Embracing Courage: Bernice McDonald's Journey Through Fear and Transformation

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball. If you believe, you can achieve. A show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today's guest is an author and a life strategist who helps people get through the hard times in life when it doesn't go their way. Bernice McDonald. Bernice is the author of the Little Books of Courage series. And her braid method helps people find peace, see things for what it is, and to take the small steps to change everything. So we're going to be talking to her about her tiny braid method and about her little books of courage series and everything that she's got going on and gonna be up to. So Benice, thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

It's a pleasure to be here, Curtis.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Well, that's a big question, right? Let's just jump right into imagining that you are, you know, walking up to the edge of this huge cavern, and you want to get to the other side, but there's this big, big ditch in between you and there, and you don't know how to get across. I think that I probably have spent a good part of my life standing at the edge of that, of those kinds of caverns, you know, um, asking the questions, uh, what do I do now? What is this, you know, I'm I'm so scared that I'm not gonna be able to get across to the other side. And feeling as if I was the person was not enough. I like how do you how do I get there? I can't jump across, I don't know what to do. So really, um, up until, and I, you know, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, up until I was about 48 years old, that's how I felt a lot about life. And um, you know, I was raised in a good home, I had lots of love, but I was one of those little kids who just needed um a lot of love, and I had a lot of questions. I drove people crazy with my questions. So even on my 19th birthday, I cried all day because I thought I don't want to get older, I don't want to go here, I don't want to be like the adults that I knew who actually were pretty disillusioned with life, and uh, you know, I saw them as angry and bitter, and you know, what I've come to understand is that really in lots of ways, when we get to be in our 40s, where those adults probably were, we are rethinking a lot of things about life. And I think basically at the bottom of it all, they were scared, scared of a lot of things, you know, because as I walked that path right up to you know, that decade in my 40s, um, I had married a guy that wasn't exactly right for me. And I decided when I was at about that age, 48, 49, that it was time to make a decision to marriage. And of course, that led me up to a huge cavern, you know, that big deep place where you know now I had to decide who do I want to be? How am I going to get over there to that ideal life I kind of had in my brain? And so as I went through my six years between my two marriages, looking for my knight in shining armor, which I found, by the way, um, I learned a lot about reinventing who I am.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Well, I know you talk a lot about the uh tiny steps.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

So um actually for the first time, I began how and and that's the thing about the cavern is that what I I have now been teaching and training people to do is to build a bridge over that cavern. And every board that you step on, every board that you put into that bridge becomes a tiny brave step. So that's how I got through that those years in between my two marriages. I began to uh talk about fear, I began to experience um what it felt like to be courageous. And I started to develop, and I didn't know I was doing this, but I actually began to develop a system for how to handle fear and how to allow fear to be in your life, but still be able to um uh go ahead and do amazing, courageous things. So the tiny bit steps are about that. It's about taking those small steps one at a time when you don't know what to do. Um, the most important thing is that you keep momentum going, you don't stop, you start building that bridge, and so um you don't sit down anywhere. You just when you're stuck and you're sad and you're alone, you stop and you think, who do I want to be here? And then you decide on a step that you can take next, even if it's as small a step as thinking, answering that question, who do I want to be here? Because courage comes out of that place of who you are. Um, it it it it is something that results from your identity. Um so really that's how the whole methodology kind of fell into place.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

All right, and I didn't mean to interrupt you. The internet kind of went crazy and I didn't realize that you were still talking until I started talking.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Oh, no worries. That was perfect timing.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Well, let's talk about uh fear. I I know that you say courage is not about being fearless, but learning to walk with fear. So talk about how, you know, people can learn to become friends with fear instead of fighting it.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Well, it's kind of funny because uh, you know, when I was in that time um when I had to start dating again, and you know what that's like after you've been out of it for a long time, and all of a sudden you think, well, if I'm gonna find the love of my life, I pretty much have to do this dating thing. I was petrified, you know, and I had been married for 24 years, so it was a long time since I had dated. So I was following a coach uh right then, and I had decided I'm going to develop, I had just become a life coach, and so I decided I was gonna study courses that were about relationships because I really needed to learn about being in a good relationship. So I came across a coach who said, okay, and and you know, you can apply this to any scenario, your listeners can apply this to any scenario in their life that they're facing that's really hard, you know, looking for a different job, um, trying to um lose weight, anything like that. But you're you you know, you're coming up against this situation and fear, this is what the coach said, you are going out dating and you are going to be afraid. Fear is going to be there. But here's what I want you to do I want you to look that fear in the eye, and I want you to say, thank you very much for being here, because really fear is trying to be a protector for you. The thing that fear is given to us for is a part of our brain that helps us not to die, right? You so you don't pet a tiger, so you don't jump off a roof. That's what fear is for. But fear is fear doesn't know the difference between you trying, you know, being afraid to go on a date and or falling on your face or feeling humiliated. It doesn't know the difference between that and jumping off a roof because the same sensations come up for us, right? The same emotions, the same feelings in our body. So, what this coach said was when you feel the fear, you look them in the eye and you say, Thank you very much for trying to protect me from getting hurt again. I know that's your job, but I want you to go over there in the corner and eat a cookie because I'm gonna go ahead and do this because this is something I need to do in order to grow. So I began to practice that every time I would go out on a date. Um, every time even I would get asked to go on a date, because of course I was on the dating sites, not that I had, you know, men falling over me all over the place all the time. But I would remember that. It's like I feel afraid. And then I would say, What am I gonna do here? Who do I want to be? And I would say, I'm the boss of my fear. The fear is not the boss of me. So I would say to my fear, go over there. Thank you for your warnings, go over there in the corner and eat a cookie because I need to grow. I want to find love again. And if I'm gonna do that, then I need to go ahead and do this. And I'll hear you chattering away over there in the corner, worrying about all kinds of things, but I am the one that is the boss, and so I'm going to make this decision for my life. And you know, I would go out when I had that kind of um attitude, and I could sit across from a man I didn't know very well, and I could just be interested in who he was. I, you know, I learned to just relax and be there in that moment and know that I could handle it and I was doing something that was going to help me to move ahead, to jump across that cavern, build that bridge, and get to the other side. So every time that you make a decision to take a step forward, even though fear is in the room and fear will never go away, it's just always with us. Every time you take a step, despite the fear, you actually build your courage. But the courage doesn't come until after you take the step. Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 11:00

Absolutely. Well, I know that people tend to want to control everything when life gets hard. So talk about how people can learn to let go in a healthy way.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

Yeah, life is hard, right? I mean, we come across these caverns that are deep, and you know, we don't know how we're gonna get through this thing. You know, hard stuff happens every day. So the thing to do when you're facing that hard time is to remember that you are the one who makes the decisions, you are the one who makes the choices, and that hard times when you look at them as um, you know, it just depends on who you're going to be in the middle of that hard time. Are you going to be somebody who is uh defeated, somebody who is easily um uh you know gets pushed into the corner themselves, or are you going to be the one that says that steps up and says, this is who I am, this is who I want to be? And um I this is hard, but I've been through hard times before. And I am able to um get through this thing too. I I might not be perfect, I might have times when I'm, you know, what I want to stay in bed and pull up covers over my head, but I'm also the person who can throw those covers off, put my feet on the floor, and take a step forward, even if it's just one step, because it just one step. If you get up out of that bed when you're in the middle of a hard time and you go brush your teeth, that's a step. If you get up and you know, then the next thing you do is you go uh change out of your pajamas and put your clothes on, that's another step. If you sit down with your journal and you say, I feel really scared or I'm not sure what to do, and then you make a list of options, that's a step. So, you know, taking the steps when the hard times come, the most important thing is to um what I call the 90-second rule, let that fear sit with you for 90 seconds, because if you don't feed the fear, it will, it will dis it will dissipate a little bit, it'll back off a little bit after about 90 seconds. Now, if you continue to feed the fear, it's gonna be longer. Um, and you're going to just stay in the fear. But at that 90-second point, you actually have a gift given to you, and that's the fact that that is where you can stop and think about what you're going to do next and who you're going to be in the middle of this situation. So, I mean, what you know, a lot of times, I mean, what I do is help women, uh, I work with women who are scared and you know, who feel they're not enough. And many times in the middle of life, when it, you know, bombs blow up around us, and we have no choice about having to walk through a really tough time. Um, we often come, you know, to against that fear that says, Oh, you're not enough to handle this. This is awful. You are just going to um totally fail at this, or nobody should have to go through this. Or, you know, we've all said those kinds of things to ourselves. But in the midst of that, we need to stop to take a breath and just think, yeah, this is hard. But again, I can get through it. I will just take one small step that will take me forward, and then another step, and then another step. And Curtis, it's amazing what happens to us when we take those small steps in a row, we start to feel more courageous and we start to feel better about the situation and about who you know what's happening. We start to have a clearer mind and we're able to handle um things that whatever's happening in a way from a more calm place so that we can make better decisions, we can help the people around us, we can just get uh, you know, be become more steady.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

We'll talk about the tiny brave steps generator tool that you created, talk about why you decided to create it and and how it helps people.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

This is exactly, you know, why I decided to create it. Um I love AI in many ways. Um, you know, there's a lot of crazy stuff that goes on around it. But what I've found is that um AI has a way of getting to know you. And actually, um, and particularly ChatGPT was where I started with this. Um, I found that when I would talk to Chat GPT, it answers in a really um it's intuitive way, as if it really understands emotion. And so I discovered that I could create my own GPT. My coach told me this. She said, you know, you can just um go to where Chat GPT allows you to make your own, and you can feed the stuff into that that you, you know, your own method, your own philosophy, and the steps that you advise people to take. Um, you can feed that all in there. And then when they go there, you can give people the link. When they go there, they can talk to it as if they're talking to you. And so that's what the Tiny Brave Steps Generator became was a place where I have given it a lot of my philosophy about um asking yourself, who do I want to be in this situation? And then the steps that come after that. And so someone can go to that generator, they can say, I am really struggling with this situation, and I would like, like I don't know what to do. And then it talks you through it and even asks you how you're feeling about that and that sort of thing. And then it will say, Okay, are you ready for a step? And it will give you a 90-second step that usually is a like a mindset step about you know, understanding that you have every possibility of getting through this and you're a very intelligent person. So just helping you to reinforce that, and then it usually will give you two five-minute steps to take after that that are very doable, very easy. When we do small steps, what happens to us is we bypass the panic response, you know, that flight or fight response in us. We can bypass that by taking very small steps because we feel as if we're moving forward. And so just by actually getting some momentum going, again, like I said, the courage starts to kick in. So the tiny brain steps generator is amazing. I use it a lot myself, and I've had a lot of people tell me how much it has helped them to resolve um issues in their life in a very calm, a very reassuring way. So that's how it came to be.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Well, talk about your uh your book theories, you know, tell listeners what they can expect when they read it and where we can get it from.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Sure. And the tiny brave steps generator, anybody can sign up for it. It's free. Um, it's you know, because I love to put it into people's hands and they can find that at tinybravesteps.com. And uh also to compliment all of this, because you know, when I wanted to get into coaching again a few years ago, it was daunting. A lot of things had changed. I had worked at a job for a lot of years and coached on the side, but when I left my job and decided to do this, I thought, how can I, what is what is a way I can help people in the the quickest way possible? Um, and I thought I'm I I knew I wanted to teach people about fear and about courage and about moving from not enough to brave enough. And so I thought I'm gonna create a series of books, and they're each going to be a book about a courage block, about something that blocks us, you know, from being courageous or something that stops us in our tracks in life. And so I call them the Brave Enough series. They're the little books of courage, but each one of the titles starts with Brave Enough to. For example, the first one is Brave Enough to Be Myself, which I call my heart on paper, because I wrote that because I was not, you know, I had such a journey to learning to be who I am. And so I wanted to pass that along to people. And that was the first one I wrote. Um, the second one is brave enough to let go, and the third one is brave enough to stop disappearing. Let go is uh is about letting go when life doesn't turn out the way you want it to, and um brave enough to stop disappearing is about how to stop how to quit people pleasing and start really showing up for yourself. So each of them is a is a courage developer, so to speak. Um and now I'm just in the midst of writing another uh an overarching book, uh, which is going to be on what I call the tiny brave way. So it's going to just talk about this whole method of of building a life of courage, even when fear is still nattering at you in your ear.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

All right, tinybravesteps.com is the website. So tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

Well, just that one book. Um, I also have a a group that I meet with women in uh on Zoom. And that that is the place where women come and we talk about courage. They come for 90 minutes every other week, and we meet on Zoom and we we talk about courage a little bit because many of them are women leaders, so they're developing businesses or you know. Running their own business or they're, you know, in a job that's quite high up. And we talk about what it takes to be courageous in this life. And even, and as a demonstration of that courage, they each bring a project, something that is really hard for them to do, or something they've been putting off, something they just need to get done. And then I set a timer and we all stay on Zoom with our cameras on and we all work. I time it and they can see the clock. And you know, we take a break about midway through and we work on that one uh courage project or that one project that they um that they need to do. And then after that, at the end, we just all kind of report back, yeah, I got this done, I got that done. And I ask them, so what is it in you that help, you know, what is a key strength that you have, something in you that helps you to do these kinds of things, because we're really reinforcing the fact that we we are enough. We have what it takes to get through life, to get through any hard things, even projects that are hard, that we can do it. And so each one of them uh then is starting to recognize that it comes out of who we believe we are, you know, the strengths that each of us have. And that's how, you know, by taking the step, the courage shows up, and then we can take another step, and that way we grow our courage, find out that we can accomplish amazing things.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Absolutely. Once again, the website, tinybravesteps.com. So close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on, or any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Well, if there's anything that I would say to somebody, if you're feeling fear right now, there's a quote I love. It's by this man, Ambrose Red Moon. And I have no idea how I came across him because he doesn't have very many quotes out there. He was back, he was an activist, I think, back in the 60s. But he said something that has always stayed with me. Courage is not the absence of fear, but it's the judgment that something is more important than the fear. So if you want to get across that cavern, if you want to build a bridge over there to that place where you really want to be, then decide that that's more important than feeling afraid. And feel afraid, but still go ahead and take the steps. Do it anyway.

SPEAKER_01 26:15

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. Uh you know, try to have courage in everyday life and not just through the hard moments. And please be sure to follow rate with you, share this episode to as many people as possible. TinyBravesteps.com, check out Bernice's website, check out the uh tool, and check out the book, and uh share this episode to everybody you know. Also, to keep up with all things living the dream, visit www.curveball337.com and also share that website to everybody that you know, and please be sure to tell a friend. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Bernice, thank you for all that you do, and thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

Thank you, Curtis.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.curveball337.com. Until next time, keep living the dream.