Welcome to Visionary Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your big, bold ideas into reality. I'm Carolina Zuleta. I'm a life and business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here.
Welcome back. This is episode 27 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. I am so excited because today I want to talk with all of you about one of my main values, personal responsibility. Hold on. I know personal responsibility is not the sexiest, most exciting topic to talk about, but what I wanna do in this episode is show you why it is so exciting to talk about personal responsibility.
In short, personal responsibility is the door to step into our personal power, and our personal power is our ability to do whatever we want to do to manage our thoughts and our emotions. It is what makes us unstoppable and allows us to create the boldest visions we have. I first learned about personal responsibility back in, I think it was 2008, when my boss at Morgan Stanley invited me to a weekend self-development training.
I. Back then, I wasn't a coach. I really had done nothing about personal development, and it took me by surprise. I spent the entire weekend with my arms crossed, judging everyone who was there, judging the person who was teaching it, and just being so annoyed by all the cheesy exercises they were making us do.
But the one that triggered me the most was an activity in which we had to get a partner and tell the partner every time we have felt like a victim in our past. And the other person had to tell us, Uhuh, uh, be responsible. Guys, you have no idea how upset I was about this. I thought it was the cheesiest thing.
I was like, I'm never a victim. What are you talking about? All these people here are losers. I don't belong here. This is dumb. Like all these people are failures and losers. Look at me. I'm having a great career and I'm only 25 years old and I'm never a victim, period. In this workshop, they gave us a CD and they asked us to listen to the CD for the next 21 days so we could really ingrain these lessons in our brain.
I'm a good girl and I like to do homework, so I took the CD home. I put it in my computer. I listened to it. I transferred it to my iPod or my phone. I don't know what I used back then. And then I decided to listen to this recording every morning while I went to the gym or when I went for a jog. And every time I'm listening to it in my brain, I'm fighting against the person, the teacher who, who led this workshop.
I'm thinking that she's a loser, that she's not that successful, that she has no idea what she's talking about. And as I was doing this in my brain, I had this moment of insight that said, Kado, right now, you're being a victim. You're being a victim to what this woman said. You're being a victim. To what the other people in that room said.
This feeling you have right now of judging them, of blaming them is victimhood. This is what they're talking about. And I started realizing that I did this in every area of my life. I really started noticing how I would feel like a victim. In so many different scenarios with my family, at work, with clients, with friends, so I decided to start taking personal responsibility.
But if I'm honest with all of you, the way I was taking personal responsibility back then was me trying to do the right thing, trying to be a good human being, trying to be a good girl. It wasn't out of conviction or an understanding. As to why taking personal responsibility was not just the right thing to do, but how it was a gift to myself.
Some months later, someone gave me the book, A Man's Search For Meaning from Victor Frankl, and that's one of the books that profoundly changed my life because in it, Viktor Frankl also talks about personal responsibility. He talks about our power to choose our attitude. If you don't know who Viktor Frankl is, he was an Austrian psychiatrist, a neurologist.
He was captured by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp and then taken to Auschwitz, uh, which was an extermination camp. So in the book, he shares that when he first got to the concentration camps, he made himself three promises. The first one was that he was gonna do anything and everything he could to survive.
The second thing was that he was gonna help as many people as he could, and the third one was that he was gonna learn from this experience. And his lessons from that experience and the work he had done before the concentration camp is what now we call logotherapy. But for me, what that book meant is that if someone inside a concentration camp can still take personal responsibility for the experience they're having there, can still choose their attitude.
Me, in this life that I've been so blessed and so privileged, how could I not do that? So that compelled me even more to really start taking responsibility for how I feel and what I think and the things I do and the results I was creating in my life. And then when I graduated from the University of Chicago, now I was deep into personal development.
I really had found that. As the answer to many of the questions I had in my life and a way to improve the quality of my life and achieve what I wanted. So I enrolled in a year long personal development program in Chicago, and again, the topic of personal responsibility was a big component of this program.
And this program, I learned more tools to really understand the experience of feeling like a victim. One of them, uh, was developed by Steven Carman. It's called the Drama Triangle, and it talks about. These games we play as human beings. These responses that we have that are very natural to all of us, but that are completely ineffective.
One of them is being a victim, is feeling that you have no power, that you have no control, that things are happening to you. The next one is the persecutor. That is the role we play when we are blaming other people, when we're just seeing what others are doing wrong instead of looking at ourselves. And the third one is the rescuer.
When I first heard rescuer, I thought to myself, that is the good position to be in, because that's a role I would play often, but a rescuer is also feeling like a victim because we're coming into a conflict and thinking this poor victim, they don't know what they're doing. The prosecutor is so out of control, so I'm gonna have to do it.
I'm the one that is gonna have to fix this because nobody else can. There's a feeling of victimhood underneath it. So this tool, the Drama triangle, is something I currently use a lot with my clients because it's a framework that allows us to notice how a system is working and why it's not changing. And by the way, the drama triangle can be happening in our brains as well.
There might be a part of our thinking that is feeling small and victimy, and we have also a part of ourselves that we call our critical voice that is a persecutor who's attacking us and tell us how we are not worth it. And then there's a rescuer that is coming and trying to save the day, but feeling overwhelmed because nobody will help the rescuer either.
And when I share this with my clients, I tell them, listen, Steven Carpen didn't know you or didn't know me, and Seal wrote this book about an experience we are having. The reason why we know this drama triangle exists is because he and his team observed lots of human beings. And notice this is something we do.
And even if we look at TV shows and movies. We can see the drama triangle there as human beings. It seems like we're fascinated by the idea of a rescuer and a victim and the drama that creates, but here's why that drama, as entertaining as it can be, hurts us. It's because when we are part of the drama triangle, according to the research by Marshall Thurber, there's a 94% chance.
That nothing is going to change. Thurber and his professor Edward Demings, they started doing some research inside corporations and they started realizing that when people were in the drama triangles, the behaviors they were having looked like blaming the other team or blaming the other employee, or justifying why they weren't able to reach a deadline or why they weren't able to produce the product at the level they had committed to, or some people even fell into shame.
Feeling like they were worthless, that they couldn't be there, that they could never figure it out. And when they started looking into corporations, they realized that when they saw a company who was facing a challenge and their employees and their leadership were falling into blaming, shaming, or justifying or falling into any of the positions of the drama triangle, there was a 94% chance.
That they couldn't get out of that problem and that the mistakes that they had been making would continue to occur. Because victimhood is a system in an organization, but it's a system inside of us as well. So when we don't take responsibility for our actions, for our emotions, for our results, what, for what's happening in our life, there's a 94% chance that we're gonna stay stuck in the same life that we don't like.
This is why I think personal responsibility is so exciting to talk about after almost 20 years. I think it's been 18 years since I first did that course. That taught me about personal responsibility. I've aimed to live with personal responsibility to look at myself when I fall into victimhood, to get out of victimhood as fast as I can.
I can see now that every time I fall into victim hood and I stand up and I cross the doorway, the gateway of personal responsibility on the other side, I always connect to my power. I always connect to my ability and my capacity to have the relationships I wanna have with others to make money. To grow my business, to put myself out there and take bigger risks, to create a podcast, to create whatever is that my heart desires.
Today, I see personal responsibility as this beautiful tool I have in my life. That gateway, that when I open it, I access and I become the woman that I want to live as the woman who's not a victim of the circumstances that are happening around her. But the woman who influences the circumstances to create the outcomes I want, and this is what I teach my clients, because all the people I work with, and I'm sure any of you who are listening to this podcast right now have more personal power inside yourselves than you even know it's possible.
The challenge is that persona responsibility is not an idea that we understand once and we're done. The challenge is that every day as human beings. We might fall into victimhood at least every week. We probably will, and it is hard to take back our personal responsibility. To me, it feels hard, even physically.
When I notice I start falling into victimhood, I feel a tightness in my chest, something hard on my throat. I don't know if it's pride or fear, but it's something that it's just hard to overcome. I think it's because victimhood. It's also a defense mechanism, right? Oh, it wasn't me. Oh, I didn't do this. Or, well, yeah, I'm late because this and this happened, or I can't produce more because I'm so tired.
You don't understand. I'm a mom and I have all these demands, right? Like we justify ourselves and it's hard to overcome that because we need to bring our, you know, natural defenses down. Take a deep breath and connect to something that is behind our instincts. And that is hard. And there are big scenarios where we need to take personal responsibility in terms of the amount of money we're making, how successful our projects are being, the relationships we're having.
But there's also so many micro moments throughout the day where we can take personal responsibility. For example, when we feel tired, when we look at our emails and we think to ourselves. A hundred emails. When am I gonna answer all of this? When we try our best, put ourselves out there and we fail and people don't buy, or people reject what we're doing, or they tell us that we're never gonna succeed, there's all these moments where we're having an inner battle in our head as to why we can't do something, why something is hard, why something is outside of our control.
And all those little moments throughout the day are the little tests. That are asking us, are you really that powerful? Are you really gonna go and become the leader you wanna be? Every time someone interrupts us during the day, someone annoys us every moment. If you look at it through that lens and you ask yourself, how can I access my inner power here?
What is in this circumstance that it is in my control? What is it that I can step into so I can live this moment as a person I wanna be. Listen, that is hard work, but it's so worth it and we can all do it. Another little thing I wanna add here. One of the things I've realized sometimes for me it's hard to take personal responsibility is because when I access a new level of personal power, I look back and I can see how I had left my power on the side before, especially lately around my energy and feeling tired.
When I access my personal power and I say, no, actually, I create my own energy and I can see how I had left my power on the side before, and I think to myself, whoa, all those moments, I thought it was because I have a newborn. I have a 2-year-old, I have X or Y. That my business wasn't growing. That wasn't actually that truth.
It was because I was holding my power and at creating the energy I wanted to grow the business to the level I want to. So I'm sharing this because I want all of you to know that in order to have personal responsibility, we need to also have deep compassion for ourselves. We have to stay on our own side.
We have to develop the ability to see ourselves. Accurately in the here and now with positive regard, because when we judge ourselves, when we become the prosecutors inside our own head, then we will be stuck in victimhood. I want you all to have the experience of navigating from victimhood to personal responsibility to personal power often.
So you start gathering the evidence. Of how actually taking personal responsibility is one of the best tools we can all use to become the visionaries we truly know we are inside. When I reflect on the many, many conversations I've had with really people from all over the world, with top executives to frontline employees, to my friends and my family members and my classmates, growth from college and business school.
What I've noticed is that the people who are the most successful, the people who make the most money, take personal responsibility more often, and the people who are burn out and overwhelmed and stuck in debt and in stuck in circumstances, they. Don't like, or most of us would agree, we don't like spend more time in victimhood.
And listen, I'm not a researcher. I'm not a scientist. I have no way of proving this is just anecdotally, but I've noticed that you could say, well, yeah, of course it's if you have worse circumstances, you're gonna feel often like a victim. But what I've noticed is that the more you spend time in victimhood, the more time you spend stuck in the circumstances you wouldn't wanna be in.
Instead, when I look at my friends and my clients and people I know who are successful entrepreneurs, who are breaking through in their industries, who are creating things that to all of us seem amazing and we admire them, when I have intimate conversations with them, it's not that they're not having very hard challenges.
It's not that everything is always working well for them. It's that they take personal responsibility in all those circumstances, and therefore they access their personal power and therefore they are more effective in their leadership. They can create better results. Again, I'm not a scientist, but I think by now in this 15 years of my career as a coach, being aware of this topic about personal responsibility.
I do believe that there is something about taking personal responsibility that leads us to success and more money and more recognition, more growth in our life, and more meaningful relationships. I. So don't even take this idea from me because if you know me, you probably would say, well, easy for her to take personal responsibility.
She's had a pretty easy life. And you know what? It's true. I've been very fortunate and very privileged, but let's all learn from Victor Frankl, who when he had lost his freedom, his health, his wife, his parents, his work, his belongings. Probably even his future and his hope in that moment. He could still say, and I'm gonna quote from his book, everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Let's let his life and his story inspire us and remind us that we have infinite power inside ourselves, and that when we take personal responsibility, we can access it. I'll see you next time.
If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea, we need to talk! In my coaching program, I'll teach you how to manage yourself, your own thoughts and emotions, as well as your team and your money, so you can turn your beautiful idea into a reality.
Go now to carozuleta. com slash consult, that is C A R O Z U L E T A dot com slash consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me. See you there!
