In this episode, we discuss the importance of being vulnerable with your loved ones.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
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. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
At the end of today’s podcast episode, I’m going to give you a prompt question to reflect on in your journal. The idea is to take one to five minutes to reflect on today’s lesson and write a minimum of one paragraph on how you can apply the lesson in your life life. You can use an actual journal, a word document like on Google Drive, or your note-taking app like Evernote. The idea is that you’re actually thinking about how to process the information to help you improve your life.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about how the strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility. If you want to have a love that can easily be broken, then demonstrate absolute strength. I was married for nine years and I feel I could have used this quote when I first got married. I grew up overweight and didn’t want a lot of attention on myself and if something was bothering me, I would just keep it inside and I carried this habit into my marriage.
If something was bothering me, I would just keep it inside and then it would affect me in other ways. I felt this keeping of my feelings and not being vulnerable, costs me from having a strong marriage that would last. We just ended up growing apart and we eventually went our different ways.
Now as I go forward in different relationships, I want to make sure I express what I want and how certain things could be bugging me. I have to show that I’m not a perfect person and that I need help in different parts of my life. When you expose your fragility, you have to be okay with having your heartbroken. This can be a very scary thing. When my ex-wife told me that she wanted to get a divorce, I was so upset for a week and I wasn’t thinking very rational but I feel that I’m such a stronger person from going through that heartbreak.
I think it made me grow up a lot more and have more difficult conversations with folks. This is a terrible lesson to learn in your 30s and should be learned when you’re a kid. I don’t think this means you should be an emotional wreck at all times, but how to be mature about living your life. There are things that I can’t control and can control. And if I want to have a love that is the strongest, then I have to have control over my emotional side. And that means expressing the things I want and don’t want. The things that bring me joy and the things that bring me pain or fear.
I also have to make sure that I’m not afraid to be alone because if I am, then I’m going to go into a situation that could be abusive for me. If it’s time for me to leave a relationship, I will leave that relationship, there is no amount of abuse that will keep me in that toxic relationship. I’m going to go to someone that deserves me. So I guess you just have to start with loving yourself first. Be vulnerable with yourself first, and then you can have a strong love for yourself. I know for a fact that I love myself a lot and that’s why I don’t put myself in situations that will hurt myself because why would you want to hurt yourself if you love yourself. This requires a lot of self-reflection and knowing what your strengths are and what they are not.
Then once you’re aware of your strengths and weaknesses and you’re fine with them and accept them, then you can start showing your vulnerabilities to other people. When my ex-wife said certain things in our relationship, I wish I would have had the strength to say what was on my mind and be vulnerable. When you express yourself, you can do it in a toxic way or you can do it in a way that builds trust. If I were to go into a situation and just yell about the symptoms and not the actual root cause of the issue, then I’m not being vulnerable and demonstrating weaknesses. This is why it’s important to use I statements in a conversation, like “I feel this way because back in the day I went through this and it made me feel this way.” Something along those lines. This is demonstrating fragility.
If you go into a conversation where you say that the other person is doing this and that and it’s not the correct way, what you’re doing is just attacking the other person and love is not going to get stronger from that. It’s like with your muscles, it order from them with your muscles to get stronger, they have to be tested to a point where they get broken down and then during the recovery time, they get stronger when they build back up. If you don’t test your love and it gets broken down, then it can’t be built into something strong. So we are going to have to be fragile for a little but understand that we can get stronger.
You can do too much at once, so maybe you just start off slow and build yourself up. Just by saying something small and showing a slight fragility, you can see that you didn’t die and the next time you flex your fragility in a conversation with your loved ones, you can do a little bit more the next time around.
That’s it for today’s episode, and to summarize it, the strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility. There are tons of books out there that can help you with this and it might be helpful to go see a therapist to help you with your fragility. It really is a mindset that tells you it’s okay to become vulnerable because in the future you will get stronger from it. I also found it helpful to read a book on fragility called Anti-fragile by Nassim Taleb, and a link to the book can be found in the show notes at growwithjoe.me/episode182. It sucks to go through the vulnerability at times but it doesn’t last forever and is required if you want to have strong relationships with all the loved ones in your life.
So in your journal, ask yourself, Am I being vulnerable enough with myself or am I lying to myself that everything is okay when it really isn’t. No one is perfect and there are still things I need to work on. Then once you write about that, ask yourself what are some resources you can use to help you be more okay with showing your vulnerable side. Just write one to two paragraphs and then give yourself an action step to help you move in the right direction. You might not take action on it now or this week but it can be something to you can back to in the future.
Thanks for listening today! 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]
I’m also on Instagram at Grow With Joe and Facebook just look up Grow With Joe
If you’re on ITunes, don’t forget to give me a five-star rating if you liked this episode.
Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
*Music outro
