Bloom Your Mind

At a party last week, someone asked what I do for a living…which led to them asking a second question. “What is the thing that gets in the way most, when people are trying to make an idea real?” 

What an amazing question. In this week’s episode, I’ll share the top six reasons that people fail at making their ideas into real things, and I’ll share a solution for each one to help you turn the obstacle that’s in your way, into a strate...

There is a goldmine of hacks and inspiration to learn from a specific population of people living in the world right now, and this episode is all about it. 

Maybe because we grew up in the 90’s, when body image culture caused eating disorders in myself and half of the young people around me. We grew up in a world that thought it had been liberated by the movements of the 60’s and 70’s, but that hadn’t yet publicly recognized multipl...

A group of entrepreneurs presented their ideas to a panel of angel investors to be rated, and eventually chosen or rejected. While both groups poured over the content of reports, and bantered over the words spoken, the real investment decision was happening on an entirely subconscious level.

Scientists who study non verbal communication were able to predict with perfect accuracy which entrepreneurs the investors would choose…based e...

As I spoke at multiple events for hundreds of people this past week, I had a moments of deep gratitude for the tools available for us to use to practice presence. Some of what I teach on the podcast is content that I’ve invented and created, and other tools and concepts are things I’ve collected over time from brilliant thought leaders, authors, theorists and changemakers. 

In this episode, I’ll share a go-to tool that I learned alm...

We’re all thinking of ideas to make real all day every day, though we often don’t realize it. Ideas for what we want to do with an afternoon, how to theme a party, what relationship or health habits we want to tweak, or the big obvious ones like what career change we want to make, where we want to travel, or what we want a creative project to be based on.

And then…we get stuck. 

Ever get stuck finding your next step?
Or figuring...

A friend of mine told a story a few months ago that has stuck with me in that way that a story does. I keep seeing echoes of it everywhere. I see expressions and examples of the point he was making in the coaching that my clients need, in my own life and mindset, and in the stories I hear from the people around me. 

He told a story about a family who came to him and said that another family had a terrible experience at their school....

Zoe is in the middle of a conversation with her partner. She’s annoyed and frustrated and is reminded of a series of other things that she feels annoyed and frustrated about in her relationship. They’re all connected by the feeling of annoyance…like pulling on a string and finding all the examples connected to it. She wants to tell him about each and every one until…

All of the sudden she realizes something. The string connecting al...

Have you ever needed a fresh perspective so badly, that you just started over instead? Maybe it was by getting a fresh relationship going, or getting into a fresh job or home setting, or starting your life over in a fresh new place. 

No matter how many times we change our external setting, we know that eventually we’ll meet the same challenges there, too. 

In today’s episode, we’ll learn the idea of giving ourselves a freshie every d...

We were camping in the mountains with a group of 20 kids and their parents, when the ground began to shake. The first things I noticed were quivering leaves on the trees around us, followed by a soft rumbling that can only mean one thing in SoCal….there’s an earthquake. The children had all kinds of reactions. Some were excited, some were curious. Some screamed and asked to be picked up. We soothed them, gathered them, and came tog...

Have you ever stood behind someone in the grocery store thinking they should put the divider between your groceries and theirs? 

Or thought someone should turn off their fanny pack music blasting down the hiking trail right behind you? 

Have you ever thought someone was watching too much TV? Not spending enough time with the kids? Following too closely behind your car on the freeway?

Yeah, me too. We all have. 

These are all examples o...

Let’s go back to emotions 101. Your emotions ARE your superpower.  

There are three ways that we naturally deal with them; we stuff them down, we act them out, and we buffer (put something else on top of them like work, sex, tv or scrolling, food or booze, or even thinking a lot!). All of those things make our feelings expand and deepen- like pushing a beach ball down underwater, so that eventually it pops out with a lot of force. 

T...

When I thought of time management, I used to feel and think… ’Blahhh.’

‘That is NOT sexy.’

‘I am not wasting my time on that. I want to be here in the present.’

‘It’s so boring. It’ll melt my face off. I just won’t do it.’ 

Ironically, all of those things proved to be the opposite of what’s true. 

As I became a time whisperer…I had time to do sexy stuff, like take care of myself and literally actually have time for a sex life. I had WAY...

Have you ever gotten roasted or teased for things you were kind of surprised about? 

Or what about this…have you ever been teased for saying something that you didn’t know was unique to you? 

I’ve recently been told multiple times that a certain word that I say is a “Marie-ism”, and I had no idea. In friend groups, family text threads, the Bloom Room and more I’ve had people say “As Marie would say…Wegotchu.” This got my attention, o...

A client recently asked how I get up at 5am in a house with squeaky floorboards and a husband who’s a night owl. The answer to this, and to so many other things comes from knowing my priorities. 

While the 5am wake up call might ring just so I can get some exercise and some alone time before the chaos of the world wakes up…there’s something else that’s even more important to me than either of those things. Knowing my priorities make...

There are two ways of looking at the world. We can think that there is one truth to everything; “one thing is true”…OR we can realize that many things are true at the same time. We call this “two things are true” thinking.  

Recently, I was working with a collaborator on something who was consistently letting me down by not meeting their commitments. When I was just trying to understand the hard things that were coming up for them a...

Two things stop people from taking action on the ideas that they have to make their own lives, their communities, their workplaces, families, and the world a better place. 

• They think that they’re not special enough…or 
• They think they’re too special to work hard for it.  

Both of these beliefs are just as harmful, because both of them rob the world of what what we have to give. 

Both of them are about seeing ourselves as diff...

Grace was sitting across from me, with her hands wrapped around a mug of tea. Our session was first thing in the morning for both of us, and I could imagine that the rain that I could see falling so consistently in gentle waves outside my office window was falling just outside the window in her office too. 

“It’s disorienting” she was saying. “This new feeling is disorienting.” 

She was describing the change that has happened inside ...

Did you know being an excellent listener is a way to practice great boundaries?

It’s hard as hell to do, with a human ego standing right in the way…but it’s also the skill with the single biggest payoff.  

Listening as a boundary tool always surprises people when they hear it for the first time. Until a few seconds later…when they have a lightbulb moment. 

Great listening makes the space between two people clear, instead of muddy. 

Whe...

Bekah Salazar and Marie McDonald are lifetime sister-friends. We are also all about becoming EXPERTS at loving ourselves so that we can give our best to the world...and even more importantly than that, because we deserve it. 

And so do you. 

We see the people around us giving everything to families and work and communities, and we want to help our people to slow down; say no to everyone else a little more, and say YES to ourselves.

To...