Ep 184: Problems Are the Point

Marie is recording this one from a pink house in Sequim on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with ocean out every window and a ten-year-old Jack Sparrow jumping off rocks on their own private beach. She's in full August mode — off, on the road, and completely in it with her kids.

But she's got a story from the road that's too good not to share. Because what started as a 10-hour drive that turned into a 16-hour day — with four hours of dead-stopped traffic, an electric car and two kids in the backseat — which turned into the best day of the whole trip. And the reason why is exactly what she teaches inside the Moxie.

Problems aren't a sign that something's gone wrong. They're the whole point.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Why the sweet spot of growth — in business, in health, in relationships, in any idea you're making real — lives inside the problems, not around them
• How design thinking's iterative cycle maps perfectly onto real life: test, see what breaks, redesign, try again — and why that's exactly what you want
• The story of the Hell's Kitchen cast party, four hours of dead-stopped traffic, a mountain pass through golden oak-covered hills, and why Marie's kids called it the best day of the whole trip
• How you talk to yourself about a problem the moment it hits — and why that internal conversation determines everything about the experience you're about to have
• Why pushing into the yellow zone of slight discomfort over and over is what grows your capacity — and why staying in the green zone of comfort actually shrinks it
• Why every obstacle is just a strategy waiting to happen — and how collaborative problem solving creates bonding, adventure, and insights you never would have found without the problem
• What it means to say yes to wild, ridiculous ideas on purpose — so that you get to have beautiful, creative problems arise that your brain gets to solve
• The reflection question for this week: when you hear the word "problem," do you think this is bad — or do you think this is exactly what I want?

Mentioned in this episode:

• The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday
• Hell's Kitchen — the Alicia Keys musical (go see it!)
• The Moxie Mastermind — where iteration, problem solving, and making ideas real is the whole game
• The Misogi goal — your six-month goal for adventure and personal aliveness alongside your contribution goal

A couple of spots still open in the September Moxie Mastermind cohort. Apply at dothebloom.com/moxie-mastermind-form

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

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_01 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. Today I am recording this from the road. I am in a pink house in a town called Squim in northern Washington. And the town is pronounced Squim, but it's spelled S-E-Q-U-I-M. And so, of course, it looks like Sequim. And I learned it the hard way by saying Sequim to people that I actually bumped into on Bainbridge Island. Um, I feel like my husband said, every time we go anywhere, someone calls your name and says, Right? It was so fun. I found this woman that is a coach that I met in another program a long time ago. And she actually lives in Washington and she called out my name. And I turned and we found her standing there smiling at me, and we got to reconnect. That was in Bainbridge Island, which we did yesterday. We took the ferry from Seattle over to Bainbridge Island. And I told her we were staying at Sequim and she said, Squim. So we are in Squim. And it is a beautiful pink house right on the Strait of Wandafuca. And so there's ocean outside every window of the house. It's really cool because when you're sitting like on the couch or something, and you look out the windows, you can't see the beach. So it kind of looks like you're in a boat. And let's see, there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. There's ten windows in this main room, and there's just ocean on all sides. There's these beautiful yellow flowers waving in the windows. And there is outside my window a little pirate jumping from rock to rock. I have told y'all about how my son um loves to dress up and he's celebrating his 10th birthday. So we're going to end this trip in Disneyland. And he has full head-to-toe Mandalorian outfit and a full head-to-toe Jack Sparrow outfit that he was planning to wear at Disneyland that we brought with us. But when we got here yesterday, we have our own little private beach on this beautiful strait where we can see the fairies going by and just this beautiful open expanse of ocean. And I was sitting out there with my book and my journal ready to read and write a little bit, just enjoying these beautiful birds that fly across the water every like five or seven minutes or so, like three inches above the surface of the water, just straight from one side of your vision to the other. And I was just sitting there with my toes in the sand, feeling just this gratitude and like, where am I right now? This is so amazing watching these birds flying over the surface of this sparkling water on this tiny private beach with beautiful rocks and all of these white seashells everywhere. And right as I was just appreciating this beauty, this pirate jumps off of a rock and lands in the sand in front of me with this giant giggle. And I yelped and cracked up because Jack Sparrow was standing in front of me in a head-to-toe Jack Sparrow outfit. We got here, and after a few days in Seattle, going to the Space Needle and the Aquarium and the Museum of Pop Culture and just exploring the city and taking the monorail and all the fun stuff there and this beautiful fancy hotel, the Fairmount Olympic. We had such a nice time staying there. It had a beautiful pool that the family got to all hang out in. We, my husband came and joined us. We've been on a road trip, just the three of us, and he joined us, and we got to have this beautiful Seattle day. And then we came out here to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and all of a sudden my kids just get in the zone. Instead of like the travel road trip, car, people, city exploration, they just immediately go into the zone where my daughter is reading books on the couch in her own world, and my son is dressed head to toe as Jack Sparrow. There is, if you've seen Parts of the Caribbean, there is a scene where he, a part of the story where he gets stranded on an island, and that is what's happening here. My son is Jack's Barrow stranded on an island on this beach. And as I record this to you, I am watching him jump from rock to rock completely in his own world. And it is so much fun. So this is a message from the road. I'm not working in August, but I am recording a couple podcasts and stories as I hit the road. And I wanted to tell you a story today that was really amazing that happened from the beginning of our road trip. And the reason I want to tell you is because it's so insightful when we apply it to our businesses or the ideas that we're making real, whether that's a book that you're writing or a health habit that you're changing or a business that you're scaling. For me, I really apply it to my business and in the moxie when I'm coaching women leaders who are bringing an idea into the world for whatever their contribution to the world is, whether that's a book or an album or whether it's scaling a business or launching a startup or whatever it is that they're working on. One person's developing an app, one's writing a book, one's doing a biomed startup. They're one's just beginning her entrepreneurial journey, whatever they're working on. We do that goal. And then we also set a Masogi goal, which is their goal for their life. That's like roller skating with pigtails on or doing a marathon or changing their relationship, whatever that beautiful goal for adventure and the expression of their moxie is. We set those two goals in the MOXI. And uh as we do that, invariably problems come up. Problems arise. Always they arise. And I want to talk today about what we do with those problems and how our brain wants to make a problem a problem. When a problem is actually exactly what we want. We want to do new things, put ourselves out there, live this beautiful life in the way that only we can by making our ideas real, our ideas for our life, our ideas for the world, for where our passion meets the world's need. We want to do that. And when we do, we will see who we become. We will see what we can create, we will explore more of the world, experience more of the world, experience more of ourselves, get to know ourselves and evolve and grow ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

But the place that that happens, the sweet spot, is in the problems.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

So I'm gonna tell you a story to describe this. I want to just mention that um, you know, I always have this design thinking background running a company and innovation. And when we think about design thinking, whenever I used to give talks about the design thinking process where you first envision your idea and there's all these components to that, and then you create your idea, the first iteration of it. I would always say, then in the iteration phase, which is again what we do in the Moxie, where you're putting your idea out there, you're testing it, you're seeing what works, what doesn't work, what you're gonna do differently in the next iteration. That is where the magic happens. That's where an idea gets good. That's where we evolve and tweak our designs so that they become better and better. They never succeed the first time. They always fail in some way, right? Whether it's a big flop or just little things that we change about them. That's what we want, right? Now you can call that iteration, you can call it call it problems. You can say in that iterative phase where we try out an idea, that's when the problems come. And then we look at what's working, what's not working, we tweak our design and we try it again, looking for more problems to solve. So you see that I'm gonna talk about this today in the context of a fun road trip, but it applies to anything in our business, in our health, in our lives that we're trying to change, an idea that we're trying to make real. And it maps onto this design thinking process because this is the iterative process. This is the iterative cycle. Test, redesign, try again. So here we are, my kids and I going out on the road. We have this incredible night where we got to see Alicia Key's Hell's Kitchen performance. And then um we're up late. We got to go to a cast-only party where um Alicia pushed my son into the pool, which was very fun. And uh that that musical, that performance was absolutely mind-blowing. If you haven't gotten and see it, please go to see it. It is an incredible story about a mother and a daughter and Alicia Keyes' story of, you know, coming up into herself in her musical journey. And when they in the musical played the song No One, which was sung between the character that played Alicia Keyes and her mom. My daughter and I, it was it was a song. That song, No One, that we all know by Alicia Keyes was being redone. So it's the perspective of a mother and a daughter singing it to each other. And my daughter and I just looked at each other and we both had tears streaming down our faces. And we will never hear that song in the same way again. It was so beautiful and delightful. So then we were up late, but I said yes to that. I said yes to that cast party, yes to that experience, which was so special, meeting all the cast from Hill's Kitchen and being able to hang out with Alicia after the show, um, knowing that the next morning I was gonna get up early and get my ass on the road with my kids for the longest day of a road trip, which was planned to be 10 hours. So I slept for about four hours that night, which was okay. I knew I know my body and I know that I can do a couple late nights and then I need to catch it. So that was the plan. We get on the road. Well, the plan was six hours, but you know, sleep does what sleep does. So it ended up being four hours. We get on the road, we're all packed up. I have my, you know, the trunk of my electric car all packed up, like a little Tetris game with all of our stuff, including all the costumes for uh Disneyland at the end, right? Hikes and stays in the city, stays out in nature. We're going on a big hike today at Crescent Lake, and we're seeing friends in multiple places in Bend, in Portland, and Seattle. And we're all packed up with, and I always pack lots of healthy snacks. And then I end up letting my kids eat Doritos. We go like 80% healthy, 20% complete road trash. It's the best. And uh we hit the road. The kids are packed up in the back of the car. This 10-hour drive is taking us on the first leg of the journey to Reading. Now we're driving north, and right away, out the gate, things start happening that delay us a little bit. My they don't want the same food, my two kids, they need different bathroom stops. We hit a couple things that just kind of create a little snag in the beginning. And that puts us behind by like an hour, I would say, because we had multiple stops to get ourselves all set up. No problem. It's an 11-hour day, no big deal. Then we hit some traffic, a couple more snags, and we're in about like this 10-hour day is gonna be about 12 hours, really, if we're if we're thinking about it correctly, which is I'm fine with that, right? We're on the road, we're traveling north, we get past LA, we're having a blast, we're singing songs, I mean listening to music and singing along with them. Not like road songs, but like my son's symphonic music and my daughter's Taylor Swift and pop music. And we're having a blast. And then we get to this point north of Los Angeles where the road is stopped. The traffic is totally stopped. So we're on our way to Reading. The next day we are going to Bend, where we have multiple families that we know, multiple friends from different parts of our life. And we know that in two nights we're gonna stay a couple nights in Bend. We end up going tubing on a river and hiking and hanging out with these friends and chatting. It was so fun. But this is our first day, right? And so we hit this traffic and we notice as we look at the map that it looks like it's projected to put us four hours behind. That is gonna turn this 12-hour day into a 16-hour day. We're like, okay, wild. So it would be so easy when this problem hit. And I want you to think about a problem in your life with your own health habits that you're changing or a business that you're starting, or an I any idea that you're making real when a problem comes up. How do you talk to yourself about the problem? It would have been so easy to turn to my kids and say, Oh my God, this is horrible. It was already such a long day. Now it's gonna be such a longer day. First of all, it would be easy to talk to myself that way. I'm the one driving by myself with two kids. I, in my head, couldn't just immediately say, This is rough. This is, oh my gosh, this is gonna be so long. I'm gonna sit in this traffic for hours. They're gonna be so grumpy by the time I get there. But I know, just like my brain follows my lead, my kids follow my lead. I don't want to have that experience. We get to choose the experience we're having. This is a problem that's popped up and we get to solve it. So, first, how do I talk to myself about it? And then how do I talk to my kids about it? Okay. And so I'm gonna share this story about how I talk to my kids about it, but I really want you to apply it to how you talk to yourself about the problems that come up in your mind with whatever that idea is that you're making real. So I turn to my kids and I'm like, okay, here we go. The point of the road trip, right? Is nothing ever goes exactly as we think it will in life, in business, in ideas becoming real in road trips. So I turn to my kids and I say, okay, here's the first one. I always talk to them about this. They help me plan the road trip. They map out all the stops and we talk about how we'll see what happens. We never know what the places are gonna be when we get there. They might be these places that we rent that we think are gonna be amazing, and then something's different about them. And that's exactly what we want. Travel, adventures, ideas being made real, they're all gonna be a little bit different than what we expect. So here's the first problem. How do we want to approach it? The traffic is stopped for four hours. This could potentially be a 16-hour day. What do we want to do? Well, we started pulling out the map. We looked at together, the three of us, this collaborative opportunity to solve the problem. We look at all the potential avenues that we can take and we find this mountain pass that is like, I don't even know. It's way out in the mountains. It's going around these little tree-lined towns, it looks like in the map. Now, we're in an electric car, and I don't really, I can't tell if there are, you know, dependable charging stations along the way. So we turn back, backtrack about 10 minutes, and we charge the car up to 100% and we hit the road. We avoid the four hours of traffic and we hit this mountain pass that takes us through these beautiful little towns with beautiful trees. And then it comes out of the trees and out of these little valleys, these like cliffside roads, this highway that's like taking us along these cliffs. And then it takes us out onto these mountaintops where there's golden swaying grasses everywhere with oak trees. And we're like riding along, they're playing music, they're laughing, they're taking videos. We are on this road for like three hours. It didn't take away that extra four hours from our road trip. It just created this beautiful experience where we got to choose our own adventure and turn lemons into lemonade, turn a problem into an opportunity that wasn't there before, right? We got to have this experience where my kids ended this day 16 hours, right? We're pulling into Reading and they are just happy. And they're saying to me, that was the best day. My son only watched one movie the entire day. It was an hour and a half of screen time out of 16 hours because he just kept saying, I just love being in these environments and watching the world go by. We're playing music. We get to Reading and they said, Mom, that was the best day. Thank you so much for that beautiful day. We're all exhausted, but we're fried and tired from a day of adventure, and it was so much fun. So, what I want you to take from this is that our problems are the opportunity to find out who we are, to find out what we can do. We want problems in our life. That's where we apply our creative brain to see what we can come up with. I am gonna record another episode about being ridiculous, which I talk about all the time, but digging down, drilling down into being ridiculous at first, into saying yes to these wild ideas that sound bananas at first, sound bananas to you, and sound bananas to everybody else, because those ideas are where we create problems for ourselves, that then our beautiful creative brain gets to solve every problem, creates an opportunity for our brain to apply itself in a new way. That's when we get that creative problem solving going that creates opportunities in the world, ideas, things, and insights that we would have never seen in ourselves. It gives us new adventures, like this crazy road trip, right? We see who we can become. We allow ourselves to push out of our green comfort zone into that yellow, slightly uncomfortable zone, which is where we grow our capacity in every way. When we stay where we're comfortable in that green zone, our green zone for what we're comfortable with, our capacity shrinks. When we push ourselves into a little bit of discomfort over and over again, our capacity grows. So we want to create these problems that create that yellow zone. I'm slightly uncomfortable. Things are not going exactly how that I had planned. So now it's my job to solve the problem. We get to have fun together solving these problems. Collaboratively, problem solving is so much fun. That's what I do with my kids. And it creates bonding and just this amazing experience between you all. Every obstacle is just a strategy waiting to happen. And I have an entire podcast episode on that. So you can listen to that or read the book Obstacles and Strategy. The Obstacle is the way by Ryan Halliday. So let's create some problems to solve, my friends. What are you right now seeing as a negative thing? How are you even thinking about the word problem? When you hear the word problem, do you think that this is bad?

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Or do you think this is exactly what I want? How are you thinking about the problems?

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Get out there and say yes to some wild ideas so that you can have brilliant, beautiful problems arise and you can apply your creative brain to see what you can come up with, to see what is possible that wasn't possible before because of these problems that you get to solve.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

That is your assignment for this week.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Where are you creating problems and how are you thinking about those problems? Are you excited by them? Are you bringing your creative energy to them?

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Or are you letting them stop you and letting them be a reason to tell yourself to quit? Problems are the point. They're the whole thing that we're doing here. So whether it's a road trip or a business or a book or a health habit or a relationship, wrap your arms and your heart and your big beautiful brain around those problems. That's what I've got for you this week, and I will see you next week.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

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.