When I was starting I wish someone had been able to tell me “get your attention off of what people are thinking about you” and put your attention on the purity of the message that you believe you can bring forth, and the difference it can make for others. So think about the benefit for others versus what they’re thinking about you.
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mary Morrissey
Mary Morrissey is an International Speaker, Best-Selling Author, and Founder of the Brave Thinking Institute, which offers transformational programs, courses, masterminds, and coaching certifications. Mary has made it her mission for over four decades to empower people to create lives they love living. In her new book, Brave Thinking: The Art and Science of Creating a Life You Love (Page Two, May 23, 2023), Mary shares her own Brave Thinking journey and offers tools for creating the extraordinary life you dream of. Mary holds a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology and an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters, has spoken three times at the United Nations, facilitated three week-long meetings with His Holiness The Dalai Lama, and met with Nelson Mandela in Cape Town, South Africa to address the most significant issues our world is facing. She’s also the author of two best-selling books, No Less Than Greatness and Building Your Field of Dreams, which became a PBS special. https://www.marymorrissey.com/
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I grew up with a great family. My mom and dad were married 63 years, loved each other. They were great friends, lovers, partners. I had a sister, eight years older than me. From the time I was a little girl, I knew I wanted to be a teacher. I had a high school experience like most young girls dream about. In my junior year in high school, I was class vice president, I had a lead in the junior play, I was on the drill team, I was homecoming princess. And during spring break, my high school boyfriend came home, I got pregnant. And May 1, I am now pregnant, and I sit down with my mom and dad, tell them that I am now pregnant. That’s almost the end of my junior year in high school. My mother wept for me as if I had died. In her mind, all her dreams for me were dying. We had a very hasty 10-person wedding and a couple of weeks later, the principal of the high school, which I attended in the town I’ve been raised in, called me to his office and he said, “are these rumors I’m hearing about you possibly true?” And I said, “well, if the rumors are that I’m pregnant and married, in that order, then yes they are true.” He just put his head in his hands and he said, “Mary, you have terrific honors and great grades, but you will not be allowed to return here for your senior year. It would be totally inappropriate for a pregnant girl to get mixed in with the normal girls. But if you want to have a regular high school diploma, rather than maybe get a GED… At which I did, because I wanted someday to be a teacher, I saw getting pregnant certainly as a detour, but I didn’t see it as a stop sign. I just knew it was going to take longer, but I still had a dream of being a teacher.
He said, “so if you want a high school diploma, we have a place for people like you. It’s not held during daylight, it’s after dark.” It was actually in a part of Portland, Oregon across the bridge, the North part of Portland, which I hadn’t been allowed to drive in after dark. It’s held in the evenings and it’s where the pregnant girls, and the delinquent boys go to high school. That next fall I drove across the river, I parked my car. I went up to the building that was Washington High School, the sign said, during the day time for the normal kids. And it became, without changing the sign, Washington Evening High School, in the evening for the rest of us. I remember walking up those steps to the school to register and I’m thinking, every girl here has a baby or is pregnant, and every guy here is some kind of delinquent. This is my new student body. I went into register and I only needed two classes to complete my high school education. So I was enrolling in those two classes, they have tables for each of the classes. And while I’m thinking, every guy here is some kind of delinquent and I feel nervous about that, and these two guys are standing there registering too and one of them says, “hi, my name’s Peter, but I’m no saint.” And the kid next to him says, “yeah, my name’s Paul, but I’m no apostle.” And they’re all starting to talk, and I just interrupted and I said, “my name’s Mary. No comment.” Because I’m now visibly pregnant, visibly pregnant. So that was the beginning of my senior year.
I graduated from Washington Evening High School in May of 1967. And in July of 1967, I was in a hospital in Portland, Oregon in an intensive care ward, with a diagnosis of fatal kidney disease. Not serious kidney disease, fatal kidney disease. One kidney was totally destroyed with nephritis, the other kidney was 50% destroyed with active nephritis. And in 1967, this was a death sentence. There’s no dialysis, there’s no transplants. And I’m 18 years old, I’ve got a 7 month old son.
One of the physicians, the surgeon comes to me and says, “we’ve decided that if we can get the blood toxin level in your body reduced enough so you can sustain a surgery to remove that right kidney, maybe you’ll have six months to live.” I’m terrified, I’m thinking, “the best shot I have is six months? I may never see my little boy even walk, let alone go to kindergarten.” And the God of my upbringing was not a friendly place to go when you felt like you had screwed up. Surely I had really screwed up because I got kicked out of high school, I was sent to a school with delinquents, now I’m being punished.
The night before the surgery was scheduled, a woman walked in my room and she identified herself as a chaplain, offering prayer for people who are going to have surgery the next day. She said, I come three or four times a week. I’m given a list in the order of the most serious surgeries, “Your name’s at the top, would you like someone to pray with you?” I was scared and I said, “okay.” She then did something that I had never ever identified or seen as prayer. She pulled her chair next to my bed and she said, “Mary, would you be willing to tell me what’s been going on in your life the last year or two.” So I told her my story, at the end of which she looked at me compassionately and she said, “Mary everything’s created twice.”
Today, I would say I have no landing page for that. I had no landing page for that. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Everything’s created twice. And then she said, “you actually know this. In fact, everybody knows this, but almost nobody knows the power of knowing this. The bed you’re laying on, the nightgown you’re wearing, the sheet covering you, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the machinery, all the machinery you’re hooked up to. First it had to be a thought before it could be a thing. This is true about everything.” And then she said, “I hear how much you love your little boy, but I also hear how much you’ve been hating yourself. You feel like you shamed your school, you shamed your family, and you shamed yourself. And now that you’re thinking how everything is created twice, could there be a correlation between that toxic thinking, and the toxicity that’s rampaging your body and threatening your very life?”
Nobody I knew thought this way. And then she said, “you know that if you think embarrassing thoughts, your cheeks get red. You know that if you think scary enough thoughts, your heart beats faster. Couldn’t it be that if you think enough toxic thoughts, your body gets toxic?” Again, nobody I knew thought this way. And then she said, “could you believe it’s possible that we could do a prayer or say some words, and in the morning when they come to get you and take you to surgery, they look at you and they say, ‘well, you look better. We better test you.’ And then they test you, and they say, ‘my gosh, we see no evidence of that disease. We’re going to send you home.’ Could you believe that’s possible?”
And I told her the truth, “no”. It wasn’t one part of me that believed that she was going to say some words and it was going to evaporate, there wasn’t one part of me that could believe that was true. She says, “all right. Well, how about this? Could you believe it’s possible… And I want you to think about you’re dealing with an infinite universe, infinite. Could it be in all of this there could be one possibility, every possibility exists. Couldn’t you agree that there could be one possibility where we could say some words. They would take the kidney and over the next few weeks, instead of getting worse, you actually got better and better and better to the point that eventually they said you have no more kidney disease. Could that be possible?”
And interestingly, in that moment I didn’t really believe it. I believe the MDs who were helping me, I believe way more. I’ve been trained to believe that they were a form of God, they knew all the answers. And she said, “could you believe it’s possible?” In that moment, I could tell she believed it. And probably for the first time in my life, I borrowed someone else’s belief that was operating on a higher domain or frequency than mine. And I said, in that moment, “I don’t know if it’s probable, but maybe it’s possible.” And she latched onto that, and she said, “that’s all we need, one corner of your mind open to the possibility.” And so she said, “so here’s what’s going to happen. In the morning they’re going to take you and they’re going to remove that kidney. After that, when you begin to wake up, you’re going to experience some physical challenges, difficulty, call it pain. And your mind is going to be busy with that. But as that abs, your mind is going to want to think down the well-worn paths of thinking that you’ve been thinking before. Thoughts of shame, feelings of shame, generating toxicity. So here’s what I want you to do, tell me what you would do if you did get well. what would you do with your life, Mary?”
I knew immediately, I would raise my little boy. I would raise that little boy and I would become a teacher. I was passionate about both those things. And she said, “okay, so let’s imagine this, you finish, your mind wants to go down thinking shameful thoughts about what’s happened. Instead I want you to… The moment you notice you’re in a thought of self-loathing, the moment that happens, interrupt that thought and say no, that left with the kidney. And then immediately imagine this. Imagine that you have your hand, holding a little boys hand, a five years old, feel the warmth of his hand in your hand, feel that. And you’re walking up some steps in a school. And on the right there is a teacher standing there, she’s a kindergarten teacher and your little boy is just jumping up and down, he’s so happy to get to go to kindergarten. You bend down, you hug him, feel that? And he runs off to kindergarten, you hear the click of your heels around the corner, and there’s your classroom.”
“Then fast forward in your mind, and you’re sitting in a great stadium or auditorium and down below are all these caps and gowns, you hear your son’s name called. He walks across the stage, picks up his diploma, switches his tassel and he’s graduated, and you feel this big boost of pride and happiness for him. And your teaching career is growing. And then fast forward in your mind, and you’re sitting in the front row of your son’s wedding and you are the mother of the groom, and how proud you are of him, how happy you are for him to have the love of his life. And your teaching career is flourishing.” And she said, “just keep repeating that.” And then I think she gave me a quick hug and she left.
The next day they took me to the surgery. They told my family that was gathered, that one kidney was totally destroyed with nephritis, the other kidney was 50% destroyed by active nephritis. It was all pocked and shriveled. And they didn’t know how much time I would have. And the first week it was touch and go, and then my numbers began to stabilize. And by the end of the 15, 16 days after the surgery, they said, “well, your numbers have stabilized. You’re not, at the moment, getting worse. Maybe you’re going to have a little more time than we thought.” So I went home in an ambulance to my parents’ house, where my husband and son had moved in, and they helped take care of me. My mom took care of me, I couldn’t even get my head off the pillow at first. I had to go to the neurologist three times a week just to get numbers checked. And my number stabilized, and then ever so slightly started to improve and improve and improve.
And after somewhere in the fifth, six months, I’m in a meeting in a conference room at the hospital with a surgeon, my general practitioner, a number of people, specialists and they’re all shaking their heads and saying, “we have no science for why that one kidney… And the surgeon said, “we saw that kidney. There’s no science for why that kidney would now be functioning, and it has now for two months as a whole perfect kidney. We don’t have any signs for this. We don’t even know how long this will last, but whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.” And I’m 18, I’m young. I’m just so happy to start to feel better, I’m feeling good. And I go on with my life.
2) When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
My favorite book as a little kid was The Little Engine That Could.
The affirmation that the little engine gave itself while it was climbing up very difficult slope and mountain, was, I think, I can, I think I can, I think I can! And it would take me many years of transformational study to realize that the power wasn’t in the “can”, the power was in the “think”.
I think I can, because you can have. We can all have more potential. But until we think that we can bring it forth, it just stays hidden in our potential.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I can easily think of my stupidest mistake. Why don’t we go there? Because that’s what I want to talk about, anyway.
For sure the stupidest mistake I made was in blind trusting. I had a second marriage. He was a CPA and I brought him into the leadership of the church that I had grown for 20 plus years and over the course of a number of years it was discovered that he had been embezzling money to the tune of about a million dollars, and when that was discovered it led to the complete decimation of the work I had built for 23 years.
He would go to prison, and I would be left with millions of dollars of debt to the congregants who had helped purchase the land and the facility we had.
I had no job. It had completely changed my reputation. I lost the house I had, the car I had, and I began again.
It would take time for me to realize that first I was angry, I was upset. I was hurt. And then over time I realized that I had a role to play in that result because I had let him have free rein with the money. And even though we had CPs and other CPAS who were supposed to be watching over what was going on, the board hadn’t seen it, I hadn’t seen it, and here it was.
I had to close the church that I had loved and built into existence for 23 years.
I ended up going to the Oregon coast and just walking the beach for weeks on end, just being so bereft and sad and disappointed and mad at myself, and mad at him and mad at the board member who was supposed to be overseeing it. And ultimately I realized the person I was really mad at was me! Looking backwards, I could see some things that I could have noticed at the time, but didn’t want to notice, evidently.
And then, after weeks of real introspection, I realized that I didn’t want to see those things, because as a public person, a minister, I was way more afraid of a second divorce and what it would mean publicly. So I just glossed over what I was seeing. But in the end that fear was way, way more expensive because I lost it all, anyway.
And then I began to build again. I made a decision, I was going to bring that 10 million dollar debt down to a zero or I would at least spend the rest of my life seeking to do so.
And my friends, Wayne Dyer, Les Brown, Bob Proctor, Marianne Williamson, and others were saying, you need to come and get in the profit making side of this work, or you’ll never be able to pay that money back.
And so I began a new work. It started very small, this is 2003–2004, and I began to grow a new work, and it grew, and it grew with the same principles that I had known were true and brought in much stronger financial and fiduciary controls and built a new work. I began to build a new work, and over time I reduced that debt down, down, down, till I received in 2016, took 14 years to do it, a zero balance on that debt. I’m proud of that result. But I’m even prouder for my willingness to really take responsibility and then use these same principles to produce a result I had never produced in my life before.It made me a much better teacher, much better leader and coach in helping other people transform results they think are almost impossible, too!
I’ve built 3 multimillion dollar businesses, the first I lost and the other 2 are thriving. Today we’re in 154 countries helping people with the art and science of bringing results into their life that they would love!
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?
This book, Brave Thinking comes out of decades of studying. I started studying transformation in 1971, that has led to a 7 year project, working with his Holiness the Dalai Lama, in seeking to solve the world’s greatest issues through dialogue and how to have healthy dialogue, where we learn to authentically listen to different viewpoints, and then come up with ideas that might answer the different viewpoints. That project called Synthesis went on with world leaders for 7 years, and I was privileged to sit right next to his Holiness, helping lead those events.I also had the privilege of working with Mahatma Gandhi’s grandchildren, and Martin Luther, King’s children to create an event at the United Nations on the 50th anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination and 64 days later, on the 30th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, this was in 1999.
There we proposed, and it was finally accepted, A Season for Non Violence, that the U.N. took on as a project, and we geared it particularly to 10–12 year olds in schools all across America, and ultimately around the world teaching the principles and the guidelines for solving issues nonviolently. And how that can be done for kids so if we learn it at 10–12 that will carry us through the rest of our lives
That moved , then of course, those learnings and trainings moved into the larger part of my work.
What I know for sure is that the principles that are in Brave Thinking bring social impact to the individual who is in the community, brings impact there in the city, in the state, in the country, and ultimately in the world.
So we know that when we change the person we help the person, it changes their world, and that gets bigger.
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
A client worked in banking for thirty-five years, a career that brought him wealth and prestige as he turned one of the smallest banks in Texas into one of the largest. And yet he felt a tremendous longing and discontent. “I was living somebody else’s dream,” he said. “This was a good dream, but it wasn’t my dream.” His health deteriorated. He ballooned to more than 230 pounds. He began suffering from debilitating migraine headaches, popping pain medication like breath mints. He felt guilty for not loving a career that benefited him and his family greatly.
To assuage that guilt, he decided to work even harder, often eighty hours a week.
This client attended one of my seminars in Los Angeles, but he continued to wrestle with himself. Then he suddenly had a vision of himself leaving the ballroom where I was speaking and arriving at a cold, dark, colorless cemetery with a single grave.
Guided by a newfound clarity of vision, he created a blueprint for the life he would love, remaining at his job while navigating a gradual transition into building his own business. I worked with him as his company grew and thrived. Today he heads his own highly successful leader- ship development organization that began with willingness to notice his longing and discontent. Now he works twenty to thirty hours a week, earning far more than he did in the past. His migraines are gone, and his prescriptions have long expired. He has maintained his ideal weight of 175 pounds and calls himself “a lean, serene, Brave Thinking machine.”
With his newfound time and money freedom, he and his wife travel the world.
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
In 1971 a series of things occurred, I was getting my undergraduate degree and I was introduced to the idea of authentic listening. My kid’s dad and I had a very tumultuous relationship at the time, and I was completely sure I wanted a divorce and then I invited him to join me in a communications class, so that we could at least raise our boys without there being a battlefield, that they were in all the time between us.
We went that first night to a class, and they introduced us to the idea that listening is not just being silent, waiting to talk, that listening is a curiosity of really seeking to understand the other person and their point of view, even though what they’re saying might be diametrically opposed to what you think and believe you could still be curious enough, and the only way that other person will know you have heard them is that you can repeat back to them, “this is what I hear you saying”. That skill set opened the door for me in listening in different ways, not just with my kid’s dad, but also in other parts of my life.
I went to hear a lecture later that month where the lecturer said, nothing is bad unless you think it’s bad. I was a young woman at the time, pretty sure I knew everything, and I just remember, either literally or metaphorically, crossing my arms and just saying to myself, “well, that’s simply not true. There is bad stuff in this world. Car wrecks are bad, murder’s bad, war is bad.” And then the lecturer said, I understand what you’re thinking. I get it. There are bad things in this world we would all like to change, but in infinite possibilities, no matter what it is, there has to be a seed of good in it, and if you can find that seed of good and borrow it, you will get some benefit, even from the things that don’t look good at all. So the next time, and then he gave a prescription, the next time something happens that you immediately think is bad, hit your internal pause button, wait 3 days, but don’t just wait 3 days, during those 3 days, turn up the volume on your curiosity about what possible good there could be in this situation.
I left the lecture, I went home and 2 days later my kid’s dad came home and he looked all ashen, I said, what happened? And he said there was a big layoff at work today, 100 of us lost our jobs, I don’t have a job.
I was in undergraduate school and he was the breadwinner, and I thought oh, my gosh, he’s lost his job. I immediately start to move to panic. This is bad, this is bad, this is so bad. And then I hear that lecturer saying, nothing is bad unless you think it’s bad? And I said, but this seems bad. And then he said, What was it? What did he say to do? He said. Hit your internal pause button! I didn’t even know I had one. I said, where is that? Hit your internal pause button, wait 3 days, all right. This is Tuesday at 5. That’ll be Friday at 5. Wait 3 days, Friday at 5, and look for possible good. I couldn’t see any good in it. But I thought, Okay, well, then, I’m going to wait till Friday. And I said to him, my kid’s dad, my husband at the time, I said, you know, we’re gonna wait till Friday at 5. And if we can’t find any good in this, then we’re gonna panic. Because this just seems so bad. So we got the kids to bed, and we sat down that night, and we just got out a piece of paper. What possible good could there be in this? And he was better at it than I was at this point he said, well, I drive 90 min to work, and 90 min back if I could find a job closer to home, and I said “well, how are you going to do that?” He said, “well, I don’t know, but if I could, it would be good”. I said “okay, yeah, if you could, it would be good. “What if I earn more money?” “How are you going to earn more money? You’re at the top of the scale of the union you’re in”. “I don’t know, but if I could, it’d be good. What if I work shorter hours?” “How are you going to earn more money and work shorter hours?”
But he began to position some possible goods, working closer to home, shorter hours, more money! “What if I could do that?”
And because we were thinking those thoughts, ideas of where he might apply came to mind. The next day he went and filled out as many applications as the different companies in our area we’re receiving.
The next day he had 2 interviews, and when I got home on Thursday
he had a brand new job, way closer to home, more money. It was just slightly more money, but it was more money, and he was going to be a milkman with a delivery route because he was a truck driver before. And as soon as he got his route learned and memorized, he could do it faster, he could go home at the end of delivering the milk he was assigned to deliver.
And actually it was so close to home that he could ride his bike to work, which he loved. Then Friday at 5 came, and I went, “Oh, my gosh!” And I didn’t even suffer in the way I had always suffered, waiting for a circumstance to change before I could feel good. Did panic want to rise up in me over and over again while it was between Tuesday and Thursday night? Of course it did, but every time that feeling of “this is horrible, this is scary” would rise up, I’d say, no, I’m going to think about this on Friday. This was the beginning of my awareness. This was a major aha! for me, that I can have an experience without the experience having me. I can have a problem without the problem having me. That I had an internal pause button where I could notice what I was noticing, and decide how to respond instead of just react the way I had been programmed to react.
That was a doorway for me!
Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
In my transformational journey of discovering myself, the most important impact, I believe, let alone the 153 countries we have clients in, is it began with my children, the way I raised my children, the way I trained them that they have choices, that no one can make you feel anything without your permission. You have a response, and you can either react to a circumstance or you can be proactive, that you have a power in you.
So you can have things that you don’t like happening in your life. But you actually have a power to surmount that, overcome that and change those results. So as individuals learn that they have more power than they’ve known and begin to understand how they can create results they would love, it impacts everyone they impact. And eventually our whole world.
Are there three things the community/ society/ politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
What becomes the community, What becomes society and what politicians are, are individuals.
So what I’m seeking to solve, the problem I’m seeking to solve is an awareness of every one of our power to bring forth more than we’ve ever known we could bring forth, to actually have our own personal dreams, and understand the art, which is the dream that you have, and then the science, which is the vibration of making it your own results. We all have results, some of our results we’re in love with, and some of our results we are not in love with.
So what makes a better community is when individuals realize that they have access to a power in them that can make changes that are more than they’ve ever known they can make. It affects the community, it affects schools, it affects governance.
And it affects the family, which is the primary place, having more awareness of facts.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
Many people think of leadership in a top-down model. You work in a corporation, and the leaders make decisions and you’re at the whim or effect of leadership.
There’s a much more important leadership for every one of us to understand, and that is self leadership. So what is self leadership? The most important leadership there is, which is your ability to give yourself a command and follow it. I’m going to start exercising, and then you follow what you believe is the thing that’s really going to help you, and you cause yourself to do things you’re not used to doing.
That takes some rigor.
And you want to have some positive things you say to yourself when you get it right, and then corrective things when you don’t get it right, so that you become more and more able to lead yourself in the things that matter to you. Self Leadership!
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? Please share a story or example for each.
When I was starting I wish someone had been able to tell me “get your attention off of what people are thinking about you” and put your attention on the purity of the message that you believe you can bring forth, and the difference it can make for others. So think about the benefit for others versus what they’re thinking about you.
I wish someone had told me earlier on that the things I thought were in my way, like the first facility I rented to have my first message I was giving once a week in this facility and renting that, it had bad linoleum, and it had metal chairs people had to sit in, and I didn’t have money for advertising. The reason I thought that work was growing so slowly and got stuck at 40 people was because of the linoleum or the chairs or the no money for advertising. Once I had a higher awareness or a higher understanding that came with really finding my first mentor, he said, “it has nothing to do with the chairs. It has to do with your belief about those chairs, it has nothing to do with the linoleum. It’s your belief about the linoleum or the no advertising for money.” When you get on a different frequency that you are really pouring good into the people who are coming, they start talking about it, and it’s going to grow. “Mary, get your attention off the things you can’t change, and put your attention on the things you can.”
And within a year my work doubled, and it kept doubling and doubling.
I wish I had known that the things I thought were in my way were not really what was in my way.
Can you please give us your favorite”Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I would say the number one is the Henry David Thoreau quote, “If one advances confidently in the direction of their dream endeavoring to live the life they’ve imagined. They pass an invisible boundary and meet with success unexpected and common hours.
I knew it was a good quote. I used it in my first book, Building Your Field of Dreams, published in 1996.
But I didn’t understand, didn’t have the awareness to know that was actually a code for how results occur until I studied further, and it was in 2007, sitting by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, that I thought, “oh, my gosh! This is not just a great quote. This is a code!”
“If one advances confidently in the direction of their dream”, well, you can’t advance in a direction you don’t have. So the the gift of dreaming, the gift of having a dream, what you would love your life to be like is stage one.
“If one advances” meaning, I gotta be moving in the direction of that dream. I could take one baby step a day, and ultimately it would take me all the way up Mount Everest if I kept taking it. So if one advances meaning, I’m making what move I can make today in the direction of my dream.
And here’s the magic of it, he says, if you’re doing that while you’re endeavoring to live the life you’re imagining or you’ve imagined. So what does that mean, I realized over time, this is the science of it, that if I’m now the woman who is living the dream I’m holding in my mind, I have different feelings even while I’m doing dishes. I’m thinking different thoughts. I’m not thinking, oh, how long is this going to take. And when will I ever get there? I’m in gratitude. I’m imagining all the things that are happening, and as if they’re happening now. And I began to realize what he was saying ultimately is, you can’t get to your dream, you have to come from it in the same way. If you’re watching a program on TV that you don’t like, you can’t wish it to change. You have to change the frequency, and all the pictures of the old show are dissolving, and the new pictures of what you’re tuning to now come into play.
So if one advances, I am that one, if one advances confidently in the direction of my dream, no one can dream your dream for you, and no dream will come true if you don’t dream it.
If one advances, I am that one in the direction of my dream, endeavoring right now to be the person, feel the energy, be in the gratitude of the life, I’m imagining, you pass an invisible boundary because the boundary wasn’t in the things you think it is. The boundary was in you. You weren’t a match for your vision, that’s all it was. This is a code for how to be a vibrational match for your vision.
In the same way I was a woman who believed that it was linoleum, and it was chairs, and it was no money for advertising, and that kept me stuck for almost 5 full years until I had a mentor who introduced me to a different kind of thinking.
And that’s what Brave Thinking is all about. Do that.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
It’s an interesting thing, you know. There was a time, of course I wanted to meet Nelson Mandela.
I think we could say, let me say this, you know, I’ve had the privilege of dreaming up meetings and having the privilege of meeting amazing people, his Holiness the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King’s Kids, Gandhi’s Grandkids and many, many other luminaries along the way.
And for all that I’m very, very grateful.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://www.bravethinkinginstitute.com/
Thank you so much for these amazing insights. This was so inspiring, and we wish you continued success!
Social Impact Authors: How & Why Author Mary Morrissey Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.