“It's the choices that we're making in those thinnest moments of life that are actually building our reality around us.” -Mary Shores
Creating what you want isn’t a fairytale where everything falls into place with the wave of a magic wand. Shirley and Mary chat about how to create your reality by making choices that propel you towards your goal, not away from it. Mary’s book, Conscious Communications contains pragmatic, step by step, actions to empower yourself to achieve the next level and in this episode, she gives us a glimpse of some of its chapters. Mary discusses the OODA loop in decision-making, the 4 alienations by Karl Marx and how to bridge these gaps, the 80-20 rule, and more, each with an insightful connection to making conscious choices. Shirley and Mary discuss the real meaning of self-care as something beyond a spa day and also how to be truly empowered even when life flips you upside down. A powerful blueprint for getting what you want is laid out in today’s episode. This conversation is something you don’t want to miss!
Highlights:
01:51 Get What You Want Little by Little
09:26 The Psychology of Debt
12:02 4 Alienations
17:00 The Negative Side of the Positive Culture
18:38 Follow the OODA Loop in Decision-Making
24:39 Close the Gap of Alienation
32:59 Know Your Truth
38:06 See The In-Betweens
Resources:
Tweets:
Create your reality by using your freedom of choice the smart way. Don’t miss this valuable exchange between @SfbaldwinOwens and @mary_shores #debt #purpose #positiveculture #OODA #4alienations #selfcare #emotions #empowerment #consciouschoices #80-20 #getwhatyouwant
Quotes:
06:28 “If you're thinking about getting what you want, it's really important to identify who you are at your core.” -Mary Shores
09:36 “...debt is a psychological burden. And it's a burden that will keep people from living the life of their dreams.” -Mary Shores
11:38 “We get to write the scripts of our own lives.” -Mary Shores
13:59 “What we should want is to be able to get back into the true nature of who we are and what our purpose truly is.” -Mary Shores
17:49 “We have been conditioned to believe that positivity and happiness is the way… But we need a strategy of what to do when our world gets flipped upside down.” -Mary Shores
24:20 “The stories you tell yourself about yourself will become your identity.” -Mary Shores
25:10 “Empowerment is great but you can't stay in a moment of empowerment all the time.” -Mary Shores
31:58 “It's the choices that we're making in those thinnest moments of life that are actually building our reality around us.” -Mary Shores
40:18 “Complaining is a symptom of words being out of alignment.” -Mary Shores
43:15 “Awareness of your choices is the key to freedom.” -Mary Shores
Connect With mary:
Mary Shores is the CEO of Mary Shores Brand, a company that offers Professional Training and Coaching to help their clients achieve their dreams. Mary is also an influential speaker, and the author of the book, Conscious Communications. Her philosophy and powerful communication strategy has reframed her entire organization and the lives of those she's trained. With over a decade of training experience. Mary now travels nationally to teach organizations her results oriented and transformational communications method.
Transcriptions
Shirley Owens: My guest today is Mary Shores. Mary is an author, speaker, and CEO whose philosophy and powerful communication strategy has reframed her entire organization and the lives of those she's trained. With over a decade of training experience, Mary now travels nationally to teach organizations her results oriented and transformational communications method. Hey Mary.
Mary Shores: Hey, how are you today?
Shirley Owens: I'm great. I'm super excited to have you.
Mary Shores: Yeah, me too. Thank you so much.
Shirley Owens: Of course. I feel like your bio doesn't even touch who you are, and what you do. I've heard so much, I've read so much, I've seen so much about you, and your journey seems incredible. So I would love to start with you just starting wherever you want on your journey of how you got to be who you are today.
Mary Shores: Well, out of everything you read, was there anything in particular that you were interested in?
Shirley Owens: Well, I love the idea that you started with the collection agency because I think that's always been kind of a bad word for everyone.
Mary Shores: Yeah.
Shirley Owens: I love the word. I love how powerful words are to you because I feel the same. So I mean, maybe we could just start with that. Was it your first business?
Mary Shores: So I started my first business when I was 24 years old, and what I really would love people to know about me is that I came from a place of a lot of tragedy in my background. So prior to starting that business, I had been on my own at 16. As a teenager, I had a child when I was 19 who passed away when I was 20 of a brain injury that happened at birth. So this brain injury left her, it left her blind, she was deaf. She was unable to suck a bottle. So she had a gastronome tube inserted into her stomach so that is how she would get fed. And she really had no hope of recovery or developing in any way. And so, I spent that year and a half with her living in the children's hospital in Indianapolis. And it was just such a life defining time in my life. I mean, my son is 18 now, and I can't imagine him going through this deep of a tragedy. So you have to remember that I was only 19 years old. And so, when she passed away, I was really in a period of limbo because so many of my friends, you know, we were all getting ready to turn 21 and so many people that I had known in my life, they were starting to get their college degrees, they were starting jobs, they were having fabulous things happen to them. And I was sort of in a rock bottom place in life, and really felt like I didn't have a lot of options that would be available to me. So it's interesting about the theme of your podcast, about, you know, being able to get what you want. And so, I thought that the way to get what I wanted was to start my own business because I didn't think that my skills, gifts, and talents would translate to very much outside of like an hourly wage if I just got a job and went that way. And for whatever reason it didn't dawn on me, I think because, I thought I was past the expiration date of when you could start college, when you're really young you just--
Shirley Owens: Yeah.
Mary Shores: --weird things like it never dawned on me to go to school. So I started this collection agency when I was 24, and the reason I started that business was because my parents, when I was growing up, they had a business that was a collection agency. So it was something I've felt like I could do because I was young and didn't realize that I didn't actually know anything about running a business, and didn't really know anything about collections, really didn't know anything about life. So yeah, that's a little bit about my journey up in to, up to that point. And so, my mother was going through a divorce at the time, and she was closing down the business, and relocating across the country. So I have reached out to a handful of clients to say: "Hey, would you let me do this?" And a few of them said yes, like no more than 10, but it gave me some work to do. And so, little by little ,day by day, I just did the work that I needed to do, and I started to build, and I was a hard worker and had a lot of work ethic, and it just grew from there.
Shirley Owens: Wow. So coming from such a tragic life, like life defining like you say, moment in time, I can't imagine that you had any type of like excitement for life and that same kind of thing that you say that your friends are in, and at the same time, like you just lived a lifetime in that year and a half, I'm sure. I can't even imagine what that was like. So you start this business because it's what you know, and you're trying to find your place, because all of us would say you started a collection agency, that's a huge business. That's what an accomplishment. Did you feel like you had accomplished something that timers, or do you feel like you're still in a survival type mode?
Mary Shores: No, I felt like I was running by the seat of my pants, definitely in survival mode. I mean, I didn't have any money, I had no resources, I literally had nothing. And in the early years of the business, I mean, I like ran it out of my dining room and I did every single job myself. It was very much bootstrapped, you know? But what I did have is that, I'm very smart, and I'm very resourceful, and I'm extremely resilient. I think that if you're thinking about getting what you want, it's really important to identify who are you at your core, and understand like how can those particular core strengths get you to whatever next level that you need to get to. Because you know, oftentimes, you're led to do things in life and you don't really know why. So one of the things for me, and this is kind of a silly story, but it's very relevant. After my daughter passed away, I got a job at a bank, and I love this job, but I got fired from the job and I was just devastated. It's a terrible feeling to get let go from a job. I took a job as a telemarketer because I thought at this point I was convinced that I was a total loser. But interestingly enough, the telemarketing job had a huge impact on me because it was where I began to understand the power of words. It was where I began to understand like, Oh, if you talk to someone this way, you get this kind of a result versus if you use this words this way, you get that kind of a result. And so, as a telemarketer, we were trying to sell caller ID, so this was like eons ago, but we were trying to sell caller ID on people's phones services through the bells, Illinois bell, or Ameritech--
“If you're thinking about getting what you want, it's really important to identify who you are at your core.” -Mary Shores
Shirley Owens: I did that exact thing.
Mary Shores: That's unbelievable. So you know, they would have us on these word for word scripts. And so, this is where I really began to understand things. So after about a few years in the collection business, I was getting really bogged down by the negativity of it. So I'm like a pretty, happy, and vibrant person. Even with all I've been through, I'm just one of these people that, I just got like that vibrant kind of energy, and I'm always like, go, go, go, doing a lot of things. So this negative stigma in the collection world was really bringing me down. It was like, daily arguments with people on the phone, everyone hated us, I would get told where to go. I don't know how many times a day people just did not respond well to the fact that they owed money and I was getting exhausted from this. Like I wanted to have my own business, I wanted to succeed in life, but I also needed to be able to sleep at night, and I needed to feel like I was a good person. Because oftentimes, the debt collector is made out to look like the bad guy. And I had this moment where one day I looked at the phone and I said out loud, I want the next person who calls to be happier at the end of the call than they were at the beginning. And that is the moment. It's like this moment that after that it literally changed everything because I didn't know how I was going to make people happy. I had no plan. I just knew that I was tired of the drama. I was tired of the chaos. I was tired of being out to be the bad guy all the time. And what happened was, over the next couple of years, I started really studying people, and I started understanding debt, and how debt is a psychological burden, and it's a burden that will keep people from living the life of their dreams. So since happiness was my new north star, I just started writing scripts because I sort of had that understanding from my telemarketing days. I started writing scripts that were all geared towards making these people feel happy. So the very first thing I did along that journey was I eliminated all negative words. So we created a do not say list, and this DO NOT SAY list is words like NO, NOT, CAN'T, WON'T, HOWEVER, and then FORTUNATELY. And see, this is extremely important because as humans, we all have a set of basic human fears.
“...debt is a psychological burden. And it's a burden that will keep people from living the life of their dreams.” -Mary Shores
Shirley Owens: Right.
Mary Shores: Now these fears are things like poverty and disease, okay? So if you're talking to someone in a money situation, it's very likely to trigger that poverty fear, even if somebody is not impoverished, you know? So once we trigger that fear, it puts somebody in their fight or flight. So I just started to play around with eliminating these words, and I noticed that the more I would eliminate these words, the more I would figure out how to really plant seeds of happiness inside the consumer's mind, and always speak in terms of what we could do for them instead of what we couldn't do.
Shirley Owens: Mm. It's funny that you say that because I remember my time on the phone, and I remember them giving a script, and I worked at several different telemarketing places, and they would give you a script. And even though I would like inherently feel like there was something wrong with what I was saying, I couldn't change it because I would get in trouble. But I know that if I'm kinder to them or if I just say this, it would work. So hearing what you're saying, like you were your boss, so you got to write your own script, you got to switch this up.
Mary Shores: And you know, I think that's true in life. Eventually, where these concepts, these communication concepts led me to a much broader perspective on this because we really get to write the scripts of our own lives. And I started to study, because this work began to change people's lives very quickly. My staff, I just started to see monumental changes in their life. And it's very interesting to me because Karl Marx in the 1800's came up with the theory of alienation, and there's these four alienations. The first alienation is alienation from nature, and he couldn't probably have predicted our world in almost 2020 back in the mid to late 1800's, right? Because that's a hundred years ago, more than that. So this alienation from nature is so important to understand how it affects our world, and our life, and our day to day because we really don't live where we're exposed to being outdoors, our life is spent a lot of times inside, in offices, interfacing with technology instead of interfacing with our natural environment. So we have manipulated our environment to be very different than what we were built for. So this causes layers, and layers, and layers of conditioning that actually takes us away from our true nature. It's not in our true nature to be around equipment that is buzzing and has notifications going off 24/7, we're not meant to sleep in that kind of environment. I don't know about you, on any given day, I can feel just overwhelmed just by looking at my email inbox.
“We get to write the scripts of our own lives.” -Mary Shores
Shirley Owens: Oh, every day.
Mary Shores: Right? But yet there's this expectation that someone sent you an email and now you need to respond. But it's like when does it ever end? Because the more that we're chained, the more that we're conditioned to believe that we have to be chained to this technology, change to these 'HA' two moments in life, the more we're alienating ourselves from nature. And the second alienation is the alienation from work, from purpose-driven work. And this is extremely important because each and every one of us has a purpose. So like when you talk about getting what you want, what we should want is to be able to get back into that true nature of who we are and what our purpose truly is.
“What we should want is to be able to get back into the true nature of who we are and what our purpose truly is.” -Mary Shores
Shirley Owens: Love that.
Mary Shores: So it's not about becoming an attorney because that's what our parents wanted us to do, but understand our own skills, gifts, and talents, our own core values, our own authenticity, like stripping away the layers of what other people have taught us that we're supposed to be and getting into that person who you really are. Like one of my best friends, she's an amazing, she can decorate cookies like I've never ever seen before, and you know, she left her career and now she's the happiest she's ever been. I was talking to her this morning and she was decorating cookies for a wedding, and it's like she's the happiest she's ever been because she's reconnected back to purpose-driven work. And purpose-driven work doesn't mean that you have work for someone else, or it doesn't mean that you have to work independently, it doesn't mean you have to be an entrepreneur, it just means that you're honoring the true nature that you came into this life, that you are being who you are supposed to be.
Shirley Owens: Yeah. I love that. I was just talking to someone else on my show the other day and we were talking about how often we try to be like someone else so that we can create success instead of realizing that the people that are the most successful are the ones who are being themselves and who have created it. And so, we tried to copy them and we tried to say, okay, this happens to me a lot. People will come and say, how can I be like you? Like I just enjoy you. You know, I want to have the life, I want to be as happy, and I'll be like, Oh, hold on a sec while I go look at how someone else is doing it so that I can tell you how to be like me. So like what you're saying is so true that we really have to step into our own alignment, our own passions, and our own purpose.
Mary Shores: And we don't even know how to do that. That's how many years we've been conditioned to believe certain things about life. And it's totally disconnected us from understanding that very thing, you know? So that's funny, the way that you responded to that. Like let me go watch how somebody else can do it so I can tell this person how to do it. Because like what that says to me is like you haven't even figured out how you did it, but you know, the way that I know, and it's certainly like I've got to chapter after chapter in my book Conscious Communications, it's all about this, it's all about, how do we strip away all of that? How do we make choices so that the choices we're making in this moment set us up for our very next best moments? Because that's really how it's built.That's the whole purpose of having free will in this life that we are creating the choices that are going to provide us with what our next set of choices are and on, and on, and on to infinity or until we get wherever it is that we think we're going. Because that's another one of the things that has disconnected us is this belief that we're supposed to have this quote unquote dream life, or this belief that we're supposed to be happy and positive all the time. You know the positive psychology culture has really only served us to believe that I'm like, Oh, you know, I'm a higher vibe person than you are, it's crazy.
Shirley Owens: Or that we're not good enough because we can't figure out how to be positive 100% of the time.
Mary Shores: Yes. And that's exactly where I'm going, because that belief that we have to be 100% positive all the time will only lead you to feel guilty and begin to hide your emotions when you're really not feeling it. So, you know, we have a range of emotions for a reason, and it is to communicate with us, it's our own intuition communicating with us. And I could go on and on for hours about this, but this frequency scale of emotions is extremely important to understand because it is so linked to our mind, body connection, it is so important, and we have been conditioned to believe that positivity and happiness is the way. And yeah, you know what? Happiness is great, and it certainly doesn't suck to be happy all the time, but we need a strategy of what to do when our world gets flipped upside down.
“We have been conditioned to believe that positivity and happiness is the way… But we need a strategy of what to do when our world gets flipped upside down.” -Mary Shores
Shirley Owens: Right.
Mary Shores: Cause you know what? Your world is going to get flipped upside down, and you need to know how to navigate through those difficult times because you can't navigate through it by thinking you're happy. And I think that law of attraction has been misinterpreted to the point where people believe that if they're not happy in every moment, they're going to attract some sort of bad, terrible thing. And it just doesn't work that way. But the way that it really does work is to have strategies. Like for example, recently I heard of this OODA loop, which is O-O-D-A, which stands for observe, orient, decide and act. So first, when your world gets turned upside down, you really want to observe everything that's going on around you. You want to take in all the data. And then once you've taken in all the data, you want to orient yourself. Or some people might say they want to ground themselves, but you need to really take all this information and then get yourself centered again. Like take all the information and orient yourself, integrate it so that you can then step into a decision making role and understand, okay, what is the best decision? What is the best choice I can make in this moment? And then, once you figured out that decision, you need to take immediate action. Now what I think is happening is we do a lot of observe act and we forget those middle two pieces, which is orienting yourself and the decision making part.
Shirley Owens: Yeah, I like that. I've worked with quite a few baseball players, professional athletes, like in the MLB, and they're very much trained to respond, react, like, observe, react, observe, react. So one of the things that I had them do is, that their reaction becomes doing nothing for a moment. You know, observing, taking the time before whatever else is the next thing. Because in their mind they're like, I can't, I can't not observe, react. I can't, I can't just not react. So part of our training is just to teach them that their reaction is this other stuff that you're talking about in between before the actual acting, but something that you had said earlier sparked my interest and that was that, well, what it reminded me of is, I know that you went through this tragic situation, and I too have been through a lot of very painful things, and I think sometimes our body, and the society tells our bodies that anything painful is a horrible thing to go through, that we shouldn't go through, that we don't want to get past that as fast as possible. And would you that part of, like, consciously connecting with yourself, and communicating with yourself would be to go through that, to actually go through it, be in it, whether it's a really positive thing that happens, or a really horrific thing that happens. Like just to sit in it and to go through however your body needs to go through it.
Mary Shores: I definitely agree with that. And I don't know how in the world we ever became a culture that innately doesn't do that. And I think it's the fourth alienation, it's alienation from ourselves. And so again, it's the years of conditioning, the traumas, the traumas that we go through, some people go through daily traumas. If they're in an abusive situation, a lot of people have traumas that they haven't processed from childhood because they were never allowed to feel what their needs were through a situation. They were never able to allowed to communicate that they were uncomfortable because they were too busy figuring out how to survive, figuring out their parents, figuring out the world. So one of the things that makes this very important is to understand that our bodies are like libraries, and this library stores everything that has ever happened to us. And I know, like with my own situation with my daughter when she passed away, no, I was never taught how to grieve, I was never taught how to let go of something, I was only taught how to observe and react, right? So I didn't process her passing. And probably even more important than her passing was, I didn't process all of the things that I had been exposed to for that year and a half at 19 and 20 years old of living in this children's hospital where I was daily seeing babies and young children who are cancer victims, and burn victims, and car accidents, and death, and dying, and sick illness, and the parents, and everything around me every single moment of every single day. And so, you know, that is stored in my body. And I had an interesting thing happen a few years ago. I was driving to Ohio because a friend of mine was in Ohio. He was actually passing away from cancer, and I wanted to go visit him before he passed. And I actually was driving through Indiana to get to Ohio. And all of a sudden I started crying, and I was in Indianapolis and I started crying, and I looked up, and literally when I looked up, Riley's Hospital was right there. No, I wouldn't have recognized it because this incident with my daughter happens more than 25 years ago.
Shirley Owens: Wow.
Mary Shores: I didn't even recognize the neighborhood I was in, none of that. But when I looked up, there was the hospital, my body knew where I was and it caused me to just start crying uncontrollably. So only in the past few years, and I would say that like writing this book had a lot to do with revisiting and processing that thing that happened to me because you know, we really write our own story and life. And I think in chapter two, I give a processes about how can we write this story that's eventually getting us to this place that we want to go instead of staying stuck in our stories from the past. So it's really important that we learn how to process the things that have happened to us so that we can tap more into the triumph and part of the story instead of the tragedy. So I feel like this is very important to be able to move through this process because the stories you tell yourself about yourself will become your identity. And I know that I did not want to have an identity of someone that is a victim. You know, I wanted to have an identity of a person who is empowered. And I'll wrap this point up here, but like this thing that we're talking about with the mind, body connection, and understanding like the emotions, and that we are meant to have an arrange of emotions. Sadness would not exist if there was not an evolutionary purpose for it to be there. Grief would not exist, it would not be part of our reality if it was not meant to be there. So every part of it, even the suffering is for our own growth. So when we're trying to close this gap of alienation from ourselves, it's important to understand that empowerment is great, but you can't stay in a moment of empowerment all the time. So when we think about the concept of self care, I think it's really important to remember that it does not mean a day at the spa. It doesn't mean a Manny and a Petty. What it means is that you're checking in with how well do you feel right in this moment. Literally on a scale of 1 to 20, how well do you feel? And if that number is a 7? It's time to close your circle in. Meaning, it's time to take space for yourself. You don't need to talk to a whole bunch of people. You need to take space for yourself, whatever that looks like. If that means going in a room and shutting the door, if that means going for a walk, or taking a drive, or making yourself a hot bubble bath with like epsom salt, or eating something that makes you feel nurtured, these are the important things of self care that we're missing the boat on. Because when you then take care of yourself for a couple of days, what you're going to notice is that number of how well you feel that day, starts to go up. And when you allow that number to say naturally and organically get up to like a 14, between 1 and 20, that is the time to take action. That is the time when the inspiration hits you, and that is the time to take action because everything you do, everything you manifest from a place of empowerment is going to show up stronger, faster, better, and it's going to be longer-lasting versus when you're in that place of disempowerment, when you're in that low vibrational state or you're just not feeling very good, and you force yourself to take action, what happens is nothing works out.
“The stories you tell yourself about yourself will become your identity.” -Mary Shores
Shirley Owens: Right.
Mary Shores: And what you've really created is a bunch of chaos and a bunch of drama, and you're sitting there going, I don't understand, this should have worked perfectly, and it didn't. So it's the universes or whatever you believe, that we're supposed to pay attention to our bodies.
“Empowerment is great but you can't stay in a moment of empowerment all the time.” -Mary Shores
Shirley Owens: I've just recently, over the last couple of years realized that I wasn't doing that. And sometimes people don't even know that they're doing what they'll actually have a day where they maybe didn't overwhelm themselves so much, and they didn't open their inbox til' 9:00 o'clock or whatever. And they're just like, wow, I really have all this energy today. Like, what can I do with it? And I think that they don't even realize necessarily that it's because you are giving yourself a break, or allowing yourself to have a moment just to sit in it, just to be with yourself. And I know that, for some people that might be a day at the spa. You know, they may need to take that once in a while too. But I like what you're saying about just allowing yourself to take whatever it is that you need to be able to refresh your body, and your mind, and your soul.
Mary Shores: And here's just a little tidbit on the day at the spa thing, cause I'm definitely a day at the spa kind of girl. That's my happy place. I feel like, a place like mirror ball, it's like Disney world for adult women, like the best, right?
Shirley Owens: Right.
Mary Shores: But here's the grind that I found myself getting into. So every weekend, I was doing my self care. It was like getting a massage, get a facial, I was doing the spa thing, and I was doing it like, not going to a fancy spa, but I was doing this self care ritual every single weekend. And then somebody finally pointed out to me, they were like: “Mary, (they said) you're kind of like the alcoholic that behaves all week and then trashes themselves on the weekend.” So basically, what this person's point to me was, like, yeah, that's great that you're taking care of yourself on the weekends for two days a week. But if you're trashing yourself on the other five, then you're really not taking, that's not true, self care.
Shirley Owens: Yeah. It's like trying to catch up on sleep, right?
Mary Shores: Right. And because I was like so hard driven, pushing myself, pushing myself, pushing myself all week long, then I was trying to fill back up on the weekends, and so that's why I really paid attention to study this other thing about checking in with yourself about how well do I feel right now in this moment, and respecting whatever that number is, and giving space for yourself because that's what the true self care is.
Shirley Owens: Oh, I agree. I love that so much. So tell me about your book. I'm excited to get into that a little bit because it's kind of like everything that we've just been talking about. Did you always know that you were going to write a book? How did that just become what it was?
Mary Shores: I always wanted to write a book. It was definitely a strong desire. And I think I actually read a statistic recently that 84% of people actually want to write a book. So it's not a super special thing to want to write a book. But I had a lot of limiting beliefs, or what I call barrier beliefs around the concept of writing a book because I didn't view myself as a writer. So I really needed to get very clear on how I was going to get this book accomplished. And I'm so proud that I did because the book has been changing so many people's lives. And the book is really a step by step guide about navigating your life in a way that creates a blueprint to get where it is that you want to go in life. It's really a very pragmatic step by step guide. So we're going to look at things like, there's an actual starting point. So it's like you start here, and then each chapter builds on the last chapter to give strategies on how to create this life that you want to create. Because I think that we're living in a time where people accept that infinite possibilities are available to all of us, and there's a high focused on people understanding that we create our own realities. And the issues that I find with that is that people don't understand why they're creating realities that they don't want. And that infinite possibilities means that only good things will be happening, when in reality, the way that recreating our life is with every choice we make. So it's the choices that we're making in those thinnest moments of life that are actually building our reality around us. So I give super simple practices on how to start to navigate that. One of my favorites in the book is chapter five is called Cleanse or Clog. And it's really just understanding that everything you do, everything you say, every word that comes out of your mouth, every action you take, every choice you make in everything sliced moment of life is either cleansing you or clogging you. So what that means is that everything is either creating a deeper connection to what you want, or it's driving a disconnection.
“It's the choices that we're making in those thinnest moments of life that are actually building our reality around us.” -Mary Shores
Shirley Owens: You know what I really love about you is, I kinda both worlds, and I don't get this very often where you are a business woman, right? I mean, you have specific step by step instructions on how to accomplish and become what our world maybe would call some woo-woo stuff, you know? But being conscious and all that.
Mary Shores: Yeah, to me, I think that science and spirituality are two sides of the same coin. I think we were really always talking about the same thing, just using it in two separate languages, it's extremely important to understand, like, we don't have to be separate from those things. And I try, like, I'm not super into the woo-woo, but I just know what is my truth, and I just know that we can take little beliefs, and everyone can put their own opinions on them, and spin them into directions that they were never meant to be. So taking things to extreme, but really being on that middle path, being in that middle road and just understanding, okay, like I'm the person, I'm the one in control of my own destiny, I'm the one creating my reality and I'm doing that by the choices that I'm making. Now the choices I'm making are influenced by all kinds of other things. Like the choices are, words influence how you feel, and how you feel include influences how you think, and your thoughts can be very, very difficult to control. But if you can do something to change your thoughts, then it's probably going to change the way that you make a choice in any given situation. Which is why something like OODA, observe, orient, decide, and act can be a powerful shift in someone's life. Because if someone is creating a bunch of chaos all around them, because by the way, like one of the things that I noticed is that, when I started using that scale of asking myself how well do I feel on a scale of 1 to 20, when that number was like a seven, when I look around my life, everything was a seven.My relationships were seven, my finances were a seven, my flutter was a seven, everything was a seven. Everything was a struggle, and it felt like I would be at times like walking through cement, and my feet were just the mented into the ground, and everything was a seven. But when I would ask myself on a scale of 1 to 10, or 1 to 20 how well I feel, and that number is say a 17, everything in my world was a 17, it was like the doors just open just by the thought of them me needing to open, you just randomly run into people synchronistically that you need to meet, that's going to be like that person, that's the next person on your path, or you just pick up the very right book that has the information that you need to know. But we are the ones creating it and there's small miracles every day. So when we can tap into understand like it's not happening to us, it's happening for us, and we are the ones that are in control, and it's not complicated. Like we don't need to take a nine step spiritual class on law of attraction to figure this out. We only need to do one thing. And that is to understand the choices that we make will shape our lives forever.
Shirley Owens: Yeah, I really liked that, and that's kind of what I was saying is, instead of having someone just wondering all the time, like how do I get in touch with myself spiritually? Or how do I get, you know, how, you're just saying it's simple like cleanse or clog. I say what empties your tank or what fills your tank, you know, fill in every moment what you're feeling about, whatever that situation is. And that seems like a very simple practice. So if someone was to pick up your book today, what is the outcome that you would hope that they have at the end of your book?
Mary Shores: I would hope that, and this is mostly going off of what other people have said about the book, like if you read the reviews, I would hope that they would have like a strategy for their next steps, or they would have a blueprint for what they want to be doing. I think that anybody is going to have a different outcome depending on where they're at in their life. So some people, let's say that they're trying to heal from a trauma, then they might get through this book and really feel like they understand how to get themselves out of that situation that was keeping them down. Another person might own a business and they might think like, okay, cause I've had a lot of business owners contact me and they buy the book for every person in their company because they really see it as a way to manifest and get things done in their world that they need to get done. Also, it's just a deeply connecting book so it helps people to connect back to their own authenticity when they understand how to shed layers of judgment, how to shed layers of our beliefs that have been working against us for pretty much the entire time we've been alive.
Shirley Owens: So the visual that I got when I was learning about you and getting to know you is like you're walking in life, and then there's just this mountain in front of you, and you can't really keep walking until you learn how to navigate that mountain. And what you do is just help people to kind of remove that out of their space or he'd get over that mountain so that they can continue to just keep walking, am I correct in that kind of imaging of just removing that obstacle of themselves so that they can also know what to do when they get to the other side?
Mary Shores: I think that we all process things differently. So sometimes when I hear something like, okay, removing that obstacle of yourself -- myself, I don't know how to do that.
Shirley Owens: Right.
Mary Shores: I don't know how to do that. I have to break it down even smaller. Because people have said to me, Oh, just get out of your own way.
Shirley Owens: Yeah.
Mary Shores: I'm like, what does that mean? I don't know what that means. Or how about this one, just get an alignment. And I'm like, what? Yeah. How do you do that? Right?
Shirley Owens: How do I get from A to B first? So that I can be the person that can do that?
Mary Shores: So if I think about the analogy of a mountain, which is actually one of my favorites. And in fact, in chapter one, I actually have an analogy about a mountain, and it just is this simple thing, if the mountain is the thing you want to do, then you're always doing things that are either walking you towards that mountain, or you're walking away from it. So you're always getting closer to the mountain or further away, but it always goes back to in this moment, what is the choice that I'm making? And is that choice putting me closer to that mountain? Or further away? So for example, if you're trying to get a job, you need a job, but this job is not going to put you closer to that mountain because this job has nothing to do with what you want to do in life. But say you need the job because you need a job, then you've got a choice to make right there in that moment. Like do I keep persevering to find a way that's going to continue to get me to my mountain? Or do I take this job because I'm in the short term squirm and I need to fix my situation right now? Now, neither one of those choices is wrong. Neither one is wrong, but maybe there's like an in between of, okay, I take this job, but I work everyday to find something in the direction of my mountain.
Shirley Owens: Yeah, like that. So happening to life instead of letting life happen to you?
Mary Shores: Yes, and I think the thing with alignment, again, it can be, when I used to hear that, I just, we'd get like, I don't know how to do that, it sounded so hard. And I realized alignment just means, when I can have my words, my thoughts, my actions, all moving in the direction of that mountain. And that's like, it sounds really simple, but it's difficult to do. You know, I can find myself complaining. Complaining is a symptom of words being out of alignment. I can find myself in a spiral of negative thoughts very easily. Like to this day, I can find myself in a spiral of negative thoughts, and that's fear. That's fear coming up. And so when the fear comes up, it can be very difficult to control the feelings and the emotions that are around that. So in order to get myself quote unquote back into alignment, I really need to address what is making me fearful right now. So it's like going into learning what these sayings mean, because here's another one I would hear all the time, "You just gotta let go." Like okay, is there a manual for that? Like, it's easy, it's easy to tell someone to let go. My friends, one of my best friends, she's dealing with a son with a terminal illness. Like how are you supposed to tell her just to let go.
“Complaining is a symptom of words being out of alignment.” -Mary Shores
Shirley Owens: Right.
Mary Shores: You know, to surrender, like, okay, you get into like the in between of what these things mean and figuring out, okay, how do I navigate? Like how do I navigate these difficult emotions that I'm having and marry that with the world and still be able to make progress through this. And so, that's why I think it's really understanding, you know, do I need to take space for myself? Even if it's just for five minutes, can I make the best possible choice in this moment that's going to lead to the best possible choices in my next moment.
Shirley Owens: And this is for anything in life, for eating, for relationship, for anything, business, I see that like, what is the choice going to be? What are you in control of? What are you allowing to happen to you? And how can you change that? But I love how you make everything simple. I think we need more of that. We need more simplicity. We need that step by step how to become the person that can take on all of this.
Mary Shores: Absolutely.
Shirley Owens: I always ask this question on my show, is there anything that you would change or do differently to get what you wanted to get to where you are right now?
Mary Shores: What I would change or do differently is I would go back to any moment when I did not make a choice that was in my highest and best interest, and it would be curious to see if I could have chosen something differently. So even if it's just like something super simple, like perhaps I lost my patience with someone, what would it look like if I could go back to that moment and choose differently. But I think that awareness, just the awareness that I would like to do that helps me to be so much more consciously aware of future choices.
Shirley Owens: Yes, I love awareness, my favorite thing.
Mary Shores: I know, I've always said like awareness of your choices is the key to freedom.
“Awareness of your choices is the key to freedom.” -Mary Shores
Shirley Owens: I love that. I feel like I want to write all these Mary Shores quotes down, it's great. So I know that you have a lot of tools in place to help people to get to where they want to be. If you could just leave one word of advice, or if you have a tool that you can give to our listeners today to help them start today, to be able to consciously create what they want for the future.
Mary Shores: My one piece of advice would be to take everything that I've said today, if you're listening to this show and you're curious, because I would say try the cleanser clog thing, do it for 45 days, imagine how much different your life would be if for 45 consecutive days you really paid attention and you asked yourself, will this choice create a deeper connection, or will it create a disconnection? And just try it for 45 days and see how much your life can change in that short period of time. And I'm going to also add to that an 80/20 rule because this is not about perfection, and so I'm just saying if 80% of the time you really made sure that you're making cleansing connected choices, your life will change in ways you cannot even imagine right now in this moment.
Shirley Owens: I love it. How can our listeners get in touch with you? Cause I'm sure they're going to want to know more about you.
Mary Shores: Well, I can be found all over social media, so I have a Facebook page, Mary Shores. I have Instagram. My favorite is actually LinkedIn and so anyone can request me on LinkedIn. Of course, I have a website, maryshores.com, that's where everything lives. And I have a website up now, but I'm super excited because I'm going to be launching a new website soon, and it's going to be like incredible, like I'm so excited about that. The best thing for me is like, if you have resonated with what we are talking about today, please go on amazon.com or wherever you buy books, check out the book, Conscious Communications, read the description and a handful of reviews, I guarantee you that you will know right away if this book is for you or not.
Shirley Owens: Awesome. Yeah, I'm excited. It's a very popular book. I've heard amazing things about it. I can't wait to read it, and I've been just super happy to have you on my show today. Thanks so much, Mary, for being here.
Mary Shores: My pleasure.
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