Freedom Friday: Your False Humility Is Not Helping Anyone!

Hello everybody and welcome once again to the unlearned podcast. I am your host with Abigail aka RA, and it is Freedom Friday, which is an opportunity for me or me and one of my friends to share with you something we've unlearned this week and how it has made us just a little bit more free. So for me, this week I've been, I've been reminded about humility, right, and here's what I know Sometimes we can use humility to stay lazy. Yeah, we can use the humility to stay lazy. So we get this thing confused, right. Confidence and humility are not mutually exclusive, and being excellent at something doesn't disqualify you from being humble. Like I've heard it said a lot, humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. So really, a truly humble person is excellent at lifting others up, not playing small, to make sure that they don't resemble someone who thinks too much of themselves, like I don't know about y'all, but like. For a long time, I honestly relegated myself to mediocrity because I didn't want people thinking that I was thinking more of myself than I should, and so I played to the background a lot more than I probably should have for longer in my life, because I was afraid of what other people would think and I think especially within the Christian culture like we demonize people who are pursuing their best, but then if they're not pursuing their best, we call them lazy and we demonize them if they aren't. And what I've really had to unlearn is that you can't make decisions about your own progression because other people might be uncomfortable with their own progression. Right Like you can't make decisions about where you go and how far you go and how well you do, based on the way other people might feel about themselves, Because ultimately, that's what's being projected onto you when other people are uncomfortable with, maybe, your progression, in a thing, it's really a reflection of how they feel about themselves. So where I go and what I do can't have anything to do with how you feel about where you're going and what you're doing or what you're not doing. Because here's the thing about toxic humility, right. In a subtle way, it really puts your insecurities in the forefront, which does exactly what it is you say you don't want to do, which is elevate yourself. It elevates the most unpleasant parts of you, which doesn't help anybody, and so it only puts you at the center of a story that nobody wants to hear. All it does is appease your insecurity, and one of the most selfish things we can do on this earth is play small to appease our own insecurity. Man, look, I've had to learn that the hard way and even though it can be a little unnerving, to step into the parts of yourself that really shine. At the end of the day, it's not just what's best for you, it's gonna be what's best for other people around you. And I also wanna say this because I think this is another important thing that we miss when it comes to humility is that part of humility is also understanding what you're not capable of Well, at the same time celebrating those who are capable of what you're not right. So it's not just being aware of what you can do, it's being aware of what you can't do, because everybody isn't good at everything and everybody will never be good at everything. I honestly think one of the worst lives we can tell kids and I'm guilty of it, I've done it is that you can be anything you wanna be. That's not true. I could not be a doctor if I tried my hardest. It is not something that's in my blood. Science is not something I'm good at. Never has been, never will be. That's not my thing. I would never be a good carpenter, I'm not detailed enough for that. That's not what I could work really hard and I could do okay, but it wouldn't be something that it would not be something that would benefit people at the highest level. So we have to be honest about what we can't do and let other people shine at what they are able to do without feeling threatened by that. So we have to be willing to help people discover and for us to discover what we're able to do, and part of discovery is failure. Part of discovery is exploration. Part of discovery is finding out what I don't like, and we have to be willing to go through that process. You'll never know the first time if something works. You have to keep trying. You have to be doing it over and over and over again. It's why we go on multiple dates with people before we decide we wanna commit our lives to them. Right Like you can't know immediately. So there's a process to finding who you are. So the process to finding what true humility is and that middle part of humility and confidence, is a process. It's not something we're just gonna wake up and find. You have to be willing to do it Again, not just for you, but for the greater good for people around you. And it could be painful sometimes to find out what you're not good at when you really wanna be good at it. Or it could be painful and unnerving to find out you're really good at something that you actually would prefer not to do. But that's all a part of discovery. It's a part of discovering who you are, and once you discover who you are, you can really pursue humility, because it's hard to pursue humility if you continue to hide. Humility doesn't come as a result of hiding. It comes as a result of being the best version of you that can serve the most people. So stop playing small because you're not sure if you're being humble. Use your best to benefit more than yourself. Stop believing that lie and unlearn that. Unlearn humility. And when you do that, when you use your best to benefit more than just yourself, you'll know you're headed in the right direction. That's all I got people. We will see y'all next week for Freedom Friday. Be on the lookout for upcoming episodes, for our upcoming series, and until then, we're dropping every Friday with Freedom Friday and we just want to keep unlearning so that we can live more freely. All right, peace. ["fleetie"]. 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.