Ep 180: The Blueprint

What are you actually building? Not reacting to — building.

Marie opens this episode with a summer reflection on the people you spend the most time with, and what it means to be truly intentional about who and what you let into your mind, your energy, and your week. From there, she gets into the concept she lives by and teaches inside the Moxie Mastermind: the Blueprint. Two focused priorities — one for contribution, one for life force — that hand you back the reins of your own life and point you toward the things that actually light you up.

If you've ever had that quiet, uncomfortable thought of is this all there is? — this episode is for you.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Why energy acclimation is real, and how to be intentional about the rooms, relationships, and conversations you put yourself in — instead of just saying yes to whatever approaches you
• The two-priority Blueprint Marie uses inside the Moxie Mastermind every six months — one goal for your contribution to the world, one for pure joy, adventure, and self-expression
• What a Misogi is (thank you, Jessie Itzler) and why setting a goal purely for fun and aliveness is just as important as your big professional swing
• Why "if you have more than three priorities, you have none" — and what it costs you to stay scattered
• How women are socialized to say yes to all the small things, hold everything for everyone, and never make the big moves toward the thing that's actually theirs to make
• Why your brain's negativity bias and your tendency to over-serve everyone around you are the same problem — and require the same intentional solution
• How the Blueprint works with your subconscious: when you choose a direction, your brain starts filtering for it and pulling you toward it — instead of keeping you stuck in reaction mode, replaying the past
• The difference between avoiding what you don't want and actively choosing what you do — and why only one of those creates real change
• What essentialism looks like in practice: letting go of everything — habits, people, scrolling, energy drains — that doesn't code you toward the result you're creating
• What becomes possible in just six months when you have a Blueprint, a community, and accountability — moves, funding, horses, healed marriages, inner peace, and wild things Marie has watched happen inside the Moxie

The Moxie Mastermind is enrolling for the September cohort now. The group is incredible, the Blueprint process is the core of how we work, and spots are limited. Find the application at dothebloom.com.

Mentioned in this episode: 

• Moxie Applications at dothebloom.com
• Jessie Itzler’s Big Ass Calendar 
• Essentialism by Greg McKown 
• Brain buckets Bloom Your Mind Episode 

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

Midyear Check-In And Reset

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 180 of the Bloom Your Mind Podcast. Hey everybody! How are you? How is it going? We are in the middle of the summer and in the middle of the year. July is halfway through the year. Where are you at? How is it going? How is this year going? You have an entire another half of a year to do whatever it is that you want 2026 to be all about. And in honor of that, today we're going to talk about the blueprint, which is a core tool, like the first tool that we use in the Moxie. And I'm going to share with you a little bit about why the blueprint is so important and what it has done for me in my life and for my ladies in the Moxie and how you can use it as this tool to really direct what you want to have the next six months be

A Childhood Lesson In Blueprints

SPEAKER_00 1:25

about. As I was getting ready, preparing to record this podcast, I was giggling about how back in the recession, when I was growing up in this little town of Ramona, and my dad was a contractor. He designed and built houses. He's built like hundreds of houses all over the town of Ramona. We'll be driving down Main Street and all the little side streets, and it'll be like, oh, I built that house. I built that house. And I have these flashes of memories of like him paying me to plant ice plant on the side of a hill because it's fire retardant, or like him paying me in this one house to like clean it at the end because I was like making a buck. Or just visiting the job sites and smelling sawdust and balancing on the frames of the houses, you know, when they were just framed up. I would like balance on the on the two by fours and walk along, just all these memories as I drive past them. And so fun, so nostalgic. And then there was a recession that hit in the 90s, I believe it was. And my dad, as you know, people didn't have money to build houses, he is such a self-starter and a creative force. And he did all these things. He like explored Equinox, this company, those like water filters, and um, he sold Max Apple Computers, which started our family with Apple Computers. And he he like iterated and tested all these small businesses as a way to have a side hustle to bridge the gap when no one was building houses. And one of the things that he did was he bought a blueprint business in Ramona on Main Street. And we had it in this big Chevy agency building that was my grandpa's, my grandpa owned. And uh he was trying to make ends meet by making blueprints for houses, right? And so that was my first job. The smell of ammonia all around me. Like, can you think of the smell of ammonia, how gnarly that is? It like burns your nose hairs, and just the smell of ammonia and like running these giant pieces of paper that are like vellum with blueprint paper underneath, right? To print blueprints for houses. And I ran them through this giant blueprint machine. And that was my first job ever, right after that. I worked at an Italian restaurant. That was really fun too. But so fun. Blueprint machine. And now the blueprint is like such a big deal in the mox scene. I never put that together until I was preparing to lead this episode, share this episode with you. So today we are going to talk about the blueprint. But before that, I always love to share little anecdotal things that are working for me in my life or that I'm seeing with my clients.

The Energy Of Who You’re Around

SPEAKER_00 4:05

And one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is this concept, we've all heard this idea that you are a compilation of the five people that you spend the most time with. And I've recently learned there's a term and I can't remember what it is right now, but it's like energetic matching. But the second word isn't matching, it's something else. It's like, it's like energetic acclimation or something. And it's basically this idea that if we put ourselves in groups or relationships, we kind of match, we have this um way that we acclimate to the energy of the people that we're spending time with and we match it. And that's this whole practice of like putting yourself in the room of the people that you want to be. Like, you know, push yourself beyond your comfort zone to create communities, to join communities that are going to lift you up to a new caliber. You're gonna start to resonate with that energy, and you're gonna make the energy of that group, those relationships, those people your new norm. It might increase your emotional intensity, right? Your joy, your motivation. Um, it might just increase the bar for how you show up. You start showing up on time, you start showing up at a higher level. Maybe it just increases your joy and your presence in life and your ability to manage your mind instead of focusing on gossip or negativity. You can create environments and relationships that ask more of you, that ask you to rise up, right? And we've done this historically as a human race through many different ways, through churches, right? Where we like have a priest or whoever who is a rabbi, whoever, whatever our our you know, choice of faith is, our faith practices. People have for many years chosen someone that will remind them of core values, like ask them to rise again to a value system. We do it through intentional communities. Um, and we can do it in different ways through just choosing relationships and groups. That's why I run the Moxie, I run the Bloom Room, so we can dip into the energy, lean into the energy, calibrate to a higher energy than what we can sustain on our own. But there are other ways I love to do this too. I love to choose environments carefully. I have the um many episodes that talk about this. Like, what are you allowing in the buckets of your brain? What books are you reading? What music are you listening to? What messages are you allowing in? And what communities and environments are you putting yourself in that you are becoming an energetic match to? So, one of the ways, aside from groups, I always prioritize being in a coaching group for myself as well as running the coaching groups that I run because it always, I always choose a group that's the next level up for me. So, like, what is the next level that I want to acclimate to? What's going to push me a little bit higher to meet myself in a in a new wonderful place to become more of who I want to be? And another way I like to do that is to really intentionally choose the people that I'm spending the most time with. And in my meditation in the morning, I picture the faces of the individuals that are lifting me up, the friendships that help me be my best self, the relationships that help me rise to a level of, you know, thought and feeling. So my energy and my focus and my action for the actions I'm taking in my life, I intentionally choose communities and people and friends that will help me become my best, help me perceive the world in the way ways that I want to do it. So I create that, I do my own work, right, through managing my mindset and meditation, journaling and all of that. And then it makes it easier for me to do that work and maintain this ecosystem of my own energy and my own intentional focus, intentional regenerative thoughts by putting myself around people that make it easier to do that. So I like to meditate in the morning and picture the friendships I'm cultivating and they then appear. I swear to you, sometimes I reach out to people because I am pattern matching with my subconscious. Like I'll have five or six people that I want to cultivate relationships with, and then it I randomly reach out to them, and a lot of times they reach out to me. I don't know what this is, it's magic. I cannot explain it, but it happens over and over. So I've been spending time this summer in the in the moments that I have to cultivate relationships. I've been spending time with such beautiful people. And what I love to do is look back on a week and see, you know, the three or four friends I spent good time with outside of all my time with my family. And I always see that they match who I was envisioning in the beginning of the week. And maybe that's like, duh, but it's also intentionally choosing, right, the people that I'm putting around me instead of reacting to, which is a big focus for our episode today. How are we being actors in the world instead of recipients of what is happening to

Two Goals That Guide Six Months

SPEAKER_00 9:08

us? So in the Moxie, we create a blueprint at the very beginning of every six months. One that we're a goal that we're accomplishing, a blueprint for a goal that we're accomplishing out in the world, funding for a startup, maybe getting a new job, creating a new career, balancing our current business or scaling it, changing cities we live in, creating less burnout, revamping our health and wellness, revamping relationships, maybe writing a book, maybe starting a brick and mortar business, maybe developing leadership skills, doubling our income while keeping the wealth that we generate just icing on the cake of the life that we've created that we're obsessed with. These are all things that might be our blueprint. Our second part of our blueprint is called our Misogee. I learned this term, the Misogi, from the founder, Jesse Itzler of the big ass calendar, which I love, I have on my wall, and my kids love it. He taught me that word. It's a word for a thing that I always do, and I always have my coaching clients do in the Moxie, where it's we set this one goal that I already described for our contribution, our thing we're doing that's like productive out in the world. And we set a second goal in our blueprint for fun, for joy, for adventure, for self-expression. That one goal, the Masogi is this idea. It's the one goal that if you look back on the year and you did that one thing, you hiked that wild trail, you wrote that book, you went on that journey, a girl's trip to another country, or you traveled by yourself, whatever that is. You swam every single day, you know, you you did a marathon, whatever it is. That goal that if you look back on the year, you'll be so proud of who you were. Not just because of what your contribution and your productivity created, but also because you're choosing the adventure, the beautiful life, and living it, the beautiful life you envision. So let's talk a little bit about the blueprint. And I'm not gonna go into the tactics. We use a very specific format, and I'll tell you a little bit about that, but I'm really not gonna go into the details. I want to more talk about why it's so important to have a blueprint, to have two things that you're focused on, and to choose it intentionally.

Priorities That Beat Reactivity

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Part of it is because we've been talking a lot about being your own ride or die, being your own best friend. Being your own best friend in this life means setting goals and going for them because they are an expression of you, your gift to the world, what you want the world to experience of the incredible person that you are, because you choose it, because it makes you feel on fire, because it makes you have fun, because you feel proud of who you're being when you're bringing that blueprint to life, because you love doing it, because the process is the thing itself. Because you get to choose what you do in this life, and when you have a blueprint, you are utilizing the most important resource that you have, your time and your energy, on something you care about. You are steering your own life instead of being in reactivity, which so many of us do. Many of us socialized as women do. I heard this quote Jim Collins said this. If you have more than three priorities, then you have none. And so let's talk a little bit about what that means. When you have more than three, and I say two priorities myself is my practice. When you don't have two priorities, your attention goes all over the place. I've talked many times about the book Essentialism and how your energy goes out in all these different, this is Greg McCowan, he your energy goes out in all these different directions when you're not focusing in on one most important thing. So having a blueprint that's focusing your energy, like McCowan says, in one direction, that direction that brings you the most joy and aliveness and self-expression, the thing you care the most about, the thing that you're creating in the world that lines up with the contribution you want to make, the change you want to make to the world, your passion, where your deep passion meets the world's deep need, the thing you want to leave behind, the thing that lights you up. When you don't have that in the center, that blueprint, and you're not making big moves toward that thing, you're never gonna do it. If you don't decide that it's the priority, you'll never pull it off. You'll focus on reacting to all the little things that ask for your attention all around you all the time. And women like us, women that are in the moxie, everybody wants our attention. In the moxie, it's a conversation we have all the time. Women who are drawn to the moxie are capable of so much and have acclimated to how we've been socialized to hold everything. And we just keep acclimating and holding more. So I remember when the movie Encanto came out, a bunch of women who have a bunch of Moxie that I was working with at the time. This is years and years ago, right? During COVID, actually, like six years ago, everyone watched that who watched that movie. Everybody had kids, and they watched the movie with their kids, and they related so much to the big sister character who was holding everything. She held like this giant boulder. She had super strength, and she held this giant boulder of her head as a visual in this one scene, and she was like the one that said yes to everyone around, everybody's needs. She was always running from thing to thing because she was so strong and she could hold it all. Everybody wants little things from us because we are so capable and we can seemingly balance it all. We say yes to all of it because we've been socialized to say yes to it. Some part of us thinks that that's what makes us valuable and worth something. We're socialized to say yes. And everybody wants a piece of what we can create. Not because they're it's not a like negatively intentioned thing. They just are like, hey, she can do it. I'm gonna ask her. Then women come to me and they're like, hey, I feel horrible saying this, but is this it? Is this all there is? Is this life? Because I have it all, I've accomplished it all, but I feel so empty. And the answer is no, that is not all there is. We take that focus back by setting a blueprint, by prioritizing two core priorities: one for contribution and one for life force, for joy, for wild play and feminine energy and joy and love. And we release that life force into the world by prioritizing that. So let me just say why this is important is to have the blueprint in order to do this. Because you might be like, Yeah, I'm gonna do that anyway. I love this. I'm gonna contribute and I'm gonna prioritize joy, but I don't want a blueprint. Well, let me talk a little bit about why it's important. Just like your brain has a negativity bias that you have to balance out in the morning or every day by focusing it in on the things that are productive to you, that are helpful, that are positive, by taking that raw material of life and deciding how you're gonna think about it, how you're gonna feel about it. Deciding your incredible, helpful perspective on what life gives you. We know we have to do that. We know that we talk about that on the podcast all the time. We know we have to manage our mind because the circumstances of life are neutral. And our brain's gonna do wild negative things with them unless we direct our brain. So we can't be surprised by our tendency to go to the negative. We got to get ahead of it and redirect our brain every morning. In that same way, we can't be surprised as women by our tendency to want to say yes to all the little things, to serve everyone, take care of everyone, give everyone what they need. It's how we've been socialized. So just like we have to know that our brains are gonna go to the negative, we have to know that our brains are gonna go there and we have to take our brains intentionally towards a more helpful perspective. We also have to know that as women, our brains are gonna tell us to say yes to all the little things, to prioritize service, prioritize everyone's needs, prioritize what we think is expected of us. And we have to intentionally upfront choose on purpose what our blueprint goals are for contribution and for fun. That's living from Moxie. And then we won't have room for all the little things unless they really, really matter to us. We will be so much easier to say no to everything that doesn't match that blueprint unless it really matters to us. So, yes, we do create and follow the blueprint from a very specific framework in the Moxie. We use my regenerative design process, which is based in 15 years of leading an innovation design thinking company. We use those tools, we use the coaching mindset tools, hypnosis tools to pull it off. But this episode is just about having that blueprint for yourself in any form. Because people who are able to turn their ideas into real things do it by choosing what they put their energy into, not by avoiding what they don't want. They choose what they're going towards. Then their subconscious system, their cognitive bias, their opportunity bias filters out what doesn't match that thing, that vision, that blueprint, and then hones in on what does match it. And the most successful people who turn their ideas into real things get pulled towards the things that they want. But when we're not prioritizing our blueprint idea that we're making real in the world, what happens is that we're just reacting to everything. And when we react, we're basing it off of what's been possible in the past. We're avoiding how things happened in the past because that's what we've experienced so far. Our decision making is based on what's been possible in the past, which is going to give us the same repeated results when we're just avoiding and reacting to the things in the world and saying yes to things that other people are asking of us instead of intentionally going in the direction that we choose, in the direction of possibility and newness and the change we want to see in the world. The blueprint

Cutting What Drains Your Energy

SPEAKER_00 19:08

helps you let go. Like Greg McCowan says in that book, Essentialism, of everything that just does not fit the filter of those two priorities. The blueprint is focused on what you can control, what you can pull off, not on what you want to have randomly happen out in the world. The blueprint is what you're gonna do with your thought, your mindset, your feelings and your energy, and your massive action that you're taking towards that blueprint. And then everything else goes that doesn't support that. And when I say everything else goes, I mean the habits that are not regenerative, the relationships that are not regenerative that are not giving you energy back. The habits like Netflixing and Netflixing, yeah, Netflix binging, scrolling, late-night snacks, alcohol, like food that doesn't give us energy, not exercising, people that bring us down, relationships, communities that bring us down, uh, environments that bring us down that don't regenerate our energy. Right? The things that we read, the things we consume in our brain buckets that are not filling us with energy. We only take in the things we energy code. You can listen to that episode. We take in the things that match this energy we're putting it out. We only take in the things that allow us to be our big, bright, beautiful, motivated selves to pursue our blueprint. We process the 50-50 of all the things, all the emotions, but we only allow things in that allow us to be most successful at bringing our blueprint to life. So having a blueprint for what you're creating takes the reins back. It gives you a container to see who you are and who you're becoming. Gives you a North Star, both one that is in the field of contribution to the world and one that is for fun and joy and you being the beautiful, unleashed, amazing you that you can be in the world. It allows you to approach life, to be an actor in life, not a recipient of what is happening to you. Glenn Tripp taught me that, the founder of Galileo Innovation Camps. And then as you work your blueprint and you bring your idea to life, you got to create some accountability. And when you do, you will watch your life take off, accelerate rapidly in the most amazing, unexpected

Proof It Works And How To Join

SPEAKER_00 21:28

ways. I see it over and over and over in the Moxie. In just the last six months alone, there has been complete unbelievable creation. A woman who was moving across the country and breaking up out of a relationship and now is staying in San Diego, bought a house, is engaged, getting married, changed careers, stopped working for free. Someone is getting funding for an incredible startup and has gotten all this funding. Someone has started Sunday dinners where their extended family that was all estranged before. A woman has made her business run without her by creating manuals and delegation for her teams. Someone has created inner peace through meditation, healed marriages by being more of who she wants to be in her marriage, gotten engaged, bought houses, bought a horse because that's what she loved when she was a kid, and she rides it every day now. In six months, we have done wild things in the way of joy and in the way of contribution. And we have a ride or die group there for it all, helping us through the hard bits, helping us stay focused on our Masogee and our blueprint, helping us all the way so we don't have to be our own energy. We can lean into the energy and energy match it. We can acclimate to the higher energy that asks us to be our best selves. So if you're interested in setting this blueprint and working it with us, if you're a woman in any kind of position of leadership in your life or wanting to be, come and join us for a September cohort. This group is so amazing. The women that are already in it. And the application is live on do thebloom.com. Go to work with me, the Moxie, and apply, and we will see you there. And if not, create another form for your own blueprint. Choose a goal for the rest of this year. We are in July. And if not, if we're in a different point of the year when you're listening to this, it's the start of some six months. So let's go, baby. Set a blueprint for the joy you want to experience and the thing you want to contribute. And I will be here cheering you along. I love you all. That's what I've got for you. And I'll see you 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.