John Jonas talks about handling adversity with online Filipino specialists, drawing parallels to his daughter Bailey's fourth-place finish at the Utah Mountain Bike State Championships. He frames mistakes and frustration as normal parts of working with virtual assistants, the same way Bailey pushes through depression and anxiety to keep competing.
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Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode 19, let's talk about adversity with an OFS. So actually, let's talk about adversity just in general. We're a big cycling family. We ride bikes a lot. I ride my bike, my wife rides her bike. People come to our house and comment like, oh, my gosh, you have so many bikes in your garage. I think we have 17 bikes in our garage right now, and they're pretty nice bikes. My kids are super competitive with racing their bikes nationally ranked. So a couple weeks ago, we were at the Utah Mountain Bike State Championships where my two teenage daughters raced. So because the state championships, not everyone gets to race. Only the top 100 kids in each category qualify. And there are about 25 categories. There's like 2,500 kids there. If you check out the blog post for this one, there's a. There's a picture of the tent city that gets set up just for people to come and congregate. It's like a five minute brisk walk from one end of the tents to the other. There's thousands and thousands of people there. People are always shocked when they come to this event. Like, oh, my gosh, I had no idea a bike race could be this big. So all this tent city is just for people to hang out with their races all day long. So on Friday, my daughter Bailey finished fourth in the freshman girls category, which is pretty amazing. You gotta figure in the state, 100 girls qualified to go to state championships and she finished fourth. The girl who won, Bailey actually split races with her this year. Bailey beat her twice, and she beat Bailey twice, and then she won that girl once. They won the state championship, which is awesome for her. Bailey is super thrilled about it. She put in a lot of hard work this year. She's gone through a lot of adversity. In the end, she came out on top. 4th place out of 100 who qualified for the race. She's super, super happy. I feel like often with virtual assistants, there can be some adversity, and if you push through, there's a lot of good to be had on the other side. Obviously, most of what you're going to experience with a, with a VA is good, but there's definitely going to be some adversity. There's going to be a time when they disappear. It happens to all, almost everybody. And you just have to figure out what to do about this. There's going to be a time when they're not doing things right or where they did something wrong and you have to figure out, like, oh, my gosh, why are they doing this? I had to deal with this recently where, like, they did something completely wrong. I was like, dude, this is so obvious what this should be. And I told them. And then I thought about it, like, oh, yeah, this is obvious to me. It probably wasn't super obvious to them from their perspective. So anyway, there's going to be a time when they're frustrating you. All of these things are going to happen. And if you push through those difficult times, which I've had to do a lot of times over the years, there's so much good work that will come out of having ofs work for you. And when you push through those difficult times is when they really begin to trust you. So my daughter, Bailey, she pushed through. She has and has been and is currently battling depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts. She's not sleeping well. Her friends have betrayed her this year, which, as a ninth grader is really, really horrible. Push through. It's worth it.
