Have you ever considered the life-altering power of a growth mindset? I'm Tabitha MacDonald, your intuitive transformation coach, and in episode 20 of the Mindful Love Podcast, we unwrap the transformative gift of growth – the kind that can see you through life's sharpest turns. From weathering personal traumas to embarking on professional quests, I've harnessed a relentless pursuit of knowledge as my compass. And I'm not just talking about the run-of-the-mill learning spree; we're diving into how this perpetual quest for understanding anchored my healing and propelled my empowerment.
Join us as I recount tales that pivot around growth – like depleting Intel's education budget with my insatiable learning appetite and teaching massage therapy fresh from certification, to secure the lessons in my craft. You'll hear about my adventures with Doug Nelson, a master body worker, whose training sessions were a testament to the rich rewards of investing in oneself. By the end of this dialogue, you'll grasp the strategies for nurturing a growth mindset, and perhaps, it'll be the beacon that guides you through your own healing odyssey.
About Tabitha Tabitha MacDonald is an intuitive transformation coach dedicated to helping people overcome their pain as fast as possible so that they can have the love, freedom and purpose they truly desire.
Have you ever considered the life-altering power of a growth mindset? I'm Tabitha MacDonald, your intuitive transformation coach, and in episode 20 of the Mindful Love Podcast, we unwrap the transformative gift of growth – the kind that can see you through life's sharpest turns. From weathering personal traumas to embarking on professional quests, I've harnessed a relentless pursuit of knowledge as my compass. And I'm not just talking about the run-of-the-mill learning spree; we're diving into how this perpetual quest for understanding anchored my healing and propelled my empowerment.
Join us as I recount tales that pivot around growth – like depleting Intel's education budget with my insatiable learning appetite and teaching massage therapy fresh from certification, to secure the lessons in my craft. You'll hear about my adventures with Doug Nelson, a master body worker, whose training sessions were a testament to the rich rewards of investing in oneself. By the end of this dialogue, you'll grasp the strategies for nurturing a growth mindset, and perhaps, it'll be the beacon that guides you through your own healing odyssey.
About Tabitha Tabitha MacDonald is an intuitive transformation coach dedicated to helping people overcome their pain as fast as possible so that they can have the love, freedom and purpose they truly desire.
Welcome to the Mindful Love Podcast, episode 20. My name is Tabitha McDonald, I am an intuitive transformation coach, and today we are going to talk about growth. This is part of a series I've been doing for the beginning of 2024, around 12 gifts that you can give your future self, and I thought about this episode a lot because I have always had a growth mindset and I've always turned problems into opportunities for growth, and so I thought how am I going to explain this to someone who doesn't have a growth mindset? So I'm going to do the best I can and bear with me here. The gift of growth is a profound gift, and I know a lot of these are that we've been covering over the last 12 days are profound, but growth is probably the thing that's saved my cookies more times than I can count.
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I have always believed in growth. It's how I got out of some pretty horrible situations in my life and some pretty traumatic events. I focused on the growth piece and how I could turn this painful experience into something that I've heard the term post-traumatic growth, and because I always focused on the growth aspect, I believe that is what anchored me in on my healing process the fastest, why I was able to heal and overcome some pretty horrifying things so quickly. So I'm going to talk to you about growth and how to cultivate a growth mindset. When I think about growth, I think about learning, and I know when I was little I really leaned into my mind and learning as a way of feeling empowered and I knew that if I could harness the power of my mind, that I would be able to outsmart the adults who were hurting me. And so that was. I don't know how that belief became, or if it was just something I was born with or if it was just one of those survival patterns that you develop when you're little. I'm glad I did, because it really has had the most beautiful impact on my life, even when I went to work at Intel in my early 20s and I remember my boss saying you've literally taken up the entire education department's budget and I mean because we got like continuing education budget and he said you take up the whole thing. And I'm like because I just love learning. I don't know why everybody isn't on the same path and I never liked traditional college or university, but I loved following my intuition and just learning what was necessary for the project ahead of me and so you know, when I was doing meeting planning and events, I would take all of the event planning courses and I just loved learning. I loved the experience of it because I felt like knowledge is power, right, the more knowledgeable we are, the more powerful we become. And I think that's still true for me.
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And when I think about when I became a massage therapist and I realized there was so much more to learn than I knew, I started teaching so I would be forced to be learning because I knew that if I taught something I would learn it and it would stay with me forever. And so I started teaching right out of massage school and I loved it because I would get to sit and learn and I had this like kind of deadline that was created by the curriculum, where I had to go relearn it and then teach it to somebody who didn't know it. And that was my way of anchoring in all of the knowledge and the learnings from my new career. And then I just invested. I invested in my knowledge. I took continuing education from Doug Nelson, who in my opinion is one of the best body workers and has done so much for massage therapy, and he trained me in precision neuromuscular therapy and every class, every time I was constantly learning, I would sit in the front. It's kind of annoying, but I would sit in the front and I would always ask a lot of questions and I would have like a whole list of questions before I took each course. And then, you know, I went and I took time to study with him in the Chicago area of Champaign, illinois, and I did not feel worthy of being in that classroom because he only allowed like six therapists and we spent, like it was three or four days of really intensive work where we would he would bring in complicated cases and then we would troubleshoot as a team.
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And I remember like the first time I went thinking I can't believe I'm investing all of this money, like what if it doesn't pan out? And I don't even belong there and I'm like not worthy, I'm not smart enough. Everyone will know I'm a fraud and I can't. I mean I remember just completely having a panic attack before I even went and come to find out every massage therapist in that room felt the same way and I was relieved and I also didn't feel so out of place and I just I loved it. It was like four full days of immersive education about the body and how it works and really advanced bodywork techniques. And the thing is is I would invest the money to go, but I would make it back tenfold because I no longer had to do marketing for my massage business because I got so good at it. People would just refer people and I think that when you own a business, that's really where you're at that golden places, when you just work from referrals.
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And so, although I made this financial investment and this time investment in my growth and in my career, it always came back to me like tenfold in, I mean, in a way that I didn't even expect and that has always been my mindset. If I invest the time, if I invest the money, then I am going to get a gain on it in unexpected ways and it'll always pan out to be way better than I ever imagined, because I'm always focused on the next up level of my knowledge and just always focused on growing and learning something new. And so when it came to personal development, I struggled to have this same commitment to investing, because I didn't see how it was going to give me the same return on my investment, like when it's a business thing. You know you're going to make more money because you can raise your rates and you'll reduce your marketing fees, because once you're in word of mouth marketing you don't have any marketing fees. So, like there's this tangible thing. And with personal development, I didn't see the same opportunity for a tangible return on my investment. I was so wrong because when I started investing in coaching back in 2017, I bought into my first coaching program. I remember it was $297 a month that I thought I was going to just die. I thought I was going to throw up. I couldn't believe I was spending that and I learned so much about myself. But in the process of learning about myself and looking at myself in this new way, I actually became a better business owner and so I did actually make more money and I did use my time more wisely and I did learn important skills like organization and things that I hadn't thought about before. And then, when I started investing in weight loss coaching, it was through a program and I remember same experience.
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It was 2019, it was January and I wanted to go to this conference with 200 other women to like meet them, and I had little kids at the time and so I was panicked. I was like I can't take a whole weekend to go to Nashville and just putz about while my kids are at home, and you know that's not fair. And I went and I booked my plane ticket so that I would arrive like five minutes before the start of the conference and I would leave like five minutes after. And I even put on the Facebook group for a roommate I had never met, which is so unlike me, but I was so worried about investing in my own self at the time that I felt guilty and I felt shamed the entire time. So I put these like really strict parameters on what I was allowed to spend on myself.
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Now, if it had been my kids, at the time I was spending $500 a month on dance for my daughter and I don't even know how much for all of the different programs my son was in, like you know, music and gymnastics and I didn't think twice about investing in their world. But when it came to spending, I think it was $197 to attend this conference and the flight and a shared hotel room and so like. When we're talking on the grand scheme of things, it was so low compared to what I would pay out for my kids and their development and growth. And so that conference taught me the value of investing in myself. I made some of the best friends at that conference. I connected with them and we checked in on Marco Polo with each other, I think every day, for four years you know, three years and they helped me through some of the hardest times of my whole life, helped me be accountable to my goals and really taught me the power of vulnerability.
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And so had I not made the investment in my personal development and my own growth, for me not because it was attached to my career, or for my kids for me as an individual, as a human being, I wouldn't have had those experiences. And it gave me some amazing tools to get through some of the roughest years of my life. It got me to understand how my mind worked and to even realize and recognize that shame was running the show of my life. And I didn't even know that because I was so immersed in shame I didn't even know it until the coach called on me and said well, that's a lot of shame you're carrying around. And I was. So I just looked at her like kind of dumbstruck because I didn't even know. And had I not gone to that event and invested in myself and my personal development journey, then I wouldn't have had the knowledge or the skills to get me through the next phase of my life experience, which was even even harder than the ones that I had faced up until then.
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And so I would love to just offer you the gift of growth. And you don't have to fly off to Nashville to go to some conference. But the gift of growth means investing time in yourself and time in your personal development, and that could be journaling and getting to know yourself. It could be listening to a podcast like this one. Maybe that gives you something to think about, that helps you grow. It could be meeting with new people who might challenge you to grow, because maybe they're on the growth journey, and finding a community of like-minded people who will hold you accountable on your growth journey. So I hope this was a little bit helpful for you.
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I know a lot of us think that we can't grow. We're too old to grow, we're too old to change, we're too old to be set in our ways and I'm 48, so I know that feeling of feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm done growing. I just kind of want to chill for a bit, but I believe that, like in our 40s, our soul comes in knocking and says oh hi, you are getting a little complacent. And I'm going to give you a little nudge into the growth department again because I have some bigger things I need you to do. And so when we grow on purpose, we don't have the big backlash as much if we intentionally set aside time to grow, we're not forced to grow in response to something. We're growing with intention and that makes us have, or allows us to have, more control over the experience and less like life is happening to you and where life is happening for you. So I hope you all find ways to embrace continuous growth.
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As you know, if you've been listening to the podcast for the last couple of days, I am having my group coaching program. My monthly membership is launching in January 2024. It's called Soma Tribe and you can go to mindfullovelove for more information, and it's a very growth-minded program where every month we're going to be looking at different areas of your life and how you can grow in them. And it's not this forced, intense growth. It's going to be a very gentle process where I'll give you tools and you figure out what works in your life, and there will be accountability and there will be friendships and a tribe of people to support one another on the growth journey, because it can be really lonely, and I find that having a supportive environment where people can make connections and friendships makes the whole experience really pleasant and much more attainable for people, especially because, believe it or not, there's not a huge population that's in the growth mindset, and it can be a little lonely if you don't find your tribe.
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So I hope that you will share with me your commitment to growth and maybe something that you're going to commit to doing for yourself in 2024. And it could be something as simple as I'm going to grow my knowledge around financial management or I'm going to grow my knowledge of baking. It doesn't matter. Find something that you don't know and how to grow. Learn how to keep your brain active. It will help keep you young as you age. It will help keep you youthful and our brain needs that. So I hope you have a wonderful day and I look forward to hearing about your growth in 2024. My name is Tabitha McDonald. Thank you so much for listening today.