Freedom Is Worth Building For

Freedom is literally the whole point of everything that I'm teaching. Freedom is the result of all of the little decisions, all of the thousands of smaller decisions made brick by brick, decision by decision towards the direction of the life that you actually want. And this is what I mean when I talk about becoming her before the evidence arrives. You don't wait until you feel free to start building a free life.

You decide what freedom means for you. Welcome to the Unblocked Woman podcast. I'm Amy Sanders. For years, I believed the next level of my life and business would come from a better strategy, working harder, figuring out that perfect plan.

But eventually, I saw the real truth. The biggest ceiling in our lives is not strategy, it's identity. The patterns we don't see, the subtle ways we play small, the version of ourselves that we keep defaulting back to even when we know we're capable of more. This podcast is where we bring those patterns into the light.

We talk about identity, leadership, growth, and what it actually takes to become the woman who can truly hold the life and business she wants. No fluff, no performance, just honest conversation about stepping fully into your power. So go ahead and subscribe and follow the show. And remember, the moment you see the pattern, you can finally break it.

Welcome back to the Unblocked Woman. I'm Amy Sanders and I am starting with a confession. I am a woman who is genuinely, deeply, and unshamely in love with the 4th of July. That is my confession.

Today's episode is going to be a little bit different. It is personal, it's patriotic, and it's also one of the important things that I think I can actually say about the work that we do here and inside my containers because freedom is literally the whole point of everything that I'm teaching. I'm a woman who is genuinely, deeply, and unshamely in love with the 4th of July. So if you're getting ready to celebrate the 4th of July holiday this week, or you're listening to this on the other side of the holiday at any other time with a little extra sun on your skin, maybe your tanner because of the holiday, welcome.

I'm so glad that you're here. So let me tell you why the 4th of July is my favorite day of the year. 4th of July for us starts early. We start with running a 5k with my family and this is just my individual family, my kids, my stepkids, my husband, and then some of our friends.

And we all move together down this parade route that is so fun because everyone's like cheering for us as we're like running down the parade route. And this is before the heat of the day sets in. across that finish line and we take a bunch of pictures and everything with all these people that we love, we go to the parade. Now the parade is super cheesy and it is literally the kind where the kids have grown up sitting on the curb and getting candy thrown at them and they're waving their little flags and they're all dressed up and they're red, white, and blue.

It is cheesy and we love it. Now my kids today, the youngest is 17 years old. He is not young. He is not little.

In fact, he is way taller than I am and he still loves to go. We all love it and we all dress up in the red, white, and blue head to toe all day long. We're literally screaming. We're ridiculous.

We're cheering on all the princesses and on all the floats and everything as they go by and we do it together. From the top to the end of the day, from the start to the finish, we are 100% percent all in on patriotism. If we're in the car, we're listening to patriotic songs. If we are in the backyard, we are listening to patriotic songs.

So after the parade, we then go home to our house and our home fills up with extended family, friends, kids everywhere. We have a big barbecue. Everyone's swimming in the pool. We also have yard games.

And it's loud. It's totally crazy. It's completely full of life. And it's exactly what I always wanted my life to feel like.

Every year on this day, my heart is literally ready to burst. Like, we are heading into the holiday right now. And I am getting so excited. The 4th of July for me and for my kids is delicious.

It's so exciting. It's so more fun and more exciting than Christmas. Then at night, on the 4th, we will watch fireworks. And we live in this incredible neighborhood where we don't even have to travel far for fireworks because we have a big firework show just right in our neighborhood.

And by the time the fireworks hit, you know, we've been outside all day doing all the patriotic things. We're exhausted and extremely grateful. The reason why this day is my favorite and also my kids' favorite is because of the memories that we have built over the years that has made it special. And even now, my kids are older.

They even dye their hair red, white, and blue. They wear funny shirts. They do all the things. They are all in on this holiday because we've always been all in on this holiday.

And we have always made it special. It's special because of what we have built around it. And I say this not like full of pride or anything, but we didn't stumble into this day. We designed it.

We designed the house that holds everyone. Me and my husband created this home and the pool. We created the schedule that lets us be fully present leading up to the day and to the day that we're going to be there. And we created the schedule that lets us be fully present leading up to the day and to the way that we're going to be there.

And we created the schedule itself. It's the life that we've created that has made this day in July feel like the most important day of the year. That's what freedom actually looks like from the inside for me. It's not an abstract concept.

It's a specific day in July where everything you value is like right in front of you and nothing is pulling you away from it. The reason why I love it so much is because every single person that I love so deeply is with me and is playing with me and is all in on the day and we are all present. And that's what we're talking about today. And I wanted to start with this because I literally feel it so deeply.

In fact, I'm already getting teary-eyed talking about this. The founding fathers of this country did something totally extraordinary. They looked at the world they were living in and at the systems that told people that they had to say and do certain things that the people had no voice, no say, no right to author their own lives. And the founding fathers said no.

They wrote their own documents and they made arguments and they fought for the idea that freedom is not a privilege to be granted, but a right to be protected. And they fought for the idea that freedom is not a privilege to be granted, but a privilege to be protected. And they fought for the idea that freedom is not a privilege to be protected. And as you can tell, I am so passionate about this.

They didn't happen by accident. All of this happened because people believed that it was worth dying for. And I do not take that lightly. Not for one single day.

And I know that as I record this, there are people outside of the United States that live in a different country that have different rules and different regulations. And I know that we are extremely blessed and extremely, extremely lucky to be part of the United States. And just as strongly as I believe this, I also believe that the founding fathers, they gave us this container. But we are responsible for what we put inside it and what we do with it.

We are the ones that are responsible for what we do with it. We are the ones that are responsible for designing our lives. Because the freedoms we have from the founding fathers that gave us this, they created the legal and the political frameworks for freedom. They secured the right to pursue this life and this liberty and this happiness that we enjoy.

But they could not define what happiness means for you. They could not build the life that makes you feel free. That part is yours. That is your responsibility.

And what I see in the women that I work with, and honestly, in myself at different seasons of my life, is that so many of us are living inside a country that guarantees our freedom and a life that doesn't feel free at all. We have all of the rights. We have been extremely blessed. But we don't always have the reality.

And that gap is not the government's problem to solve. It is ours to solve. So I want to ask you, do you feel free inside your daily life? Not in theory or in practice, but when you wake up on a Tuesday, does your life feel like yours?

Or are you just showing up for somebody else? For other people? Or do you feel trapped? I want to name what unfreedom, yes, I'm calling it unfreedom, but I'm calling it unfreedom.

I want to name what unfreedom actually looks like. Not the political kind, but the personal kind. Unfreedom looks like building a life around what other people expect of you and then feeling vaguely resentful or maybe very resentful that it doesn't feel like yours. It looks like working constantly but never feeling like you're getting ahead because you're grinding toward a version of success that someone else has defined and it's not even something that you actually want.

But you're not even stopping. You're not even stopping. You're not even stopping long enough to ask yourself that you want this. It looks like saying yes to things that your body is already saying no to because you haven't given yourself permission to want what you actually want.

It looks like being physically free. No one is stopping you. No law is restricting you and you're still feeling trapped. Trapped by an identity that you built before you knew who you were.

And by the way, that's all of us. We get to decide who we are. Maybe you're feeling trapped by the pattern of overgiving or overperforming or overproving. Maybe you feel trapped because you're in a relationship that doesn't serve you anymore but moving forward, doing something different feels scary.

Maybe you're trapped because you're in a job that you hate or you feel trapped by the voice that says you haven't earned it. You haven't earned the life you want yet. You're not actually worthy of that life that you want yet. All of that is not freedom.

That's a cage that you've built yourself and you forgot that it was optional. We live in an incredible country. It's optional. You get to choose your life.

Your life right now is exactly what it is because of every little choice that you have made to this moment. And I say this without judgment because I have lived it. There was a version of my life where I had every right to be free and I was choosing small choices every single day. I was living a life that I felt like was not mine.

And by the way, it was not because I was weak. I am not a weak person. It was because I hadn't decided that I could own the life I want and that I was worthy of it. I didn't believe that I was allowed to build my life.

I didn't believe that I was something that could feel free freedom requires a decision and you have to make that decision the founding fathers made theirs and they created a path for us but we are responsible to make ours so i want to ask you are you living inside a cage inside your life that you've built and if you are what would you do differently if you genuinely believed you were allowed to i am super passionate about this because i know the difference i know the difference of feeling like you can't pay your bills a feeling like your relationship you're trapped i know the difference of feeling like you can't speak your voice but i also know the difference of what it feels like to feel free i know the difference of what it feels like to feel free to invite people that you love into your home and to be able to put on a really big party because you have built that life, that home, that freedom for yourself. I have told you why I love the 4th of July. It means more to me now than it used to years ago just because of the difference of my life. But none of it happened by accident.

The house that couldn't hold everyone, that was a vision before reality. It was a dream that me and my husband had. And we actually found the house we wanted to build two weeks into dating. We didn't know we'd end up together.

We didn't know we'd actually end up building our dream house. The schedule that's clear enough to be fully present, that was a dream. That was a dream. That was also designed.

That was built intentionally. Boundary by boundary and little decision by little decision. The business that doesn't require me to actually work. I do work.

I'll admit, I work a lot. But I also vacation a lot. If you know me, I spend a lot of time with my family and with my friends. All of this is by design.

It's built on purpose because that's what freedom is. That's what freedom looks like to me. My kids' favorite holiday didn't come because their favorite holiday was just a certain day on the calendar to them. It became their favorite because we decided what we wanted that day to feel like.

And then we created it. And we made it feel different than every other day of the year. We created it. Freedom is the result of all of the little decisions, all of the thousands of smaller decisions made, brick-by-brick, decision-by-decision, towards the direction of the life that you actually want.

And it is available to you. The life that you are dreaming of, it is available to you. The life I'm living today, and I do not say this boastfully. I hope you do not take it that way.

That is not what it's intended. It is intended for it to be, if I can, you can. The life that I built now that I live now, I used to only dream about. I used to only dream about it.

And now the life that I want is even bigger. Because that's progression. That's what progression is. And this is what I mean when I talk about becoming her before the evidence arrives.

becoming her before the evidence arrives. You don't wait until you feel free to start building a free life. You decide what freedom means for you. And by the way, it's going to look different for you than it looks for me.

That's part of it. But you're specific. You start making choices in your actual daily experience and then you start making choices from that identity. That is the work that we're talking about here every single week.

What does freedom look like to you in your body on a Tuesday? What does it look like in your schedule? Who is in your home and how often? What things do you love to do together?

What does work feel like to you? Not in like this highlight reel, but every week. What does it look like to you? What are your kids going to say their favorite day of the year was and why?

What are you creating? This week looks very different for me. And yet I'm so grateful for the work that I've built so that this week can look the way it looks. So we're moving into the 4th of July this week.

But this past week I have been sick. So I haven't worked as much as I wanted to. And then I had multiple birthdays of different groups of friends that I wanted to be able to be present at. And I was able to.

Because that's the kind of life that I have built. And you can too. These questions that I'm asking you are not frivolous. They are the most important questions that you can ask yourself.

Because the answers tell you what you actually want to work towards building. If you don't know what you want or what you're building towards you'll keep... You'll keep building towards what's expected instead of what's wanted. I want to say that again because I don't think I was very clear.

If you don't know what you're building towards you will keep building towards what's expected instead of what you actually want. Do you know what your version of freedom actually looks like? Not the concept, but I'm talking about the specific, ordinary Tuesday version of it. Wednesday version of it.

Here's why I do the work that I do. Most women know on some level what they want their life to feel like. They have this picture. They have a sense.

An internal knowing that keeps showing up when they slow down enough to listen. But then those damn patterns return! And it's the pattern that says that you're not ready yet or that you're not capable. It says that people will think that you're too much or that you have to earn your rest.

You have to work harder in order to play. You have to earn the life you want before you're able to actually live inside it. Before you're allowed to want it openly. But that pattern I'm telling you is not the truth about you.

It is a survival strategy that made sense at some point and now has become the primary obstacle between you and that life that you actually want. The unblock method exists because I believe freedom is not just political. It's personal. It's physiological.

It's the internal work of identifying what's running you. That identity pattern. That default identity loop that we talk about. That fear underneath the behavior.

It's seeing that and then deciding right now that you're going to choose something different. Because you can't build a free life from an identity that does not believe it's allowed to have one. Your identity has to match. I watch so many people say that they're working on their mindset.

I'm working on my mindset. I'm doing mindset work. I'm saying all the affirmations. I watch it so often.

But what they have is not a mindset issue it's a pattern problem. The good news is that patterns can be interrupted if you don't know that it's a pattern problem it's not going to be interrupted. But once you interrupt it you can shift it. And I've watched so many women's lives hundreds of times shift and I've lived it inside my own which you can tell in this podcast I am super passionate about.

But it requires the willingness to see it first to look at the pattern honestly not with shame or judgment but say I see this and this is not my truth. This is just something that I've learned and I can learn something different. And that decision right there is the most patriotic thing that I know how to do. It's the personal equivalent of what those founders did.

Saying the way things have been here is not actually how I want them to be and I am claiming the right to do something different. I want you to reflect on your life right now and see if there is a pattern that's consistently standing between you and the life you actually want. And I want you to also stop long enough to ask yourself why you've been telling yourself why you can't have what you want. Why?

Because I'm telling you that you can. You absolutely can. So in closing sometimes I want you to visualize things and tonight is one of them. I want you to envision your 4th of July.

Let me rephrase that. I want you to picture your version of what my 4th of July is. I have told you what my 4th of July is and I have told you why I love it. I want you to envision yours not mine.

What does a day look like when you feel your life is totally completely free? When you're not managing or performing or practicing. When you're just in it. When you're present.

It's fully yours. Where are you? And who's with you? How do you feel in your body?

Now I want you to notice is that picture far from where you are right now or is it closer than you've been giving yourself credit for? And then I want to ask you one question. What is one decision that you could make this week that moves you in the direction of that picture you've just created? That decision, whatever it is, that's your declaration of independence.

From that pattern. From that permission. From the life that is ready for you. Here's what I want to say to you before I let you go.

I am genuinely, deeply grateful for the country where freedom is the foundation. Where the right to build a life on your own terms is not just possible but it's literally protected. Where I can build a business, I can raise the kids I want to raise how I want to raise them, I can speak what I believe and I can sit in my backyard on the 4th of July and feel like every single thing I work for is right in front of me. I do not take that for granted.

Not for one moment. And I also know that what the Founding Fathers gave us was just the container. Not the life inside it. They gave us the right to pursue happiness.

They could not pursue it for us. That is our job. That is your job. And it's literally the most important job you have.

Building the life that feels like yours. Designing the days that your kids will carry with them. Creating freedom that isn't just a word on a document but a feeling that you get to live inside every ordinary Tuesday of your life. That is what this work is.

That is what becoming her means. That is what my method in the mirror is for. Freedom is worth working for. It always has been.

It always has been for the life I have and the life that I am creating. The Founders knew this. And so do you. So with that happy 4th of July week I hope you have the most amazing holiday.

And go enjoy your people and create memories that will last a lifetime. That is exactly what I will be doing with my people. And with that I will see you next week. Bye.

Thanks for listening to The Unblocked Woman. Listen, you don't rise by waiting you rise by leading. So if this episode sparked a shift send it to a woman who needs to hear next. And if you are ready to go deeper join the Unblocked Woman Collective or begin the Unblocked Method at amysanders.

co And remember, see it, shift it, become magnetic. Your next level starts now.