Welcome to Visionary’s Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your bold and inspiring 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.
Hi, and welcome back. This is episode 39 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. And I truly feel so grateful that we get to connect through this platform every week. I love hearing from you that you're listening to the podcast every week, that you go back, that you take notes, that you reflect,
that you take action based on the insights you're getting from this podcast. I love hearing your stories. I love knowing that this is making a difference in your lives. I am grateful to those of you who are following us, who have given us a review or a rating. Because it does go a long way in helping me spread this message that I wanna share with all the visionaries. And if you do love this podcast and you're currently not following it or you haven't rated or giving us a review, I would really appreciate it if you take a couple of minutes and go ahead and do that.
So here's where the idea for this episode originated some days ago, I was talking with my father-in-law who was very successful in business, and who now mentors. Young entrepreneurs and helps them start their businesses, go to market and grow their own startups.
And he briefly said something around the lines of, yeah, that's the work nobody wants to do. So I started reflecting on what is the work that I haven't wanted to do in my business, the work that my clients don't want to do, and how that work that we avoid is actually the key to getting to the goals we have, to building the ideas we really want to bring into the world. So today I wanna talk about the difference between passive and active action.
I am going to explain these ideas from the perspective of a business, but if you're a visionary who doesn't have a business, perhaps you're a film director, an actor, an actress, a professional athlete, this is still very relevant to you. And I want you to listen to this episode, thinking about how it applies to your own projects and ideas. And at the end, I'm gonna give some very specific examples and ideas for those of you who are growing projects who have a vision, but maybe that vision is not exactly a business.
So there are two different types of actions we can take within our businesses. I'm gonna call them passive and active action. Passive action. We can think of anything that is preparing us to go out into the world and sell our products or services.
It can be learning, organizing, ideating, writing, tweaking refining our packaging.. It's all those things we are doing that don't involve. talking with potential clients or investors or putting ourselves out there, taking, the risk of emotional exposure. we're not exposing ourselves to a potential failure, to a potential rejection.
And they also feel important, and they also feel like we're busy, so we can spend hours and days and weeks and sometimes even months trying to make things within our business perfect. Or that we feel sure they're going to be successful without even ones trying to sell it to someone.
And although prep work is part of all of our entrepreneurial journey, it's not what's gonna give us the results we want. So absolutely there is a place for all these things within our business, but where we need to be honest with ourselves is that these things are not gonna necessarily bring clients, money, investors.
They're not gonna expose us to the outside world. So we can either get the results we want or fail and learn. And the reason why many of us get stuck in passive action is because feeling busy, checking things off the to-do list gives us a dopamine rush so it also feels good in our bodies.
And it's this loop in which we stay safe. We feel busy, we tell ourselves a story, that we're doing things for our business. We're getting a dopamine hit. But the cost. Is that we're not actually making progress to growing our business.
Now let's talk about active action. Active action are all those things we do that feel risky, uncomfortable, that we're exposing ourselves to others, putting ourselves out there. And what happens when we take these actions is that we get outcomes.
Those outcomes might be the ones that we want. We got a sale in, we got some money, we grew our revenue. Or they can be outcomes that we don't want. We got rejected. Nobody bought. We got criticism, judgment. And it's because of those outcomes that we don't want
that. We avoid taking active action. And yet again, if we're honest with ourselves, it is only through those rejections, failures, or wins that we're actually gonna grow our business.
So some examples of active action are cold outreach, prospecting, making sales calls, pitching to investors, meeting people at networking events, and telling them about your product or service and making offers to sell them or to help them through what you have to offer.
Active action usually involves that you're interacting with other human beings, being those clients or being those potential investors.
And why taking active action really matters is because that's where we can get feedback. We can collect data, and we can actually produce the results that are gonna get us to our goals.
So if we all know that active action is the way we get the results we want, why do we all get stuck in passive action?
And how I like to think about this is that being an entrepreneur, being a visionary acting like we're superhuman. Our human brain, if we were gonna stay with our instincts, with what our brain is designed to do, in some ways that is protect us, is survival is keeping us safe.
We wouldn't be exposing ourselves. There is something that's called the motivational triad. The motivational triad are the core motivations we have as human beings in order to stay safe, and there's three of them. The first one is our brain wants to move us away from pain, move us towards comfort and save energy.
So spending an entire day designing your logo, designing your packaging, designing your website. Feels comfortable, gives you that dopamine hit. It feels good to be doing some work. So that type of work is within the motivational triad. Making a call to someone that can hang up on you or say they're not interested or criticize something that you're selling is going against.
That motivational tribe is going against that instinct that we all have to stay safe. And that's when I see visionaries out in the world. I think to myself, they're acting as though they're superhuman because they're going against the instinct that tells us, stay safe.
Stay within what you know. Have people like you stay safe within your tribe.
And here's the other reason why we get stuck in passive action. Because when we're doing things for our business. It makes it easier to tell ourselves a story that we are working, right? If we had spent the entire day watching TV or you know, being in our garden and not doing anything for our business, then it's harder to lie to ourselves.
But when we're taking passive action, it's easier to not be honest with ourselves. It's easier to say, well, look at me. I was so busy. I did so many things, but the truth we're avoiding is I was busy, but I wasn't creating results.
So the question that is important that we ask ourselves every day is, are the actions that I'm taking, creating results, meaning are they bringing money into the business or rejection so we can learn and get better at it?
I wanna take a minute to talk about the difference between service based businesses and product based businesses. So service based. You really just need the person who's gonna deliver the service and you just do it.
That might even be you. So the time from ideation to action is shorter. When you have a product, you do need to spend a little bit more time in creating a prototype, the packaging, something that is physical in order to go out there to the world.
But still understanding the difference between passive and active action is important and telling yourself the truth. It's very important because I've seen many entrepreneurs who are creating products stay. Way longer than they need to creating a product, making it perfect before they go out into the world.
In entrepreneurship there is a term that's called the minimum viable product, and that is the simplest possible version of your offer that allows you to test whether people want it or not.
Before spending too much time, money, or energy building it. It's not the final thing. It's something that you create in order to test.
One of the things I teach my clients is the idea of tiny experiments of failing fast. So you can learn fast and then you can get better. And the only way we can do that is by interacting with other human beings is by getting real world feedback, not just what we think in our head.
So some of the myths we tell ourselves is, oh, my product has to be perfect. No, it doesn't. It just has to work well enough so you can learn something. Or, oh, it's not fully done, so I can't charge for it. Well, actually you can and probably you should charge for it because charging for it is part of the validation or the last one is if I finish the whole thing, then people will come. This reminds me of when I was at the University of Chicago, when alumni came to tell her story and she told us she wanted to build this spa and she spent months and millions of dollars building the most beautiful spa with all the things she desired.
She did this grand opening and her thought is. This is so beautiful and it's so amazing that people are going to come. But the truth is, at the beginning, no one came because she hadn't tested it. She hadn't talked with potential clients to understand really what is it that they wanted. So the minimum viable product helps you quickly find out if your potential clients are interested in what you have to offer or not, or what are the tweaks and the changes you have to make
in order to be able to sell more,
To summarize, there are two types of actions that we can take in our business. Passive action are all those things that make us feel like we're busy, that we're doing things for our business, but require zero emotional exposure or risk, and therefore we don't know if the results are gonna take us to the goals that we want.
And active action are the ones that do feel risky, that involve interacting with potential clients or investors that create the results that are gonna teach us if we're on the right path or not. My recommendation today is that you take a look at where you're spending your time.
Are you spending time. In taking action that will create results, good or bad?
Or are you spending the time in passive action prep work, the work that will not get you to where you wanna be?
So how do you know you're doing the right things in your business? Well, the right things usually feel uncomfortable, not just productive. So if you're feeling exposed, if you're feeling a little nervous, maybe you're worried about being judged or rejected.
That's usually the signal that you are taking active action. Real growth happens when you're making offers, talking to people, asking for the sale, following up and putting your voice out there.
The other way you can know if you're spending your time in active action or passive action is because active action will move you closer to money, visibility, or direct feedback.
Ask yourself at the beginning of the day, okay, here's what I have planned to work on today. Are these actions? Are these things that I'm going to do, going to give me results I can learn from? If not, it's probably just busy work in disguise.
The last way that you can check in with yourself is by asking yourself if you're seeing measurable results
did you get an answer from a prospective client, yes, I'm buying, or No, I'm not. Did you get a follow up meeting with a potential investor? Are the conversations moving forward towards the goals that you want? Active action puts you in the real world and gives you real measurable results.
So if you are my client right now, and we were looking at your business and what you're doing, and we're realizing that you're spending the majority of your time in passive action, or that you're not taking enough active action, my number one recommendation is for you to not beat yourself up when you start criticizing yourself.
You actually create less safety for you, and therefore you're gonna want to do more of the passive action to get dopamine to feel safe. So what do you have to do instead? Is choose one, two, or three things that you wanna do today or within this week. And go to them. Experience the fear, experience the vulnerability.
Allow yourself to have all those emotions and still take action. And then you can address how you wanna be with those emotions. You might wanna talk with a friend. You might wanna receive a hug, you might wanna go for a walk in nature. Manage your emotions, separate from your business.
Make the decisions about your business because you know they're gonna get you results, not just because they're gonna make you feel better.
Like I said, the beginning of this episode, I wanna share some ideas for those of you who are visionaries but are not entrepreneurs.
So what I've noticed in those of you who are in the arts or in sports is that you tend to stay in circles of people you've known for a very long time, and where the conversation seems to be the same one. Over and over again. Your active action comes here when you go and seek to be part of circles that you feel very uncomfortable, that you don't know the people who are in them, that those people feel like they're 10 steps ahead of you, where you feel like you don't belong.
A big part of being able to have a bigger impact. Is by meeting people who are 3, 5, 10 steps ahead of you starting to spend more time with them than with your friends who've been your friends. Always.
Another idea for active action is to be able to hold the people in your team accountable to have the difficult conversations with your managers and agents, and hold them accountable to the results they're supposed to create.
Many times I see artists and athletes being so worried that these agents or managers are going to accept them and represent them, that they don't speak up and they don't ask for what they want and they don't raise their hand when things are not working.
So being complacent to whatever your team is telling you, that is passive action. Active action is speaking up.
And the last way. I see many people holding themselves back is by telling themselves the story that they're not ready, that they need to practice a little bit more, take another class, improve this specific technique. Instead of signing up for a tournament, competing, doing an audition, going for bigger projects, asking investors to invest in your projects.
Yes, it's important to prepare, but most of us can start taking action. Way before we think we can. So my invitation is if you don't feel ready, take action anyway because it's in that action and the feedback that you will receive, that you will learn and actually become the person who's ready for the bigger projects.
So my friends. Being a visionary is tough. We are choosing the path of maximum emotional exposure and risk,
The path of greatest resistance. And what I've learned by working with so many visionaries is that it almost feels like it's not optional. It feels like we were born to do this work. So instead of saying stuck in passive action, I invite you that this week you challenge yourself and take 1, 2, 3 steps that feel risky, that feel scary, but you know are gonna give you results.
Because what happens as we take more and more active action is that we grow the resilience inside of us to experience all these uncomfortable emotions and keep going.
In other words, it's through active action that we become the visionaries we wanna be. All right. I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.
If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea and would love some support, let's 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!
