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Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everybody.

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It's your girl, Sonya McQueen, with it's your life.

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What are you going to do with it?

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Your mind, your body, your choice.

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So today I want to talk to you about the rule books.

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Where are the rules?

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Where are all these rule books that people assume are floating around the universe?

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I'm going to give you a couple of examples, of course.

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You know how somebody says, well, I've never been married before.

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I don't know what the rules are.

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Or I've never been a parent before.

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I've never been a mom.

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I've never been a dad.

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I don't know what the rules are.

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Where are these rule books?

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I've heard those words a billion times.

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Now I can honestly say I've never said that.

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I've never said I've never been a blah, blah, blah, where are the rules?

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Or I want to be a blah, blah, blah, where are the rules?

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There is one rule book I know about.

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It's called the Bible.

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And even that's hard to follow.

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You read the Bible, you're like, yeah, I'm not doing that.

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And who does that?

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And why would they do that?

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Right?

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It's a blueprint.

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So where are these rule books?

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The way you're supposed to act in life.

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There are rules to everything, right?

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There's something called the law.

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We follow the law.

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We stop at stop sign, some of us.

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We stop at signals if it's red.

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We stay in our lane.

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We don't swear from left to right...left to right.

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And not expect to get pulled over or have somebody curse us out

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or call the police on us, right?

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Those are laws.

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They're all kinds of laws.

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That's why we have lawyers and judges and court systems and jails.

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We break the law.

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You risk the chance of going to prison.

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But where are the rule books?

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All right.

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So I have several authors I follow when they come out with a new book.

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I read it because they drop gems in our life.

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You know, they tell you how to be this kind of person

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and that kind of person.

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And they're just really good books.

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And some of the things you want to manifest in your life,

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some of the things that they write about,

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or if you watch some TV shows,

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some of the things they speak about,

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you're like, I am going to apply that to my daily living, right?

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It's going to make me a better person if I do X, Y, and Z.

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And I'm going to do that.

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How about the friend who you speak to?

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And you're like, how in the world did you make that work in your life?

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Because I'm going through that same situation.

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And then they give you their gems.

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Well, this is what I did to make my marriage work.

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And then you go home and you try that exact same thing and it fails.

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Not only does it fail, sometimes it makes things worse.

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You know why?

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Because you're not your friend.

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Your situation does not include the same two people,

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even if you're going through the same thing.

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I've said this before.

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You can have a parent that loses a child

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and that parent will grieve every day for the rest of their life.

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And somebody else can have the same thing go on in their life.

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It could be a parent that lost a child.

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And they feel like my child would not want me to be sad and suffer.

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So they celebrate the life that they had with their child

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and they go about living with their child.

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They go about their life not forgetting their child,

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still loving their child, but not living their life in misery.

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There are going to be a plethora of people who find fault in both scenarios, both of them.

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They're going to tell the person who's mourning every day, get over it.

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Like it's their place to tell them.

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Because in their mind, that's the rule.

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You mourn for 21 days.

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You can wear black during those days.

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After the 21 days, do some push-ups, go for a run and come back happy.

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And we don't want to hear nothing again unless it's your child's birthday.

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And then on the other side, how dare you celebrate that your child is not here anymore.

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I don't care.

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You're supposed to cry for 21 days.

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Wear black if you want to.

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Do some push-ups, go out for a run and then come back.

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And we don't want to hear anything else again.

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Unless it's their birthday or unless we bring it up.

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Because in that, their mind, that's the rule.

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Or how about a parent?

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You're a new parent and you have this person on your left saying,

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do not allow anybody to touch your child, to come around your child.

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Do not take your child out of this house unless it's for a doctor's appointment

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for six weeks, period.

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In the discussion, nothing else said.

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Six weeks in the house with that child.

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Keep that child's head covered, keep their feet covered,

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and don't let anybody touch your child six weeks.

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And then you have somebody else saying, hey, you know,

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we used to give birth and be out in the field the next day.

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Working.

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Shoot.

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Just because you had a baby, you think you get to stay home for eight weeks now,

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12 weeks, you better get your butt out of this house.

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Take that baby and drop him off at daycare.

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He's a week old.

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What's the problem?

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Because those are the rules in their heads.

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Right.

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So who do you listen to?

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You have all these rules.

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Oh, don't cook like that.

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You got to do it like this.

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Oh, you shouldn't do your hair like that.

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You should do it like this.

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Oh, oh, you know what would look better if you did this because these are the rules.

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Got a surprise for you guys.

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There are no rule books.

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There are suggestive books.

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There are suggestive shows.

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There are people who want to give you a better quality of life.

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So they drop those gems I was talking about earlier.

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But there are no real rule books.

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You have free reign.

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You can make your own decisions.

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You just want them to be great, positive decisions.

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And if you fall, it's okay.

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Get up, dust yourself off, try again.

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Right.

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You make your rules as you go along.

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Sometimes you adopt other people's ways.

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And they become your ways.

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They become your rules in your home.

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You know, you were raised by, hopefully you were raised by parents.

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I don't know.

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Some people look like they were raised by rules.

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But if you were raised by humans, you adapt some of their behaviors, some of their rules,

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the things you have kids and, hey, no TV after eight.

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As soon as you come home from work, you do, from school, you do your homework.

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You have a snack.

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You can't go outside and tell your room is clean.

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You have chores to do.

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Right.

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Then you have some parents who are like, all right, when my kids get home,

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they just left school.

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I don't want them worried about no school.

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They're not going to come home and still be in school.

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I want them to have a good time, enjoy their, their kid, their childhood, go outside and play,

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grab a snack if they want to, come in just through their homework before they go to sleep.

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Or better yet, do your homework before you come home.

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Why are teachers giving homework after school?

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They've been in school eight hours.

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Now you want them to come home and do more school.

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So there are no rules.

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There are no rules.

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And you have people who judge you by the way you run things and the rules in your home

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and the rules in your life.

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They don't have the answers either.

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They just know the way they run things and their rules.

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So they turn this smile upside down and take the time out to judge the way you run things.

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There's no perfection.

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Y'all, I, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but none of y'all are perfect.

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None of you.

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I'm the only perfect just joking.

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There is nobody perfect here.

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No matter what it looks like, what it smells like, what it tastes like, it's not perfect.

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Well, maybe taste my food is hitting perfect, perfect.

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But people's advice is just that it's not a rule.

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It's advice.

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You take it or you don't.

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You bump your head, you get up, you try something different.

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I'm going to give you this last thing.

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When COVID came out, I was working for the Department of Health.

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And, um, of course, we didn't know what COVID was.

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We, we didn't understand, you know, COVID has been around for ever, but this is a new strand.

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It's called COVID-19.

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And what are we going to do?

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We made up the rules for COVID as they went along.

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And I don't know how many of you remember, but in the beginning COVID, you don't come out.

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You, you isolate, you sit in quarantine, you quarantine yourself from your family, from your friends.

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People were actually leaving their homes, sleeping in their cars.

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For 14 days, getting hotel rooms, which is just as bad, but just getting away from their families,

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ask to not get their families sit.

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You know, hospitals at first were taking in people, then hospital workers were getting sick.

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So you couldn't come to the hospital.

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Don't bring that, don't bring that mess here.

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You know, you do this, you do that unless you're having a heart attack or a stroke.

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You have a cofactor, which made your COVID worse.

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And people were passing away left and right, left and right.

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Now COVID is just considered a bad code.

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It's the flu.

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You stay home a few days and you can take your butt back to work.

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You don't even have to stay home a week anymore.

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You can go back to work.

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You can't pass it to anybody.

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And you tell people you have COVID now and it's like, oh, wow.

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Yeah, I had it last week or oh, yeah, I haven't had it yet.

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You tell somebody had COVID, February 2020, they would hang up on the, scared it's going

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to come through the phone.

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The fear was so great from somebody getting COVID.

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And I do know really good people who passed away from COVID, but they had cold conditions.

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And if you think about it, go do your research.

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Look at how many people pass away from influenza.

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And my whole point is though, I don't want to go off on that trail there down that rabbit hole.

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My whole point is there were no rules when COVID first came out.

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We were scratching our heads.

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Well, I wasn't, but people were scratching their heads.

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The medical world, the departments of health and all the people, right?

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And they're scratching their heads trying to figure it out and they're trying to make the rules as they go along.

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But as they learn more and more and more about the virus, they started changing the rules.

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And they kept changing the rules.

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And now the rules today are totally different than the rules in 2020.

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Totally different.

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We used to sit outside at the Department of Health before anybody could come out.

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We had all this paperwork.

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We had to ask questions.

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We had to wear a N95 mask.

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We had to sit there and we had to ask these questions.

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Somebody say, yeah, to any of those questions, you got to get out of here.

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You got to get out of here.

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We had all these drive-throughs at all our Department of Health.

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And you got to drive through them.

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We're taking your temperature and we're asking those questions.

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And there were long lines, thousands and thousands of people in the world shut down.

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The world shut down.

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And people started getting depressed and sad.

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And suicide rates went up and depression went up.

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And people fighting in grocery stores over toilet paper and paper towels and soap.

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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.

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And we just couldn't keep enough of those things in the stores.

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And now look, you got COVID.

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You can still, people still going out. Yeah, I got COVID.

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Wearing cloth mask or no mask.

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The rules changed.

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You guys, write your own stories.

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Don't live in the shadows of other people.

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And if somebody has great gems, go ahead and adapt them.

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It's okay.

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It's all right.

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That's why we read books that are not available.

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Books that that change our outlook or make us think or I can't even think you guys can help me think though.

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That's why we read those kind of books.

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That's why we watch certain shows so that we can be enlightened and mentally and emotionally grow.

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You know, so we can learn.

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There's this beautiful lady on Facebook.

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I follow and everything in me says we used to be really good friends.

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But she might tell me different.

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So don't embarrass me.

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But she's playing this game.

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And I had never heard of it.

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So she was telling me where I could find the game and I went and downloaded the game so that I could.

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She said, it keeps you sharp.

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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.

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And and whatever my husband loves watching stuff.

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And I used to look at him be like, who the hell watches this stuff.

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My husband will watch almost anything from Hitler to slavery movies to anything, anything, biograph anything.

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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.

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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.

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But you know what's funny, even watching those shows doesn't mean everybody who believes in that things like that.

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I'm getting off again. So let me just say.

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Think for yourself.

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Come up with your own rules.

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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.

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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.

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So I will be talking about them next week. Thank you for the emails. Thank you for following me. Thank you for just.

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Thank you. Thank you. I cannot express the appreciation. I don't get a lot of comments on social media and that's okay.

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Because I get to see the numbers of how many people listen to this podcast and I am truly grateful.

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Have a great day on purpose, everybody.