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 34 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. And today we're gonna talk about the visionaries mindset. And I'm so excited because this is one of my favorite topics. And when I think about visionaries, I'm not only thinking about entrepreneurs who have started their own businesses, but I'm also thinking about artists and athletes who need to get investors and sponsors in order to pursue their careers.
And finally, I'm also thinking about all of you who work in a large corporation and maybe you lead a big team. You're innovating within that corporation launching a new product or a new service because all the things that are required to have a visionary mindset are gonna be incredibly helpful to what you're doing.
Here's what I know, the biggest threat to the success of your business, to the accomplishment of your goals, to your success. Here's what I know. The biggest threat to your business growth, to your own success, to the achievement of your goals is you. It's your thoughts, your limiting beliefs, your self-doubt, your inner critic.
That's what's gonna really hold you back. What you create will never be bigger than your limiting thoughts. Because it'll be impossible to create. Now, here's the good news. Your visionary mindset is 100% under your control. You get to decide what you think, what you believe. Having a strong mindset, being able to navigate uncertainty, learn from mistakes, shift, innovate within your business.
That's where success comes from. So in this podcast, I've shared a lot about my work as a coach and what I do with my clients. But the other part of my work is that I'm an entrepreneur and I have a business that I've run for almost 10 years, and I've learned a lot in these 10 years. I. Recently I was having a conversation with a friend who's also a coach and a business owner, and we were talking about how some coaches are making significantly more money than others.
Some have businesses that have made, some have businesses that make 10, $50 million a year. Well, the average coach makes $60,000 a year, and we're talking about why, what is the difference? And when I look at my own journey, I know that the level of income I've created. How far my reach has gone is directly related to how I've thought about my business.
So at the beginning of my journey as an entrepreneur, I wanted to figure out how, how can I have a successful business and as many of us do, I Googled it and I looked on social media and I found thousands of people, I dunno, tell me that they had the perfect formula. Here is the perfect formula to create your podcast and be successful in your podcast.
Here is how you can create a YouTube channel. Here's how you can do Facebook and Instagram ads. Here's the best strategy for LinkedIn. Here's why you should have the most incredible website. Oh, by the way, you should also launch a book. I purchased every one of those programs. I applied every tactic. I followed one step after the other.
And yet none of them were taking me to the place that I wanted to go. And it wasn't because any of these programs or strategies were wrong, it was because here's how it went for me. So before I even had the first coaching client, I spent hours and probably a couple thousand dollars creating the perfect website, taking pictures, writing the copy, making sure the functionality was great.
But behind it, I was so unsure of what I was doing that that website really never brought clients. Or I would try one strategy, let's say YouTube channel, create a YouTube channel. Here are the steps. Here's how you're gonna get clients from this, and I will try it for a little bit, and then I wouldn't see the result, and I would decide that, hmm, that strategy wasn't working, or that wasn't the right niche, or my price-wise too high, or my price was too low.
I would come up with a reason. To stop everything I was doing and instead look for another strategy. I even remember that I did this course on how to do webinars and how to sell through webinars, and I was so excited. I had followed every single step this person taught me. I was able to create my first webinar.
I told one of my friends who is a personality, who has thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, if she can promote the webinar on her social media. She said yes, and in a matter of hours, I had 15,000 people. Enroll to watch my webinar and I couldn't believe it. I was like, this is it.
This is their breakthrough. I was so excited. I was doing the math in my head of how much money I was gonna make and how many people I would change their lives. I was very excited. The day of the webinar arrived and I started with all my enthusiasm, teaching everything I knew. I was so excited. Then I went on to.
Tell them about the course that I was selling and why it mattered and how much love I had poured into it. And there were crickets. Everyone had access to a sales page and no one was buying, but people weren't unplugging either. They were there. They were asking me questions, we were having conversations.
So I stayed in and I kept talking to all of them, and I kept selling and explaining what my course was amazing, and nobody would buy. At some point I thought maybe the system is broken, but no one was complaining about it either in the comment section. So I wasn't sure. All of a sudden I see one person purchased and I was like, yes, it is working.
This is so exciting. I go to look who that was and it was my mom. So after, I don't know, two and a half hours of being with these people connected online, thousands of people, me talking to them, selling, doing all the steps that I had learned. And I had only one person purchasing my course, and it was my mom.
I was devastated. The story I made up is, see, this is never gonna work for me. I'm not good at this. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Why can other people do it and not me? And. Instead of learning from that and trying a new webinar and trying a different way of talking, I decided that webinars were not the way I was gonna do it, and I stopped doing them for years to come be while I jumped into another strategy, changed my marketing, changed my pricing, changed my product, my service.
I did all of this because I was scared, because I didn't realize in that moment that it wasn't about the how. It wasn't about finding the perfect formula. It wasn't that other people had a secret of how to do it, that I didn't know that really creating a vision, being an entrepreneur is about making thousands of mini experiments, failing quickly, learning from them, innovating, applying those lessons and trying it again as fast as you can.
Back then, I didn't know that that level of resilience was required. Back then, I never stopped to look inside myself. I never stopped to think, what is it that I'm believing here? What is it that I'm thinking now? When I look back, I know that instead of thinking now that I reflect back, even though I had people following it, I never believed that people really wanted my services or products.
I had a lot of doubts and I think that came across through any of the strategies I tried. And thankfully I never quit because I was committed to having this business, even if it hurt a lot at the beginning. But today, what I understand, what has become my mantra in my business is that who comes before how, who I am, what am I believing about myself, my services, my customers?
How am I seeing my business? That will have a huge impact in the results way more than having the perfect strategy. And of course now I'm using many of those strategies that I learned back then, but I'm doing it from a very different place in my heart, in my mindset, in my energy. One of the exercises I do with my clients is define that.
Who? Who do they have to be in order to achieve the goal they have? So for me, I've created this personality that is the version of Carolina, who is the CEO of a multimillion dollar company. And I have spent some time thinking about how she thinks, how she strategizes, how she talks to her customers, how she goes about her sales.
So when I'm doing my work in my business, I. Connect with her. I connect with that version of myself who is a couple of years ahead of me and who is guiding me to make all these decisions. So who before? How is the key for all of our success? And when we look at the research of neuroscience, there is an interesting thing that confirms.
What I'm telling you is that all of us have a part of our brain that's called the reticular activating system. RAS. What it does, it filters how we see the world. So we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as who we are. I don't know if you've ever had the experience of buying a new car and before you buy it, when you're making the decision, you start seeing that car everywhere and it almost seems like the entire world went to buy the same car that you want.
And it's not because those cars didn't exist the day before you had the idea of buying that car. It's because your RAS was blocking them from your consciousness. Your RAS didn't see those cars as relevant enough for you to be aware of them. Or maybe, I know this happened to me for sure when I got pregnant, or maybe someone you knew was pregnant.
All of a sudden you start hearing about all these other women who are pregnant, and it seems like there are more babies coming to the world that ever in history's just that, because that's your experience, your RAS decides that's now important for your conscious brain to be thinking about it, and then you start seeing it more in the world.
I have a friend who has a beautiful story when she was a little girl. I have a friend who has a beautiful story. When she was a little girl, she heard that some clovers had four leaves and she started looking for them. But she tells me that when she was looking for them, she thought like she was looking for a unicorn.
So she never found them. And one day her mom sat with her and said that actually that it is real, that four leaf clovers exist. She believed that and all of a sudden she started finding them. She now has an incredible collection of four leaf clothes that proves to her that whatever she believes she sees in the world, I.
And this is so true. When we're visionaries, whatever we believe is what we see in the world. If we're believing for, if we believe that success is hard or that we're not gonna make it, we start seeing other problems or the obstacles or the reasons why we're not gonna be successful, versus when we start believing in ourselves, we believe our services are on demand, that people wanna buy our products, that we matter, that we have a way of adding value to the world.
In a way that people want the value we have to offer. We start seeing all the opportunities. The RAS starts saying, oh, we're gonna make this successful. Okay, let me filter in all the information that proves that you are gonna be successful. So it feels like you start having new ideas and you start taking other risks and you start meeting people and potential clients and investors in the most.
Surprising places, but it's not because those people didn't exist before. It's because you've opened your mind to being successful. And as visionaries, our job is to solve problems and to find opportunities. There is not one right way of doing it, it's just that you face one challenge after the other and after the other.
And when we look at some of the greatest entrepreneurs in history, that's what their stories are about. It's not about they created this product and they sold it, and then everything was perfect, but it's how they had to find opportunities at every stage in their business. One of my favorite stories is the story about Hersheys.
So about 120 years ago, Mr. Hershey had the vision of creating this town where they would make chocolate bars and that it would be beautiful and they would have pools and beautiful places for all the employees and their families to live. I. And he went ahead and he created Hershey, Pennsylvania. And that town was beautiful and the employees were happy, they were treated right and they were making the most yum, and they were making the most delicious chocolate bars.
And they started selling them all over the US and they were a success people or loving them or buying them. Everyone was talking about them and his business was growing and expanding, and then the Great Depression began, and because people saw Hershey Bars as a luxury product, they stopped buying it. So what did Mr.
Hershey do? He had to step into that visionary mindset, look at the problem and figure out in his own head. With different ideas how he can navigate this challenging moment. And what he came up with was making a bar that was bigger than the one he was selling at a cheaper price. And then he started telling people how this bar.
It was not just a luxury, but it would provide the energy that they needed when they couldn't afford all the food they needed to stay alive. So people started buying Hershey bars as sustenance. I know it sounds funny to us today because we see them as candy bars. But that was true back then. And when he changed the mindset of everyone as to why they should buy the Hershey bars, his business started growing again, and even in the toughest time, he was able to overcome this challenge and keep growing his idea, his business expanding.
And then World War II started and he faced another huge crisis in his business. So what did he do? He connected to his visionary mindset and came up with an innovative solution for that moment, what he did is he went to the government and sold them Hershey bars, a sustenance for the troops. And they accepted and he sold all these bars to the government and he sold so many bars.
So the name of Hershey's became an international brand because of the troops eating these candy bars all around the world. And today, Hershey's is a $42 billion company. And why I love this story is because if Mr. Hershey had stopped and asked himself, how should I sell chocolate bars? And had looked at others to tell him how to create his business, he would've never done any of these things because he couldn't know the how when he started because he couldn't know the ideas that were gonna come to his mind.
He would couldn't know the challenges that were ahead in the following years. So for all of us who are visionaries, we need to remember that there is not a perfect how the, how is the story we're gonna tell 10 years from now looking back, and we're gonna say, here's how I built my business. What we have today is our mindset of resilience and creativity and trusting ourselves and having a strong belief in ourselves, our business, our services, our products, and our customers.
This is why developing a visionary mindset is the key. So when I think about the process of developing this mindset, I think a lot of it has to do with being out there in the world and taking action instead of thinking in our heads of the best strategy. And I also think it's about surrounding ourselves with people who have strong mindsets or who can help us see our blind spots.
As I was sharing about my story, I couldn't see the limiting beliefs I had back then because they feel like the truth. That reality to me. It wasn't until I started hanging with other entrepreneurs, hiring my own business coach and looking within myself that I really noticed what was holding me back. I.
And with the support of them, I was able to overcome those limiting beliefs and self-doubt and take my business to the next level. Also, your visionary mindset is not something that's static. I. You need a mindset to take a business from zero to a hundred K, but you need another mindset to take a business from 100 K to a million and then to 5 million and then 50 million.
And of course, you need a completely different mindset to go to 250 million or have a billion and above. Our visionary mindset is an ongoing process. It's asking ourselves every day, who am I being before we work on the how we're doing it? So I invite all of you to take a moment today and ask yourself the question, who am I being and who is the version of me that will take my vision, my ideas, my business, to the next level?
All right, my friends. 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!
