In this episode, we discuss how to overcome impostor syndrome so we can pursue the life that we want.
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 someone else did it, we can too. If I treated my life as something where I only did things where I thought I could do them, then I would not accomplish very much.
I grew up in a mobile home, with two blue-collar parents, but they made sure I went to a good school. And I did pretty well in school because I was always ambitious. I wanted to get good grades and do well in competitions. I was overweight as a kid and I had a lot of confidence issues with my social skills, so I think this is why I doubled down on my school work. It was much easier to get a good grade than to interact with a group.
Then as I went through grade school, middle school, and high school, I noticed that if I tried hard, then I could get a good life. I was the only minority in a lot of my classes. I think this was a good thing because I could see that skin color didn’t matter when it came to academics.
I think it’s important to see what you’re possibilities in life are. I remember listening to a story on a podcast where a teacher was asking a 2nd or 3rd grader what their dream job could be, and the kid ended up drawing a pizza delivery person because their uncle was one and that was the only stable job that he saw in his environment. This is sad to me because there is nothing worse than untapped human potential.
Even though I got good grades, this formal education was only going to give me a good living. And a good living meant I worked 40 hours for someone else where I was living a decent lifestyle. Once I left the Marines and got my first job outside of the military, I quickly learned to hate it.
It felt like I was not creating value and I worked so hard in the Marines that I soon got really depressed. I knew I had to quit and if it wasn’t for podcasts and books, I would still be miserable. When I hear stories of other people who’ve made it and I realize that I’m just as smart or hardworking as they are, then this gives me the confidence to pursue my goals.
I started my own financial planning company because I believed that I could do my own thing. At my own company, I had to give them 60% of what I made, and I had to follow their rules. Plus they changed the commission structure multiple times and said that we had to take on extra expenses to continue to work with them. This was frustrating to me and luckily for me, I was listening to podcasts about how financial advisors started their own business.
And once I was hearing these stories, it inspired me to do my own thing. I already had the experience and confidence, I just needed to take the leap. And anytime you take the leap, it’s going to be hard but think of it as going through the fire where you burn away all your impurities and what left behind is the gold.
And it’s the stories of others that keep me going because I hear how much control they have over their lives that I will gladly live five to ten years of my life like most people won’t so I can live the rest of my life like most people can’t. But to do this, you need to have the right system in place. I saw at my last firm that they offered the entrepreneurship dream but their method sucked. It was possible but it was not very probably in today’s environment.
We are going to make mistakes, but the key is to keep learning and quit the stuff that doesn’t work as fast as possible. Now I’m going into my second year of running my own business and I love my life and it’s because I have control, creativity, and autonomy over my day. No one is telling me what to do, I decided how my day should go and I would have it no way.
This requires discipline though and learning from other people on how to be successful. But if you’re not satisfied with life, find someone who has a good life, and see how they got it. And if that life doesn’t seem possible, then find someone else. It’s going to require work, but it will all be worth it when you get the life that you love and you have control over all aspects of your life.
And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, if someone else did it, you can too. Life is too short to live a life where you play it safe and just take what life gives you. And in order to get the life that we desire, we need to know how to play the game. And the way you do that is you find someone that has a life that you want, and then just model your tactics and behaviors after them. If it took them 10 years to become that person, it can probably take you five years because you can learn from their mistakes.
For my financial planning business, I get a lot of my ideas from Micheal Kitces’s podcast called Financial Advisor Success Podcast. This saved me so much time and always me to live my best life because I see how I can become successful as a development coach and financial advisor. Life is short, so start living your best life and most likely you’re going to get the inspiration by seeing someone else’s success.
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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