The hidden code for transforming dreams into reality | Mary Morrissey | TEDxWilmingtonWomen

What could your ideal life look like one year from today? Throughout her life, Mary was able to improve her results, no matter how difficult the challenge. Through interactions with thousands of leaders including the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and delegates to the United Nations, Mary learned the code to advance confidently in the direction of one's dreams.

Mary Morrissey has over 40 years of experience empowering individuals in the areas of abundance, authenticity and success. As a sought after expert on the “invisible side” of success, Mary has spoken three times at the United Nations and worked with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. Mary has a Master's Degree in counseling psychology, an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters and is the author of two best-selling books, "No Less Than Greatness" and "Building Your Field of Dreams," which also became a PBS special. Among all of her achievements and degrees in higher learning, Mary’s favorites are the two black belts she has earned: one in success and the other in failure.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Imagine it's one year from today,

and we all agree that we're going
to come back for a reunion.

Not maybe, absolutely;

we'll all come back,
exactly the same group of us,

and we're to come back for a reunion.

Only we're going to share the things
that have happened in our life

during the last 12 months of our life.

We're going to share
what it is that we dreamed up

when we were here
at TEDx in October of 2016,

and what's happening
in our lives now,

365 days later.

What would you love
to be saying about your life?

What would you love to say
in the four areas

where humans actually do create results?

We live in a spiral universe.

In a spiral,

there's an ever upward pull
of becomingness.

A little blade of grass feels it
as it presses through cement

to become more of itself
today than yesterday.

A tree presses to the edges of itself

to become more of itself
today than yesterday.

And humans feel the same thing;
we just feel it a little differently.

We feel it through longing,
and we feel it through discontent.

We feel a longing for greater freedom,

we feel a discontent with
certain circumstances and situations.

And if we just keep breathing
another 365 days,

we will create results,

because that's what humans do.

Now, we create results in four areas.

We create results
in health and well-being.

You could look at your own results
right now in health and well-being,

but what'll you love a year from now?

Because if you keep breathing,
you'll have results in that area.

Humans create results in relationships.

Some of them are wonderful,

some of them are deep,

some of them are supportive,
some of them are not.

What would you love
in the area of your relationships?

To bring someone special in your life?

Would you love to transform
a relationship you're in?

Maybe a relationship is on auto-pilot,
and you'd love to have it go deeper.

Humans create results in vocation.

What we do with our time and talent,

whether we earn income doing it or not,

because just by our beingness,

we're doing something
with our time and talent.

Even if we think,
"I've made so many mistakes,

I'm going to crawl in bed
and put the covers over my head."

What I create that day
is "covers-over-my-head day in bed."

I don't get to not create
out of my experience.

And humans create results -

here we go - humans create results -

humans create results

in time and money, freedom or constraint.

So if you think about next year
when we come to the reunion,

what would you love to be saying?

You know, on my calendar
the last 12 months,

here's what were the evidences
of more freedom for me, and time.

More freedom for me
in the economic freedom

where I could go where I wanted to go,
do what I wanted to do,

but maybe even more importantly,
and I believe it is,

actually give to the things
that matter to you.

Provide some of the things
for those that matter to you as well.

Now, about 40 years ago,

I got very, very interested
in transformation.

I was getting my undergraduate degree,

and I cared deeply about kids.

I longed for quite a while
to become a schoolteacher.

While I was getting
my undergraduate degree

I wanted to study everything I could
in the field of transformation.

And the purpose was to help
children discover a kind of self-esteem

so no matter what their circumstances
or their situations,

they could actually believe

that they could become
the person they wanted to be,

and achieve the things
they wanted to achieve.

I went on a got a graduate degree
in counseling psychology;

I earned an honorary doctorate;

my first book, "Building Your Field
of Dreams," became a PBS special;

I had the privilege of working
with His Holiness the Dalai Lama

over the course of seven years,

creating week-long conversations.

I could just sit right next to him
for a week at a time over seven years,

three different times.

Conversations with world leaders about
how to transform our world's results.

I got very interested
in how results happened,

and how to transform results.

I had the privilege of speaking
at the United Nations

with the Martin Luther King kids
and Ghandi's grandkids

and creating a 64-day season
for nonviolence,

particularly teaching junior high kids

about how to solve problems
through acts of nonviolence and caring.

And I spoke at the UN
three different times,

one of them with Rosa Parks.

I was building my dreams;
they mattered to me.

I had the privilege of working
and flying to Cape Town, South Africa,

and meeting with Nelson Mandela.

I had a deep dream
to ask him the question,

"How did you transform your results?

How did you be a man
who gets sentenced to life in prison -

you served 27 years in hard prison -

and then not only do you get
out of prison before you die,

but you actually then become

president of the country
that sentences you to life.

Who on our planet does this?

How did you do that?

What was going on inside of you?"

And that has been my quest
and my interest and my deep longing

so that I could transfer that

and offer that to the people
that I had the privilege of working with,

working with tens of thousands
of people around the world

around changing their results.

Does it mean that because
every time I've studied this

and worked with my own life and others,

that every time for me
my dreams came true?

No. Does it mean
everything I did worked out? No.

My first business
that I spent 23 years building -

I took my eye off the ball,

I hired somebody to run the finances,
it was totally mismanaged.

I lost everything I had built.

It was heartbreaking to me.

But there are three steps

that dream builders use
either consciously or unconsciously

to transform their results

so that the dream wins over conditions;

so that the dream wins over time;

so that the dream wins over
all kinds of circumstances, situations,

and even our history,
no matter how long it's been there,

and sometimes
it's been there for decades.

About 150 years ago, a man decided
to do an experiment with his life.

That's what we're invited to do
over the next 12 months.

Keep breathing and do
an experiment with life.

He went to the woods, Henry David Thoreau,

and he said, prior to his - this quote
that's up here, he said,

"I wanted to learn to suck
the marrow out of aliveness.

I wanted to live a life
I loved living while I was living it.

I went to the woods

because I wished to deliberately front
the only essential facts of life

and see if life could not teach me
what it had to teach,

and not when I came to die

discover that I had not
even really lived."

Now, Henry did this two-year,
two-month, two-day experiment,

and then he wrote an essay about it.

In the conclusion of that essay,

he writes a quote that is worldwide known:

"If one advances confidently
in the direction of their dream

and endeavors to live
the life they've imagined,"

he said, "I learned this
at least by my experiment,

if one advances confidently
in the direction of their dream."

Well, you can't advance in a direction
you don't already have an idea of.

And the first thing dream builders
or people who evolve their results do

is they have an idea of what they
would really love their life to be like.

If I say to you "your front door";

if I say to you "the kitchen sink
where you live";

if I say to you "the bed
you sleep in most often";

you did not see the letters
B E D or S I N K or D O O R,

you saw pictures.

You saw a picture of a door,
a picture of a sink, a picture of a bed.

This is important for us to know
as building a dream,

because most of us dream dreams,
and we're vague.

We don't really see a dream.

We say, "I want it to be better,
I want it to be easier.

I'd love to travel,"

and there's no picture
for where we would travel.

The more specific you are
and the more specific you are right now,

this talk will mean way more to you
over the course of this next year.

What would you really love?

Most of us ask this question:

What do I think I can do?

What does the economy say I can do?

What do you think I can do?
What does my mother think I can do?

What would you love?
is the right question.

You'll have different thoughts
on the frequency of that question

than you will have
on the "What do I think?" question.

What would you really love?

Because you're going to have results
in those four areas anyway.

Now, I knew nothing about this in 1966.

In 1966, I had grown up
in a very, very happy family.

My mom and dad,
my sister, eight years older.

This was 1966.

I was a junior in high school,

I was homecoming princess,

had a lead in the junior play.

I was my class vice president,

had three best friends
from the time I was 10 years old,

and we'd hung out together,
and done many, many things together.

In spring break of 1966,

my high school sweetheart
had gone off to college,

came home on spring break,

and I got pregnant.

May 1, I tell my mom and dad
I'm now pregnant.

My mother wept for me as if I had died.

We had a very hasty
10-person wedding middle of May.

The high school principal
calls me in, says,

"Are these rumors true?"

I said, "If the rumors are I'm pregnant,
married, in that order, then yes."

He just put his head
in his hands and said,

"Mary, you will not 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 we have a place for people like you.

It's a high school
not held during daylight.

It's across the river -
in a part of Portland

I hadn't been allowed
to drive in after dark -

and it's where the pregnant girls
and delinquent boys go to high school."

So that's where I began my senior year,

and my first son was born
in December of 1966.

Only now, the mothers
of my best girlfriends

would no longer let them see me
because I was married, I was pregnant.

It was as if what I had was contagious.

I graduated from Washington
Evening High School in May of 1967,

and in July of 1967,
I was in a Portland hospital,

having been diagnosed
with fatal kidney disease.

One kidney was totally
destroyed with nephritis,

the other kidney was 50% destroyed
in active nephritis.

And in 1967, this is a death sentence.

We don't have dialysis,
we don't have transplants,

and every medical physician,
doctor, specialist, surgeon

all said the same thing:

"The best we can do
is maybe give you six months

if we can get the blood toxin level
in your body reduced enough

to remove that surgery,

then maybe you'll have six months."

And I was terrified.

And my belief system at that time
was this was happening to me.

I was being punished for being a bad girl,
and I was being punished.

Well, the night before the surgery,

a woman walked in my room at 10 pm

who identified herself
as a chaplain offering prayer

for people who'll have surgeries
the next day - did I want prayer?

And I'm thinking, you know,
well, the God of my upbringing

probably needed to have
some anger management classes.

(Laughter)

It's the only God I knew at the time,
and I said, "Well, maybe."

She didn't do anything
that looked like prayer.

She talked to me,
and she asked me to tell her

what had been going on in my life
the last year or two, which I did,

and when I was finished, she said,
"Mary, everything's created twice."

"What do you mean?"

She said, "You know this.
In fact, everybody knows it.

Almost nobody knows
the power of knowing this.

The bed you're on, your nightgown,
the sheet covering you,

the walls, ceiling, floor,
all the machinery you're hooked up to

first had to be a thought
before it could be a thing.

You know this."

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 yourself,
you shamed your school, your family.

And now that you're thinking
how everything's created twice,

could you consider
that there could be a correlation

because, notice this Mary,

if you think embarrassing thoughts,
your cheeks get red;

if you think scary enough thoughts,
your heart beats faster.

It doesn't mean
anything scary is going on;

it doesn't even mean anything
embarrassing is going on;

it means you think those thoughts,
and your body responds.

Could it be that if you think
enough toxic thoughts about yourself,

there could be a correlative, a toxicity,
that goes on in your body

that actually could threaten your life?"

Well, this was so beyond

anything that I had
any framework for at that point.

"Could you believe it's possible
that we could do a prayer or say words

and this could completely
be eliminated from you,

and when they come
to get you for surgery,

they say, 'Get up, go home. You're fine.'

Could you believe that?"

And I told her the truth: "No."

I didn't believe that
was going to happen for me.

There was not one part
of me that believed.

I was way more belief
in my pain at that point.

She said: "Alright,
if you can't believe this,

remember there's an infinite
number of possibilities.

There has to be one
where instead of - we do this prayer,

we pull all the genesis of this dis-ease
that's going on in you

and put it in the kidney
that's going to be removed.

And when it's removed, you get better.

Could you believe that's possible?"

I didn't know if it was possible,

but I could tell
she believed it was possible,

and I believe it was the first time

I ever chose to believe on the frequency
of someone else's belief,

who was operating at a higher domain.

I said, "Maybe it's possible."

Remember, this is before Sheldrake
and David Bohm, and quantum field science,

and all the things -

at this point, there was
no mind-body clinic at Harvard.

I mean, in the last 40 years,
so much has happened.

So she said, "Alright,
let's work with that.

One idea," she says,

"one part of you open to the idea;
let's work with that."

She said some words.

She gave me a prescriptive for how to use
my thinking and my emotion,

and then she left,

and they did the surgery,

and about a week or two later,

my numbers were stable -
enough that they said,

"You might have a bit more time.
You can go home."

I went to my parents' house
in an ambulance,

where my son and husband were staying.

I could hardly get my head off the pillow.

But subtly - I was in many times a week
at first, and over time, less time

as being checked,
having my numbers checked.

And subtly over time, my numbers
not only stabilized, but improved.

And four or five months later,
I'm sitting in a doctor's office

with a surgeon and a specialist
and my regular GP,

and they're scratching
their heads, saying,

"We have no science
for why your one kidney

is not only getting [better]

it seems to be functioning
as a perfectly whole fine kidney.

We don't have any science for this.

We'll put medical anomaly on your chart.

Whatever you've been doing,
keep doing it."

(Laughter)

That's when I began to do the things
that I've told you about.

I got into undergraduate school,
I got into graduate school,

and over time as I reflected
about what happened,

and I studied people
who transform their results -

people who transform their results,

not just wish for a better result,
but actually transform their results -

there are three things they do,
every one of them,

whether they do it
consciously or unconsciously.

When I transformed my health result,
I was totally an unconscious competent.

I just did what she told me to do.

She said: "Here's what's going to happen.

When you have that surgery, yet your mind
is very much like a rubber band,

you thought those thoughts so much,

your mind is going to want
to think those toxic thoughts.

They're going to remove that one kidney.

Every time you notice yourself
starting to think of toxic thoughts,

say, "No, that left with the kidney,"

and then immediately imagine yourself -

like you're walking in
and getting into your own bed -

imagine yourself."

I wanted my two big dreams:

I want to be a teacher,
and I want to raise my son.

"Imagine you're walking into a school
with a five-year-old's hand in yours.

Feel the warmth of his hand in yours.

He goes into his kindergarten class.

You hear the click-click of your heels.

Around the corner, there's your classroom,

and you're a teacher, and he's five.

Imagine yourself.

Then fast forward: imagine
you're sitting in a big auditorium.

There's caps and gowns down there.

Your son's 18; he's graduating
from high school, and you're there,

and your teaching career is growing.

Then fast forward and imagine
you're in the front row of a wedding.

You're the mother of the groom.

Your son's marrying the love of his life.

And your teaching career is flourishing.

Keep repeating that."

I had done that unconsciously.

Every time I would start
to think, "Oh my gosh!"

and start to generate
that wavelength of self-loathing,

I said: "No, that left with the kidney."

Then I saw myself,

and I imagined being the person
taking him into kindergarten,

being the person seeing him graduate,

being the person sitting
in the front row of his wedding.

I had no idea the power of that.

But after 45 years of studying
and tens of thousands of people,

what I know are these three things.

That if when we get together
next year for our reunion,

and if you would love
to be able to share results,

in particularly
one or two areas of your life

where you feel the greatest longing
and the most discontent,

then these three things will help you.

Number one, you want to create
with clarity a specific dream.

Imagine yourself: health,
what would you love? relationships.

As clear the dream you can design,

the more your brain
can work on that frequency.

You know if you want to change
your television channel,

you have to change the frequency.

You know if you want
to change the radio station,

you've got to change the frequency.

We're not really different.

We think on frequencies.

Our ability to see
and not see opportunities

are on the frequencies we think from.

Create a specific dream.

See yourself in it.

Refuse to stay discouraged.

I didn't say refuse to get discouraged;
we're all going to get discouraged.

Not everything we try
is going to work out.

We learned to walk by falling down;
we just didn't stay down.

We were little kids.

It was normal to explore, experiment.

We got older,

and we thought every step
we take has got to work out.

So decline to stay discouraged.

Okay, that was feedback.

When Edison was asked
"How did you survive 10,000 failures?"

He said: "I never had a failure;
it was all feedback."

You'll have some feedback this year.

Decline to stay discouraged,

and then be more interested
in the growth that will happen for you

by means of having a dream.

Yes, many, many wonderful things
will happen if you become a dream builder,

not a dreamer, a dream builder,

because you're going
to create results anyway.

But to stay in the comfort zone

means you're going
to keep having what you've had -

that's where you're comfortable.

If you want something you've never had,
do something you've never done -

that's growth.

We'll get a little unstable
in that part of our life.

So if you're more interested
in growth than comfort,

you're willing to be interested
a little bit in growth

because it's more for you
than what's been,

and do that in service of your dream.

So those three things:

be specific about your dream;

decline to stay discouraged;

be in service of your dream
through the growth that happens,

and you can have that every single day
during this 365-day experiment

before we have our reunion next year.

Now, not one of us can go back
and change what's back there,

but every single one of us can decide
what's going to be out there.

Thank you.

(Applause)