In this episode, we discuss how being flexible can help you in a lot of areas of your life.
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. 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 flexibility is the key to stability like the great John Wooden has said. If you’re always stiff in your approach and allow no flexibility, then there is going to come to a point where you’re going to break. One major event that has the force of an earthquake is going to cause everything in your life to crumble down. You have the flexibility to handle those type of events but you also have to be strong enough where people are not knocking you down.
If you look at a sport like Basketball, if you come into the game with a game plan, and after the first quarter, everything is not working, it might be wise to have some flexibility in your game and try running some other defensive scheme and offensive plays. Otherwise, you’re just going to lose the game badly. Sometimes you just need to continue with the game plan until things click. This will only come from wisdom.
When it comes to my life, I try not to hold on to something longer than I have to. I don’t hold on to beliefs, values, and other things if they don’t serve a purpose for me. This is how I maintain stability in my life. One of the hard things I had to do last year was to leave Washington, DC to go move back with my parents. I wanted to start my own financial planning firm and I knew I needed to keep my expenses low. At 33 years old, it’s not a good feeling to go live with your parents, but it was fine. I got to see my parents a lot and I was able to help them out.
But if I stayed adamant about not living with my parents, then it would have taken twice as long to start everything with Grow With Joe. I would have to get another job and that would limit my time working on this Grow With Joe business. I needed to have flexibility with the way I accepted my standard of living. It gave me more stability with my life now. Now I’m in Mexico City, following my dream six months earlier. I thought I wasn’t going to be living in Latin America until March of 2020 but I was able to make here by October 2019.
When it comes to relationships, you have to be flexible or another way to say it is compromised. You can’t have everything go your way if you want to have a happy relationship. There is going to be some give and take. And don’t expect things to be 50-50. Some days will be 80% you do all the work and there will be some days where you’re only giving 20%. This is the flexibility that you should seek in your relationships and will help you have the stability to maintain a long term relationship. When you start keeping score, then that’s when resentment starts to happen. You do something and then you expect something in value come in return, but then it doesn’t come because you didn’t say anything. This is when you start to lose stability in the relationship as well. There is are tons of ways to lose stability in a relationship, and it comes from too rigid in your ways.
But you have to realize that sometimes, you shouldn’t have flexibility in your values and principles because it will cause you to dip into mediocrity. So you just need to have the wisdom to know where you should be flexible and when you shouldn’t. Since I was living with my parents, I try to make sure to make them feel happy I was there since technically I was living under their roof and not paying rent. I felt I had no flexibility because they were being generous to me. So when you’re flexible in one way, it can cause you to be inflexible in another way. Just make sure you’re okay with this trade-off.
With life, things won’t do exactly as you plan, it will always take longer and be more expensive. The keys thing is that you’re just flexibility and let the problems slide off of you instead of sticking to you. If you can do this, then you’re going to be fine in life. You’re going to accomplish more in life because you moved on with your life and not stuck in the same spot. I only give myself five minutes to dwell on a problem before I move on. I’m more successful with this than not because I expect these things to happen and just part of life, so I just need to be flexible. I don’t control the world, but I can control my life and having this semper gumby mindset of always being flexible just helps me have control over my life.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, you want to be stubborn on your vision, flexible on the details. This will give you the stability you need to help you reach your goals. You might have one plan but then five minutes into the game plan, something unexpected happens and you need to change everything up or you just need to shake off the initial shock and continue with the game plan. You just need to build up your wisdom to know which one you should choose. If you can’t be flexible, then problems will stick to you and who wants to have problems sticking to them. I don’t want that and I’m just going to work on my goals and relationships and be flexible when I need to and to be stubborn when the time calls for it. This will help me live my life, and I don’t want anything else.
So in your journal, ask yourself, where do you need to be more flexible in your life? Where do you need to be more stubborn? This is a balance, and the type of person you want to be in life will determine the balance at that specific moment. Just remember that it will never be a 50-50 balance and the percentages will change. Then make sure you stick to the balance and if it doesn’t work, then try something else.
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 and hit the subscribe button as well.
The greatest compliment you can give me is to share this episode with someone else.
Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
