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 back. This is episode 55 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast.
So today I wanna share in this episode something that I've been experiencing in my life. Something I already knew about, but kind of forgotten because I feel like in coaching and in personal work, there's this thing that happens to me, and I think it happens to most of my clients, is that we learn a lesson and then some months later, or some years later. We have a similar experience. And what happens is that we deepen our understanding of that lesson. And this is one of them.
So in the last few months I started noticing that every time I had one of those very special moments with my kids, you know, those moments where we hug a little extra longer or when you see them sleeping on your lap and they look so adorable or when you're celebrating an accomplishment, or just those moments of connection that are so special in which I feel so much love for them.
I would also experience a little bit of heartbreak thoughts like, oh my gosh, they're growing so fast. My 3-year-old is soon not gonna be a toddler anymore, and I won't have babies and toddlers at home anymore. Or I would see my older one that, you know, she's becoming such a big girl with her own thoughts and opinions and all of that I love, but I would experience heartbreak. I even started telling people, you know what, being a mom is constantly feeling joy and constantly feeling heartbreak when you see them grow.
And then I was in one of my own coaching sessions and my coach I said, you know, you don't have to feel that heartbreak. You're feeling that heartbreak because you're focusing on the loss of your kids growing. And you might want to pay attention to that because you don't wanna be giving up on the joy of these days. And the reason why I'm telling you this is because I see it happen with my clients as well, not only in terms of our personal lives and our relationships with our kids. But also in business.
I have a client who had been raising some money for his business and he raised his first million dollars and for a moment he was elated. But then another feeling showed up, worry that that money was gonna go away, worry that he wasn't gonna be able to deliver on the results of that, Or even the feeling that he was still behind, that still that million dollars wasn't enough.
And also another client of mine who for so many months had been working so hard. To get a specific deal and she got it. And again, the elation, the excitement of reaching that goal followed by the, "oh my God, what if I can't deliver?" "Oh my God, what if this is the last one?" "Oh my God, what if this doesn't go the way I hope for it to go?"
So my question is why, as human beings, when we're experiencing the moments of our greatest joy, accomplishment, love, and connection, we have this dreadful feeling that some of us can call it the expectation of when is the other shoe gonna drop. Can you relate?
So as I usually do when I'm trying to understand an emotion, I turn to the research of Brené Brown, specifically her book Atlas of the Heart. And in the book, what she says is that joy is the most vulnerable emotion any of us can experience, it can be surprising because we don't tend to think happy emotions, specifically joy to be vulnerable. But what she says is that when we're experiencing joy, our nervous system also starts experiencing the feeling that we can lose a lot.
So she talks about another experience or another emotion that she calls foreboding joy. And forboding joy is that experience that when you are elated, when you are feeling happy or proud or lucky, you have that sense that something bad will happen to balance it out as if the amount of joy we could experience was limited.
So what Brené says is that when we have a limited tolerance for vulnerability, we will make it smaller by thinking about what could potentially go wrong.
So again, you can think about those moments when you got a promotion or you got the deal and you think to yourself, what if I'm not good enough? What if I'm not as good as they think I am? Or when we receive the money from an investor and we feel the pressure to not disappoint them, or when we hit our financial goal one year and we start thinking, Ooh, can I make that the next year?
What we need to understand is that it happens to all of us, and it's our mind's way of trying to avoid pain because joy requires vulnerability. The higher we rise, the more there is to lose.
But there's really good news around this also what Brené Brown found in her research is that the people who allow themselves to experience the most joy also practice gratitude.
That in those moments we're hugging our kid, or when we signed the deal, we received the million dollars and we experienced that quiver, that moment of vulnerability of fear. The people who experience the most joy turn into gratitude, and they allow that moment of vulnerability to pass through them while they're focusing on how grateful they are for the life experience they're having.
So basically what she says is that joy doesn't make us grateful. Gratitude makes us joyful.
When I was studying coaching and neuroscience, we learned that gratitude activates the prefrontal cortex. It releases dopamine and serotonin, and it helps the brain focus on what's working instead of what could go wrong. When I've been reading about different spiritual practices, Buddhism and others, they all have gratitude as a component of their practices.
And when I studied positive psychology, gratitude was one of their core principles. They talked about how when you journal about what you're grateful for, it improves your sleep, your optimism, your resilience, which are all key for high performers and also some research from Northeastern University says, gratitude increases patience and long-term thinking.
Which is also fundamental for any of us who are building a business and we're playing the long-term game.
Gratitude is one of the most powerful tools we have, and even as I'm recording this podcast, I'm thinking about how much more I really have to focus on that. Since I had that conversation with my coach and I did this research about foreboding joy, I've been very mindful that in those moments where I experienced the fear or the worry, I just focus on gratitude and it's working big time, it's really allowing me to be in those moments and experience more joy and feel happier.
So gratitude doesn't just make us happier. It expands our capacity to hold more joy, more success, more money, more visibility without collapsing into fear or stress or shame. In other episodes I've talked about building capacity, building our capacity to hold a bigger business, to have more clients to.
Work through more challenging problems. But today I want us to focus on developing the capacity for more, for more joy, more success, more opportunities, more attention.
So capacity is our ability to stay open and regulated in the presence of more of the things we want. When our nervous systems associate success with danger, we will unconsciously avoid it in one way or another. We will sabotage that success because our nervous system can't handle it. Gratitude helps our bodies to learn that it is safe to have more.
Some weeks ago I was talking with a friend about this topic because a lot of things are going right in her life.
She recently found a lovely partner and she was telling me how all of a sudden she's so scared of losing him. Yeah, so I was sharing what I've been learning about foreboding joy, and we were both joking about how Taylor Swift, if she has the ability to have the highest grossing tour, get engaged with a man that looks like loves her a lot, launch a new album, all these amazing things, if she was able to hold that amount of success that we still had a long way to experience joy and success before the other shoe drops.
It made us laugh, but it also felt a little bit true. Even though it was a joke, it kind of gave me permission to allow myself to have more success, more joy, more money, more love, more of all the things that I want. In a way it kind of worked for me.
So the next thing I want us to talk about is some recommendations that I wanna make so you can increase your capacity for more success, more joy, more money, more of all the beautiful things we want in life. So the first one is about learning how to regulate your nervous system. What I've been doing with my clients, after they have a big win and their, and they're experiencing this vulnerability, I ask them that instead of rushing into the next task or worrying about losing it, they take a deep breath, they move their bodies.
They went for a walk and they told themselves that it was safe. To be where they're at, that it was safe to receive that money, that it was safe to accept that deal, that it was safe to be achieving the goals they had worked so hard for.
There is something about exercise and positive thinking that really relax our body. So going for walk while you're replaying the joyful moments, while you're replaying the journey that has brought you to this moment of success can help your brain integrate that moment as a good moment, as a safe moment, as something that you have the ability to receive.
The second exercise I've been doing with my clients is upgrading their self-concept. It's asking themselves what is the new identity that is coming forth, asking themselves who they need to become to feel safe withholding that new level of success. So when we talk about this, we've explored what is it that they're afraid might happen if they keep this level of success?
What beliefs do they need to release from the past so they can hold more? And you know what's been beautiful is to witness my clients reflecting on their journeys. This client I was telling you about, who she finally got this deal she had been working for a very long time.
One of the things we came up with was that it was inevitable that she had been training and practicing and learning and taking risks and doing all the hard work so she could land this deal. So it wasn't that this deal was so out there.
When she thought about success as the next logical step for her as the thing that obviously was gonna happen she upgraded her self concept to understand that those deals, that size of a deal was just what she's been preparing for, what she's ready to now receive and deliver, and what's kind of continue happening in her life. That this deal wasn't a once in a lifetime, but more like the new level she's achieved .
and the last two practices I wanna share today, we've already talked about them, but I wanna name them one more time. One is the practice of building more emotional range. And what I mean is telling your body that you have the capacity to feel all that. I tell this to my clients when they're experiencing uncertainty or rejection or failure, right, that their bodies wanna shut down. They don't wanna feel those uncomfortable emotions. They wanna get distracted and numb. And what I tell them is to imagine their chest opening and them telling themselves that they were built to experience these emotions, these uncomfortable emotions, that those emotions are not gonna kill them. But we have to do the same for the positive emotions.
We also need to imagine our chests opening and allowing all the joy and happiness to be within us and to remind ourselves that we've also been designed and built to experience that level of happiness, that it is safe to do it.
And the last one is gratitude. So I think there's two ways of practicing gratitude. One is a very deliberate practice where you can sit every day with your journal and write five to 10 things you feel grateful for. The key is not to write a lot of things. The key is to feel gratitude as you're writing them. So I'd rather you write only one thing, but when you're writing it, you're really connect to the gratitude you experience. You really connect to the gratitude you feel for that thing than writing 10 or 20 with just writing them down really fast just to get the list done.
And the second way is those moments we're achieving what we wanted. We're really happy and then we feel that shudder of vulnerability instead of thinking, oh, that means something bad is going to happen use those moments to think about gratitude. I've been doing that for the last few weeks, maybe months now, in which every time I hug my kid and I experience that, oh my God, they're gonna grow so fast. I go, and I'm so grateful for them the way they are right now. I'm so grateful that I have these two beautiful, healthy, loving girls, and that I'm here to experience that moment. And my clients are doing the same.
In our coaching sessions, we're starting with gratitude. We're really connecting to how grateful we are that we get to build the businesses that we want, that we get to achieve the goals that we set and that we work so hard for.
Because being a visionary is not just about dreaming big. It's about learning to hold the emotional range that comes with success. The more capacity you build, the more success feels natural, not overwhelming.
So I want you to take a moment and ask yourself, when was the last time you felt joy and immediately braced for something to go wrong? What are you afraid might happen if you fully enjoy the success you're having?
And what is one gratitude practice you can start using today to expand your capacity for joy and success?
So as we're closing this episode, I want us all to remember that joy. Makes us feel alive, and that gratitude is how we stay there. So when life gets good, let's not rehearse tragedy. Let's instead receive the joy, breathe it in, and tell ourselves, thank you. That's how we will expand our capacity to be the visionaries we deeply desire to be. 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 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!
