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.
Hello and welcome back. This is episode 49 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. Exactly. One year ago today, August 27th, 2024, we published the first episode of this podcast and it's titled Dream Big.
And I still believe that that is the biggest message I wanna share with the world. To dream big, to have the courage to connect to your desires and to pursue the dreams that feel so wild and impossible. And the reason why I think dreams are so important is not only because of the dream, I do think that having in this world, people who are creators, entrepreneurs who are generating employment, who are innovating, who are making this world better, is crucial for humanity.
But more than the dream itself. Why I encourage everyone around me to have big dreams is because I think it is the most effective way to fulfill your potential. Getting to the dream, getting to the goal is amazing, but what matters the most is who we become on the journey.
In order to achieve the most impossible goals, we have to transform ourselves. We have to evolve. We have to bust our limiting beliefs. We have to create new, empowering beliefs. We need to learn how to have better relationships with people. We need to confront our own psychology.
And I think that journey of looking inside and becoming the best version of you is the most sacred journey we have.
So if you haven't heard that episode, I really recommend you go listen to it because it's still one of my favorites.
One of my life's missions is to make boldness the norm. So after you listen to today's episode, go and listen to the first one.
It's one that I hope all of you keep going back to.
In my coaching, I have the privilege of working with highly educated men and women who are leaders, who by any measure, have already achieved success in many ways. And I also have the privilege of seeing behind the scenes. To have conversations with them, where they tell me how the expectation that everyone has about them is that they know everything, that they have all the answers, and how that can feel like crushing pressure. When they don't, when they have doubts, when maybe they're at a board meeting or meeting with investors and someone names a financial term that they don't understand and they feel like an imposter, they get worried that they're gonna find out that them as the founders, as the CEOs don't have all the answers, don't have all the knowledge.
But the truth is that no one has all of it. In entrepreneurship, in business, we often praise the self-made millionaires, the self-made billionaires, and of course, those people deserve a lot of recognition and they have worked really hard and have been visionaries. But I don't think there's anything as self-made. No one does anything alone. We always do it with other people.
The only way to accomplish our biggest goals is by surrounding ourselves with the people who are gonna help us get there.
As founders and visionaries, we pride ourselves on being independent, having grit, being resourceful. We often fall into the trap of, I should figure this out on my own. And we see asking for help as a weakness, when really it's not asking for help, which creates the problems, which hold us back.
Here's the truth. Trying to figure it out all on your own is going to be the reason why you can't get to where you wanna be. At the beginning of the journey of entrepreneurship we are the ones who have the ideas. We might be even the subject matter experts in the product or the service we're offering.
We achieve our goals by hustling and doing the work and doing all the things in the business. But as I have shared in previous episodes, the mentality, the mindset of I have to figure it all out on my own. Is really what causes the problems, the bottlenecks, the burnout, the lack of growth, the slowing down, the dissatisfaction of our team.
Recognizing that we don't know it all, that we have blind spots that we need other people in order to be successful with our ideas takes humility. Takes courage. But it's necessary, especially when our dreams are big and bold and exist on a path that has never been charted. When there's uncertainty on how we're gonna get there.
Recently, I had an amazing conversation with a man who in the nineties built his company. It was a technology company that grew, like all technology companies, grew back then so fast. He made so much money in a very short period of time. But when the dotcom bubble burst, he lost a significant percentage of his revenue, he had to file for chapter 11. His business went bankrupt. He shared with me how painful it had been.
How tough it had been financially, mentally, emotionally. But he decided he wanted to rebuild the business because he believed in it. But this time he decided to hire a business coach, a life coach, a spiritual director, and keep working with his business mentor.
He told me he hired this team of people to help him be at his best, to help him see the blind spots that he couldn't see because he was so in the business. He was in his own psychology, so he couldn't see outside of himself in the same way that when we're driving, we have blind spots that when we're inside the car, there's parts of our surroundings that we cannot see.
It is true of our psychology, of our mindset, of all of us. We are in our heads living our own reality. Living from the programming that we've created throughout the years. And it's very hard, and I would say almost impossible to see the limitations or the challenges that that way of being, that identity we're holding has.
He told me I hired these people to help me see those blind spots because I knew that building a business wasn't only logical. Building a business is a psychological game. So the second time around, he grew his business and was very successful.
He ended up selling it for millions and millions of dollars. And his life after that changed, and, his wealth and his family's wealth was changed forever.
So I pressed a little and I said, tell me one of those blind spots. And he told me this anecdote of one of his coaches telling him, listen, you can't keep spending your own money, which was a way of telling him that he was enmeshed with his business.
That every time he was gonna take a risk with his business, invest in something new. He felt like it was his own money he was investing and therefore he couldn't make the best decisions for the business. So with that coach, he worked on separating himself from the business, seeing the business as a separate entity and making decisions for the business without thinking that those decisions were about his personal wellbeing.
And when I reflect back on that conversation, one of my favorite things he said was. Listen, experience is a great teacher, but it's damn expensive. And it's true. We can all learn by experience, by hitting our head on the wall by making mistakes. There is definitely some learning we're gonna do through experience, but if we can hire people who know about a topic, who can help us hear our blind spots and pay them some money, we're gonna save time. We're gonna save relationships, we're gonna save potential mistakes that could take a while to fix.
And I think athletes and artists know this. So even when we look at solo sports, although there's only one player, there's a team of people helping that person be at their best.
Tennis players have a coach. Have a mindset or a mental strengthening coach. Have a chef, have a trainer, have a doctor. They have people from different fields supporting them.
One of my favorite stories that continues to inspire me to this day and that I've talked about on the podcast before is the story of Diana Nyad, the woman who swam from Cuba to Florida without a cage to protect her from the sharks. She's the only person that has done this to this day, and if you watch her documentary or her movie in Netflix, one of the messages she shares is that although swimming is a solo sport, her achievement was never solo, that without her team, it would've been impossible.
So my first invitation is to question the idea that says I should be able to figure this out on my own and instead replace it with, I'm going to build the best team of people around me to help me be at my best so I can be the leader for this vision that I have and who will support me with their expertise so we can build this vision together.
What I know is that the leaders and the founders who invest in guidance in coaching, in therapy. In anything that helps them be at their best, accelerate their growth, avoid costly mistakes, preserve energy, find more fulfillment in what they're doing, have less issues with other people.
Because the other beautiful thing of looking inside ourselves of understanding our blind spots, of understanding our limitations that are self-imposed, is that when we're guiding others, we can see when they're doing that themselves, and then we can help them.
See those blind spots. Transform their points of view. Find more empowering perspectives, and have more compassion for a shared human experience.
So I want you to take a moment and ask yourself, in what areas of my life am I trying to figure it out alone?
What is the hidden cost of doing it by myself? And you can think in terms of time, energy, opportunity, money.
And the last one, which is my favorite, is what could become possible for you if you allowed yourself to be supported?
Because I strongly believe that we don't know everything, that we can't see our blind spots, and that going with other people makes us better. That's why I created the Visionary Mindset Program. It's a program to support founders, leaders who have a vision and who are working every day to achieve it.
Throughout the program, participants start seeing their blind spots.
I'll give you an example. Recently, one of my clients who's in the program and who's starting a business was telling me about how she was planning on funding it, what strategies she was going to follow in order to get the money to grow the business.
But as she was telling me this, I didn't feel her heart in it. So I asked her, tell me what is the business that you really, really wanna build? And when she connected to her deepest desire, she immediately realized that the way she was going about funding her business was not gonna allow her to create the business that she was dreaming of.
So she was able to course correct in that moment. Throughout the entire program, you're gonna explore different parts of your mindset, of your psychology.
With the group who's currently going through the program, we just finished the emotional mastery module, and on the last call I asked them what they had learned and the message was consistent amongst all of them.
They said the way they were relating to emotions completely changed, that no longer they were trying to hide their emotions or not express them or see them as weaknesses. But now they understood that their emotions were a compass that if they paid attention was a very powerful guidance that would take them to where they truly wanted to go.
And the last thing I wanna say today about the Visionary Mindset Program that I think it's incredible. Maybe one of my favorite parts, although I have many favorite parts, is what happens when we create a community of visionary peers. You are not only gonna get feedback or ideas from me, you're gonna have a team of other founders, entrepreneurs who come from different walks of life, who have different levels of experience, adding their perspective to your own journey, and many times a little nugget that you get from someone else can completely transform your business in the best way.
The doors to the Visionary Mindset Program are opening soon this week for anyone who's inside my community and next week to the public. So if you wanna be the first to know make sure you sign up for my newsletter at carozuleta.com so you can receive the information directly in your inbox.
So remember, you're not supposed to figure it all out alone. You don't have to go on this journey by yourself. You get to surround yourself with brilliant people who will support you in being the best version of yourself, who will help you be the leader that you really wanna be.
You deserve to have that team. I'll see you next week. 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!
