Episode Transcript
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Hello, hello, hello. Good evening. Actually, it's supposed to be good morning,
good afternoon, good evening, girlies.
I hope you all are having an amazing day.
Oh, wait a second. Let's insert intro right now.
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, it girls. I hope you all are doing amazing.
Welcome to Faithfully Feminine Podcast, where I, your host, Imani Bailey,
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shares all things faith, all things feminine, and practical ways to transform
yourself through navigating womanhood while sharing lessons God has taught me along the way.
Sit back, relax, and let's get into some things.
Y'all, I totally was tripping. I don't know what was going on with me,
but this one is actually a hard one for me.
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And I know I've talked about a lot of things on this podcast,
like some heavy hitters.
I've shared a lot about myself over over the years on the internet.
And I don't have any regrets. But without further ado, child,
let's get right into this.
I honestly have always struggled with gossiping. And although I've gotten better,
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I still fall victim to it. And I'm really not sure.
And my, okay, let's, let's pause. Let's go back.
I don't know if it's just a Southern thing. I know it's not just a Southern thing.
I feel like women or people in general, it's very easy to like talk about others.
Let's just stay that out there.
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Now, if you are on your high horse for today and this morning and this afternoon
or evening, I'm gonna need you to park it, tell her to go drink some water and
get off of her for a second and come back down to reality with the rest of us.
But But I really do think that when I picture gossiping, in my mind,
I picture women over the age of like 65 out on a porch of a house that probably
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was like an old plantation.
They're sitting on land that is probably housed slaves in the United States.
And I just see them in their rocking chairs, white rocking chairs.
I want y'all to like close your eyes and like picture this white
rocking chairs like y'all know the old school rocking chairs
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that's made of pure wood with a table
in the middle and a glass and a pitcher of sweet tea and two cups and just women
with sweet tea lemon and they just on the porch just gossiping girl just going
at it on a nice summer day when it's not too hot outside.
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That is what, it's just like an old Southern, like it's an old Southern thing.
Older, elder people sitting on the porch talking about folks. That is deep South.
Deep South stuff right there.
And I'm going to start off by telling y'all where I think I pinpoint outside
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of the imagery that I just gave y'all, my problems with gossiping.
And in this episode, by the time you finish this episode, you will learn exactly
what gossiping is, what it isn't, where it talks about gossiping in the Bible,
and what you can do to implement if you are someone who is like me,
who struggles with gossiping.
Way back when I was like, okay, well, the Holy Spirit was like,
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this is something that you struggle with.
I wanted to know because I've always been a very curious person and just a thinker,
really and I like to know why things are hence why I have a podcast and a platform
and I was like okay but why is this like what I don't think I'm bad at gossiping
this there's people that are worse,
doesn't just like discount the fact that I have
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struggled but anyway and I realized I was like I want to go back and see like
what perpetuate me to do this and I came to find out that growing up outside
of the imagery that I just told y'all and me being from the South and part of
gossiping is like spilling the tea. What tea you got?
What's the 411? We want to know, right?
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But growing up, I always really liked celebrity gossip.
I loved, even if it was younger celebrities, it didn't even have to be Paris Hilton or whatever.
It could have been what Raven Simone was doing outside of That's So Raven.
It was Teen Vogue. It was Seventeen Magazine. It was reading like page six.
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It was watching reality shows too.
I've always had a huge love for reality TV and I still do.
But it was all of that. It was celebrity gossip.
It was watching reality TV show. It was wanting to not necessarily be who I
was talking about, but I was just very interested in like celeb stuff.
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And then as I got older, like once you got like teenage girl age or not even that,
but once I started having like afterschool programs and I was around a lot of
different different types of children that went to different schools all around
Metro Atlanta at Boys and Girls Club. Shout out to the Boys and Girls Club of America.
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We would always just gossip. That was my favorite pastime. My favorite pastime was gossiping.
And I had to dig a lot deeper to see why this was.
And I've heard people say like, oh, people who gossip really don't want to face
the reality of the things that they have going on.
So they would rather talk about other people. And I would always kind of disagree
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because it wasn't like gossiping for me was like an escape for my own reality at the time growing up.
And I was having household stuff and still am child, but I was having household
stuff that I was dealing with as a child that I feel like most children should
not have to deal with, but that was my reality.
And so it wasn't like I was like like gossiping and talk about other people
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because I didn't want to face what was going on at home.
I felt like I was just more nosy more than anything.
But honestly, I was just more nosy, like, oh, OK, that's that's hot tea.
And I felt like gossiping was a means of entertainment to me most times.
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And that's just how I entertain myself.
And then I was like, wait, But why do I feel like that's entertainment?
And then I started to like, because that's what I'm watching, right? Right.
The definition of gossiping, and I'm going to read this word for word so I don't
get anything misconstrued.
It is casual or unconstrained conversations or reports about people typically
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involved with information that is not confirmed to be true.
I'm going to read that again. Casual or unconstrained conversation or reports
about people that are typically involved with information information that are
not confirmed to be true.
That is the definition of gossiping.
So it's like being chatty Cathy's around information that may or may not be true.
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Now, if you're telling, and that's, that's the thing too, because when I started
to do this whole, like, I want to be better at this, it got to the point where
I was like, then God, what do I talk about?
Honestly and truly, what do I talk about? I don't want to talk about myself
self 24-7, that's not fun.
Like, honestly, what do I talk about?
But if something involves you and you're there and it involves you and you have
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feelings towards something and you're telling your friend about what happened,
that's not gossiping because you are there. You have recollection of the events.
You have feelings towards whatever conversation you had.
That's to really just hone in on the information that is not confirmed to be
true because the things that are said out of your mouth can be damaging to others' reputation.
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Not only that, but it's just damaging in general.
Not saying that you really stopping bags out here because at the end of the
day, like, who are we really? But,
I will say that the Bible does mention a lot, not just of gospel,
yes, of gossip, but in a way that a perspective that is more different from
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probably what you've heard before with other, like, I don't know,
episodes or whoever's talked about gossiping.
And so I have like three, three verses. They will also be down in the description
box. Y'all know I'm always there for the girls.
Sidebar, if you're not signed up for my substack community, click on the link
below and sign up and then you will get one email a week of what we're talking about.
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And sometimes it matches the podcast. Sometimes it does not.
Y'all know I love to throw in a good information or two because I'm always loyal
to the girls who are loyal to me.
So it will also be on the sub stack just so you have these as well.
And join the conversation. Whenever you get the email, you can click to join
the conversation and we can chat together, believe it or not,
almost like a a text message conversation.
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So if you love me that much, like, why not? Anyway, first verse is Proverbs 8.21.
And this verse hints at watching what you say, because our tongues hold power.
Now, honestly and truly, Proverbs 8.21 is something that, let me read it word
for word, and I'm pretty sure you've heard this voice, this,
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not this, I'm pretty sure you heard this verse over and over again.
Well, not 821, y'all. I mean, 1821.
821 is wisdom's call, but we're not talking about wisdom's call.
We're talking about the power of the tongue.
So Proverbs 1821 reads, the tongue can be used as a weapon to harm and destroy
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or as a tool to build and heal.
Just beautiful. I love that translation because something when we get into the
new King James Like, whew, child. But, yeah.
Yes, the next one is Romans 1.29, and Romans 1.29 talks about God's wrath against
a sinful humanity in which we've seen time and time again.
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I actually highly encourage you to read the whole first chapter of Romans,
but for time's sake, we're just going to read Romans 1.29.
They have become filled with every... Are we going to read it?
Because what? They have become filled with every kind of wickedness,
evil, greed, and depravity.
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They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice.
They are gossips, slanders, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful.
They invent ways of doing evil. They disobey their parents.
They have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.
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Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death.
They not only continue to do these things, these very things,
but also approve of those who practice them.
Talk about a drag. i mean not gossip is mentioned with murder greed wickedness
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and everything in between.
And the last verse the prince to that
points to watching what we say being gossipers is first timothy first timothy
5 13 although i say last verse i mean like last verse that we're going to talk
about there are over like 30 verses in the bible actually there might be over
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40 i could be be wrong. Look, I'm not a theologian.
There we go. But I know there are over 30 verses in the Bible that talks about
gossiping, lying, and saying things that you should not.
First Timothy 13 reads, besides they get into the habit of being idle and going
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about from house to house.
And not only do they become idlers, but also busybodies who talk nonsense,
saying things they ought not to.
So I counsel the younger widows to marry, to have children, to manage their
homes, to give the enemy no opportunity for slander.
Calendar with that being said the first thing you're going to do as a serial gossiper,
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is to be careful of
the entertainment you watch now I have this
separated into two parts because we are in a digital day and age well it really
should be three but I have it separate the two first part is our tv shows tv
shows movies anything you watch on the television monitor it to the shows you
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watch and how much you watch them. That's going to be step one.
You're not going to change anything yet. We're just going to,
you're going to write down, you can write it down the shows that you watch,
like your top shows that you watch, how long you watch them,
how many hours do you spend watching TV throughout the week.
And you're also going to do the same for social media, but we're going to,
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we're going to wait on social media for a second.
After you monitor the shows that you watch, you write that list down,
you figure out and gauge how many hours a week you are watching TV,
it will kind of give you an idea of where you are.
So for an example, Miss Imani watches literally every reality TV show.
And I probably watch now not as much, but probably before, I don't know,
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you could say say like 10, 15 hours a week of gossip and shows,
of shows with drama and gossip.
And then look at your social media.
So I want you to survey the apps that you love.
I know we all probably have different social media tastes, but the most popular
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apps, of course, Instagram,
Facebook, Facebook, YouTube, and our favorite TikTok child, I want you all to
look at you all's feeds on each one of those apps.
And even if you're a Pinterest girly, you can write that down,
but there's not much gossiping on Pinterest.
Now I've become a Pinterest girly. I'm like, oh, I really like this.
So when you open up your Instagram app, that's just going to be the easiest for right now.
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But when you open up your Instagram or your Facebook app, I want you to scroll
at like, Like what types of things do you see?
What types of people are you following? What are they talking about?
Do you follow the Shade Room, Spiritual World?
Was it the N-Words Be Hose OK page? Justin Laboy?
Any like blogs? You follow blogs? You follow pages like that that are giving
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you the tea on the latest and the greatest of what's happening?
Also, do you follow any influencers that are doing the same?
Name, almost like a Wendy Williams, but in an influencer manner.
Do you follow like messy TikTok, messy talk?
Do you see content on messy talk that's talking and gossiping about what the
latest influencers are doing and who didn't get invited to the TART trip and who signed what deal?
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Figure out what your algorithm looks like.
And that will tell you everything you need to know. So step two to that,
after you figure that out, you're going to start watching different types of
shows, different types of TV.
Maybe you can lean into, and I've done a hobbies podcast episode before that
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talks about like feminine hobbies you can try, but maybe you wanna learn something new.
How about you start watching a YouTube channel or a YouTube video to like learn something new? Ew.
How about you start watching educational TV that's teaching you something?
It can be something about history. It can be anything.
How about you start watching different types of interviews from different business
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people you may or may not like or people in the financial sector to learn about
things that may be coming up or maybe you're tech girly or you're tech bae.
You can watch about the latest inventions.
Start watching TV that is more stimulating, kind of as if we want to be,
and I know how it says in the Bible, you want to be like childlike kind of, right?
And so as a kid, think about how sometimes like early, early on,
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your parents would typically put you in front of what?
Educational television, literally. So you can learn colors and numbers and whatever else.
Maybe you want to learn a new language. Why don't you put on childlike program
shows so you can learn the colors in a new language and stuff like that.
But you kind of want to be childlike in a sense of you never want to stop learning
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because there's always something to learn. Right.
And for the social media, you're going to start looking for other pages that are different.
You're going to start liking different things, just like things that can teach
you things. Or I have like, oh my gosh, I found this one page that gives you
like 10 ideas to do a month that are like low budget things.
Or like the little self-care pages where it's like, oh, you can try this this
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month. Or like financial pages.
Holy Girl Habits. I started watching like YouTube.
Holy Girl Habit vlogs. Logs, guys for low budget, self-love ideas,
outfit guides from different influencers.
Try to follow different types of pages that are not always making you,
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one, talk about people or hear gossip about other people, and two,
not pushing you to always buy something too.
I know that's another podcast episode for another day, but still,
we can kind of lump it together.
And on my blog, I kind of have some examples of that.
And then when you do that, you will start to see that your taste will change.
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You will no longer crave looking at content that talks about other people 24-7.
Your entire, because what you consume, it's like you are what you eat type of situation.
I never like growing up, I would hear that all the time. And I'm like, what?
But you literally are what you eat. Just like if you were to consume food,
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more food or more calories than you can burn, you gain weight, correct?
So if you consume things in the media and with TV and with music,
it's going to manifest and show up in your life. Point blank, period.
On to the step two. This is the second most important thing when getting rid
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of being a serial gossiper.
And this is going to be your prayer life. life. One, you cannot do anything
on your own with your own merit, especially when it comes to gossiping.
Actually, I've tried and I failed many times.
I failed many of times. And I'm here to tell you, if your prayer life starts
to slip, you will start to gossip again.
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And it might not be as bad as before, but you will start to,
you'll fall, you might fall back into your same old habits.
So your prayer life is going to help you because, one, we can do all things
through Christ who strengthens us, Philippians 4.13.
However, with Philippians 4.13, we all know that verse, Christ strengthens us.
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We get our strength from Christ.
But if we are not in communication and in conversation and in relation with
Christ, how are we going to get our strength to do something that is against
our natural sinful nature? right?
The Holy Spirit is a helper that God left us, and the Holy Spirit can and will
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cultivate you, but the Holy Spirit cannot cultivate you if you don't have a relationship with Him.
So, I know having a prayer life, and this is something that I worked on so much
recently because of a lot of outside things, and we're going to get into that later,
but But what it means to have a in-depth prayer life is very hard,
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especially when you don't know where to begin.
I found it easiest when I do my prayer because I was like, you know what? I'm going to pray daily.
And I just felt like at the time I was praying when I got food,
I would just pray when I got in the car.
I would thank God for taking me home. But I realized that you can pray every day throughout the day.
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It doesn't have to be a long prayer. It can be a short prayer.
You just want to invite God continuously on your day.
But starting that out is in the morning. And I found that it was best in the morning.
At first, I started at night and I was like, it's just it wasn't hitting the same.
Now, when I started praying in the morning, that's when I can see a drastic
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change throughout my day.
And even when I felt like I did not have much to say, I started journaling.
Like I highly recommend you getting a journal and putting dear God and literally
write a letter to God every day. Thank him for things.
The God, the God, the Bible, God's word does teach us how to pray.
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And although we're not going to get into that this episode, there is a recipe
that God gives us and teaches us how we should pray.
However, that's not a recipe of, oh, if you put in some cinnamon,
like now the whole, the whole dish is ruined.
God's not going to answer you. God is happy to hear from you.
He wants a relationship with you.
So even if it is saying, dear God, and telling him all of your worries for that
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day and signing it off with amen and just thanking him, he's going to be so happy.
It does not have to be the same way every time.
And I found that was the easiest way I could pray without like,
oh, I don't know, what should I say today? Like what? You get what I'm saying?
So pray daily, whether it's night, whether it's in the morning,
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whether it's both throughout the day, every time you get in your car,
every time you get out of your car, just thank God. Just thank you.
And then after that your
prayer life when you start to slip it's not
if it's always when because we all know
but when you start to slip you may start to see that you will start gossiping
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again or you will start craving those shows or you just fall back into your
old habits and I'm here to to tell you that when you get off the horse, get back on.
Don't stay there. It's okay. You will live to fight another day.
You can always repent to the Lord. The Holy Spirit also will be a helper to
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give you what we call a tap-tap.
I know I told y'all this before in the episode. My friends and I got this thing,
tap-tap, girl. You out of line.
You really out of line, girl. It's that little shoulder tap,
like, excuse me, log off for me, babe. Yeah.
You can ask God for discernment. You can ask God, like, Holy Spirit,
please, like, help me with this.
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I cannot do this on my own. Like, literally, I have, have you ever,
have you ever been down and you begged God?
Yeah, that's me. I'm like, God, please, I can't do this on my own.
I can't do this on my, I need you.
And that is okay. And when you even start to gossip, I promise you,
next thing you know, you will start feeling the Holy Spirit like,
uh-uh, tap, tap, you out of line.
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You add a line, casually start to change the conversation.
And that's going to lead into our next thing because whenever you are on this
like glow up, self journey, personal development journey, you will always lose friends.
You will lose friends. You will lose followers. Hi, I'm here. I know.
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I've lost followers in this life of doing content creation because I was not
not always in the personal development space.
And I always was not very open about being Christian and God's love.
And my teachings did not always reflect that.
And so when they started to, people started to get upset and I've started to
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lose followers, just like I lost friends.
And that's okay because whatever you lose in God's, like doing whatever God
wants for you to do in your life that is alignment into his will,
you will always gain 10 times over.
So that friend that you lost, you will get another one. You'll actually,
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you might get two friends in replacement of that one friend,
or you might just get one friend that is so good that sticks closer than a brother
that you don't even realize,
wow, I was crying because I lost these friends, but I really have a good community, right?
And so when you start off this journey, I cannot tell, There's not one recipe, right, to do this.
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But you may want to tell your friends.
Because one thing I know is that serial gossipers stick to other serial gossipers.
Like, we feed off of each other.
And so when you decide in that moment, I'm going to break this serial gossiping
cycle, you can't just do some cold turkey mess and expect your friends not to
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look at you like you're crazy. Because they will.
So you're going to have to have a conversation. And although this conversation
might be very uncomfortable, you're going to have to learn how to have uncomfortable conversations.
Because if you're listening to this and you're a single woman dating in this
world, you'll know that you will have to have uncomfortable conversations with these men out here.
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Trust and believe. So good practice with uncomfortable conversations in general
is to do them with your friends. and you will see very close how your friend
responds if that person can truly continue to be your friend or not.
And I'm not here to tell you that you need to say, hey, I'm not gossiping anymore.
Like we can't be friends anymore. I don't think you should say that,
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but just say, hey, I'm working on not being a gosper anymore.
Like I wanna be more intentional on the things that I'm saying.
And so, you know, whenever we get together, I know we love to gossip.
I know we love to look at key girl, girl.
But I want to try to not do that, right? And your friend may be open to it.
And when your friend is open to it, that's great.
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And whenever y'all do get together and they start gossiping,
or maybe it slips up and you start gossiping, you can always course correct.
You can always change the conversation.
Or this is one thing I like to do too, because I'm like, I know Holy Spirit just gave me the tap tap.
Like I'm caught in the act, red handed, caught in the act going going in.
And then I'm like, let me actually say something nice about this person.
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And then because I knew I gossiped about them, I'm going to pray for them.
I'm going to pray for whatever I know they're working towards and just pray
that they receive it in God's name because I should never have been gossiping
about them in the first place.
So there's always room for course correction. You can always get back up.
Now, what happens when you have that conversation with your friend and maybe it's not working out?
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Maybe they start putting you down. Maybe they say, oh, Imani thinks that she's
better than people now or she thinks she's better than me now or I don't know who she thinks she is.
Like, she's too good to do X, Y, and Z. She used to do this all the time.
Y'all know how folks be. That has happened to me time and time again.
It is okay. And I know that it might hurt your feelings, especially if if this
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is coming from somebody who you care about, like a friend, it will more than
likely hurt your feelings.
But the pep talk here is that with every day you have and every,
like, and I tell my mom this all the time, because she'll say things like, oh, I can't do this.
Like, I feel like it's too late for me. And I'm like, as long as you still have
air in your lungs, that God is breathing through you, you still have a life,
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you still have breath in you.
There's always a new day and a new opportunity. You can always turn around and
decide to do something better. Always.
I don't care if you fall nine times, you could get up 10, like Cardi B said.
There's always time to reinvent yourself, to do better, to grow up, to become whatever.
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So do not let the words of others discourage you from this walk because it's
not going to be a linear walk.
And you're going to have to find new friends, which is always fun,
but could be a little hard, could be nerve wracking.
And in moving, like I, y'all know I moved from Atlanta to DC and it was a good
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thing and it's a bad thing because I started to meet people who we did not have
people in common with at all.
Like I've met people who did not know any other person that I knew and that
kind of started off. it was easier for me to not gossip with them because who
we gonna gossip about? We don't have mutuals.
We don't know the same people unless they're like, oh, I have this friend named
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da-da-da-da. But I just found it a lot easier.
But when you lose friends, you can always find more friends and cultivate new relationships.
And you can try different hobbies like I have in my other podcast episode, feminine hobbies.
It's like, what, 30 or 40 feminine hobbies that you can try.
You can meet someone there.
You can go to one of those meetup groups. I know D.C. has a ton of them.
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I tried, what's it called? City Girls Who Walk D.C.
I tried one of those. You can like try stuff like that around the city or state
that you're in and meet new people. You can meet new women at church.
I met women at church. I joined a small group and I met two women at church.
You can meet people volunteering. There's always opportunities to where you can meet new people.
So do not be hung up. And I know it might hurt because friend breakups do hurt
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just as bad as romantic partnership breakups. Trust me, I know.
But the silver lining is that you always can meet new people as long as there
is still breath in your lungs.
Last thing is the things you're going to do when you slip up.
When you slip up, you're going to repent.
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If you are caught in the act red-handed, girly, you can also change the conversation.
And then the last thing I recommend I said before is that you can pray for someone else.
Always pray for others and cheer people on. And I mentioned this in my,
it's like the first season I had a jealousy and envy episode.
And I talked about how, like the difference between the two.
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And at one point I found myself like a little envious of my friends because
what happens when you've been praying for something, you don't get it and you
see someone who you love of have it.
You're not necessarily upset with them, but you kind of like,
oh, like you're coveting your neighbor's stuff, right?
And so pray for them. Whenever you feel these feelings arise,
or you feel like you want to talk bad about someone, do the complete opposite.
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Instead of talking about her hair, whatever, her birthday, whatever,
you can be like, I pray that she has an amazing birthday trip.
Because I know how it feels to have a traumatic birthday trip.
So I pray Pray that this birthday is the best birthday for so-and-so ever or whatever.
So just pray for others in a good light. Like don't be saying no like messed
(30:54):
up prayer now, like be for real.
Let's not play with God like that, but pray for others and you will see when
you pray for others, God also blesses you as well.
So I hope y'all have enjoyed this episode from one serial gossiper to another.
Ex-serial gossiper, I'm trying to, I'm trying to get up out of,
(31:15):
I don't think I'm a serial gossiper anymore. I think I'm now just a sipper, you know?
I lost the G and the O and the S.
Now I'm hanging on to one S. I'm a sipper. So by the time this airs, happy President's Day.
If you're listening to this in the United States, I do apologize for the bye
week, but I will see y'all next Monday. And I love y'all so much.
(31:38):
Share this with another gossiper, because I know you got one.
If you're listening to this and you're a gossiper, I know you got some gossiping
friends. And I'll see y'all later.