Freedom Friday: Understanding the Big Impact of Seemingly Small Problems

0:10 body and welcome once again to the unlearned podcast. I am your host, ruth 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. All right? So recently I just received a book called ordering your private life. I got it a few weeks ago and I hadn't picked it up yet until just recently, right? So the last couple of days I've actually been hearing references to this book or references to the author, and so I kind of took that as a sign to pick it up and start reading it to the author. And so I kind of took that as a sign to pick it up and start reading it. I'm a few pages in and I haven't even gotten to like the real numbers yet.

0:50 I'm in the preface, which I actually don't even read most of the time. It's crazy. I don't normally read the preface. So I said I'm gonna read the preface here and I'm not even into the preface and I already have things that I'm like oh shoot, it just triggered two things in particular that I'm like I think I need to unlearn that. So the first thing is I need to unlearn expecting a sensationalized situation as a wake-up call moment. That's first thing. The second thing is I have to unlearn that seeing the emptiness of the soul, I have to unlearn seeing the emptiness of the soul as a minor problem, especially if nothing horrible seems to be happening as a result of it. So let me kind of unpack those things right.

1:34 We live in a breaking news culture and we've been doing that for a while. Like, no news is just regular news anymore. Everything is big. Every email I get it says breaking news. It drives me crazy. How can everything be breaking news? So whatever. So we live in that culture. We also live in a culture where social media has curated the most impressive things for us to consume all day long. I heard a professor his name is Scott Galloway on the Cary Newhoff Leadership Podcast which is a great podcast, by the way that it's a great time to be impressive today. It's a great time for impressive people, a really difficult time for people who are less impressive, which is most people.

2:18 He also said that it's easier today to become a billionaire and harder to become a millionaire. That's a crazy thought, but I think he's right because it's underscoring that we live in a world that values these cultural extremes. So when nothing extreme seems to be happening, it feels like we're okay, right. So if nothing super bad is happening, it feels like we're okay, right. So if nothing super bad is happening, it seems like we're okay. But also, if nothing super good is happening, if we're not at billionaire status, then it seems like we are not okay. We just have these extreme mentalities.

2:59 Most of us don't actually live in the world of extremes, but we're being presented with it. So then we include that in the world of extremes, but we're being presented with it. So then we include that in the way we look at our own lives. So in the book Ordering your Private World, mcdonald begins to describe when his life hit a wall and this is where my first unlearning kind of jumped out for me, as I found myself expecting him to have been caught up in some scandal, or I have cheated on his wife, maybe cuss out a member of his church, something juicy, right, that we hear all the time right here today. But the wall that he actually ended up running into, right, was recognizing that his misdirected busyness was impacting his private world, namely with his family, which his wife pointed out, and it broke it.

3:48 It broke. It. Compared to what we hear all the time, it seems like such a big deal. Like it seemed like a big deal and it's scary that it doesn't seem like a big deal deal. And it's scary that it doesn't seem like a big deal Recently, by the time, I think, by the time this comes out right, the Harvey Weinstein conviction was just overturned, and Harvey Weinstein we all know the man whose alleged actions kind of fueled the Me Too movement in a really big way. Like I'm reading this book the same day I'm finding that out, and so sometimes it's hard to see the significance of how misdirected busyness can bring you to a place of brokenness.

4:39 When this dude over here is being accused of heinous crimes that sparked a whole global movement for several years, it's hard to it's just hard to bring those two together. So I think we have to unlearn that it's easy to spend their, them and their terrible situation series of harmful and heinous decisions. I turn attention to that because it's more dangerous than what goes on inside of us, and that's just not true. We got to pay attention to who we are internally and less attention to what others are doing externally. Otherwise we can find ourselves in the same situation.

5:19 So there's a scripture that comes to mind when it comes to this First Corinthians, 10, 12, 13. This is what it says. If you're standing on if you let me get it right If you think you're standing on strong ground, be careful not to fall. The temptations in your life are no different than what other people experience, and God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you're tempted, he will show you a way out so you can endure. Underrated way of escape sometimes is that God can offer more often than we recognize is the unexpected gift of downtime.

6:01 And if you're like me, what you'll do is you'll fill it up and continue to operate in the business and position yourself for burnout experiences that could cause more crucial mistakes. So this past week, my team and I did some proctoring at an elementary school for state testing in Tennessee. Let me be honest, none of us wanted to do it. It is not a fun activity and one of the requirements is that you have to turn in your phone so you're phone-less for a couple of hours. That's really hard and it's not fun. It's a way of escape. That's a way of escape, in fact, one of my, one of my, it's.

6:44 It's a gift of downtime that we really see more as a burden, but it's a gift, right? One of my team members shared with us a very profound, like reflective moment she had at that time. So she had a tent, she attended that particular school as a child and she didn't really have memories as an adult and imagine if that moment hadn't been presented. What could have, what could the what could the small things have been in her life that are piling up, that she didn't even realize, that she wouldn't have been able to pay attention to if those moments had not been presented to her.

7:24 So like it's the little stuff. It's the little stuff. It's the little stuff we have to watch out for. It's the small soul snatching moments that we don't like to deal with that can then turn into the extremes that we hear other people deal with. And now we are the people that others are looking at, saying I don't want to be like them. Unlearn, underrating small issues. Don't just focus on the extreme stuff. It's the small stuff. It's the small things that burden your soul from day to day that if left unchecked, you could land in a breaking news headline.

8:04 Breaking news headline where the world then has access to your greatest failures. I'm not even in the number pages of the book. I'm still in the Roman numeral part, right, and already I see that there are some ways that my brain has been wired based on the society that we live in. I wouldn't have even caught, and so I hope that's helpful. I wouldn't have even caught, and so I hope that's helpful, because we can't. That will become extreme when it becomes too much. And now what do you do? And that can become a really scary thing.

8:46 And, quite frankly, when you look at people and you kind of, we are silently judging them. Let's be real, based on the mistakes that we see them make, most of the time it's because they pay attention to the small things that we're piling up. So don't be that person. Don't be that person. Don't let the extreme stories out there make you feel like you're okay, because that's not your story. Unlearn it, all right. This has been another edition of Freedom Friday, so let's keep unlearning together so that we can experience just a little bit more freedom, and we'll see y'all next week. Peace. Thank you once again for listening to the Unlearned Podcast. We would love to hear your comments and your feedback about the episode.

9:29 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.