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Nov. 1, 2024

Freedom Friday: Stop Hoarding Your Vision!

Freedom Friday: Stop Hoarding Your Vision!

What happens when you let go of sole ownership and embrace the power of a shared vision? Having carried the weight of my ideas alone for too long, I share my revelations on creating a vision that is owned and evolved by everyone involved. Through strategies like discussing ideas rather than just communicating them, welcoming others' contributions, and embracing the inevitable changes that come with collective input, we can not only lighten our burdens but also ensure the sustainability and growth of our visions.


Chapters

00:09 - Shared Vision Unlearning and Trust

11:19 - Creating Together Towards Freedom

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.

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So this one today is for my visionaries, people who have ideas, people who are always wanting to build something, start from scratch.

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It's also for those who like coming alongside those people and enjoy building stuff.

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Right, I am a visionary.

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I like starting things from scratch.

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I love, you know, just a blank slate.

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There's a problem that needs to be solved or there's there's there's an opportunity to do something different.

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Let's figure out what that can be.

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Right, I absolutely love that.

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So, in that, though, something that I've had to unlearn and it's a pretty recent unlearning unlearn and it's a pretty recent unlearning.

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Something that I've had to unlearn, is that the best.

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I have to unlearn this idea of my vision.

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Right, you have to unlearn this idea of your vision.

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The reality is number one.

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If you're a believer, anything that you get, if you're a believer in Christ, anything that you get, is not your vision, it's God's vision, okay, so we're just going to put that there, but then, just in general, like when you get a vision right and you get something.

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What we don't realize is that what comes with that is it can be kind of heavy, right?

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Maybe you've got an idea for an organization.

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You've got an idea for a project you want to do.

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You've got an idea for a song like to do.

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You've got an idea for for a song like you're creative, you have that.

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Um, you have an idea of a new way to teach a class.

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You have an idea for a curriculum.

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You have, you know idea for how to design a house, whatever it is right.

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You have a vision for something and very quickly, visions can become kind of weighty and burdensome when you feel like it's yours, when you feel like you have it and now I have.

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Now it's my responsibility to carry this out.

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And one of the things I've been unlearning lately is this concept of my vision right, how do we move it from my vision, from your vision, to our vision and create a shared vision?

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Right, it sounds like a simple concept, but if we're honest at least if I'm honest it's hard for me to let go of what started off in my head.

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Um, one of the things I've had to unlearn is that we.

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We have to.

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In order for a vision to be sustained, it needs to be held by more than one person.

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So you can have an idea, but once in a time, what we do is we come with that idea.

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We say, okay, guys, this is my vision, here's what I need you to do, right?

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That's kind of the way that it happens.

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My vision is what I need you to do, and you have people that have been like yes, absolutely, I want to do that, I will help you do that.

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But the problem with that is the responsibility.

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The weight of the realization of the vision is still on that one person.

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You feel it right, as opposed to taking a different approach.

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So here's like three things that I think are really important a different way of thinking about a vision, right.

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Thinking about an idea.

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Again, this is for people who are visionaries, who have the ideas, and then also people who come alongside and say I just want to do it because I think there's a responsibility for those people as well to shift the mindset Right.

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So the first thing is, if you're visionary, one of the things instead of just communicating the vision, here's my vision, right.

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Instead of just communicating it, discuss it.

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So open it up for discussion, right?

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So don't just communicate it, but discuss it.

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So open it up for discussion, right?

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So don't just communicate it, but discuss it.

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What does that do?

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It brings other people's thoughts into your vision, which starts off as your vision, and as their thoughts begin to mold what you bring to the table, it becomes our vision, right?

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It becomes something that we share, which can be very scary because, especially if you've lived for, lived with something in your mind for a long time and it's like yo, like this is the thing I see and this is what I want to see out in the world, and then you bring it to the table, other people start to contribute to it.

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It's going to change and you have to be okay with that changing if you want it to sustain and if you don't want to be burdened by yourself with it.

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You can have people that work for you or work with you, and if you have a shared vision, you have people that are working with you to accomplish the thing that we are creating.

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Right, you might be the beginning, you might start the conversation, but you aren't the only, but you're not necessarily the only person in the conversation anymore, and so by the time you leave, it's less of a.

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I just told you what I have in my head.

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It's I'm telling you what I'm thinking.

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I want you to add to it and then we'll come with what we are thinking.

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Right, so don't just communicate it.

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Bring it up for discussion.

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Let people contribute to the initial vision, to the initial idea, Because the second thing to remember is that when others contribute, it doesn't because it's no longer yours, it's ours.

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Again, that's a very hard concept you have.

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We have to learn to let go visionary.

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Sometimes I find that the the hardest thing, one of the hardest things for creatives and people that are naturally just create things to do.

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One of the hardest things is to take criticism, is to be asked questions about what do you mean by this?

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This doesn't really make as much sense.

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This is hard for me to understand.

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I don't like that wording that doesn't hit right.

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The criticism and it's not to be overly critical, just to be critical, but to be constructive, so that the purpose of what it is you're creating actually lives and sustains itself for a long time.

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The only way it's going to do that is if the only way something's going to sustain is if other people sustain it and other people aren't going to sustain something that they don't understand and that they don't believe in.

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And so we have to.

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We have to be willing to take the uh, constructive, uh feedback, criticism from people, from the thing that we've created in our minds, just to ask questions, to poke holes in.

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If you're a writer, right, this can be really hard because it's like yo, like I just I put my heart and soul into something and this is what it is, that I'm presenting it and now you have things to say about it.

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You know, for me it lives in like I have.

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You know, I've been, I'm in youth programming, so I'm constantly coming up with different ideas for different programs to serve people, and so I might come to the table and say, hey, y'all, I think it's a really good idea.

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And then I start getting questions and it does sting.

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Sometimes it's like yo, like that ain't really what I had in mind.

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Or, you know, I kind of had it like this no, no, no, we going to is I wanted them to do?

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And then I've lived in the world where I've allowed people to contribute and, from experience, it is way better when other people excuse me, when other people get to contribute, because then again, you are not feeling the burden of the vision yourself.

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You also have the ability to.

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You know you also don't have have the burden of continuing to uh, continuing to just refine and refresh it by yourself.

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Right, it takes more than one brain to keep up with the pace of the way that a vision is rolled out.

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So you have to understand when others contribute, it doesn't become.

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It's not yours, it's ours, and we have to be okay with that.

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You have to unlearn that visions that are sustainable are not one person's vision, and so the last thing that I would encourage people to do, on both sides of the equation visionaries and executors is trust the change process.

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You want to trust the change process.

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Change is hard.

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I don't care who you are, where you are, uh, I don't care how much you think you know, I don't care how uncomfortable, how comfortable you are with being uncomfortable, all those things.

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Change is hard, no matter where you are, and change is a process and we have to be.

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You have to trust the process.

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You got to trust that the thing that somebody else is saying that they see is going to be as valuable as what you see and that you can trust that it's going to come together to see some to where you both.

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You also have to trust sometimes you don't see everything.

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Even as a visionary.

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You ain't going to see everything, and you also you do.

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You have to trust that some people know how to make things happen in a way that you don't, in a better way and a different process.

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And so, um, for people who are executors, I think sometimes it can be hard to believe that you have something to contribute to the vision and you just tell me what to do.

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Well, no, like sometimes, your thoughts and contribution to the vision will help to create a path that makes sense for you in the execution process.

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But it has to start off with the first, with the contribution at the beginning.

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So the first thing we don't.

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We want to make sure we don't just communicate, we discuss it.

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We want to make sure that we recognize that when other people contribute, it's no longer yours, it's ours.

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And we want to make sure that we trust the change process and trust that as we move forward together, that it will become something better than any of us had in our heads by ourselves.

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So I hope that makes sense.

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Again, man.

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This is, like some of them, I'm learning and it's been a really, really great thing.

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There's a lot of things, personally and professionally, that I'm a part of that we are building and this kind of including this podcast.

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You know, I'm saying including this podcast.

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Um, this different shift has helped me to be able to get excited about things growing without being burdened by the responsibility of being solo in it.

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Not don't have to be, I could choose to be, or I can choose to invite people in, not just as people that do stuff for me, but people who I do things with, and I have to be willing to let go of what's in my head so that we can create something together that none of us see until we see it All right.

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So that's it.

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Um, y'all have a great week and we will see y'all next week, but until then, 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.