Ep 176: Be Your Own Ride Or Die

Marie is back from a week in the Catskills (and a stroll down the High Line) and diving into a concept that keeps showing up everywhere in her life — in her therapy, at the retreat she just led, in her coaching groups, and in the books she's been reading. When she mentioned it in both the Bloom Room and Moxie, the room lit up. So here it is.

The idea is simple and radical: the person who should be your ultimate ride or die isn't out there. She’s you.

We start with talking about how parents are doing in the transition between the school year and summer, how to 

What you'll learn in this episode:

• What it actually means to be your own ride or die — and why Marie sees it as the heart of living from your Moxie
• How to protect your time and energy through regenerative design — and why access to you is something people earn, not automatically receive
• Why living authentically (even when it's uncomfortable) is one of the most powerful forms of self-loyalty
• What "shame slaying" is and how radical honesty robs shame of its power
• How to be a cycle breaker — and why you probably won't get positive reinforcement for it (and why that's okay)
• The difference between loving someone and giving them an all-access pass to your time and energy
• How to be the compassionate observer of yourself when you're struggling — and what the "I got you" energy really looks like from the inside out

Mentioned in this episode:

• The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck
• The Limit Does Not Exist by Shoshana Raven
• The Time Whispering course (now available for purchase)
• The Love and Moxie course (now available for purchase)
• The Moxie Mastermind — and the June 25th Mixer in San Diego
• Find Marie at dothebloom.com or @the.bloom.coach on Instagram

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 friends, and welcome to episode number 176 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. I skipped last week, didn't really mean to, but I was traveling in upstate New York, spending a week among a group at a retreat of um female CEOs, and we were coaching in the Cat Skills. I had never been to the Cat Skills before, and it was so fabulous, and I forgot my podcast microphone. Well, that's kind of a lie. I couldn't fit it in my suitcase because my suitcase was already 56 pounds. And I thought I might do it a different way when I got there, but I did not. So you skipped a week, and I hope you're okay with it because it meant that I got to enjoy New York. And I also went to Chelsea, where I stayed in my friend's unbelievably beautiful little mini mansion in Chelsea. And I walked the Highline for the first time, and it was so amazing. It made me feel like the future is now. So I love some New York. And I am back now, and it is the week when we transition from school to summer for my kids. And every parent that I've talked to this week in coaching calls has their heads spinning a little bit because it is a wild transition as a parent to move from the school year to the summer. Our kids need more from us because change is hard for kids, but they need more from us when we have less to give during these transition times because transition is happening for all of us. There are so many details to track, things to take care of, and it is a lot to hold and a lot to carry. So if you are listening to this real time in June, give some extra love to the parents around you and your community because it's kind of a lot. So many celebrations, so many wonderful things. And most parents I'm talking to are kind of exhausted. This morning when I was making my coffee, I was warming up my oat milk. Despite all of my information about blood sugar, I have been drinking my coffee with oat milk and a little bit of maple syrup and cinnamon, and it makes me so happy that I keep doing it. Oopsie daisy. And the other thing I keep doing is that I heat it up on the stove and then I get impatient that it's heating up at like a level four or whatever. I have a very powerful electric stove. So I turn it up to a seven or an eight, and I'm like, I got it this time. I got it. I'm right here watching it. And over and over. Hey, not every time, but plenty of times it will boil over, y'all. This is what I think they call the definition of insanity, right? Which is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. My husband and I also do it with our water because, like, it's really loud when you put a mason jar or a large glass down in the sink and fill it up with drinking water. And so we always do it up on the counter and then over and over again we forget and it overflows. It is hilarious to be a person that considers yourself pretty high-functioning, good head on your shoulders, pretty capable, very capable, and still doing silly things like that. But it does tell me also that it's one of those times when we're moving a little fast. The oat milk is overflowing, the water's dripping out of the glass. Slow down. So I'll say that with the coaching I've been giving all my beautiful, wonderful, heroic, epic parents this week, and actually other people that I've coaching, that I've been coaching that have a lot going on, is in times like this, I recommend doing two or three things. Number one, slow down as much as you can. This is the time when people leave their coffee cup or in worse scenarios, their laptop on the roof and drive off, or leave their keys in their car or back into something, right? When your brain is really overwhelmed with things to do, slow it down, baby, as much as you can. And second thing, only be around people in places doing things, working on projects as much as you can control. Only do those things with people, places, communities that give you good energy. Do not spend time around challenging individuals, individuals that trigger or challenge you right now. Just be around people who lift you up and help you feel really good and strong. There's plenty of time in other periods of your life when you're feeling stronger and have more capacity to be in more challenging situations. But when our capacity is diminished, let's really surround ourselves with people that are easy and supportive and loving. I like to say that sometimes 80% is our 100%, right? Sometimes our capacity is lower, and that's okay, and it's dependent on life circumstances. So let it be what it is and give yourself love and compassion. And lastly, get super nitty-gritty with self-care. Exercise, drink water, move your body, sit and rest, complete your stress cycles with a little shake or a little something, a little stretch to get the stress out of your body. Eat nutritious food, go slow. Here's all the things that I like to do for myself, and I like to encourage people around me to do when life gets a little bit bananas. All right. So I have had this thing come up over and over and over, this theme that has come up over and over lately. And so I was like, okay, okay, I'll make a podcast episode about it. And I uh have been working with a therapist who's been having me work specifically on doing this. Then I personally myself, then I went to this retreat, and the woman who led the retreat chose it as the theme for the retreat because she heard it in a yoga training. It was the theme for the yoga training. And then I also heard it in a couple of other places recently, and over the last couple months, I've mentioned this concept in both the Bloom Room and the Moxie, and people really lit up when I mentioned this concept. So it keeps appearing everywhere. And the idea is I want you to think about who in your life is your ride or die. And then whoever comes to mind, just hold them in mind. There's a reason why that person came to mind and they're important to you. And the idea is rather than any person external to us, we should always be our own ride or die. Our own ride or die. And when I thought about why does this speak to all my clients so much? Why is this coming up in my own life so much? I'm like, oh, this is what we talk about in Moxie all the time. This is Moxie, right? Ultimately, it's it's all of these exercises that we do in the Moxie mastermind in our Moxie groups. Being your own ride or die is a way of saying live from your moxie. This morning I led over the past three days a course on time whispering, which people are saying they're really, really loving and is going to be available for purchase in the next couple weeks. Both the course on relationships called Love and Moxie and the course on time management called Time Whispering, both have gotten incredible reviews and people are just raving about what they're getting from them. So they're purchasing the course and sending it to friends and giving it as gifts. And there's always a Telegram channel that is open. So when no matter when you do it, you can get support, ask questions, get coaching for either of those courses. But I was teaching it this morning, and we were talking about a couple days ago, actually, two days ago when I taught the first class, we talked about how I believe that it's important for us always to have a list of our priorities in our life, our top five priorities, which I've mentioned on the podcast before. And my number one priority is always my mental and physical well-being. The reason that taps into time whispering is because I kind of code that around the way that I manage my time to look at my color-coded calendar and see if it's lining up with my priorities. Being your own ride or die means always prioritizing your own mental and physical well-being above everything else. For me, that means I meditate, I exercise, I spend time with people that fill my cup, that give me good energy back. One of the things that is so important to me, I've noticed in my life, is that I hang out with reciprocal listeners. That it's not, I don't like to spend time in relationships where the other person is only listening in a self-referential way, and or the person talks about themselves only and doesn't sort of share the mic and do some talking and some listening and asking some questions about the other person. This interactive element in relationships I find is very important to me. So I spend time in relationships where they're interactive, they're reciprocal. We care about each other, care about learning about each other. It's not all one person show. That's one way I make myself my ride or die is I don't like to spend a lot of time. Unless I'm coaching someone, it's all about them. If I'm coaching a group, it's all about them. Of course, leading a retreat. If I'm working, it's different. But in my own personal relationships, I want to be with people who share, share the space and care about each other. As a woman who's been socialized not to do that, it's something I had to work at and that felt uncomfortable at first to make sure that the relationships I have allow me to take up space too. Another thing I teach is regenerative design. This is huge in the idea of being your own ride or die because our time and our energy are not free. We only allow access to our time and energy. We limit that access to the people, the places, the communities, the projects, the things that give us energy back. Our time is not free. Our attention is not free. And people can lose access. Being your own ride or die means allowing access to people who deserve it, and sometimes allowing people to lose access. And let's just say, let's just get clear here that someone losing access to our time and our energy and our focus doesn't mean we don't love them, doesn't mean they're dead to us, we don't forgive them. Of course. We can love people, we can forgive people, we can be compassionate and empathetic and have a beautiful relationship and think beautiful thoughts about a person without them having an all-access pass to our time, our home, our attention, our energy, our focus. I can love you and not spend a lot of time with you. Being our own ride or die, your own ride or die, means that you spend time with people who create safety and love and fun and joy for you, that don't take advantage of you, that don't steamroll you, that don't take you for granted. That's being your own ride or die. You know your worth, you know your value. And you can love, love, love the people around you, but only give access to the people who earn it. The other thing that I think of with Moxie, we work on this all the time in Moxie, all these things, but being your own ride or die means living authentically. There is a woman named Martha Book who wrote a book that I've referenced before called The Way of Integrity. And she did a challenge which I did, which was living a year of no lies. And by lies, I mean like not laughing when it's not funny, right? Not staying in a conversation when I don't want to be there, not going to something if I don't want to go. And it was a wild year, and things changed. Relationships changed, and it felt really good. So being your own ride or die means we don't pretend. No matter how we've been socialized as women, we don't pretend to make everyone around us feel good. We're authentic. We laugh when it's funny. We go where we want to go. It can be an incredible challenge to take this on if you're willing to do it. There's another book I've read lately called The Limit Does Not Exist by Shoshana Raven. And in this she talks about shame slaying. I love this version of being your own ride or die. It's like allowing yourself this radical authenticity. It's like next level. These, this, these books are like building off of themselves. And for her, she talks about how freeing it is to put on blast or say the things that you feel a little bit of shame about. Talk about them to strangers around you. They lose their power. So for her, she talked about an STD that she got and how she just started talking to everyone about how she had it. For me, I talk often about how I used to be anorexic when I was in my early 20s, and I almost lost my life to that. I had a huge eating disorder because of some of the trauma that I had lived through. And there's no energy on it when I talk about it. I don't care. I think the more we own the things that we've lived through, the more we own our humanity, the more other people can own them too, and the less we have to hide. Because when we hide, we get weird. So whatever it is that we're hiding, how can we open it up and share it? Be our own ride or die because we don't want to live with the ick of things that we're hiding and parts of us that we won't show. How can we shameslay? We got this. We got each other. As women, we're also socialized not to take care of ourselves, not to practice self-care. Being our own ride or die means taking up time and space for ourselves. I shared this post. It was a real on Instagram, and I never know what people are gonna like. I'm just trying to share my work and invite people in to the transformation in their own lives, yeah. And I shared this post about how a lot of us as women don't take up time or space. And my time and space is at five in the morning, y'all, because it's a before people wake up. And I really like being alone in the dark at five in the morning with my candle and my coffee. And I meditate and I make a little nest. I teach all my meditations in the Moxie mastermind. I make this little nest with all these beloved objects. It's all cozy and warm. And the other day, my daughter woke up really early and I was about to do my meditation, and she was banging around the kitchen. And I just looked at her and I was, she's like, What? Because I must have been making a weird face. And I was like, hey, I would love it if you would wait for about 10 minutes before you make your lunch and do your cereal. If you can go in your room for like 10 more minutes, that'll let me meditate and that would be amazing. And she goes, Okay. And I sit down and I meditate, and then she comes back out, and I was like, So part of that, part of me being my write or die, part of me being in my moxie is just asking for what I need, right? Even if it means that somebody else might have to go out of their way a little bit. As women, it can be so empowering. That's what so many women said to me after they saw that post. They were like, the thing that was crazy was that you actually asked her to do something different. I was like, Yeah, I didn't demand, but I did say, Hey, can you do this for me? And then the other part of it was when she came back out, I made fun of myself to her. And I was like, How was I this morning? I was like, Wake up, bear. And she's like, Yeah, you are weird. And I was like, I know. It's because I need to meditate. And it was really early, and you were awake banging around, and we cracked up because I made fun of myself as like a hibernating bear that was like waking up. And that's the other part. It's like that's the shame slay, right? I don't have to be perfect. I can be awkward. And then we can talk about it, we can make fun of it. And that just shame slays, right? It takes out any uh inauthenticity and allows us to connect with each other so beautifully. So taking up our own space, saying what's real, we don't have to be perfect, and being a cycle breaker by taking up our own space. I was coaching someone earlier in Moxie, and she's been riding her horse every single day. Oh, that sounds so good to me. I wish I could do that. I'm gonna have to put that on my list. Okay, so riding a horse every day. And she said, you know, it's hard. It's hard to back myself up. It's giving me so much peace of mind and uh, you know, like joy. And it's it's her being her own ride or die, literally. She's riding a horse, get it? She's being her own ride or die. And I said, Yeah, because you're a cycle breaker. And when we're taking time and space for ourselves as women, we're being cycle breakers. We're taught that we're not supposed to do that. We're supposed to serve and serve and get out of everybody's way and not take up space and not take care of ourselves. And that is not our moxie. That is not being our ride or die. But here's what I want to say about being your own ride or die, about living from your moxie, about taking up space. It's that you're gonna be a cycle breaker. And when you're a cycle breaker, you often do not get positive reinforcement. You have to be your own positive reinforcement. Many of us experience this in breaking cycles and dysfunctional family systems where there's a lot of dysfunction, then we become a cycle breaker and we get negative feedback for being cycle breakers. Many of us have experienced that. It's because you're breaking a cycle and the cycle's still going. The spin cycle that you were tumbling around in, you stepped out of it and it's still going and it doesn't want you to step out of it, right? So you'll probably get negative reinforcement when you're a cycle breaker. Because the system that you're breaking doesn't want to look at itself. It can't look at itself and see the dysfunction. Whether that's the dysfunction of making women stay small and not take care of themselves, or whether that's the dysfunction of a family unit, it has to villainize you as a cycle breaker because otherwise it has to look at itself and it can't do that. So being your own ride or die means protecting yourself and validating yourself and having your own back and celebrating the way that you break a cycle. And then getting into groups of women who are breaking cycles too. Being your own ride or die means that you get to feel good even when the people around you are in a different model. So, in the regenerative thought model, we see how we cycle our thoughts through and through and through, and we can break those. We can use our neuroplasticity to introduce different ways of thinking and feeling and behaving. Being our own ride or die means we protect our own thinking and feeling. We might want to feel resentment for somebody else because we get attached to it, because that resentment make we feel like they deserve it, and we gotta feel resentful in order for them to change, or we gotta feel resentful because they deserve that resentment. But that's not how it works. If we feel resentment, we're the ones that suffer. If we feel resentment, we're probably acting resentful. So letting someone off the hook of our resentful feelings only benefits us. We can still hold people accountable, we can put up boundaries, we can choose where we are and where we're not, but we can love people instead of feel resentment towards them because that benefits us. We can love people, be joyous even when they're sad, even when they're overwhelmed, even when they're feeling chaotic. That's being our own ride or die, is not stepping into somebody else's feelings so they don't feel so alone. Not jumping into somebody else's model so we're stressed with them. Being our own ride or die means we protect our own inner space, our own energy, our own feelings and our own thoughts. And it means that when we're alone, we can enjoy our own company. We can look for things that entertain us. We can do what works for us. You can do what works for you. I can dress in fashion. I love fashion and I love style, but I I want that to be for me. Not so that other people are impressed with me. Being your own ride or die means developing a sense of style that's for you. And it also means being your own ride or die that when you're not doing great and you're not feeling great, you are the compassionate observer. You are your own best friend, love. You come to yourself when you mess up and you say, What's going on, love? Why won't I follow through on these things I said I'd do? We talked about this in the time whispering course. When you behave in a way you're not proud of, you come back to yourself and say, What's going on, love? Tell me, what's happening? Where's this coming from? What need am I trying to meet right now? What's going on? I got you. We don't beat ourselves up, we check in. That's what happens when we are our own ride or die, when we're living from our moxie. We got that I got you energy with ourselves. Do you know what it feels like to be in a really hard moment and have someone feel and say, I got you. When my husband is having a hard time. This happened the other day. I just gave him a hug, and inside I was like, Oh, I can hear the words going through my head. And the words in my head were like, I got you. You got this, I got you. And that's how we gotta be with ourselves, the same way we are with our most precious people. My husband, my two precious kids. I got you. But in order to do that for them, I gotta be able to say that to myself. I got you. So I gave you so many examples of how I think about being my own ride or die, how I think about you being your own ride or die, what it means to live from that place of moxie. What does it look like for you to be your own ride or die? Some of the things I said are something different. If you want to build this skill of being your own ride or die, come into the moxie mastermind. We work on this all the time. We choose an idea to make real in the world, we put our love and energy into it. We say no to all the other stuff we don't want to do. We learn to live from our moxie, and we do it in the company of women, and we celebrate this. Go to the.bloom.coach on Instagram, and there's a link in my bio. Or go to the website do thebloom.com and go to work with me and click on the application for the Moxie Mastermind and come and join us. We're doing a mixer on June 25th in San Diego, bringing women together in a community to back each other up, to meet each other, learn each other's businesses, support each other's businesses, have some laughs, talk about moxie, get some coaching. We're doing that too on June 25th. You can find that in my Instagram bio as well. If you are a woman interested in joining your community of Moxie ladies, we got you. All right. I can't wait to hear what comes up, how you figure out how you can be your own ride or die. Send this to a friend that needs a little moxie in her life or someone who's really good at being her own ride or die to tell her you inspire, she inspires you. Yeah, you I said that backwards, but it's probably because you inspire her too. And that's what I've got for you this week, my beautiful friends. 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.