In this episode, we discuss the importance of not playing the victim card.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about not playing the victim card. There are two ways to look at life, you can either be a victim or you can have a growth mindset. When you play the victim card, you believe things are out of your control and there is nothing you can do to change your situation. If you do this, then you’re waiting for someone to save you. If you maintain this mindset, you might be waiting for a long time in a situation that is causing you to suffer.
Humans had to go through a lot of tough stuff in the past. You were a hunter-gatherer or a farmer, and you had to take what your environment was giving you, so the human-adapted to its environment in order to survive, and these meant that you just dealt with the hard stuff and tolerated. The human mind is good at adapting to a negative environment because there is certainty with what is going on. You know what is going to happen and you’re not going to get any surprises. It might suck, but at least you have food and a place to sleep. You’re maintaining the basic necessities of life.
The world is a lot different now than it was in the past and we value certainty too much in areas where we shouldn’t. So if don’t like our job, but it pays an okay salary that we’re comfortable with, then we just stick with it because having certainty is better than dealing with uncertainty. So then we can play the victim mindset that says the economy is too rough, you don’t have the right network, you didn’t go to the right school, or your skin is too dark. There are plenty of people who came from the worst backgrounds than me and are way more successful than me. The key is that they didn’t play the victim.
They had a growth mindset that told them, where they are in life is not who they are going to be for the rest of their life. I am blessed that my parents sent me to a good school because it taught me that I’m on the same level as other people when it came to academics. As a Latino and Polish, there are lots of immigrant jokes about these two groups, but I want to show folks that I can succeeded with my work ethic and brain. I just set a goal on what I wanted to accomplish and I went after it. I realized that I could get better if I focused on the thing and got better at it.
Going into the Marines, helped me grow up a lot and reflecting on it, I’m glad I went through that experience. It showed me that I can transform my life if I take the action to become a better person. All I had to do was to say yes to going into the Marines and they took care of the rest. There comes a point where you have to say, do I want to continue down this path or switch to something else. I choose to get out of the Marines because I wanted something else out of life.
And when you get out of the Marines, it can be a scary situation. In the Marines, they give you all these benefits, a decent paycheck, you’re told what to do all the time, so there no confusion on what needs to be done for the most part, and you’re guaranteed a paycheck for the most part for the duration of your contract. When you get out of the Marines, then you’re just a regular civilian that needs to navigate this world. I remember doing countless job applications and going on interviews. I thought my military status would help but it really doesn’t. So I had to work on other parts of myself in order to get what I wanted out of life.
If I would have played the victim card, I could have been a bitter veteran that want the world to change to fit my expectations but that is not how the world works. You have to change your environment. There is an analogy that the world is the anvil and we’re are just hammers. We can help mold things using the world, but if we try to change the world, then we are just going to break. A hammer trying to change an anvil is just going to break. So you have to respect what is going on and don’t force something that can’t be changed. So I know I need to have a growth mindset and figure out what actions do I need to take to get the life I want.
To help me get away from a victim mindset, I went to school, I took improv classes, I read books on management and emotional intelligence, and making self-care a priority. This has helped me become a personal trainer, a white house intern, a financial advisor, and a published author because I believed that I could grow into obtaining those things. If I played the victim card, then I would have never accomplished those things.
Don’t believe that people will come to save you, you have to be the hero in your story. You can get help and everything, but the success of the journey comes down to you and your actions. When it comes to people’s finances, they are waiting for someone to give them a higher paying job or to offer them a job out of their current crappy one but if you did this, you might be waiting a long time. You have to take action on changing it by seeking that better career and just managing your finances. When I sit down with people to organize their finances, what I see is that people just haven’t taken control of their situation. There is a lot of things to know about financial planning, but the first step to creating a better life financially is just to start taking control over the situation and believe that things can get better and just work on it brick by brick.
It’s easy to play the victim card, but if you do it, you will never get the life you want.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode, to summarize it, don’t play the victim card, because you can save yourself a lot faster. If you need help, go seek help but try to maintain control over your life and how a growth mindset. Do this and you will never be more satisfied in life. There is no better feeling than doing things on your own terms and being the person you were meant to become.
To get a free copy of my book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and just pay for shipping and handling.
I have a quiz on my website that grades your inner circle, so if you want to find out if your inner circle is an A, B, C, D, or F, you can take that quiz at growwithjoe.me/quiz
I’m also trying to do a feedback Friday episode, so if you have a question that you would like to have my answer on the air, just e-mail me at [email protected]
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
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