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Begin Again is for people in the second half of life who sense that the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Host Winston Faircloth — spiritual director, daily poet, and fellow traveler — brings honest conversation, personal story, and original poetry to the journey of remembering, releasing, and returning to who God created you to be. Visit www.myreuniontour.com for more resources.
Hey there, it's Winston Faircloth, and welcome back to a bonus episode of the Begin Again Leadership Podcast. Last episode, we talked about the first step of refinement, which is the step of unplug. And this weekend, I did a Facebook Live to go through some practical steps on how you can unplug in your life. Here's that live.
Winston Faircloth:And what prompted the day's live was I had the opportunity this week to go to do some coaching in a mentors group that I work with. In that mentors group, asked a simple question. So what is your word for the year so far? This past year has been crazy. It's just been so unpredictable and so unexpected.
Winston Faircloth:When I talk to folks in the community that I was coaching in the other night, two words really came up all the time, exhausted, overwhelmed. Those two words kept coming up over and over again. Hey, I want to raise my hand and say, I am right there with you. My April was very much like that. I had really hit the wall.
Winston Faircloth:I was beginning to not only feel the sense of overwhelm and exhaustion, I was having the third leg of that stool, which was almost resentment. I would say resentment was also part of the experience I was feeling then. So as a natural encourager, I just knew that I couldn't go any longer with that kind of state of mind. And this year has been so challenging in that way. It doesn't have to be that way.
Winston Faircloth:And in the sixty days that followed, I followed what I'm now calling refinement season. I learned some things that I wanted to share with you here in my community and also to just make this resource available to you, just to give you another way of thinking about what's going on. So refinement is restoring the flame within. And it's a play on retirement. Living here in Florida and being of a senior age, I'm not ready to retire but I definitely wanna get that passion back.
Winston Faircloth:I wanna get that sense of excitement and commitment up to a higher and higher level. And so over about a sixty day timeframe, I went through a four stage process. Then my four stages were to unplug and that's what we're gonna talk about today. Unplug, unlearn, which is really hard for people with lots of life experience, rest, prioritizing rest, and then this process of relearning, reintroducing new beliefs into the concept. So in this week's podcast, I talk a lot about unplug.
Winston Faircloth:And so today I just want to give you some practical applications of unplugging and give you some things to consider in terms of how you implement unplug in your life. So what do I mean by unplug? Well, we're gonna curate, we're going to take a moment, we're gonna take a step back from all of the inputs that we've had in our life and are a part of in our life. And we're going to curate our connections, in which voices are we going to listen to and pay attention to our content, whether those are courses or classes or masterminds or things that are popping up on our smartphones and the communities. And for me, I ended up taking a intentional decision to unplug from many things I found extremely valuable.
Winston Faircloth:And as I share in the podcast, I unplugged from some coaching programs, some mentorship and other courses that I had made significant multi 5 figure investments in. And I had to just get away from them for a while because what was going on inside of me was I was really my head was spinning like a top. I felt all these competing voices going on and I couldn't even hear my own voice any longer. And so the refinement process is a step by step journey of helping you rediscover that voice and that flame from within. But today I just want to pass on a couple of tools and tips that I use from a practical perspective.
Winston Faircloth:So the first one is Facebook and my desktop, the distractions there. I've really struggled with social media, especially in this election season. This Chrome extension called the News Feed Eradicator, it works for both Facebook and Twitter. And what it does is it basically takes out In Facebook, what it does is it takes out the feed of all the people you follow. And what it does is it blocks that with a really nice, handy quote, an uplifting quote.
Winston Faircloth:And what it allows me to do is to just navigate over to the Facebook groups that I want to participate in. I really enjoy the groups that I've opted into and are part of. And that's really the only thing I want to see in Facebook these days. And so on the desktop, it's a great tool. It's a Chrome extension.
Winston Faircloth:It's free. And it really helps me kind of filter out a lot of the noise so I can really listen to and experience the parts of Facebook that I want. And then the other app that's also a desktop app is called Freedom. And think of it as it's rules based. It has a number of different types of websites that you can temporarily block.
Winston Faircloth:You can set times of day to block your access to these apps. And it's really a great I don't want to eliminate being able to go to LinkedIn and to other things on the web, but I don't need to be going there all the time. And so Freedom has been a real helpful tool for me in terms of helping me on the desktop side. Now, in terms of the handheld or portable side of the house, I've just installed an app called Motion. And what Motion does is it looks at how many times a day you're touching your screen and how much time that you are picking up your phone and how long that then you're scrolling on your phone.
Winston Faircloth:And it's a very intuitive free app that helps you just be more mindful about the number of times that you're interacting with your phone. But a lot of the manufacturers, whether it's Apple or Android have a version of apps inside their ecosystem to help you monitor your screen time, which is always little bit of a scary notification on the weekend when you get notified how much time you spend on different apps over the past week. And then the do not disturb function is really helpful. I'm an Apple user and so I really enjoy being able to use that. And the new sleep function in Apple has been a real godsend in terms of making access to the phone more challenging as it's time to go to bed.
Winston Faircloth:But I'm also going to ask you to go bigger. In this season of UNPLUG, I mean, you don't get to the same level of pain that I was at when I faced this challenge in April, but I decided to go big in terms of all these inputs that was coming into my mind and my soul. So one of the things that you can do to minimize the attention seeking applications that are on our phones is to delete notifications. They're just trying to get your attention. And I would say to you, how critical are some of those notifications to your day to day life?
Winston Faircloth:Most of the apps that are on my phone are conveniences, but they're not necessities. And so this season of unplugging is helping you curate. That's the key word here. What works and doesn't work for you? The other thing that I did, I took the radical step of deleting email from my phone.
Winston Faircloth:And I challenge people kind of scream at me a little bit when I share this particular suggestion of taking email off your phone. And I challenge you to say, is there any, in your day to day work, if you're an entrepreneur, you're running your business, most of the folks I work with are in the either beginning stage of building their business or they have an established business, how many emails are of an urgent immediate nature that land in your inbox in a given day? Here's what I would say. I'm working with people who know how to reach me if something's an emergency. They're not going to send an email, right?
Winston Faircloth:That trusted circle of clients and internal contacts know how to reach me with something that is of an urgent nature and they know that it's not via email. And so I don't need email on my phone. I can check email when I come to my desktop. That could feel radical to some of you, but I'd ask you to challenge yourself and really look at your inbox over the last twenty four, forty eight hours and look at the emails that landed there and ask yourself how urgent are any of those emails? And if they are urgent, can you begin to train people on how an alternate way to connect with you for those urgent matters?
Winston Faircloth:And then I've also removed temptations and I think that differs for all of us. But Facebook and Twitter came off my phone, Instagram and LinkedIn stayed on my phone, but they're not on the front page of my phone anymore. And so those kind of It just takes a little more effort to get to those other apps. And I'll say that my life is tremendously better having taken email, Facebook, Twitter off of my phone. And that's the whole purpose with this UNPLUGED season is for you to be more discerning and take intentionality about these interruptions that are in your life because this will make possible step two, which is coming up on the podcast starting this Monday, is unlearned.
Winston Faircloth:And you can't really begin this process of discernment if your head is always being on a swivel with all of these different inputs. So refinement is not for everyone but I bet if you're feeling overwhelmed or exhausted, this could be a practical first step for you to regain that fire and passion from within.
Winston Faircloth:So that wraps up our Facebook Live that we did over the weekend, just to give you some more practical application as to how you can unplug. And on our next episode, which is coming on Monday, we'll talk about the second step, which is unlearn. So thanks for checking out this bonus episode, you only get this as a subscriber, we're not promoting it any other place. So thanks for being with us today. I hope this serves you and I'll catch you on the next episode.