WEBVTT
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Yo, yo, yo, what's up, everybody?
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And welcome once again to the Unlearnt Podcast.
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I am your host, Ruth Abigail, a K-A-R-A.
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What up, friends?
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This is your girl, Jaquita.
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And this is the podcast that is helping you gain the courage to change your mind so that you can experience what, Quita?
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More freedom.
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More freedom.
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What it do, what it do, what it do, what it do.
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What it we're such middle adults.
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We are.
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I feel like, you know, listen, you know, not to give away anybody's age, but we're giving away ages.
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40 is right here.
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Pop, pop, bop, bop, bop.
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It's like we're knocking at it.
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You know that what's the the memes that that's been going around 86?
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You have 1986, and you have uh 1986 is running and then 40 is chasing.
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Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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And we run it, boy.
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You ain't finna get me.
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Let me tell you something.
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40 is catching up.
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Okay.
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I I've started, I there are distinct things that I'm doing that I know that I'm I'm about to hit 40 and I don't even care.
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Like I'm like wearing tennis shoes to work.
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Yeah.
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But like with like dress pants, be like, you know what, let me put these tennis shoes on.
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Because what I look like wearing these heels.
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I don't need those.
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Nobody needs to do that anymore.
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No, no, no.
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You you think differently about footwear at 40.
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You know, you think differently about comfort.
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Okay.
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Listen, I'm not trying to be.
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I was at a dinner last night and had them little flimsy fold-up chairs.
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I almost left.
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Oh no.
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Almost left.
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The ones that sink a little bit when you sit in them and you gotta hold yourself up.
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I was I was so mad.
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I was like, I'm too old for this.
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No, no.
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I won't be doing old for this.
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The the team was uh discussing today doing a lock-in with the kids.
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Oh no.
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I said uh oh no, oh no.
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I fully support y'all.
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Uh I won't be sleeping on the gym floor.
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That's not something that I'll be.
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It's not even possible.
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It's it's not possible that I would find sleep that sleeps.
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It's not it's not, it's actually not physically an option.
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Um you just know there are things that you just have to uh politely exit from.
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Yeah, excuse me.
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I'm sorry.
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I hired the young folks.
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This is yeah, this is okay.
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And you know what?
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In my current role, like I didn't really have a team for a while, it was just me.
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And I ain't gonna lie, productivity was down, okay, because there are some things, there are some job activities that I was supposed to have younger people for.
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There you go.
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It wasn't supposed to be me.
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You get to a point where you're like, I am no longer the implementer.
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Uh no, no, no, no, no, no.
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I'm the mentor, I am the the voice.
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Yes, okay, that's all you need from me.
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Hello.
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Can I advise anybody?
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How can I how can I help you?
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Yeah, no, no, no.
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How can I support you?
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How can I support you?
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How can I support you as you do it?
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As you do it.
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That's it.
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Yeah.
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What what do you need?
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What do you need?
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What would you tell me today?
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You Quita was advising me on how to have a coaching meeting.
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You she said, don't say what do you need from me.
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She said, What do you need from the organization?
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I said that part.
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That part, no, decentralized.
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This is an important message for leaders, especially middle adult leaders.
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Okay, we let me tell you something.
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I know if everybody who's listening to this podcast right now, if you were to list out all of your priorities, right?
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They have significant, significantly grown since your 20s, right?
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And they are competing with each other, right?
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It's not, you know, from eight to five, I do work things, and then from five to six, I work out because my health.
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And then from six to eight, it's family time, and then I go to sleep at 8:30.
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No, no, everything's running together, everything's bleeding together, everything is competing for your time and for your attention, right?
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And we are no longer at the point where you can put yourself at the center of everything.
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That's the fact because there's not enough of you to lead everything.
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You need to lead the people who are leading the things, and if they start putting things back into your hands, that's when you need to say, Hold on, wait a minute, the structure of the organization, we need to re-look at this because I don't do things.
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I don't I I can.
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I can.
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But that's not that's not gonna be the best use of my time and energy.
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So what's funny is, and this is y'all not what we actually talking about today.
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However, we probably could go into this uh later, Quita.
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But I think last week is just something I jotted down.
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Like, what do you do as a leader?
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And these are five things, right?
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You care, okay, you hold the people accountable, uh-huh, you set strategic direction, you communicate, and you learn.
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Those are your doings.
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None of that, did you see anything about execution?
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That's not your job.
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That's not your job.
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If you have a team and you're leading a team, that's not your job.
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That the the care, accountability, direction, communication, and learning is your job.
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And that's that's where you put your energy because you you you that's that's the decentralization.
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And then when you when I heard that, it's like, hey, connect it to a system, a system of of support.
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That is what I need to like.
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I need to create a system of support.
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I don't need to do it.
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I need to create a system of support.
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Let me tell you something.
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You when you were in your 20s, you felt very much led to make yourself be the answer.
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Yeah, right.
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Like, I I I am going to show up as the answer to everyone's problems, right?
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Because you're looking for that sense of like purpose and identity.
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And like a part of your identity as a young adult is this is what I'm good at, and this is what I do, and this is where I fit, this is where my significance is, right?
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And a lot of our a lot of your significance in your 20s and early 30s is in being the person that people can depend on to do things, right?
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But when you get, I think when you get to this middle adult leadership stage, especially for those of us who are in middle management, who are now pushing forward into more executive management roles, right?
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Like you have to decentralize yourself as I'm not the answer, but I am the person who is forming and shaping the answers so that so that our the systems of our organization can respond to the needs as they come up.
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That's right.
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Um and that makes you a more valuable player.
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It does not the most visible, that's right, but the most valuable.
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That's right.
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And I think that's the shift from young adulthood to middle adulthood.
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It's a shift from being visible as a groundworker and being valuable as kind of like a top-down worker.
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Yeah.
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And I I to like I think that the as you move into that state, we have to redefine momentum.
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See what I did there?
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See how I did?
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See how I did it.
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Here we go.
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We gotta we gotta redefine momentum.
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And so like, because for for for so long, momentum has been about doing and tasks.
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And like, you know, we're we're we're we're we're we got juggling these many things, and it's like productivity, right, has been what momentum has been about.
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And what we don't realize a lot of times is that there's a process to momentum that we we we forget about when we're not in that executing stage.
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It's not that you you it's not that you don't have a pathway towards momentum, it looks different.
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And so you have to break down the process so that in this season of your life and your leadership, um you understand how to get momentum without necessarily being the executor.
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That makes sense.
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That's so good.
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And I will tell you, you know, I, you know, this honesty, transparency, that's one of our tenets here on the on the Unlearned podcast.
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You know, I'm at a stage in my life where I've really been asking myself, like, why am I so tired all the time?
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Right?
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Like why I just feel exhausted.
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And a part of it is because, you know, middle adulthood.
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I mean, yeah, you're just tired.
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Yeah, different challenges, and and you really are juggling more.
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But and also if your energy, if your motivation, if your um if your capacity is being misused, like if it's not being exerted in a way that matches the stage of life you're in, you're not aligned, right?
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And so you're you're running a race that's no longer yours.
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Yes, right.
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You you still trying to do the sprints.
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We're not we not sprinters no more.
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Yeah, right.
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We're long distance.
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That requires pacing, yes, that requires different breathing techniques, right?
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Yeah that requires not necessarily being the fastest one in the beginning, but being the one that can sustain the longest, right?
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Like that's what leadership looks like at this point.
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It's not sprinting from goal to go to goal, it's building a long-range plan that can sustain an organization and the people that are within that organization, yeah.
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And so you have to shift your mindset to move from being a sprinter to being more of this cross-country runner, yeah.
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Right.
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And um, and by the way, I did neither one of those, but it's not the point.
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Okay, it's okay.
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Joy did it, all right.
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Joy does it.
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Oh, it does it.
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Joy be running, so yeah, it's represented on the podcast.
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Don't worry about what me and Ruth Abigail does.
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Yeah, don't worry about it.
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Okay.
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Sure.
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We have worked out recently.
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Before.
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Oh Lord, I'm getting my life back together though.
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Don't worry about me.
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Don't worry about me.
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Um, but you know, you you if you are if you are in a long distance race and you start sprinting, and you're gonna feel really good at the beginning because you're gonna be like, yeah, man, I just sped past everybody else and I'm I'm all the way up here.
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But like literally, what when you used to maybe just do a hundred yards and now you're doing two miles.
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And so you sprinted that 100 yards and used everything you had to get one thing done, yeah, when really now you have 20 million things to do, right?
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And and so what looked good in the beginning is not sustainable.
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And I think that's that's the challenge for middle adulthood is sustainability.
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No, seriously.
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How do I sustain what I have begun?
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So that's real.
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Like, I mean, and that's that's we're we're you know, we're kind of we're kind of using work as an example, but you think about by the time you get to your 40s, which is really difficult for me to say, but by the time you get there, you know what I'm saying?
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It I mean, so and and this is the season, this is kind of like a commonality in the season of life.
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You really do start to your career starts to really start to gain a little bit more momentum in your life.
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Like you, you get you you're a little more settled there.
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Um, you know, you might have a family, you might have children, you might be married.
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Um, you're your your parents are getting older.
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Um, you you have um you you might have uh you might be an aunt or an uncle and you're you're you know you're supporting your your siblings.
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You said what?
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I said might be you are you got a friend, a you you do somebody, right?
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You got children in your in your circle, yeah.
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Which means you have parents you have to support, right?
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Right.
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So, you know, you you might have um different uh roles in in your in your church community or in you know your your your grand in other other circles.
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There are like when you think about all of those things, like it there's a lot of different there's all this energy that has to be directed in all these different places.
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And so to your point, the sustainability factor is so critical.
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Like if you it is not going, you cannot, you can't meet that, meet these challenges in the same way you did 20 years ago.
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Um, you don't have you didn't have all that.
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A lot of people didn't have all of that 20 years ago, some did, but like in this season, it was very different.
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And so I think as as we're talking about this, like what does momentum look like?
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And I think, you know, um we there's a process to momentum.
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And momentum, I also the thing again, again, the sustainability factor.
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I I told one of my my team members this today, it's a principle of slowing down to speed up.
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Like there's a um the process of momentum is a lot of times you slow down to speed up.
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There are some things you have to do before you just sprint.
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Um and so we're gonna we're gonna just talk about that, but it turns itself into a system because systems are what get momentum, um, not necessarily your personal hustle.
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That is not you not you can't gain momentum like that.
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Um when you think about a hill and you're rolling down a hill, as you, as the ball gets further down the hill, it gains momentum, but it starts off slow and it gains it as it's moving.
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And then you realize, okay, this is what momentum looks like.
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So and now you can repeat the process once you understand what it looks like.
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So we're we we just want to like run through some principles around that.
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And um previous Freedom Friday we put out, kind of went through it fast, like went kind of quickly through them, through each one of these.
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We're gonna take our time a little bit and just kind of break down uh what this pathway to momentum looks like and what it's not and what we think it is, and it's really not.
00:14:59.440 --> 00:15:07.679
Like we we think we got momentum somewhere, and really you just you just got motivated and didn't do anything.
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Like, you know what I'm saying?
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Let's just be real.
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You got motivated and excited, and then you sat down and you thought that was enough to gain momentum, and it's not, and so I think you know not, it's not like motivation.
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Sorry, unlearn that that's not enough.
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We we get motivated every day, like like Queen was we see we see people telling us to do exercise and go to the gym just about every day in some shape or form.
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And that has not happened in a few months for me.
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But you know, I tell people like something, uh a small distinction.
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We get inspired every day, like we get made like, and when you get inspired, that helps you to like think differently and believe differently, right?
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Like you're like, oh wow, like man, working out is a great part of life that we all should do.
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I am inspired, right?
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But there's no movement in inspiration.
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Motivation, you are not truly motivated if you're not moving.
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That's correct.
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That's you're not, but I would even I would even spark you got a spark, but I would even argue there's some things that have to happen even before the movement.
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Yeah.
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When you get when you're when you're headed towards motivation, but agreed, inspiration comes first.
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Like at the at the end of the day, inspiration comes first.