In this episode, we discuss how we need to let people down from time to time to live our best lives.
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.
In today’s episode, we are going to talk about how if you’re about pleasing everyone, you’re going to struggle endlessly. This is a very valuable lesson that I learned and you’re going to make people upset, but that’s more of their problem than it is yours.
If I focused on pleasing everyone, I would not be where I am right now. I love my life and it required taking risks and letting other people down with their expectations. I remember when I went to go see a Marine Corps recruiter and he convinced me to join, I had to tell my parents. My dad was on board and like this is what you have to do, then do it. My mom started crying. This was 2004 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were going on. She was just worried about my safety but she is proud now. I also had a friend whose mother was against me joining. I had to let her down to.
I needed to go to the Marines in order to make my life better. I was able to get a paycheck that was way more than job at a grocery store. I also had to grow up and the separation from my family allowed me to do that. I also met a lot of great folks and learned a lot of great lessons with my seven years in the Marines.
And since I’ve gotten out the Marines, there have been times where I had to let people down by choosing myself over their expectations. You have to remember that the real ones will forgive you and the fake one will hold a grudge. Now you know who to keep in your life and who you should disregard.
I feel the only way to happiness is to be true to yourself and if you do this, then you’re going to upset some people. This is going to require you to be emotionally strong and be okay with being alone at times. This is also why it’s good to build up your network so that you can reach out to other folks and you’re not solely focusing on this one person.
This is where a scarcity mind can hold you back and you’re just constantly worrying about losing that person in your life so you’re going to do things that go against your values, principles, and beliefs and then you end up struggling.
I’m an ambitious person and I don’t want to stop growing because I want to reach the outer limits of my human potential. I don’t want to be placed in a box, because if this happens then I can’t grow. And when you live in a box of someone else’s expectations, then you can’t grow to your full potential.
Plus it’s just exhausting to please everyone. You’ll have no time for yourself and you want to be able to indulge in self-care. Then if this happens for too long, then serious problems can develop in the future. When I was working at my last firm and sold life insurance, I would run quotes for people in their 50s and a majority of them had high cholesterol and high blood pressure. I feel that they were too worried about pleasing other people and the thing they had to give up was their health.
I’m 34 now but I was experiencing those lessons at 30. It really opened up my eyes on what type of future I could have for myself. Now, I make decisions based on my values, principles, and beliefs, because this will allow me to make the greatest good in the world and live my best life. If you want the same joy as me, I would suggest that you stop trying to focus on making other people happy to give yourself happiness.
That’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it if you’re about pleasing everyone, you’re going to struggle endlessly. This will be a bottomless pit that can never be filled. You can work really hard on trying to achieve this one thing, like a job promotion or a reward, and then the joy from that event wears off and things are back to normal. Now you might be thinking, why did I do all this work because I don’t even enjoy where I am at right now. So just focus on challenging yourself and pursuing your true desires, but also make sure you’re being a good person along the way. If you follow this path, then you can have true joy that is not dependent on someone else, and that’s more controllable.
If you would like to get the journal questions for today’s episode, you can sign-up for my monthly journaling subscription newsletter, where you get daily journal questions Monday through Friday, and as a bonus, you will also get my time management course and my personal development cheat sheet. You can get all this for $13/mo, which is less than the cost of an audible subscription and it’s less work to gain more wisdom. You can get this offer at growwithjoe.me/journal
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.
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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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