The spark in your life to do something, whatever your purpose in this world may be, is deeper than your own soul. It drives you to continue living and chase the best version of yourself. However, due to numerous elements and factors, your spark may wane and ultimately fade if you simply set it aside. Penny Zenker chats with award-winning author Rachel Marie Martin who shares some practical tips on getting your spark back and feeling more alive than ever. She emphasizes the power of embracing a state of constant wonder, accumulating huge shifts through inclement efforts, and shaping a highly resilient mindset. Rachel also discusses the right process of letting go and the immense power of just daring to try something in life.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Getting Your Spark Back With Rachel Marie Martin

Welcome to Take Back Time. My name is Penny Zenker. I always have special guests, interesting people to help you think, and sometimes to spark something new in you. I’m excited. We have an author on the beat. Rachel Martin is on the beat out there on Good Morning America and all of these different places, and signing books at bookstores. Rachel believes in the power of the human spirit to overcome, to thrive, and to find deep joy. Because of that, she pours out her heart via these platforms. She’s a writer behind the site FindingJoy.net, which is where I found her. I loved one of her posts and started to follow her. I said, “You have to come on this show.”

She’s the author of Get Your Spark Back, which was released and what she’s on tour for. She also wrote Mom Enough: The Fearless Mother’s Heart and Hope and The Brave Art of Motherhood: Fight Fear, Gain Confidence, and Find Yourself Again. She’s the founding partner in Audience Industries, a company designed to train and equip entrepreneurs in their ventures. Her articles have been translated into over 25 languages, and her site reaches millions of visitors per month. She has a robust engaged Facebook community. She has been featured on the Today Show, Good Morning America, NPR, Huffington Post, Tiny Buddha, iVillage, and the list goes on, but I’m going to stop there. Without further ado, welcome to the show.

I’m super excited to be here. I love that you said you had interesting guests because I thought that’s a cool descriptor.

It would not be great if I had uninteresting people. Who would want to listen to boring people? “Everybody, I have the most boring person today that you’re going to listen to.”

We could make it fun.

We already are.

That’s so good.

Human Spirit

I love that in your bio description, you say that you love the human spirit. You know what’s funny? As soon as I talked to you and read some of your stuff, it’s one of the things that I often say too. I’m in love with the human spirit. It’s funny that you use that same language. We’re sisters.

We’re kindred spirits right there. I love the term the human spirit. The soul or the spirit is that part of us that has that drive to do these adventures and to try new things. It’s the part of us that’s most alive in life. You know when somebody is on fire. You can see it. I love to inspire people to go after it because I know life is short. I once heard this analogy about time, that it’s the only commodity we all have, but we don’t know how much of it we have. That sunk in so deeply. That’s why I love the human spirit because when we fully go into it and sink into it, we use that time. We go after it. We’re so grateful for it. Even with what happened in the time previous and prior, we want to use the time in front of us to thrive, to find that joy, and to live that life.

That’s what I love too, seeing what people come up with. There are so many different areas of expertise. People have skills and how they put them together to create magic. How they overcame in the past, and how they keep moving through. I’ve heard some incredible stories of people with such resiliency. It’s like, “Where does that come from?”

That resiliency, I think we all have it. We have these moments, sometimes we forget about it, and then when we’re pushed to our limits, it emerges. There are these moments in the future where we think, “I’m not that strong.” I’d like to remind people, “Think back, there’s part of you that’s experienced this, that knows how to tap into that emotion.” The resiliency, to me, it’s why we love all the underdog stories. We go to them for inspiration. I love the movie The Pursuit of Happyness because of the resiliency in it, in believing and having faith in something. It might not even seem logical to anybody else. That celebration is worldwide, the celebration of that human spirit.

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One of my favorite movies, did you ever see Will Smith’s Collateral Beauty?

I don’t know if I have. Maybe, but it’s not popping in right away. I’m going to write it down.

I don’t know why, but it has some very interesting themes in there. Will Smith is an architect, or I forget what the business is that he’s doing, but he loses a child and he breaks down. His partners and the people around him are having a breakdown there. I don’t want to tell you the story, but see it because it’s him going through this incredible journey that we do when we’re going through trauma or impossible situations, and his experience and interaction with love, time, and death.

I have it written down.

Get Your Spark Back

I won’t say more than that, but very interesting. Your new book that came out is Get Your Spark Back: How to Find Happiness and Reignite Your Life. Where does that originate from, getting your spark back?

I went through my own journey of losing that spark. I like to call even the spark a level deeper than the spirit, like the soul of who you are. It’s who you were created to be. So often, the world where we put it, we hide it. We think we’re too much. It’s too risky. People will say, “Who does she think she is?” or it’s the expectations.

It’s the part of us that’s dying and wanting to be heard, but we’re like, “I don’t know about that. I have to take the logical, the practical route.” I knew I had lost it. Fifteen years ago, I went through a very unhealthy marriage, divorce, and severe financial crisis, and then I went through single mom years and all of that. I got to this place where life seemed like everything should be good, and then I was like, “Who am I now? What’s next? How do I deal with all of this stuff? Where does it fit in my story? How do I move forward?”

It happened to coincide with COVID and the pandemic, and I think a lot of us had those moments of normal can be taken away. What do I do next? I don’t want to go back to how it was, but how do I move forward? In that process, that was what I set out to do, and my readers would start to say they saw my spark come back. They saw this vivaciousness, the joy part coming back. They would email me saying, “How do I get my spark back?”

How did they see it? In the way that you were posting. How was that coming across?

I think it was the way I was posting. They would start to see this energy return. What happened was my site kept growing and it exploded during COVID. We went at one point to about 300,000 people liking the page within 6 or 7 months. Very rapidly it grew because I think everybody was home. They’re looking for inspiration.

Looking for good people.

A lot of people started giving me a lot of advice because once I got to a million people there, it became a lot to manage. I had to figure out, “How am I going to do this and keep growing and doing stuff?” The advice, while it was beautiful, became chatter to me. It became noise, and I lost my own footing. I describe it as being in a fog.

The readers saw me going through this process, “I feel like I’m in a fog. I feel like all of that.” It was the same time as COVID. We’re all in this like, “What’s the fog?” Gradually, I started to write about how the fog was lifting. There was this clarity, this North Star. They saw me start to do things that, to them, were like, “How is she doing that?” I ran 1,000 miles in 2022 as part of that journey. I kept pushing.

Was that the goal, to run a thousand miles, or did you kept running and it turned into 1,000 miles?

My brother likes to call me Forrest Gump, but I wasn’t Forrest Gump. It started as a goal to run 899 miles, the distance between my driveway in Nashville to my parents’ driveway in Minneapolis. The goal was there. I was already running, but that goal was there because COVID freaked me out. I thought I needed to prove to my brain that if everything else kept going crazy like that, I could get from my house to my parents. I could see them again because I could walk, I could run.

That’s the goal, and then about a couple of months into it, I had to run about 3 miles a day. I got ahead of schedule, and then my husband said, “What if you ran 1,000 miles?” I’m like, “I can’t do that. It’s 101 miles difference,” but it was interesting. He said, “Have you figured out the difference?” I did the math, and I had to run 0.3 more miles a day. It was mind-blowing.

Everybody who’s tuning in, take that in for a minute. Upping the goal, what seemed like impossible, when you break it down into its smallest pieces, it was insignificant.

What happened because of that was very cool. It meant taking a left out of my driveway and going around the block. The lesson I learned in that process, plus the book came to me during it, was I started looking for tenths, 0.10 of a mile, because there’s a cul-de-sac right by my house. I realized if I ran the cul-de-sac every day, when I got back, after ten days, I would get a mile without even realizing I got a mile. If I were to say, “I’m going to run an extra mile,” I can’t do it. I started looking for that 10%. How can I do this? I would run driveways. I’d find cul-de-sacs because then it became fun, that little bit extra was so motivating for me, and that’s what readers started to see. That’s what they started to hear. I’d start talking about the power of 10% and running or breaking out of uncomfortable.

That’s powerful for people to think about because I’m also somebody who sets big goals. I’m setting a big goal right now. I’m going for the New York Times bestseller list. I know everybody’s like, “That’s impossible. You’re not going to get that. You never even know what they decide to do.” I’m like, “Maybe.” Go big or go home. I live once. If I have a message that I feel passionate about, then I’m going to go for it. I’m going to figure it out. I did a lot of things wrong that I realized up until this point. Maybe it won’t be this time, but maybe it will. If we don’t go for it, then we’re not going to get it. As you said, it breaks down into much smaller pieces when you give yourself that runway. It’s the micro decisions.

I know that’s good. There’s a race that’s on our runway here in Nashville. I’m like, “It’s too flat. I can’t do it.” Those micro-decisions, the goal, I referenced in the book Randy Pausch, and he did The Last Lecture. In The Last Lecture, he talks about how there are these brick walls or speed bumps that people come up to. The goal for most people is it’s a place where they have to stop, “I should stop. It’s too tricky.” He said the successful people are the ones that see the speed bump and figure out how to get around it and to push through. That has been my philosophy for the last ten years. Even now, you and I are both in the midst of a book launch and book campaign. There’s probably a million speed bumps every single day that we face. It’s the courage to allow yourself to feel the emotion of the speed bump, feel whatever it is, and then move beyond it.

 

Reset Moments And Art Of Wondering

We keep moving through it. I call these moments reset moments, where we recognize that maybe we need a new path. Maybe we do need to go around it. Maybe we need to go over it, but we also need to evaluate what our options are. Sometimes, if we are moving too fast, we don’t see the options. We may jump too quickly as to which path. It’s part of what I call a reset mindset. It’s, approaching things from that curious, open place, pushing those boundaries, but also being very intentional about how you’re doing it.

I like that because I call it the art of wondering. I have teenagers, but when they were little, they would wonder all the time, “Why is the sky blue? Why is it like that?” Sometimes as adults, we forget that art of wondering. We forget to ask, “Why am I even doing it this way? Why am I feeling that emotion? Why am I assuming that’s the result?” I love it when you ask that simple question because it takes the pressure off of needing to know the specific answer. It opens the dialogue with our own soul and heart again. It opens that up again versus pushing through so fast that we lose touch with what’s right.

What feels right and what matters. Could you repeat the question? You said when you asked that question?

When you ask the question “Why?” because kids will say, “Why is the sky blue? Why is this?” It’s that wondering, “Why am I feeling anxious? Why do I believe that to be true?” That is a question I ask myself quite often. When you hear that, sometimes it’s like, “You learned that in fourth grade.” I’m going to be 50. I certainly don’t need to follow something that I learned in fourth grade because your brain is good at spitting out the truth to you, but so often we don’t want to go. That’s not the reason. We try to rationalize and find a better reason, but more times than not, that first answer is it.

Understanding The Why

I wanted to challenge you a little bit and hear what you think about this because I’m not a fan of the why question because why can take you down different avenues. Why can take you down blame or make you feel shame, “Why did that happened? Why me?” It’s great when you want to catch a purpose. My question is, how do you ask yourself why so it doesn’t become like if I asked you, “Why did you do that?” You might get defensive and be like, “Because blah, blah, blah.” I like what questions like “What’s happening here?” or “How did we get here?” Walk me through how you ask that question so it doesn’t turn into a negative impact.

I love that you asked that because it’s true. You can go down a line of questioning, and it can go negative. It’s being gentle with yourself. As you said, it can lead to shame, then it would be, “Why am I feeling shame? What is it about that?” Keeping the question, the dialogue going versus, “I’m feeling shame. I’m looking for something to blame.” It’s more of opening up the dialogue in the wondering.

You’re right. It could very well be what or how, or all those adverbs that we learned about. It’s more about being willing to listen. I believe that a lot of us, at least for me growing up in the ’80s and all that, it was such a fast track. You do this, and then it’ll be equal to A or equal to B, and B will be equal to C. We get to these lives, and we do A, and we do B, and we do all the steps, and it looks nothing like what we thought.

We get to what we thought it should be, and we’re like, “This isn’t making me happy.” It’s being willing to go, “Let’s explore that, understand it without judgment.” I believe we’re our worst critics. We judge “I’m feeling shame or I’m feeling embarrassment or all of that.” Instead of I tell myself, “All right, I’m feeling shame. Why? What is it?” Try to understand the root of it, and so often it’s something that “Can I survive doing this?” because I don’t want to wear that cloak of shame. I don’t need it anymore.

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I hear what you’re saying. It’s the state. The reason it works for how you’re doing it and how people need to do it when they want to see success in it is what you said in the beginning. It’s coming from that state of wonder. If you’re in the state of wonder, then you’re curious and you’re diving deeper, and you’re using it for awareness. That’s what clicked for me as you were talking. It must be in that state of wonder. That’s something we probably have to check with ourselves to make sure we’re in that state.

It can be easy to go down that path and spiral into other emotions.

“You suck because.”

“You’re the worst. How come you didn’t give that answer?” Every time I leave a conversation, “Why didn’t I say that or all that?” That doesn’t help when you’re in that cycle of it. You have the reset. For me, it’s a pause. I highly recommend it. I’m feeling that negative emotion, whatever the emotion is that would lead to the wonder. I physically will have to take, “I’m going to take that breath. I’m going to release what I don’t need to have.” I’m going to do that until I’m not so triggered or charged.

Sometimes it takes a long time, or sometimes it takes me running and doing all of that, but until I can get to that spot where the internal emotion is more neutral, it’s very hard to start doing the wondering because all of those other emotions are too high at that point. I know that it needs to come from a place of more neutrality, but also love for the person that’s experiencing that emotion. We’re hard. “You shouldn’t feel that way.” It’s rebuking of, “Don’t be so overly sensitive.” It’s okay. “ I love you for that response. Let’s figure out a better way.”

I love that. Recognizing that emotion as a trigger, and then reducing the intensity of that so we can step into that place of wonder.

That’s a beautiful way to say it. You must be a writer.

Getting Back Your Sparks

Get back your sparks. What are some tips for somebody? We already got a lot of tips, but what else would you say can help somebody feel alive again?

Honestly, we probably all hear this. It’s the idea of breaking out of comfortable or stasis, that status quo, moving through life. When you do something that’s out of your comfort zone, it immediately sparks that “What is that happening?” People will tell me, “Let’s go back to running.” “I can never run. I can’t run. They might like to run, but I can’t.”

They have a whole list of reasons, “I do groups for it. I’ve not done this.” I’ll tell them, “What if you run to that stop sign? Run there and then call it a day. The next day, maybe you run 5 feet beyond that stop sign, then the next day, maybe another 5 feet.” After a while, running to the stop sign is not a big deal anymore. Getting our spark back, we think it’s running the marathon. “Once I run the marathon, I have my spark back.” No. It’s the process.

It’s that whole journey of, “I ran to the stop sign,” and then feeling great, celebrating it, coming home being like, “I ran to the stop sign. I did it.” Allow ourselves to celebrate the small wins. I tell people all the time, the only reason you and I, or people that have moments that get to talk about it, is because we dared to start. We dared to have the moment where we’re like, “I don’t know how this is going to end, but I’m going to try.” It’s the process of trying that is where your spark comes back and ignites, and you get to build it. It doesn’t mean that everything’s perfect. It’s ups and downs and starting again. It’s living that “I’m going to try my best. I’m going to live fully alive.” That allows it to return.

Book Feedback

What’s your favorite response that somebody has had after reading the book?

I got one. It makes me get very emotional about it. It’s people that try things again. It was a friend of a friend of ours that had read the book, and she decided she was going to go golfing with her husband, and she hadn’t golfed in twenty years. She was out there, and one of the things I talk about is you need to allow yourself to be a beginner. Being a beginner when you’re older is trickier because you think, “I should have it all together. There’s a thirteen-year-old that’s doing this perfectly.” She said she got out there, and immediately all the voices came in, “Who do you think you are? You’re going to look like a fool. You’re going to look like an idiot. You’re not even going to hit the ball,” and they were so loud.

She wanted to stop, and then she said, “I remembered the part where you talked about clearing the residue and being a beginner and giving yourself the grace to show up and try.” She said, “Screw it. I’m going to try. I’m going to do this.” She said it was the best day ever. It was amazing because she felt so alive. She got over that little hurdle. That’s what makes me the most excited. It’s all of these women and people saying, “I decided I’m going to try,” and then in that trying, it’s when they start to feel that energy and that excitement again.

Raising Women’s Voice

What didn’t I ask you yet that you want to share?

I talk about this often, especially as women. We live in a time now with the internet where we can support each other. I look back, and I love this opportunity, like you and I are getting to dialogue and talk. For most of history, women have fought and fought for us to be able to have this type of voice, to be able to share, and to do this.

One of the things I believe most strongly in is supporting other women, loving them, showing up, and supporting people in that way, and collaborating, knowing we’re stronger when we’re together. I consider it a complete honor to get to be able to talk and to share on the internet, and to have this voice. What an honor it is to the generations of women that have fought for this very spot that we’re in.

Women are much stronger when they support, love, and collaborate with each other. Share on X

Thanks for sharing that. I’m sure people feel honored to be a part of your group because you’re so authentic and real, and you’re sharing, and it’s making a difference for them.

I love the space online that I’ve created. I call it a sacred space because it’s meant to be a place where we can show up at the table together. We don’t have to agree on everything, but we can show up, have a dialogue, be respectful, and encourage each other to pursue each of our stories. Each of our stories looks so different, and it doesn’t need to be the same to be wonderful. It’s about loving each other in the process.

I think that it’s so important now more than ever that we truly connect. Not just connect online and hit like, but truly make deeper connections. You can do that online. I’ve coached people for years without ever having seen them, and we’ve created a deeper relationship. It’s about what you talk about and seeing each other and listening.

It’s taking that moment. I know that for everybody that responds, and I can’t respond to everybody, but I do know that they are taking a bit of their time from their day to respond to me, and I’m very grateful for that. I recognize they’re going through their day, and for them to pause and say, “I’m grateful for what you’ve written or Thank you very much.”

I try to respond and express gratitude back because without it, it’s a one-way street. It’s just me talking. I wanted to create this community where we could say, “I’m here for you, and I’m here for each other.” For me, that has been the coolest part about doing this book tour. It’s getting to meet so many people in real life who I feel like I’ve known for years.

Reset Mindset

I ask a lot of guests this question. I’ve released the book The Reset Mindset: Get Unstuck, Focus on What Matters Most, and Reach Your Goals Faster. I know you don’t know what it is, but maybe from the name, it gives you an idea. I always ask, how would you define a reset mindset from your perspective and your history, and why is it important today more than ever?

For me, a reset would be, I think back to when my computer would freeze up, and I’d have to do a reset on it. It clears the cache, clears the memory, clears it all, and it’s still the same structure, but it gives me a moment to decide what tabs I need to open and what I need on my screen. For me, a reset doesn’t mean wiping everything out. It means being intentional, pressing the button, letting myself catch my breath, and then deciding, “What do I need to have? What do I need to bring with me? What do I need to adjust, and what do I need to let go of?”

Letting Go

That’s beautiful. I’m so glad that you said the let-go piece because I find that the most important part of resiliency and the most challenging part is letting go. We carry everything with us. We might be moving through it, but it’s hard, it’s heavy, and it keeps pulling us back at times. That’s why I love that word, that it comes with the letting go. As you said, “What can we let go?” Before we get off, I have one more question to ask you around that.

I’m ready for your question.

Do you have a technique or a way that helps you to let go?

I do. I think sometimes we hear let go and we don’t know exactly what it means. We think, “If I let go of it, I’m never going to have to deal with it again.” There’s a lot of stuff in our lives that we have that we can let go of. We’re not pushing it out for our future vision. We’re deciding, “I don’t need that book open right now.”

The technique for me is I talk about if time were a timeline that we could see in our heads, and the future was in your right hand, and the past was in your left, there are certain things in our lives that happened in the past that a lot of us see all the time. It’s always there. We are seeing it through that filter. Letting go means saying in some ways, “I’m going to be brave enough to not have to see this with that intensity today. I’m going to put it on a shelf in front of my timeline. It doesn’t mean that I’m ignoring it. It doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. It’s that I’m choosing today to not allow the intensity of the emotion to dictate what I do next.”

That has been the way that I have learned to let go. Some stuff, I can push it back into the timeline, but there’s other stuff like I got divorced. I can’t erase that. That’s part of the story, but I don’t need to feel the angst of it every day. I can set it down. That’s the way I visualize it.

Very similar to the way that I see it as well. We can detach the emotion from the events. The event happened. We can’t change history, but we can detach that intensity. As you said, that emotion, when we think of it, we’re not in a bucket of tears every time. I believe that when we get the lesson out of it, that helps us to detach, give it new meaning, and move on from it.

I strongly believe in that. I believe that the other thing is you, me, and everybody have a different timeline for how long it takes to get to that spot. It’s giving each other grace for their timeline to get to that spot too. Sometimes, from the outside, I’d be like, “You’re still in that spot?” When I’m in that spot, I’m like, “You know what? I need to process.” One of the things that is a beautiful gift to humans is the respect of knowing that everybody’s timeline for letting go and healing doesn’t match. No one is right and no one is perfect. It’s about loving the person while they’re on that journey.

Episode Wrap-up

Tell us where we can get a hold of your book and hear more about you and the platforms you’re on.

Thank you, I appreciate that. My book is Get Your Spark Back: How to Find Happiness and Reignite Your Life, and you can get it on Amazon, Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and at your independent bookstore. Where I write is at FindingJoy.net, but most people find me on Facebook at Finding Joy Blog. If you search that, you’ll see my face and a little blue check mark that says Facebook has verified me.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you all for being here. If you feel like you’ve lost that spark, this is an opportunity to get that spark back. Maybe you want to turn up the fire. That’s okay too. Turn it up, turn it on, and get living your best life because this is the only one you have. You may have had a lot of things happen in your life. Nobody gets to escape things happening, but we do get to choose what we do with it and what we go forward in life to experience and create. I’ll have you reflect on what it is that you want to create and what it would take to turn it up or get your spark back. Why don’t you get Rachel’s book? That’s a great start and join her communities. My name is Penny Zenker, and this is Take Back Time. We’ll see you in the next episode.

 

Important Links

• www.FindingJoy.net
• The Brave Art of Motherhood: Fight Fear, Gain Confidence, and Find Yourself Again
• Mom Enough: The Fearless Mother’s Heart and Hope
• Get Your Spark Back: How to Find Happiness and Reignite Your Life
• The Reset Mindset: Get Unstuck, Focus on What Matters Most, and Reach Your Goals Faster

 

About Rachel Marie Martin

Rachel believes in the power of the human spirit to overcome, to thrive and to find deep joy and because of that she pours out her heart via these platforms: she is the writer behind the site FindingJoy.net and author of Get Your Spark Back (releasing 8/27/24), Mom Enough and The Brave Art of Motherhood and a founding partner in Audience Industries – a company designed to train and equip entrepreneurs in their ventures. Her articles have been translated into over 25 languages, her site reaches millions of visitors per month and she has a robust, engaged Facebook community.

Her content has been featured in The Today Show, Good Morning America, NPR, The Huffington Post, Tiny Buddha, iVillage, Stuff New Zealand, John Tesh, PopSugar, Motherly, Parents, What to Expect, Star Tribune, Independent Journal Review, Dr. Greene, Power of Positivity, Her View From Home, and many more. She speaks worldwide encouraging others to live each day with purpose and drive. Beyond that, she’s a mom to seven, and calls Nashville, Tennessee, her home.

 

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