Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everybody.
It's your girl, Sonya McQueen, with it's your life.
What are you going to do with it?
Your mind, your body, your choice.
So today I want to talk to you about the rule books.
Where are the rules?
Where are all these rule books that people assume are floating around the universe?
I'm going to give you a couple of examples, of course.
You know how somebody says, well, I've never been married before.
I don't know what the rules are.
Or I've never been a parent before.
I've never been a mom.
I've never been a dad.
I don't know what the rules are.
Where are these rule books?
I've heard those words a billion times.
Now I can honestly say I've never said that.
I've never said I've never been a blah, blah, blah, where are the rules?
Or I want to be a blah, blah, blah, where are the rules?
There is one rule book I know about.
It's called the Bible.
And even that's hard to follow.
You read the Bible, you're like, yeah, I'm not doing that.
And who does that?
And why would they do that?
Right?
It's a blueprint.
So where are these rule books?
The way you're supposed to act in life.
There are rules to everything, right?
There's something called the law.
We follow the law.
We stop at stop sign, some of us.
We stop at signals if it's red.
We stay in our lane.
We don't swear from left to right...left to right.
And not expect to get pulled over or have somebody curse us out
or call the police on us, right?
Those are laws.
They're all kinds of laws.
That's why we have lawyers and judges and court systems and jails.
We break the law.
You risk the chance of going to prison.
But where are the rule books?
All right.
So I have several authors I follow when they come out with a new book.
I read it because they drop gems in our life.
You know, they tell you how to be this kind of person
and that kind of person.
And they're just really good books.
And some of the things you want to manifest in your life,
some of the things that they write about,
or if you watch some TV shows,
some of the things they speak about,
you're like, I am going to apply that to my daily living, right?
It's going to make me a better person if I do X, Y, and Z.
And I'm going to do that.
How about the friend who you speak to?
And you're like, how in the world did you make that work in your life?
Because I'm going through that same situation.
And then they give you their gems.
Well, this is what I did to make my marriage work.
And then you go home and you try that exact same thing and it fails.
Not only does it fail, sometimes it makes things worse.
You know why?
Because you're not your friend.
Your situation does not include the same two people,
even if you're going through the same thing.
I've said this before.
You can have a parent that loses a child
and that parent will grieve every day for the rest of their life.
And somebody else can have the same thing go on in their life.
It could be a parent that lost a child.
And they feel like my child would not want me to be sad and suffer.
So they celebrate the life that they had with their child
and they go about living with their child.
They go about their life not forgetting their child,
still loving their child, but not living their life in misery.
There are going to be a plethora of people who find fault in both scenarios, both of them.
They're going to tell the person who's mourning every day, get over it.
Like it's their place to tell them.
Because in their mind, that's the rule.
You mourn for 21 days.
You can wear black during those days.
After the 21 days, do some push-ups, go for a run and come back happy.
And we don't want to hear nothing again unless it's your child's birthday.
And then on the other side, how dare you celebrate that your child is not here anymore.
I don't care.
You're supposed to cry for 21 days.
Wear black if you want to.
Do some push-ups, go out for a run and then come back.
And we don't want to hear anything else again.
Unless it's their birthday or unless we bring it up.
Because in that, their mind, that's the rule.
Or how about a parent?
You're a new parent and you have this person on your left saying,
do not allow anybody to touch your child, to come around your child.
Do not take your child out of this house unless it's for a doctor's appointment
for six weeks, period.
In the discussion, nothing else said.
Six weeks in the house with that child.
Keep that child's head covered, keep their feet covered,
and don't let anybody touch your child six weeks.
And then you have somebody else saying, hey, you know,
we used to give birth and be out in the field the next day.
Working.
Shoot.
Just because you had a baby, you think you get to stay home for eight weeks now,
12 weeks, you better get your butt out of this house.
Take that baby and drop him off at daycare.
He's a week old.
What's the problem?
Because those are the rules in their heads.
Right.
So who do you listen to?
You have all these rules.
Oh, don't cook like that.
You got to do it like this.
Oh, you shouldn't do your hair like that.
You should do it like this.
Oh, oh, you know what would look better if you did this because these are the rules.
Got a surprise for you guys.
There are no rule books.
There are suggestive books.
There are suggestive shows.
There are people who want to give you a better quality of life.
So they drop those gems I was talking about earlier.
But there are no real rule books.
You have free reign.
You can make your own decisions.
You just want them to be great, positive decisions.
And if you fall, it's okay.
Get up, dust yourself off, try again.
Right.
You make your rules as you go along.
Sometimes you adopt other people's ways.
And they become your ways.
They become your rules in your home.
You know, you were raised by, hopefully you were raised by parents.
I don't know.
Some people look like they were raised by rules.
But if you were raised by humans, you adapt some of their behaviors, some of their rules,
the things you have kids and, hey, no TV after eight.
As soon as you come home from work, you do, from school, you do your homework.
You have a snack.
You can't go outside and tell your room is clean.
You have chores to do.
Right.
Then you have some parents who are like, all right, when my kids get home,
they just left school.
I don't want them worried about no school.
They're not going to come home and still be in school.
I want them to have a good time, enjoy their, their kid, their childhood, go outside and play,
grab a snack if they want to, come in just through their homework before they go to sleep.
Or better yet, do your homework before you come home.
Why are teachers giving homework after school?
They've been in school eight hours.
Now you want them to come home and do more school.
So there are no rules.
There are no rules.
And you have people who judge you by the way you run things and the rules in your home
and the rules in your life.
They don't have the answers either.
They just know the way they run things and their rules.
So they turn this smile upside down and take the time out to judge the way you run things.
There's no perfection.
Y'all, I, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but none of y'all are perfect.
None of you.
I'm the only perfect just joking.
There is nobody perfect here.
No matter what it looks like, what it smells like, what it tastes like, it's not perfect.
Well, maybe taste my food is hitting perfect, perfect.
But people's advice is just that it's not a rule.
It's advice.
You take it or you don't.
You bump your head, you get up, you try something different.
I'm going to give you this last thing.
When COVID came out, I was working for the Department of Health.
And, um, of course, we didn't know what COVID was.
We, we didn't understand, you know, COVID has been around for ever, but this is a new strand.
It's called COVID-19.
And what are we going to do?
We made up the rules for COVID as they went along.
And I don't know how many of you remember, but in the beginning COVID, you don't come out.
You, you isolate, you sit in quarantine, you quarantine yourself from your family, from your friends.
People were actually leaving their homes, sleeping in their cars.
For 14 days, getting hotel rooms, which is just as bad, but just getting away from their families,
ask to not get their families sit.
You know, hospitals at first were taking in people, then hospital workers were getting sick.
So you couldn't come to the hospital.
Don't bring that, don't bring that mess here.
You know, you do this, you do that unless you're having a heart attack or a stroke.
You have a cofactor, which made your COVID worse.
And people were passing away left and right, left and right.
Now COVID is just considered a bad code.
It's the flu.
You stay home a few days and you can take your butt back to work.
You don't even have to stay home a week anymore.
You can go back to work.
You can't pass it to anybody.
And you tell people you have COVID now and it's like, oh, wow.
Yeah, I had it last week or oh, yeah, I haven't had it yet.
You tell somebody had COVID, February 2020, they would hang up on the, scared it's going
to come through the phone.
The fear was so great from somebody getting COVID.
And I do know really good people who passed away from COVID, but they had cold conditions.
And if you think about it, go do your research.
Look at how many people pass away from influenza.
And my whole point is though, I don't want to go off on that trail there down that rabbit hole.
My whole point is there were no rules when COVID first came out.
We were scratching our heads.
Well, I wasn't, but people were scratching their heads.
The medical world, the departments of health and all the people, right?
And they're scratching their heads trying to figure it out and they're trying to make the rules as they go along.
But as they learn more and more and more about the virus, they started changing the rules.
And they kept changing the rules.
And now the rules today are totally different than the rules in 2020.
Totally different.
We used to sit outside at the Department of Health before anybody could come out.
We had all this paperwork.
We had to ask questions.
We had to wear a N95 mask.
We had to sit there and we had to ask these questions.
Somebody say, yeah, to any of those questions, you got to get out of here.
You got to get out of here.
We had all these drive-throughs at all our Department of Health.
And you got to drive through them.
We're taking your temperature and we're asking those questions.
And there were long lines, thousands and thousands of people in the world shut down.
The world shut down.
And people started getting depressed and sad.
And suicide rates went up and depression went up.
And people fighting in grocery stores over toilet paper and paper towels and soap.
And I don't know what it was about paper towels and toilet paper, but they were fist the cuffs over paper towels and toilet paper and water.
And we just couldn't keep enough of those things in the stores.
And now look, you got COVID.
You can still, people still going out. Yeah, I got COVID.
Wearing cloth mask or no mask.
The rules changed.
You guys, write your own stories.
Don't live in the shadows of other people.
And if somebody has great gems, go ahead and adapt them.
It's okay.
It's all right.
That's why we read books that are not available.
Books that that change our outlook or make us think or I can't even think you guys can help me think though.
That's why we read those kind of books.
That's why we watch certain shows so that we can be enlightened and mentally and emotionally grow.
You know, so we can learn.
There's this beautiful lady on Facebook.
I follow and everything in me says we used to be really good friends.
But she might tell me different.
So don't embarrass me.
But she's playing this game.
And I had never heard of it.
So she was telling me where I could find the game and I went and downloaded the game so that I could.
She said, it keeps you sharp.
And I like that because I love doing puzzles and crossword puzzles and things that make me have to think and you know, stay sharp.
And and whatever my husband loves watching stuff.
And I used to look at him be like, who the hell watches this stuff.
My husband will watch almost anything from Hitler to slavery movies to anything, anything, biograph anything.
And you're wondering, why are you watching this animal planet, the way the world is the earth, the, the Scientologists, the Christians, that it doesn't matter.
He's going to watch it and he's going to learn from it to see the way other people act and the way they think.
But you know what's funny, even watching those shows doesn't mean everybody who believes in that things like that.
I'm getting off again. So let me just say.
Think for yourself.
Come up with your own rules.
If you don't like them, adjust them. If somebody has a great gym, adapted everything I just said, expand your mind, try to grow a little bit every day.
All right, you know where to find me. I'm Sonia M. at lead by motivation.com or you can email us at lead by motivation 07 at gmail.com. I had some great things going on.
So I will be talking about them next week. Thank you for the emails. Thank you for following me. Thank you for just.
Thank you. Thank you. I cannot express the appreciation. I don't get a lot of comments on social media and that's okay.
Because I get to see the numbers of how many people listen to this podcast and I am truly grateful.
Have a great day on purpose, everybody.