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.Â
 Hi, and welcome back. This is episode 40 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast 40. Oh my gosh. I'm just gonna take a second to celebrate that we're in episode 40, and to give a quick shout out to my husband and business partner who's the one that makes all of this sound beautiful, and really take the content to the next level.
So, yeah, 40 episodes. It's gone by so fast, and I . Always love being with all of you here today and, here's what inspired me to create this episode. So I was listening to a podcast. Episode with a woman whose name is Emma Greed. She's been a businesswoman fashion designer. She's mostly known because she's been the business partner of many of the Kardashians endeavors and businesses.
And basically she has tons of experience building businesses. And what she shared in the podcast was that many people ask her. Do you ever feel imposter syndrome? Do you experience that doubt? And she said, my answer is always no, because the way she thinks about it is if it's not her, then who.
And the other thing she knows after building all these businesses is that nobody has that perfect answer. Or can be a hundred percent confident that a strategy is going to work. What she knows is that businesses are built and figure it out as we go.
And she even said, I've built so many businesses and I'm still figuring it out as I go, because no two businesses are the same. You're building different products, different culture, different employees, different type of clients. So when I heard her say this, I thought about when people have asked me if I experience imposter syndrome, and my answer is no. If I look at my life, I would say I don't experience imposter syndrome in my business. That doesn't mean that sometimes I don't get scared, that sometimes I doubt what I'm doing. That sometimes I'm like, oh my gosh, how can I think?
And sometimes I think, oh my gosh, how is it that I'm in this position that I'm talking to these very successful people or this person who has built their business way bigger than mine and I'm here. Coaching them. But the reason why I don't experience imposter syndrome, or I don't stay too long in self-doubt or fear, is because I remind myself of what I do know.
What is my lane? I acknowledge what I don't know. And that gives me a lot of peace, and that's what I want us to talk about today. I want to offer you the idea that experiencing imposter syndrome and self-doubt is optional. I. Imposter syndrome and self-doubt have become words that everyone just throws around and says, everyone is having imposter syndrome.
I especially hear comments around, I especially hear around, I especially hear a lot of comments from women saying, well, women sp, I especially hear a lot of comments from women saying, well, yeah, all women in experience. Well, yeah, a woman experiencing imposter syndrome, men don't. And I think that conversation as to what gender experiences it, and I think the conversation about what gender experiences more self-doubt is not helpful.
Like what are we gonna do about that? It's, you know, it's not useful. But what does matter is that we're not buying into the culture. Especially if we're women, that we have to experience self-doubt or imposter syndrome when we're doing something that we've never done before or when we're taking an important role or becoming a significant leader in our business or our community.
And I loved Emigre saying that publicly because I think it's also going against the norm. Of a woman, you know, being quiet and complacent instead of us standing up and saying, no, I believe in myself. I trust myself. I may not have all the answers, but I believe I can figure it out. And my hope is that every day more, there's more women and men of course as well that can show up in the world in that way, believing in themselves and not playing small.
I have a whole other episode about how to overcome imposter syndrome, and if you're feeling that, experiencing that, I really recommend you go listen to it. But today I want us to look at it from a different perspective, not making the experience of self-doubt or imposter syndrome wrong, but seeing it as optional.
The definition of imposter syndrome is a persistent feeling of inadequacy. And fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of success.
So the way I think about it is we experience imposter syndrome when we believe who we are, what we know. Our experience is not enough and we should be somewhere else or know more things or show up in a different way than who we truly are.
So if that's what creates imposter syndrome, the answer to it to not have that experience, is to present yourself to the world just as you are with the knowledge you have. With the experiences you have, with all the things that you don't know yet with the failures and the successes. When we work on believing that who we are and what we've done at what we know is enough, and then we present to the world that way, we don't have to experience imposter syndrome because we're not an imposter.
This is the truth of who I am. Now self-doubt. I think it's a little bit different. Self-doubt shows up when we're gonna do something for the first time and we are unsure if the way we're going to do it is going to work. I think self-doubt is a very normal experience and it usually happens when we're getting outside of our comfort zone.
The challenge with self-doubt is allowing ourselves to sustain the fear and the doubt, and not simply making a choice, running a risk, and learning from it, or being successful from it as well. So as you can see, imposter syndrome and self-doubt are not required for you to have success. They're also not wrong if you experience them.
But it all has to do with the way you're thinking about you and how much you're trusting yourself, and how much you believe that you are enough.
Which brings me to the other two concepts that I wanna talk about in this episode, which are confidence and self-trust. So let me start with confidence. Confident. We feel confident as a result of doing something so many times that now we absolutely know we can do it.
Tying our shoe laces, making a deposit in the bank, buying an airplane ticket. Things we've done over and over and over again. We feel confident about doing them because we've had the experience and now we know with absolute certainty that we can do it. Confidence grows as we have more experiences, as we take more risks, as we have more failures, and we overcome them as we have more successes as well.
When you're new at something, let's say you're starting a business or you are taking your career to a new level, you're making a movie, you're running a race you've never run before. Of course you're not gonna feel confident because you've never done it. But what you do need in that moment is self-trust. Self-trust is knowing that we are flawed. That we don't know everything, that we make mistakes that we have failed and still hold ourselves with high regard
And what happens often is that we mistake these two terms.
People think we need to have confidence, meaning I need to know with a hundred percent certainty that I can do this. When really what you need is self-trust, is the belief that you can figure it out, is the belief that even if things don't work out how you think and you want them to work out, you can.
Learn course correct. Try something else and keep navigating.
What I love about the definition that I just shared with you about self-trust is that it acknowledges that. We are not perfect, that we don't have all the answers, and yet we hold ourselves with high regard. So if you're gonna ask me , okay, Caro, so how do I develop self-trust?
What I would tell you is that it has to do with a conversation you are continuously having in your head. What are you telling yourself about who you are, about your abilities, about your capacities? What is the story you're telling yourself about your failures and mistakes?
I hold them with love and care as they're experiencing all the uncomfortable emotions that come from failure, and I remind them that the story they tell themselves in that moment will determine their success in the future. If you decide to start a business, if you decide to launch a new project and it fails, or you quit before you see it successful, and you tell yourself the story that you're not capable, that you can trust yourself, that see, you know, I start many things and I never finish, or I always give up, or I always go back to my old habits, then what you're doing is you're eroding your self-trust.
So what you can do is tell yourself a different story. Okay. I failed. Yeah. I'm a human being. Oh, I give up. Yeah. This time, this time, and this specific moment.
I allowed fear to win, but that doesn't mean that it's what's gonna keep happening in the future. This time I made an estimated guess with the information I had, and it was the wrong decision. But I can make it better and I can try again. This is not the end.
When I look at my journey as an entrepreneur. My gosh, have I made mistakes? My gosh, have I allowed fear to stop me? I remember the first webinar I did online. This was, I dunno, 12, 13 years ago. Someone that I really care about criticized the way I did it, and it took me into such a shame spiral that it took me three years to do it again.
Now I can do it, receive negative feedback and try again sooner. It doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt or it doesn't sting. It just means that I've learned to not go into shame when I do something that's wrong or when someone criticizes what I'm doing. It is some,
it is a practice that I've learned by coaching myself. Working on the way I manage my brain and my emotions,
and that's why I love coaching. That's why I continue to invest in myself by hiring a coach, by exposing myself to personal development workshops and masterminds, because I know those investments I make in my mind in learning to refocus my mind and tell myself a more loving, compassionate, and positive story.
It is what allows me to keep moving forward towards the results and the goals and the vision I have.
Why I wanted to create this podcast is first to have you start considering that you don't have to feel imposter syndrome. That if self-doubt arises, it can be just for five minutes, an hour. It doesn't have to last very long.
That if you're a person who doesn't experience imposter syndrome to give yourself also the permission to share with others and be an example of what's possible. Be an example of a person that is succeeding, taking risks, growing their business, and are not necessarily feeling like an imposter.
And the second message I want you to take is this. You don't need confidence. Confidence is overestimated. We've been sold. The idea that why some people make it is because of their confidence, but we need to remember that confidence is the result and that it will come with, and that it will come with time and experiences and challenges and growth.
Now the op, what we can focus all of our attention today, what we can, well, no. And instead of confidence, my invitation is that you focus more on self-trust. That is allowing yourself to be imperfect and still hold yourself with high regard. If you can experience more self-trust than self-doubt, you're gonna move forward.
It's not about being always in self-trust either, but it's about cultivating that mindset so you can experience more of it during your every day, and therefore take bigger risks, go for bigger projects, pursue bigger dreams. Alright, and here's the last concept I want us to talk about and is trusting our gut, which is a little bit different than self-trust.
It's about trusting our intuition. It's about trusting that inner knowing we have.
One of our family friends, uh, he's been a very, very successful businessman and he's made a lot of money. He sold businesses. People love him. He's an incredible leader. And one time we were talking and he said, Karo, don't think that the people who have this big businesses know what they're doing.
We are all making it up as we go. What you have to do is trust your gut. Your gut is where all the answers are, and I have cultivated that, trusting myself, listening to myself, what is it that my inner knowing is saying and following that, and sometimes that inner knowing hasn't been exactly accurate.
What I think is the right decision, that and even fail than asking everyone to tell me where I need to go. And then get there. And if it works, it wasn't my idea. And if I don't get there, I'm gonna be regretting. Why did I ask everyone when I knew this inside of me?
So to trust our gut, to trust our intuition, the first thing we need to do is to listen to it and ask ourselves the question, what is it that I think? What is it that my wisdom is telling me about this? What is the hunch I have about this decision? And the more you listen to it, the more it's gonna speak to you, the more you're gonna be able to recognize it.
And as you start following that gut feeling, you will start strengthening the relationship with your intuition, and it's gonna become one of the most powerful tools you'll have as a visionary. So my friends, let's stop fighting with who we are or where we are. Let's embrace our imperfection and also hold ourselves in high regard and believe that we have powerful wisdom within us.
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.
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