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
This is episode 48 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. Last week we had a meeting at my daughter's school. She's starting third grade, and we were meeting with a principal. She was reminding us all that. In her school phones, smart watches, any other class of device is prohibited.
And I love the metaphor she gave to explain why these devices are prohibited. She said, giving a kid a device. It's like giving a kid a warm chocolate chip cookie they have to carry in their hand for the entire day. And the kids are going about their day while thinking about the cookie smelling the cookie.
And the attention these kids are giving to the cookie is consuming a big part of their cognitive capacity. So in their brains they're thinking, oh, this cookie's so good. Oh, I wanna taste it. No, but I can't. And they're having to control their impulse throughout the entire day. And that cognitive capacity that is going to manage themselves around the cookie is cognitive capacity that they can't use to learn to engage with what's happening in the classroom.
And I agree giving a kid a device is tempting for them because they wanna use it. But I also think that it not only happens to kids, it happens to all of us. In today's world. We are all carrying, warm chocolate cookies around all the time in the form of notifications we're getting on our computer. Our phone vibrating when we get a new email, a new text message, a new ping on Slack. All of us are constantly having to control our impulses to not be distracted with the 1 million things that are happening around us.
And when we are the founder of a company. Those distractions, the level of requests for our attention increases exponentially.
Some weeks ago I was talking with a client about some important strategic decisions she had to make about her business. She had collected very important information and she had to analyze it in order to make decisions about hiring new employees, deciding to take some clients or not take them right now.
So in the coaching session, she committed that before we met again, she was gonna do this work and come to the session prepared with her new decisions about her business.
And when she showed up she told me I didn't do it. I can't believe I didn't do it. I carried this information with me all week. I had the intention to do it. I even started trying to do it, but I didn't. And then she told me all the other things she had done. She had been dealing with employees challenges with clients who were not happy with some of the work or wanted additional things from her team.
So it's not that she's lazy or she didn't wanna do the work, it's just that life happened. All the other demands she has as A CEO became more urgent or she resolved them first instead of taking time to think and plan for the future. And I know she's not alone in this. It happens to all of us.
Things that seem urgent. That in the moment it feels like we need to attend to them right now. Being the founder and the CEO of a business is like driving a car while you're building it. You have to decide where are you going.
You have to decide at what speed you wanna go, and you need to accept that there's going to be parts of the car that are not working properly. The radio may not be working, the windows may not be going down. A hundred things may not be ideal at the moment, but you have to keep going.
So as the founder and CEO, we need to decide. Which problems we can live with, even if they're uncomfortable, even if they're creating a lot of noise, and which ones are fundamental in order to get to the destination, we're going.
You can be in the car with the windows up and everyone might be saying, it's so hot, we're sweating. Please fix the windows. It's so uncomfortable to be here, and that is going to create pressure on you, stress. But you have to have the ability to say, no, we're not gonna fix the windows right now because we're having a problem with the engine.
So all of our attention is going to go towards the engine, and you have to figure out a way to keep your team motivated and calm and still wanting to work on what they need to do even though they're hot and sweaty. And this is a skill that we're not born with. It's a skill we need to develop. So as any other skill, we develop it by practicing it intentionally, learning from our mistakes and getting better at it.
When I talk with my clients about how they manage their attention or how they manage their time, I always tell them that it's a math problem and a psychological problem.
So, let me take a minute here to talk about different parts of our brain.
We have a part of our brain that's called the prefrontal cortex. That's where we can make thoughtful decisions. It is located right behind your forehead, and it's responsible for things like logic and reasoning planning and long-term thinking, impulse control, empathy and perspective taking, goal directed behavior. When you are using this part of your brain to make decisions, you are likely thinking ahead and considering the consequences. You're being able to evaluate if that window that can't go down is that urgent or important or necessary for you to get to your destination.
Also, when you are planning from your prefrontal cortex, you're weighing pros and cons. You are regulating your emotional impulses.
You're making decisions that are based on your values and your goals. You're solving problems in a more creative way, you're innovating. The other part of our brain is the amygdala. This is where our emotional and survival instincts live.
When we're using this part of our brain to make decisions, we're making emotional based decisions, survival based decisions, and not thoughtful strategic decisions. The amygdala is part of the brain's limbic system.
It's fast, reactive, and it's focused on our survival. The amygdala is in charge of the flight fight, freeze responses of fear and anxiety, of emotional reactivity, of quick and instinctual decisions. When we make decisions from this place, we tend to react out of fear or stress.
We might avoid risk or perceive danger even when it's not real. We might lash out. Make impulsive choices or shortsighted choices. When we are making decisions from the amygdala, we're wanting to resolve a tension that we're feeling inside and going back to the metaphor of the car.
Imagine everyone in the car screaming at you that they're hot and that they need to bring the windows down. That is a tension. And when your amygdala is focused on trying to solve the tension you're feeling because everyone is stressed and asking you for something, you are not gonna make the most strategic decisions.
So when I'm helping my clients be more deliberate with their attention management and their time management, first we start with what I just shared with you, understanding how our brain works. Then we create a plan so their decisions are being made from the prefrontal cortex.
An example of it is taking Friday evenings or Saturdays to review the week that they just completed, to understand what they accomplished, what's still pending, what's new, what has become a priority.
To connect that list of to-dos they have with their bigger vision and their specific goals and their values as well. And from there, redesign their to-do list. So what is priority is at the very top. Then they can go to their calendars and look at the week ahead and decide.
Remember they're sitting here on a Friday or a Saturday, or sometimes even a Sunday. They're deciding what are they going to do every day. They're not just allowing meetings to be in their calendar, but they're choosing to put whatever time they need to think and make strategic decisions at the top of the day, creating big chunks of time in their calendar where they can do this incredibly important work.
So remember, the reason why we know they're using their prefrontal cortex is because they're making decisions ahead of time. The amygdala delegates activated in the moment. Now, I'm gonna give you a caveat. Sometimes when we're doing this planning and we start seeing the number of things that are popping up, we're seeing that we have 93 emails unread.
The amygdala might take over and say, listen, stop the planning. Let's answer these emails really quickly, and then we're gonna come back to the planning. So that's when I say, no longer, it's a math problem. Here's a psychological problem.
And what we need to develop is the ability to be with that tension that is created when we know we can solve a problem instantly, get a dopamine hit and move on.
So we need to be with that discomfort in order to continue focusing on what's most important. So first step is using your prefrontal cortex to plan your week, what are the three things that you have to do, no matter what, when are you gonna create the time to think about the future, and review information that is gonna help you be more strategic?
Now the second part of this, and I actually think this is the harder part, is to honor whatever decisions you've made. If you said that on Monday from nine to 11:00 AM you're going to sit down to review your numbers, your projections, and 9:00 AM on Monday comes, but you're seeing all these emails, people are asking you,
can I get five minutes of your time? The psychological part, or what I refer to as the psychological part is developing the ability to say no, to stay true to the decisions you made from your prefrontal cortex.
Remember the amygdala wants to solve the pain we're feeling in that moment. And it's really hard when someone is saying, Hey, can I get two minutes of your attention? Because our amygdala wants to solve that problem in the moment.
So again, developing that ability to be with the discomfort in a moment is gonna be huge. But also you can use external help like closing the door to your office or deciding that when you're gonna be doing this work that requires thinking and strategy, you're gonna go somewhere else doing it from a coffee shop or from home, deciding to turn off all the notifications.
This reminds me of a client that I coached, I don't know, 10 years ago when I was doing coaching in person. So he came to my office and we were talking about all the things we'd talk about in coaching, and he kept touching his pocket.
And I could see it would distract him for a second, and then he would be back in the conversation. So I asked him what's going on? And he said, no, no, no, no worries. It's that my phone vibrates every time I get an email.
And I remember in that moment stopping whatever other topic we were talking about, and we spent some time assessing the impact it had every time his phone vibrated. Every time he, for a second would think, oh, I got an email. Oh, I wonder what it is. Oh, let me come back.
That drains our energy. That doesn't allow us to do our best work. So help yourself as well. Support your nervous system, your amygdala by turning off notifications, by letting other people know that you're gonna be focused doing some work, and you can't be interrupted by setting some boundaries that are gonna help you focus on what really matters.
One of the things that sometimes happens is that the first week they use this to plan and decide ahead of time what they're going to do. They create schedules that are not very friendly to them. They usually forget to add time to go get lunch , or to simply stop and stretch and breathe.
I'm sharing this because I don't want you to have the expectation that the first time you try to plan ahead of time, everything is gonna work perfectly.
The idea is to think about the way you manage your time and your attention and your energy as a skill. What I do promise you is if you do it week after week and you include an analysis of what worked. What didn't I include in my agenda that I actually need to include moving forward? And you start tweaking your strategy week after week you will get so good at this that you're gonna start experiencing a sense of deep accomplishment. Less pressure on your nervous system. Less need to be controlling your impulses at every second.
There is an idea that we borrow from engineering, from radio communications. That's called the signal to noise ratio. So for them, signal refers to the useful information you wanna communicate, and noise is everything else that interferes .
A high signal to noise ratio means the important part comes through clearly. While a low ratio means the message gets buried in distractions.
So what I'm inviting you to do is to make decisions ahead of time. Use your prefrontal cortex to decide what is a priority, when do you wanna do it? How do you wanna schedule your time for the following week?
And continue practicing these four weeks in order to improve your signal to noise ratio. In order to every week, know that what's most important is getting done and the noise is less and less interfering with your vision, with your goals, with what truly matters for you and your business.
And before we go, I wanna share this anecdote because it always makes me laugh. I was working with another client on this topic, and one of her complaints was that she got too many emails. At any point, she would stop looking at her email and then it would have 130 unread messages, 200 something. I think when we're doing the coaching session, she had close to a thousand unread emails.
So I asked her, what are you gonna do about that? And she came up with an idea that I loved. She said, I'm just gonna mark them all read. And in front of me, she went to her email, she selected all the unread emails, and she clicked read, and then she told me if any of these thousand emails are truly important, they're gonna contact me again.
From her experience, I learned how much freedom she could experience by deciding not to be perfect by choosing to focus on where she adds the most value to her business.
And she knew that looking at those thousand emails was not where she was gonna really take her business to that level she wanted.
So here's what I wanna say. You don't need more time. What you need is a system in which you can make decisions about your attention and your time using your prefrontal cortex. And then train yourself to be able to manage your emotions, your impulses, so you can honor that system.
And that's what we do in the Visionary Mindset Program, we spend an entire month talking about emotional mastery, how do we navigate those emotions that are pushing us to make decisions fast or out of instinct because we're scared or we're feeling rushed.
We also have another month that we're talking about capacity. How do we grow our capacity to hold more responsibility without that meaning that we're going to burn out. We're opening the doors to this program at the end of this month. Make sure you're signed up for my newsletter so you can receive all the information once the door's open.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Have a great rest of your week.
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
