In this episode, we discuss how we can be fool by our environment where we think that everything is okay and how to over this.
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 are going to talk about how it’s hard to see the label when you’re inside the jar. Now, this quote is about how you need to expose yourself to different experiences and ideas so you don’t get stuck in your way of thinking.
And it’s easy to get stuck in your way of thinking when your environment is agreeing with you. I feel that I’m blessed as a person because I have many different experiences. I grew up in a small town in Oregon with about 5,000 people. Sometimes I would travel to my friend’s house on a bike on these windy back roads with cars going 45 mph. It also wasn’t very diverse.
I went into the Marines and I lived in Hawaii, I went to boot camp with a lot of different folks from across the United States, I went to Iraq.
I lived in Washington, DC and I used to tutor a kid at Anacostia High School and he needed a lot of help. I was also a federal employee, a white house intern, and that’s where I started my own business.
I’m also half white and half Mexican. I’m 6’3”. I’ve also been one of the tallest in my group of folks but I was also overweight as a kid, where I was picked on for being overweight. Now I’m fit and will take care of the body. I was in a nine-year marriage. Now I’m living as a digital nomad in Latin America. I also read over 250 books from a bunch of different backgrounds.
I have a vast amount of experience to help me see the label outside of the jar. And this is important because if you don’t see the label outside of the jar, then you can be making decisions that are harmful to yourself and society.
Right now as I’m writing this podcast episode, there is a lot of tension within the United States that revolving around race. I see people spreading messages about things that they probably don’t understand. It’s easy just to use your environment and background as a basis for what other people should do, but people don’t have the same background.
I’m blessed that my parents made sure I went to a good school. I was able to go to school without worrying about my safety and get a pretty good education overall. When I was tutoring this high school student from Anacostia in Washington, DC, he was a senior in high school and didn’t understand general math principles. We had to do a lot of work over the year we worked together and hopefully I helped him out.
There are a lot of things wrong with our school systems and people don’t start out on the same level. I know the world is never going to be fair, and we can do things to escape a low socio-economic status but we should show empathy and not dismiss people’s feelings. But we shouldn’t make people victims either and if we can help people grow, then we can make the world a better place.
We could be irrational in our opinions of a situation or a person because we don’t see the label because we’re nice and safe in a our jar. But this is not going to make the world a better place. We need to get outside of our comfort zone and experience different things.
I feel like a lot of people get captured by confirmation bias, where we seek information that we already agree with. So to prevent this, I’ve read a bunch of different books from different perspectives so I can see what makes sense in the world and move closer to the truth. The worst thing we can do is live a lie or lie to ourselves that things are good when they are not because eventually things will go wrong and we’re going to have a mess to clean up.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, it’s hard to see the label when you’re inside the jar. So make sure you’re exposing yourself to different ideas and experiences so you make irrational and bad decisions because you don’t know all the facts about the situation. If you’re ignoring the label, then eventually that tension is going to build up and your jar might be shattered. So the idea is just to know what is out in the world and make decisions that take in all the factors, not just the ones that make you feel comfortable. If we can do this as a society, then we can live a better life.
So in your journal, ask yourself, do you know enough about the outside world? Do you only get your information from a few select sources? If you get in a confrontation with someone, do you know their background? Is there an uncomfortable conversation you need to have with someone? In life we have two choices, we can choose to be an important person, or we can choose to do important things. Focus on the second part and society will be better for it.
Thanks for listening today! To get a free copy of my audiobook “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and you can download it right there.
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
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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.
*Music outro
