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 we shouldn’t burn our bridges. One of the things we have to do is forgive if we want to be good people. Plus you don’t know if you’re going to need that person down the road. And it can bite you in the butt.
Recently I had the opportunity to burn a bridge with someone that I was taken advantage of, and I decided to help them out. I decided to be a professional in the situation. I’m just going to use the motivation to be ten times better without them. To me, that’s the best revenge.
To know that I’m doing the right thing is all I need. I don’t need justice and I’m just going to focus on my journey and pursue obtaining the outer limits of my human potential. When you spend a lot of time trying to burn bridges, you’re just wasting a lot of time and creating more chaos in the world.
There is a cognitive bias as humans that we have where we seek justice. When were in tribes thousands of years ago, you couldn’t hide in the crowd and justice could be better served. Now we live in a much more complex environment where people can have more resources. So even if an injustice was served, it can take way too much time and energy to solve it.
It probably best just to keep that bridge intact and move on with your life. And the best thing is just to focus on becoming a better person and let go of that grudge. You can use it as fuel to focus on being ten times better. That’s what I’m doing and I know what I’m doing with Grow With Joe is so much better to focus on than my grudge because it’s like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
You don’t have to let this person back in your life, but do something that can cause you to be on the ledge where you can be pushed off. You want to have that bridge there. Or focus on making other bridges. There are so many more productive things that you can be focusing your energy at.
Every day, well almost every day, I use the motivation of the past, to help me move forward with my life. There were things in the Marines where I was taken advantage of, along with my other jobs. I just use those memories to help me build my best life and I love my life now. I have the wisdom to be a better person now and help more people. So I guess it was good that I went through those events because it should me what was wrong with the system and now I’m on my pursuit to fix it.
Maybe, most of the time, it is the system that we should really be mad at instead of the person. So if that is the case, design a new system that is fairer and you might need that other person’s help to do so. They might even want to help you out when you ask for help again and then things can be healed again.
Like Michelle Obama said, when they go low, we go high. This is what the world needs and it’s what the ethical thing to do is.
And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, don’t burn your bridges. This can be hard because it is programmed in our brains that we want fairness when we see something unfair. The most ethical thing is to forgive and then just focus on being ten times better as a person. Maybe I need those moments of unfairness to motivate me to work on this business. If things were fair, then I wouldn’t have started my own business and I really love my life now and couldn’t see myself going back to my old life. So keep doing the right thing even though it can feel unfair, and just focus on getting better every day.
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.
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
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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
