Transcript
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Hello everybody and welcome once again to the unlearned podcast.
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I'm your host with Abigail aka Ra, and this is freedom friday, where we come and share something we've unlearned recently and how it has made us just a little bit more free and listen.
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This is the first Freedom Friday of 2025.
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And it's the first episode of the Unlearned Podcast in its third year of existence and I am very, very humbled and grateful for everyone who has been rocking with us from day one.
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Thank you for your support, thank you for your encouragement, thank you for your comments, thank you for sharing, thank you for listening.
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Um, man, we're just going to continue to grow this unlearned community.
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We're going to be doing some interesting, fun new things where hopefully step it up a little bit this year, uh, and continue to get to know.
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Uh, get to know you all, um, and get to know what this unlearning experience is like together.
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So, thank y'all once again.
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Uh, one of the new things that we're going to be doing that we would love for you to tune into is, on January 14th, we're going to do our very first Facebook live event.
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Myself and co-host Jaquita Ross will be doing it at 7 PM central, 8.
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Eastern and we're going to kick off our first episode in the series we're embarking on here in the next couple of months, for the next couple of months, and we're going to be doing our first recording live.
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So we want you guys to join us.
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So make plans to join us on Facebook Live 7 pm Central, 8 pm Eastern.
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We're excited.
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We want to hear from you guys, we want to know who you are, we want you to experience our first episode of 2025 together.
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So that's that.
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And then on next Friday, I'm going to have an incredible guest and friend of mine, kena Burks, to join us for Freedom Friday.
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It's been a while since we've had a guest on Freedom Friday, and so it'll be a different format.
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It'll be a little lengthier and a little bit more meat, and she's going to share her unlearning journey with us.
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So thank you in advance for tuning into those things y'all.
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So, again, if you are unfamiliar with Freedom Friday, what we do every Friday is drop something that we've been unlearning recently, right, and how we're more free as a result and I just got one real quick thing right Is I've been doing a lot of.
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I'm in this leadership cohort and it's been an incredible blessing in my life, and we're in this stage where we're kind of really what we call what they call a breakthrough plan.
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So it's this idea of what is it that you need to really do personally and in the work that you do, to break through.
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Where is your breaking point?
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What are the things that you, what are the highest points of leverage that you need to focus on so that these smaller things can actually help you to break through to the next level of your life and of your work.
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Okay, so we have to create this plan and we started doing it.
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We're doing it in chunks and I am a planner Like I am not somebody who doesn't plan.
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I am actually a pretty good planner.
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I think I may be too good of a planner.
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I might plan too much.
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I'm definitely one of those people who over plans, like I.
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I love the idea of sitting down and thinking through a plan and thinking through a strategy, thinking of the how, how do we do what it is?
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We say we want to do right, and I do that pretty well.
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But doing that for a while I will say this and it's gonna sound weird and maybe to y'all it's not, but for me it just clicked and I didn't realize.
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I didn't realize how important understanding this was, that it is futile.
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And this is what we need to learn or, I'm sorry, unlearn planning.
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We need to unlearn that planning you can plan without a solid vision.
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We need to unlearn spending so much time on the plan and little time on the vision.
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What I mean by that is, once you make these plans, you start moving in these plans where we at least where I have made mistakes before is man, these are excellent plans, these things are going to work.
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I know they're going to work because you know they make sense.
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Right, this leads to that, leads to this leads to that, but without spending enough time on where you want to land.
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What's the actual vision?
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Where are you really going with this?
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It's really easy to plan and create steps that make sense, but if you don't have an actual destination in mind, that's not even to say that it'll actually be the destination you would arrive at.
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But if you don't have a destination in mind, what is the purpose of making all these plans?
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And I think that when we come to the beginning of the year, we are so excited about plans.
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We make all these plans.
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I'm going to work out more.
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I'm going to eat better.
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I'm going to do better with my finances.
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I'm going to do I'm going to read out more.
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I'm going to eat better.
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I'm going to do better with my finances.
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I'm going to do, um, I'm going to read more books.
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I'm going to, you know, start being on time to work.
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I'm going to start to, you know, um, I'm going to build better relations with my family.
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I'm going to build a better, better relation with my spouse.
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I'm gonna spend more time with my kids.
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I'm gonna do all these things and my question is how much have you thought about what that looks like when it happens?
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How much have you thought about, if I want to get my finances together, why?
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What's the vision for that?
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Because I can do.
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Y'all know I'm a Dave Ramsey fan.
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I can do.
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I can read his book Total Money Makeover.
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I could do Financial Peace University, because I know it's the right thing to do and I know I need to get my life together with my money.
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But if I don't actually have a vision for what I would like that to turn into, what will that look like for me when my money looks different than it does today?
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What will what?
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How will my life look, and what about?
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That is actually exciting, right?
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How will my life look when my money changes?
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How will my life look when my relationships are better?
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How will my life look after a month of eating healthier?
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How does my life look?
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Here's the thing If you don't have, if you haven't answered that question of how will my life look, the chances of you continuing on with the plans that you have made are slim to none.
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I don't know if any of you know this, but January 10th and I just found this out I don't know how widespread and corroborated it is, so take this with a grain of salt, but I thought it was interesting.
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January 10th is apparently national quitting day.
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Apparently, it is quitter's day for January 10th.
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Why?
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Because most people stop and they quit their New Year's resolutions on January 10th, which is wild to me, because that is literally 10 days later.
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10 days after January 1st, we done stopped going to the gym, we done stopped eating healthy, we have stopped budgeting, we have stopped making those phone calls to our family members.
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We have stopped doing those things 10 days, just 10 days after we started.
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And I think that one of the reasons it's so easy to quit is because we've spent more time.
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We've spent more time determining the how and not seeing the picture.
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We, we've.
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We've read books on how to do things.
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We've become motivated.
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You know, we've, we've.
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Some of us are moving because we're guilty.
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It's like oh, I know I'm wrong, I got to do better, I got to do better, I got to do better.
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And so we make these plans to do better.
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We get the calendar out, we make the meal plans, we go to the grocery store, we do all the things we're supposed to do, and then on day 10, we're stuck, we quit, we're back.
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We're back to eating out.
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We're back at Chick-fil-A.
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Well, that might be my problem, not yours, but we're back at Chick-fil-A.
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We are back going to sleep at midnight instead of at 10 o'clock, the way we said we were.
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We're back to our old habits.
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We're back to doing what we were doing in 2024 when we said we're going to do something different this year.
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My challenge is unlearn that the problem is your plan.
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Your plan probably is pretty good.
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It's your lack of vision.
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It's your lack of vision.
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It's the fact that you haven't spent enough time falling in love with the you that actually is on the other side of the plan.
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You don't love the you that's on the other side.
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Yet, because if you love the you that's on the other side of your plan, you wouldn't stop your plan.
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You would do everything you could to get to that version of yourself or that version of your life.
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So what is that version?
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What is it?
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What does it look like?
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Have you and I'm not talking about a vision board, which I love, I love those.
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I think that's a great first step.
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Vision boards, though, sometimes can be very scattered, like I've done.
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Vision boards, you know, it's the concept.
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If you're not familiar, as you, you kind of you take it's.
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It's a creative, uh, artistic way of of painting a picture of what you, some things that you would like to see in your life.
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And again, I think it's a great start.
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You know, a lot, of a lot of times you take, uh, magazines or things like that, maybe old books, old newspapers, and you cut out things that represent what you'd like to see for your life.
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Again, excellent, excellent method.
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I've done it several times.
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I love it, I think it's great, I think it's a first step.
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If you've done a vision board, now you have to focus in on something right, because you can't create one plan for 20 things and for 20 visions the vision for your life.
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One of the things that I have learned in this program is, when I think about vision, I think about something just being almost insurmountably big, right, and I think we talk about vision like that a lot.
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Well, you got to have a big vision.
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You got to have a big vision, paint a big picture.
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You know it's got to be almost unreachable in order for, you know, to get people excited about, to get you excited about it.
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And I do think that's one element of visioning, but I think another one is a very realistic element of visioning where you can actually begin to see.
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Realistic element of visioning where you can actually begin to see hey, in three years, this is where I want to be, in three years, I want to own a home.
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I want that.
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I remember when I was in my 20s I said and I had this and I was very committed to this vision I want to be debt-free.
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And the reason I wanted to be debt-free wasn't just because I was going to be debt-free, it's because I wanted to buy a house, I wanted to live in a house, I wanted to be a homeowner, I saw myself as a homeowner.
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I saw myself living in a place that was totally mine and I didn't have to.
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I wasn't.
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I could do what I wanted to do.
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I didn't have to call anybody to make changes.
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I could come and go as I please.
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I didn't have to worry about you know, I just not that you can't do that with a house that you rent in, but you understand what I'm saying.
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Like I just it was this vision of, hey, this is mine and I own something that's an asset and I've started.
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I felt like for me, that was like man, this feels like my first huge adult move and I wanna do that.
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Right, and I was very committed to that.
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I saw myself as an owner of something, and for me it was a house at the time.
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And well, that vision I kept that at the forefront of my brain, which meant that I needed to be debt free.
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I believe that that was the best way to buy a house was debt free.
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I needed to do that.
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So then I had to take a step back and say, okay, what do I need to do to be debt free?
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All right, so now I need to make plans as to how I need to be debt free and it's what kept me on the debt free path was my vision of myself, of owning something.
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So whenever I got an extra paycheck, extra money for something, or if I was doing a different gig, or I took extra students for piano that I was teaching at the time, or there was an opportunity for me to do a conference, and I would go there and I would play there.
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You know anything?
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Right, I've played on a Sunday morning, whatever it was.
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For me it was music, if you can't tell.
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I did a lot of.
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I did a lot of things like that, got little paychecks here and there and went towards the debt, goes to the debt court, goes towards the debt.
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Why?
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Because I was like I want to get this house, I envision myself in this house, I want to get the house I want, I want to be a homeowner.
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That's what I want to do.
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Now, that was me.
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You might have a totally different vision and once I got on that path, it didn't take long, took about three years of real intentionality of getting out of the rest of my debt and buying that home.
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So what I love about this is like you got to see yourself, but you don't have to see yourself 20 years out.
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You don't have to see yourself 10 years out.
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You can see yourself two years out, two or three years.
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Where do you want to be in two or three years?
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What do you really want?
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And don't don't, don't get hung up on whether it's possible or not.
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What do you want?
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Ask yourself, where do you want to be in 10 years, I'm sorry, in two years, in three years?
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Where do you actually see yourself?
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And then, what are the actual steps that need to be taken to get you there?
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And that's where your planning comes in.
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We have to unlearn.
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Man Like we can't.
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We can't plan and not have a vision.
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Stop spending so much time on the plan and spend more time on the vision, because then your plans will actually have meaning and purpose and you will stand a chance of sticking it out.
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And don't quit after 10 days.
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You won't quit after 10 days.
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If you have fallen in love with the you on the other side of those plans, all right, that's it.
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I will see you guys on Tuesday, again, seven o'clock Central, eight o'clock Eastern Facebook Live.
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We're gonna do this first event.
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Y'all welcome back to the Unlearned Podcast and let's keep unlearning together.
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We're going to do this first event.
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Y'all welcome back to the Unlearned Podcast and let's keep unlearning together so that we can experience more freedom.
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Thank you once again for listening to the Unlearned Podcast.
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We would love to hear your comments and your feedback about the episode.
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Feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram and to let us know what you think.
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We're looking forward to the next time when we are able to unlearn together to move forward towards freedom.
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See you then.