Welcome to Visionaryā€™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.Ā I'm thrilled to have you here.Ā
I'm recording this episode after spending an entire week in a lake house in the mountains of Colorado where I got to be with my family. Hike, swim in the lake, go kayaking. Being nature. It was incredible. And I have to tell you, when I first arrived at this house, my brain was on. I was having so many ideas and so much creativity about things I wanna do with my business that I was sneaking from where my family was to go into my computer and write all these ideas.
But then I thought to myself, I have to trust that all these ideas and all this creativity is still gonna be there when I finish my time off and I'm back on work mode right now. What I need to do is to be with my family and to really enjoy this moment. And what happened was that in that moment I was able to let go of the thinking brain, doing brain and really be present.
And because we were doing so much exercise, swimming in the lake, kayaking, hiking, I got so connected to my body again, and it felt so different at the end of the day to be tired. Not because I've been working on stress and deadlines and doing things, but because. I was tired physically from doing a lot of physical activities, and it just felt so different in my body.
And I think when we're founders, our businesses are babies and we love them and we can think constantly about them because we care so much. But I also believe this time off where you unplug is key. And we have to trust that whenever we come back to our work, it'll still be there. And that brings me to today's topic.
So have you ever heard the phrase that it feels lonely at the top and wonder what that really means? And I see that happen with a lot of my clients who are also founders, and what they feel is that they are the only ones that truly, truly care about all the details and all the results of their business, that their employees are there to do their job, but at that level of care doesn't really, really exist.
And here's the truth, probably because we are the ones taking the risk. We were the ones that came up with the idea. Our names and our reputation at the end of the day is. What gets affected if something gets wrong? Of course, we have more skin in the game and we care a lot and probably more than our employees, but sometimes believing that we are the only ones that care the most brings a lot of costs.
Who? Our wellbeing to the company culture, to our relationship with our employees. This makes me think of a lot of my clients that have lived situations like that. I have a client who has a consulting business and she wants to deliver the best excellent product to her clients. She's competing with the big consulting companies of the world.
So she has this vision, this idea of how her product has to be finalized. She has thought about every single detail, and many times her employees miss the mark. They skip on the details. They don't deliver the product to the level of her satisfaction. So she ends up doing their work at nights, during the weekends to be able to deliver to the clients what she wants, or I think of another client who.
It's so beautiful. She wants to create a culture in her company that over delivers to their clients, meaning that they're not just thinking about their services and products they sell, but if they're in a meeting with a client and the client is sick, that they can send a care package to their client to really demonstrate true care for the human beings they're working with.
But many times she feels so disappointed because. She sees that there are opportunities to wow their clients that her employees didn't see or didn't care enough according to what she thinks, to actually take on that opportunity and go above and beyond to serve their clients. I can tell you so many stories about founders that have that experience where they constantly feel like they're the only ones who truly care.
So let's be honest, it's true that as a founder, you probably care more than any other employee in your company because you are the one who thought about the idea. This is your baby, this is your money, this is the risk you've taken. Because if something happens or goes wrong with a client, it is your reputation that's on the line.
But what I wanna talk about today is the cost that exists in believing that we are the only ones that care. When we believe that we are the only ones that care, we start feeling that if a. We don't do it. Nobody's gonna deliver at the level that we want. And as I have explained over and over in this podcast, when you have a belief about something, when you tell yourself the story that the only person in the company that really.
Cares about the end product, the culture, your clients. Then what happens is that you don't think of ideas on how you can train your team to have the behaviors that you want and you end up doing the work for them. You end up being frustrated with them. You end up probably resenting them. You miss the mark in communication in so many details because you are operating from the belief.
No one cares like I do. So, for example, my client who wants to create a culture of care to go above and beyond for her clients, what we realized in coaching and digging a little bit deeper is that this belief that nobody cares like I do, was stopping her from really. Putting into words and in frameworks and in processes, the behaviors she expects from her employees.
She thought that by saying, Hey, we need to go above and beyond with our clients. We need to take great care of them. That everyone understood what she meant. So when we switch it to, you have incredible employees and they do care. Maybe what's happening is that we haven't communicated well what caring means.
Then she had actions to take. So then she sat down and thought about all the ideas of what care means and how she can train her employees to find those opportunities and how her employees would get rewarded by caring for the clients, and she's starting to see a shift. But we had to start in shifting the belief that it was only her who cared about this.
Another way I hear this belief show up is when as founders. We start caring too much about the emotions of our team because we wanna create a culture where everyone feels taken care of, seen, valued, appreciated. We have the best of intentions, but then we overdo it by starting to take responsibility for how everyone feels.
And what that means is that we're not giving direct feedback. We're not having difficult conversations. We're not letting go of employees who are not the right fit. We are overselling how great it is to work in our company. Think of another client who I got to work with as the founder and also his leadership team.
And one of the complaints his leadership team had was that he would go in the middle of the night and change things in the code that they were a technology company or in Salesforce, that he would be into details that they didn't understand why he was getting into those details. And when I explored this with him and I gave him the feedback from his team, what we realized is that he didn't want anyone to feel bad.
He didn't want anyone to feel that they were doing a bad job. And deep, deep inside of him, he was very scared that people would quit and he would be left alone And, and all this story we create again because we are believing I'm the only one who cares, but I'm gonna care so much for my employees that I'm not gonna tell them the truth about my feedback or about my expectations.
But then that creates a mess because his employees didn't trust his feedback because he said, yeah, things are good. But then he would go quietly and fix things and make them the way he wanted them instead of having direct conversations with each of the employees. Again, it came from a good place, right?
Wanting his employees to feel good, to feel appreciated, but it creates a mess. So here's the wake up call. As a founder, you do carry the risk. You do carry the pressure. It is your money, it is your reputation. All those things are true. But there is a very fine line into taking the responsibility for that part of the business and going into emotional overdrive where all of a sudden you're not only caring about the success of the business, but you're caring about how everyone feels.
We have to separate the emotions we have for our business, for the vision we have from. Really treating this business as a business. So being the only one that care doesn't mean that you have to solve every problem, that you have to manage everyone's emotion, that you have to absorb all mistakes, that you are the one who always has to have an answer, or that you can't show cracks, or you have to always be the most motivated person in the room, or that you have to keep pushing no matter what.
But that's not leadership. That is your fears and your doubts and your insecurities. Showing up as taking control over things that you shouldn't be controlling. The place to start is by questioning the belief that the only one who cares is us. We need to start looking at our employees and believing that they also care, even if they're not caring the entire responsibility of the business.
And I want you to consider if you start treating your employees and believing that they actually care. What would be the result of that? Or if you can't believe that about your employees, why not? Maybe you don't have the right people in the right positions. Maybe you have to carry so much for your business that you're gonna have to let go some employees and find the right people who actually care.
Care about your product, your service, your quality, your going above and beyond for your clients. We don't scale a business by carrying more of the responsibility. We can scale a business when we grow our cap. Capacity to hold more of the business. Those are two different things. I have another episode all about capacity and how to increase your capacity, but the way I want us to think about it in this episode is the difference between control and capacity.
Control comes from when we're trying to prevent. Pressure from existence, mistakes from being made, failure from happening, and it looks like micromanaging everything, redoing your team's work, avoiding delegation over planning, being very stuck to your own ways. The story we tell ourselves when we're in control is I need to make sure that nothing goes wrong.
And the subconscious story that we tell ourselves is, I need to make sure nothing goes wrong or else I won't survive. But again, I want you to notice how that is coming from fear and from something that is not. True, because we can't control every outcome. We can't control every single person in the company.
Capacity, on the other hand, is telling us I can handle mistakes, failure, pressure without breaking, without shrinking, without over-functioning. Control is about wanting to manage every detail outside of ourself. The circumstances in our life and in our business that as I've shared in other episodes, are not in our control.
They're simply happening and being part of our reality capacity is about learning to manage ourselves, to manage our emotions, our thoughts, our beliefs, our energy, so we can be stronger and more resilient in order to grow. Our business even more. I often have conversations with founders who are scaling their businesses and are only focused on the strategy.
What is the marketing strategy? What is the sales strategy? How are we fixing these problems so we can grow faster? But what they often forget is that in order for their businesses to grow more, they themselves, as the leaders, as the founders must also grow. They need to increase their capacity. So I think about.
Another story. One of my clients a few years ago, he started his business very young and he grew it and made it a profitable business, but then he wanted to take it to the next level and he decided to accept VC money for his business. So he thoughts were, how do I create the perfect pitch, the perfect deck?
How do I get investors to invest in my company? And he was successful with that. But the moment the money came in and the pressure came in to grow his business, he started feeling that he was drowning. He started having high levels of anxiety, even having some panic attacks because what he didn't do in that process was develop his own capacity to grow at a faster pace, to hold the pressure of investors.
So that's what we worked on during our coaching time together. We focused on him learning how to regulate his nervous system, how to set emotional boundaries, how to create systems and processes and frameworks within his company so he could lead and stay focused on the bigger picture, on the things that matter the most, and trust that his employees could take care of all the other details.
And that didn't mean that all his problems were solved. It meant that he got better at solving those problems. He stopped working during the weekends. He started making time to exercise and meditate. He became better at giving feedback and having honest conversations and hiring the right people and letting go of the people that weren't working, not because of the strategy, but because of the inner work he did.
To develop himself. Some months ago I shared that I have a program that's called the Visionary Mindset Program. We named it Visionary Mindset Program because that's exactly our focus. It's not the strategy to sell or get investors, but it's how do you develop yourself so you can become the leader that has the capacity to hold a bigger business, to hold more employees, more clients, more money, and.
Bigger problems without that meaning that you're gonna collapse. One of my students recently said in one of our calls for this group, wow, KA like it really, it's all about mindset. Mindset is at the core of everything we do, of all the results we create. And it's so amazing to see how my clients, when they shift their mindsets and they increase their capacities, their results are way better.
When we say it's lonely at the top, it's probably true for a lot of people, but it doesn't have to be that way. Right now, inside my Visionary Mindset program, there's a community of founders that are hearing each other, that are understanding that their fears, their doubts, that problems they face are not just for them.
That a lot of other entrepreneurs are experiencing those same challenges, and even though that doesn't solve their challenge. It helps them not experience those fears alone. Okay, there is a clinical psychologist. Her name is Dr. Becky, and she teaches a lot about parenting, but there is something she said that stuck with me and she said, listen, when your kids go through a tough moment and they come back home and you sit with them and you listen, and instead of fixing their problem, you stay with them and you hear their experience.
And you hold them as they're having all the emotions about that challenging experience. What happens is that although those kids will have a memory of, uh, traumatic or challenging, difficult moment they lived because you sat there and heard what happened and you were there. As they relive that experience, that memory gets encoded with, oh, this was awful.
But I didn't do it alone. And she explained that that creates resilience. And I think that's the same thing that happens inside my program when one of our students shares a tough moment and is seen by the others and held with compassion and understanding and empathy. They feel that, yes, this is tough, but I'm not alone.
And that makes us all the more resilient. So if you're a founder and you can relate to being lonely at the top and you're growing your business and you know that you need to expand your capacity, work on your mindset in order to allow your business to grow, keep an eye out. We'll be opening the Doors to the Visionary Mindset Program in a few weeks.
Again, here's the thing I want all of you to take from this episode. You can create a culture with your employees where you're not the only person that cares, and you can create or be part of communities with other founders who are living similar experiences. And because human beings we are social, that support goes a long way.
All right, 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 toĀ 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!Ā
