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. This is episode 42 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. I spent this morning brainstorming ideas for this podcast, and usually how I come up with these ideas is that I reflect on the stories my clients tell me, their struggles, their wins, or conversations I have with other visionaries or entrepreneurs, or from my own journey.
And I was thinking that I would love to hear from you to hear what is a topic you'd like me to talk about in this podcast, or if you have a question that you would love me to answer. So if you do, please just comment here below the podcast. We'll be checking for your answers so then I can turn your ideas into other episodes and that way together we can continue to make this podcast valuable and relevant to all of us.
Some years ago I enrolled in a one year long self-development program and it was intense and it brought up a lot of things for me, and there was so much growth that even it was almost, I think 10 years or more than 10 years that I did that. I still reflect on it and take the lessons I got and apply them in my life.
And one of the biggest lessons I learned while I was there. Is that at the end of everything, there's only really two things that stop us from becoming the person we wanna become or achieving the goals that we want to achieve. And those are our thoughts and our emotions. In many other episodes, we've explored mindset and the way we think in many different ways.
Today I wanna spend a little bit of time exploring why emotions or not wanting to feel those emotions are the reason why we hold ourselves back. So if you think about it.
Why we don't make the cold call to offer our services is because we don't wanna experience rejection. Why we don't go and invest money in growing our business or invest money in ourselves so we can become the leaders we wanna become is because we're scared of failing or making a mistake or being disappointed.
I want you to take a moment and really reflect on that. What is something that you know you are not doing? And ask yourself why are you not doing it? And the answer you will find is because you're scared of having an emotion. Emotions are neurobiological responses to our environment. They're meant to guide us towards safety, comfort, survival.
And all human beings on this planet have them. Emotions are the way we understand each other's experiences, no matter our background, our culture, our language, our age, our race, the way we can really understand another human being is because we can relate to the emotions they're having, because emotions represent our shared human experience.
Now we live in a society that has told us to turn off our emotions, to not be too emotional, that emotions are bad or good, or we have learned that some are bad. We should never feel jealousy or envy, or if we feel hurt, it's because we're weak. Or if we cry or feel sad, it's because we're too emotional.
But instead we say, yes, you can be happy, but don't be too happy. So throughout our lives, we've received so many messages about what is okay to feel and how we should feel it. And listen, I believe that all the emotions are important. That in order to be as successful as self-expressed as we wanna be, we must learn to experience a broader and broader range of emotions.
But I wanna be very clear. Feeling those emotions doesn't mean that because you're feeling them, then you can express them irresponsibly, lashing out, hurting others. Feeling the emotion and what you do with that emotion are two different things. In the episode today, I'm gonna talk about experiencing the emotion in your body, acknowledging where it is, and understanding what that emotion is here to tell you.
There is one book that I keep on top of my desk because when I'm coaching, I love pulling it out and reading from it, and it's called Atlas of the Heart. This book is the summary of Brene's Brown research about emotions. Brene believes that. Learning about emotions, having a language to express and understand our emotions is key to have more control over our human experience.
In the book, she gives an example when she's explaining the importance of broadening our emotional vocabulary and really understanding what all the emotions mean to us as humans. She tells a story about going to the doctor and your shoulder is hurting, and imagine that you don't have the word shoulder, you don't have the word pain, and you can't point to it.
How would you tell a doctor what's going on with you? And imagine how upsetting and scary and frustrating it would be to not be able to express the pain you're physically having. Well, it's the same thing with emotions. When we don't have the vocabulary to express and explain what we're feeling, we're trapped in that emotion.
And that's why I keep this book on my desk to help my clients understand their experience, to give them the language so they can. Really explain what's going on with them to understand why a certain emotion is happening. Because one thing I know is that the entrepreneurial journey, the visionary journey, is a rollercoaster of emotions.
The other day I was talking with a prospective client and she is trying to decide if she's gonna stay in a corporate job or if she's gonna start her own business. And what she wants is to start her own business. And what she's the most scared of is to start her own business. And it got me thinking about why some of us choose this journey when it's a really challenging journey.
And I think it's because at some point we make the decision to choose freedom. Purpose self-expression over certainty. We decide we're gonna go on the rollercoaster of emotions to be able to live our lives to our fullest, and we're going to sacrifice certainty, safety. And I think that's amazing. And I think it's so cool that we get to choose to leave safety behind in order to fulfill our deepest desires.
But we are signing up for a rollercoaster of emotions. So the first thing I wanna share with you is that emotions are part of our human experience. A lot of the times when I'm reading to my clients the definitions of emotions, I remind them that B, Brendan Brown didn't write this book based on their experience, and yet that experience reflects what they're living.
It's our shared human experience. It's not personal. It's simply how our bodies and our minds and our biology react to certain circumstances. The second thing I wanted to say is that there is no selective numbing of emotions. If we start holding ourselves back from experiencing fear, hurt, rejection, we are also holding ourselves back from experiencing satisfaction, happiness, pride, love.
You can't numb the emotions that feel uncomfortable and expect to feel the other ones. It's a game in which you decide I'm all in to experience the full range. The ones that are really hard to feel and the ones I really like to feel, or I'm gonna numb and limit myself. Think about it like going to the doctor and you're gonna get an electrocardiogram and you get some electrodes attached to your chest, and then on the screen you can see your heartbeat, you can see it when it goes up, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And then there's like a little bit of a flat line and then boom, boom, boom, boom, and a little bit of a flat line. If you are there and you're watching your heart, what you wanna see on that screen is ups and downs. Boom, boom, boom, boom, and then down, and then up and then down. Because if you were seeing a flat line, it means you're dead.
And I think it's the same thing with your emotions. Your aliveness is your ability to experience a wider range of emotions. When you start numbing your emotions, you start limiting your life. You start letting go of your aliveness. So my second invitation is to step into the full aliveness of your life, meaning allowing yourself to experience a wide range of emotions.
Now, as we think about our journey as entrepreneurs or visionaries or creatives, we try to not feel certain emotions. What we end up doing is hiding, playing small procrastinating, not taking risks. And therefore we fail. I believe that in order to succeed, in order to be successful, in order to be able to bring our ideas to life, we must learn to experience all the emotions because avoiding them, we'll only guarantee that we fail.
So what I wanna do next is talk about some emotions that are very common amongst entrepreneurs and what we usually do to avoid them and what to do instead. And I wanna start with boredom and like I do with my clients, I'm gonna read you the definition of boredom. According to Brene Brown, boredom is the uncomfortable state of wanting to engage in satisfying activity, but being unable to do it.
So a lot of times when we're working on our own business or on our own idea, we have to do a lot of boring things. And when we look out in the world in social media and TV shows, podcasts, there are a lot of other exciting things to do. And our human nature, what it tells us is let's jump. Let's not do this boring thing.
Let's do something that is more exciting and therefore we drop the activity. And that might mean we change our niche, we change our product, we change our marketing, we change our whole business so we can be entertained by another idea that we find more exciting. But I want us to consider that our businesses, our projects are not meant to entertain us, are not meant to satisfy us.
It's not the job of the business to make us feel something that we wanna feel. We need to be in charge of our emotions. And learn how to experience boredom in order to get to the other side of that boring activity, but that it's crucial for our business. One of the things that I find most boring about my business is when I have to sit down and understand.
Things that are related to legal. You know, that I have to get a permit here, that I have to submit this for workers' compensation. You know, all those rules that really I'm like, Ugh, I don't wanna be doing this. This is so boring, and yet I know how important it is to my business. So I've learned to be bored.
And do it anyways. And I think I've learned this because when I was little and we would be at home and one of my brothers or myself, we would tell my mom, we're so bored there's nothing to do. Her answer was always, guys, you need to learn how to be bored. And at the time we would be so annoyed by it. But with time, what we started realizing is that.
After spending a little bit of time in boredom, our creativity would come in, we would imagine new games. We would create forts and adventures, and now as adults, it's something my brothers and I have reflected back on multiple times. In fact, my brother who makes music for movies and TV shows, he says that he started playing instruments because he was bored.
Brenda Brown says in her research that she's found that when we stay with boredom for a little bit longer, that's when our creativity comes up. That's when her imagination starts working. So when I hear people. Say things like, oh, I don't know if to launch this business or work on this idea because I'm scared of being married to an idea that I am bored with.
My answer is boredom is not bad. Learning to stay bored for a little bit longer could be the gateway to the most extraordinary opportunity or idea you have for your business. I would even go as far as saying it is important that you get bored because it will make you innovate and to create something that you maybe hadn't thought about before.
And also I wanna remind you that our businesses, our projects are not meant to entertain us. We have to take responsibility for our own satisfaction, because if we're always looking at our business to satisfy us, we're gonna get trapped in only liking some aspects of our business and being committed only to some parts of it, versus embracing the full journey and us being responsible for how we feel.
Another emotion that I think we all don't wanna experience is embarrassment. So here goes the definition from Atlas of the Heart. Embarrassment is a fleeting feeling of self-conscious discomfort in response to a minor incident that was witnessed by others. Throughout my life, I always thought that being embarrassed was the worst thing.
Like I never wanna fall in front of anyone or make a mistake. Many times I think I stayed quiet and didn't ask a question I had because I didn't wanna be embarrassed. But some years ago I was listening to Armchair Expert, the podcast, and the host was talking about how much he loves feeling embarrassed, that the feeling he gets in his body when he's embarrassed, he thinks it's awesome and it's funny, and he craves it.
It blew my mind to hear that I couldn't believe there was another human in this planet that actually liked to be embarrassed. And after that, I've heard from many other entrepreneurs and business owners that they like to be embarrassed, that they find it thrilling, exciting, and just hearing their stories reframed embarrassment in my brain.
It made it not this very big thing that I had to be scared of, but. Minor discomfort that I can live with and that it's worth it because that's when the best anecdotes come from. I think one of the superpowers we can develop is the ability to laugh at ourselves, to laugh at those moments where we make a mistake, where we say something dumb, or when we do something that it's embarrassing.
If we can laugh at ourselves, then we don't have to avoid being embarrassed, and therefore we can take bigger risks, do more things in front of others, become more visible, and then in return, our business, our project, our ideas will grow. The next emotion I wanna talk about is frustration. And again, here's the definition from Atlas of the Heart.
Frustration is when something that feels out of my control is preventing me from achieving my desired outcome. So it's when we go out and we do this big launch to sell our product or service, and people are not buying or they're not responding, or when we're trying to use technology for a masterclass or some type of online event and the technology is not working, or when we hired a team of people and they're not performing in the way that we want them, frustration is directly related to our expectations.
When we're expecting someone to behave a certain way or that we are gonna create certain results in our business and that doesn't happen, that's when we feel frustrated. And the answer is, A, you don't set up expectations. I wouldn't recommend that because you need to have expectations about what's gonna happen to set a standard to set a goal.
B, you can experience so much frustration and anger that you end up lashing out or saying something you'll later regret, or you acknowledge your frustration. You understand what is the expectation that is being unmet. And then you course correct because no one said that the journey to our goals would be a straight line.
It's all about course correcting all the way. So the way we manage frustration is by. Understanding how it feels in our body, understanding what it means and allowing ourselves to experience that discomfort, and then being flexible to course correct when things are not going our way, so we can be visionaries that have multiple ways of getting to our goal and we're not stuck in only one way.
That flexibility, I think, is also very important. When we remember that there is some control that we hold, that our creativity and our resourcefulness can help us overcome whatever obstacle we're facing, then the frustration doesn't feel as big. So we can embrace these emotions and keep moving towards our goals.
Instead of trying to avoid them, because when we try to avoid them, we procrastinate. We go into perfectionism, we avoid taking risks, and those are actions that won't take us to the ultimate desired outcome. Then the next emotion I want us to talk about is stress, and stress has become such a part of the vocabulary of all of us.
I'm so stressed, I'm so stressed. We say it all the time, but let's see what the definition says. We feel stress when we evaluate environmental demand as beyond our ability to cope successfully. So when we see our circumstances as unpredictable or uncontrollable, or we feel overloaded when what's required of us supersedes what we believe we have.
So what can we do about stress? Number one, I think there is a good type of stress that motivates us, pushes us, makes us be resourceful. And then there's the stress that is debilitating, that it's so big that we're paralyzed. And I think it's important to acknowledge where we are in the stress spectrum.
And if we're feeling. Overwhelmed. We need to focus on managing our stress, calming our fear response, our fight flight, freeze response, taking a couple of deep breaths and being able to remind ourselves that there's actually enough within us to cope with whatever the situation we're living. Again, I think it's about responding to stress.
With self care and love, and also with empowerment, reminding ourselves that we are creative, that we are resourceful, that we can figure things out, and taking one step at a time. The number one tool I use in coaching is called the self coaching model. And when we use this model, the way we look at the world is that every single emotion is created by our thoughts, by our perspective, by the story we're telling ourselves.
So what I work with my clients on is developing. A mental structure in which they tell themselves, they're able to experience any emotion, that no emotion is gonna stop them, and that they're gonna be loving and compassionate with themselves as they experience it. I think the number one emotion that will absolutely derail us from our goals is shame and shame.
Is created by our brain when we think that there is something wrong with us, that we are broken in some way. That's why beating ourselves up, being hard on ourselves does not work. In order to embrace the journey of aliveness, to allow ourselves to experience a larger range of emotions, we have to also have a loving voice inside of us and learn to be on our own side.
As we experienced all of these emotions beating ourselves up, being hard on ourselves, shame, that is the only emotion that I will say will stop you. All the other emotions are important to feel them, and we need to embrace them to move forward. Shame lives in the darkness. Shame lives in those parts of our brain that we don't wanna share with anyone.
But when we bring it to the surface, when we share it with someone who is loving and compassionate, we take away the power that shame has and then we can keep moving forward. What also we need to learn is how to create shame, resilience, and we become more resilient towards shame when we understand it, when we don't believe it, when we can share it with someone that is loving and understanding, and we can.
Express that other part of our human experience. So my proposal for all of you today is to step into your full aliveness. To know that in order to turn your boldest ideas into realities, you have to train your mind and your body to experience all the range of emotions that exist while staying on your own side and being loving and compassionate to yourself.
When you are not scared of experiencing an emotion, you become unstoppable. This is hard work, but it's a hundred percent worth it. All right, my friends. I'll see you next time.
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!
