Mastering a Thriving Mindset Even in Uncertain Times — with Anne McKeown | BlissTalk Podcast

In a world where uncertainty feels constant and stress often runs the show, how do you stay grounded, focused, and joyful? In this uplifting episode of the BlissTalk Podcast, Anne McKeown—renowned mindset coach, NLP Master Practitioner, and founder of 2MPower—shares her simple yet powerful system for mastering your mindset, reclaiming inner peace, and creating a life filled with balance and joy.

With years of experience coaching high-achieving individuals through life’s biggest challenges, Anne has developed a reputation for turning burnout into breakthrough. Whether you're juggling career demands, personal responsibilities, or simply feeling overwhelmed by the pace of modern life, Anne’s strategies are both practical and transformative.

This isn’t about surface-level self-care or fleeting motivation. It’s about a deep, lasting shift in the way you respond to life’s challenges. Anne’s thriving mindset method is designed for busy, driven people who want real tools to manage stress, navigate uncertainty, and stay energized—even when the world feels upside down. 

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• How to find calm amidst the chaos using Anne’s practical strategies
• Instant techniques to transform stress into clarity and joy
• A proven mindfulness routine for high achievers with no time to waste
• How to break free from overwork and access untapped reservoirs of energy
• The subtle mindset shift that creates resilience and emotional strength
• Why “doing more” isn’t the answer—and what to do instead to truly thrive

If you’re someone who’s always striving but rarely arriving, this conversation will help you pause, realign, and return to what really matters. Anne’s wisdom is empowering, grounded, and refreshingly real—offering a roadmap for joy that fits right into the life you’re already living.

✅ Links & Resources:

Ready to Trade Stress for Balance and Burnout for Joy?
 Explore Anne McKeown’s empowering course Reignite Your Spark on Blisspot—designed for high-achieving individuals ready to shift from overwhelm to joy, and from exhaustion to energized clarity. This step-by-step program blends mindset mastery, daily balance techniques, and emotional resilience strategies to help you thrive—even in uncertain times.

👉 Discover Reignite Your Spark by Anne McKeown on Blisspot

Transcript

 Welcome to the Bliss Spot podcast series where we interview global well-being leaders to share ideas to invite more joy and happiness into your life.

Unknown Speaker 0:01
Welcome everyone. I'm absolutely delighted to be here with master coach Anne McKeown, and not only is she a very dear friend, but she's an acclaimed master life coach and founder of To Empower, dedicated to helping people reclaim their inner peace and emotional resilience, especially during life's most challenging times. We're particularly presenting this podcast as evergreen content that will help us throughout the whole year, but particularly when you're under pressure around Christmas or leading up to preparing to go on a holiday, getting all your work wrapped up. When we have those times, all our coping mechanisms can go out the window. So we're here today with Anne to get some tips and practical tools on how to actually be able to be calm even when the pressure is on. So Anne, with over 20 years of experience across education, corporate, private, and the voluntary sectors, she empowers high achievers to balance ambition with well-being. Anne specializes in teaching transformative techniques that enable you to navigate high-pressure periods, like the holiday season. So whether you're overwhelmed by Christmas stress or struggling to maintain a sense of joy amidst the chaos, her approach equips you to take back control of your time, energy, and happiness. Anne understands that true success is rooted in alignment with your authentic self. By helping you to prioritize what truly matters, she supports you in making the shift from surviving to thriving, even during the busiest times of the year, fostering growth that enhances both your well-being and relationships. So even though I've heard Anne speak numerous times, I'm dying to hear what she says today, because every time I learn something from her, it's really insightful. I apply it to my own life, and she, I can say, has helped me be the person who I am today. So, Anne, welcome, and if you can just give us an overview of what it is that you do.

Anne McKeown
Well, thanks, Deb. It's lovely to be here, and I love your podcast and all the work that you do. And as you said, we've been friends but also fellow business owners who have helped each other along the path, and I think it's lovely that we're able to do that. And even before we started, we were both chatting and saying how we continually learn from each other and other business owners in our lives. And so, as you said, I'm a coach, and I empower people to believe in themselves and have an inner confidence where they will step up and try and take on a new goal. They'll speak up, they'll find their voice, and they'll actually have the courage to share their message, and they'll show up with confidence. Because often, people have the inner belief, but then they're not able to get that message across. That makes perfect sense, and it's so fantastic that they reach out and get the support because one of our missions at Blissspot is to let people know that they, whether they get support from Blissspot or wherever it is, should not continually struggle for long periods of time by themselves, but to actually reach out and get the support. And I know that when people do that, the only regret they have is that they didn't do it sooner because they realize like, oh, the relief. And there are different ways, new perspectives, and it's just learning the tools and moving forward in life. So what is the biggest problem that people come to you with?

Anne McKeown
Yeah, look, I think a big thing is a lack of belief. By the time they come to me, they're full of self-doubt. They're usually quite exhausted because all that negative self-talk is very draining. They're probably spinning too many plates and trying to balance life and work, maybe not achieving the goals that they thought they would have by now, and so they're quite hard on themselves, feeling like a failure, and feel quite stuck. So it's that kind of "hitting a wall" moment where they just don't know how to move forward or how to feel good about themselves and their situation anymore.

Deborah Tyson
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's wonderful, like I said before, that they do get that support. So is it even possible to go beyond stress during a busy time? Like we can all feel relaxed and happy when we're sitting on a beach or by the pool on holidays, that's pretty easy for most people, especially after we unwind after a few days. But is it possible to really develop those skills, to go beyond stress in this modern world, which is inherently quite stressful, particularly during these times with the global situation, the war, obviously that impacts all of us, because it's our fellow human beings suffering, the cost of living rising, a lot of aftereffects of the pandemic with flus and all sorts of viruses that we didn't seem to have before?

Anne McKeown
So yes, that is actually really possible, especially now with stress being at an all-time high. Yes, I do actually, and that might sound like a big statement. I'm not saying it's easy, but I do think it's possible, and I think it depends where your focus goes. Like you just mentioned, quite a number of negative things that are happening in our society right now. And if you're busy with a family and at work, and you're paying attention to the news and you're upset about politics and you're trying to organize Christmas and you're worried about money, then you're definitely going to feel stressed and overwhelmed and unable to cope. So it's where is your focus going? That's the first thing. Then where is your time going, and where is your energy going, and where is your money going? Because they're the things that we have limited supply of—focus, time, energy, and money—and if we're not careful, we can get caught up in scrolling on social media, for example. We all do it, and that takes up a huge amount of our time and energy, and our mind space as well. And I think when we're feeling so overwhelmed, we have to replace those negatives in the mind with positives. So not scrolling through looking at all the bad news or worrying about our finances or how are we going to manage on Christmas Day, but actually setting up a bit of a plan for time management, focus management, and financial management. And I actually have systems in place that become a daily way of life. I don't think we go from suddenly being all stressed to then the next week saying that we'll be fine. That's what happens on holidays. But what we really want to aim for is a kind of equilibrium every day, so that maybe you don't look at what you can achieve each day, but you look at, well, what could I get through in this month? What can I cope with this week without getting overwhelmed and stressed? And the other thing to remember is that there's positive stress as well. So some things that cause stress can actually be really motivating, and learning what the stressors are that drive you and what the stressors are that pull you down is really important to be aware of. So a big part of this whole stress thing is self-awareness.

Deborah Tyson
Well, gosh, that's so interesting. And I just love that, because often, the most powerful ideas can be very simple, like where you direct your focus, that is so important, where do you spend your energy? And even though they're simple, sometimes they're not easy to implement, because we need to break our old habits and then replace them with new habits. And I think the thing that I love that you're talking about there, it's like incorporating these techniques into your daily life to support yes, can't just sort of click our fingers and that's all going to happen, but it's those little consistent actions that can have a very big impact over time. Yes, how we feel. Amazing. Anne, so where do you find that your clients get stuck on their journey?

Anne McKeown
Look, I think often we expect positives. I think in life, most of us have good intentions. We work hard, we try hard with our family, we earn as much money as we can, we put effort into our fitness, and when things don't go the way we planned, we can take a nosedive quite quickly, because we're not very good at accepting negatives. I mean, I know even from past experiences, say I've maybe done a presentation or something, and I've asked for a feedback form, and I'll get two people out of 100 that have put a negative comment, and the rest could all be really quite positive or quite neutral, but I'm devastated and anxious and stressed because of those two negative, and that's just an example of what we do on a daily basis. So we go to the gym and we don't really work out hard enough because we're too tired, and then we're hard on ourselves, and then we feel stressed about that, or we feel that we're maybe not as good a parent as we ought to be, and we're trying really hard to be positive about that, but we don't feel that it's going so well. So that's a negative, and that leaves us feeling a bit down and then we compare ourselves to how others are parenting or working out at the gym or doing their business and that brings us down. So I think the negatives lead to the stress, and the mind tends then to ruminate about those negatives, and that's where the real pain is caused, because we kind of go over and over and over in our head and that whole train of thought that we just seem to not be able to stop. That's what really causes the stress and the heart palpitations, and it leads to that negative self-talk that really is self-harming.

Deborah Tyson
Absolutely, and it's just so good to have the awareness around that, isn't it, the reminders like if we're feeling down, or we can even ask ourselves, What am I thinking now? Am I thinking stuck on that same old thought for the last five minutes, creating pain and suffering to myself, but having that awareness is the first step, isn't it, to being able to make choices and then positive change? Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. Good reminder, this is a little bit of an extension of what we're talking about before. But do you think it is possible to feel calm and peaceful on a consistent basis? And we'll just say, as an example, leading up to Christmas, when there is a lot of those pressures, you mentioned, financial, social, you still trying to be a great person, you know, with all the people you meet, but there's a lot going on.

Anne McKeown
Yeah, look, definitely, and I think preparation and planning are really important, and I think a big part is to get out of your head. So like I said earlier, where we're constantly thinking about things like that train of thought. Imagine it like an actual physical train, and we stay on that train, and we're on the same track, and we're just going round in circles. We can actually every now and then, when it stops at a station and the doors open, we can choose to jump off. We can say, I'm actually going to step off this train and be on that platform and be mindful in this moment that my thinking is not helping me and it's pulling me down, that Christmas is meant to be a time of fun and joy, and if we can tap into that, and tap into that kind of childish excitement that we used to have about Christmas, and feed on that more, rather than all the negatives and things that so and reframing the thinking around I've got all the family for dinner, it's going to cost me a lot of money, and I've got to make the turkey, and I hope that's a nice, sunny day so that I don't have everybody inside and we can sit in the garden and wait, you know, but if we can reframe that and say, Well, thank God I'm not alone this Christmas, and that I've got the family coming, and it is going to be expensive, so I'm going to ask everybody to bring a plate to share, and we'll sit out in the garden and we'll enjoy the sunshine, if it's raining, we'll come indoors, and we'll play games. I'll get some games that we can share. And again, it's the planning and the preparation in that way, but completely changing your mindset and then on the day, as well as in preparation, having that mindfulness towards how do you want the day to look? Because if we don't plan it, it'll just become a bit of a mishmash. You might know, I mean, you plan the menu, but you don't plan your state of mind.

Deborah Tyson
That's interesting. That's right, that I don't think really people do plan their state of mind, yeah, or how are you going to interact with everybody? Like, there might be a family member where you just think she drives me nuts, but I've got to invite her. And then when she enters your house, you kind of got that bristly feeling around her, but maybe beforehand, if you say, You know what, for this one day, I'm going to kill her with kindness. I'm going to be so nice, because I will feel better. And that's what the spirit of Christmas is all around and so knowing that we have those thoughts, we are, most of the time, aware of our thoughts. Even write the thought down and say, Why do I feel like that? Does it make me feel good? No. Does it make other people around me feel good? Probably not, because my behavior is probably a bit negative. How can I act in a different way that does make me feel good and in control, so that it's you're consciously taking control of the thought, rather than letting the unconscious run away with it and then reacting based on your feelings. Because that's that tends to be how we all don't feel like it, or, Oh, I don't feel that she likes me, or I don't know when we rely on our feelings, then everything will go pear shaped, and you will definitely be stressed.

Anne McKeown
Well, it's kind of like your mind and your emotions are running the show, rather than you acting from your empowered state and making decisions. Because I know in those situations, that was a good example. If somebody comes along and you decide that you're just going to make it the best day possible.