You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 58.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

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Hello, my strong friends. If you hear some weird noises on today's podcast, please know there's a storm going on outside of my windows. So you might hear a little bit of interference. Hopefully, it's not too bad.

I want to talk about last week. Last Wednesday, Kamala Harris got sworn in as the United States' first female black, Asian Vice-President, oh my gosh. I didn't realize how emotional I was going to get that day.

Seriously, the way that the United States has been for the last four years, it felt almost like survival. Like every day, you just had to figure out how you were going to make it through, just because there was so much emotional turmoil from everybody.

So those last couple of days that were leading up to that very historical moment, I wasn't even thinking about that historical moment. I was just thinking about how are we going to get through all of these couple of days and helping people with their emotions over it all. That I hadn't even thought about all of the positive feelings that I would feel that day. Seriously, I had not even scheduled in time to watch the Inauguration Ceremony.

I was just going business as usual. I wasn't thinking anything about it all. So then, when I actually sat down and I watched it, oh my gosh, emotions just flooded through me. I cried a lot that day.

I remember I was just feeling amazed and astounded by what she had done. I felt so incredibly proud of her. And I felt so grateful for what she had done. Years ago, I didn't even know who she was. I think it was about four years ago, and we were at a pride parade in San Francisco, and all of a sudden we heard the crowds roaring. Just like so much happiness. And it was Kamala Harris coming down on one of the cars, you know, she's in the parade. And the people of San Francisco just absolutely loved her.

And I was like, okay, who is this woman? Well, now I know, and I know why people would love her. Because she wants to open the door for everybody. She wants to create opportunities for everybody from all backgrounds to be able to live their dream.

I love her saying of "first but not the last." Kamala has really created a legacy, and she's opened the door for more legacies to happen.

I know that she had to evolve through several versions of herself in order to become the person that she is now. I look back at the different career steps that she took to get to where she's at. And she was the District Attorney in San Francisco for seven years. Then she went on, and she became the attorney general of California for six years. Then she became the Senator of California. And she did that for three years.

And now she's Vice President of the United States. The amount of changes she had to go through for each of those roles, that was all part of her own evolution of who she is as a person.

Defining Evolutionary Journeys

When I think about evolutionary journeys, it comes down to three things.

1. How we think about things
2. The processes that we use
3. Our individual capabilities
   
   

Now everybody's on a different journey. We might not have big moonshot ideas of being in the white house and completely changing the whole landscape of what's possible. We all have our different things for how we're going to impact the world. But we all have an evolutionary journey.

I know you've seen the logo for My Freedom Grove. It's really symbolic. I'm not going to get into all of the aspects right now, but I wanted to take a look at that little squiggly line in the middle of the Redwood tree. That's a symbol that's called a Yuna loam. It represents that evolutionary journey. To become Unshakable and unstoppable like a Redwood tree, you have to have that internal evolution.

Each year of our lives is going to bring new obstacles to us and growth opportunities. Each year we get to choose, are we going to evolve, or are we going to atrophy? My Freedom Grove is here to evolve together. We're here for the long haul with each other.

Redwood trees represent legacy. They exist for hundreds of years. The oldest still standing Redwood tree is 3,500 years old. Hundreds of years from now, Kamala's legacy is still going to exist. People will still say her name. She will still be making an impact on people's lives.

You can also be a legacy. Your impact can be felt for generations. Some people get scared off when I talk like that. They think that legacy has to be huge and take a ton of work. It feels overwhelming to imagine everything that needs to happen between here and there. It can feel daunting, impossible, confusing, even downright scary. Those are real feelings that come up.

Those feelings are about the journey itself, but once you're there, once you have evolved into that future version of yourself, you're going to have those feelings of being astonished and amazed at what you were able to accomplish. Proud of yourself, and incredibly grateful that you were willing to put in all of that effort and all of that time and patience to become the person that you are.

Reflecting on my Evolutionary Journey

As I watched Kamala standing in front of the fireworks that night, I sobbed. Those feelings, astonished, amazed, proud of her, all of that was just flooding through me. And I was so grateful that I was starting to fight back those tears, man. It really was. My daughter even looked at me because we were having dinner at the time. And she's like, mom, are you crying? Cause I mean, it's just pouring down my face. She didn't understand it.

But I just kept thinking about that evolutionary journey that Kamala had gone on and everything that she went through in order to be where she was and what that meant for the rest of us.

And then, I started thinking about my own evolutionary journey. I may not be the future self that I completely imagined, but I have definitely evolved towards being that person. I started to reflect on all of that internal work that I've had to go through so that I could become this person that I am now and all of the future evolutionary changes that I'm going to have to make in myself in order to get to where I want to be.

And I thought about all of the internal evolution that I still have to go through in order to create the legacy that I imagine. The legacy that I'm trying to create involves each and every one of you; you are all legacies in the making. I'm here to bring you together and to provide some tools and help as you start doing all of your internal evolution to create your legacies.

With these tools, both you and I will be able to evolve our thinking, our processes, and our capabilities. I developed the clarity steps process as a structured way of helping us to be able to do that, so that we always are clear on what are we doing? How do we break this down to the smallest steps so that we can actually make this happen?

Change is hard. Evolution is a gradual process. Everyone evolves at their own pace.

Each person's goals, their vision that they have is different. All of the steps that we each have to take are going to be different. The different obstacles that we face again, different. I know I just said different obstacles, right? But we do.

We all have different things that we are challenged with, and we can work through all of those. We can resolve the obstacles. We can find the things that work for us so that we can go on and create that legacy. Everybody's comfort level is different when it comes to change and to evolution. There are some people that I see that just take it by leaps and bounds. They love change. They just go right on into it.

And there's other folks that changes just really uncomfortable, but they're willing to change a tiny bit at a time. And that's okay. The whole point is just to make progress and go forward.

The Staircase Metaphor

There's no timeline that says when you have to be done; your legacy is yours to create, not someone else's. it’s your timeline. An example that comes to mind for me easily is staircases.

So I live in what I call an ocean house. So out here on the coast, none of the houses have very big footprints. So if you have a two-story house like I do, your staircase doesn't have a lot of room to be gradual. So the staircases out here are really steep. Our staircase incredibly steep. It's been so hard on me to get used to that after living in a single-story house for so long.

So my son, he's able to take these steps two at a time, and I'm just like, whoa. So for me, again, I'm not used to stairs at all, let alone steep stairs. I've also had knee surgery. So climbing stairs with my knee how it is, has been quite the challenge to build up the strength. So I'm a little bit more cautious.

I also have to do just like one leg that does most of the bending. The point is not to get to the top of the staircase the fastest it's just to get to the top of the staircase.

So sure. He might be to do it in about two seconds. And I don’t know; it might take me 30 seconds. The point, though, is that I got to the top of the staircase, and each day, I evolve more. My strength changes. My ability changes. Even my thinking changes. So that I can get up there.

Even when we go out on nature hikes, we might encounter cliffs and big rocks and hills and stuff. And my son, we lovingly call him a billy goat. He just like prances right on up there. Just drop hop, hop, hop, hop.

But for me like, okay, I've got back issues, I've got knee issues. I've had foot surgery on both feet. I have to break it down into those smallest manageable steps. I have to think through it. I have to think about the process that I'm going to use so that I don't fall and that I don't hurt myself. And then I execute on that.

And in the beginning, I may not have much capability. I might not have the strength, but just getting up there is a good thing. And then the next time that we do it, I might try it a little bit different. I might change up my thinking. I might change up the process that I might use, and my capability is getting stronger. Right? It could be the physical thing or just that I'm now capable because I've changed my processes or my thinking.

So I have that for everything in life, right? I've had different experiences in my life that have shaped how I think about things. So when I'm approaching any kind of goal, no matter how impossible it might seem, I have different ways that I think about it based on those experiences. I have different processes that I might use based on my own unique needs. And I continuously develop my capability so that each time that I do it, I'm a little bit stronger. I'm a little bit faster. There's less waste in all my processes, all the ways that I do things.

Sometimes I might only be able to get so far in my goals. And it's like, okay, now I have to pause. I can't go on to the next stuff because these things, sure I might've been able to do it, but I need to optimize how I'm doing it so that I have enough energy to take on the next part of it.

There's always going to be somebody else out there in the world that has a goal similar to mine. And they might just focus on the end goal and just be able to go out there and get it. Maybe they're all about the speed of getting it, but that's not how I do it. I like to evolve, so it becomes a permanent shift in who I am and everything that I'm about.

Using the Clarity Steps to Evolve

So I always use the clarity steps so that I can break everything down into tiny, manageable steps. I know that for every step, I'm going to have to figure out some stuff. There's evolution that's needed in me for each of those steps. If I already knew how to do all of it, I'd already be there. That would already be my reality. It wouldn't be an issue for me.

So for each step in any goal, I have to consider my thinking, my process, and my capability. The obstacles I encounter for that step are always either just a mindset or a process obstacle.

Now you might be thinking, but what about those capability obstacles? Well, capability is just a mixture of mindset and process.

So let's talk about process. Last week, I led a really fun workshop that was based around the clarity steps. We focused specifically in on obstacles and experiments. So one of our exercise volunteers was creating his legacy of being a paid writer. He's already a published writer, but the next evolution that he wants to get to is to get paid for his writing.

When we look at just the end goal of being paid for writing, it seems overwhelming and pretty confusing. So in the workshop, we focused in on process. We started high-level of what would be each of the process steps if he already was a paid writer.

So in the workshop, I brought out my dry erase board like I always do when I'm coaching people. And we started to draw out what are all of the process steps that would be happening if he was a paid writer? So we came up with about six steps.

Step 1: Find a publisher that pays for articles

Step 2:  Connect

Step 3: Make an offer

Step 4: get the offer accepted 

Step 5: Write and submit the article

Step 6: Get paid!

Now we know that each of those steps is going to require some evolution because these are steps that he had never done before. So each step is going to require an evolution in thinking, in process, and in capability, right? If you've never done this before like you don't even know what the process is. You don't know all of the things that you need to think. You might have a lot of unhelpful thoughts that pop up on any of those steps. And then capability, I mean, if you don't know all of the steps, you don't know how to do it. So, of course, you're not capable of doing it because you've never done it before.

So when we look at all six of those steps, and we think of the full amount of change that has to happen, it can definitely get overwhelming. It's like, sure. We might be a little bit more clear, but the woah, feeling's still big.

So let's break it down. We got more granular. We started with just step one because why would you focus on step four if you haven't figured out how to step one yet. We broke that one down into even smaller process steps. These are specific just for this one step. All of a sudden, things got a lot clearer and easier to manage. We can discuss what obstacles came up for each of those micro-steps.

Each one was either a mindset or a process obstacle. Then we could use the right tools to do some experiments. And once we resolve the obstacles for that micro-step, that micro-step is going to be done effortlessly. It's going to be so easy. He's going to know how to do all of that fully capable. He will have evolved.

We can celebrate that step. We celebrate the micro-steps. We don't wait all the way until we achieve that big, huge goal. All of those micro steps deserve some celebration. And then we can go onto the next micro-step feeling really good.

Think of Your Strong Why

Now, as you can imagine doing it this way takes a lot of patience. It also takes a lot of compassion with yourself. And most importantly, it takes a really strong why. If you're going to put in this type of effort, this type of evolution, if your why is just, eh, you're not going to want to do this.

But if you have a strong why, you're willing to go through all of this because you know how important it is. This thing at the other end is so big, and the emotions with it are so big that, yeah, you're going to be so grateful that you took the time to develop yourself and evolve in this manner.

That's why I want you to consider the legacy that you're creating.

So it let's take this back to Kamala for a minute. She could have seen being a lawyer as just a job that pays a lot of money. Some people love money, and that's okay. They're willing to go through all of the extra schooling. They know that the extra schooling, it's a long journey, there's a lot of effort, but Hey, there's this big payoff of a lot of money. So then, when you land that high-paying job, you're like, yes, I'm in the money. Okay. Forgive my singing. I know a little goofy there, right? But we got to have fun.

So after a while, though, that money that felt so good starts to wear off. It's like all of your bills and stuff pile up; you start living into that money. And then, all of a sudden, you're hurting for money. Cause you're so used to spending it.

And then all of a sudden, you're like, well, was it all really worth it? And then you're left just feeling burnt out or even apathetic. But if your why is something more meaningful than money, you'll always be willing to go through the evolution.

Kamala created a legacy. This wasn't just for her. This wasn't just for a paycheck. This was so much bigger than that. On Inauguration night, she mentioned that she had to keep trying new things, experimenting, tweaking things along the way. She was talking about her thinking. She was talking about her processes and her capability. She was trying to inspire the rest of us. She was telling us to go after our dreams, but know that it's going to take that effort. It's going to take all of that evolution in order to get there.

The Butterfly Effect of it All

But she always had that strong why behind all of it. All of the time and effort was worth it because she knew that what she was doing was so much bigger than her.

My why is bigger than me, too. I am so willing to go through all of this personal evolution because my why involves all of you and the generations that come after you. I'm willing to go through all of my own internal evolution so that I can be here. I can be visible. I can create programs that are tailor-made to be there to support you as you're creating your legacy. In doing that, I've created my legacy. I've created my impact on the world by helping you to make your impact.

And when you make your impact, you've now made it possible for everybody else to make their impact. It becomes so much bigger than any of us as an individual, but it starts with us, our own internal journey.

Sometimes when I think about this, and I sit back and I just think about how big this can be, the butterfly effect of it all, I get really emotional. It's a positive emotion. Like when I was even writing this out, like trying to figure out what I would say in this podcast. I started crying again because I was just getting so overwhelmed with the feeling of love and pride for all of us in this journey.

Find Your Why

So let me ask you this. What legacy do you want to create? What ripple effect do you want to have on this world that wouldn't have had existed if you hadn't gone through your journey?

If that is something so strong and it moves you so much, then you know you have found your why.

Would you like some help along that journey? You don't have to do this alone. You can have me and a community of support to help you through all of the evolutionary changes for your thinking, your processes,, and your capabilities. If your answer's yes. Then let's talk. Go over to my website MyFreedomGrove.com go to the contact me page, set up a free consultation call so that we can start talking about your dreams and figuring out how to make this possible.

I can't wait to see what you have in mind. I'll talk with you soon. Bye-bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships, and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out Unshakable Men and Unshakable Women. The Unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, the coaching and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to MyFreedomGrove.com/workwithme. I can't wait to see you there.