Freedom Friday: Why Overcommitting DECREASES Your Value!

Hello everybody and welcome once again to the unlearned podcast. I am your host, ruth Abigail, aka RA, and you have entered into Freedom Fridays, which is when me or me and one of my friends shares with you something we've unlearned recently and how it has made us just a little bit more free. So before I get into this little kind of short thing that I think has helped me hopefully it'll help you we are starting a new series called Unlearning Politics and it will drop in the next few weeks. So if you have not already subscribed to the podcast, make sure you do that so that you can receive the downloads automatically. You don't have to worry about trying to go search for it. I think this is going to be really, really interesting and it's going to help us unlearn a lot of things. That actually is going to impact not just you, but impact the community around you when we begin to unlearn what we believe politics actually means and how we actually play a role in it. I know a lot of people don't even believe it's relevant and a lot of people don't believe that they have any relevance in that world, but I happen to believe that and I think we have a lot of things that we have to unlearn around it. So, anyway, make sure that you stay tuned for that. In the next few weeks, we're going to have some really, really interesting guests that have a lot to share and a lot of ways to help us unlearn some things. Okay, so let me ask you this question why do you do things that are constantly draining and not adding value to your life, like, why is it that we continue to do things over and over and over and they add no value, even good things, even good things? I think that's something that's important to unlearn is that even good things or things that have seemed good in the past may not actually be adding value today, and even good things can go ahead and drain you, and I think that's important to unlearn. But anyway, I want you to ask yourself that question like why is it that we constantly do that? I think we live in a world I know I certainly do where being over committed is considered successful or is looked upon as a trait that we admire. When we see people doing a lot of things, we assume that because they're involved in a lot of things, then that means that they're doing a lot of things well, and that's not always the case. So we tend to think that being over committed means that we're important and needed. But what I've learned and I've had to unlearn over the years because over committing has been a huge thing for me is that over committing doesn't make you important. Just because you do a lot of things with a lot of people, it doesn't make you important. It actually makes you unwise and it decreases your value. When I'm over committed, it makes me unwise and it decreases my value Personally. Now let me just be real. I enjoy juggling. I love having multiple things to do. I get bored when I feel like I have to just do one thing, and I'm actually better when I have multiple things to do. I'm a person who's a natural multitasker and I've had to learn that that's a skill that needs to be honed and not something to run away from. That's just part of who I am. But I don't think multitasking is the same as being over committed. I don't think that those things automatically go together. Here's what I have had to understand about being over committed is that being over committed typically means that your commitments pull you in more than one direction at a time and you're too stretched, so think about a rubber band. It's meant to be stretched, but only in one direction, because if you start stretching it in multiple directions, it'll break faster and then will become useless. You start stretching a rubber band in multiple directions, especially at one time, it'll break faster and then it'll become useless. And we are the same way. And so a few years ago, I actually made a decision that my commitments that I have have to work hand in hand or else I'd have to give it up. I think that when you're multitasking, sometimes we assume that people that multitask are multitasking in different directions, and that doesn't always have to be the case. You can be an effective multitasker moving in one direction and moving in a direction that makes sense for your life. There was one point in my life where I was doing a million different things. I was doing. I was participating, you know, at the choir at church. I was teaching music to kids. I was doing work and just having, you know, my particular work with doing youth development, and I was taking kids different places over the weekends. I was participating in the young adult ministry at my church. I was in leadership around certain different things that really didn't have anything to do with each other. I was also helping to start different organizations. I was also helping to invest in young leaders. I was doing all these different things, and that's just work stuff, that's not. You know friendships and relationships and family, and you know all these other commitments that we have in our lives, and I didn't realize that I was burning out until really it was too late, and what it ended up making me do was essentially drop absolutely everything. I stopped doing everything, except for the thing that I had to do, which was work, because I had to make money right, and so I had to recalibrate my mind and say, if I'm going to do more than one thing, then all those things have to make sense with each other. So there just came a point where I could no longer do things I even liked to do, and it was hard, and I had to figure out what those things are. And a lot of times you have to figure out what season you're in and how you can honor the season of your life by filtering through what the commitments are that you have. And so here's the thing If you're struggling with being over committed, here's some questions I would ask yourself. These are questions I ask myself. First question what are the top three areas that I spend the most energy on, and do those things work hand in hand? The second question where am I dropping the most balls? The third question what or who am I consistently canceling on? I think this is really really interesting we joke about, especially in our culture, about you know, saying yes to doing things and then you get to the you know the day of you're like man, I really don't feel like doing that, and so you come up with some excuse where you say, okay, I'm gonna cancel it and I've done that. I have, I ain't a lie about it. But the question is like, where does that happen consistently? Because if you're constantly canceling on something or someone, even then that tells you the level of value that you feel like it holds in your life. And so if we're constantly canceling on things and we're doing that all the time, why are we saying yes to it in the first place? I think that's important. The fourth question when am I resting? So when you weigh the answers to these questions up against your value system and your current season of life, I think these questions can help you filter through the things that you need to spend energy on versus the things you need to. That needs to take a backseat. It'll also help you discover if you're being stretched in more than one direction. So I think again, we have to unlearn that being over committed doesn't get you a trophy. At best, it gets you a participation certificate, and we all know how we feel about participation certificates. My generation has been accused of accumulating way too many participation certificates because we get a trophy just for being a part of stuff, and the truth of the matter is none of us really value that right. We want the trophy because we earned it, not just because we signed a piece of paper. So don't settle for just being a participant. Work on being a player, work on being a valued player. Find out the best way for you to do your best and contribute your best self to impact what's greater than you, and I think if we begin to do that well, not only start adding more value, we will start to receive more value, but also we're going to enjoy our life more because we're actually putting energy into things that we care about and not things that we feel like we just we need to do or we have to do because it gives us some imaginary status in the world that we live in, I bet. So unlearn being over committed y'all, it's not a trophy, it's not something we should be proud of. It's actually unwise to do that, and we can ask ourselves some really good questions to make sure that we're not using the time that we have here on this earth in a way that's not benefiting us or the people in the world around us. All right, until next week, keep tuning in to Freedom Fridays and remember to download and subscribe if you haven't already done that the Unlearned Podcast, so you can make sure to be aware of the upcoming episodes, specifically the upcoming series Unlearning Politics. All right, y'all, have a great week. We'll see you next time. Peace. ["unlearned Podcasts"]. Thank you once again for listening to the Unlearned Podcast. We would love to hear your comments and your feedback about the episode. Feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram and to let us know what you think. We're looking forward to the next time when we are able to unlearn together to move forward towards freedom. See you then. ["unlearned Podcasts"].