The salient point of our discourse centers on the concept of "everyday sparks," which encapsulates the often-overlooked moments that invigorate our lives and rekindle our sense of joy amid the chaos of our daily responsibilities. In this profound conversation with Melissa Smith of Balance and Bloom, we delve into the significance of cultivating presence and conducting energy audits to identify those fleeting yet vital sparks that can enhance our well-being. As we navigate the complexities of life, we discuss the importance of recognizing these micro-sparks, simple joys that can arise from shared moments, such as enjoying a bowl of popcorn with loved ones. We also explore the necessity of loosening our grip on overly scheduled lives, allowing ourselves the freedom to appreciate the beauty in small occurrences. Ultimately, this dialogue serves as a reminder that joy does not necessitate monumental changes; rather, it can emerge from a mindful acknowledgment of the present.

Takeaways:

1. In a world of overwhelming responsibilities, finding one's spark is crucial to maintaining joy and presence.
2. Melissa Smith emphasizes the importance of micro sparks, which are small moments of joy that can significantly enhance our daily lives.
3. An energy audit can help individuals identify their peak productivity times, allowing them to tackle less enjoyable tasks when they are most alert.
4. Service as a legacy is a theme that resonates throughout the conversation, highlighting the intrinsic desire to support and uplift others in our communities.
5. The podcast encourages listeners to appreciate the simple joys in life, such as sharing a bowl of popcorn, to cultivate gratitude and presence.
6. Martin and Melissa discuss the necessity of loosening our grip on the chaotic aspects of life to rediscover joy without requiring drastic changes.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. Balance and Bloom
2. Melissa Smith-LinkedIn

The following audio was used in this episode:

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2. Shapes in the dark - background video music by gis_sweden-- License: Attribution 4.0
3. Sound for a poem 1 by gis_sweden -- License: Creative Commons 0
4. Electronic Minute No 348 - Almost a loop by gis_sweden -- License: Creative Commons 0
5. ATONAL01 by gis_sweden -- License: Creative Commons 0
6. Electronic Minute 382 by gis_sweden -- License: Creative Commons 0

Welcome back to Martin Loves Chaos, the place where we slow down just enough to listen to complexity, make space for curiosity, and learn how to work with chaos as a creative force rather than something we have to eliminate, I'm grateful you're here.

Today's conversation is one that feels especially needed.

So many of us are moving fast, juggling rolls, holding responsibilities, trying to keep everything together.

And somewhere in the middle of the swirl we wonder, where did my spark go?

I'm joined by Melissa Smith of Balance and Bloom for a thoughtful, grounded conversation about everyday sparks.

The small, often overlooked moments that sustain us, give us purpose, and help us rediscover joy.

In the middle of full calendars and full lives, we talk about presence, energy audits, microsparks, service as legacy, and what it means to loosen our grip when life feels over, scheduled and tight.

If you've been craving a reminder that joy doesn't require a life overhaul, that sometimes it's found in a bowl of popcorn shared on a couch, this conversation is for you.

Take a breath, settle in.

Let's step into the complexity together.

Melissa welcome to Martin Loves Chaos.

Thank you Martin.

Thank you for having me on your podcast.

Yes, I am the founder of a health and wellness coaching practice called Balance and Bloom.

I mostly work out of my home in private one on one coaching sessions, although I do have some corporate clients that I visit to talk to their leadership or their employees about things like absenteeism, about just overall wellness, ways to be joyful, ways to just be healthier in the workplace.

What is alive for you right now as we sit together?

Whether it's something that came in this week or just this morning, this is.

A question that I feel is very timely because this morning I had to stop myself and ask myself that this week was a little crazy with some sickness in the house and the sports and the typical things that a lot of us have going on a daily basis.

And I felt like my grip on things was very tight, like I was really over scheduled and really tight grip on the outcomes and what was going on with everything between work and the kids.

And so I told myself this morning that it's just about presence today and I was only going to live in the hour of the day.

Right now is 11 o'.

Clock, I'm living in 11 o'.

Clock.

I'm not thinking about what's happening tonight at 5 or tomorrow at noon and that has really helped me to calm down today and kind of loosen that grip.

I appreciate you acknowledging like, oh, I'm here right now.

Where do I Need to be?

How do I need to show up?

What is important at this moment?

Sure.

It's helping me too.

All of us, we're not just an individual.

We're not just one person.

We're not just individual in this one moment.

We do carry a lot of things from the past, whether it's our ancestors, our family, our upbringing, our current family.

Can you share a little bit about your background?

What brings you to this point?

What are some storylines that bring you to Balance and Bloom today?

Just to help give people sort of a little story of how you arrived to this moment.

You mentioned ancestors and so I think about my family and we are.

I'm from a long line of people that like to be of service of others.

I have a lot of educators in my family.

I have a lot of nurses.

My mom works at a nursing home.

She's been there for 20 years.

I feel like it is innate in my Persona to want to continue that legacy and help others.

I do this through coaching at Balance in Bloom because people don't get to open up to others like they may want to.

They don't.

They're not heard like they should be and without judgment, with eye contact, without being interrupted.

That is being of service and that is what they teach you in health and wellness coaching so people can feel better.

That is how I feel.

I'm giving back of service and I surround myself with expanders, with people that are lifting others up, people that remind me to lift myself up if I need that reminder.

It's in my blood to want to be of service.

It's part of my heritage.

Do you have any stories from your childhood or family that really bring out that concept of service?

Whenever I think about service, I always think about my mom because she has been in the service industry since I can remember.

When I grew up, she was a stay at home mom, but she always watched other people's children.

Our house was always filled with babies.

Now she's taking care of older people.

And it's similar the needs of babies and the needs of the elderly.

They need contact, constant attention and somebody that is soothing and that is just a good person.

And my mom said to me one day that she has two missions when she's with the people that she cares for.

She said it is to give a compliment and to get a compliment.

And giving a compliment, she said always perk somebody up.

But the getting the compliment, it's not like for reasons of being vain, but it's just to feel good.

It gives her that little spark and I Think that those two things working in tandem is a really sweet concept.

So I try to think about that, because if you get a compliment throughout the day, it's like something that sticks with you.

It's.

It doesn't matter how small it is, it makes you feel good.

She likes to bring joy to others, but she's also really good at receiving joy.

Made me think of yesterday.

I was in a meeting with a.

A couple people I'm doing some coaching sessions with, and we all had a moment to share a little appreciation of each other.

It was really neat to see the full picture of that person from different angles.

When you're getting the appreciation or compliment, sometimes it's hard.

I don't know is that really me?

So being able to receive it is just as important, and I do connect very much with that.

Thank you for that story.

Nature of this podcast is about casts and working with cast, and I have a seed that I'm working with these days, which is this idea that we all have a chaos that is our comfort level, our wheelhouse, the place that we function really well.

Other people look at you and go, wow, Martin, I could never deal with that amount of chaos or that type of chaos.

I would love to hear from you, what are those environments or situations that you go into and immediately know how to handle it?

And other people look at it and go, wow, Melissa, never in a million years would I ever want to deal with that aspect of.

Of our work, of our life, of our situation.

The first thing that comes to mind is when people really get to know me.

They say to me, a lot of times, how in the world do you fit it all in?

To me, it's just time management.

I have my practice.

I'm studying for my national boards to be certified in health and wellness coaching.

I have three teenage sons.

I have two dogs.

I'm a basketball coach.

I'm a flag football coach.

I'm a Sunday school teacher.

I'm on the pto.

I'm the board president at one of my son's schools.

The other one.

I'm on the board making a lot of the decisions.

To somebody that doesn't have all of those things going on, they might say, how do you fit that all in?

It's actually, for me, it's about the time that I have and making it matter.

So those things are all important to me.

When I look at my calendar and I see those things, I like doing those things.

They're important to me.

So it's not like I ever say, I don't have any time because I really try to fit in the things that matter.

Many of us overestimate how busy we actually are.

We're just putting things on our calendars that we don't even actually enjoy.

And so if we could eliminate those somehow, either by setting a boundary or by delegating or there's a lot of different ways that we can eliminate those things that don't bring us joy, then we have more time for the things that actually do bring us joy.

So I do not like vacuuming.

I don't like it at all.

One time I avoided vacuuming for a few days until it got really bad.

And then I said to myself, okay, I'm going to vacuum and time how long it takes me to do this.

And it took me seven minutes to get done with everything that I wanted to get done.

And I thought to myself, why did I avoid this for so long for seven minutes?

So I would recommend doing that for the different chores or things in your life that you don't like doing, time it and see how long it really takes.

Because I think a lot of times we overestimate the time that something's going to take because we are just trying to avoid it.

Families, they create a lot of chaos, a lot of structures, and sometimes having to do things that we don't always want to do.

One of my children, we have them taking care of just emptying out the dishwasher.

They have one little chore, and we want them to do it right away when they get home from school, take care of it, get it out of the way.

And they always wait till the last minute to do it.

And even then, it's like they wait past the last minute, but when they actually sit down and do it, it takes them 10 minutes at most to do it.

If you just did this earlier, you'd be all done out of the way, and it would have created a lot less hassle for the rest of the family because all the dishes are piling up.

If you just took care right away and it's only 10 minutes, it'd be done and out of the way.

You mentioned that we fill our time with things that may not bring us as much joy, may just make drudgery, which makes us put things off.

And going back to your story of having to vacuum and then ultimately time and go, oh, it only takes 10 minutes.

But that's still something we need to do.

And there's many things in our family lives and our work lives that are sometimes don't bring us joy, but you still need to get them done.

How do you balance that with the things that bring you joy?

How do you go back and forth between those aspects?

So I have done an energy audit on myself and it's something that I have in my practice as well, especially when I go into corporate situations where you try to realize your energy and where it's at throughout the day.

I am a morning person.

This morning I was up at 3:30 and I'm just going, I have, I will have a lot of energy until about maybe 2 or 3 o' clock this afternoon.

So if there's anything that has to get done that I'm not looking forward to, now's the time to do it.

Because now's the time that I have the energy and the brain capacity to say, okay, just get it done, just do it.

Melissa whereas after 3 o' clock today I will not be so kind to myself because I'll be more tired and I'll have been up for 12 hours already.

I take the things that I look forward to less and do those when I have more energy.

So I just heard a great little tool there, an energy audit.

Can you expand on that a little bit?

Everybody has certain times of the day when you feel more energized, more clear headed.

You don't have that brain fog.

If you're a morning person, maybe six o' clock when you get up.

I found from doing this energy audit over and over that people crash and have a drop between 2 and 3 o' clock in the afternoon.

It's after lunch.

That might be when you want to go out and take a walk, have a cup of tea or do something to get the blood flowing.

And then there's other people that have a lot of energy at night and so through the morning they don't want to stack the things that they are not looking forward to.

They're going to wait till the end of the day.

So that might be cleaning, making a phone call to somebody that they might not be looking forward to talking to, but it's something that they have to do.

Knowing where your high energy points are throughout the day is when you can do some of those things that you may not be looking forward to as much.

I really like the idea that it's individual.

I know for me a lot of times energy, it's even when there's something I'm very passionate about, such as when I love editing podcasts, I'll sit there and I'll like power through whenever it is.

Even in a time that I know I Have brain frog.

A lot of times if I don't have that thing that energizes me.

So I like the idea that noticing when you have more energy put some of those things that might take more brain power and energy to complete.

Getting to the work world now in balance and bloom.

I noticed on your website you have these things that you do with people called spark sessions.

So I called myself the Spark Coach.

Everything revolves around sparks.

And that's because when I was going through my health and wellness program and talking to people, this one person told me she looked like she had it all together.

She is a lawyer and she has three kids.

Everybody's doing well, great marriage, it looks great on paper.

And what she said to me really stuck.

She said, I just am not all that happy.

For some reason, I feel like I've lost my spark.

It just clicked.

And since then, many people have said the same thing to me but in a different way, without using the word spark.

So spark can mean anything, can mean I no longer enjoy my career.

I am not happy with the way that I've been feeling.

I don't like the way that I look.

A spark can mean so many different things to so many different people.

And so my spark sessions are ways to reignite that spark.

But it's not something that I'm trying to fix on my clients.

It's something that I'm getting them to notice how to fix themselves.

Because I don't know what's going to bring your spark back.

You do.

But a lot of times my clients don't know that they have it in them because they've only been told by others, you should do this, you should do that, or they are learning from someone else that they see on TikTok or Instagram that they've done this or they've done that.

But really we all have it in ourselves to bring back our own sparks.

And so my job as the spark coach is to ask you the questions and to get you to that place where you have the confidence so that when you're done with the spark sessions, you're able to do it on your own the next time you feel like you've lost your spark.

What are some things that you do to help stay in that coaching mindset?

I use a lot of reflection.

It's a lot of open ended questions.

Most of coaching is curiosity.

It's just being curious and digging a little bit deeper each time.

Because my job is to get my client to say the things that they either have been ignoring or only say in their own head, but saying it out loud, and it's not for my benefit, it's for theirs.

Because there have been so many times that my clients have said, that's a really good idea, but it wasn't my idea.

It was something they came up with on their own.

I just repeated it back to them.

The coaching relationship is different from a therapist, and both of them are needed.

In some situations, people want coaching because they're tired of being told what to do.

In fact, some people will turn around and say, I don't want to be told what to do anymore.

Where do you turn when that happens?

You turn internally.

And that's what a coach's job is.

So this makes me remind me of Otto Scharmer, who's a systems thinking person out of mit.

Through a lot of his research, he had someone came up with this concept.

Everyone knows what changes they need to make or.

Or how to fix the system or do something better, but we keep repeating the same errors.

A lot of his practices in systems thinking is to really pause and listen in a coaching session, which you're actually doing is giving them the space to just listen to themselves, which is very precious.

And like you said, it's a.

If you get them to have that idea on their own, even if they think it's coming from you, it's ultimately coming from them.

They're probably more likely to act on it or go, ah, a spark has just happened, as you mentioned.

Yes, I love that we've been talking about chaos and you shared a little bit of your structure, your methods and thinking of time and connecting with passion.

How do you feel your engagement with chaos or your version of chaos has changed over time.

I used to move through it very blindly where I would say, why is this happening to me right now?

When things feel like they're out of your control?

And now I trust that it's there for a purpose, to teach me something.

It's there for a reason.

Something that I visualize is cleaning out a closet.

When I look in my closet, I see chaos sometimes, right?

I see purses and shoes and tons of clothes and maybe some things that don't even belong in there.

And in order to make that, you actually have to make it worse because you have to pull all of that stuff out of your closet and make an even bigger mess.

Then slowly you put the things back in that belong in there, and you put it on the right shelves and on the right hangers and in the right spaces, and then you're okay.

Now I'm good, but you can't get to the good until you get to the worst, until it's completely chaotic and messy.

And so I think about that, especially when I'm at that point when it seems like I have no control over anything.

I know that any second change is going to happen and things will start to get less messy and a little cleaner.

That's my cleaning method as well.

Many times my family members go, this room was a mess before and now it's really messy.

What happened?

I go, I'm pulling everything apart and putting it back into its place and figuring out what do you keep, what do you get rid of?

Because if you just push it all off to the side, you're not actually taking care of it.

You did post in our little workbook a question you wish I would ask, but if someone feels stuck in chaos, what's the first realistic step towards flow without overhauling your entire life?

I would say that it is micro sparks.

This seems to resonate a lot with people and I describe it as the opposite of a trigger.

So a micro spark is something that you notice throughout your day.

Hopefully it's many some things that make you pause and it brings you joy.

For example, the other night I had come downstairs and I have a 16 year old, a 14 year old and a 12 year old.

The two older ones were on the couch and they were sitting right next to each other and sharing a bowl of popcorn, which I don't typically see.

I turn and I just thought, wow, that's nice to see that.

And I was really glad that moment didn't pass me by because I'm still thinking about it.

I could have been in a rush and I don't even know what I was doing, but I was just doing chores and stuff and it made me stop.

What I would recommend to your listeners is enjoying those micro sparks that you see.

It can be a pack of deer on the side of the road, something with your family, or it can be something that you see in a restaurant too.

It looks like like a couple that's been married for a long time sharing food or something to those ideas that just bring you joy.

Because when you're noticing those things, you're more joyful.

And then you can pass that ripple effect to the next person you meet.

Hopefully that ripple effect can bring more sparks into people's days.

That sounds like a great thing for our listeners to do in the next day and the next time.

Have you ever heard of Ross Gay?

So he has the what sparks joy?

What moments of awe is A lot of his conversation, this connects very much.

He has this one book that he did because every day he wanted to think of something that created awe for him that day and he wrote it down in his journal.

Every day he created a book that is basically a story of that whole experience.

As you do that, you start to notice all these little moments of joy.

I use it a lot in my meditation groups when I'm trying to help.

Just taking a moment and waiting at the bus stop with your kid and noticing that a deer walked through your yard some point last night and just go, ah, there's some other beings here.

And how can we start to connect more to what's present in our world?

I think there's a lot of great things here for our listeners.

I really do appreciate you joining.

I would love for you to share a way that people could connect with you as well as follow up with you to find their own little ways to create sparks.

So I can be found on my website, which is balanceandbloom life.

I am on Instagram balanceandbloom.

I have a LinkedIn page just under Melissa Smith.

I'm very active.

I write a lot about micro sparks and about positivity, you know, about just wellness all around.

And I'm also on TikTok underneath the spark.

Coach.

As we come to a close, I just want to say thank you, Melissa, for bringing your presence, your steadiness and your spark into this conversation.

Thanks, Martin.

Appreciate it.

So I want to close out by encouraging my audience to sort of listen to what Melissa was saying, identify those sparks, notice them, name it, see where it lands, either in your own self, in the environment around you.

Just take a moment to pause and notice the sparks in our everyday life.

And with that, one last thank you to Melissa from Balance and Balloon for helping people with this and thank you, thank you for joining.

Martin loves chaos.

I'm Martin.

Keep listening, keep noticing, keep working with beautiful complexity of your life.

And as always, welcome to the swirl.