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 to episode 56 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast.
When I first discovered coaching and started doing small workshops here and there, teaching people what I had learned, I had the opportunity to be interviewed for a TV show in a local channel, and one of the things I talked about was how emotions were our compass, our GPS guiding us towards our highest truth, our our biggest desires and towards our pleasure. And I remember hearing a lot of criticism about it. Hearing people say, what is she talking about that is so cheesy.
Throughout the years, many times when I've been invited to do a workshop or to speak at some type of business event, and I start talking about emotions. People stare at me like I'm crazy or like I'm talking about something so out there. Even once I had a woman come to me and say, you're brave talking about emotions at work.
And I understand because most of us, what we have heard about emotions is to leave them at home, to not bring them to work. Well, and maybe, you know, feeling a little bit stressed or frustrated or even some happiness. They're acceptable at work, but everything else makes us too emotional.
But yet we are emotional beings. We can't deny that. That universal language for human beings are our emotions. It's the way that we can relate to each other, past our differences, past the languages we speak, or the religions or the cultures we come from. And also research shows the opposite.
Instead of emotions being a deterrent or something we need to eliminate to be great leaders, what the research shows again and again, is that leaders, the best leaders are in touch with their emotions and know how to navigate them.
And that's why I wanted to do this podcast. Even though I've talked about emotions in other episodes, in this one, I wanna talk about how paying attention to our emotions. Learning how to navigate them is a way of self-care and a fundamental skill to be the best leaders we can be.
So throughout the years, what I've noticed is that people deal with their emotions by doing one of two things. The first one is by suppressing them or numbing them. We do this when we experience an emotion and immediately get our phones out and start scrolling through social media. You know, when we're sitting at a restaurant by ourselves and we're feeling uncomfortable, so we get our phones out to numb that discomfort. Or maybe it's when we come home after a long, tough day and instead of sitting and noticing what we're experiencing, we pour ourselves a glass of wine.
Or turn on the TV and get a bag of chips and just numb. We aim to escape the emotions we're experiencing.
On the other side of the spectrum, what I've noticed is people allow their emotions to run the game. This is what I called getting hijacked by emotions. It's maybe when we explode in the middle of a meeting and we say things we later regret, or it's when we can't do anything else because we are constantly repeating that story that made us upset. And we start searching for reasons why we can get more and more and more upset, more angry at the person that hurt us.
But you see numbing emotions or allowing them to hijack us, don't help us. If we're numbing, the emotions are still there. And even when we get hijacked by them, the emotions are still there.
What I know is that neither of these two ways work. When we numb, those emotions get stuck and are not gonna allow us to perform at our best. And of course, when we're hijacked, we're not making the best decisions. We're not being the best leaders.
So what I wanna do today is offer you a four part framework so you can start learning to take care of yourself by taking care of your emotions.
But let's go back for a moment to suppressing emotions because what I have seen is that in the corporate world, in business, that's what seems acceptable.
People who, from the outside, seem very composed, but are actually enraged inside or frustrated or terrified. That's what we think is acceptable., But what we know from research, from neuroscience research is that when we numb our emotions, when we suppress them, we actually are degrading our cognitive function.
Research from Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence tell us that when we suppress emotions, we reduce our ability to recall memories and we reduce our capacity for making good decisions.
For many of us in the corporate world, we believe that remaining calm under pressure is something to be proud of. And it is, but I want us to look at the two ways that we can do that. One is by regulating our emotions. That means that we become aware of what we're feeling and we know how to channel those emotions in a productive way.
The other way is that we suppress our emotions. We fight our biology so we can look like we're calm, even though we're not. What research from universities like Yale and Stanford have shown is that when we suppress our emotions, our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that it has the ability to reason and plan and make decisions actually goes offline.
When we're suppressing our emotions, we're consuming our cognitive resources and therefore we have less ability to recall memories. We make more mistakes. Our decision making is not as good.
When we're suppressing our emotions, we're not managing them, we're not processing them, and even though from the outside we may look cool or calm inside, our whole system is still activated and it's signaling danger, danger, danger instead of using the energy to make the best decisions, a lot of that energy is going inside to try to see what's the thing that's going so wrong? Where is it that we're in so much danger?
You can think about suppressing emotions as driving a car at 80 miles per hour with a parking brake still on. You may be moving forward, but you're burning out in the process. So the first thing I want us to all understand from this episode is that suppressing emotions doesn't make us stronger or better leaders. It actually hurts our strategic thinking, creativity, empathy, intuition. So what we need to learn is how to regulate the emotions, and I'll come back to that in a moment.
I wanna paint you the other picture. The picture of leaders and people who have become really good at regulating their nervous system and managing their emotions. When we can identify what we're feeling, we can name it, we can interpret it, we can channel it in a productive way. What we know from research is that we become better at risk assessment.
For example, there's research from Wharton that says leaders who are aware of their emotions are more effective negotiators and they're less likely to make impulsive decisions during high stress periods. A study from Korn Ferry showed that 74% of investors believe emotional intelligence in A CEO improves company valuation.
And if you think about it, it's because when you know how to navigate your emotions, you can communicate more clearly under pressure. You can navigate conflict faster, and you know how to. Attract and manage the top talent so your business can grow at its best.
I don't wanna keep giving you more research, but there's a lot more. That justifies or that explains why emotional intelligence is a fundamental skill for any leader. So if this is maybe your first approach to emotions or maybe you have been talking about emotions for a while, I really want you to know.
That this is the right path. That in order to be the visionary, the business founder you wanna be learning about your emotions is fundamental. Every metric founders care about valuation, performance, growth, innovation, retention depends on skills that are related to emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is at the core of everything I do. My coaching programs, the one-on-one meetings I have with my clients. My goal is that by the end of the time people work with me. They can name their emotions, understand their importance, understand what the emotions are telling them, and how they can use these emotions to be better at everything they're doing.
But yet I often find people very resistant to emotions. So I wanna share some of the reasons people give me as to why they don't wanna work on learning about emotional intelligence. One of them is, listen, I don't have time for emotions. I don't have time for feelings.
I understand that many times in business, everything feels urgent, but the mistake, belief is that if we avoid the emotions, we can go faster. But the truth is that when we don't address those emotions, like I've mentioned before, and all the research shows, we actually end up making mistakes that take longer to resolve.
And also taking care of our emotions doesn't mean that it has to be days and hours and suffering. A lot of the times, just acknowledging what we're feeling and putting a name to that emotion is enough for us to reconnect our prefrontal cortex and recover our ability to lead from intention and vision and not reactivity.
A second mistake. Belief is that venting is the same thing as responsible expression. But those are two very different things. I've noticed that in the last few years there's been a trend about being authentic at work, but people have confused authenticity with telling everyone everything they have on their minds. But that's not authenticity.
My favorite tool that I teach my clients and that I use in all of my workshops, it's called the Self-Coaching Model, and the key insight of this model is that all of our emotions are created by our thoughts.
And when we fully understand this and we believe in it, or we adopt this belief, what happens is that we no longer are venting and sharing a frustration and making people responsible for how we feel, but we develop the ability to understand that what we're feeling is our own creation.
That even other people may say things that we don't approve or we find offensive. We are the ones who have the power to feel offended or not to feel heard, or not to feel frustrated or not.
When we understand this. Expressing our emotions is not about throwing them at somebody else and making them responsible or venting or just saying things like, you're driving me crazy or You're making me so upset. We now understand that expressing our emotions is revealing to others what's happening inside of us without making other people responsible for how we feel.
So becoming emotionally intelligent, taking responsibility for our emotions and expressing them. It doesn't mean screaming and yelling and blaming others and you know, venting with other people about our inner experience. It's the other way around.
And the last common mistake I wanna share with all of you is when we confuse numbness with resilience. You can imagine numbness in this way. Think about going to a doctor to get an electrocardiogram, and what do you see on the screen is a flat line. That is numbness. I'm not feeling anything.
I'm swallowing my emotions. I'm numbing them with social media or drinks or smoking or whatever, versus resilience. Resilience is when we go to the doctor, we get an electrocardiogram, but we see the heartbeat go up and down, up and down. When we are numbing, we are disconnecting from yes, frustration or fear, but we're also disconnecting from excitement and joy and creativity. And when we do this in the long term, we start running our businesses to function, but not to inspire, not to innovate.
Resilience, on the other hand, is allowing ourselves to experience rejection failure, uncertainty. Noticing these emotions in our body, naming them, staying with them as they naturally are processed and we can get to the other side where we experience love and connection and joy and excitement.
One of my teachers, wrote something very beautifully in her book, the Soft Addiction Solution, and I wanna read it to you because I think it is so powerful and something we can all really benefit from. And it goes like this.
"We have mistakenly believed that pain is the opposite of love. We haven't realized that pain and other emotions actually lead to love and can be seen as aspects of love. In addition, peace is not the absence of pain, but the result of the acceptance and expression of pain. Peace awaits expression, it only arrives when we express what is in our hearts."
Recently I met a business founder who has had a lot of success and who is currently going through a lot of challenges, and what she said to me is, the only thing I want is inner peace. But when she first told me this, what she meant by inner peace is I just want all my problems to go away. And yet what we did was allow her to connect with the pain she was feeling inside to be with it, to cry, to go out for a walk and let it run through her body.
So on the other side, even though the challenges and the problems were still there, she could experience inner peace. Maybe you've experienced this after a big cry. You know, one of those big ugly cries that you cry and cry and cry and there's a moment where you stop and you're like, there are no more tears. And you feel some inner calmness.
That's what happens when we fully process an emotion and we get to the other side of it. Now I'm giving you examples of things that might take a little bit more time. But you can learn to do this throughout the day by staying connected to yourself, to your emotions, to your experiences, naming them, feeling them, and quickly moving through them.
Okay? So for now, I hope you are in the place of saying, okay, Catalina, I believe you. That emotions and paying attention to your emotions are important. What do I do with all these feelings that show up? And here's where I want to share my four skills framework for emotional mastery. The first one is acceptance.
It's noticing when emotions arise. Frustration, fear, shame, uncertainty, and noticing your instinct to wanna push them away, but instead being able to name them and allow them in your body without justifying them, fixing them, judging them.
For a while, I had a hard time with acceptance because I thought acceptance was agreement, but acceptance is acknowledgement. Acceptance is when you tell yourself, you know what? I'm so scared right now, and that's okay. Or when you tell yourself, Ooh, this uncertainty is so uncomfortable, but I get to feel it. Acceptance is simply acknowledging the truth of your human experience.
The second skill is your ability to identify emotions, to put a name to them.
Lisa Feldman, who's a neuroscientist and researcher, has shown that when we accurately label our emotions, we calm down our amygdala, which you can think about it as the alarm system in our brain, and we reconnect to our prefrontal cortex where we do our highest level of thinking.
So one of the things I love to do when I'm coaching my clients is to read from Atlas of the Heart, the book written by Brene Brown. That's a dictionary of emotions. So together we can label, we can give a name to their emotional experience. And what happens over and over again is the moment we find the right emotion, the right description for what they are experiencing.
I see a relief. I see a release of tension in my clients, because as the research explains the moment we can name our experience, then we can navigate it better, then we can manage it. Expanding your vocabulary, your emotional vocabulary is gonna be fundamental to increase your emotional intelligence. I can't stress enough how much I think Atlas of the Heart is a key leadership book to have in your desk so you can understand what's happening inside of you, or also you can understand what's happening inside your employees that people you work with.
The third skill is how to express, how to communicate our emotions without blaming other people, without projecting what we're feeling on others, without being reactive.
So we do this by expressing our emotions with responsibility. It can look something like this. Hey guys, i'm so frustrated by our progress. I thought we were gonna be further along than where we are can we all come together, figure out what's blocking us so we can speed up the process? That is very different than saying, I'm so frustrated with all of you. You are not making progress. We're stuck. Right? That creates chaos. But when you name the emotion frustration, you understand that frustration comes because you are not meeting the expectations you had, and then you propose a solution, then people can come together and even though you express your emotion it's not creating more chaos, it's driving towards a solution. It's driving towards where you want the team to go.
When we express our emotions responsibly, what we are doing is transforming that emotion into information that other people can work with. Instead, when we're venting or dumping our emotions, what we're creating is more anxiety, more fear, and it starts eroding the trust the team has in us.
And the last skill I wanna share with all of you today is learning how to complete our emotion. According to the research from Dr. Jill Bolt, Taylor, emotions are physical experiences that last about 90 seconds when we don't fuel them with more thoughts that make them bigger and bigger. Right? Like what I explained earlier on, that it's when an emotion hijacks us.
So developing the ability to stay still. To notice the physical sensations of that emotion in our body to maybe take some breaths when you need to or go for a walk or take a break in the middle of a meeting so everyone can cool down then also recognizing when the emotion has passed, when you have, again, access to your prefrontal cortex, to your highest level of thinking and then coming back. That skill of allowing an emotion to complete is emotional mastery.
And when we develop these four skills and we get better and better at them, emotions become instruments, information that are guiding us towards where we wanna go instead of problems, interruptions, things we need to get rid of.
And the last thing I wanna say, most people think that self care is about exercise, eating well, getting a massage. And yes, those are ways that we care for ourselves. But the deepest way of caring for ourselves is paying attention to our emotions and following the four skills I shared with you today.
Emotional mastery is going to allow you to take your business to the level that you wanna take it and bring the top talent with you while at the same time you get to enjoy your life and experience through fulfillment.
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!
