Mary Shores is the author of Conscious Communications: A Step-by-Step Guide to Harnessing the Power of Your Words to Change Your Mind, Your Choices, and Your Life. Before her success as an author, speaker and entrepreneur, Mary shares her background starting when she was living on her own since she was 16, how in 1992 her daughter was born with brain damage and lived only 1 and 1/2 years, and how later she also suffered from a divorce. Regardless, Mary grew her company to a multi-million dollar business, and here shares her strategies on living a life in alignment and her take on the difference between positive psychology and affirmations.
Mentioned in this episode:
- MaryShores.com
- Mary Shores’ Facebook page
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Conscious Communications: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Harnessing the Power of Your Words to Change Your Mind, Your Choices, and Your Life
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Kathy: I understand back in 1992 as a parent, you went through a traumatic experience with your daughter, Haley, and I was wondering if you can share with us what happened during that time for you?
Mary: Sure. Well, I have been a person who’s been out on my own since I was 16 years old and a lot of people that know me, they really focus on the tremendous successes that I have achieved over the last 20 years and not as many people know some of the more tragic things that have happened in my background. So I was actually out of my own when I was 16 years old and still a senior in high school, so I had to complete my senior year with literally no resources and no guidance. So I was able to, I was able to graduate high school and become enrolled in community college, which I liked a lot, but soon I became pregnant. So I just became like a teenage mom statistic.
Kathy: So you’re in a senior in high school. When you said you didn’t have resources where you living on your own, is that what you mean?
Mary: Correct.
Kathy: OK. All right, go ahead. Please continue.
Mary: Yeah. So my mother had gotten remarried during that time period and she decided that she wanted to live with her new husband and moved into his house and wanted to sell our house. And so basically I just wasn’t part of the equation anymore, is the way that it felt like at the time. Um, so yeah, I graduated, then I enrolled in community college. I got pregnant with my daughter, Haley, and when I went into labor there was a traumatic event that she suffered over five minutes, lack of oxygen to the brain. So she had profound brain damage, which I’m talking about as profound as it gets. She was blind, she was deaf, she was unable to suck a bottle. She didn’t have a swallow reflex or a suck reflect. So she had to have a gastronomy tube inserted into her stomach to be fed. So a feeding tube placed directly into her tummy.
Mary: And for that time period I really lived in and out of the children’s hospitals. Haley lived for a year and a half and I probably didn’t understand at the time that, that what she had was terminal because to me she just looked like a little baby and even though she was hooked up to tons of machines because when she was born for the first week she was on full life support. So you know, machines making her breathe, making her heartbeat, all of that. And um, yeah, I lived in the children’s hospitals. I slept on the emergency room floors and I saw things that you can’t just ever unsee. It was a really scary time period and filled also with just crushing heartbreak.
Kathy: I can’t even imagine it. Did you have any support during this time? You or your parents, your family to help you with this?
Mary: I had my boyfriend who was my daughter’s father, um, we were sort of in it together, but I mean he was also just as young as I was and we were just getting through it as best we could. We didn’t really have any money or you know, he worked like a job making $5 an hour and I was, I was working through the community college on a part time basis, but I didn’t really have, um, outside support. Other than that,
Kathy: any moral support at all to at least accompany you to the hospital or to talk about things? Did they have a counselor there for you?
Mary: Well, in our town that we lived in, which was about two hours away from the hospital, I mean she did have a, uh, social worker type of person is just a person that helps you get through the system there. Not really a person who’s like, oh, let’s talk about how you feel about this. If that’s what you mean.
Kathy: Hell boy, that must’ve been horrible. And not being able to discuss anything, any of this with anybody except for that one person. Your boyfriend.
Mary: Yeah. I don’t think I ever felt about as that way. You know, when you’re in an emergency emergency medical situation, and this was 25 years ago, I don’t think that’s something that’s even taken into consideration. It’s more immediate, drastic needs that are at the forefront and are the priority.
Kathy: So, Haley, she lived for a year and a half and that was, I think about 10 years after you say you had another family who started in another family, is that right?
Mary: Well I, after Hailey passed away, I really got, I just, I went through a period of regression because I sort of became a teenager again and then I started my business when I was 24 and was really focused on that and starting my family. So these were much happier times that came from me after that.
Kathy: So let’s talk about your business. You started a business when you were 24 and you’re starting a family at the same time. How were you able to juggle that together? I mean, uh, your, your business group quite well, from what I understand,
Mary: right. It didn’t seem difficult at all actually. I mean, when you’re 24 you don’t have a lot going on to keep you busy. So that was just what I spent my time doing. It felt pretty effortless to me.
Kathy: OK, good. Well, it seems like a lot, two kids.
Mary: Well, it’s not. I didn’t have two kids at 24. I mean I started my business at 24. I had my children when I was 27 and 28.
Kathy: OK, got it. I understand one particular year you wrote in your book Conscious Communications, Your Step by Step Guide to Harnessing the Power of Your Words to Change Your Mind, Your Choices and Your Life, and you talk about your loving husband. One year his behavior starting to change. Can you talk about a little about what happened back then?
Mary: Yeah, so when, I think it was starting in 2006, my ex husband had had a very serious case of chicken pox and after that his personality just wasn’t quite the same. It was almost like he turned into a different person in. For example, he went from a person who never drank at all to drinking all the time and sometimes not coming home at night. He became. He was a person that was extremely close with like me and the kids and to a person that could really care less and
Mary: he started to become abusive and we actually, it was so drastic of a change that we went to a doctor who referred us to a neurologist and he was diagnosed as bipolar, which was really shocking to me because I didn’t expect that at all. Like I thought maybe the high fevers he was experiencing when he had the chickenpox had like I thought he had encephalitis or like there was some sort of brain inflammation causing this behavior. I was not expecting it all to, to get those results. And um, yeah, he just, his whole personality changed and to the point where within a couple of years, a couple. So from 2006 to 2008, we did try everything we could to try to keep things together, but it eventually got to dangerous of a situation and I had to file for divorce.
Kathy: What do you mean too dangerous of the situation, for example, like what would be a typical day for you during that time?
Mary: Well, I would say he was just really angry and devoid of devoid of a spectrum of human emotions that, that we all enjoy, like compassion or, you know, love. He felt, he said his only emotions were anger and indifference.
Kathy: Even to you and his kids, your kids.
Mary: Yeah, that’s correct.
Kathy: Oh Wow. So when you say that there was danger involved, you’re fearful for your safety?
Mary: At times? Yes.
Kathy: Going back to your book, Conscious Communications, you’ve wrote quote, when my mind was idle, I drifted off into dark unspeakable places and thought about all the other ways my life would end or worried about how my children would make it without me. Was a situation where you feeling so strongly that you were considering suicide?
Mary: That’s not what I meant by that at all. Um, no. I just, I had been relatively a successful person and my marriage was at the foundation of my entire life and I didn’t understand I was going to be able to carry on without that foundation that was in place. So all of a sudden I was a single mom. My older son is on the autism spectrum, so I’m a single mom, I’ve, I’ve got a small business to run and I have a special needs child to take care of and I was so down and out emotionally. I was just completely checked out as a human being. I wasn’t suicidal, but what I thought was I just sort of envisioned this future for myself were things that I had accumulated over the probably at that point nine or 10 years of my adult life just sort of began to, in my mind, I thought they would like dwindle down until there was really nothing left. And so that’s what I’m talking about. So like I, I thought I would just, you know, run out of money, be penniless. I kind of envisioned myself as, as a bag lady eventually.
Kathy: Oh really? So you’re thinking as your future was going to be dire.
Mary: Exactly.
Kathy: I remember reading about yourself when you’re working on your business. You called yourself a functioning catatonic and yeah, working between that and having very obvious inner nuclear meltdown working between those two, those two states.
Mary: It’s true. So I would become extremely reactive to things like, for example, I remember having a conversation with my brother and he would say like, Mary, you’re reacting at a level 10 to things that are really a level two, you know, when you, when you get into this and you understand that when, when your brain and your body have gone through trauma, it’s, it really affects your nervous system and it effects so many parts of your body. And the thing to understand is that one of the reasons you become more overreacted to situations or for some people it might not be that they overreact in angry ways or maybe they don’t have outbursts, but maybe they feel so sensitive, you know, maybe things that wouldn’t bother person a to them, it really hurts them very deeply because they’re sensitive. So once our, once our nervous systems have been triggered that way, if we were for not taking the time to heal properly, then we can just really get stuck in this, um, in a lot of these symptoms. And that’s what I was experiencing. So I wasn’t able to. I wasn’t able to fully be present. And be my normal energetic self because I was in this like low level ptsd, I mean pretty much all the time.
Kathy: I see. And you mentioned your son, he was diagnosed with autism and that’s adding a whole nother level of stressors to your life as well. I imagine, aside from the ptsd just mentioned,
Mary: Right. Yes, it really was because he got my son got the diagnosis. Um, the very same month that I had filed for divorce, like a lot of. I was trying to process a lot of life changing situations and it was just too much to handle.
Kathy: What do you think was your turnaround moment where you had the Aha to shift your mindset where like you were saying you’re a level 10, bringing it back to a level 2?
Mary: Well sometimes it was just talking about it. So like that particular thing, I believe all it took was that conversation with my brother and I became aware of it because, you know, a lot of times just awareness can be so powerful. So I started just watching myself and, and paying attention. I would say that the turnaround, and I really love that question because it was probably about two years after my divorce that I started to feel that something big was going to happen.
Mary: Like I remember I would walk around and I would say things like, I know I’m supposed to do something different, but I don’t know what it is. And I would be really excited about what this thing was. Even though it was kind of frustrating because I didn’t know what it is, but I just had this internal feeling that something was shifting inside of me. And then all of a sudden I started to have these periods of time where I just. I felt like I would describe it like this to people. I would say. It was like the back of my head opened up and that something was just like downloading tons of information into my brain. And within a very short period of time, energetically I felt like I was right back on top of my game again. And so even though I had had several periods of time, like the several years of my business where our revenue percentages went down, down, down, all of the sudden I felt like my old self again and I started to build that revenue back up.
Mary: And I remember, I remember one time there was an older woman, her name was Eleanor and Eleanor lived in another little small town near mine. And she called me and she said, Mary, I’m, she owned a similar business to me. She said, I want you to come out, I’m ready to retire and I want to talk to you about buying my business. And I went out and, and talk to her. And she said something to me that I’ll never forget. And this was, this was an important moment for me. She said, at one point, did you know in the seventies, I also used to own another business like this one. And I said, no, I never knew that. And she said, yeah, well, I went through a divorce and I lost it, um, shortly after my divorce and had to file bankruptcy. And there was something about hearing that from this woman that I admired, you know, cause she was thinking by this time we had this meeting, she was like 80 and she was really old.
Mary: She was totally ready for retirement. But my point is that when I looked at her and thought, you know, she went through a divorce and she wasn’t able to keep her business going. I went through a divorce and I went through a divorce at, at, uh, at the worst economical time period of my adult life because this was right after the real estate bubble. And so now now looking back, I can’t even really tell you whether, whether my revenue decreased because of real estate bubble or whether my revenue decreased because of me. Because my revenue didn’t really decrease any more than any other small businesses during that time period. Because I actually studied, studied up on that. But my point is, it was like when I saw the resilience, when I saw my own courage reflected in, in the way I looked at this other woman, that also had a very powerful effect on me, where I could realize, and that’s one of the reasons I always focus on, like how courageous I’ve been, how persistent I’ve been in, in achieving the things that I’ve wanted to achieve, and also how resilient I became because, because what I ended up doing was within two years I had this business.
Mary: Um, now revenues better than they had ever been. I started creating my communication strategy that I call Words that Work, which really became, um, a big part of the Conscious Communications story and became like that next chapter of my life. So when I was talking about like, I knew I was meant to do something else, I just didn’t know what it was. Boom. It came to me. It hit me like a lightning bolt. And like I said, I just started getting these. It just was very strange. I just started getting it. Tons of ideas and creative inspiration and just knowing with like laser clarity, focus what I was supposed to be doing. So I feel like I feel like the story with Eleanor was just a, just a small piece of evidence for me that, that validated, that it validated me being OK with feeling proud of what I had accomplished.
Mary: You also talk about you had a shift when or after you attended a Tony Robbins event. Yeah. So that was actually years earlier. So the, it’s, you know, I always say that my, my, my journey through life has been so extraordinary and I’ve lived through things that, that most people can never imagine. I mean like living through the death of a child, living through. I mean lots of people have children on the spectrum, but there’s so much more to that. And um, I’ve had like the extreme highs of success and also these, these tragedies. And in 2005 I went to a Tony Robbins seminar and I learned a couple of things that I was able to apply to my life right away and saw it and make a real difference. One of them was what you focus on grows and the other was always know your outcome and I remember I went back to my office and I had this big moment where I looked at the phone and I said, I want the next person who calls here to be happier at the end of the call.
Mary: Then they weren’t the beginning of the call and that moment changed the entire rest of my life because, you know, I think when some people think the term always know your outcome, they think big outcomes like, oh, I want my outcome to be like a million dollars or a trip around the world or, you know, cure some illness or something. But I really didn’t think that at all. I just thought I want the next person to be happier at the end of the call. And that set into motion. Everything that happened after that. Because I started to develop this communication strategy and that became a lot of. When I started to get those downloads that I was talking about, it was like, wait a second, Ding, Ding, Ding. Your next thing has been there all along. You just didn’t recognize it because I had this communication strategy called Words that Work and immediately I started training other companies how to, how to use this communication strategy that I had developed.
Mary: That all came to me just because I asked this question, how can I make the next person happy? The next person who calls here, how can I make them happier than they were when they called in?
Kathy: That’s a great foundation to work from. It was.
Mary: It was a huge. It was huge. My business that I own is a debt collection company, so think of that for a second. Here I am, a debt collector trying to collect money, but yet my goal is no longer collect the money. My goal is how can I make this person happy because my mission soon after that became I really want people to feel good about paying their debt because having a debt is a psychological burden and it’s a burden that stops people and maybe even some of the listeners, you know, they may have a debt and the thing is that a debt can keep you stuck.
Mary: It can keep you from pursuing the life that you want to pursue because you’re kind of swirling in this chaos of shame and unworthiness. It’s like an underlying foundation of that and so this. This just became huge and to develop this strategy, Words that Work that was really all about making the person feel good about the fact that they even cared about paying their debt versus versus I’m using shame and intimidation to make them fearful and have even more anxiety over then they already had and it worked.
Kathy: And it worked. So can you give us an example how you’re on a call with somebody to make them feel happier, paying their debt?
Mary: So what I did was I studied words and I studied the effective words on the nervous system and I found out that there were certain words that would trigger the nervous system.
Mary: So like for example, when I was telling you that my brother would tell me that I was reacting at a level 10, I started paying attention to what words have other people react that way. And so we created a list. We call it the Do Not Say List and it’s in the book as well, but it’s a list of words we never say which are no, not, can’t, won’t, however, and unfortunately. And you know, if you think about when you call customer service, what are the most frustrating things ever is you call them and they say stuff like, no, I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Our policy is blah, blah, blah. And it’s just so frustrating because it makes you feel like your needs are not going to be met. And what I found was that if you just eliminate negative words in always focused on telling the customer what you can do instead of what you can’t do, that it actually builds tons of rapport and confidence and it just makes them feel so much better.
Mary: So there are certain words that will also trigger the parasympathetic, which is the opposite of fight or flight. So like for example, if you tell someone, you know, I can really understand or I can see how this is concerning to you. So you have to validate them as they need to feel heard and they need to feel taken care of and you say, I want to assure you that we’re going to be able to get this taken care of or whatever it is. I mean it’s without knowing specific details, it’s hard, but it’s just all about the words that you say to another person and words you can either damage or words can heal and we just choose to say healing words. And then that system, you know, the more I began to study it, the more I began to learn about like affirmations and Louise Hay.
Mary: I had another huge turning point probably in 2011 when I was in the bathtub one day. And I like to watch youtube in the bathtub. I know, I know I’m not the only person that’s guilty of that. It got a little stand for my smartphone and one day, you know, youtube is really cool because it can predict like what you want to watch. It always gives you suggestions in the next video. Yes. So this video came on by Louise Hay and it was the you can heal your life documentary and this was in 2011 and I don’t know what happened to me but within just the opening first few scenes, so we’re talking 10 minutes Max of this 90 minute documentary. I was crying out of every orifice of my body. I mean I, I had this huge release and it, I, I, it’s so hard to explain what came over me but I remember when that I stayed in the bathtub until my water was like ice cold cause it was 90 minutes and I just could not budge from my little five inch smartphone and I, at the end of that documentary I just jumped up out of the tub like a lightening bolt and I said, Louise Hay is going to publish my book.
Kathy: Oh really?
Mary: And of course I did. I and I didn’t know what the heck my book was going to be about, but I remember I was so excited. I mean that is probably the most excited I had ever been. And of course now like, you know, six years later, Louise Hay did publish my book and I couldn’t be more grateful for, for just that moment and how, like I was saying, like my journey has been extraordinary, but it has not been comfortable. It is not been a graceful journey. But it is my journey and I’ve learned so much that I can give to others. You know, I think back in, in certain of those days, like especially into 11 and 12, I was constantly going to these weekend workshops like I was a weekend workshop warrior and I was always thinking I was going to have a transformation in a weekend because doesn’t that what all these things promise and I would get to the end of the weekend and I would look around and all these people would be like, yeah, my life has changed.
Mary: Um, you know, life will never be the same. And I would look at myself and say, I’m still the same person. Nothing’s is different. And what I realized was I would talk to those people, those same people who were, who were all saying their life to change. Talk to them in a month and nothing has changed because what was really going on is they were riding high on the emotions of the event they had just immerse themselves in a weekend of joy and fun and music and away from your responsibilities, away from notifications away from your family. You’re basically in a la La land where there are no problems and you’re being pumped full of positive motivation, motivation. And so the thing that I realized from that is like my life was changing because I was taking the tools that I was learning at these workshops and I was applying them to my life.
Kathy: That’s key. That’s where everyone is supposed to do.
Mary: But I think that a lot of people don’t. I think they have that. The riding high on those emotions and I think that they think that that’s going to last forever. And what I learned from all of this is that true transformation happens in small pivots over time and I’m still transforming. Even now I’m still going, you know, deeper into my spiritual journey, deeper into my, you know, everything that is unfolding in my opportunities in life and, and it’s, it’s incredible.
Kathy: It is incredible. Let’s talk about going back to your book. You mention a really interesting section about Cleanse or Clog and I really liked that phrase. Can you describe to us what do you mean by Cleanse or Clog and how do we work on that?
Mary: Yeah, and actually, Kathy, I’ll, I’ll tell you, um, I actually wrote that chapter first even though that is chapter five of the book and I believe it’s called to Cleanse or Clog.
Mary: That is the Question. And I wrote that book. I wrote that chapter first and then the rest of the book I wrote later, but Cleanse or Clog is this concept that I use that just helps me check in to let me know whether I’m creating connections or disconnections and I’ll explain what I mean by that. I think we’re living in a time period where we can really accept that infinite possibilities are available to us. But the problem is, and part of this is like all blame the positive psychology movement, which I think is complete crap. Um, but part of it is we don’t understand the infinite possibilities mean anything could happen, right? It doesn’t, it doesn’t mean just the good things, it means the good things and the bad things, but we always want the good things. So it’s like how do you turn your possibilities into a probability, meaning a probability is you’re in control and it’s more likely to happen.
Mary: And what I realized is that everything you say, everything you do, every word that comes out of your mouth, every action you take, every choice you make in every thin sliced moment of life is either creating a deeper connection or it’s driving a disconnection. And so cleanse or clog is just like. The best way for me to explain it is if you’re on a diet, and I actually am on a diet right now, I’m doing whole 30. Every time I put I’m getting ready to put a bite of food in my mouth. All I have to say is, will this cleanse me or will this clog me? And I think we all can intuitively know that if we look at an apple, we know that the nutrients in the apple would be a cleanse that would be healthy for our body, but if I’m looking at a snickers bar, I think we know that that’s going to clog, that will the ingredients and that snicker’s bar going to clog my internal systems cause it’s one or the other.
Mary: It’s not like halfway cleanse halfway clog, but that’s true for every area of life. So if you have a significant other and you walk in the door and the conversation you have everything you say, everything you do, every action you take in your relationships is either going to create a deeper connection in that relationship or cleanse. It’s either going to cleanse that relationship or it’s going to clog it, and that’s true with your finances. Like what choices are you making that are going to either cleanse your finances or clog them. Same with your same with your career, with your personal growth and development. You know, if you’re feeding your mind full of like mindless drivel off of facebook, that’s probably a clog, but if you’re spending your personal time reading or learning or growing or singing or doing yoga, you know those things are cleanses.
Mary: And so it’s not about being perfect though because I always like to point out that I live by this 80 20 rule means means that 80 percent of the time I need to be making cleansing connected choices. And if I do that, it will cover me for the 20 percent of the time when I want to just have my piece of chocolate cake .
Kathy: so you can have your cake too. You don’t have to eliminate everything.
Mary: You do it. You do it in an 80/20 fashion. So of course you’re not going to eat cake every day. But Hey, Saturday night out to dinner you can have your cake and your glass of wine and you’ll be OK. Because what you’ll find is this gets you in control of your choices. And if you become, you know, I have a quote out of the book and I think it goes awareness of your choices is the keys to your freedom.
Mary: Because I think that deep down, one of the things we’re all looking for is freedom. And when you become the master, when you become the person in control of your choices, then you’ll start to see your world really manifests differently around you.
Kathy: That’s so true and there’s so many choices all day long, what you spend your time with. Like you were saying, you could spend your mind or your time cruising the Internet. It’s much, much different than reading a book, studying something new, talking to friends, going for a walk in nature. This either step forward towards your improvement or not a step forward towards it.
Mary: It’s so true, and I’m not saying facebook is bad, but you know, we’ve all been guilty of. I remember over Thanksgiving this past year, I was looking on facebook and someone wrote a post that must’ve triggered me. And then next thing I know, I’m in this conversation that, that with hundreds of people that were commenting on this post that lasted for days.
Mary: You talk about a clog. I was like, looking back, I was like, I cannot believe how much time and energy and frustration I allowed myself to get into.
Kathy: It happens easily. Yep, I succumbed to that too. You start cruising the Internet and next thing you know, you’re watching some videos of something was completely unrelated to what you were trying to search. So yes, I can understand that. I want to go back to what you had said a few minutes earlier. Positive psychology movement as complete crap.
Mary: So listen, I’ll tell you what I mean by this because it’s, I’m not against positivity. Um, I think that this is what I think, I think that the positive psychology movement that we are experiencing in today’s um, trendy, spiritual world has a lot to do with. Well, you’re creating your own reality. So if something bad happens to you, you created that.
Mary: And I think it leaves a lot of people feeling even worse because it’s almost a form to me of bullying. If you have a tragedy that happens in your life. The thing about positive psychology is it doesn’t leave you a way to process your emotions. You can’t just solve your problems by being happy and positive all the time. And so I have a big issue with that because I, and I think I talk about this and one of the chapters of the book, um, it might be chapter six, but there’s a, there’s a section in there called laying it all on the massage table. And I was really, um, this happened in real time when I was writing the book because I was doing all this research about affirmations and you know, the, the saying change your thoughts, change your life. So I was getting ready to get a massage and I really went into this with the intention of, I’m going to think happy thoughts about my ex husband, the entire massage.
Mary: I had it all planned out and it backfired so bad because every time I tried to think these positive thoughts, it was like a war opened up inside my head and I couldn’t understand and then I just felt like such a failure in the positive thought movement and I started to cry and I. my massage therapist, she’s also a psychotherapist. We started to talk about it and I really. I really learned something in that moment and it was. It was an incredible shift. So I ended up writing a process called five steps to break through your breakdown because this is part of what helped me realize is you can’t use positive psychology to solve your problems. I think you can be a positive person, which I certainly am, but it’s more of a perspective taking thing. Like I choose to take the perspective of things that are more that that paints a more positive light in things.
Mary: But if we are forcing ourselves to have positive thought, that is not natural, then we’re really. We’re really covering something up and we’re not processing something that needs to be processed. And so the five steps to break down, break through your breakdown, which is in the book, takes you through a process that’s been researched by neuroscience. So like the first, the first one, just to give you an example, is um, to write a list of all the problems you have and that might seem like it’s not a big thing, but what the research has shown. Matthew Lieberman of UCLA did a study where he found out that your brain really loves lists, they love making lists and it loves checking things off of lists. And so just, just the act of naming your problems and creating a list actually creates serotonin and dopamine in the brain, which means quite strangely, you write this list of all of your problems and you actually feel better. I thought it was fascinating.
Kathy: It is something simple as that. And identifying your problems. I think a lot of times I know for me and my past experience, immense amount of frustration and not knowing why I did something similar, writing it down, just becoming aware what I was being frustrated about was a big relief.
Mary: I think so because especially if you write it down too, you know, there’s other components, like I said, this process is actually five steps, but one of the components is to be able to look at it and understand that you know, anybody going through this would probably feel how I feel about it, like I’m not messed up because I feel sad because I feel overwhelmed or because I feel frustrated. But again, if we go back to this positive psychology, I think there, there’s this propensity to feel guilty for your sad feelings.
Kathy: Yes, I’m saying all my positive thoughts, why am I not feeling better? There must be something wrong with me.
Mary: And the and the fact is that the human body, I mean there’s something that’s being studied called the negativity bias. We are programmed, our bodies are built so that we can sense danger and we can be aware when negative circumstances are around us. We are, we are meant to be aware of those things and we can’t just, you know, positive think our way out of a speeding bullet.
Kathy: OK. Let me ask you this, Mary, what’s the difference between the positive psychology movement, saying positive statements versus affirmations?
Mary: That is a great question. So affirmations are something to be used, I believe, to reinforce neural networks in your subconscious mind. So for example, I’m a great affirmation is something that’s going to meet you where you’re at in your life. So I don’t suggest, I don’t suggest saying affirmations that just are completely untrue.
Mary: There’s some studies showing that if you say an affirmation like, oh, I am skinny, healthy and whatever wise or something, and you don’t really feel like you’re those things, it’s actually going more reinforced the negative neural network in the subconscious. And so repeatedly saying affirmations, like, I’ll tell you some of the ones I used, I would say, um, guide me to thoughts and harmony with my core desire, help me rendezvous with like minded people, Show me my power. I would just say these simple affirmations that over time started to change my thoughts. So like for me, and that’s the reason why the book is called harnessing the power of your words to change your mind, your choices in your life because words are deliberate where thoughts just seem to come from out of nowhere, yes, but words you can make a choice to be deliberate with.
Mary: And that’s what I love about them. So, and again, I’m not suggesting anyone lie, but if you carve out a period of time or have a daily practice. And actually what I did, I felt uncomfortable saying the affirmations. So I would write them down. Um, I would write down a page of affirmations a day and I, and if I couldn’t think of new ones, I would just write the same ones over and over again. I didn’t really have rules. The only rule was that the affirmation needed to resonate with me. So like one of the ones I’m saying right now, um, is something amazing is going to happen today. So sometimes when I’m in the shower, I’ll just say, oh, something amazing is going to happen today. Or I’ll write it down. Something amazing is going to happen today. But it’s just simple and it makes me feel good.
Mary: Um, one time I was speaking at a yoga retreat and I was talking about affirmations and I said, well, if anybody, if anybody wants me to help them write one, you know, come up and I’ll help you. And a young lady came up, she was going through a divorce. I’m, I resonated with her so very much because I could see, I could see the light in her eyes were, you know, she, she wants, she wants to have this business, but yeah, she’s going through a divorce. It’s just a really big time of transition. And she said, well, I own a fashion company and I create fashion for pregnant women. And she goes, but I don’t like saying that I’m the best fashion designer or I’m a, I’m a powerful fashion designer or whatever. She said, she said, I don’t like saying that because it’s not what my degree is in.
Mary: So because, because her degree, because she felt sort of like an imposter, right, right. She felt like I’m not the real thing so I shouldn’t be saying that. So I said, well, what if you said my designs make pregnant women feel beautiful? and her face lit up like a Christmas tree and that’s the moment I know. So whenever I’m working with somebody and I give them an affirmation, I can always tell because they’re, their face will light up when it’s the right one. They go from this kind of look of bewilderment or even like a low level frustration, like why is it so easy for everybody else but not for me. It’s not easy for anyone.
Mary: It’s just not. So when they get the right one, they’re like, I like that. So what felt good to her and what didn’t feel like a lie was my designs make pregnant women feel beautiful. Which by the way, I just [inaudible] that right from her because that was the mission she told me for her company.
Kathy: Oh, that’s great. Yeah. So going back to the affirmations and you’re saying, don’t say things that you don’t believe because it could backfire on you and make you feel worse than you did.
Mary: Unless you’re the. there are some people that can get into that unless that makes you feel good.
Kathy: Unless it makes you feel good.
Mary: Yes, if saying you are a billionaire, if that makes you feel good than say it, so it’s only because the truth is it’s about the way it makes you feel more so than the words because when you do one that makes you feel good, then it’s reinforcing this positive neural network system in your subconscious.
Mary: I feel the same way about gratitude because gratitude is also very similar to affirmations that if you can get into a gratitude practice, you will really be changing some things in your subconscious.
Kathy: So let’s talk about living in alignment. Can you define living in alignment for us? I mean it sounds like a little bit about what you were just discussing. You got to be aligned with your affirmations as well.
Mary: So I, I am a bit of a spirit, spirit junkie and I used to listen to a lot of these new thought leaders talk about alignment and it sounded so strange to me like what are they talking about? I could not figure it out for the longest time and they would always say, you need to get an alignment, and I thought, what the heck does that mean? It’s like you’re speaking Spanish right now.
Mary: I don’t understand what I’m reading, but I feel that way about so many of these like new age tech or new age terminologies as sometimes I’m so lost. I’m like, just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. Yes. Don’t talk with words that I don’t understand this a little bit. So I figured out alignment and what it is and actually I figured this out a few years ago and just this year my definition has gotten even deeper, so I’ll share that with you too. Alignment is when you get your thoughts, words, your actions and your feelings, like all moving in the same direction of what it is that you want. So if. So, it kind of goes back to that cleanse or clog thing, right? So if my. If my desire is I want to lose 20 pounds, but I’m eating a snickers bar, that’s an example of being out of alignment.
Mary: My own personal story is I, and I say this a lot that I wanted to write a book for 10 years and I would go around and I would say to anyone who would listen, I want to write a book, but I’m not a writer, and the thing is that words are like a mirror to your subconscious mind. So when you hear me say the words I want to write a book, it’s almost like you can see that written on my soul that I came into this life with this purpose of wanting to write this book, but I have a big problem when the, when the next words out of my mouth are, but I’m not a writer. Because those words are also revealing something. So that’s a really great example of being out of alignment and what I needed to do. So I couldn’t just sit around and say affirmations like, I’m a writer, I’m a writer.
Mary: I’m a writer because that would not have worked for me. What I needed to do to correct that one was I needed to invest in myself. I needed to say, how can I become a writer and I got an opportunity to go to a writer’s workshop. And when I went to it, um, it was a week long writer’s workshop at Omega Institute and with the most fabulous teacher ever, Cheryl Strayed and it was really intimidating and scary because all of the other people in the room were professional writers, like screenwriters and novelists and all of that stuff. So, but at the end of the week, I wrote a piece that I shared with the class and it was about my daughter who passed away in ’93. It was about my son on the autism spectrum and it was also about my roller coaster life as an entrepreneur. And no one laughed at me.
Mary: No one criticized me, know, and shook their finger and said, oh honey, you are so not a writer. It was the opposite. People loved it. People resonated with it. People had tears in their eyes and they wanted to encourage me to write more. And so for me, you know, that gave me the evidence and it was the evidence that I could then I could use to then change my words and what I change my words. I then changed my thoughts, which changed my feelings, which changed my choices, which changed my entire outcome of my life because now I have a best selling hay house book.
Kathy: That’s great story Mary. And it’s really interesting how it’s so true. I’m thinking about what you’re talking about a little bit earlier about the alignment. You know, your things that you say, how you say it and is it aligning with your actions? Because I’ve seen a lot of people where we’ve done workshops and list your goals. Well the goal is I want to be a millionaire like you had mentioned earlier, but their activities since their goal making lists was watching reruns of Seinfeld. You know, so there was quite a, quite a bit of out of alignment right there. And so I so appreciate that you’re bringing this up.
Mary: Yeah. That’s the Seinfeld thing as a perfect example because like if you need to watch an episode of Seinfeld or you need to get a little bit of funny in your life, there’s nothing wrong with that, but watching it, binge-watching it for an entire weekend or months on end, that’s not going to get you. That’s, that’s an example of out of alignment and I want to share with you too this deeper part of alignment that I’ve just discovered in the last six months and actually I think this is the first show I’ve ever even brought this up on, but I’ve recently discovered that part of being in alignment is forgiving yourself because something that can keep you out of alignment is when you have junk in your trunk. You know what I mean?
Kathy: Give us an example. What do you mean?
Mary: So, I think it’s different for every person. You know, I grew up in a Christian family. I’m not anything like over the top, but I did go to Lutheran school and I think that I was raised to believe that I needed to pray in the evening and ask for forgiveness and I understood that concept and I said my prayers at night and I repented. Well, I think when I think about it now, I think you know, who needs to be the person you’re asking forgiveness from is yourself and we have this and you know, the thing is that we’re all, the thing that I won’t forgive myself for is going to look different than yours, Kathy, because we all have a different compass of our own morals and values. I might tell you the thing that I’m having trouble forgiving myself for that happened when I was, you know, I don’t know, 20 and you might look at me and go, what?
Mary: That’s kind of silly. Right? And I would probably look at yours and say the same thing because, because you’re only judging against your own measurement of your morals and values. So if I were to say like I owe, you know, and we’ll say it like this because you know, we’re all civilized people, well I don’t like to judge, but that’s not what I would do. Right? But here’s the thing, you’re not walking in her shoes and then the minute when you are walking in her shoes, maybe 10 years later and you did the thing that you vowed to the universe that you never going to do, that’s the thing you’re not going to forgive yourself for because it goes against your own comfort zone of what you accept to be morally correct or not. But we forget that, that these like modern day rules that we set upon ourselves are, are, they’re just, they’re just cultural, you know, their, their belief systems that, that have been installed in our head for decades without even understanding them and a lot of ways.
Mary: I’m going to read you something out of my book. I love. I love this passage. It’s beautiful. I know it’s easier said than done, but what if, as an experiment, you try to be happy just by becoming who you really are. Just living in stepping into it to get to who you really are, you have to shed layer after layer of who you’ve been pretending to be layers of the person that you know deep down you are not. You’re shedding layers of your problems, layers of self judgment, layers of how others have judged you, shedding layers of unworthiness, fear, worry, and unnecessary responsibility and layers of beliefs and challenges around what other people think you are, or even worse. I think you should be.
Kathy: That’s so true. I think we’re our own worst enemy sometimes so judgmental on ourselves that we don’t share with everybody else.
Mary: Right, and I think that that for me, when I was saying alignment is your thoughts, words, feelings, actions, choices, you know all of that in the same direction. I feel like, and this is again, I’ve just been ruminating on this the last six months, the missing piece of that is forgiveness because the truth is you can’t really be in alignment with that million dollars if you have something from your past that you’re judging because you won’t feel like you deserve it.
Kathy: That’s so true, and it’s that limiting belief that’s going to become that obstacle that we’re usually not aware of. That’s such a great point, Mary. Mary, wrapping up here now
Kathy: for somebody that’s listening to you. I mean because you have so much information and so many good things to help people learn about themselves who are stuck in some way or another. Do you have some words of advice and maybe they’re going through a troubling or I’m in adversity or trauma, kind of like maybe you did or maybe not so like you did, but maybe something that helped you that, that may help somebody else.
Mary: Yeah, I think that, um, when you’re in that deepest, darkest hole and you feel like you feel like you’re, you can’t budge, you know, you feel like you’re just walking through mud or something like that. Think that it’s really important to understand that anybody going through what you would go through would feel the way you feel and it’s OK to feel that way. And I want to encourage people to just take even just one step in a new direction because taking one step in a new direction can change the entire rest of your life and that one step might be to sit down and write a list of your problems. That one step might be just getting out of your comfort zone and doing something that’s uncharacteristically not something you would do, like walking into a gym or making a phone call that would be terribly scary to make, but you take that one step. And I, and I don’t know about you, Cathy, but what I have experienced is whenever I take one step and another step in the right direction, it’s like the universe or God or whatever you believe in, it just comes down and meet me half way.
Kathy: That’s true. So taking your step towards your cleanse, toward a cleanse. Yes. OK, great. Thank you Mary. So how can people, if they’re interested in learning more about you and what you offer, how can people get Ahold of you?
Mary: Well, I love, love, love. If anything that I’ve said resonates with you, please, um, go to Amazon to check out my book, Conscious Communications, and just read the description. I always say if you read the description and maybe some of the reviews, you’ll know instinctively whether this book is for you or not. If you want to interact with me, the best place to do that is in my facebook group, which is called Fearless Ambition. And Trust me, you don’t have to be fearless to join. It’s more about acknowledging that sometimes stuff is really scary, but um, you can find me on all kinds of social media, facebook, instagram, twitter, everything. But I’m the best way to interact as in Fearless Ambition. And of course I would be honored if you check out the book on Amazon.
Kathy: Wonderful. Mary, thank you so much for not only sharing your story, but it’s sharing all that great information. That was wonderful.
Mary: Thank you Kathy. And I want to tell you, I love the name of your podcast, inspire café. What a great name.
Kathy: Thank you. I appreciate that, Mary, especially coming from somebody who is so attuned with words, so I appreciate that.
Mary: Those are good words.