[00:00:00] Lauren Brollier Newton: Hello, and welcome back to The Abundant Coach podcast. I’m super thrilled that you’re here because we have a very special guest today. This is a person who has been studying transformational principles for more than 50 years, teaching it for more than 40. And the high level of respect that I have for this person is that every single day she has gotten out of bed for the last 40 years, serving, not a business, not something a goal, but a deep calling to truly help people transform. And so, she has written three bestselling books, No Less Than Greatness, Building Your Field of Dreams, which became a PBS Special.

[00:00:41] Lauren Brollier Newton: And now, the new hit, Brave Thinking. And among many other things, this lady has trained and certified more than 5,000 coaches worldwide to continue to spread the mission that we are more than we’ve known ourselves to be. So please welcome, if we could all give a round of [00:01:00] applause on a podcast, the biggest standing ovation, Mary Morrissey.

[00:01:03] Mary Morrissey: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

[00:01:05] Lauren Brollier Newton: I am so thrilled to be with you, Mary. So, this is a podcast for coaches who are feeling the calling, but haven’t yet answered that call in a physical form yet. There’s coaches here who have been coaches for a long time and just want to grow more. There’s coaches who are just getting their start.

[00:01:21] Lauren Brollier Newton: And so I thought, one of the most inspiring things to me that you’ve shared with me is a series of events that happened in 1971, that really got you to gain interest in transformation. So I’d love for you to just take us back to that time in your life and give us a picture into those three events that really opened your mind to a whole different way of being.

[00:01:45] Mary Morrissey: Yeah, it was October of 1971. I was 22 years old. I had two little boys, was married. And ever since I was a little girl, I knew I wanted to be a teacher. So I finally after getting pregnant, married, another child, but [00:02:00] finally, now I’m in my undergraduate year I’ve just started. And as I’m starting school in September of 1971, the marriage that I’d been in, we didn’t know how to communicate.

[00:02:12] Mary Morrissey: There was a lot of disruption and hurt in the marriage on both sides. But I was finally getting my education now, so I was happy about that. And I was thinking one day, I was in the commons. And I was thinking, I’m just going to have to get a divorce. And I flipped through the Vanguard, which was the Portland State University newspaper, and saw a little ad that said wanted couples for communications encounter group.

[00:02:37] Mary Morrissey: I had no idea. This is the beginnings of encounter groups, which were turned out, of course, to be personal development processing. But I didn’t know what it was, but I went to the counseling center and I said, my husband and I are getting a divorce, but we need to communicate. So this is a communication encounter group and they said, yeah, we’re going to take eight couples, work with them for three months, 12 weeks, and teach you how to communicate [00:03:00] in good times and in not so good times.

[00:03:02] Mary Morrissey: And I knew that I wanted my children to not be raised in the battlefield of our own disruption. So I said, no, it’s fine. I’ll see if he’ll come with me. And I went home and he did say he would come. So in the next week, we went. And there were eight couples sitting in an oval with empty chairs on each end.

[00:03:19] Mary Morrissey: One the head of the psychology department from Portland State, Jean Hawkins was sitting there. And then the other was the head of the psychiatry department at University of Oregon Medical Center, uh, Julia has Julia Zaslow. And it began. I’d never been in anything like this. One of them, I don’t remember which one said, you’re all here to learn how to communicate.

[00:03:42] Mary Morrissey: What we need is one of you to tell us your story. Who’s willing to go first? And nobody raised their hand. But I was in so pain. In the family, I grew up in my mom and dad. It was such a harmonious relationship. If there was ever any tension, it would just be gone [00:04:00] in a few minutes. It was very easy.

[00:04:03] Mary Morrissey: My husband, his parents, literally fought physically. The last time he was in the house, the mother chased him with a meat cleaver. It was very lot of name calling and shouting. And so, we were very young, got married, I’m pregnant. And as we were beginning to have conflict, the style of conflict that he used was name calling and labeling, and I wasn’t going to take that. So I matched what he was doing, and I was an equal partner in creating unhealthy conflict. And now there’s all this pain and there’s all this gap between us. And so I conclude, I need to get a divorce. So, who’s going to tell their story? I raised my hand. And I saw him just put his hands on his head, Oh no.

[00:04:46] Mary Morrissey: So I tell my story and I tell everything that’s wrong with him. My whole story was what’s wrong with him. And at the end of my diatribe there, they looked at him and they said, have you been listening? And he said, you bet I’ve been [00:05:00] listening. In fact, there’s a few things I’d like to say.

[00:05:02] Mary Morrissey: And they said, we’re going to give you a chance to say everything you want to say, but not just yet. What we want to do is the first step is to make sure that Mary knows that you were listening and that you actually heard her. So, step one is just say exactly what you heard Mary say without adding any of your own story.

[00:05:20] Mary Morrissey: And he could remember part of it, but a lot of it, he couldn’t remember that I said. And then, they pointed out to all of us a distinction that there’s a vast difference between actual listening and waiting to talk. And being able to say to somebody, this is what I hear you saying without agreement. You don’t have to agree with what they said, but you need them to know that they exactly heard you. And once they pointed out to him that he hadn’t been listening, I just puffed up like a peacock. I told you, it was your fault. And then they turned to me and they said, Mary, you’re hurt. So your response to being hurt is to withdraw your love.

[00:05:59] Mary Morrissey: [00:06:00] When you punish someone, it’s important to give them the length of time you’re planning to punish them. So how long are you going to withdraw your love? Is that going to be a month, six months, a year, the rest of his life? When will he have paid enough for the pain you’re feeling? And I didn’t know how to answer that question.

[00:06:19] Mary Morrissey: And then they introduced us to some steps of how to communicate in conflict. And they were introducing the concept that conflict is not the enemy. Misuse of conflict creates a gap, destruction to relationships. On the other hand, the healthy use of conflict for deeper understanding, greater connectedness is actually a doorway to a greater loving. And so, they gave us seven rules.

[00:06:43] Mary Morrissey: First, they asked me if I would be willing to make a year commitment to this relationship. We dated four years. We’ve been married five years. We have two kids. This is a nine year investment. And I said, I am not willing to make a commitment to a year.

[00:06:56] Mary Morrissey: And they kept whittling it down. And finally, when they said three [00:07:00] months, I said, one month. I’ll work on this marriage for one month and then see where I am. And so, we agreed. And they gave us agreements to how we were handling conflict. No name calling, no labeling, no bringing up the past. It was seven simple rules like that. And instead what you do is say, this is what happened. This is how I feel about what happened. Here’s what I’d love to have happen. Is that okay? And then, back and forth.

[00:07:25] Mary Morrissey: So we had our first fight on the way home. Everything I would say, he say, that’s not fair. And if he said something, I’d say, that’s not fair now. And we didn’t quite know how to apply what they had given us, but we didn’t know what we had agreed would be unfair. And we began to work with that. So I’ve agreed now to work on the marriage for a month.

[00:07:42] Mary Morrissey: That week, he heard about a lecturer who was coming to town the next weekend. And the lecturer, my husband’s mother really thought, we should go hear this guy. I did not want to go, but he got up for the first, he was doing two lectures on one day. He went to the first lecture, came home and said, you’ve [00:08:00] got to hear this guy.

[00:08:00] Mary Morrissey: And because I had promised to work on the relationship, I would not have gone except that I promised to work on the relationship. I went to that lecture. I remember sitting there. I’m 22, very typically, pretty much sure I know everything. The lecturer said, nothing’s bad unless you think it’s bad.

[00:08:17] Mary Morrissey: And I remember crossing my arms and thinking, that’s just not true. There are bad things in this world, car wrecks are bad, murder’s bad, war is bad, come on. And he said, I will agree with what you’re thinking. I can tell what you’re thinking, and I would agree with you. There are things in this world that we would all like to change.

[00:08:37] Mary Morrissey: But here’s the truth, inside everything, there is a seed of an equal or greater good. And if you will pay attention to that possibility of good, you can always pull a good out of no matter what the situation is. And so he said, here’s a tool. The next time something happens and you immediately think this is bad, hit your internal pause button and wait [00:09:00] three days. During that three days, you’re not just waiting, you actually turn volume up. You’re turning the volume up on your curiosity of what possible good there could be in this. And so we heard that, went home.

[00:09:12] Mary Morrissey: Two days later, I had the boys at a daycare center while I was going to school, picked up the boys, came home, I’m cooking dinner. And when he came in for work that night, he just looked ashen. And went, Oh my gosh, what happened? And he said, there was a huge layoff at work today. A hundred of us lost our jobs. I don’t have a job. And I immediately, oh my gosh, then I started to move into panic. This is horrible, you don’t have a job, I might have to quit school, and my mind is running like this.

[00:09:40] Mary Morrissey: And then I went, wait a minute, that guy Sunday said, nothing is bad unless we think it’s bad. This just seems really bad. Hit your internal pause button. Where is that? I didn’t even know I had that function. What’s your internal pause button? Wait three days. It’s Tuesday at five. That’d be Friday at five.

[00:09:57] Mary Morrissey: And we’re supposed to turn the volume up on our [00:10:00] curiosity about any possible good. So we fed the kids, got them to bed, and then we sat down with a piece of paper. And he was actually way better at it than I was. He would say, one of the things he said was, you know, I drive 90 minutes to and from work. That would save three hours of my day if I found a job closer to home.

[00:10:16] Mary Morrissey: But he was a teamster. He had a really good paying job at the time. And I said, how are you going to do that? And he said, I don’t know, but if I did find a job closer to home that worked, it would be good. And then, what if I worked shorter hours? What if I made more money and both to both of those things?

[00:10:32] Mary Morrissey: I’m going, how are you going to do that? I didn’t know yet, how on hold and just get dream up what you really want. And so, he wrote those things down. The next day I came home and he found a couple of places where they were taking interviews. He was scheduled to go to the interview, Thursday when I came home.

[00:10:48] Mary Morrissey: He was whistling when I walked in the house. I was like, tell me. And he had found a better paying job, closer to home, inside his skill set, a driving truck, and he could ride his [00:11:00] bike to work, which he loved doing. And so, a little more money, and definitely it was a route so he could do work shorter hours.

[00:11:07] Mary Morrissey: And I realized that night, that for the first time in my life, I hadn’t suffered waiting for a circumstance to change before I could feel better. Cause during those three days, whenever panic would start to rise up in me, I would say, no, Friday at five. And I had found a way to notice what I was thinking and notice that I had actually a level of authority over what I was thinking and feeling that I’d never known before.

[00:11:36] Mary Morrissey: So that interested me. I went the next week. Nothing really struck me, except that there was a workshop that would be the following week, which I went to. This is all now in October of 71.

[00:11:48] Mary Morrissey: And the person who was doing that lecture was a man named Richard Alpert was his birth name. He became Ram Dass, who was a student of Hinduism [00:12:00] and other things. And he was talking about how the mind is the generator of the thoughts that we think have everything to do with the results we’re going to create. That next week in class, I was taking a class called Concepts of Nature. Ram Dass and this Concepts of Nature class came together, and they introduced me to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and dentalism. And I realized, oh, that’s what happened when I hit the pause button. There was a part of me that was bigger or more than the circumstances I was having. And I was beginning to relate to that part, so that I could experience a life that had circumstances, but it didn’t control my whole life.

[00:12:41] Mary Morrissey: I actually could decide what I was going to do with that, and come from a more intelligent space inside myself. And I just began to be like Lauren, like a thirsty sponge for everything I could find in the field of transformation. And that’s what occurred in 1971. Every day, since then.

[00:12:57] Lauren Brollier Newton: Wow. In one month, the [00:13:00] things that occurred, I think I’ve heard you describe it before as like drinking out of a fire hose of this new way of thinking.

[00:13:05] Mary Morrissey: It wasn’t. I was just like, Oh my gosh, I felt like I’ve been living in the attic of myself. And I was just buffeted by, what my programming said. This is good. This is bad. This is hard. This is horrible. And now, I began to develop a sense of I get to choose what I’m going to think about.

[00:13:21] Mary Morrissey: And no longer was life happening to me. I realized life was happening with me. I turned into a minor evangelist at this point, wanting everybody I knew to have this because it was so freeing and life giving and telling my parents and telling my friends and asked my best friend, have you ever noticed patterns going on in your life?

[00:13:41] Mary Morrissey: And it was spooky to her. And she was, what do you mean? And my parents were like, look, Mary got religion. This is working for you good, but you don’t need to come. Every time you’re coming over here asking us to think this way or read these books. And so I realized that trying to push it on people was not the way to bring transformation, that it would [00:14:00] be more important that I study and I let my life show what this does.

[00:14:05] Mary Morrissey: And then some will be interested and some aren’t. And that’s what I’ve seen over the last 50 plus years. Some are interested and some aren’t, but today we’re in a world where way more people are interested in transforming their lives in a degree in order to experience a life that they love in one or more areas.

[00:14:23] Lauren Brollier Newton: I was wondering, as you were talking about going to the communication group, it’s 1971. I’m wondering if either your family or your kid’s dad’s family, that at that time, there was a stigma around going to counseling or going to therapy or going to a group session like that. Was there a feeling of, Oh, only people who are troubled do these kind of things?

[00:14:46] Lauren Brollier Newton: Because I think that I was born in the 80s, but I think there was still a stigma around working on yourself, so to speak.

[00:14:53] Mary Morrissey: It was just that the environment I was in was so conducive. If I had been a stay at home mom and I hired a [00:15:00] therapist, I think I would have encountered that. But I had a whole, we had another couple, we had seven other couples who were in the same class with us. It was a class more than a therapy.

[00:15:11] Lauren Brollier Newton: I see. Yeah.

[00:15:12] Mary Morrissey: That was how it was perceived. I was getting my degree, both in education and psychology at the same time. So these explorations, were just part of the curriculum. Powerful.

[00:15:23] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. Very powerful. So I’m thinking about coaches in particular. And each of the three things that you shared happened in 1971, you can take and put on top of things that happen in the everyday course of building your coaching business, wanting to help people, I think about the communication.

[00:15:41] Lauren Brollier Newton: Let me just start by saying, when I heard these stories from you over the course of my time working with you, Mary, I had never heard anything like it before. I felt the same way you felt in October, 1971, you share these stories. And I felt like my DNA got rearranged in my body. Like it was a whole different, it was like a technicolor world.

[00:15:59] Lauren Brollier Newton: [00:16:00] Dorothy opens the door and then here it is all of a sudden in color. And I think that as a coach, one of the ways that we can apply that first tool of you don’t have to agree to listen. I remember very specifically a time when a perspective client. I don’t even think she was a client. I think it was a perspective client who had a session with me, who felt like I pushed her. And I was surprised because I was like, Oh, I didn’t mean to do that. That was not my intention.

[00:16:23] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I remember that story that you told that you don’t have to agree. You can show you’re listening without having to agree by repeating back to the person what you heard them say. And was such a powerful moment because I got on the phone with her and I just said, tell me everything you felt, I really want to hear how this was for you. And she told me, and it wasn’t like that was easy because of course I was like, one, I didn’t say that to, in my mind, I’m thinking, I didn’t say that.

[00:16:46] Lauren Brollier Newton: And then I remembered, no, I’m just supposed to listen. It doesn’t mean I’m agreeing. And when I repeated back to her nearly, identical to the words she said, because you had trained me in that. She’s actually said to me, when I hear you say it back [00:17:00] to me, it actually wasn’t as bad as I was making it.

[00:17:04] Lauren Brollier Newton: Now that I hear it back, it feels really harsh, and I don’t think it was that harsh. And so we didn’t even have to have really any much more conversation because she felt heard. And I listened fully to what she said, and I didn’t say anything other than what she said. And she was happy, just for being heard that I listened.

[00:17:19] Lauren Brollier Newton: And so as coaches, I think, especially in the world where we might put ourself out there on social media. And someone could comment something or someone feels something about what we did. What a powerful tool to just be able to listen without feeling like you have to respond with your side of the story.

[00:17:36] Mary Morrissey: This is what, so can I let you know what I’m hearing? And sometimes, as they’re speaking, you might be not quite hearing everything, so would you tell me more, those three words, tell me more. Please tell me more, so I can really understand this part. And when you come in into a conversation, really seeking to understand, the other person is going to feel more and more understood.

[00:17:59] Mary Morrissey: And [00:18:00] that creates a bridge and a connection, whether you ever work with them or not.

[00:18:03] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes. Cause they can feel that you’re coming from an energy of openness and understanding and connection as opposed to I can’t wait to defend. I think to the internal pive.

[00:18:13] Mary Morrissey: There’s the human side to us that may have a little of that going on, but we just set it aside long enough.

[00:18:19] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. And I think the pause button too, for coaches, as we’re building a business, there’s going to be all sorts of ups and downs and curve balls and things that we didn’t expect. And we hear coaches say, I did everything I could. Nobody came to my workshop, or I had five sessions in a row and no one wanted to coach with me.

[00:18:37] Lauren Brollier Newton: And what a powerful tool to use the internal pause button around that. And not make it into something. I’m just reflecting on these tools. We live what we teach.

[00:18:46] Lauren Brollier Newton: So now, let’s fast forward. It’s 1971, you have this amazing experience, this awakening, and then you didn’t teach the work until 1981.

[00:18:55] Mary Morrissey: Right. I invested a decade in getting a master’s degree in counseling psychology, [00:19:00] attending a two year seminary, then begin to experiment with writing and teaching, creating classes that I would teach before I opened up a teaching center where I would teach these principles. Because I really felt strongly that I needed to have lived enough of these to know how it really worked in life.

[00:19:20] Mary Morrissey: Transformation means literally to go beyond the current form of something. So you transform into hopefully a higher version versus a lower version of a possibility. And then I began and I worked. It was very slowly. Did this work grow? And I had along the way, I did everything I knew to do.

[00:19:41] Mary Morrissey: I was doing therapy during the week or at $30 an hour in 1980, in 81, to generate the money that would help pay for the facility that I would use on Sundays for this teaching work. And the only way I knew how to teach transformation in those days was through church. We did coaching in those days.

[00:19:59] Mary Morrissey: If you ask [00:20:00] somebody, and they said they’re a coach, you would say, what’s for it? Because the idea of coaching in business or in personal development or in any of the other kinds of endeavors was not a profession that was on the table. We hadn’t developed that yet. So I incorporated and opened up an independent non-denominational church, very little, took four years of it. There were at the most 30, 40, 50 people sometimes.

[00:20:26] Mary Morrissey: And I had stories in my head about why I wasn’t successful. One was that they only had metal chairs. Who wants come and sit in a metal chair, a foldable metal chair. That place was the Odd Fellows Hall, and it was old, curling linoleum at the edges of the walls and yucky looking. And I didn’t have money for advertising. So the bad linoleum, the metal chairs and the no money for advertising, I was barely paying my portion of, by now we have four kids. And my portion of the income, and [00:21:00] then supporting this fledgling work, I just had this pattern of thinking, the reason we’re not growing is that, and then I met a man who became a mentor to me.

[00:21:10] Mary Morrissey: I had been listening to some cassette tapes by him. And I just knew that he understood, first of all, his expression of success was it so much a higher level than mine. Studied the same things so I could hear that. His way of describing it was really pristine and clarified. But he had hundreds and hundreds of people coming to his work. He was on radio and TV in the Detroit and Northeast area. And I got myself to a seminar that he was leading on Church Growth and Development in Chicago with two other teachers.

[00:21:43] Mary Morrissey: I didn’t go there to have him be a mentor to me. I went there to sit in his presence. And then, I wanted to ask him some questions. That’s really why I went. I Got myself an airplane. It was a big deal as a mom of four little kids and my husband had inherited a berry farm and he’s berry [00:22:00] farming, and I’m trying to create a different path for us.

[00:22:03] Mary Morrissey: And I go get myself there and hear him speak. He speaks Friday night, his name, Jack Boland. And I was so enamored by the way he could articulate the same kind of message I was giving, but at a different whole level. And I stood in line until the end. And then, thanked him. And then I asked him, I said, anyway I can buy you breakfast tomorrow? And he looked at me and he said, wait, I we’re in a three day seminar. I can’t go to breakfast with you. And then he paused. And I don’t know what happened in that moment, but he said, you know what? If you get yourself to the cafe at 7am, I’ll give you 30 minutes.

[00:22:36] Mary Morrissey: Of course, I was in that booth when he came down at 7am. And he said, how can I help you? And I said, I want to do what you’re doing. And he looked at me and he goes, I can help you with that, but it’s going to cost you. And when he said that to me, my body actually went backwards. I said, how much? And he goes, Oh, that’s your problem. You actually think how much something costs has anything to do [00:23:00] with what you want. And I’m sure my eyes darted back and forth and I went, yeah, everybody I know thinks that same way. I have to know how much it costs before I know if I can do it. And he says, I’m telling you, that’s your problem.

[00:23:12] Mary Morrissey: He might as well, have been speaking Martian to me at the time. I had no idea really what he was talking about. And then he described that he was creating a mentoring program that would be one year long. He already had two male people he had selected, who were upcoming teachers. I told him about my work, and that I wanted to move it to a whole new level.

[00:23:33] Mary Morrissey: And he said, I’ve been thinking there might be a woman that I would bump into this weekend who really had a passion for bringing the work to a much larger expression, and I think you’re that person. Then he told me that the price for the year long mentoring was $19,000. Now this is 1987, equivalent of just over $50,000 today.

[00:23:56] Mary Morrissey: I’m a mom, I’ve got four kids, I’ve got a fledgling little [00:24:00] ministry, I’m funding it with counseling I’m doing. This was beyond, I said, there’s no way I can do that. He said, what if there were? And he says, and what if by your investing in it with what you could do with what you have a year from now?

[00:24:14] Mary Morrissey: It would be easy to finish that payment because of the growth and the development and the expression of your work. And then he asked me, he said, there’s a deposit of $2,500. And I said, I took everything I had just to get here. And he said, don’t you have a rainy day fund somewhere? Then I thought, in my mind, he just turned into a used car salesman.

[00:24:33] Mary Morrissey: Oh, you’re just trying to sell me. I thought you were this. Now, you’re just trying to sell me. And he said, so notice that you’re very protective of saving that $2,500 for something you don’t want. You don’t want the car to break down or the roof to leak, but you’re not willing to invest that in an expansion of your work and life and income that’ll grow with that.

[00:24:57] Mary Morrissey: So notice that choice. You’ve been trained to [00:25:00] think you have to have this. What if you could be trained to think that you actually can go for what you want? And something happened in that moment. I realized, he knew how to create much larger work than I had any idea how to create. And he had a long track record. It wasn’t that he just knew he had a long track record of that.

[00:25:19] Mary Morrissey: And I also could feel that he cared. I always tell people, when you’re looking for a mentor, you want someone who understands how things occur. They don’t think they’re random and accidentally bumped into something. It was just an accident.

[00:25:32] Mary Morrissey: There’s invisible laws that govern how things occur, just like gravity, electricity. So he understood this. And he had a long track record in creating his success. And I didn’t want his success, I wanted my success. That what my calling was. And then, he had a deep caring. I could tell that he cared about me having my results.

[00:25:53] Mary Morrissey: And so, I made that move. And then I never looked back. I studied with him, not just one year. Then the next thing he said is, [00:26:00] now you’re going to be in Detroit next weekend. I went, there’s no way I can get you. I took everything I have to get here. And he says, then I can’t help you.

[00:26:07] Mary Morrissey: Detroit next weekend because we’re launching the mentoring program and the two men that I’m going to mentor are going to be there, and you have to be there if you’re going to be in this group. So guess what? I found a way to do it. I was in Detroit and I went in, sat down in a conference room, with two men.

[00:26:21] Mary Morrissey: I met Wayne, I met Les. Then Jack Bowen came in, sat down and introduced me to Les Brown, Wayne Dyer, and Mary Morrissey. And he mentored us not just that year, but we all renewed each year. And for five years, he was my mentor along with theirs. We became very good friends, the three of us.

[00:26:41] Mary Morrissey: And then Jack died. I would have signed again, but he passed away. And that investment I made in working with him has been with me. He’s been gone since 92. So, it’s been decades now, but that investment yielding and yielding and yielding in my life. And is informed and inspired [00:27:00] the coaching work that I do in the world.

[00:27:02] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes. Oh my gosh. So powerful. So powerless. But when you said, back to Jack, everybody I know thinks this way. You gotta know how much something is before you can know if you can have it or not. And you’re changing this, Mary, and my mission is to change this, but I think so many people still think that way. And this is why you founded Brave Thinking Institute.

[00:27:21] Mary Morrissey: It is. I was introduced to Transcendentalism, early on 1971. So in Transcendentalism, the idea that you have circumstances, but circumstances don’t have to have you. So it’s not like you don’t know what your current money is, but you don’t yet know what the investment in the learning and the growth might bring to you. You need someone who understands how that can make a huge difference in your life.

[00:27:47] Mary Morrissey: So as a coach, it’s important that we are informed about what really brings transformation into people’s life. Not just, I’m a trained therapist. I have master’s degree in counseling [00:28:00] psychology. The modalities I was trained in, in the 80s, late 70s, we’re all pretty much reflective thinking. It would look backwards on, Oh, I’m this way. So I’ve been afraid of water my whole life. And then you go back and you go back and perhaps through some regression or hypnosis. You find out that when you were nine months old, your mother, you were slippery little body, and slipped on out of her hands and put your head underwater. And you got jolted with a big fear and it’s still operating in you.

[00:28:29] Mary Morrissey: So finding out, why you’re afraid of water doesn’t change that you are afraid of water. That’s transformation. So sometimes, it’s helpful to be informed. Most of the time, you don’t even really have to know where it came from, just that you want to change it.

[00:28:42] Mary Morrissey: So, the idea of Transcendentalism introduces us to two kinds of thinking. One is, what is in Henry David Thoreau’s work called Common Hour Thinking, which is just what I had when I sat with Jack Bowman. Of course, I have to know how much something costs before I know if I can [00:29:00] have it. And he says, I’m telling you, you’ve got this backwards, decide what you want without the price, whatever the price is, if it’s something you really want.

[00:29:09] Mary Morrissey: So, when I knew I wanted to veer out of just the enclosure of only being a minister and really take a work that would go way beyond the walls of any church, that move, I was new territory for me. But I didn’t let the circumstances control me. Once I knew what I really wanted to do, I began to move towards it.

[00:29:30] Mary Morrissey: Thinking that there has to be a way to do it. We’re in a sea of infinite possibilities. If we think it’s going to be hard or we think it’s going to be easy, there’s a high tendency. There’s going to be exactly what we think is going to be.

[00:29:41] Lauren Brollier Newton: I’m glad that you brought this up, Mary, because I often think to myself. The deep level of admiration I have for you is, I’ve only been doing this going on, almost seven years in now. And I know the rigor that it takes to get out of bed and serve the calling. That’s [00:30:00] only going on seven years.

[00:30:02] Lauren Brollier Newton: And then I think about someone who’s gotten out of bed every day for 40 plus years and served the calling. And the rigor that took. And one of the things that comes to my mind often is, there was a time in, I want to say 2004, tell me if I’m correct, that you lost the work you’d done in the world.

[00:30:19] Mary Morrissey: I’d stayed married to my kid’s dad. That we were going to get a divorce, we’re going to work on it one month, that turned into another 21 years in our marriage. We were married 27 years, had two more wonderful kids. And we were kids, I was 17 when we married, he was 19. And as we matured and grew and got more interested in our own professions, we were just not on the same wavelength.

[00:30:42] Mary Morrissey: What he thought was fun and funny. And what I thought was fun. Were very different. What really mattered to us was, we were a hundred percent united in raising our kids. And then after 27 years, we freed each other to go on to the next stages of our life. We are still very dear friends. [00:31:00] We’re at all our kids events together. We hug, we’re grateful, we talk on the phone. The friendship was always the best part of that relationship for me. And we saved that. So I’m very grateful for that.

[00:31:10] Mary Morrissey: Then a few years later, I met and married a man who was a CPA, who was consulting as our church grew, and we were getting a new property. And I met him, dated him a couple of years, fell in love, married. I knew he had depression disorder when I married him, but I had no idea how far it went and how deep it was. And the first, maybe four years of our marriage was actually pretty good. And then, he became more and more reclusive and depressed.

[00:31:34] Mary Morrissey: And he was operating. The board had given him a key position in the financial management of our church and turning in the financials every month that the board and I would review. I was busy at this time working with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and speaking at the UN, and my book had become a PBS special and I was very busy.

[00:31:53] Mary Morrissey: And then there came a moment when I realized, something’s wrong financially here. It didn’t matter how much money we raised, [00:32:00] it was never enough. And I went outside what he was doing, and got some independent CPAs and attorneys to look at what was going on. And they sat me down and they said, you have a very big problem.

[00:32:13] Mary Morrissey: There’s been embezzling here. There’s been probably a million dollars taken out of the church. And when one thing after another happened and came out, ultimately, I would have to close the work that I had built 23 years. And I was devastated. He went to a mental hospital for a year, then pled guilty, and went to prison.

[00:32:32] Mary Morrissey: I divorced in the process. It wasn’t just that he was mentally ill. It was that he had a capacity to over the time when I would have questions that he could look me right in the eye, and lie about it. A lot of people, bipolar disease, but not all of them have that same expression where they can just look you in the eye and lie right to your face, and other people too.

[00:32:53] Mary Morrissey: A lot of people got hurt, I was one of those. But at the end of the day, the congregants, I was part of [00:33:00] that. We had put money into this facility. So it was a trust that owned the property. And there was a 10 million dollar debt to congregants on that trust. And when the attorneys came in and bankrupted everything, I personally felt a spiritual responsibility to my congregants. I knew that they didn’t just trust the church, they trusted me. I was a senior minister. I had started this work. And I just couldn’t make peace with bankrupting those congregants.

[00:33:27] Mary Morrissey: I put an escrow fund together in the State of Oregon, where we were. Everything that could get sold got sold. And I’m either going to get this 10 million dollar paid back, bring this to a zero balance, or I will spend the rest of my life attempting.

[00:33:41] Mary Morrissey: Once I made that decision, I could feel, wasn’t easy, but I could feel at peace with that decision. And I didn’t start any new work right away. I was just bereft. I went to the Oregon coast, found a place to stay. And I gave my last sermon. It was broadcast all over the Northwest. And then the next Sunday, I had no [00:34:00] place to go, after three years. I’d get up at three or four o’clock in the morning and get ready for the day and be the first person in the church, filling it with love.

[00:34:08] Mary Morrissey: And it was just no place to go. He’s an intermedialist. There’s all this still swirling. So I went to the Oregon coast to walk the beach that afternoon, which has always been a calling place for me. And I knew of one afternoon was not going to do it. So I found a place to stay and I stayed 90 days, and I walked that beach. I pounded that beach every day.

[00:34:27] Mary Morrissey: But in the first five or six weeks, I just sobbed and cried. I was bereft. I would get angry. I was angry at him. I was angry at the other CPA was supposed to be watching over it and they weren’t. But ultimately, I was angry with myself. Because in hindsight, as you have hindsight, it was like, Oh, I could have seen that.

[00:34:47] Mary Morrissey: And I ultimately got myself to realize that, I didn’t want to see it. I could have seen it, but I didn’t want to see it because as a public person, I was afraid of a second divorce, more than seeing the truth. That was very [00:35:00] expensive to allow that fear to govern my way of being.

[00:35:04] Mary Morrissey: Took with me on all those beach walks. I was reading a book called Dark Night of the Soul by a Christian mystic who wrote that probably in 1100 AD. And I remember particularly, Lauren, one spot, and this is, might be helpful to anybody who’s listening to this, who is in a dark place or has been in a dark place. He says, when the dark night comes upon you, the first thing you do is try to get it to go away. And when you find out your power is not enough to make it go away, somebody you love dies, a work dies. This was my baby, 23 years, and it crashed and burned with scandal all around it.

[00:35:37] Mary Morrissey: There’s just so many things that people, we all deal with certain things. And that was much worse than this. No, it’s whatever is worst, that’s where we are. So, when the dark night comes upon you, the first thing you do is try to make it go away. When you realize, your power is not enough to make it go away, it’s here. You can’t change it. It’s happened. When you come to that moment, If you surrender, three [00:36:00] things will happen.

[00:36:01] Mary Morrissey: First is a feeling of relief, because you’ve stopped fighting it. I can’t change this. This has happened. Somebody I love has passed, I can’t get them back. Whatever the deep dark night seems to be for you. You feel a sense of release.

[00:36:15] Mary Morrissey: Relief, cause you set it down. Release, because you’re no longer fighting it.

[00:36:19] Mary Morrissey: And the third thing that will happen is a strange feeling that will come upon you, that you actually don’t want it to end too soon. Because you actually do want everything it came to give you.

[00:36:31] Mary Morrissey: Now, that was not an easy place for me to get. I was still arguing in my mind, how it shouldn’t have happened, and this and that. But eventually, I’m walking down the beach, probably six weeks, seven weeks into the 90 days. And I’m walking one day and at that particular hour, I’m not crying, I’m just walking. And I hear, dark chapter, not your whole book. And that was the first moment when I can write more chapters.

[00:36:57] Mary Morrissey: Dark chapter, not your whole book. Oh, it started [00:37:00] with saying, you’re still breathing. And then I heard dark chapter, not your whole book. And that was the first opening. It had been so dark. That was the first light shining through that there could be more chapters. There could be more. Because I knew in that moment, no matter what the form of the work I had done, one thing absolutely had not changed. And that was how much I loved helping people and see them really get help. To realize that they were more than their stories, more than their circumstances, that they had in them a power that was greater than anything that’s outside them. And just one little thing after another started happening for me, and I began to do very small work.

[00:37:43] Mary Morrissey: At one point I decided, I had been invited and I was going up to Seattle once a week to speak at a smaller church, who was asking me to do that. Driving home, I guess the second week, we were doing that with a couple of my friends who, we’d all lost our jobs because the church had closed. And I realized, oh, [00:38:00] I need to make myself available to that.

[00:38:01] Mary Morrissey: I had two to three thousand people coming every Sunday. And now that everything’s closed, I need to make myself available to those people. Cause all they can see was what’s in the newspaper. One of the headlines was, I had gone from being on the front page of the Oregonian, the newspaper in my state, from Mary at the UN, Mary with the Dalai Lama, Mary with a PBS special.

[00:38:23] Mary Morrissey: Profit for profit. Nobody was publishing bipolar husband. It was embezzlement at her church and this and that.

[00:38:31] Lauren Brollier Newton: Mm-Hmm.

[00:38:32] Mary Morrissey: I thought I need to get with them. They need to get mad at me, accuse me, yell at me, whatever they need to do, because there’s no way they can have access to me.

[00:38:41] Mary Morrissey: At this little place that brought several hundred people at a time. And we just sent words out and then they knew people and word went out that I was doing this every Tuesday night. I didn’t want to do anything on Sundays, because there’d been five little churches that had sprung out of the ashes of the work I had built. And I would do a little service. I said, we’re going to have [00:39:00] a short service here at the end of which I will stay for any question you want to ask. I’ll stay as long as you have questions and no questions out of bounds.

[00:39:07] Mary Morrissey: And at first, like two to three months, were just full of accusation. And how could you not have known? Who you are? I understood from where they were standing, but the board and I both, were exonerated of. There were CPAs putting in our hands financials. They were CPA approved. We had a right to believe what was handed to us, but it didn’t change the results.

[00:39:29] Mary Morrissey: In it, and stood in it, and stood at it, and then more questions were fewer and fewer, but they still wanted that service. So a much smaller group, of course, than the 3,000 people. This was more like three, four hundred people coming. And they called it Sabbath Tuesdays. And I would do that while I was traveling. Building a work now that had just the little sproutings of being a coaching business. And eventually, they had no questions left.

[00:39:53] Mary Morrissey: I did that for three years.

[00:39:55] Lauren Brollier Newton: Wow.

[00:39:56] Mary Morrissey: Yeah.

[00:39:56] Lauren Brollier Newton: So I wanna just really highlight this for [00:40:00] coaches. At the level of fact to Mary, it can seem like she’s lost everything, marriage, house, church, people who used to believe in you going, Oh, the newspaper talking about you. And if I’m calculating correctly, you’re 55 years old at the time.

[00:40:14] Mary Morrissey: Exactly.

[00:40:15] Lauren Brollier Newton: Right, 55 years old.

[00:40:16] Mary Morrissey: Yeah. Temptation to go crawl under a rock was very present.

[00:40:20] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes. Because I’m thinking about many times, our coaches that we train and certify are in the range of 50s and 60s. And they’re saying to themselves, am I really going to do something new? And I think about this. And I think, okay, you’ve lost everything. It seems like 55 years old. But there was a part of you who made this decision that somehow, you had no idea how, but it felt important to you to commit to pay this 10 million dollars back. So there’s a power move here.

[00:40:44] Mary Morrissey: It looked like a mountain that was not achievable at first. And then of course, applying the principles that we apply, I began to realize, nothing can be bigger than God. And there’s a power breathing me. So I just need to do the thing I can do with what I have.

[00:40:59] Mary Morrissey: I made an [00:41:00] agreement to pay 15% of the gross dollars that I earned. Now, that doesn’t sound like very much, but I had moved now to California, and you earn a dollar. You pay 15 percent off the top, but you paid 37%, and another 14% of taxes on the full dollar, which meant, I would have 33 cents in the dollar that I earned, after I put 15% to my Oregon debt, and paid the taxes that were mine to pay.

[00:41:27] Mary Morrissey: And my first thought is, how am I going to live on 33 cents? And thoughts came to me. Then you got to earn a whole lot of 33 cents. I just began a small and growing work. But the vision I held, and this is I think, important for all of our coaches, to have a vision of what your work thriving looks like. Have a crystal clear vision of what a work that you want to do and you feel called to do is, what does it look like when it’s thriving? And you hold that in mind, even though you’re looking at whatever looks like so [00:42:00] small, but you keep that vision in your mind. And you do the thing you can do with what you have from where you are.

[00:42:06] Mary Morrissey: The thing that I believe is the distinguisher in the work that we do together, Lauren. And that I’ve done is Jack Bowen told me early on, the reasons lots of people get into, either writing books or being somebody known in the personal development world. And then they fade out, they fizzle out after a few years. And you’ll see a lot of those.

[00:42:28] Mary Morrissey: I’ve been doing this work now, Lauren said, 40 years. Even with the big smashing failure right in the middle of it. It wasn’t long and then it’s all sprouting again. And he said, and I believed, it’s the love you have for people. If that’s authentic, if you’re just trying to make a bunch of money, you can make a lot of money in coaching.

[00:42:47] Mary Morrissey: You can travel. And you can work from any place in the world. There’s so many benefits. But if your primary interest is on authentically helping people, they can feel that, like I could feel with Jack [00:43:00] Poland.

[00:43:00] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes.

[00:43:00] Mary Morrissey: And that’s really the energy that goes before you and helps attract people to your work because they can feel that you care. And that has to be authentic. Not something you just put on when you’re on stage and then behind the stage, you’re something else.

[00:43:15] Mary Morrissey: And the other, I think for our coaches is to recognize, it’s okay to be transparent about your own learnings. In my bio, it says, after all the degrees that I’ve earned, my two favorite degrees are two black belts I’ve earned. One in success and one in failure. And they were equally instructive to my growth.

[00:43:35] Mary Morrissey: And I would hold in mind as the image, I’m writing that last check to Oregon. I imagined that it was going to be about a million two. So my work had to grow quite a bit, before I started really whittling it down. And it turned out it was a million seven, was the last check I wrote. But for years I’d been imaging at least once a day, that I’m writing that last check.

[00:43:58] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes.

[00:43:59] Mary Morrissey: Did get [00:44:00] it done in my lifetime. And the feeling of now I get this note that I’m at zero balance.

[00:44:06] Mary Morrissey: I started in 2004, and I actually accomplished that in 2017 18 it’s not that long.

[00:44:15] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. I think, the big power message in that is, even in the face of losing seemingly everything, there was a part of you that said, spiritually, this feels right for me to pay this back, or to die trying if I have to. That the decision was made that this is what you’re going to do before there’s any, I have a new work or I know how I’m going to make money.

[00:44:36] Lauren Brollier Newton: There was none of that yet.

[00:44:37] Mary Morrissey: Yeah.

[00:44:38] Lauren Brollier Newton: And it’s similar to the same thing that all of these coaches who are listening right now, they’re going through a, I have a heart to help people, I have a spark in me. At some level, I don’t have any idea how I’m going to do it. But notice that Mary made the decision first.

[00:44:51] Lauren Brollier Newton: The decision that she was going to do this thing because the one thing that she felt like she hadn’t lost was she still wanted to help people.

[00:44:58] Lauren Brollier Newton: And that is for me [00:45:00] personally, when I said, even only doing the six or seven years, there can be a rigor to getting up and doing this and serving this calling every morning. But it’s easier when I remind myself of why I’m doing it, because I know the call is to help people. I’ve felt that call since I was a little girl.

[00:45:14] Mary Morrissey: Mm hmm.

[00:45:14] Lauren Brollier Newton: And for many of you listening, I know you felt a similar call in some regard to the difference that you want to make. So let’s take a page out of Mary’s book here, and not have to know how it’s all going to work out. But just know that if we get up serving the call with the decision already being made, that’s what’s going to keep us sustainable in this business.

[00:45:33] Mary Morrissey: That’s right.

[00:45:34] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes. So, I have a few questions I’d like to ask you, Mary, that are very common that come up for our coaches. So I’ll just do like a lightning round here of questions I can often come up for coaches. The first one is, how am I ever going to get my first clients?

[00:45:49] Mary Morrissey: How am I ever going get my coaching clients?

[00:45:52] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes. It feels like insurmountable to actually somehow find a way to get clients.

[00:45:56] Mary Morrissey: Yeah. So, notice the word get. [00:46:00] Get is in the frequency of lack. I understand, we’re thinking these thoughts are common to be thinking. So here’s the deal, if you are giving versus getting, people will flock to you. So doing podcasts, putting yourself out there, we train in doing, having a workshop that you do, you can do it online. You can do it.

[00:46:23] Mary Morrissey: It was one of our coaches, Lauren, who came Mexico city. He’d been trying to do some things, in the most he’d ever earned was $7,000 in a year. A period, he was living with his mother. He had dreams of having his own home, getting married, having children. And he came and he went through our basic coach certification training. And we trained him in how to do a small workshop that helps people simply get in touch with a vision for what they would love, and how to codify that, how to have it be crystal clear enough that it had a sense of, Oh, I would [00:47:00] love that. And then, introduce them to some simple things they can do to help make it happen. And that’s a give, it’s just completely given. And then, if you’re interested in more or you’re interested in support in actually executing on this, we can have a conversation. So it was full of giving, and full then of invite into greater possibilities.

[00:47:20] Mary Morrissey: The first time he delivered this online, did his best to get people there, I think there were 27 people there. But when it was all said and done, I think he made $30,000 of clients who were investing 3,000 a piece. I think, 10 of them enrolled to work with him.

[00:47:36] Mary Morrissey: It came down to dinner. And he realized that he was doing what he would love doing. He’d help people who just even attended that workshop that night. And now, he’d enrolled 10 clients he got to work with. But it wasn’t about getting clients, the whole thrust is about giving value. And clients will absolutely be drawn to you.

[00:47:57] Lauren Brollier Newton: I love that. So true. And you can tell when [00:48:00] someone’s in a get energy. You go to a networking meeting, or you go somewhere and someone’s just looking around, you can really feel that and it’s off-putting.

[00:48:08] Lauren Brollier Newton: When you’re the person who’s giving, that’s I think why, as you’re saying, people flock to you because I want what they’re having. That looks well, it’s warm and fuzzy.

[00:48:18] Mary Morrissey: The other piece, feel good when you’re around them.

[00:48:21] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes. And then people want more of that.

[00:48:23] Lauren Brollier Newton: One of the things that I notice as I work with coaches is that, there can be a tendency for some to spin their wheels, doing things that don’t really produce income or impact.

[00:48:36] Lauren Brollier Newton: Like I’m working on my logo, and I’m working on this flyer, and I’m working on this. And when all of that’s done, then I’ll somehow start putting myself out there.

[00:48:45] Lauren Brollier Newton: So what would you say to the person who’s working really hard but it’s not producing impact? How would you help them get started in a way that’s actually gonna help people?

[00:48:55] Mary Morrissey: Just it could be a simple move. Often, we do that [00:49:00] because we’re not confident yet about putting ourselves in front of people or the rejection that might come if somebody says no. Remember, your win isn’t whether they say yes or no. Your win is that you’re giving them information and support to become awake to what they would really love in their life. What’s working, what’s not working.

[00:49:20] Mary Morrissey: So, one of the things I train in and myself did myself, when nothing seemed to be happening. Yes, we were going to build a website, but that I knew that was a framework. It wasn’t the work. I made at least three phone calls a day to people. That I was not in the work, I was around the work, unless I was making at least three phone calls a day to people, either I’d met at a networking, I just checking in on you, remembering what they said.

[00:49:49] Mary Morrissey: I remember you were saying, you were going to be doing this and I just want to check in, see how you’re doing.

[00:49:53] Mary Morrissey: And pretty soon because you’re giving support, you’re going to see more and more [00:50:00] coming back to you. So without making three phone calls a day, at least I would say, you’re not in the work, you’re around the work. You’re going website and you are going to have a logo, but that’s not driving your business.

[00:50:11] Lauren Brollier Newton: No.

[00:50:12] Mary Morrissey: Yeah.

[00:50:13] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah. And I think, this goes back to the service piece. If we’re thinking about how we might get rejected, or we might not know what to say, or these things that are very normal, but they put the focus on us. And of course, our nervous system is going to get triggered because at the level of fact that could happen, I could get rejected or someone could not like what I’m doing. But if put the focus on how can I serve,

[00:50:35] Mary Morrissey: Mhm. Mhm.

[00:50:36] Lauren Brollier Newton: It’s way easier.

[00:50:38] Mary Morrissey: That’s okay. This finally took me years, Lauren, to come to the place where I knew in my bones, it’s okay for people to say no to me. But it’s not okay for me to know a system that’s going to really help them have a life they love and not at least put it in front of them. Let him say no, that’s okay.

[00:50:57] Mary Morrissey: But it’s not okay for me to hold it back because maybe they [00:51:00] won’t like me. That’s not who I came to be and what I believe really serves.

[00:51:05] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yeah.

[00:51:06] Mary Morrissey: It’s okay if they say no. Some will say yes, some will say no. That’s the nature of it. But the more you put it in front of people with you really sincerely caring about helping them, the more your work will grow.

[00:51:16] Lauren Brollier Newton: It’s interesting. It’s like you said in the beginning, you wanted everybody to have it. And your parents were like, Oh, this is funny because I had heard that, you had shared that with me from the beginning of my training. I trusted that. Okay. If I just live this work enough, people will get interested in my family or in my friends group.

[00:51:32] Lauren Brollier Newton: And so some of my friends, they were willing to help me with the work. Like I’ll do the sign in sheet or I’ll do whatever, but they weren’t really interested in the personal development, until they wanted something.

[00:51:42] Lauren Brollier Newton: I had a friend who wanted a new house. And she’s looking at me, experiencing all this growth. So one day, she texts sends me a text message and she says, this is five years in, Mary, so I’ve already built a multimillion dollar business. I’ve spoken on stages and all this, and she sends me a text message and she says, “Do you know anything about [00:52:00] manifesting?” Question mark. And I said, I do happen to know something about that. Why do you ask? And she said, I have this dream of having a house, but I don’t know how to get it.

[00:52:07] Lauren Brollier Newton: And I remember thinking in that moment, Mary said this. You live the work, you put it out there, you do your workshops, you give as much as you can, give value, and people will get interested. And whether it takes them that first workshop or five years later, do you know anything about manifesting?

[00:52:23] Mary Morrissey: Everybody’s got their own growing season.

[00:52:25] Lauren Brollier Newton: All right. One final question for you, Mary. If you were a coach, starting from scratch today. So we just take away everything. We take away your email list and all of that and your contacts and everything. And you’re going to start a business brand new. What would be your first move?

[00:52:40] Mary Morrissey: A very good question, Lauren. You could start with so many different. When I started fresh, in 2004 and ’05, podcasts had not even been developed. That might be a good way to start with giving value, coming up with possibly, what would you do with a webinar, and what value would you give people and [00:53:00] what would you want them to leave with? So, you have something that you’ve put together. That’s why when we train coaches, we give them a vision, a workshop to help clarify and get crystal clear.

[00:53:11] Mary Morrissey: Once the woman knew she wanted a house, she was willing to take some different actions. And most people, they’re so busy dealing with what’s coming at them, that they don’t get help really paying attention to what’s seeking to come from them. And then show them how you can serve, that’s what coaching is.

[00:53:29] Mary Morrissey: You help them identify what it is that really matters to them, and then you coach them into having the results that are a match for what they want. And so, I would discover what my unique way of teaching or helping people discover what it is they really want. That’s step one, before anyone’s going to make a move to hire you as a coach, they have to identify what they really want. And you can do that on podcasts, you can do that in webinars, you can do that in mailings, you do have a mailing list. Everybody has a [00:54:00] mailing list. It’s everybody they know.

[00:54:01] Lauren Brollier Newton: Yes.

[00:54:02] Mary Morrissey: You can invite them to something that is easy. We’ve got Zoom today.

[00:54:07] Mary Morrissey: We didn’t have Zoom, years I was developing. It’s just so much easier really to get in front of people. And you can just start attending some networking events, and really hear the longing in people and what would serve them. So you’re gaining, getting information, and insight yourself.

[00:54:23] Lauren Brollier Newton: Love that.

[00:54:23] Mary Morrissey: How you would answer that question, Lauren?

[00:54:26] Lauren Brollier Newton: How would I answer it? Yeah. Very similar, I would go to every networking event around, and just really hold state with people. Just really listen to what’s going on with them. If it seemed online, I’d invite them into something, whether it’s a conversation or a workshop.

[00:54:41] Lauren Brollier Newton: But I think, the first mission I’d make is go network and just really be there with people.

[00:54:46] Mary Morrissey: And learn.

[00:54:47] Lauren Brollier Newton: And learn. Yeah. So, Mary Morrissey, I would love to talk to you for another two hours, or three or four or six. I want to thank you so much for being on the podcast. And I’m going to invite everybody to go to BraveThinkingInstitute.com. That’s where you [00:55:00] can find Mary. You can follow her on Facebook, and Instagram, and YouTube. Mary Morrissey.

[00:55:05] Lauren Brollier Newton: Mary, thank you. Thank you for everything you bring to all of us. It’s just such a gift.

[00:55:10] Mary Morrissey: Thank you. Thank you, Lauren, for your great work in the world and all the people that you’re helping, as well. It’s a privilege to work with you.

[00:55:17] Lauren Brollier Newton: My pleasure. All right.