Mary Morrissey’s junior year of high school started out like a fairy tale.
She was class president and a homecoming princess, starred in the school play, made excellent grades and dated a college boy. The future was bright.
But when she became pregnant at the end of the school year in 1966, she says her mother wept for her as if she had died. Summoned to the principal’s office, she was informed that she would not be allowed to return for her senior year.
“'It would be inappropriate for a pregnant girl to get mixed in with the normal girls,'” Morrissey remembers him saying.
Instead, she could attend a high school “for pregnant girls and delinquent boys” at night.
Then, the moms of the girlfriends she’d had since the fourth grade decided they didn’t want their daughters associated with her anymore.
“'I lost my best friends; I lost my school, the student body, the world that I had known,'” Morrissey says. “Unconsciously, I’m sure I adopted some of the rejection and the feeling of, ‘Now this must make me a bad person.'”
Her family hastily cobbled together a small wedding and, instead of the excitement of a normal teenage summer break, she was enrolled in an advanced course in adulting.
A Diagnosis and a Turning Point
Morrissey graduated in May 1967, and by July, she was in the intensive care ward of a Portland, Oregon, hospital, battling a fatal kidney disease. One kidney had to be removed, and the other was 50% destroyed by nephritis. After kidney-removal surgery, the doctors gave her six months to live.
At the time, her son was 7 months old, and she was terrified she’d never get to see him take his first steps, let alone live out her dreams of becoming a teacher.
But then a visitor changed everything.
The night before her surgery, a chaplain asked if she’d like to pray—then gave her permission to think differently about her life. She asked about the past year or two and, after hearing her story, said: “Mary, everything’s created twice.... The bed you’re lying on, the nightgown you’re wearing, the sheet covering you, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, all the machinery you’re hooked up to—all of that had to be a thought before it could be a thing.”
Then she asked a powerful question: What if the toxic thoughts she had about herself were related to the toxicity rampaging her body?
Morrissey never considered that the mind and body were connected. The idea that everything begins in the mind before it manifests in the external world was a completely foreign concept. In those days, doctors were like deities, so when they told her she didn’t have a chance of survival, she believed them.
But the chaplain believed something else.
She asked Morrissey to imagine funneling the toxicity and negative feelings into the diseased kidney. That way, when the kidney was gone, the thoughts would be, too. Then, she invited her to visualize something scary: the future.
She told her to picture herself walking her son into his kindergarten class and then into her own classroom. Then, fast forward to an auditorium where she hears her son’s name being called as he walks across a stage, holding up his diploma.
Six months after surgery, Morrissey found herself in a room with the surgeon, urologist and other baffled doctors who told her that her formerly nephritis-riddled remaining kidney was now functioning as a healthy kidney. Instead of estimating her lifespan, they gave her advice: Keep doing whatever she was doing, because it was working.
Fast forward to Morrissey in a Portland State University lecture where the teacher said, “Nothing is bad unless you think it’s bad.... There’s always a seed of good in everything. That seed has to be found, planted and nurtured.”
Then he gave her some homework: The next time something happened that felt bad, hit the pause button and wait three days. During that time, Morrissey was instructed to look for any possible good that could be found, thereby planting a new thought in her mind.
When her husband lost his job the following week, and she was beginning to panic about finances, she told him about the pause button. Instead of being negative, he started thinking about possibilities: a job closer to home with shorter hours and better pay. He became excited instead of scared.
The next day, he applied to a few jobs, and the following day, he had a new job so close to home he could ride his bike, work fewer hours and make more money than he did in his previous job.
After seeing so many things align with what the chaplain taught her in the hospital, she changed course from the traditional teaching path she’d set for herself and decided to spearhead a new movement.
Building a Movement
“In the ‘70s, we didn’t have coaching [or] personal development,” she says. “That whole industry—I was one of the people who helped found it and build it.”
Starting as a spiritual teacher and minister, then becoming a life coach, author and sought-after speaker, Morrissey has helped people live a life they love through multiple pathways throughout the past 40 years—all rooted in the idea that your thinking is what gets you where you want to be.
She founded the Brave Thinking Institute in 2006 in a quest to create a reliable, repeatable and accessible system for transformation. She and her team help people in 151 countries across the world create lives they love through programs, live events, courses, masterminds and coaching certifications.
“There’s this gift called life that’s moving through us and then gives us complete free rein,” she says. “You get to think any thought you want. You get to choose your own actions. You have complete dominion here. What do you want to create? Because you’re going to create results... one of two ways. Either by design, which is a vision, or default, which is the old thinking lived over and over again.”
The brave part, she says, is breaking free from the default thinking and living from a vision. If she had stuck to her default thinking, she may have never left that hospital. She may never have seen her son graduate, let alone meet her second child. She would have missed her purpose in transforming lives, living out her dream of being a teacher in a way she never imagined.
“Life is not happening to me,” she shares. “Life is happening with me.... I’m the one who gets to choose my thoughts.”
Featured image © Richard Luu
This article was first published in the March/April 2026 issue of SUCCESS Magazine. Get your copy here.
