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 32 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. I am always so excited that I get to talk with all of you every week, and thank you. Thank you to all of you who send me messages saying that you've been listening to the episodes or sharing with me what you're getting out of it. It really means a lot to me.
Even those of you who give me ideas for other episodes, I value that a lot and I want to invite you, if you haven't done yet, to, you know, rate the episode here and wherever you're listening to the podcast and give me a review. That helps a lot so more people can listen to it.
Today I wanted to start with a story. When I look at different people, when I have conversations, when I meet many of my clients, I realize that most of us humans have an era of our lives That is. The part of our lives where we feel a little bit more nervous about or less secure about.
For me. It's always been around my body and the way I eat, but it has rarely been around my work and my career.
Even though I've taken big risks with my career, you know, moving from Columbia to New York, trying to get a job at a one of the big investment banks, and that seemed impossible back then. I never felt too scared. I felt. Somewhat confident that I would make it, except when I left my last job to start this business.
When I first became an entrepreneur, that jump for me was the scariest thing I've done in my life. Every day I would wake up with a story that I had too many things to do that I didn't know how to do them, that people wouldn't like it. Who was I to be doing these things?
That it was really hard that I had no idea how to do it, and this conversation was so overwhelming that many days when my husband would leave to work, I would get back in bed under the blankets, and at that time I was watching Game of Thrones, and I would just watch one episode after the other, after the other.
And then I would realize my husband would be coming home and I would jump in the shower really quickly. And when he would arrive, I would tell him the truth. I would be like, I did nothing. I was so scared. I spent most day in bed. And he would, he was the best. He would always comfort me and say, okay, we'll try it again tomorrow, or whatever the conversation was.
I remember back then one of my friends invited me to the launch party of Bumble work.
I can't remember how it was called, but Bumble, the app, the dating app, was creating a new service for people who wanted to meet other people, but around their careers and their work and their jobs, and it was fantastic. I met a lot of wonderful women, but I started realizing that I was not speaking clearly, that I was quiet.
When someone would ask me, what do you do? I would stumble. I was like, ah, well I'm starting a business.
And I think it was the first time in my life that I experienced. Real insecurity about what I was doing professionally. I experienced that social anxiety of the fear. What are people gonna think about me when they say, when I say I'm a coach, or when I start saying like, I have a coaching business. And everyone's like, yeah, so we're we, we're, can we see you?
And I was like, no, I'm just starting. I felt so scared of that and. Looking back, I realized that what had happened to me was that I was way out of my comfort zone, and now I understand that when we get so out of our comfort zone, our nervous system gets triggered out of our comfort zone For our brain means danger out of our comfort zone for our brain means.
We are going to die, basically, you know, many, many, many, hundreds, thousands of years ago, human beings would be out of their cave and they would be scared because a lion might eat them any other animal could attack them. They would be scared that they would run out of food. They would be scared of so many things.
For us today, it's not about an animal eating us or running out of food, but when we take big risks with our career or we take big risks with our money, it creates the same response in our body.
Fight flight, Philly, right? Like our whole system is thinking we are in danger. And one of our visionaries, this is what we're doing every day. We're putting ourselves out of our comfort zone in big ways so we can realize these visions we have. And what we need to learn is how to calm our nervous system so we can access higher thinking and make the best decisions that will end up leading us to creating this vision.
And that's what I want us to talk about today. Let's break it down. Let's look at what happens inside our body when we decide to get out of our comfort zone. First, like I said, our amygdala, our brain perceives the uncertainty, the unknown as a threat, and it activates our fear center.
Our sympathetic nervous system takes over and we start releasing cortisol through our body so we can experience things as our heart beating really fast, we start breathing more shallow. Our muscles get tense. We might even get sweaty palms or this sense of urgency and panic. When that happens, guess who gets activated as well? Our negative self-talk. The part that tells us how everything is gonna go wrong, how we're not good enough, we're not smart enough, we're not capable enough. We start doubting ourselves big time and we start perceiving everything as. A big threat to our lives.
So we start thinking, nobody's gonna buy from me. They're gonna fire me from this project. I'm never gonna make it. I'm gonna be so embarrassed in front of everyone that I've told them I was gonna run this project, start this business. Or when we have bigger companies and we have employees who start thinking, we're gonna have to fire everyone.
We're gonna have to let them go. We're gonna get so much into debt and how are we gonna get out of it? And this negative self-talk. Reinforces all the fear responses. More cortisol gets released faster heartbeat, more shallow breathing, and we get stuck in this cycle of fear unless we learn how to calm our bodies unless we know how to calm our brains and those racing thoughts.
Many of my clients experience this high sense of fear, of uncertainty because they are putting themselves out there and they're risking their reputation, they're risking their money, so it's common that they're experiencing this level of fear. And what we do in coaching is develop some practices, some inner conversations that help them navigate these tough moments.
Because the beautiful thing of our brain is that when we are experiencing that fear, if we can create safety within ourselves, if we can soothe our nervous system, our whole physiology will calm down and then that threat, it will make it less scary.
And with time, with practice of calming ourselves, we become able to take even bigger risks. So it's not that I just calm myself for this specific situation, it's that every time I learn to calm myself when I'm out of my comfort zone, when I'm taking a big risk, my body starts creating that resilience.
So next time when I also take another big risk, it's easier for me. Because my body now knows how to calm themselves. So what is it that I teach my clients in coaching on how they can calm themselves? This is what I like to call creating safety within yourself, finding the safety in your body and in your mind.
And by the way, all this that I'm gonna teach you is based on neuroscience. It's not just like woo woo or, you know, positive thinking. It actually talks about the physiology in your brain. So the first thing is to take a couple of deep breaths. When we bring oxygen to our brain, when we calm down our breathing, our body starts interpreting that as signals that we are safe. So the first thing is to simply notice, right, that you are like rushing and that you're feeling scared and that you're feeling nervous, and take a couple of deep breaths. The next technique is called, name it to tame it. So what neuroscientists have found is that when we use a word to name our experience, we're engaging our prefrontal cortex, we're engaging our high level thinking.
And when we engage our high level thinking, that can start taking over the amygdala, over the emotional response and calming it. So you take a couple of deep breaths and you said, oh, wow, I'm really scared. Oh wow. I'm nervous. This is scaring me. And just naming your experiences starts to create a different response in your entire body.
The third step is bringing yourself to the present moment. Most of our fears, most of our uncertainty comes when we're thinking about the future, when we're imagining in our brain a terrible scenario. And, a couple of months ago, I went to this doctor who's specialized in sleep, and she said something that I thought was so beautiful.
She's like, remember, your brain doesn't have eyes. So your brain believes whatever you're telling it. So when you tell your brain, listen, I'm gonna go bankrupt, I'm gonna lose this client, or I'm never gonna make it, your brain thinks, oh, that is true.
In the same way when we go to see a horror movie, we all understand that movies are made, that people are acting that none of it is real, and yet our bodies experiencing the threat as real. Right. I'm one that gets really scared when I'm watching a scary movie. I many times have to like lower the volume because it's too much for me because my heart starts racing really fast and I start getting sweaty palms even though I completely understand it's not real.
My body interprets it as real. So when we are visionaries, when we're entrepreneurs, most of our fears come from. A future we're imagining from an uncertainty from where's the money gonna come from? What if I don't sell one single more of my products? What if I have to let go people? What if my clients fire me?
All those stories are not real in this moment. They're made up in our heads, and yet we're having a physical response as if they were true. So the third technique I teach my clients is to bring themselves to the present moment. And this works by sitting down and grounding your feet and noticing where your body is and looking around in your office or wherever you are, and start telling yourself, I am safe right now.
I'm safe right now. I do have money in the bank, or right now my clients haven't left, or many people become successful entrepreneurs. I can figure this out as well. If you bring yourself to the present moment and you tell yourself a better story, and by a better story, I don't mean this perfect positive story that everything is gonna work great, but.
Telling yourself a story like, you know what, right now I'm safe. I'm in my office. Nothing has gone wrong. I have friends and family that support me. Even if I get into debt, I can figure out a way of paying it or there are ways to figure this business out. I can learn, I can grow. I'm smart. Right. Any story that you believe it's very important that you believe it, that brings you back to your.
That brings you back to the here and now, and that reminds you that you have a lot of resources to navigate this uncertainty.
If you start noticing you have very harsh or very negative self-talk, I recommend that you replace that harshness, that negativity with more neutral thoughts. Instead of saying, oh my God, I'm gonna get fired.
Oh, I'm gonna lose all my clients. You can find a way of telling yourself, hold on. Even if that happens, I can figure it out. Or if you're telling yourself, this is so hard, you can tell yourself, this is hard and I can do hard things. I'm gonna do it one step at a time.
When we stop the story at this is so hard, our brain thinks this is so hard and we're going to die. When you complete the story by saying, this is so hard and I can do hard things, your brain perceives the threat. This is hard with the safety and I can do it. And that starts changing again, the physiology in your body so you can start having access to higher thinking and making better decisions.
I created these very short ten second scripts if you wanna download them.
The link is here in the description of the episode that you can have handy for any time that you're feeling out of your comfort zone, that you're feeling your negative self-talk is very loud, or you're feeling self-doubt, or you're simply, you're feeling very scared, you can pull them out and you can just do these ten second scripts that are gonna start helping you.
Calm your nervous system, calm your brain, calm your body, so then you can have access to your higher thinking and figure things out in the moment. When I was a little girl, dinner time was very important. I have two younger brothers and my parents, we would always have dinner together and have the most incredible conversations and we would all share about our day.
And I remember my dad would share often about the problems he was having at work. He was an entrepreneur for a while. Then he was the CEO of a company and he would have these big challenges and he would share them with us. And I asked him once. Oh dad, but your job seems awful. You always have problems.
Why is that? And he told me, no. Problems are the best part of my job. It's where I get to use my creativity, my innovation, my critical thinking. I am hired. To solve problems I love that reframing about problems. I actually think about often in my business when we're having a problem,
to think, well, yeah, this is why I'm here. This is why I am the entrepreneur, the CEO, the visionary. This is why I am not having a very easy job. I chose this path. I chose to have problems, and I can figure them out. So I want to invite all of you to start thinking about the challenges you're having about work, about the boss who's awful, or about the employees who are not performing, about the clients who are.
Upset or complaining or maybe threatening even to leave you to think of those problems that can be scary as simply what you signed up to do Instead, if you can reframe the way you're seeing problems, you can be more calm as you navigate and find the solutions.
If you listen, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that I often talk about compassion and self-love, and although I know those topics are so cheesy or you know, we use them so often that they've lost meaning, I truly believe. Having the ability to be loving with ourselves, compassionate with ourselves is the secret to our success.
And in this episode, I was explaining why, because when we are being harsh, when we're being critical, we are activating all the fear response in our body. And that's not where the best ideas come from. That's not where we can be innovative or creative. I see it often one. I see it over and over with my clients. They might come to a coaching session with their stress response very high. So the first thing we do is try to calm it. And we try different strategies, and we have conversations about what's really scaring them.
What is true about that fear? What is just perceived? How can they face it? And when they start relaxing throughout the coaching session, I. They start having the most incredible ideas to solve their problems. They start thinking about ways to find new opportunities, to change relationships, to open themselves, and that is incredible.
So I guess the bottom line of this podcast is to be very conscious of what are we thinking and how can we think in a way that comes her nervous system. If you think about your nervous system as your house, the walls, the columns, the windows, the roof, when your nervous system is.
When your nervous system is dysregulated. It's like living in this house where the smallest wind makes everything shake, where you all of a sudden feel like, I can't live in this house. It's gonna fall apart. Versus if you've learned to do positive self-talk, breathing, naming the emotions, calming yourself, you can be in this house and the harshest.
Storms can come, the harshest winds, and you know this house is strong enough, stable enough for you to be safe in it.
So let's all take care of our house. Our house is our nervous system, our brain, our body. Let's do it with love and compassion and an understanding of how we work so we can continue putting ourselves out there, taking big risks and turning those bold ideas into our reality. It was great to be with all of you here.
I'll see you next time. Bye.
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!
