Welcome to Visionaryā€™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.Ā I'm thrilled to have you here.Ā
Hi, and welcome to the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast. This is episode 63. Today's episode, I am dedicating it to one specific client. I'm pretty sure when she listens to it, she will know this is for her, with whom I've had this conversation multiple times. And in our conversations, what we've been doing is challenging the belief that more hours of work means more success or more money.
Many of us have been taught that idea that in order to make more money, achieve bigger results, double our income. We have to put more hours into our work. And what I wanna do with this episode is really challenge that belief and help you disconnect the idea that the number of hours is equivalent to the amount of money you make.
And let's start by really asking ourselves if that is true, because if more hours is what's gonna make you rich, then the burnout most exhausted people who work the longest hours who have three jobs would be the wealthiest. But if we take a quick glance at our society, we know that that's not true. Often the lowest paid jobs require the most hours.
Because if it was true that more hours made you rich, then the people who work three different jobs to make ends meet, it would be the wealthiest. But we know that is not true.
Yes. Maybe more hours can make you more money until it doesn't. And what those extra hours start doing is burning you out and actually diminishing your results and actually reducing the amount of money you can make.
So, if it's not hours, that are making us more money, what is it? And what I want to offer you today is that it is value, not time. What creates wealth. What creates money. I hope that by the end of today's episode, you have challenged disbelief. You have understood where is it that you add the most value, and that you will have some ideas on how you can start making changes in your daily life so you can be creating more money without that, meaning that you have to work more or even better. That you start creating more money by working less.
Let's start by defining what is value. Value is what you give to your clients and that they're willing and happy to pay you for that. Value is a result someone wants enough that they are willing to exchange money for it. Value is not effort. Again, it's not time. It's not even what you as the entrepreneur think is valuable. It's what your clients consider that is valuable.
I often ask my clients, let's get to the core of what you're getting paid for. What is it that you are hired for, or what is really your job about? And a lot of the times the answer includes many different things. Some of those things are not really what they're getting paid for.
For example, in my case, I don't get paid for the number of hours I coach, even though it may seem that way. What I'm really getting paid for is the results I can help my clients achieve. And in fact, I believe that if someone could pay me for five hours of coaching to get to one result versus 10 hours of coaching to get to the same result. I think they would choose five hours . So that has been a big challenge for me to really understand that when I'm selling coaching packages, i'm not trading hours for money. I am trading results that my clients can get there faster, better, more efficiently.
Another story to represent this is something I learned from my father when I was growing up. My dad worked in textiles and, and clothing, and for a while he was a CEO of a company that sold these big machines that could do everything from designing the clothes, cutting it, sewing it, all of it. And every now and then he would tell us about one of the machines not working for one of his clients and he would have to fly the engineer who, this company was based in France, so the engineers usually lived in France and he would have to fly the engineer, pay first class, pay for the best hotels, pay a lot of money for their work, and that the engineer would come look at the machine, get a little hammer and just hit the machine in two places, Uck, and then he would leave again and he would say, can you believe I spent all this amount of money on this guy and the only thing he did was hit the machine in this place, twice?
But let's say he paid this person, I dunno, let's say $50,000. He wasn't paying this person $50,000 for hitting the machine in that part twice, he may be paid a hundred dollars for that, but he was paying $49,900 because this man knew where to hit the machine, knew where to touch the machine or what exactly to do to fix it.
So again, he couldn't think he paid the engineer $50,000 for one minute of work. He paid it for the knowledge this engineer had in his head and his ability to solve a problem that was costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to his clients because they're machines when they're stopped and they can't produce the clothes that need to go in the market. That's very costly.
So I want you to take a moment right now and ask yourself the question. What is the value that you generate? If we're gonna look at your day and all the things you do, and we're gonna pay attention to what creates the most value, what are the two things that you would say, yes, this is what I'm getting paid for. This is actually my job. It was this call to a customer, or it was this incredible compelling email that I wrote that brought us a hundred thousand dollars in revenue. So take a moment and really ask yourself that question. Where is it that you add the most value?
I often also run into a lot of entrepreneurs who became entrepreneurs because they wanted to work less hours because they wanted to have more of a work-life balance. And there's this common myth that says that actually when you become an entrepreneur to work less hours, you end up working a lot more hours because this is your business and you really love it, and you don't have another employee to help you do this.
Or you can't just disconnect and go home. Think, that's a company's job. I'll figure it out on Monday because it's yours. So you really take ownership of it and you're probably gonna be willing to work as many hours to make it successful. So when I start challenging the idea that more hours doesn't mean more revenue or more success, and that actually sometimes less hours means more money and more revenue or more success, it's not because you're going to do less.
It's because you're gonna do less of the things that don't add value. And also because you're gonna get a lot better at the things where you really add value and you are gonna able to do those things in less time.
One of my mentors, her name is Stacy, is currently giving us access to see behind the scenes. So she's recording her days, she's showing us how she works, how she organizes her time,
it has blown my mind at the level of efficiency and productivity she has. So to give you an example, you know, when you are in my business, one of the ways we sell is by writing sales emails and by creating a sales page where people can go and pay for the course that we're selling or enroll in one-on-one coaching.
And usually when Andrew and I are gonna write some sales emails and create a sales page, we probably give ourselves an entire week to write the copy for the sales page, to review it, to go back and forth and to write the emails. And watching Stacy on the first day, she's recording the behind the scenes in an hour and a half.
She wrote three sales emails and wrote an entire sales page the program for which she was writing these emails and creating this sales page for. has already sold $800,000. So in an hour and a half by her sitting and doing that, she was able to create in revenue $800,000.
That blew my mind and I, and I imagine that if you're listening to this, it might blow your mind too. So again, it's not necessarily doing less is doing the right things and learning to do the right things in less time.
When I meet a client who's working endless hours, and I often do, my clients sometimes work until 11:00 PM and then they wake up at 4:00 AM and they're working during the weekends. One of the questions I ask them. Why do you stop at some point, right? Because they're telling me that they have to work these very long hours because they can't get their job done in the normal work hours.
So I tell them, but why do you stop? Are you done at 11:00 PM? And they're like, no, we're not done at 11:00 PM So I'm asking them. Why do you stop then? And they're like, because I'm tired because you know it's time to go to get some rest. And what I like to talk with them about is how there is an ending point. It's not like they're going to work forever and never stop. All of us stop at some point, by the time we decide to stop is arbitrary, right? If we finish at five o'clock or 11:00 PM it's because in our mind, we have given ourselves that amount of time to do our work, and there is a law that's called the Parkinson's law that says.
Work will expand to fill the time we give ourselves to do it. So if you give yourself an entire day to write a sales email, you will take an entire day to write a sales email. But if you tell yourself, I have to send it in the next hour, and you have to write it in this hour, then you will focus in a way that you will get this email written in one hour or 10 minutes or 20 minutes.
Sometimes when we constrain the amount of time we give ourselves, we become better at choosing what's most important and getting it done.
So I want you to stop here again and ask yourself, how much time are you unconsciously giving yourself? When you look at your day tomorrow, you're thinking, yeah, you know what? I'm gonna do these meetings. I'm gonna do these things, and probably I'm gonna have to end up writing this email to my clients or putting this report together and I'll probably start at 5:00 PM notice how in your brain, you're already telling yourself that you're gonna work after hours, how you are telling yourself the story that you cannot get your work done within the nine to five or however many hours you wanna work.
And I want you to start challenging that story. Right. Why? Why are you not being able to get your work done during your work hours?
Our goal is not only to work less, but it's to create more value per hour.
You know, another thing that just came to my mind why I think a lot of us are not as efficient with our time is because we manage our calendar for others and not for ourselves. So we first accommodate all the other people's demands before we accommodate ourselves. We answer emails first thing in the morning.
We book space for the meetings we have with our team, with clients, with investors. But it's rare that we make time in our calendar for our thinking time, for our creation time, for our creativity time. And that we defend that time in the same way that we would defend a meeting with a very important potential investor. Part of the shift going from hours give me success or money to value creates money and success is us starting to respect and really protect the time for us to think and do the work that adds the most value, even before we're protecting the times for others. And probably I could do a whole podcast about that.
and you figure out how either the rest of the 80% is not gonna get done or who else is going to do it.
So going back to Essentialism, the framework that Greg McKeown proposes in the book is the following. The first step is to explore. This is the time you're going to spend getting clear on what creates the highest value in your work today
When I think about CEOs and business founders and what I believe is where they create the most value, I think is one, setting the vision, a clear vision as to where the company's going, who your clients are. What is the essential things we doing as a business to create the outcomes we want?
They're really good at creating the culture, the values. Everyone is living by the processes we follow to hire, to train people, to evaluate people, and then they're meeting clients and bringing revenue into the business. It's those three things. But I want you, if you're a business founder, think why are you really focusing the majority of your time?
Is it on those three things or what else are you doing and why are you doing the other things? So the first step in the book and that I'm offering here, is to explore and get clear where is it that you at the most value. The second step is to eliminate, is to say no to certain things that you're gonna stop doing, is to edit.
The capacity you're doing others is to remove other things from your schedule. And one of the things people think when I offer this idea is that this has to happen tomorrow. But what I have seen that is more practical is that this becomes a goal for you to start doing only 20% within two months or three months.
And these two or three months, you are gonna spend them editing what you're doing, hiring the right people to take over some of your tasks that you do every day, or reorganizing the way your company works so you don't have to be focusing on those things that you know are not adding the most value.
I'm actually working with one of my clients on this very specific thing and she first, what she did was created a list of all the things she did and we organized those by buckets, right? So she is the CEO, her business does accounting and finances and tax stuff, so we organize it by acquisitions because her strategy of growing her business is buying small accounting firms. Then the other segment was, the CPA work she does, the other one had to do with her team.
Anyway, we separated in buckets and then we started thinking, where is it that she really was essential? Where her knowledge, her vision, her wisdom was required for her to get to the vision or for the business to accomplish the goals they have.
So what we did is we wrote job descriptions for the people she needs, and we went very deep into that so she can get comfortable asking for people who had the skills and the work ethic exactly as she wanted it. And now she's in the part of training those people, some of them are shadowing her.
So to really understand what she does. So The goal is that in we gave ourselves like three or four months to be able to move her from doing a hundred things to doing only the 20 things or the 20% that are the most important. So anyway, steps are, number one, you explore. Number two, you eliminate, and number three, you execute.
And that's when you're, able to delegate or to remove the 80%, and you have this 20%. And now this is about your work ethic, your discipline, your ability to get things done in the best way, in the fastest time.
So here's a fun question that you can ask yourself today. If today or tomorrow you could only do two work actions, that's it and those who be the ones that would create the most money or the most value, what would they be? And then you can ask yourself, to whom would I delegate the rest?
To summarize what I've been wanting you to take from today's episode is first to challenge the belief that more hours equals more money or more success. Two, to understand that it is value that creates the money and the success. And three, to challenge yourself to understand where is it, where you at the most value.
And to only do that.
But there is one more thing I wanna add before we end the episode today, and it's the idea that rest is one of your essentials. If you look at athletes, the best athletes in the world, you will see that rest is part of how they get really good at competing. The time they take to rest and recover is equally important as the hours they're training or they're competing. So as you're looking at your days, as you're looking at your month, at your year, what I recommend my clients to do is to first schedule all the rest days in their calendar. All the weekends are gonna take off, all the holidays they're gonna take off, you know, any rest day.
Every now and then that they wanna have in their calendar, that has to go first in their calendar. Because when they plan to rest in a strategic way, they know that rest is gonna allow them to be more valuable or more productive in the days they're working.
So start seeing yourself as a value creating human and think about all the things that are required for you to produce the most value, all the things that are distracting you, all the things that are just busy work, all the things you. Think you should do because others are expecting them from you. And get very clear on what is it were you at the most value, and what is it that you require to be at your best to be able to deliver at that level of value?
And that is going to include for sure time to rest.
I absolutely believe that you can do this by yourself. And I also believe that when you work with a coach, what we do as coaches is help you see your blind spots, is challenge your assumptions, challenge the way you're thinking about the things you think you should be doing and help you get even clearer where is it that you at the most value.
So if you're curious about what it would look like to work with me as your one-on-one coach, and how I can help you build essentialism in your entire organization so all of you get more productive, you create more value without creating more burnout and tired employees or unsatisfied employees.
Go to carozuleta (dot) com and book a free consult with me. I'll spend an entire hour with you talking about your business, talking about how you can be more productive and how you can take more time to rest, and I'll tell you all about what it looks like working with me as your one-on-one coach. And that's today's episode. Thank you so much for listening, and 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 toĀ 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!Ā
