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 57 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. Before we get into today's topic, I want to ask that if you're enjoying this podcast, if you find it valuable to go ahead and follow us, give it a rating, share it with your friends. This is what's gonna allow us to continue creating this content and sharing it with all of you every week.
Today I come with a little bit of a different type of podcast. Usually when I record these episodes, I come up with ideas that are based on the different topics, challenges that I'm working with my clients on, or tools and strategies that I've been using for years and now I feel very confident that they work.
Today's episode is inspired by not something that I feel confident about, but something that I'm learning right now. Something very personal to me, but that I know many of you can relate.
So lemme tell you what's been happening for years, eight, nine years I've been having trouble sleeping and I've gone to so many doctors trying to figure out what's going on.
And for me, it's not that it's hard to fall asleep, but that I wake up three or four in the morning, full awake, energy up, ready to go, and even a little bit anxious, but not in a bad way, but kind of like, okay, let's go. Let's do it. So then it's really hard to go back to sleep and then I don't get enough sleep, so then I'm tired during that day.
For years, you know, I've heard the things that probably all of us have heard. Many doctors have instructed me to turn off my phone or any screen, one or two hours before bed to meditate, to read a book, to try to calm myself before I go to sleep. To be honest, that actually has made it really hard for me because for me, watching a really dumb show or something before I go to sleep or listening to a podcast, it helps me transition easier from the day to the night.
I've been working on, on this for a while some months ago I decided I was gonna delete all social media apps from my phone and I'm gonna confess something. I had tried that before and I would download them again. So this time what I did is I asked my husband to change all the passwords from the app store, and I don't know what other kinds of securities he put on my phone, but I have like a child phone. I cannot download my own apps, which is great because it has stopped the chatter in my mind of, oh, I need to see this in Instagram. Oh, I need to respond to this person on, Facebook. I just simply can't download it today. I'll have to check from my computer tomorrow.
So I've been trying different things. I'm also taking some drops that are natural and that help me stay asleep through the night. I may wake up at three or four, but then I can easily go back to sleep.
So the moment after I had put my kids to sleep, I had talked with my husband for a little bit, or maybe we had watched the show together. You know that moment when you're finally letting go of everything so you can fall asleep, what would happen to me is in that instant, I would feel incredible pressure on my chest and like I couldn't breathe well, and it was a horrible experience. I know it's anxiety now, but I was so confused, like, why is this happening? Why am I feeling anxiety when life feels so good? Because I recognize life has ups and downs. But I feel like right now we're in an up, you know, there's challenges here and there, but everyone's healthy, we're happy, you know, the business is growing.
I was so confused and frustrated. So I went back to my doctor and we talked for a while. She has known me for many, many years, and one of the things she explained to me is that my brain is always on. I'm always thinking, I'm always planning, organizing, solving problems in my head, planning the logistics of my family from the moment I wake up until that moment, my brain has been on.
And she even joked, your body is in bed but your brain is not, your brain is still on. And of course you have anxiety 'cause you haven't down regulated your nervous system. You're still operating from stress and activation. So my brain all day is thinking from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. And it's not just thinking in one thing, it's thinking about many things about my business, about my clients, about the emails I have to send, I love my clients so much that I spend time thinking about them. What are their challenges? How can I help them? What is the thing that we're not seeing? What is the blind spot? But also, I'm a mom and there's a lot of logistics in our home. Anything from, paying all the bills we have to pay to making sure the gardener came and this thing that they were fixing, the house got fixed, right.
Plus the school things, the, you know, the invention convention, the Halloween party, all the things that if you are a parent, you know, there's so many different things that come up all the time. So of course in that moment when I'm trying to go to sleep, my brain is still in a state of alertness.
My nervous system is fully activated because I haven't downregulated.
But I think this goes even deeper. And here's the truth, is that I love being activated. I love doing three things at the same time and being challenged and being creative and solving things and being in charge.
That's why I even volunteered to be my daughter's teacher's right hand to communicate with parents and the one who's coordinating the birthday gifts for the teachers and for Christmas and the end of year activities.
I have no business doing that but yet, there I am, or right now, you know, there's, my MBA reunion and of course I'm one of the volunteers coordinating their reunion, which again, it makes no sense when you see my schedule, but I know that the deeper truth is that I love being busy.
And I have a lot of dreams and ambitions and things I wanna achieve my life.
And the other truth, and I I'm sure many of you can relate to this, is that it's addicting.
It's addictive to be pursuing things, to checking things of our list, to achieving, to feeling even feeling important, that people need you to accomplish certain things.
So I'm not a victim to all the things I do. I know it's a big source of motivation for me. Throughout all these years when doctors tell me, you need to slow down, I would hear them, but I would just decide immediately that that's not something I'm going to do.
Because when I slow down, I feel very uncomfortable. And when I tell you that this has been going on for years, and it's almost a little bit embarrassing to say that I haven't figured it out, but I wanted to be very honest and vulnerable with all of you today because I think many of you can relate.
So when I had my second girl I even decided to stop all my marketing and sales so I can be a present mom. I know how important that is, but I kept coaching and I kept, you know, having clients and because my business has organically grown by word of mouth, it kept growing back then, but definitely the workload was a lot less.
And yet I remember sitting in the chair feeding my new baby that I adored. And not even being present with her there. My brain would just go to do the things that I love to do, and maybe it wasn't about sales or marketing, but it was about planning my other girl's birthday party or by thinking about the things I wanna fix around the house.
My brain loves to go into planning and fixing and doing things, and when people say, slow down, I just felt like my judgment. Here's another confession, is that they were just not very ambitious. You know, you're slowing down, it's because you don't understand ambition. But now of course, I think about it in a very different way and I've been sitting a lot with the idea slowing down.
In fact, three or four months ago, I wrote on a Post-it train, your ability to Do Nothing. And I see it there every day and I'm like, how am I gonna make this happen? So again, talking to my doctor, we went even deeper and I explained that for me, slowing down was really hard. That I didn't understand why I had to slow down and all the arguments, but one of the beautiful things she explained to me is that I don't have to slow down for as many hours as I'm moving forward, right? I can spend the I dunno, 16 hours a day. I'm awake doing most of the time things. But adding little pauses that can be two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, five minutes will go a long way for regulating my nervous system.
So the first reason why I am training my ability to do nothing, my developing the capacity to slow down. To be with the discomfort. I feel right now when I'm trying to downregulate is because of my health, because I don't wanna have that anxiety because I don't wanna be operating from high cortisol all day long.
I recognize that it's taking a toll on my body and my health is very important to me. I don't enjoy feeling anxiety. I don't enjoy feeling the tension in my body all day long. And I know that I'm overdoing it. I know that. The doing part of my brain and of my system is going way too far, and that's not being helpful. And also because I recognize that when I do slow down, I have brilliant ideas for my business. It's when I have the highest level of thinking.
So also as a strategy for what I wanna achieve, slowing down and taking breaks and doing nothing is very, very important. And the other reason why this is so present in my mind right now is because I know life is very short and we're gonna be here for some years and then it's gonna end.
And I'm very mindful that when we leave, we're not gonna be thinking, oh, I'm glad I checked my email one more time. Or, I'm glad I did another podcast episode, or created this thing for the business. Maybe a sense of I'm so happy about the impact I have. But I also know that we're gonna be missing this planet the people we're here with the miracle of nature, which every day I'm more absolutely in awe of nature.
Yesterday I was carving pumpkins with my two girls, and as I was getting the guts out of the pumpkin, I started asking myself, how does a pumpkin know to create the seeds versus the guts?
And even that small thing, but I stopped and I appreciate it because the natural world is a miracle and I know that when I spend more time in it, when I pay more attention to it, I'm more blown away by it.
So how this relates to what I'm talking about today is because slowing down and practicing the art of doing nothing is also a way of appreciating the present moment about appreciating what surround us about fully taking in this life experience. That it's not just about achievement.
I've probably talked about here one of my favorite poems that is called The Summer Day, written by Mary Oliver, and I encourage all of you to go look for it online. It's a beautiful poem, but the poem ends with a following. It says, "tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
I believe this was about achievement. I believe this was about, I am going to create this impact. I am going to grow this business. I am going to do these things. But the more I read this poem, the more I reflect on this poem, I realize that it's about being in the present moment, that it's about appreciating what is around us.
So I don't have perfect tools to share with all of you today, but I wanna share what I'm doing and I'm doing imperfectly, but I am doing it: number one, multiple times throughout the day when I remember, I close my eyes and I take two deep breaths and I tell my brain and my body that we are safe, that we're okay, that we don't have to do all the things right now, that there's an abundance of time.
And I really try to calm my nervous system and those little breaks, it's incredible. I maybe do, I don't know, two to four a day. But just doing that has started to minimize the anxiety I feel at night. The other thing I'm doing is having lunch without distractions.
That one is one of the hardest ones because usually for me, lunch time is when I'm trying to do follow ups and send emails, but I'm trying my best to sit down, even if it's 10 minutes, and eat and be present with my meal.
As I told you earlier, the other thing I did was delete all the apps that have the infinite scroll from my phone, so that way I didn't feel as addicted or wanting to be ne near my phone all the time. Because actually I didn't mention this earlier, but I think having smartphones is another reason why our brains are always on, because we have them next to us and that's scrolling and checking the email 1000 times to see if something new came up or chats or our dms.
When we have a smartphone, and we have, as my husband calls us the bright blue light of infinite information, it is hard to be away from it because there's always something new happening and we're scrolling and we see a post, and it gives us a little bit of dopamine, and maybe the next one we don't. So we scroll a little bit more until we find that other perfect post that gives us entertained.
And what I started feeling as well was that I would be with my kids looking for my phone, wanting to check my phone again instead of being present.
So deleting the apps, deleting the infinite scrolling from my phone has helped so much I thought I was gonna miss it. I thought it was gonna be so hard to not have it, but actually, because I don't have the passwords, because I don't have the ability to download them again, my brain stopped considering as an option, and it made it way easier. Even when I'm at dinner with my friends leaving my phone inside my purse or inside the car, so I'm not tempted to check it while we're having a conversation.
And yet all of this feels so hard. I wanna get to the point that I can go to sleep without having to watch something or listen to something. But right now it feels so hard i'm in the process of learning to Downregulate, I'm in the process of retraining my ability to do nothing. To sit down and look out the window and appreciate what we're seeing. To see my kids play without having to interact and tell them what to do or how to play the game, but just simply observing them, their laughter, their smiles, their creativity.
So I know that maybe deleting all the apps from your phone might not be very realistic to all of you. For a business owner that has to be checking social media or that uses that as a tool. But I do want to encourage all of you to ask yourself the question on how do you turn on your brain and how do you turn off your brain, and what are small things you can do throughout the day to downregulate, to slow down, to turn off your brain, because it will give you access to, better health, better ideas, more creativity, better productivity, better problem solving. There's so many benefits of those little breaks. And as my doctor explained to me, those moments don't need to be super long. They can be short.
The other tip she gave me is that. I can't schedule them right? I can't say it's at 10:00 AM it, it can't feel like another to do. It has to come from a place of awareness, of paying attention to what's happening inside of us, to noticing when we are feeling that anxiety, that pressure, and take a step back, take a couple of deep breaths, look out the window, and it can be 30 seconds, two minutes long. And that goes a long way.
I encourage you to drive without listening to anything so you can notice what's happening inside of you, or to go for a walk without headphones. Many times we're also distracting ourselves because we don't wanna notice the emotions that are inside of us. But that awareness, that paying attention if we're frustrated or scared or happy or proud, is gonna give us so much emotional intelligence.
So at the end of the day, we don't have everything bottled up inside, but we've actually throughout the day been letting go of little things here and there.
I am on this journey with you, and as I figure more things out, I'll be sharing with all of you. But what I do know is that the small steps that I'm taking, especially that one of taking small breaks throughout the day is helping me go to sleep much easier. I'm sleeping throughout the night, which is a blessing.
I'm feeling less anxiety, or at least not every day maybe. Some days I still feel it, but it's not consistent and I think the biggest insight that I realize is that ambition and presence are not opposite. They're actually complimentary. The more I learn to downregulate, the better I can be when I need to upregulate and be creative and solve problems. That it's not about learning how to stay always on, but to develop flexibility in our nervous system.
There is a book I read many, many years ago, and the title is Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And the explanation is because they're in the savanna, they're just eating their grass chilling, and then there's a lion. So their whole nervous system activates. They become alert, they run, they go into the survival mode, their heart races faster. They're running, they're running for their lives. But the moment the lion is gone, they go back to eating and chilling.
They don't say thinking, that that experience was traumatic or worrying about when the lion is gonna come back again. So this ability to go back to the present moments, one, they're not under attack. Once there is no threat, is what allows them to not have the levels of anxiety that many of us do have. Because as humans, our brain stays on even after we're out. Of the threat or when we are not in danger. So I think the message, I guess, is let's be a little bit more like zebras.
Let's turn our brains off. Go full in, play full out, solve, create, build the businesses that we wanna build, and find those little moments throughout the day to do nothing to be present. To down-regulate our nervous system, to be grateful, to be appreciative of this miracle we're in.
And let's allow our presence. To enhance our ability to execute on our ambition. All right, my friends, 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!
