliefs that you have about each part of your idea, yourself, your idea, and the world that your idea is coming into as it's coming into existence, and you can switch them out and just watch what happens. It's like a bank account. When we're not looking at how much we're spending, we kind of like look away, we look in the other direction, and we wonder why we're always broke. That's what it's like when we don't look at our beliefs about something, but we just keep trying to do it. But once we create visibility, transparency, we look with clear eyes at what we believe, we can see what we're dealing with, and then we can make a change. We can swap out those beliefs for beliefs that actually support the changes we're trying to make, the things we're trying to create, and it gets so much easier so fast. Those mysterious things that are keeping us stuck, the mysterious reasons we keep making the same mistakes actually disappear as we change out the beliefs that we have about ourselves, the idea we're trying to make real, and the world we're trying to make it real in. So that, my friends, is the practice of the triumvirate of belief, and that's what I've got for you today. I can't wait to hear what comes out of this, and I'll see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you've got to 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. I'll see you in the Bloom Room.