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 everyone. Welcome back this is the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast, episode 61. And today I want us to talk about the difference that there is in the mindset of entrepreneurs who are very anxious and who are suffering a lot in the day to day, and those entrepreneurs who feel powerful, grounded, and who feel unstoppable.
And it's this, most entrepreneurs spend more time focusing on what they cannot control than on what they actually can control. And because of this, they take less action that moves their business forward.
And when I tell you that this is the difference between feeling overwhelmed and feeling in charge, I mean it. So let's get into it.
For any of us who are building businesses, we know that having energy, our own energy is fundamental. It's required in order to grow our businesses, to create, to expand, to lead other people. And yet one of our biggest energy leaks is when we obsess about those things that are completely out of our control.
When we spend a lot of our mental power thinking about what's happening in the market or whether the algorithm is favoring me or not today.
Or will this client sign or will they ghost me? Are my employees happy or motivated? What are competitors doing? They're going faster. They're come up with a great idea. When we think about the economy or whether our next launch will work or will not work.
When we focus on all these items that we cannot control, we drain our energy, but yet to our brain, it feels that if we are worrying about those external factors, we're being responsible. We may even think that it's strategic, that we're looking at the competitors and the markets and you know, if the clients are happy, employees are happy or not, that that's strategic, but worry is not strategy. Worry is just your brain trying to create certainty in a place where certainty doesn't exist.
It happens almost every week that I'm talking with entrepreneurs. It happens to me too. When we're facing uncertainty, let's say we're going to do a new launch. We're gonna share a new product, make a new offer. We have no control on how people are going to accept it. So we start worrying are they gonna take it?
What if nobody buys? What if we can't meet our goals? That worry, it almost feels like it gives us certainty, but what I keep telling my clients is, if you wanna be successful entrepreneurs, you have to continue expanding your ability to be with uncertainty.
Because here's the cost of worrying. The more time you spend thinking about those things you can't control, the more anxious you become. Instead of making decisions, you start waiting to see what's gonna happen. The self-doubt that we all have, that it's normal, starts growing.
And what I see often is that we stay spinning, thinking about those same things over and over again. And while you are spinning, you are doing a lot less of the things that you can actually control.
In some of the ways I see my clients spinning in this in decision is when they're considering too many opportunities. Oh, I could sell to this market, but my product also solves a problem to this other market. Or maybe I can sell this as a course, or instead of a course, I'm gonna do a retreat.
When we give ourselves. A lot of options and we love all of our options. It's hard to decide because if we look underneath what's really happening, what we're trying to figure out is what is the right answer?
What is the choice I'm going to make that it's gonna be successful? But again, the success of what I do, it's not a hundred percent in our hands because there is a lot of factors that are gonna affect it. So when we're trying to figure out the right answer for our business, the like, kind of like if we're taking a test, what is the right answer? Then decision making becomes very, very complicated.
When we're entrepreneurs, if we have a very realistic view of the things that are happening in our business, a lot of them we cannot control. We cannot control what's happened with the governments or the decisions that Instagram or LinkedIn are making. We cannot even control the happiness of our employees. Of course, we wanna influence and we wanna give our best to help them feel appreciated and valued, but at the end of the day, how any person in the world feels depends on their perspective, on how they're seeing the world and a lot of other circumstances like their childhood and stories that we do not have control over.
Although that is a reality, that there's so much that we can't control, my goal with this episode is to show you why focusing on those things doesn't work.
So to shift into having real power, what we need to do is focus on the things that we can control, on those things that are always available to us, no matter the circumstances, no matter what's happening around us and there's only three of them.
Your thoughts, your emotions, and your actions. That's it. And yet, if we spend the majority of our time thinking about those three categories, we will blow our own minds on how powerful we really are. So when we talk about thoughts, we're talking about the story we tell ourselves about what's happening, our perspective.
It's also the meaning we give to certain situations is whether we choose to focus. On the possibilities, on the options, on the ideas or on the fear, the risk, what we may lose. The way I love to think about thoughts are all those sentences in our brain, and we get to decide what stories we tell ourselves.
When we think about our emotions. What I'm referring to is our ability to generate inner confidence, to choose to calm, to regulate our nervous system, to decide to be courageous or determined or to lead with curiosity is that incredible power we have to shift our emotions based on what we're giving our attention to.
And when I talk about actions, I'm talking about your own standards, your discipline, your consistency, the decisions you make, your follow through, how you communicate with your employees, if you judge them or not judge them, if you're present with them. It's in the way we sell to others, how we show up, what we decide to write in our marketing materials.
All of those are our actions and they're 100% in our control.
A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a podcast episode with the two founders of my favorite brand of swimsuits. It's called Agua Bendita, and these are two women who grew up in the same city that I did in Medellín, Colombia, and they've grown this swimsuit brand from their house, from making swimsuits in one of their bedrooms to this global brand, and they were sharing that one of the questions they get asked the most is, what have been the biggest challenges you've had? What have been the biggest problems you've faced? And I love their answer because they both laughed and they said, honestly. "Every day there is a problem."
They talked about that. Many times when the prints on the fabrics weren't aligning or when they got to this very important trade show and all of the bags with the material they brought for the trade show didn't arrive, and on and on, they just shared about so many of the challenges that happen. And they said the truth is that every day is a new adventure. There's a new problem. An employee that quit something that is not working right.
And what they said about this that I really love is, we don't even think about them as problems anymore. This is our job. We are solving problems every single day.
And listening to them reminded me of a story my dad told us when I was growing up () I think I've already shared in another episode, but I think it's relevant here) growing up, we had a tradition that every night we would sit my two brothers, my parents and I, and have dinner together.
We would spend a long time at the dining table just talking about the day, what everyone was doing and learning and you know, our anecdotes. But I remember my dad would often come and tell us about this problem he had at work and this other challenge that happened here and how he resolved it and the chaos that's happened and you know, all these problems.
And one night I looked at him and I asked, but why do you have so many problems? That sounds awful. And he just smiled and said, "Well. Because if there aren't any problems, I wouldn't be working here. The reason why they hired me is to solve problems. That's what leaders do."
And I've never forgotten that. I understood that being an entrepreneur, a business founder, a leader in the world, we don't sign up for this because we want a life without problems. We sign up for this because we wanna become every day better at solving those problems.
Tony Robbins says, you know, all human beings have problems. That's part of being a human, a person in this world. The difference is what quality of problems do you have? Do you have high quality problems or do you have low quality problems?
And when I heard him say this many years ago, I started asking myself, what is a high quality problem or what is a low quality problem? And here's how I wanna explain it to all of you...
a low quality problem is a problem that we cannot solve. It's a problem that we are a victim to. It's a problem that is completely out of our control. The market is slow. These things are happening in politics. My clients aren't buying, oh, the algorithm is terrible, or they change this or that in social media now my posts are not being seen. My team isn't motivated. Everything is going wrong.
When we think about problems in that way, we feel victim to those challenges. We feel disempowered.
As I said at the beginning, when we are having low quality problems, problems that we don't have control of and that we feel like a victim to, they drain our energy and most of the time they take so much of our motivation that we don't even try to reframe them or think about them in a different way so we can start resolving it, and yet this is something we all do.
What I want to encourage all of you listening to this episode when you're having a problem, to start classifying it. Is it a low quality problem? Or a high quality problem. And if it's a low quality problem, how can I change it? How can I reframe it? How can I think about it in a different way to turn it into a high quality problem?
High quality problems are those problems that we can solve. Those problems that when we tell the story, we can be the hero of the story instead of being the victim. Instead of focusing on my team is not motivated because young people don't wanna work anymore, and it's hard to find good employees if you ask the question differently. If you say, how can I lead my team more effectively? How can I do better interviews so I can get higher quality people? How can I understand what my dream employees want at work so I can provide those circumstances for them and they wanna come and join me?
When we're focusing on a low quality problem, for example, I hear a lot of people right now who are very scared of artificial intelligence, who are worried about what the future is gonna look like, and I understand there is so much uncertainty and there are stories of people that are experts that are scary to listen to.
So I'm not denying that it can be scary. The point I'm trying to make is how is it helpful to think about how scary is it going to be? Instead of asking yourself the question, how do I prepare myself for the future that is gonna involve artificial intelligence.
What do I need to learn? How do I incorporate in my business? How do I become better at it?
When we change the way we look at problems, we go from feeling like a victim to feeling like the hero of our own story. When we reclaim our own power. Now it begs to ask ourselves if that is the case why is it so hard to do it sometimes?
Why do we wanna be in victim hood? Although we understand it's not good for us. And I think it's because when we take responsibility, there is risk. Sometimes it's easier to say, well, my business didn't work because the market changed, and you know, things just weren't set up for this type of business to succeed at this time, versus saying, well, it didn't succeed because I made some wrong choices. And again, with this, I'm not saying that circumstances don't affect our businesses. They do.
And I get it because it does feel easier when things don't work and we tell ourselves a story that it wasn't our responsibility, right? There's like a relief in that, but we need to understand that that relief comes with a very high price. That is losing our ability to make decisions, our own personal power, our capacity to change the circumstances.
So I wanna be crystal clear. I'm not talking here, that we need to be naive and don't understand that there are all these things that are outside of our control, that affect our businesses, that affect our leadership. They do exist. Of course they exist. My point is that when we spend time focusing on them, we actually don't take the necessary action to change what's in our control.
If I spend my time thinking, ah, will people like this product? Will the launch work? What if it doesn't work? What if nobody buys? Instead of asking myself, how can I make this product better. How can I communicate the value of this product better?
We spend more time waiting and thinking instead of taking the risk of making a decision. Seeing if it worked or didn't work, adjusting and doing it again, which in reality is the game of entrepreneurship.
What if I hire the wrong person? Well, you need to hire someone, learn if they're the right person or not understand why, and if it didn't work, let them go and find a new one. But if you stay months trying to figure out who the ideal person is going to be for this role, you are losing time.
Here's the deeper truth. Focusing on what you can control is really about making decisions and making decisions is vulnerable. Decisions require risk, uncertainty, exposure, courage.
When you make a decision, you're saying, okay, I'm choosing this path and I'm taking responsibility for what happens next. It means you are also taking responsibility for the failures, for the moments that things don't work out the way you intended.
And that is hard. Because when we make the decision and things don't go our way, we cannot hide behind the excuses. The market, the algorithm, the other person, the timing, it is all on us, and that level of ownership is very uncomfortable.
It is so vulnerable and I, I took a minute to stop and really think about some of the decisions I made and thinking about when they don't work, how vulnerable it feels, how much responsibility I take on, and how unpleasant that moment is. And I understand, that's why a lot of us sometimes avoid decisions, but I think that staying stuck in the drama of why things are not working, feels safer than actually exposing ourselves to real failure.
But we also know that in order to fulfill our vision. To grow. To pursue our biggest ambitions. We have to become good decision makers. We need to learn how to be with the uncertainty of our decisions, with the emotional exposure of potential failure or embarrassment or criticism. But the solution is not to hide behind problems that we cannot control.
The solution is not to avoid making decisions. The solution is to expand our emotional capacity so we can take more risk, more uncertainty, and make better decisions.
Now, the other thing that is so important about making a decision is that once we make it. We need to sell it to ourselves first. We need to fully buy into the decision we are making. We need to sell to ourselves the reasons why we're making it, why it's a great decision, why we're so proud of it, why we're excited for it.
Because if we make a decision but we're not convinced about that decision, then we're also gonna hold back. I always tell my clients, listen, if you're gonna go sell a product to the world, the first buyer is you and you need to be a hundred percent committed to buying it. If you have doubts inside yourself, your potential clients are going to feel them. And we do this by paying attention again to our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions.
One of my favorite sayings, common phrases in entrepreneurship is that entrepreneurship is not about waiting for the perfect decision. It's about making a decision and then making it right through our actions, through our leadership, through our ownership.
Here's the whole message. You'll always have problems. You'll always have uncertainty. You will always have challenges. That is not the question. The question is not if there are things in your life that you can't control. The question is how are you framing those problems?
Are you looking at your problems through the low quality lens? Where you're powerless, or are you looking at those problems through the high quality lens where you are the answer, where you are in power?
So your job as the founder, as a visionary is to elevate the quality of the problems you're solving and before you place blame on anything that's outside of your control. First look at. What are you thinking?
How are you feeling, and what are you doing? That level of responsibility of ownership is what's going to move your business further. Now, if you wanna take what I'm sharing today to the next level, I'm gonna give you a coaching exercise. Go ahead and get a piece of paper and write down all the things you're currently worrying about, all the problems you have, all the challenges you have, all the things that make you feel uncertain.
After you write them down, go back to each one of them and ask yourself, is this a low quality problem or a high quality problem? And turn each one of those problems or challenges into high quality problems. I promise you that the moment you make that shift, you are gonna feel empowered, energized, and you're gonna have access to that part of your brain where the creativity, innovation, and ideas exist that will help you solve those problems.
And the more you do this, the more you master changing low quality problems to high quality problems and focusing on how to resolve them, your inner confidence is going to grow. And that's what your vision needs. To be visionaries. To fulfill these visions, we have to be deeply committed to mastering our own thoughts, emotions, decision making, and taking full ownership for our success and also for our failures.
That really is the formula for all of us to become unstoppable. 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!
