Your Outer Circle Success (Your Career, Relationships, and Personal Finances) will never surpass your inner circle success (Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual). Learn why I focus so much on working on myself.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you 10-minute lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
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.
In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about the need to grow your inner circle’s success. I am a big believer in the John Wooden quote where he says your outer circle success will never surpass your inner circle success. So if you want the outer circle success of your career, your money, and your relationships, you have to work on your physical self, your mental self, your spiritual self, and your emotional self. Once I started to work on myself, I saw huge increases in my self-confidence and my resiliency to life. Think of your inner circle like a castle. If you properly defend it, you can always be attacked but never captured.
Life will throw us tons of curve balls that we have to deal with. I remember two years, I lost my marriage, I was doing horrible in business and almost went bankrupt, and then I had a $4000 car repair bill and a $2000 root canal all in a four-month period. If I didn’t make sure that I was strong physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, I don’t know if I would have made it through those events without a major breakdown. I was attacked but I wasn’t captured. Going through that rough period of time just reinforced that I need to continue to work on my inner circle.
The key to working on yourself is that you have to believe that you can change yourself. Have a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. I grew up in a small town, and I was overweight as a kid and super shy, where I had the biggest trouble talking to girls so I focused on school to get a better outcome for myself. Since my parents didn’t save up for my college, like many others because they didn’t know better, I went into the Marines to pay for my education. The Marines was one of the first transformations that I made as a person. I got more fit and they gave more confidence in exploring new items. It also made me believe that I could change my situation and not be stuck with what I have. It might take a while but I can change my outcome with enough persistence and by improving myself. A fixed mindset where I say that things won’t change is a self-fulling prophecy where things won’t change, a growth mindset says, how can I change something to help me get momentum to move in the direction that I want to head in. The Marines really helped me understand what I needed to move in the right direction, I wanted to quit at times and thankfully my Drill Instructors told me to keep going and I was able to graduate from Boot Camp three months later.
I have done things over my past 12 years to constantly put myself in a position where I can grow as a person. I moved to Washington DC, I took improv classes, I went to a public speaking conference, I took a week-long networking course, and now I’m pushing myself by posting more video and audio content. Growth doesn’t come from being comfortable. If all you do is comfortable things, you’ll just hit a plateau and eventually you’ll start to go back in progress because of time and decay more in the same direction. If you don’t put any energy into something it will just start to decay with time. But putting energy into some is uncomfortable if you’re not used to it. This is why it is important every day to do so. It doesn’t take much time either. I spend about an hour and a half every day on myself. If you don’t have an hour and a half for yourself, then something needs to change in your life. Now I can look back on my life and be proud of the accomplishments that I have done.
We only have one life and we have to live and we have to prepare for what the future may bring. It’s like the Aesop fable about the grasshopper and the ant. Where the grasshopper wasted away the summer by only taking about in leisure by playing music, while the ant worked during the summer to gather food. Once winter hit, the grasshopper died for a lack of food and the ant lived on because he prepared for necessity. There is a time for play and a time for work and we need to be the judge of what that balance is. I know if I just spend an hour and a half on myself, then I’m going to be ready for what life gives me like that terrible 2017 Winter I went through.
Success is when preparation meets opportunity and working on myself, I know I’m going to be prepared for that moment. There is a great quote by Winston Churchill that reminds us that we should work on our inner circle.
To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.
Are you prepared for your finest hour? If not, what are the steps you’re going to take to make sure you’re ready for that moment?
I want to thank you for listening to today’s episode.
To get a free copy of my book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and just pay for shipping and handling.
I’m also on Instagram at Grow With Joe and Facebook just look up Grow With Joe
Also, don’t forget to sign-up for my newsletter so you can read my weekly blog post.
If you’re on iTunes, don’t forget to give me a five-star rating if you liked this episode.
Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
