In this episode, we discuss how we need to be comfortable with calling things out so that the standard isn’t lowered.
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 we see something, say something. This can be one of the hardest things to do because it can mean we go against someone in power or against the group, but if we let a mistake go by, then we lower the standard. And the world doesn’t need to lower its standard, we need to raise it.
In the Marines, as a senior enlisted person, you were told that if you see something, then you say something. Now, this wasn’t applied to every situation. There were many situations where a senior enlisted was not doing something correctly and you felt that it was not in your arena. But this is not good for morale among the troops.
If you see someone above not holding the same high standards, then it causes a feeling that people can start lowering their standards. I remember having this officer in my first unit and we didn’t really respect him. We didn’t appreciate that if we saluted him, he would just ignore us. Also, he did not take care of his hat and would crumple it into his cargo pocket.
No one was going to say anything to him directly because he was the boss and in the Marines, we were told chain of command, so you expected the person below him to say something. We all saw the mistake but we didn’t do anything about it. Things were still good overall but it could of been better.
I’ve seen this same mentality in all my other jobs. And I’ve seen it in relationships. Where someone is doing something that is not up to par, but it’s just causing problems down the road.
So I would say that to make saying something easier, just know that you’re making the situation worse by not doing anything, and it’s going to be more work to fix the thing down the road. I felt that I couldn’t change the culture of the Marines and it was just better to focus on my stuff and leave when I could.
To help me say things to my bosses is if I didn’t have to worry about losing my job or endangering my livelihood. When you have to pay your bills and trying to protect your family, it causes you to let things slide. This is why it’s important to build up an emergency fund where you can quit your job and then take time to find another job. So if this is the case, I have to make sure my spending is not totally reliant on my salary.
If I’m making $5k a month and I’m spending $5k a month and not spending everything, then I’m going to have a lot harder time to say something when I see something because my livelihood is on the line. But if I’m spending $2k and then saving $3k a month, then in one year I will have a year and a half war chest to help me out if what I say, doesn’t work out for me.
This is not the movies and we don’t always have happy endings when we do the right thing. So I would say that people try to take away as much power from institutions and people as possible so you’re not reliant on their assistance. You can love your job and what you do, but sometimes the managers and leaders cause the work to turn sour.
When I was in the Marines, I loved what I did as a budget analyst but it was the people that wanted to do things that I didn’t agree with but I was at the bottom of the totem pole and I was worried about going to school and I didn’t want this benefit taken away from me, so I went along.
Life is tough, and it requires making decisions on what type of person we want to be. I know for myself, I don’t want to be placed in a position where I have to lower my standard. My mom always tried to preach to me that we should do the right thing, so I feel that this is the right thing to do.
If we can get to the point in the world where a majority of the people are saying and doing things when something is not right, then the world will be a better place. And it’s not enough to say something, we have to work on making the thing better. There are tons of things wrong in the world, so start building up your human, social, and financial capital so that you can have the strength to say something.
And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, see something, say something. Napolean once said, “The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people. But because of the silence of the good people.” So it’s important that we have the strength and courage to actually say something when we see something go wrong. But we also can’t be spending all our time on problems, we also have to take care of our families and we have to take time for self-care.
So I would just say focus on what you can control on in the situation. Sometimes that is just a reminder for people to do better in the situation and sometimes that requires tearing down the institution and then creating a new one. Or you can create your new institution and starve the old institution of their energy because your path is so much better. The world is a complex place and requires us to know how to do the right thing, but that is going to come from working on yourself and building up your skills and then having the courage to do say something when you see something.
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